'What’s going on in the Short Sun' by James Wynn

Nothing in this is canon. But, I assert, the following explanation binds the whole of the plot of Long Sun and Short Sun together better than any other theory I’ve examined.

1 Summary

The setting of The Book of the Long/Short Sun is the solar system of Urth. The colonists left in the time of Typhon and have returned – thanks to relativity – millenia after they left.** This is the story of the origin of the Yesodis. Urth is now the hell planet Green. Blue is a constructed planet – using the same technology that the Yesodis used to artificially create their planet Yesod itself. The demonic inhumi will eventually ascend to be the angelic Hierogrammates. This is not the end of the Solar Cycle. It’s a prequel. As described by Master Malrubius:

“In a certain divine year (a time truly inconceivable to us, though that cycle of the universes was but one in an endless succession), a race was born that was so like to ours that Master Malrubius did not scruple to call it human. It expanded among the galaxies of its universe even as we are said to have done in the remote past, when Urth was, for a time, the center, or at least the home and symbol, of an empire.

“These men encountered many beings on other worlds who had intelligence to some degree, or at least the potential for intelligence, and from them — that they might have comrades in the loneliness between the galaxies and allies among their swarming worlds — they formed beings like themselves. It was not done swiftly or easily. Uncountable billions suffered and died under their guiding hands, leaving ineradicable memories of pain and blood.

“When their universe was old, and galaxy so far separated from galaxy that the nearest could not be seen even as faint stars, and the ships were steered thence by ancient records alone, the thing was done. Completed, the work was greater than those who began it could have guessed. What had been made was not a new race like Humanity's, but a race such as Humanity wished its own to be: united, compassionate, just. I was not told what became of the Humanity of that cycle. Perhaps it survived until the implosion of the universe, then perished with it. Perhaps it evolved beyond our recognition. But the beings Humanity had shaped into what men and women wished to be escaped, opening a passage to Yesod, the universe higher than our own, where they created worlds suited to what they had become."

~ Citadel of the Autarch (chapter 34)

In this universe, the Yesodis did not strike the sun so there was no need of a New Sun. In fact there were no Yesodis to strike the sun because this is the origin story of the Yesodis.

** I used to be believe that Long Sun/Short Sun took place in the impossibly distant future relative to Severian. But I now i think it takes place just as long since the time of Typhon as Severian. This is not Our Severian's universe or timeline. Malrubius himself was unsure when -- relative to Severian's own timeline -- the animals that became the Yesodis were actually found and the project to make them sentient began. He says

Perhaps we are no more than a race like that who shaped them. Perhaps it was we who shaped them  — or our sons — or our fathers. Malrubius said he did not know, and I believe he told the truth.

This is an alternate timeline/universe from the one in Severian's story—one where the Yesodis were never involved. No Autarch project. No striking the sun. And this will be important to understand when we encounter Severian in Return to the Whorl. The purpose of the Autarch project is to improve the humans who will create the Yesodis so they themselves will better when they occur.

2 Onomastics of Seraphim

It makes sense that the demonic inhumi, constantly analogized to reptiles and snakes, would ascend to the angelic Yesodis. The association is in the word seraphim, the plural for seraph – a word used seven times in the Hebrew Bible. Twice, famously in Isaiah 6:

In the year that King Uzziah died, I saw the Lord seated on a throne, high and exalted; and the train of His robes filled the temple. Above Him stood seraphim, each having six wings: With two wings they covered their faces, with two they covered their feet, and with two they were flying. And they were calling out to one another: “Holy, holy, holy is the LORD of Hosts; all the earth is full of His glory.”

The rest of the time, in Isaiah, Numbers, and Deuteronomy, the term is used to denote a “flying, venomous serpent.”

Do not rejoice, all you Philistines, that the rod that struck you is broken; from the root of that snake will spring up a viper, its fruit will be a darting, venomous serpent [seraph].

- Isaiah 14:29

This is the connection suggested between the angelic Yesodis with the eyes on their wings like the seraphim and the flying reptilian inhumi. As demons are fallen angels, the inhume are pre-ascended Yesodis.

3 Dream Travel is Time Travel

This is the most important mechanic to understand in this story.

For me, my first hint to this was when the Rajan (the Short Sun narrator) travels to Green and meet’s Sinew’s wife and children, the boys are both a little too old for the amount of time that seems to have passed since Horn died there. This event is taking place in the future: a time (likely) that occurs after then chronological end of the book.

In Return to the Whorl (RTTW), the Rajan asks Hoof how long it’s been since his father left. He says “About three… (what’s that?)…” and he never gets around to answering the question. That’s as big and red a flag as you can get that the chronology is not what you expect.

When Pike’s Ghost appears to Silk in the manse, this is the Rajan of the Short Sun, who, along with Oreb, met Mucor in Blood’s House on the Whorl in RTTW (chapter 6), and traveled with them to the past to find Silk (her mission directed by Horn).

4 Green is Urth. Blue is possibly constructed from Verthandi (Mars), Skuld (Venus), and Lune – which have a combined mass that is almost the same as Urth’s (Earth’s). As I’ve already noted, Yesod is also a constructed planet.

When the Rajan plans to dream travel to Green with the group. They end up on Urth. That’s as good a signal as you get from Wolfe.

5 The Whorl has arrived back at Urth

Although I used to presume that the Neighbors were the descendants of the Green Men, I don't think this is necessary, and is probably not true. Yet, just as the Green Man had dispensed with the need to eat, living by photosynthesis, the Neighbors have gone a step further to the point that their bodies are in the form of trees. This allows their bodies to constantly sleep and their souls to dream travel at will, with the assistance of their inhumi in liana bodies.

6 The interpretive door to this story is Faerie lore

“Neighbors” is a term for fairies. Wolfe knew this, because he has a character at the beginning of An Evil Guest say so.

Faerieland is the afterlife, the Summerland, the spirit world. You walk into a faerie circle and end up in faerie. When you meet a white deer you know you are at the borders of fairyland (per the story of Pwyll in the Mabinogion). Or otherwise hinted by J.R.R. Tolkien in The Hobbit, where the company encounters a “flying white deer” which they expend the last of their arrows trying to bring down. But story says:

Yet if they had known more about it and considered the meaning of the hunt and the white deer that had appeared upon their path, they would have known that they were at last drawing towards the eastern edge, and would soon have come, if they could have kept up their courage and their hope, to thinner trees and places where the sunlight came again.

~ The Hobbit (chapter 8)

In other words, that they were on edge of the kingdom of the Elves.

As with Pwyll, when you near the borders of Fairie you are prone to be replaced by a fairie. This happens to Horn. He sees a young Neighbor in the form of a greenbuck and chases it, falls into a pit (the faerie circle) and dies (Faerieland). The Neighbor feels guilty for “killing him” (at the end of RTTW he says he doesn’t want to see Hoof and Hide because he ‘killed their father’) and possesses his body and memories to resurrect him (thus the marionette reference and Pinnochio allusion early in ‘On Blue’s Waters’). Now he has Horn’s memories and opts to complete Horn’s mission to atone for killing him.

This suggests where the Neighbors went when they left Blue to the colonists: They went to the distant past and became the gods and fairies of human antiquity. Some of them, perhaps, went to the Commonwealth via the Citadel tunnels (the sewers of Green that the Rajan cleaned out) employing the bodies of the giant House Absolute statues. Certainly the Megatherian’s have come from the future, per the Prophet in Dr. Talos’s play:

In future times, so it has long been said, the death of the old sun will destroy Urth. But from its grave will rise monsters, a new people, and the New Sun.

~ The Claw of the Conciliator (chapter 24)

7 The rest of the story

After Horn’s death in the pit, the Short Sun narrator is neither Horn nor Neighbor but a combination of the two. He-Pen-Sheep calls him “Neighbor man.”

Unfortunately, it is not possible to complete Horns mission because Silk died some time well before Horn left home. He slashed his wrists in front of Hyacinth’s casket. But when Horn’s body is destroyed on Green, the Neighbors help out their comrade. They send the narrator back in time at the moment of Silk’s death and repeat the trick he did with Horn – healing his body. Now he is Silk’s body and memories and the Neighbor that gives him life. The Neighbor’s body is, at all times, sleeping on Blue. And while controlling Silk’s body, he carries the memory of Horn’s memories. This the literary purpose of the extensive conversation about hybridization. It is also a rationalization of the Trinity (Father, Son, Holy Spirit) that Wolfe already pulled off with Marble, Rose, and Molybdenum.

The moment where the Rajan encounters Mucor in Blood’s house (RTTW) is the exact time that Horn is on Blue in Marble’s hut waiting for her to return to her body.  The next scene is clipped from the Narrator’s story in RTTW. But we have it in The Book of the Long Sun. The Rajan, Mucor and Oreb all go back into to Silk’s Manse (Pike’s ghost).

Remember that Silk’s appearance had an uncanny resemblance to Pike’s. His face intimidated Mint because he looked so like Pike.  And Rose said she resented Silk because she could see his revulsion toward her in the face of her lover. This suggests that – like Silk – Pike was one of those clones stolen from the freezers.

When Mucor meets the Rajan at Blood's house, Horn is back at the little island waiting with Marble. The Rajan instructs Marble to tell Horn not to try to come to the Whorl because it's "too dangerous". He knows what lies ahead.

8 Where do they go?

At the end of the novel, they gather into the lander with plans to return to the Whorl. What happens along the way is not known but it seems they all traveled via dream travel back in time on the Whorl. Because we meet an older couple in ruins of Viron as the Trivigaunte are attacking who are most certainly Marble and Hammerstone. It is certainly inevitable that a chem in dream travel would be as human as an inhumi is.

Additionally, the Rajan retrieves the inhuma, Fava, from dreamworld (remember her body died during dream travel). He releases her into the Whorl and she goes by the name Hyacinth (both “bean” names, and favas are Italian beans which the Romans believed carried human souls).

The Rajan does something Silk’s mother always wanted him to do – he goes to work at the Juzgado. Silk goes to talk to him – a scene referred to by Silk but never portrayed or detailed – and probably learns and intuits a lot in that meeting.

And of course Silk learns more when he is enlightened a second time on his wedding night. And that is the meaning of Silk’s depression and his telling Horn that there’s a wrongness in his and Hy's love that doesn’t come from either of them.

9 Final mystery

It seems obvious that Silk is a clone of Typhon. He has blonde hair. But when Gurloes asks Severian who he was talking to in RTTW (chapter 19), he says he’s talking to Master Malrubius (who is dead at this time). When Gurloes sees the Rajan, his reaction suggests he does look like Malrubius.

A big, heavy man [Gurloes] with a big heavy face had hold of the boy. He was telling him to come along, and from the way he said it, it sounded like the boy [young Severian] was in for a whipping. The boy said, "I will, Master. I'm sorry, Master. I meant no harm."

Then the bird came yelling, "Watch out! Watch out!" like it did sometimes. The big man stopped to look at it and said, "What's that doing in here?"

"It belongs to Master Malrubius, Master," the boy told him, and the big man he called Master hit him across the face. [...] Then Father came up behind him and put his hand on his shoulder. He turned around and saw Father, and his mouth dropped open. He did not say anything, just backed away. I think he must have run after that, but there was so much noise I could not be sure.

~ Return To The Whorl (chapter 19)

The answer is in the questions that have plagued readers about RTTW Severian. This Severian is younger than Our Severian and yet he already has a dog. He has already met Merryn in a way that is contrary to how it is recorded in The Claw of the Conciliator. The explanation is that we are a different universe cycle -- we are not even in the universe iteration where we started... the universe of The Whorl -- because this is the First Severian that was discussed in the final chapter of The Citadel of the Autarch -- the Severian of a previous iteration (a subsequent iteration for the inhabitants of the Whorl).

This allows us to piece together a mystery that eluded Our Severian: That is, since it was the First Severian who sent the undine back in time to save Our Severian from drowning, how did the First Severian not drown?

Two things are clear to me. The first is that I am not the first Severian. Those who walk the corridors of Time saw him gain the Phoenix Throne, and thus it was that the Autarch, having been told of me, smiled in the House Azure, and the undine thrust me up when it seemed I must drown. (Yet surely the first Severian did not; something had already begun to reshape my life.)

~ Citadel of the Autarch (chapter 38)

The answer: The Rajan...

(coming from another universe and timeline)

...saved the First Severian in his own separate universe/timeline or arranged for him to be saved. Then the Rajan became Master Malrubius – in Severian's past relative to the scenes in RTTW. When the First Severian becomes a Walker in the Corridors of Time, he arrives at his own childhood in the next universe iteration and discovers that there is no Master Malrubius teaching at the tower. So he takes that role and when he dies (or pretends to) and he is buried in the mausoleum where he played as a child – Cilinia’s tomb. In universe iteration of The Book of the New Sun, Cilinia might or might not have been buried there – the First Severian’s encounter with Typhon might have changed any number of events by the time Our Severian is born.

But in the ironic timeline of The Book of the New Sun, Our Severian plays in the tomb where he himself is buried – but he doesn't play there because he’s buried there – rather, he was buried there because that is the tomb where he played and where he found Cilinia buried.

Additional Confirmation: On the Urth List Gene Wolfe took part in a Q/A for questions about The Book of the Long Sun. the following is a question asked and Wolfe's answer:

Q14: Is there a member (current, former, future) of the Order of Seekers for Truth and Penitence on the Whorl?

GW: I'm going to interpret this question in the broadest possible sense, since that seems to be what [the questioner] wants. Yes, there is. It is Silk.