Gideon

John Watkins · 16 Jan 2009, 14:42 · 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: john.watkins04 at gmail.com (John Watkins)
Date: Fri, 16 Jan 2009 09:42:06 -0500
Subject: (urth) Gideon
In-Reply-To: <49707CF2.9080003 at gmail.com>
References: <006b01c9779c$1afc0fa0$efcf4a0c@rclackey>
	<49707CF2.9080003 at gmail.com>
Message-ID: <93d4039f0901160642g4f137751t343a0d2d7e645c33 at mail.gmail.com>

About this angelic stuff.

I don't have the book at hand, but it's my recollection that, at
Cassie's "raising," Cassie suggests that a "raised" human would be
"like an angel, or..."

I think that the "or" is what we should be looking at--Cassie was
clearly about to say "a god," and she's identified repeatedly as the
"green goddess."  Although traditionally an angel is "lower" than a
god, I think here an angel would be higher--Cassie's on the plane of
the Overcyns.



On 1/16/09, Dave Tallman <davetallman at msn.com> wrote:
> Roy C. Lackey wrote:
>> Gil Corby was in the cargo space behind the seats, so I don't think there
>> was any danger of making eye contact. And I don't know that he knew then
>> (or
>> any time before she went to Woldercan) that Margaret was Cassie. I assume
>> that any hop had the potential to warp time, and Margaret was afraid of
>> what
>> might happen when the craft warped.
>>
> It's true that the other riders "turned to speak with Corby" (155), so
> Margaret could have kept from eye contact without holding her eyes shut.
> It did give her an excuse not to look at him. She knew she was about to
> be arrested and that Gib was working for the FBI. She didn't want to
> risk giving him information that would make her interrogation more
> difficult.
>
> The time-warping fear seems implausible, since there seems to be a
> connection between warping distance and the amount of time skipped.
> Messages to and from Woldercan seem to time-shift only a few days or
> weeks. To go back further, one must traverse an even greater distance. I
> think this is the explanation for why the Milky Way looks like a "little
> band of bright stars" (301) at the end. Cassie has left Woldercan and
> gotten into position to make her run back into time.
>
> Possibly Cassie and Margaret being in close proximity makes it more
> dangerous. I'm starting a new theory on the reality-shifts. They seem to
> happen only in places where the two are together. Perhaps the proximity
> of the two creates a paradox field. As Cassie says, "it's liable to get
> complicated" (298) when you mess with time paradoxes.
>
> For example, look at what happened to Jimmy. He was sandwiched between
> Cassie in the tiny dressing room (backing away from her) and Margaret
> coming in (nearly bumping into her), on p. 56. Then  "...Cassie
> suspected he would have run, had he still been capable of running" (57).
> Jimmy was in his sixties or seventies (52). Would age alone make him
> unable to run? Would he still be employed as a theater watchman if he
> couldn't?
>
> A short time later, Jimmy was dead, apparently of natural causes.
> Cassie's assumption at the time was that Reis killed Jimmy somehow, but
> later we realize that isn't his style. Cassie half-heartedly asks
> Margaret to look into it for her (90), but nothing ever comes of this.
> They seem to mutually agree to let it drop. There is one more possible
> sign of an uneasy conscience on Cassie's part: when she buys a hopper
> she chooses a Jimmy Galactic (297).
>
> More cases:
> 1) Cassie's apartment number, address, and floor seem to move. Cassie
> and Margaret are together there more than once.
> 2) When Cassie and Margaret are together at Rustermans, Margaret is
> identified as "Alexis's dresser" and Margaret says softly "I'm Miss
> Casey's dresser now, Miss White" (60). Soon Alexis has been converted
> into a waitress at Rusterman's.
> 3) When Cassie needs a safe in her hotel room, Margaret helps her
> find/create it.
>
> This is a little better than my other theory where Cassie does all these
> changes alone, by pure angelic power.
>
> _______________________________________________
> Urth Mailing List
> To post, write urth at urth.net
> Subscription/information: http://www.urth.net
>

-- 
Sent from Gmail for mobile | mobile.google.com

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