(urth) Succession Memories

[Jeff Wilson]

On 8/2/2010 7:59 PM, David Stockhoff wrote:
> That's a damn good question. You could pass on the codes without the
> alzabo, but then what happens to your memories?

Another possibility is that the Autarchs add memories of freshly dead 
Commonwealthers of some merit or useful perspective. As memories fade 
with succession, they may feel the need to add another of the now 
inaccessible kind, explaining the multiple children and farmwives.

This also explains why Severian is the final Autarch in another way: his 
eidetic memory revives the fading imprints so that he has sufficient 
awareness of them that all of them serve him in a significant way at the 
trial, while someone attempting to add all the memories directly to 
himself would be driven mad or incapacitated by the myriad, vivid 
memory-sets all second hand fresh.

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >