(urth) Faterh Inire Theory cont.

[DAVID STOCKHOFF]

--- On Mon, 12/13/10, Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie> wrote:

From: Gerry Quinn <gerryq at indigo.ie>
Subject: Re: (urth) Faterh Inire Theory cont.
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Date: Monday, December 13, 2010, 10:45 AM


From: "David Stockhoff" <dstockhoff at verizon.net>

I'm combining  two of your posts on the same issue:

> It's simple. Jonas recognized the architecture as Urthly architecture much like our own. He recognized technology from a time he was familiar with. He's been around 20,00 years and has touched on Urth many times.
       "We crashed. It had been so long, on Urth, that there was no port when we returned, no dock."

I don't remember him saying how often he touched on Urth.  But his last journey was very long indeed.  He may well have made multiple voyages early on (maybe around AD 3000) but then his ship got stuck near a black hole or something and re-emerged closer to Severian's time, probably at least several tens of thousands of years in the future.

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?
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.
If you did have them, they would be much better designed than something intended to hang lights from and keep off flaking paint.


Something else about the ceiling:
       "You're right. There was an old ceiling above this one, for a room much smaller than this. How did you know?"

       "Because I talked to those people. Yesterday."

Not because "I'm a robot constructed as a crewman for a starship but for some reason before I left I spent some time working in an office on Earth where there were drop ceilings"
---What do office buildings have to do with it? Just because YOU have seen this technology in an office building? 

There's some connection here and it isn't architecture.


Here's an interesting passage - Severian is half asleep and it leads it leads into where he wakes as Thecla.  It could be coincidence - but what is he thinking about?  Distances, passages, stairs on a spaceship!
       Three hundred and ninety steps from the ground to our dormitory. How many more to the room where the         guns throbbed at the top of the tower? One, two, three, four, five, six guns. One, two, three levels of cells         in  use in the oubliette.



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?

> If it IS a starship, it would make more sense if the vault was painted AFTER it was grounded.

Maybe renovations do happen in dry dock.  Who knows.  The paint was flaking, but that is not necessarily due to a subjectively long voyage, as it has been neglected for a long time since anyway.
---My point was that IF it is a "crashed" (and subsequently righted) ship, plainly it has been treated as ordinary Urthly architecture for a long time. This is an improvement to your theory.


> 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?


Wolfe repeatedly makes a connection between sea-going vessels and starships. Could a modern sea-going vessel have a painted vaulted ceiling?  Of course it could!
---Sure, and you can lean on the railing and smoke those big see-gars on deck. Just like in a spaceship!

- Gerry Quinn







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