(urth) Sev as the avatar of Abaia

Roy C. Lackey rclackey at stic.net
Thu Apr 6 00:06:23 PDT 2006


Andrew stated his case in his original post, so I won't bother to quote it
all; just lend him some support. Btw, it is nowhere indicated in the books
that the ability to breath underwater is acquired upon the occasion of
becoming an eidolon. As for such an eidolon becoming a "real human",
Barbatus said:

      "You speak of what is real, Severian; thus do you hold to
what is real still. A moment since we spoke of him who
makes. Among your folk the simple call him God, and you,
the lettered, name him Increate. What were you ever but
his eidolon?" (V, 355)

The parallels of the destruction visited upon Urth by the coming of the New
Sun with the Book of Revelations doesn't really address the issue Andrew
raised. He didn't claim that Abaia & co. are the good guys, just that they
had a different agenda that didn't involve destroying Urth's population.

When Juturna, at great peril to herself, came to the throne room, Nessus had
been drowned two days earlier, millions of its people were already dead and
the New Sun was no more than a few hours, if not minutes, from its
rendezvous with the Old Sun. The damage had already been done to Urth, and
there was no way for anyone to stop it, even if they tried. But she came
anyway, to make one last pitch on behalf of Abaia. Why?

As she told Valeria, Abaia could have crushed the Commonwealth in short
order, long ago. But that wasn't what he wanted. He wanted people to serve
him and to do his bidding, whether willingly or not.

Anyway, we don't know what happened between chapters, between the scene
where Sev was stabbed with a poison knife and when he next wrote of coming
to himself floating _facedown_ in deep water. (309) Even if we attribute, as
Sev did, his healing from the wound and/or revival from drowning to the
power of the New Sun, that power was now gone from him. (310) It doesn't
account for his new ability to breathe water, which he most certainly did.
If the powers he once took from the white fountain were gone, where did this
new ability come from if not Juturna? She said she had come to save him --
to save all who still lived. Sev wrote:

      Perhaps because she was a woman, her voice was not so
deep as I anticipated, though it was deeper even than
Baldander's [sic]. Yet there was a lilt to it, as though she who
struggled to pass the doorway even as she spoke and was so
clearly dying had yet some vast joy that owed nothing to
her own life or the sun's. She said, "Because I would save
you..." (305)

And next page:
*********************************************
      I was reminded then of what Famulimus had asked me
when I met her first: "Is all the world a war of good and
bad? Have you not thought it might be something more?"
And I felt myself upon the marches of a nobler world,
where I should know what it might be. Master Malrubius
had led me from the jungles of the north to Ocean speaking
of hammer and anvil, and it seemed to me also that I
sensed an anvil here. He had been an aquastor, like those
who had fought for me in Yesod, created from my mind;
thus he had believed, as I had, that the undine had saved
me because I would be a torturer and an Autarch. It might
be that neither he nor the undine were wholly wrong.
********************************************

As Andrew indicated, Sev later had second thoughts about a being created
from his own mind agreeing with himself about the reason why the undine had
saved him from drowning as a boy.

      "It was because I couldn't watch Thecla in torment,
wasn't it? Now I've seen Urth die like that, and I was
Urth's killer."
      "Who were you," she asked me, "when you stood before
the Hierogrammate's Seat of Justice?"
      "A man who had not yet destroyed everything he ever loved."
      "You were Urth, and thus Urth lives."
      I shouted, "This is Ushas!"
      "If you say it. But Urth lives in Ushas and in you." (341-42)

Then Juturna pointed out "directions I had not seen until she indicated
them", the Corridors of Time and, apparently, of Space.

Back in the throne room, Sev had asked her if she remembered saving him when
he was a boy: "No. It hasn't yet occurred. It will, because you spoke."
(306) Very curious. Sev's pronouncement thus became a prophesy. The New Sun
and the flood were established facts as she spoke before the throne, she
knew for a fact that Sev would succeed in bringing the New Sun, yet she came
there to save him anyway that day if she could *and* she would see to it
that she saved him from drowning in *her* future, which was *his* past. It
seems to me that she succeeded on both counts.

Something funny about beings whose time sense is all screwed up, and it
makes Sev look like a figure on the stage of a toy theater.

-Roy




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