"Shadow", Chapter 13, Part 3

"You know of the roads?"

"I know they must not be used. Nothing more."

"The Autarch Maruthas closed them. That was when I was your age. Travel encouraged sedition, and he wished goods to enter and leave the city by the river, where they might be easily taxed. The law has remained in force since, and there is a redoubt, so I've heard, every fifty leagues. Still the roads remain. Though they are in poor repair, it is said some use them by night."

"I see," I said. Closed or not, the roads might make for an easier passage than traveling across the countryside as the law demanded.

This is letting us know that the Commonwealth is quite totalitarian. Lots of governments have restricted travel to defeat "sedition," including Communist Russia, the Incas, Nazi Germany, North Korea, the USA during the "Red Scare," and many more that I don't know about, I'm sure. Restriction on travel within a country only happens at quite an advanced state of totalitarianism, though. The last sentence is satirical (I hope); traveling isn't outlawed, just traveling on the roads. It's inconvenient for everyone, but doesn't really stop travel, and therefore seems unlikely to stop the spread of sedition.

The four books I had carried to her a year before remained, stacked with others on the little table. I could not resist the temptation to take one; there were so many in the library that they would never miss a single volume. My hand had stretched forth before I realized I did not know which to choose. The book of heraldry was the most beautiful, but it was too large by far to carry about the country. The book of theology was the smallest of all, but the brown book was hardly larger. In the end it was that I took, with its tales from vanished worlds.

I personally think this is a statement of Wolfe's preferences; He is a religious man, but if he has to choose one book to take on a trip, it's going to be an anthology of the great stories, and not a theology text. I think that this is near-universal. Even if you choose the Bible to be the one book you take, it's the stories in the Bible that are interesting (and contain the most wisdom, anyway). Once they start talking about cubits and who begat whom, your eyes glaze over and you skip ahead. Don't deny it.

"Then I abandoned all thoughts of the south and her ice-choked sea.... North lay the wide pampas, a hundred trackless forests, and the rotting jungles at the waist of the world." More evidence that this is the southern hemisphere, and the word "pampas" suggests Argentina, which I think is another hat tip to Borges.

"Shadow", Chapter 13, Part 2

"We cannot kill you, you see. I have had a most difficult time convincing Gurloes of that, yet it is so. If we slay you without judicial order, we are no better than you: you have been false to us, but we will have been false to the law. Furthermore, we would be putting the guild in jeopardy forever - an Inquisitor would call it murder."

He waited for me to comment, and I said, "But for what I have done..."

"The sentence would be just. Yes. Still, we have no right in law to take life on our own authority. Those who have that right are properly jealous of it. If we were to go to them, the verdict would be sure. But were we to go, the repute of the guild would be publicly and irrevocably stained. Much of the trust now reposed in us would be gone, and permanently. We might confidently expect our affairs to be supervised by others in the future.

This sounds like a concern of any self-governing body, which is scary, because this is describing a cover-up. So this means that any organization whose powers overlap with any other (and that's most of them) has a strong incentive to cover up wrongdoing. To give a relatively current example, when prisoner torture at Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq came to light, Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld formally apologized, but he also said this at a Senate committee hearing:

But I wish I knew how you reach down into a criminal investigation when it is not just a criminal investigation, but it turns out to be something that is radioactive, something that has strategic impact in the world. And we don't have those procedures. They've never been designed.

We're functioning in a -- with peacetime restraints, with legal requirements in a wartime situation, in the information age, where people are running around with digital cameras and taking these unbelievable photographs and then passing them off, against the law, to the media, to our surprise, when they had not even arrived in the Pentagon.

This seems like he is lamenting the fact that there are "legal requirements in a wartime situation" (e.g. the Geneva Convention). And it seems like he really wanted a way to deal with the matter completely internally. I just worry that the easiest way to deal with something that no one else knows about is to ignore it. It makes me glad that we live in the information age. That way, at least there will be the possibility to try to make our laws self-consistent.

Yet again Severian's infallible memory becomes suspect: "I saw the red light of the sun again, and breathed that wet wind that tells in winter that spring is almost come.... The first brass-backed fly of the new summer buzzed against the port." So, is it winter, spring, or summer? Is "new summer" a figure of speech, or is Severian seriously mixed up about something as simple as what time of year he betrayed his guild? Another indication that maybe his memory is not as good as he says:

"Severian!" Master Palaemon exclaimed. "You are not listening to me. You were never an inattentive pupil in our classes."
"I'm sorry. I was thinking about a great many things."
"No doubt." For the first time he really smiled, and for an instant looked his old self, the Master Palaemon of my boyhood. "Yet I was giving you such good advice for your journey. Now you must do without it, but doubtless you would have forgotten everything anyway.

So Master Palaemon thinks Severian is attentive and yet forgetful? Hmm...