AEG clones

Dave Tallman · 18 Dec 2008, 23:45 · from 2008-December.txt.gz

This is the message as the crawl holds it, before anything here touched it. What the conversation shows has been through ingest: transfer encodings decoded, attachments dropped, quote markers repaired, and the archiver’s ? resolved into quotation marks and dashes. Those repairs are judgements and some of them are wrong, which is what this page is for. Email addresses are obscured here as they are everywhere else on the site, so it is before our repairs rather than byte for byte.

From: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Thu, 18 Dec 2008 16:45:19 -0700
Subject: (urth) AEG clones
Message-ID: <1bf4dd40812181545s57baa914vbcdc7d4b4e3a1822 at mail.gmail.com>

Roy C. Lackey wrote:

> What reserved seat? The theater wasn't anywhere near full and she saw Reis
> in the second row, not the first, where a reserved seat would be.
>
> By "reserved seat" I really meant "the seat assigned by India's free
ticket." Regardless of how full or empty a theater is, patrons normally sit
where their ticket says. So this is something Cassie might check. Reis must
have thought he was fully invisible the whole time. He had no idea that
Cassie's star-power had penetrated his ability to cloud men's minds. If he
thought she had checked, then he might choose to change his story.

I don't know if it is relevant (Wolfe might have made a mistake), but there
> is a ticket discrepancy. At the cast party Reis said that India had given
> him "a ticket". (66) At Rusterman's he said India had given him "tickets,
> and I didn't want to admit I hadn't used them." (119)
>
>
I wouldn't worry about the plural discrepancy. India probably gave him two
tickets in case he chose to attend with a companion. His story at the party
was that he went alone, and hence used only one ticket.

Gid (or someone) had already told her that Reis "walks unseen" in the note
> written on the back of one of the pictures he left her the night before the
> play. (44) With that in mind, go back and read carefully the bit at the top
> of page 21, as he was leaving the White House. On a sunny day. If I were a
> rabid clone theorist, I would also start wondering about John's glasses
> (15)
> and Gid's cryptic little dig at him about optics. (19) And why Reis wears
> glasses only in some photos. He was wearing glasses when she saw him in the
> audience.

Perhaps Gid can also "walk unseen" when he wants to, and was worried about
shadows. A few points about "optics":
1) Gid may be referring to the ability to walk unseen, since it is a skill
used and taught on Woldercan.
2) Since we have laser surgery even today, one would think ordinary glasses
to correct vision would be obsolete.
3) The assassin says she wears glasses that let her see in the dark (p.
249). John's glasses may be of this type.
4) John's glasses are thick (giving the impression of blindness, p. 15) and
making eye contact difficult. That might be a precaution against hypnotism.
5) The glasses are only seen in the full-length shot (p. 44), perhaps taken
without Reis knowing. The close-ups may be posed. Reis may wear glasses in
public as a disguise.

Speaking of invisibility, here is a really strange instance. Vince Palma
brushes an "invisible yellow feather" from his lips at the party (p. 64). He
will wear a headdress of red and yellow feathers as the Volcano God (p.
285). Is he wearing this at the "Red Spot" party, and rendering it invisible
by mental powers? He seems to be one powerful guy:
1) He knows about Gray Neighbors and banshees (p. 64).
2) He plays with Cassie like a cat with a mouse (p. 63).
3) He knows Cassie's real name (p. 63), which she is startled to find out
that Reis knows later (p. 146).
3) His voice makes everything he says sound important (p. 285).

His role in "The Red Spot" is minor (a poor scheming detective p. 63), but
Rosenquist picks him out for the Volcano God at once. Who is Vince Palma
really? Is he possessed by the Volcano God, perhaps under the control of
Bill Reis? The real Volcano God looks like him when he appears to Cassie, so
there seems to be something there...
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.urth.net/pipermail/urth-urth.net/attachments/20081218/1007e644/attachment.htm>

An unofficial mirror of a public mailing list · about & removal requests · download the archive · before the list · original archive at urth.net