(urth) heartburn was: Re: travelling north

[Jeff Wilson]

On 6/13/2010 4:48 PM, Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> Jeff Wilson quoted and wrote:
>>> Obviously it would be bad for the newly-created eidolon, because he
> would
>>> cease to exist. That eidolon walked the Corridors to get back to Ushas,
>>> where he eventually penned his second manuscript, the account we are
> reading
>>> of how he came to be in that tomb.
>>
>> Why couldn't the eidolon stay at the stone town and the strangled meat
>> go back to the future?
>
> The strangled meat didn't know what the eidolon knew; all that had just been
> learned from BF&O in the tomb. The eidolon had to get away from him or die.

okay - so there seems to be a fairly short distance limit on BFO's 
method of branching off an eidolon, so normally they are only made of 
dead people for practical and safety reasons (poor badger!).  Severian 
has a habit of coming back from the dead, so they want to make the 
eidolon and send him on his way before the light of the White Fountain 
revives the strangled body and causes a merger hazard. Sound right so far?

So...why do they wait until the White Fountain's light is almost there, 
instead of showing up a week early?  Perhaps because the new eidolon 
still needs the White Fountain's light to enter the Corridors of Time 
again? And they don't know for sure that the WF will revive the 
strangled meat, and they can't spare a week farting around the Stone 
Town keeping Sev from getting strangled again, so they cut it close, 
hoping the anxiety at escaping horrid death and being faced with it 
again almost immediately will motivate Severian to head back uptime 
right away?

-- 
Jeff Wilson - jwilson at io.com
IEEE Student Chapter Blog at
< http://ieeetamut.org >