(urth) Short Story 103: The Map

[Marc Aramini]

“The Map” first appeared in 1984 in Light Years and Dark and is collected
in *Endangered Species*.

SUMMARY: Set after Severian has abolished the torturer’s guild (which was
implied at the end of *Citadel of the Autarch* but which became “reformed”
the guild by *Urth of the New Sun*), Eata makes his living as the captain
of a small boat. In the wake of a beating by his lover Synteche and a man
named Laetus in which they break into his chest and steal Eata's map (Eata
wanted them to take it and left the key in his pants on the floor), he is
commissioned by a man who calls himself Simulatio to take him far South of
the Old Citadel of Nessus for an asimi a day to find a place where three
roads meet. On the way to the brutal and primitive parts of the city,
Simulatio keeps watch in the night and finds the body of Synteche in the
river, killed by Laetus. When Eata relieves him on watch, Simulatio hears
Eata sobbing in the night and smells perfume in the cabin of the ship.

Simulatio takes a pike on shore and assures Eata that he will return by
nones, after which Eata will leave. Searching down nebulous streets in
search of a treasure indicated on a map he found in an ancient book, he
foolishly loses his pike and is eventually accosted by omophagists. They
chase and overpower him, but just as he is about to be killed by his own
fancy dagger, their greed for the bauble lead them to fight amongst
themselves, and Eata arrives to save him. They head back towards the Cygnet
Inn, and Eata advises Simulatio to burn his map or to lock it away with a
goldsmith and go home until he has recovered. Simulatio wants to continue
looking, but Eata refuses to return and casts his silver coin into the
river. As Eata casts off with Simulatio on the warf, he says, “You'll come
back for me! … Because I'll let you come with me! Because I'll give you a
share!” Eata does not look back, “but his hand shook as it gripped the
teller.”


 COMMENTARY:

Repeatedly in “The Map”, the things that men value and seek after
obsessively cause strife and conflict. Even though Eata planned to let
Laetus and Synteche leave together, he still fights them when they wake him
from his slumber, getting a beating. Even though the omophagists had their
prey cornered and defeated, the attraction of Simulatio’s shiny knife
causes them to fight among each other and lose their goal, giving Eata time
to intervene. Moralistic themes in Wolfe can often be muted behind the
ambiguity, but the concept of “The Map” is powerful without requiring much
ambiguity – some obsessions can never come to fruition, and some hopes will
never be real. Beyond this theme, there are several other important aspects
of “The Map” that bear discussing.

Severian finally gets an objective description (recapitulated on the boat
at the culmination of *Urth of the New Sun*), and it reveals that to
external perceptions he is a hard man. “Severian would have been angry,
too, to be sure, and Severian had beaten [Eata] more than once. He spat out
clotted blood. Beaten him worse than Laetus and Syntyche had last night. …
Now Severian was the Autarch, Severian was the law, and murderers died
under the law’s hand.”

This harsh image of black and white justice belies much of the interplay
between Palaemon and Severian at the conclusion of *The Citadel of the
Autarch*, when Severian returns to the Guild with the plan of abolishing it
as something unnecessary. It seems that he has instituted something which
even his old “friends” fear. Nevertheless, Eata is no longer a torturer,
though murderers must die under the law.

The objective description of the Old Citadel is equally important.
Simulatio notices it and comments how out of place it looks. Eata says,
“They call it the Old Citadel … I don’t know much about it.”

Simulatio remarks, “You can almost imagine them going up, can’t you? … Just
taking off with a silver shout and leaving this world behind.” Eata denies
his ability to conceive of the Citadel taking off into the heavens – as
someone who grew up in the halls, he knows that space flight has been
eclipsed by alternative, pragmatic uses. Simulatio says, “That’s what
they’re supposed to do, at the end of time. I read about it someplace.”

Eata immediately says that paper has killed many more men than steel –
something that we can see come true before the end of the story. Beyond the
concept of ideologies promulgated through books and propaganda that inspire
men to kill others both for causes and to persecute those not like
themselves, we see two maps that hold the vague promise of treasure
practically destroying the value of human life. When Simulatio (in the
narrative always referred to as “the stranger”) looks at the map, “Those
spidery streets might – or might not – be the very streets that stretched
before him. … The map presented an accumulation of detail, and yet it was
detail of a sort that did nothing to confirm or deny location. He committed
as much of it to memory as he could, all the while wondering what feature
or turning might prove of value, what name of street or structure could
have survived where there was no one left to recall it … For an instant it
seemed to him that it was not the treasure that was lost, but he himself.”
He seeks “Life and mastery without limit.” Looking at the map, its
landmarks are so nebulous that almost any confluence of streets could match
its contours. Thus are ideal dreams forced onto reality.

The description of dead Synteche is powerful in its imagery:

“The corpse performed a slow pirouette, like the half turn of a thrown
knife seen by an ephemerid, or the tumbling of a derelict through the abyss
that separates the worlds. … He tried to judge her as he had judged the
women whose compliance he had secured for coins, to weigh her breasts with
his eyes and applaud or condemn the roundness of her belly; he discovered
that he could not do so, that in the way he sought to see her she was
beyond his sight, unreachable as the unborn, unreachable as his mother had
been when he had once, as a boy, happened upon her bathing.”

Even though his name is given in dialogue, in the narrative text
Simulatio's name is never used, while at the start Eata refuses to
acknowledge his own name but is instead referred to as Eata in the
narrative.

Maxellindis, who is briefly mentioned as a casualty of Eata's obsession,
was the daughter of a boatman who appeared in *The Citadel of the Autarch*
in Chapter 37: “Across the River Again”. Mention of her was also made in
Chapter 66: “The Runaway” of *Urth of the New Sun, *which causes extreme
continuity problems. When he first sees her, Eata asks if she is in danger,
and Severian remarks:

“She’s not in as much danger as you are from her,” I said. He did not know
what I meant, but I did. His Maxellindis was not Thecla; his story could
not be the same as my own. But I had seen the revolving corridors of Time
behind the gamin face with the laughing brown eyes. Love is a long labor
for torturers; and even if I were to dissolve the guild, Eata would become
a torturer, as all men are, bound by the contempt for wealth without which
a man is less than a man, inflicting pain by his nature, whether he willed
it or not. I was sorry for him, and more sorry for Maxellindis the sailor
girl.

In his introduction to* Endangered Species*, Wolfe states he wrote “The
Map” because “we have sought and not found, you and I.”

CONTINUITY PROBLEMS AND URTH OF THE NEW SUN:

While this story was published in 1984 and *Urth of the New Sun* was not
released until 1987, there are some severe continuity problems that are
actually created BECAUSE Severian probes Eata for his story so thoroughly.
If Eata simply appeared on the boat after the coming of the New Sun and
Severian did not inquire about the timeline of his life so particularly,
there would be no way to ascertain these inconsistencies. The first thing
Eata says is that Severian “never did [Eata] much harm when [Severian] was
real.” He also says, “There was that time you pounded me. Remember,
Severian?” The third person presentation of Severian in “The Map” is much
more unkind, and the abuse seems to have occurred more than once.

There is also a rather insane moment in *Urth of the New Sun *when Severian
speculates that Eata could have been the one to save Vodalus if things had
been different, and Eata makes several of Jonas’ Wellerisms, including:
“That’s what boys are like, like the skipper said when he showed his
daughter.” However, the timeline and the events presented by Eata don't
seem to allow sufficient time to have passed for the events of “The Map” to
ever occur if Severian left to bring the New Sun after about ten years as
Autarch (Eata says that “a man can spend half his life looking, and never
find a thing”, and that he has wasted his life and Maxellindis' seeking the
treasure of his map. Therefore, in “The Map”, Maxellindis is probably
already dead and he seems like a man much older than his late twenties).

In *Urth of the New Sun, *Eata says that he left the torturers instead of
being elevated to journeyman, then worked with Maxellindis and her father
until her father died after four or five years, then smuggled with
Maxellindis until a cutter grappled their boat. This occurred about eight
years after the ascension of Severian, and then Eata was shipped as a slave
by the law to the Xanthic Lands and did not return for over two years, at
which point Severian was gone and Valeria was Autarchia. When, then, could
he have had his boat when Severian was Autarch and Maxellindis was already
gone?

Why this difference in presentation? Maxellindis and Eata are an item in
both, and he loses her in both, but are these differences truly only small
details that are either easy to misunderstand or slight oversights in the
construction of *Urth of the New Sun*?

Or are they evidence of an early iteration? Why does Eata speak in
Wellerisms at the end of Urth of the New Sun, and why does Severian think
of both “The Tale of the Student and his Son” when he sees Eata and also
consider that in a different reality Eata saved Vodalus?

A WATERY THREAT:

Eata says, “If you see a face in the water than stares at the light and
disappears, it’s a manatee. Don’t worry about it. But If you see anything
that swims like a man, call me.” In *Urth of the New Sun*, Eata posits that
Maxellindis was pulled to her death by a nixie.

LITERARY AND MYTHIC ALLUSIONS

When Simulatio stands watch, he sees the green light of Lune come down, and
thinks that the city on the east bank is merely asleep rather than dead.
“Its towers were black, but their sightless windows, thus illuminated from
behind, appeared to betray a faint radiance, as though hecatonchires roved
the gloomy corridors and deserted rooms,t heir thousand fingers smeared
with noctoluscence to light their way.” Hecatonchires, or the hundred
handed, were the allies of Gaia against Uranus. Later, Zeus freed them and
they guard the Titans in their prison.

NAMES:

Simulatio has the most interesting name, as it is a rhetorical figure of
speech, a type of irony in which one feigns great emotion as pretence. It
can imply a façade or pretext. (As far as we can tell, Eata is actually
engaged in the opposite, dissumulatio, most of the time, acting as if
things which exist do not – denying knowledge of the Old Citadel, saying
that he can’t imagine the towers escaping into the heavens, and pretending
that he has overcome his obsession.) There not seem to be a Biblical or
Saint reference in the name, unusual for a “normal” citizen of Urth. Is
Simulatio an assumed name? He remembers his father's estate in a dream.

Synteche means “fortunate” or “with fate” and is a New Testament name (in
the world of Urth, normal citizens are named after saints or Biblical
figures, but those from different epochs or origins have more mythic or
fictional names). Synteche is famous for a quarrel with Euodia mentioned in
Paul’s letter to the Philiipians, Chapter 4. Paul calls upon an unnamed
person to intervene directly in their argument. Here, we have a third party
intervening in the dissatisfaction Synteche feels for Eata (Even though
Eata is based on his own saint, there is a close resemblance between the
names Euodia and Eata). In addition, though Euodia is a female name, there
has been some gender confusion and some sources translated the name as that
of a male (Euodias)– even going so far as to claim that Euodia was the
gaoler of Phillipi – something that would definitely resonate with Eata’s
old profession as torturer, with all the prisoners in the oubliette and the
individual cells.

Laetus means “happy”, and is the name of a saint (also known as St. Lie)
who served as a guide to Leonard of Noblac (Leonard is the patron saint of
prisoners – supplications to him are meant to break the bonds of their
chains – which may or may not be relevant, as Laetus has taken broken the
lock on Eata’s chest and forever taken the physical representation of his
obsession away from him, though in a very negative and violent way).

UNANSWERED QUESTION:

Is there any significance to Simulatio's memories of his father's estate?
Why is he always called “the stranger” in the third person point of view
narrative? Does he have an identity in *Book of the New Sun*?

Why does Eata speak in Wellerisms in *Urth of the New Sun*, when there is
no evidence of those speech patterns in “The Map”?

Is there a way to reconcile the timelines for Eata and Maxellindis given in
“The Map” and *Urth of the New Sun?*

CONNECTION TO OTHER WORKS:

“The Map” and “The Cat” are the only two "realistic" stories directly
related to *The Book of the New Sun* (besides its series of sequels, “The
Night Chough”, and the miscellaneous Brown Book tales like “Empires of
Foliage and Flower” which are more like allegories.)
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