(urth) What's so Green about Ushas?

[Roy C. Lackey]

Tony Ellis quoted and wrote:
>> I don't think the Corridors necessarily led to alternate realities, just
>> different points in time.
>
>I think if that was true, there would only have been one corridor, as
>there was when Tzadkiel first showed Severian the Brook Madregot.
>Severian is now talking about a multitude:
>
>"All about me stretched the Corridors of Time, waving meadows roofed
>with the lowering sky of Time and whisperous with the brooks that
>ripple from the most supernal universe of all to the least." UotNS, LI
>
>Brooks, not brook, you notice.

The multiple brooks refers to the brooks that run between the tiered
universes. Small Tzadkiel could show him only the one brook, Madregot,
because that was where she had been exiled by her larger self.

-----------------------------------------
"This is the Brook Madregot, and it runs from Yesod to Briah."
      "Between the universes?" I asked. "How can that be?"
      "How could it not be? Energy gropes for some lower
state, always; which is merely to say that the Increate tosses
all the universes between his hands."
      "But it's a stream," I protested. "Like the streams of
Urth."
      Tzadkiel nodded. "Those too are of energy seeking a
lower state, and what is perceived is dictated by the
instrument. If you had other eyes, or another mind, you
would see all things otherwise." (URTH, XL, 285)
----------------------------------------------

Since the brooks run between universes, it would not be very meaningful for
the Corridors of Time to be merely congruent with them. Urth and Ushas were
in Briah. I see no evidence that the Green Man traveled to Urth's past from
outside Briah. True, Sev moving along the Madregot (or at least at an angle
to it on the bank beside it), somehow ended up on Urth some forty years
after he left for Yesod, but I find that inexplicable.

> Severian goes on to say "Behind me
>along a line that seldom exists, Apu-Punchau, the Head of Day, stepped
>from his house and squatted to eat the boiled maize and roast meat his
>people had left for him." If the corridors only lead to different
>points in the same time-stream, I don't see how Severian can look back
>and see a reality that 'seldom exists'.
>
>The quotes you give where the Green Man talks about his future still
>make sense if he comes from one of a multitude of futures.

I don't know what Severian meant by that, but if there are a multitude of
futures, then trying to understand the Urth Cycle becomes a decent into
chaos. If a man from a future that was not Sev's can interact with Sev in a
practical way that Ash could not, then that opens up a can of worms better
left alone. Any of the story's many mysteries can be explained away by
appeals to influences from undemonstrated alternate futures.

-Roy