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racefortheironthrone · 2 years

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Thoughts About the OG Lyctors

Introduction

For my money, one of the most satisfying elements in Nona the Ninth was that we finally got an account of everything leading up to the destruction of Earth - notably, Harrow cuts off the retelling before the Resurrection, the establishment of the Empire, and the lyctoral ascension at Canaan House - in no small part because we get some really comprehensive information about who the original lyctors were and what they were up to.

So in this post, I want to talk about what we learned about the lyctor’s pre-Resurrection lives and what we can infer from them about their post-Resurrection lives.

M- and A-

I’ve decided to start with the “usual double act,” both because M- and A- spend so much of the narrative in close proximity, often described one right after the other, and because I think their arcs taken together are an interesting example of the ways in which Tamsyn Muir is playing with repetition and mirroring between pre- and post-Resurrection dynamics.

M- and A- aren’t just John’s first followers, they were the first team members in the original group that was trying to cryogenically preserve eleven billion people. M- was the group’s doctor, which suggests a strong continuity with her later lyctor specialty as an anatomist. Notably, John 19:18 establishes that M- made it a special cause of hers to fight against reproductive injustice in space, which is quite interesting given her post-Resurrection distaste for all thing having to do with children. A- seems to have been the chief cryobiologist - he’s described in John 20:8 as the “glycerol-6 genius,” and glycerol-6 is a cryoprotective agent that prevents the freezing process from damage physical tissues. (Interestingly, we never learn what John’s specialty is on the project.) Here, we don’t get as strong a link between pre- and post-Resurrection interests, although there may be some link to the unexplained experiments with the apples that Ianthe was doing on the Mithraeum.

John 15:23 establishes that “their usual double act” of squabbling frenemyship was absolutely a dynamic of their pre-Resurrection lives, and throughout the rest of the bubble narrative we see M- and A- acting as a pair - sometimes in opposition and other times acting as a united front. In 15:23, for example, A- is the first to believe in John’s new powers, whereas M- “was so frantic to prove something in the science had gone wrong, or right,” and insisted on putting the immaculate corpses through elaborate experiments - to the point where she has something of an atheist’s crisis of faith in John 5:18.

At the same time, both M- and A- act in concert most of the time - they’re the first to move into John’s compound full-time, they try to keep an eye on his mental wellbeing, and once they come to terms with the idea that John’s a necromancer, they’re the ones who “go raid a fucking graveyard” to see whether John can do it to more than just the specially-treated corpses of the cryo-project. Most significantly, it’s M- and A- who act as “good cop and bad cop” in negotiating with what seems to be the U.S government for billions of dollars and a suitcase nuke in the early stages of their conflict with the FTL project - a revelation that gives them a significant degree of responsibility for the dstruction of the ten billion.

As the crisis escalates, it’s M- who puts the final pieces together that there is no second wave of the FTL project, whereas A- is the one who pushes John to prioritize stopping the first wave from leaving - which leads to the crisis escalating. Furthermore, when John reveals to the group his intent to use nuclear blackmail to stop the first wave from leaving, M- and A- both side with John - although M- does get cold feet in the final hour and tries to get John to stop.

And in the final moments, M- and A- express their intent to “go out together.” A- is shot first in front of M- and John, and M- is shot trying to get their assailants to spare John’s life - which is a detail that particularly grabbed me as an inversion of her death in HTN.

G- and P-

The second pair I want to talk about is G- and P-, who seem to have been the next pair brought on to the project. Although it does seem like G- was the project’s engineer - hence the bit about “we even lent them G- at the time because they wanted to talk about coating,” presumably having to do with how to shield both spaceships and cryo cans from the harmful effects of radiation and the like - the dominant theme of both G- and P-’s arcs have to do with loyalty and familiarity.

Throughout the narrative, John makes much of the fact that “G- and I were both hometown boys” and that “he and I had grown up on the same street. I’d spotted him for mince pies all the time as kids.” On the other hand, P- "knew G- from way back” but doesn’t seem to have been as close with John - and I get the sense from the way that John keeps passively-aggressively denigrating her skills and qualifications that he was somewhat jealous of her closeness with his childhood mate.

P-’s role on the project is somewhat ambiguous - she seems to function as a kind of volunteer head of security, but all we really learn is that “she’d made detective by that point; was going on to big things in the MoD.” Unlike G- who doesn’t seem to have followed up on his engineering post-Resurrection, P-’s skills clearly put her in good stead as Commander of the Second House and Head of Trentham Special Intelligence.

G- somewhat drops out of the narrative in this middle section, while P- plays a more significant role as the one who “said...if they’re going to let us fix the world, you’ve got to make them take us seriously. Get some leverage,” and seems to have been the one to set up the deal with the U.S government. Likewise, it’s P-’s police and military connections that the group turn to in order to investigate the FTL Potemkin village. At the same time, P- has a moment of crisis when John kills the hundred military and police surrounding the compound, challenging John’s actions - although she does ultimately fall for John’s deception that it was all an accident.

The crucial moment is when John chooses G- to carry the suitcase nuit to Melbourne for the negotiations with the government(s). “I wanted G-. P- volunteered to go with him, but G- said he wouldn’t arm it if P- was in range. P- went off at him, but it was one of those times where he held his ground against her.” It’s a fascinating example of dueling sacrifices, as P- is either trying to save G- from being sniped or is trying to go down with him, while G- prioritizes saving P- at his own expense - which is an interesting reversal of what happened during their Lyctoral ascension. While they die later, their fate is essentially sealed the moment that they are separated.

C- (and N-)

One character who speaks to the potential opportunities and dangers that lay in opening up the group is C-. As we learn in John 20;8, “C- was brought on by the oversight execs for contracts, you know, checks and balanced, but look where that ended up, she was on our side before the first year was over.” While it is somewhat surprising that C- was a corporate lawyer specializing in contracts rather than an academic (given her post-Resurrection pursuits), we do see right off the bat the way that John was able to use his significant charisma to circumvent attempts to control him from the outside.

C-’s outsider status is further confirmed by the fact that we learn in John 5:20 that C- was the one member of the original team who was English rather than a Kiwi (I’m assuming that M- and A- were Kiwis, given the way that John seems to have stuck to people he knew pretty well for his early team, and his education was solidly in the home country). It was in NZ that C- meets her cavalier-to-be N- (a local artist), which starts the extended plotline where C- refuses to admit to her relationship with N- until the very end - which could be a result of the fact that “C- had been raised little-England Anglican.” (Incidentally, I’m not quite clear what Muir means by that - the “little-England” movement was an anti-imperialist movement in the UK but from a rather conservative and xenophobic perspective. It’s not used very often in conjunction with “Anglican” - the only thing I could find is that T.S Eliot was described as a “little-England Anglican.”)

In the middle phase of the narrative, C- is present mostly as the project’s legal advisor who is active in trying to prevent the Energy department from cutting off power, and then “she’d managed all the contracts and told the cops we needed to be in there to make sure disposal and records were handled properly,” in order to buy the project breathing from. Notably however, C- chooses to live with N- offsite rather than move into the compoung, suggesting a degree of independence even as she leaves her job. At the same time, C- does get stuck in to M-’s experiments despite really not being cut out for working with dead bodies. (A sign of her predeliction for matters of the spirit?)

C- somewhat drops out of the narrative for a bit, until after John acquires his suitcase nuke. However, she really comes to the fore in the wake of this acquisition as the one member of the team who really challenges John on this point: “Pick one. Are we more interested in proving this new plan is bullshit, or in saving you...it can’t be both. Pick one and stick to it. Decide what you give a fuck about.” Similarly, when it comes down to the final conflict between John and the FTL project, it’s C- who pushes for John to use his growing necromantic powers to actually do something about climate change: “can’t we gin up some kind of miracle...any way to stabilize the North American glacier? Any way to trap atmosphere over the North Territory, show them we can fix things here?” This opposition culminates in C-’s final challenge to John once he initiates nuclear brinksmanship:

“C- said, John your problem is that you care less about being a saviour than you do about meeting out punishment.

I said, C-, I was just your best man!

C- said, You still are. That doesn’t change the fact that you can be quite the most appallingly vindicative person I have ever met.”

More than any other of the original lyctors, it’s C- who manages to see John Gaius for who he really is - a man whose genuine desire to save the Earth and the ten billion living on it was ultimately outstripped by his wounded need for revenge against the trillionaires who had undermined his solution and destroyed his reputation. While I’ll get into issues of post-Resurrection memory later, I don’t think it’s an accident that it is seemingly Cassiopeia of the Sixth who is the first of the lyctors to reach out to the Blood of Eden and enact a secret plan for the secession of the Sixth. My guess is that Cassiopeia’s relentless intellect wouldn’t let her remain content with the narrative that John had spun about the Resurrection and the Empire’s mission - and that this led her to make contact with the Messenger cadre of the Blood of Eden, who seem to be focused on the preservation of old Earth knowledge, allowing her to check their records against the Imperial records held by the Sixth and come to some sort of understanding of the lies that John had been telling for five thousand years.

In contrast to C-’s thematic importance to the bubble narrative, N- is really only present as a romantic interest - with C- finally deciding to come out of the closet and marry N- in the final day before the destruction of the Earth, which serves as a kind of final moment of happiness before the inevitable downfall. N-’s one main contribution to the project seems to have been that, once John decided that “they want to call us a cult, let’s be a cult” that it was N- who designed the new religion’s aesthetic presentation, since “N- already had eyeliner and capes.” This suggests that Anastasia wasn’t the only goth among John’s lyctors...

M’s nun

Perhaps the most surprising revelation from John’s narrative is the dramatic role played by the unnamed person who can only be Cristabel - she’s a nun and the Eighth is the most pious of the orthodox Houses, she’s M-’s best friend and works closely with her, her only other association in the group is with A- Jr. the brother of A-, and her major act is a suicide meant to provoke metaphysical transformation - rather than Anastasia.

Cristabel enters the narrative somewhat late, after John’s made the discovery of necromancy and has begun raising the dead and healing the sick. While the rest of John’s scientific buddies are flying in the dark somewhat, Cristabel uses her deep knowledge of the New Testament to provide advice about how to handle a burgeoning religion - “Christ never said no and never asked anyone to pay and got way too much attention and brought the heat down on everybody” - and help the group get religious cover from the Vatican to avoid being labelled a dangerous cult.

Most significantly, Cristabel is the one who makes the most consequential discovery in the burgeoning field of necromancy by pointing John in the direction of the soul: she tells John that the reason he can’t bring people back from the dead is that “their souls are gone,” and then later tells him that “the last frontier I couldn’t cross was the soul. M-’s nun of all people was convinced that this was the element I was missing, and that finding it...would bring us closer to God.” And then, during the final 24 hours, Cristabel decides to force John’s hand by making him witness her suicide - although given the context of her earlier speech about reaching out to God versus pushing away from God and fear and grace, she clearly sees what she’s doing as an act of sacred martyrdom - which enables John to first perceive the nature of the individual human soul, and then to make contact with the world-soul that is Alecto, enabling John to become the Necrolord Prime and gain the power needed to destroy the sun and the solar system. This makes her possibly the most consequential Catholic figure in human history - and it lends an entirely different, equally tragic air to her and Alfred’s suicide pact at Canaan House, suggesting both an inevitability where the same personality drives push to the same conclusion but also suggesting that John probably anticipated what was going to happen and chose to do nothing to prevent it.

At the same time, I don’t want to reduce Cristabel to a martyr complex. Cristabel also had a close wortking relationship with both M- and A- Jr., working with them to uncover the FTL project’s fraudulent manifests, and working with A- Jr. to attempt a last-minute mediation during the nuclear standoff.

Ulysses and Titania

The second-most surprising revelation to come from John’s narrative is that we learn that Ulysses the First and Titania Tetra, the sexy-party-having founders of the Fourth House, were the first two corpses that John was able to preserve and pilot around in the very advent of his discovery of necromancy:

“my two kids, the guinea pigs, they were U- and T- on their certificates, youi know their old names. I thought about using those but it didn’t seem appropriate. They weren’t around to say yes or no. I was starting to really care about that. What they would’ve thought, what they would’ve wanted...so I brought them into the room with the bodies and I was all, Let me introduce you to...Ulysses. Let me introduce you to Titania.”

Ulysses and Titania are obviously distinct both from the rest of the original first wave of lyctors and the second wave of lyctors who John met after the Resurrection, in that they were fully dead already before necromancy was even a thing. This raises a rather important question: where did their souls come from? This in turn raises a bunch of others: Did John somehow manage to pull their original souls from the River when he resurrected the rest of the original Lyctors? (Did the River even exist prior to the Resurrection?) Did he stuff completely new souls from the ten billion floating around into these pre-existing bodies?

Leaving aside matters of the soul, I’m fascinated by the interpersonal implications. How did John treat Ulysses and Titania once they were up and alive, since on the one hand he had this deep Pygmalion-like obsession with their bodies in a way that really presages everything he got into with Alecto, while on the other he didn’t have the pre-existing relationship with them that he had with the original lyctors he had known in life? Were they his favorites?

The second generation

So what do we say about who’s left? Well, one thing that we can say is that we have to revise something of our understanding of the different generations of lyctors - the Locked Tomb wiki has Cyrus and Valancy as first generation lyctors when they don’t appear at all in John’s bubble narrative and so must have come up post-Resurrection, while Ulysses and Titania are described as second wave when we know that they were there in body, if not in spirit, along with A-, M-, G-, C-, N-, Cristabel, and A- Jr.

Another thing we have to grapple with is the fact that, as we learn during John’s raising the dead and healing the sick for online clout period, John was fully capable of curing cancer long before his powers were enhanced by lyctorhood with the earth. This has understandably raised some comments because of the implications for Cytherea the First. A lot of people have asked why John allowed her to live with cancer for ten thousand years when he could have cured her at any time - and I’m certainly one of those. However, after talking it over, I think I have the answer: we know that Cytherea and Loveday only went along with the lyctoral process because they thought it would save Cytherea’s life. If John had cured her cancer before they went through with the Eightfold Word, Loveday would have flatly refused to go through with it and would have resisted any attempt to make them proceed, given how hostile she was to John and the other lyctors for putting a sick woman through the rigors of travel and scientific investigation. If John had cured Cytherea’s cancer after they went through with the Eightfold Word, she would have turned on John instantly instead of waiting for ten thousand years. I think John did nothing because he wanted Cytherea as a lyctor in his service, one more finger to hurl at his enemies, and nothing more.

Finally, I want to say a few words about Anastasia. The last chapter of Nona answered a lot of theories that had been floating around about Anastasia, Alecto, and the Locked Tomb: no, the Locked Tomb on the Ninth wasn’t a decoy with the true tomb being located at Canaan House, yes, Alecto was inside the Locked Tomb, and no, Anastasia was not the Body or the Nonabody. However, we do learn that inside the Locked Tomb there is “Anastasia, tucked where nobody would find jher: Anastasia, all bones. Not really Anastasia. but Anastasia’s body without the meat on it, snuggled right into the curve of the rock, ready to close the door whenever it was opened.”

This tells us a lot about what happened to Anastasia: it doesn’t seem that she completed the Lyctoral process, but rather seems to have gone the revenant-haunting-your-own-bones route pioneered by Doctor Sex and later by Palamedes. More importantly, at some point - possibly when Anastasia and Alecto were sealed inside the Tomb? - Anastasia and Alecto entered into a pact that bound Alecto to the line of Anastasia, a pact whih includes some unspecified favor to be done and a cavalier-like pact of service.

Initials and Memory

Finally, I want to close by talking about the most consequential decision John made in the Resurrection - namely the decision to bring back both “my loved ones” and “anyone I feel didn’t do it. Anyone I feel had no part in it. Anyone I can look in the face of and forgive” without their memories. I’ll quote the section in detail:

“In fact, G-’ll be easiest - he won’t remember the compound - none of them will have to remember anything. I know where rememberance lives in the brain, and he won’t have any of it...”

“Teacher, why?”

“They won’t forgive themselves...they’ll spend the rest of their lives asking what-ifs. “What should we have done? How could we have done it differently? Did you need to do it?”

While John posits his actions as esentially benevolent, driven by a desire to prevent mental suffering, and imbue his loved ones with a “blessed ignorance” as he put it in HTN, it’s abundantly obvious that what he really cares about is avoiding that last question. He wants his friends back, but he doesn’t want them to be able to question or challenge him for having gotten them and everyone else killed. We see him already beginning to think about this during the final siege of the compound when he says “People don’t forgive, not really. Once they doubt, you’ve already lost them. That’s what was sacaring me about the others. Had I already lost my best friends.”

So while John displays an enormous amount of self-pity because he’s the only one left who’ll remember the old world and who’ll laugh at his jokes, ultimately John chooses his own isolation by remaking his friends without their memories. As with Ulysses and Titania, he tries to remake them while staying as close to the original as possible, changing the names but keeping the same initials because he’s unimaginative and nostalgic.

But anyone who knows even a little bit about the brain knows that it’s pretty much impossible to separate personality from memory - the existence of the self is essentially the result of the brain constantly rewiring and reinforcing itself over time, creating new connections and new associations, resulting in a constantly evolving moving target that we think of as a continuous and authentic whole. And from everything we’ve been able to compare about the original Lyctors before and after Resurrection, they’re way too similar to their prior selves. They have the same personalities, the same relationships, they make the same decisions and the same mistakes, over and over again. So rather than being pure blank slates, I think John left quite a bit of their previous selves intact - I doubt he would have wanted to start with object permanence, language acquisition, and not touching fire, and he definitely would have wanted to hang on to useful things like Mercymorn’s medical skills or Gideon’s engineering know-how or Cassiopeia’s facility with logic.

Here’s another thing about the brain: it’s incredibly plastic. Even when parts of the brain are damaged by injury or disease, it has this fascinating ability to re-wire itself, forging new connections that reconnect separated areas. Who’s to say that, across ten thousand years, this didn’t happen to at least some of the original Lyctors as they pondered the mystery of the Resurrection?

One last thought:

“You want Cyrus, Augustine, Cassiopeia...you want Gideon the First, and Gideon the First is dead. He’s not coming back. Oh, God, Gideon,” said Pyrrha suddenly. “Gideon...G-, you died for nothing.”

#the locked tomb #nona the ninth spoilers #ntn spoilers #spoilers #mercymorn the first #augustine the first #cassiopeia the first #nigella shodash #cristabel oct #alfred quinque #ulysses the first #titantia tetra #gideon the first #pyrrha dve #anastasia the first #samael novenary #alecto #nona the ninth

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