(urth) heartburn was: Re: travelling north

[Jeff Wilson]

On 6/14/2010 12:00 AM, Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> Jeff Wilson wrote, quoted, wrote:
>>>> 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?
>
> Close enough, except that eidolons are always of the dead.

Are they? Aren't some made from a living person's impression of the 
subject, rather than from the subject's corpse?

> They weren't interested in keeping Sev (as Apu, Head of Day) from being
> strangled by the townspeople, if that's what you mean. That tomb had to be
> built and a body put in it for future history to pan out as it had panned
> out. The strangled meat, a sun god, had to rise again to make the myth
> (358-59). And he did rise again and leave the tomb (365-66). He also had a
> future (the revived strangled meat's personal future) date with young Sev
> and Hildegrin in the stone town.

How did Severian merge with the meat? I thought it was only a problem 
eidolons - the two Gunnies are both meat and they don't merge. Or did 
the Cumaean  make an eidolon of the  meat, that eidolon merged with 
Severian, killing Hildegrin, and then everyone went home leaving the
old meat still there?

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