(urth) Hethor

[Rex Racer]

I remember the Citadel being not a ship, but a spaceport with any number of
the towers being "landers" as Silk calls (though the nomenclature and
descriptions in the BotNS makes it pretty clear that the towers are old
spaceships repurposed when the age of space flight (at least the part coming
from Urth) came to an end- walls being added, stone structures and
extensions slowly accreting through time.

I can claim no authoritative positon without the books at hand to reference,
but I remember nothing to indicate the whole Citadel being a massive ship on
par with the Quasar, rather than Nessus old space port.

On 5/5/06, Macronaut <macronaut at yahoo.com> wrote:
>
> I remember that the towers of the citadel are revealed
> to be ships waiting to leave Urth in the last days of
> Typhon.  But I don't recall anything suggesting that
> the citadel as a whole was itself one big ship.  It's
> an interesting idea -- is there textual support for
> that? Or am I misinterpreting?
>
> Macronaut
>
> --- b sharp <bsharporflat at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
> > I first saw the idea of Mourning Glory's mention of
> > Purn as Hethor and
> > Gunnie as his paracoita in Robert Borski's Solar
> > Labyrinth.  Perhaps Mantis
> > is in agreement on this idea.  I believe the logic
> > is that Hethor is a shape
> > shifter, taking the form of a half-bird, half-deer
> > creature called a
> > peryton.  Severian sees the peryton/Hethor over him
> > during his escape into
> > the mountains but eventually decides it is a
> > constellation.
> >
> > Hethor is presumed to be in this form when Agia,
> > riding a winged creature
> > with claws, later snatches Severian from the evzone
> > soldiers.  So peryton
> > becomes Purn (shades of Dragonriders of Pern?). Both
> > in Severian's earlier
> > dream and during the snatching the winged creature
> > is noted to have a mitre
> > of bone on its head, suggesting the dinosaur-era
> > pterodon.  But it also is
> > supposed to have the head of a hag which sends
> > things into a mythological
> > slant I won't pursue here.
> >
> > Like Roy, I don't find the Purn-Hethor connection
> > satifying.  It is all
> > based on the name Purn and that he is a sailor.
> > There is no physical
> > resemblance nor psychological resemblance to
> > twisted, mysterious Hethor.  To
> > me Purn seems to represent the simple, average Urth
> > resident who would
> > instinctively fight to save Urth without much care
> > or thought to deeper
> > issues or personal demons.  Also, Gunnie has dark
> > eyes, not violet, and is a
> > very big, strong, aggressive woman.  Hardly a good
> > candidate for a poppet
> > doll with small hands who lays in a lemonwood box
> > all day waiting to spend
> > the night with Hethor.   (But perhaps a childish
> > version of Thecla is...)
> >
> > However, Hethor as a shape shifter is satisfying to
> > me for a few reasons.
> > Even Severian wonders how Hethor is able to
> > transport his larger pets
> > around.  There are some interesting early (SotT)
> > statements Hethor makes to
> > identify himself.  Stammering, he says something
> > like  "I the old captain,
> > the old lieutenant, the old cook, feeding the dying
> > pets." I take this to be
> > a true description, though I can't tell whether
> > Hethor is describing a
> > series of promotions or demotions on the ship.  But
> > I think he was, at some
> > point, captain.
> >
> > In UotNS we find in Tzadkiel, another ship captain,
> > an angelic,
> > shapeshifting being (as is the angel in Melito's
> > story).  I think this lends
> > credence to the idea of captain Hethor also being a
> > winged, shape shifting
> > creature, perhaps the obverse of Tzadkiel...a fallen
> > angel?
> >
> > Hethor also describes himself as serving on the
> > Quasar, and on a ship with a
> > hundreds masts and silver sails.   He also says he
> > served as the captain of
> > the "limping ship".  In the time of BotNS's writing
> > I think quasars were
> > theorized to be white fountains, the compliment to
> > black holes.  So I think
> > the Quasar is likely (what we later learn to be)
> > Tzadkiel's ship because its
> > primary literary purpose, in the first 4 books, was
> > to carry the New Sun
> > back to earth.
> >
> > So what was the limping ship Hethor was the captain
> > of?  Some suggest it was
> > the ship that crashed leaving the ancestors of the
> > antechamber prisoners and
> > that Hethor's real name is KimLeeSoong. This could
> > be the case, but then he
> > would be a normal human not a shapeshifter.
> >
> > There is another ship which looms very large in
> > BotNS but seems so far to
> > have avoided attempts at explanation through all
> > these years.  This is The
> > Citadel.  I take The Citadel to be a ship on a par
> > with the Quasar due to
> > its large size and irregular shape (contrast to the
> > Hierodule's ship which
> > is like a flying saucer).  I think the Citadel ship
> > is an alternate version
> > of the Quasar, with Hethor as its captain.  This
> > ship was apparently poorly
> > captained,  flew too close to Urth (to retrieve his
> > stolen paracoita?) and
> > got stuck.
> >
> > bsharp
> >
> >
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