(urth) What's So Great About Ushas?

[Jeff Wilson]

thalassocrat at nym.hush.com wrote:
> 
> On Sat, 07 Jun 2008 17:02:38 +1000 "Roy C. Lackey" 
> <rclackey at stic.net> wrote:
>> Looking at that quote again just now, it occurs to me that it 
>> offers support
>> to my earlier speculation. If the white fountain had actually been 
> 
>> created
>> *in* the heart of the old sun, rather than travelling for 
>> millennia from
>> some unspecified place *to* the sun, it would not have passed near 
> 
>> Urth to
>> get there. If its mass had never come nearer Urth than the sun, 
>> would Urth
>> have been spared the violent upheavals that occasioned its 
>> destruction?

I don't see the narrative presenting "appears in the sun" as an 
alternative possibility to "travels to the sun". It could be that the 
fountain-like flux of energy will only turn on full blast once the 
arriving object enters the sun, and before then it is only figuratively 
the White Fountain, but isn't the celestial object that Severian draws 
his his power already visible and remarked upon during the first four books?


> As it turned out in UOTNS, I don't think there were any violent 
> upheavals? Baldanders speaks of gravity waves which he can detect, 
> and which may be enough to tinkle the bells in Valeria's audience 
> hall, but that seems to be about it. 

Other than the flooding that submerges Nessus, the Citadel, the House 
Absolute, and all land features previously within sight of the area?


-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
< http://www.io.com/~jwilson >