(urth) Succession Memories

[David Stockhoff]

That works. Even if it was not a routine practice, some autarchs may 
have done that for various reasons.

Jeff Wilson wrote:
> 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.
>