(urth) Is Agia a robot?

[Jerry Friedman]

From: "brunians at brunians.org" <brunians at brunians.org>
[quotations on chems from BotLS]

> I did not remember that reference.
>
>Thanks.
>
>It does not 
nullify my hypothesis.

Here are two more:

"'It's not just reuniting the metal, Patera.  There are little tubes in 
there, tiny tubes, and wires, and things like threads--fibers, they're 
called--that pipe light.'"

EftLS, Ch. 2

"... he took off the white towel that had covered her [Maytera Marble's] now-lifeless right hand and held it up, in appearance the hand of an 
elderly woman.  A short cylinder of silvery metal extended from its 
wrist.  'I lost some fluid,' she told him, 'but not very much. There are valves and things to control that...."

[Marble holds her stump up.  Swallow tells her] "'Pretend that you're 
going to grab hold of my nose.'

"Minute glimmerings appeared in the shadowy interior of the stump of 
arm, pinpoint gleams...."

EftLS, Ch. 7

I think these make your hypothesis very hard to sustain.  If Agilus were a chem built like Marble, his neck would probably have been sheathed in metal and would certainly have contained wires, tubes, and optical fibers, not flesh and bone.  This would have done /Terminus Est/ no good and would surely have felt and looked different from cutting through a human neck.

Maybe there was another kind of robot.  But I doubt very much someone would make robots with necks that acted just like human necks when cut, but with skulls that sounded different when banged into stone walls.

>We used to call hydraulic fluid red juice, or cherry juice in the service.
>
>That is because it is red, very 
much in the way blood is red.
>
>There is a very slight difference 
in color.

The fluid that spurts out of a Vironese soldier when Mint severs its leg with an azoth is black, by the way (CotLS, Ch. 9).

>I don't know that you'd notice, if you were focussed on bringing off as
>difficult an act as a public execution with the 
attention to detail that
> Severian brings to everything he does.

Severian makes a general remark in that scene about how a well-done beheading feels to the headsman.  I take that to mean he felt nothing different about Agilus's head.  And see below.

From: David Stockhoff <dstockhoff at verizon.net>
[...]

> However, I agree that Agilus, when slaughtered, appears to be flesh and 
> blood---a lot of blood. Even if chems have blood, it would smell and 
> flow differently. Severian would notice.

He also cleans his boots.  By that time the blood would have at least started to clot, and he'd have leisure to notice its texture and smell, since he'd no longer be focused on bringing off the execution.  He must have cleaned /Terminus Est/, too.

Also, the blood frightened the baggage sumpter (presumably a horse), which would have been by smell, not color.

> Perhaps Agilus and Agia are false names and they are not twins at all, 
> one a chem and one a human. This is not as neat as if they were indeed 
> twins, but it's plausible---they are deceptive people.

Agilus was the heir of an optimate and impoverished himself by having a sexbot made to look like a female version of him or like his real sister.

No, I don't believe it.  And I repeat that Severian doesn't say Agia's head hitting the stone wall sounded like a hammer hitting stone.  He said it sounded as /sharp/, not as metallic or ringing.

It's interesting, though, how things can be read differently when I have this theory in mind.  "Agia shrugged, and the moonlight turned her bare shoulders into something more precious and more beautiful than flesh."  (/Claw/, C. VIII)  There are a couple other examples like that.

Jerry Friedman