Cassie as the Ambassador's wife

Roy C. Lackey · 18 Sep 2009, 06:30 · from 2009-September.txt.gz

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From: rclackey at stic.net (Roy C. Lackey)
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 01:30:34 -0500
Subject: (urth) Cassie as the Ambassador's wife
References: <1bf4dd40909161830r5d20bacao479347b332225867 at mail.gmail.com>
Message-ID: <004f01ca3829$8a9add20$d4ce4a0c@rclackey>

Dave Tallman wrote:

> My reconstruction of the time travel would go more like this:
> 1) Cassie's original 20+ hop trip to Woldercan involved no time-travel.
She
> met with Gideon Chase, as planned, but learned there was no way to restore
> her mojo. (She might shoot him at this point).
> 2) Using Woldercan resources (talking fish, Woldercan natives, etc.) she
> finds out how to do time travel. She takes big hopper with lots of fuel
and
> uses it to go into the past, to Earth.
> 3) The time is before the appointment of Bill Reis as ambassador. She
finds
> a way to court and marry Bill. Tricky, but she knows a lot about him and
> what he likes.
> 4) They travel to Woldercan together. She takes the picture (p. 301),
which
> explains why she isn't in it. Bill says the old amabassador was kind to
him
> and his wife (not family), so there is no son yet.

That picture would have been just 11-12 years in the past for Klauser. He
should have recognized the woman who came to his house to ask advice.

> 5) Rian is conceived. When the boy is born there are medical troubles.
> Cassie knows they can only be resolved on Earth, so she leaves. She uses
the
> time-travel trick again. Rian will be the right age if she does this, and
> that may be the purpose (time-looped history reconstruction). Her
> time-travel will inspire Bill to learn to do the same trick.

If Cassie could travel back in time, why didn't she go back in time just far
enough to do something to avoid Bill getting clubbed to death? All she had
to do was to make sure they would not be on the island that night. That's
so easy, and it would have spared them all their grief. Just go back about a
year. She lands her big fancy new hopper on the beach on the island where
she and Bill went to be alone, the one they were on when they decided to get
married. Whip out a sales receipt for the diamonds and a few newscast clips
of the coming storm. She could hardly be ignored.

Bill and Cassie need not make any big changes or take any chances. They
could have used his hopper to hop over to Paris for dinner or something on
the day he would have died. Problem solved.

> 6) She spends the next 18 or so years raising Rian. The boy is her life.
If
> she's Pavlatos, she also remarries and does some boating, etc.
> 7) This gets her to about ago 50. Rian is gone -- empty nest. Maybe he
dies,
> killed by Bill's enemies.
> 8) She broods again on the past and decides to try to shake it up as
> Margaret. She gets the old ship back from where-ever she stashed it and
does
> one more trip deeper into the past.
> 9) She uses another ten years to establish herself as Margaret the
dresser.
> Now she's in her 60's.

Why didn't Reis recognize her as his ex-wife? Yeah, she's aged, but still.

> 10) Her attempt to change the past fails, so she ends up sad and alone.
She
> knows her younger self will repeat the cycle.

Either the past can be changed or it can't. If Margaret was ever our Cassie,
then she has Cassie's memories of Margaret, just as we have their
interactions recorded in the book. If, from Margaret's perspective, she can
change *anything*, even something as minor as what she ordered for breakfast
on page 153, then the past can be changed. If not, she is stuck in a time
loop.

My point is that Cassie/Margaret need not waste all that time and energy
establishing a false identity just to get close to her younger self and
figure out if she could change things. After all, Margaret exercised very
little influence on Cassie, and was out of the picture half-way through the
book. For example, Cassie/Margaret would know about the coming abduction of
Margaret, since Cassie had lived it. All a future self would have to do is
not get in Zelda's hopper that day, and Zelda didn't even want Margaret to
come because the hopper only seated four. She had no freewill? She didn't
know what was coming?

In the Urth Cycle and FREE LIVE FREE, Wolfe made provisions to avoid two
versions of the same person being in the same place at the same time. To do
otherwise leads to endless plot complications and paradoxes. Why would he
make an exception in AEG?

-Roy

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