(urth) Tzadkiel/Melek Taus

[António Pedro Marques]

This is worth pursuing but I think there are a number of problems with it.

If Tzadkiel is honest, his intent is to renew the planet and give Humanity a 
new chance. If there is an afterlife then drowning almost everyone isn't 
such a catastrophe as it might seem. The fact is that the world is in dire 
need of moral cleansing, not only terraforming, and I don't see how you 
achieve the former without some global disaster that at once decimates the 
population and changes the natural environment. The new world will have a 
chance to be good.

If Tzadkiel is a liar, then I don't see what does he gain by destroying the 
world. Sure, he could do it out of sheer evilness, but I don't find it 
convincing that he would take all that trouble just to have a 5 minute 
massacre sport. We tend to associate evil with selfishness, and to 
annihilate your potential servants makes little sense selfishly. And if the 
intent is to take pleasure in killing them, then a global drowning is 
possibly one of the least interesting methods - quick and clean. If otoh he 
wishes to wipe out Humanity for whatever reason, giving a renewed planet to 
a reduced population seems to run counter to the objective.

Moreover, if Tzadkiel could send the new sun to destroy the world, why not 
just do it without all the hocus pocus? And if he didn't have that power all 
by himself, then whoever did have the power is calling the shots, not Tzakdiel.

You mention Severian could have asked for the population to be evacuated. 
Well, could the building of the Whorl have been done not out of fear that 
the sun would die out, but that the flood could be irreparably deleterious? 
And where would you take all those wicked people, and how would you reform 
them? If it were easy, what would a new Earth be needed for? In the dying 
earth future, my impression is that the population had been steadily 
declining for ages.

Does Severian not asking for an evacuation imply that he is evil as well? I 
suppose your idea is that he is so embroiled in Tzadkiel's way of presenting 
things that such a question doesn't even cross his mind.