From: "ArchD'Ikon Zibethicus" 
Subject: (urth) Re: names, Blue is Urth..
Date: Fri, 13 Dec 2002 04:10:48 +0000

Well, I'm quite happy to trudge along as Zibethicus if everybody else can 
live with it - I have no wish to occupy somebody else's `muskrat'.  
Zibethicus might sound like a silly name to many, but I'm generally known by 
it on the Net and in divers other quarters.  So, can we live with that?  Zx 
or ->Zx<- will do for short...

I judiciously snipped my sig., too - dunno whether I can live with changing 
it, but I'll try to remember to snip it.  Get stuck into me if I forget.

`Urth is Blue' theory; as far as I remember, the Long Sun Whorl is stopped 
at the Blue/Green system for repairs.  There is no explicit statement of how 
quickly it was designed to travel.  I suppose that it is _just_ possible 
that, given that it was sent out during Typhon's initial reign, several 
hundred years at least before Severian's advent as Autarch, if it travelled 
at an appreciable percentage of the speed of light, the Whorl would 
experience some time dilation.

If I remember correctly, the inhabitants of the Long Sun Whorl apprehend 
that three hundred years have elapsed since departure.  _If_ it was 
travelling rapidly enough for time dilation to occur, their three centuries 
would have been - who knows? millions of years by Urth standards.  Long 
enough, at any rate, for the people seeded by Severian's activation of the 
New Sun to evolve on the New Urth into, perhaps, the Vanished People, and 
then to tactfully depart when colonists arrive from the Short Sun whorl.  
(Any reader of Olaf Stapeldon knows that body forms can take on all sorts of 
other forms over the kaplas - and, speaking as an arthritic with a bad back 
and bad knees, I would put my hand(s) up for two extra legs anytime!  More 
stable...)

This putative lapsation of time would allow for the jungles of the Moon 
mentioned in the Book of the New Sun to evolve further into the gigantic 
trees of Green.

That's one way to explain it, if an explanation is what you are seeking.  
How the Long Sun Whorl is, in that scheme, supposed to have found its way 
back to Urth I have no idea whatsoever.  You'd have to ask Mr. Wolfe...

->Zx<-

(bereft of sig.!)

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