(urth) the miracle of apu-punchau (text based questions)

[Marc Aramini]

Last night I was looking through the coming of the New Sun in Urth and it gave me a big headache. Like Roy, I actually prefer to work with the text instead of math or real astronomy, but I usually think there is a whole lot of irony in comments by narrators.  We have a bunch of sea monsters floating around at some point at the end of Urth, no surprise, some with kraken bellies, some with a hundred heads.

The following quotes gave me a headache, I was hoping somebody more lucid than myself could make a connection here.

First, the postscript in which Wolfe says the eclipse "may leave less credulous minds puzzling over the ways in which such a marvel might be achieved without a cataclysm GREATER than that which accompanied the arrival of the new sun", that they will posit a solution to the opaque body causing the prolonged night, barring mass hypnosis.  Why would a greater cataclysm stem from an eclipse without the arrival of an extremely dense and large object?  A bizarre aside, I feel.

"No sort of wonder is more convincing to the primitive mind than one affecting the presumably immutable workings of the heavens .... it should be noted that the stars seen in the skies of the Comonwealth in winter rise in spring over the stone town (presumably due to the precession of the equinoxes); but that during his prolongation of the night Severian SEES HIS ACCUSTOMED SPRING STARS.  This would seem to favor the second explanation,as does the immediate manifestion of the Old Sun, already higher than the rooftops, after the capitulation of the autochthons.  Nothing Severian writes indicates what the opaque body may have been; but the thoughtful reader will find little difficulty in advancing at least one possible speculation." (371-372)

So are the constellations Sev sees supposed to be visible from the other side of the world at that time?  Is this a mirror like effect, a portal, something else?  I don't understand that passage very well.  What would cause unseeable constellations to appear in the sky?

>From chapter xliv, the morning tide
"There was a shimmering azure light.  The claw had returned - not the claw destroyed by ascian artillery, nor even the claw I had given the chiliarch of Typhon's Praetorians, but the Claw of the Conciliator, the gem I had found in my sabretache ... The claw endured, shining and swaying against the dark void. ... I lifted my head, opened my eyes, and spat a stream of crystal fluid like no water of Urth's; it seemed not water at all, but a richer atmosphere, corroborant as the winds of Yesod."

I am assuming here the claw he speaks of is the new sun in the sky, right?  But what is this water he's spitting that is like Yesod, and nothing like the water of Urth?

Chapter XLVIII is more disconcerting, he has just visited Nessus underwater, and then:

"under me lay another city, one I did not know, a city that was NEVER NESSUS.  Its towers sprawled along the floor of Ocean  ... at last a huge shadow glided down the sand-strewn avenue before me, and I looked up to behold the undine, kraken-tressed and ship bellied, pass swiftly overhead and vanish in a dazzle of sunfire ... I waded out of the sea while living it still, even as I had earlier dropped from the stars while loving them; and in truth there is no place in Briah that is not lovely when it no longer holds the threat of death  ... 'the new sun comes and he will send them crashing into the sea like foundered ships.  and from the sea lift new-glittering with gold, silver, iron, and copper. ... "I who boast of forgetting nothing, had forgotten that IT WAS THE DEMONS WHO HAD SPOKEN SO."
 338- 339

The chapter title here is old lands and new, but the demons making the claim that the sea lift the continents to something new  seems to have a significance I do not immediately grasp.  Is this just another city on Urth, an older one than Nessus?

"Lune was concelaed behind clouds from which fell a gentle rain.  ... again green light drenched the beach.  One of the flapping horrors that had snatched me from the wreck of the old Autharch's fliers fluttered mothlike between my eyes and Lune, waxing ever larger; for the first time I knew that notules were its wings. ...  Fish as large as ships swam between the towers, which I had been wrong to think fallen; save for the water and their wreaths of weed ... the great gun that had fired at me when I had been taken to the prefect Prisca now boomed again, its bolt cleaving Ocean with a roar of steam.  The bolt struck me, but it was not I who died - this drowned citadel vanished like the dream it was, and I found that I was swimming through the gap in the curtain wall and into the REAL Citadel itself." (340-341)

Here Sev has "abandoned" his life and slips into this watery grave, but whether this is real, imagined, where it is exactly, seems terribly confused, and I wondered if anyone had made any sense of the bolt that cleaves ocean and suddenly leaves him deposited going through the curtain of the REAL citadel (like the other one was not?)

Here we go, this is only trite semantics:

"you were urth, and thus urth lives."
I shouted, "this is ushas."
"if you say it.  But Urth live in Ushas and in you." (342)

So Severian is Green. That last quote is not important at all. Seriously though there are a lot of weird weird weird things going on at the end of Urth that I just can't seem to get my head around, and Apheta saying that planetary bodies can be created doesn't help very much.

I don't know how the ship blocking the sun would allow different constellations to be seen in the night sky.  A giant galactic mirror?  I don't know.  Do the masters of apheta create one of their temporary galactic bodies?  Can they even reach there?