(urth) Faterh Inire Theory cont.

[Gerry Quinn]

David Stockhoff wrote:
> Gerry Quinn wrote:
> > It's not just drop ceilings that he recognised - he worked the mirror transporter.  How was he familiar with > > that technology?  You would at first sight expect it to be wildly futuristic by his standards - but no, he was  > > instantly able to operate it.


> ---I don't understand your assumptions. Is transporter technology incompatible with inexpensive-renovation  > technology? Is it impossible to build transporters on or under the ground? So maybe they had them on ships. > So what?

What we know is that Jonas knows how to operate them.  Now it seems unlikely to me that transporters were ever a commonplace technology, that most people would have been able to operate just as in other times most people could drive a car.  So this is perhaps a technology that Jonas learned to use as part of his duties as a crewman on the Fortunate Cloud.  But then there must have been a mirror transporter aboard the ship.  Surprise... it's right outside the door of the antechamber, or at least not far away (they have to descend a lot of steps... a bit like getting anywhere in the Matachin Tower).

> OTOH, the very idea of a drop ceiling on a spaceship is almost silly. They are filthy because they trap dirt. They > > are meant only to hide pipes and so on. On a spaceship, you can't waste your payload on things like that, and  
> you would organize your functional space more efficiently than to have inaccessible pipes. Think submarines, not > aircraft carriers.

I agree they are a bit questionable on a ship, though by no means impossible.  It is interesting that Jonas recognised them and Severian didn't, though (nor did Jonas expect him to).  They must be uncommon in the architecture of Severian's day.  But they seemed normal to Jonas.  "I'm sure that's what we used to call a drop ceiling."  So does the architecture of the antechamber derive from Jonas's day?  If so, it being Jonas's ship is an obvious possibility.

Why does Jonas hallucinate about his craft here anyway?  Okay, maybe he thinks of it every time he has a nightmare.  But maybe, there's something about this place.  This place that he *has* to get out of.


> > Here's the entrance to the transporter room:
> > 
 > >       We had descended perhaps a hundred steps when we reached a door painted with a crimson teratoid        > >      sign that appeared to me to be a glyph from some tongue beyond the shores of Urth.
> > 
> > Wolfe is spelling it out!  Okay, an alternative interpretation is that the symbol is associated with Inire.  But if you > > prefer, here's another allusion to starflight.  [See, I can play the allusion game too!]
> > 
> >       this wing has always been Father Inire's
> > 
> > Inire grabs the high tech stuff, natch.  A starship is perfect for him.

> -Meaningless. You can't have stairs and doors with DANGER glyphs underground?

Sure you can.  But wouldn't the DANGER glyph be a standard Urth one?  Of course you might expect that too on a spaceship launched from Urth, so it does not make a lot of sense either way.  But one reason for it, I suggest, would be simply to make the reader think again that we are not in a normal Urth building, but something from far away.  This particular thread is thin, I will admit.


> > > The problem with painting a starship interior, which I am surprised no one here sees, is that life support 
> > > systems would fail if the crew went around renovating the ship. If it didn't fail, the crew eventually would get > 
> > > sick.

> > I don't see how you can confidently assert that.  Sure, if you tried to bring a conventional painting crew into a > > > ramshackle vessel such as the current International Space Station, it would probably cause a few problems. > > > But we are talking about a much more sophisticated vessel of the future. Possibly decorative materials also > > > > have advanced so that Sick Starship Syndrome is a concern of the past.

> ---I can confidently assert it because I have no choice but to do so. It's simple physics+medicine. Wolfe is a 
> materials engineer. He knows about particulate matter. He may not know much about lungs, but he knows about 
> rules dictating how much dust factory workers can breathe. Even wood dust is deadly---and highly flammable too. 
> 
> If your future super-safe paint is to be admitted as evidence, why does it flake? Why not create pre-fab colored > 
> panels?

I really think you are making too much of these limitations on the permissible furnishing of spacecraft which, though far in Urth's past, are far in our future.  They have artificial gravity; if they also have good air filtration, dust may not be as much of a problem as you imagine.  Think of them as like ships on Earth - you can put anything you want there, within reason.

They use paint because it looks better.  Would you want to sail in a grotty pre-fab starship?  And maybe it didn't flake at all during the voyage anyway.

- Gerry Quinn




  



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