The Shadow of the Torturer: Chapters XIX and XX

The Botanic Gardens and Father Inire's Mirrors

Well, I said to read Chapter XXI as well but I’m saving it for next week now. Also, I’m a day late because I unexpectedly had to spend most of my day in the car yesterday. Oops.

But I do think it’s worth ruminating on these two chapters for a while. Because, as you’ve noticed, the novel has changed shape over the last handful of chapters. We began with a coming of age story about a young man in a very strange, far future earth where humanity has gone to the stars, colonized worlds, brought back animals from extinction, and all of that science fictional stuff is history and in some cases ancient history to Severian’s world.

It’s unclear how much time passed between the first chapter and Thecla’s suicide, but it was at least one year.

Since leaving the Matachin Tower, with Severian’s betrayal of his guild, the time has slowed dramatically. These last six chapters have occurred over less than a day, with these last five happening over the course of a few hours.

I do believe the passage of time in The Book of the New Sun is an important aspect to it. And, yes, it tells us much about Severian, but I think there’s something a bit more to it than that. Sadly, I’ll ask you to keep this at the back of your mind for the next thousand pages. We’ll discuss it more someday, but not now.

But there is, to me, a clear transition that’s happened in the novel, where we’ve gone from coming of age to more of a picaresque style novel where our hero sort of bumbles his way through a collection of misfits and weirdos and unsavory sorts. We stumbled into Baldanders and Dr Talos and then faceplanted into Agia who, I’ll remind you, is taking him to get a flower that is a weapon so he can fight in a deathmatch that evening.

Severian seems hilariously little concerned with this. Perhaps it’s true that he doesn’t fear death. Or that he just can’t help himself around a pretty girl.

Along with that, the botanic gardens seem to effect Severian significantly, almost as if he’s drunk or hallucinating, compelled by something beyond or within him.

But let’s take a step back and consider the Pelerines and the Claw of the Conciliator.

It’s still not exactly clear what this valuable relic is, but it apparently causes miracles. Agia says quite a few things about the Conciliator and the Claw. Severian tries to make a joke about its name with Agia but she misses it completely, which, I think, tells us something about how Agia thinks of Severian.

She sees him as incredibly naive. So naive that he may not have even heard of the Claw, which we should recognize as being rather famous. Either she sees him as a hopeless bumpkin or she just thinks he’s an annoying idiot and her task to teach him how to fight is a bit of an imposition.

But back to the Conciliator.

“Like all these religious arguments, this one gets less significant as we continue. Supposing the Conciliator to have walked among us eons ago, and to be dead now, of what importance is he save to historians and fanatics? I value this legend as a part of the sacred past, but it seems to me that it is the legend that matters today, and not the Conciliator’s dust.”

Sacred past is a curious phrase, and I think plays with the typical fantasy notion of the past as a golden age of humanity. We see this in Tolkien and almost every other fantasy writer between Tolkien and Wolfe, save Le Guin.

And remember, Wolfe is a SFF nerd and he is very much in conversation with the genre. He’s a man who grew up on pulp magazines and paperbacks with Franzetti covers, and he loved them even still as an adult. But he was not above poking and prodding at them, subverting and reimagining them.

So we know the ancient past of Severian’s Urth was one of intergalactic expansion and the present is almost medieval. The march of progress that so many of us believe in has reversed and the past truly was one of wonder, not merely of myth.

“Supposing him—we turn at this corner, Severian, you may see the head of the stair, if you’ll look, there where the statues of the eponyms stand—supposing him to have lived, he was by definition the Master of Power. Which means the transcendence of reality, and includes the negation of time. Isn’t that correct?”

I nodded.

“Then there is nothing to prevent him, from a position, say, of thirty thousand years ago, coming into what we call the present. Dead or not, if he ever existed, he could be around the next bend of the street or the next turn of the week.”

Well, how about that!

The Conciliator has immense power and is capable of transcending reality, breaking the bonds of time and crossing millennia.

Or perhaps it’s only a myth. But a myth believed by many, or at least by the Pelerines, who Agia considers fanatics. And so we can take her word for it or not, or take her word on this, and remain suspicious of the rest.

Like why it’s so important to get this flower rather than figure out who challenged him to a duel and maybe talk it out, work something out, rather than a fight to the death.

But alas, Severian’s been trapped by a pretty face.

There’s quite a bit of banter and Agia seems to enjoy it, pulling Severian into a kiss. Though Severian also seems to have landed on his own suspicions of her.

“I am almost inclined to think this whole affair is some trick of yours, or of your brother’s. You were outside when the Septentrion came—did you tell him something to inflame him against me? Is he your lover?”

So Severian himself doesn’t entirely trust Agia and may even be aware of what her aim is, but he goes with her, carries on by her side, because he finds her pretty. Fallen in love, nearly at first sight, and now follows along like a puppy.

Which is to say: a young man.

Within the Botanic Gardens, Severian loses himself and cannot remember all that he did, despite his perfect memory. Which maybe puts some question to that long ago statement.

“Severian, you argued and argued, and in the end I had to drag you away. The gardens affect people like that—certain suggestible people. They say the Autarch wants some people to remain in each to accent the reality of the scene, and so his archmage, Father Inire, has invested them with a conjuration. But since you were so drawn to that one, it’s not likely any of the others will affect you so much.”

“I felt I belonged there,” I said. “That I was to meet someone…and that a certain woman was there, nearby, but concealed from sight.”

Agia knows nothing of the House Absolute or the power players in this world, but she is aware of Father Inire and there’s a certain ambient fear regarding him. He has power that terrifies and can create this hallucinogenic trap from the beauty of the gardens.

Also, this feeling that Severian had—keep that in the back of your mind for a bit as well.

As Agia had said, the real jungles sickened far to the north. I had never seen them, yet the Jungle Gardens made me feel I had. Even now, as I sit at my writing table in the House Absolute, some distant noise brings back to my ears the screams of the magenta-breasted, cynaeous-backed parrot that flapped from tree to tree, watching us with white-rimmed and disapproving eyes—though this is no doubt because my mind was already turned to that haunted place. Through its screaming, a new sound—a new voice—came from some red world still unconquered by thought.

I quote this at length because of the luxuriousness of it. A grand feast of a sentence. But I quote it specifically because of the mention of the House Absolute.

We know the House Absolute is the seat of the Autarch. We know Severian has backed into a throne. And we know he’s writing this story for some audience. An audience who would not need him to state clearly what throne and where, and so it takes us twenty chapters to getting these two breadcrumbs, twenty chapters apart, to put this initial riddle together.

I believe that should serve as an answer for now, yeah?

While Agia and Severian continue their way through the gardens, feeling enough danger that Severian draws his sword, we also get an extended memory from Thecla that she told to Severian.

Why does Severian tell us now and not back when she was alive?

While Severian has a self-reported perfect memory, he does not reveal memories in chronological order all the time. This is signaled in the arrangement of the first two chapters of this book. Remember: Chapter II happens before Chapter I.

This is Wolfe telling you that Severian is choosing how to arrange his narrative. Which means, sometimes, he chooses not to tell us something when it happened in the narrative until later.

This is one such time.

And what a strange story!

What are Father Inire’s mirrors? They seem to be able to conjure people and creatures across vast distances, including across time. His mirrors are small versions of what they use to traverse the galactic empire, allowing cacogens (an obscure word, here, but seems to be used in place of aliens—though are these aliens or simply branches of humanity long split from those of Urth?) to visit Urth.

Hilariously, Wolfe gives us an answer as to what Father Inire’s mirrors do, though I don’t know that it helps us understand any better. He seems to be describing Einstein’s theory of relativity but also, perhaps, quantum mechanics, but also something quite a bit different. Something akin to opening a wormhole through spacetime.

“‘Think of two girls running across a lawn without looking where they’re going. When they meet, there are no more little girls running. But if the mirrors are well made and the distances between them are correct, the images do not meet. Instead, one comes behind the other. That has no effect when the light comes from a candle or a common star, because both the earlier light and the later light that would otherwise tend to drive it forward are only random white lights, like the random waves a little girl might make by flinging a handful of pebbles into a lily pond. But if the light is from a coherent source, and forms the image reflected from an optically exact mirror, the orientation of the wave fronts is the same because the image is the same. Since nothing can exceed the speed of light in our universe, the accelerated light leaves it and enters another. When it slows again, it reenters ours—naturally at another place.’

“‘Is it just a reflection?’ Domnina asked. She was looking at the Fish.

'“‘Eventually it will be a real being, if we do not darken the lamp or shift the mirrors. For a reflected image to exist without an object to originate it violates the laws of our universe, and therefor an object will be brought into existence.’”

Clear as day!

Severian is walking beside Agia literally muttering this all aloud to himself and Agia seems to wonder if he’s deranged in some way, especially because Severian seems hardly to notice how strange this behavior is.

But they come to a hut and a terrified man, who flees into the hut.

Now, there’s quite a lot here, which is why I decided it’s best not to just hurry ahead for the sake of hurrying ahead. How much of this are you meant to understand?

Unclear.

In truth, I still don’t understand. I have connected dots across the Book of the New Sun, but am I correct? Who can say?

Books are not about being correct. Books are conversations.

And here, at its most opaque—even with pages of explanation—a book is also at its most open to interpretation and therefore discussion, so feel free to make up your own mind about all this. Or to challenge me, or to bring up anything you thought important that I didn’t focus on.

While the series is often clear and goes in a straight line, occasionally we come to something like Father Inire’s mirrors where sense seems to leave us. Or at least me, who amn’t smart enough to put these things in their proper place even still, after a decade with these books and reading them for the third time, and the second time in about 18 months.

So while I can hold the shape of this story in my head and I can point you towards what I think matters, I, too, am but a traveller here. A pilgrim, perhaps not as lost as you, but certainly not found.

Next week, we’ll read Chapter XXI and XXII.

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• Glossolalia - A Le Guinian fantasy novel about an anarchic community dealing with a disaster

• Sing, Behemoth, Sing - Deadwood meets Neon Genesis Evangelion

• Howl - Vampire Hunter D meets The Book of the New Sun in this lofi cyberpunk/solarpunk monster hunting adventure

• Colony Collapse - Star Trek meets Firefly in the opening episode of this space opera

• The Blood Dancers - The standalone sequel to Colony Collapse.

• Iron Wolf - Sequel to Howl.

• Sleeping Giants - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse and The Blood Dancers

• Broken Katana - Sequel to Iron Wolf.

• Libertatia; or, The Onion King - Standalone sequel to Colony Collapse, The Blood Dancers, and Sleeping Giants

• Noir: A Love Story - An oral history of a doomed romance.

• House of Ghosts - Standalone sequel to Libertatia; or, the Onion King