(urth) What's So Great About Ushas?

[Roy C. Lackey]

Dave Tallman wrote:
>The Heiros attempt to give the many who will die from the New Sun some
>representation with a trial by combat between Sev and the sailors. I see
>you have already argued about trials by combat in the Knight series, so
>I won't argue that was a just proceeding (the Heiros admit it wasn't, too).

You mean Hierogrammates, not Hieros, who were a race of beings cognate to
the humans of Briah and who fashioned the Hierogrammates in another
universe, since collapsed. That's why the Hierogrammates were messing with
Urth. Since the humans of Urth's First Empire had not become the Hieros of
Briah, and since Urth's resources were largely gone after Typhon's time,
obviously something had to change if the Hierogrammates were to have any
hope of repeating the cycle in Briah. The only way they had of accomplishing
that was apparently to start over. So they arranged for Urth to be destroyed
and reborn as Ushas.

As has been said and the text affirms, Urth's survival was not necessary for
human survival. Urth's only real value was emotional or spiritual, because
it was the ancestral home of the species, and by extension the ancestral
home, potentially, of the Hieros who might eventually produce the
Hierogrammtes; or so they hoped. Whether or not what they did had the
blessing of the Increate is another argument.

Apheta said:
"You know that we have condemned the peoples of
Urth, and why. They now feel they have earned our
forgiveness, and the chance to resume the places they held
of old--" (URTH, XVI, 112-13)

No one believes that the black hole in the sun was due to natural causes. No
one argues that the black hole was there before Typhon's time. That's why
the first ruler to go to Yesod to win a New Sun was his successor, Ymar.
There was no need for anyone to make the trip to Yesod in hopes of fixing
what hadn't been broken before Typhon's time. The entire purpose of a
representative of Urth going to Yesod was to bring a cure for the damaged
and dying sun. The cure was a white hole, aka white fountain, that became
almost synonymous with a religious figure, known both as the New Sun and the
Conciliator. The reason Severian was sent back to Urth in Typhon's time was
to establish the Conciliator legend, which he did. That all adds up to this:
The condemnation Apheta spoke of was directly connected to Urth's dying sun,
not some incident or nebulous amalgam of transgressions committed by the
people of Urth before Typhon's era.

If the Hierogrammates caused the black hole in the sun, as has been argued
before, then they are directly responsible for the destruction of Urth's
biosphere that would have resulted from the ice-future. Ushas avoided the
ice-future, all right. Do they get a pat on the back for fixing a problem
they created? Not from me.

If Typhon somehow caused the black hole in the sun and the Hierogrammates
took it upon themselves to "condemn" the peoples of Urth for *his*
transgression, then the result, for Urth, is the same; destruction of the
world and the death of the blameless by way of a white hole. It's the
wife-beater defense writ large: "Now look what you made me do." If the
Hierogrammates acted at the behest of the Increate, then it can and will be
written of by the curious logic of the religious minded as justifiable, and
there is no point in pursuing that argument. If the Hierogrammates acted
solely out of self-interest, then the argument changes to -- where do they
get the moral authority? If they got it from the Increate; case closed. But
if they are self-anointed free agents?

>In the end, most of us don't get a choice of when and how we die. The
>situation of Urth was a choice between bad alternatives. I can see
>enough positives in the choice that was taken that I can't buy the moral
>inversion argument. But you may see it differently.

And I do.

-Roy