(urth) heartburn was: Re: travelling north

[Roy C. Lackey]

Jeff Wilson quoted and wrote"
> > Close enough, except that eidolons are always of the dead.
>
> Are they?

Yes. "While I stared in disbelief, Famulimus sang, 'You came too near your
double once, you know; that was here, in this poor town of stones. Then he
was gone, and only you remained. Our eidolons are always of the dead. Have
you not wondered why? Be warned!'" (p-361)

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

I assume you are talking about the mind of the eidolon, not the body. Some
eidolons get their imprint from living people, others from "remembrance" or
"reflected thought" in a subject's dead mind (359).

> > 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?

I'm not sure I understand the question. When young Sev encountered Apu in
the ruins of the stone town, Apu disappeared in a flash like lightning. So
did Hildegrin, but Hildegrin was just collateral damage. Apu left no corpse
behind. He had been summoned by the Cumaean, but she made no eidolon.

Neither of the two Gunnies were eidolons. They were two iterations of the
same person at different ages, possible only because of time travel. As
Gunnie said on The Ship, "Here it's not one nor the other. We're between the
 suns and the years too, so there can be two Gunnies with no danger to
anybody. Or a dozen." (185)

In that section, Sev also gave some half-ass conjectures about that
encounter with Apu and Hildegrin, but that was before his talk with BF&O in
the tomb.

-Roy