(urth) Wolfe's Puzzles

[Gerry Quinn]

From: "Lee Berman" <severiansola at hotmail.com>
> A number of years ago my brother asked me for something new to read
> and I gave him BotNS. After he read it he told me he had "figured out
> the secret". I was a little intrigued (though not too hopeful) with
> what he'd come up with.  He told me he had figured out that Dorcas was
> really Severian's grandmother.

I can't honestly remember whether I figured that out, or picked it up from 
internet discussion.


> Now I am no literary genius but, like some others, I thought that was
> pretty clear and not a puzzle. But since my brother is at least reasonably
> intelligent I must conclude that Dorcas'family status should be considered
> one of the puzzles of BotNS though prehaps a relatively easy one.
> I felt the same about the "puzzle" which suggests incest between Agia and
> Agilus though, again, I guess that wasn't obvious to everyone on first
> reading.

Surely Severian caught them in flagrante in Agilus's death cell?  That makes 
it about as much of a puzzle as whether Baldanders likes catamites.


> I think a somewhat harder one (pre-UotNS) is that Severian was the
> Conciliator. I did get that one...I think maybe on my second reading.
> But once I started searching online for answers I found there were many
> mysteries I was unable to solve that others had.

This one came immediately to me, I think.


> Notable among these is the Maid playing Holy Katharine identified as
> Severian's mother. I could never have gotten that on my own.
> There is nothing tangible in the text to "prove" this as fact but there
> is an appealing literary leap of faith to it which allows most of us
> (I think) to accept it as a reasonable working possibility.

I have never seen any real reason to believe this.


> I like the puzzles where there are competing theories. Wolfe openly
> invites us to solve the mystery of Hethor's mirrors. Borski reasonably
> argues that any mirrors big enough to summon a giant slug would be too
> big to carry around on a long journey, hence Hethor must be a shape-
> shifter. Andre-Driussi counter-argues for the more parsimonious and
> text-supported theory that the mirrors consisted of sail-scraps from the
> ship, so even large ones could be conveniently folded up and carried.

See also 'The Sister's Account' from 'Procreation', in which "a crumpled 
little mirror" is opened up until it is "as large and smooth as a pier 
glass".  The narrator uses it to travel between universes.  This story is 
copyright 1983-4, so approximately contemporaneous with _BotNS_.


> Anyway, the group came to one puzzle that none of us could make heads nor
> tails of, including Mantis, (at least I inferred that from his silence). 
> It
> regarded a series of numbers, arranged in a pattern which was found on the
> Seal of Pas.
>
> 5553  8783  4223  9700  34
>
> 2221  0401  1101  7276  56
>
> SEALED FOR THE MONARCH
>
> Anyway, I also searched this Archive for solutions to the Seal of Pas but
> didn't find anything.  Did I miss something? Is there a known solution out
> there? I truly hope Wolfe has enough respect for his readers to not have 
> made
> this an unsolvable snipe hunt to make idiots like me play pointlessly with
> numbers and letters for hours upon hours.

I take the view that it is essentially random.  It is a fundamental point of 
algorithmic information theory that almost all numbers are.  Why should this 
number, essentially a barcode for one not especially important storeroom, be 
special?

I don't see it as a 'trick' to make them random, because logically they 
should be random.  Of course I cannot tell whether they are in fact random. 
[There is also an important theorem that strings - or numbers - above a 
certain length cannot be *proven* to be random!]


> With that assumption, my point (aside from random story telling) is that
> there are some easy puzzles in these stories but some really, really
> difficult ones also that take smart people many years to figure out (or
> are never figured out at all). But the mere presence of these complex
> puzzles and the occasional appearance of an interesting solution keeps
> me inspired.

Agreed.


- Gerry Quinn