"Sam, Ziggy says you're here to heal the sun."

[avram]

Man, this is too early for me to be awake given how late I was up last night. (Well, maybe not now, but I’ve been awake for over an hour.)

A new half-formed conjecture came to me in last night’s New Sun reading (I’ve started Castle of the Autarch, the last book of the series proper.)

At the end of Claw (and ladymondegreen suggests that Claw was retold as Toy Story in response to my theory that New Sun was retold as Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure) Severian meets the Cumaean and her apprentice. He’s told that the mind in sleep (or a trance) can transcend time along its own lifeline (toss Quantum Leap in there while we’re at it), and that the Cumaean will conjure up Apu-Punchau, though she isn’t nearly old enough for her own lifeline to extend that far back, with the aid of some ancient being living on a planet around some distant star.

In Short Sun, I was confused over the fact that Horn/Silk can, in the presence of inhumu, project himself and others to Urth. I figured out what he was doing, but I couldn’t figure out why this was happening. Now I wonder if it was related to what the Cumaean was doing.

Comments

[whumpdotcom.livejournal.com]

I'm so glad I wasn't drinking coffee when I read that title.

Huge spoiler for The Book of the Short Sun. Really.

[womzilla.livejournal.com]

Silk, of course, is thousands of years too young to reach back to the time of Apu Punchau.

It seems very likely that Silk/Horn can project astrally because they have been contaminated by the Neighbors, who are not bound by time and space in the way that we are, and because he has mixed blood with inhumi who have fed on the Neighbors. (I think someone on the Urth list pointed to textual evidence that this is how the inhumi can come to Blue--they can't actually travel through space, but once they fly high enough on Green, they can project themselves to Blue. The inhumi couldn't come to Blue until the Neighbors came to Green.)