AEG: Gideon

Roy C. Lackey · 07 Jan 2009, 20:55 · from 2009-January.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: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Wed, 7 Jan 2009 14:55:36 -0600
Subject: (urth) AEG: Gideon
References: <1bf4dd40901071109g476f9991tc10dedf305aca828 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <002f01c9710a$4fe3a360$e2ce4a0c@rclackey>

Dave Tallman quoted and wrote:
> > If real-time phone service between planets light-years apart were even
> > possible, the government would know and use it. Clearly it is not.
> >
> >
> The government doesn't know everything. I quote:
>  At last John said, "There are only two ways to communicate with
Woldercan."
> The president muttered, "That we know of."

Cell phones aren't magical. They require support technologies that the
government could not help but be aware of, and Reis was being monitored. If
packaged communication, such as eithermail, was problematic, and even if
lag-time were not a problem (which it would be, since even a hopper trip
must be done in stages), then real-time phone conversation would be
impossible.

> Besides,what could either Reis or Chase have been doing on Woldercan
> during the week
> > or so that Cassie was left to cool her heels in the islands that would
have
> > benefited either man's immediate agenda?
> >
> >
> I can imagine several possibilites:
> 1) Reis - Consult with the beings who taught him how to walk unseen and to
> make gold. What else could they teach him? Love potions, maybe? Cassie
> become much more loving after smelling that mysterious spicy cologne.
> 2) Chase - Find his natural father. Pick up some of the magical skills
Reis
> has learned. Get dirt on the existing ambassador so he can be replaced.

Chase didn't need to dig for dirt. An ambassador serves at the president's
pleasure. Gid's ambassadorship was partial payment for services rendered. As
the president said, "We want you to find out how he does it an' make him
stop doin' it. That's what it comes down to." (20) Gid did it.

Gid knew from the start how Reis was able to breach government security.
Reis "walks unseen", as the note to Cassie on the back of the photo showed.
What I am suggesting is that Gid set Reis up. He recruited Cassie as bait,
and Reis took the bait. When Reis acted to make Cassie his island queen, and
since he had already pissed off the Squid God by killing off a thousand of
the god's international recruits on the islands, he knew he had to act to
insure his queen's safety. The island natives were too afraid of the Squid
God to be of any help. So he hired Gid as a consultant, knowing Gid had the
ear of the president and the backing of the U.S. government. Gid told Reis
how to set the bait for the Squid God and got the president to send in the
Navy. The island natives killed Reis to placate the Squid God. Problem
solved. The presiden't commision was satisfied. Gid got his reward, the
ambassadorship to Woldercan he said he wanted (222), where he could learn
how to make gold, just as Reis had done.

-Roy

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