Cassie as the Ambassador's wife

Dave Tallman · 18 Sep 2009, 14:23 · from 2009-September.txt.gz

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From: davetallman at msn.com (Dave Tallman)
Date: Fri, 18 Sep 2009 08:23:13 -0600
Subject: (urth) Cassie as the Ambassador's wife
In-Reply-To: <004f01ca3829$8a9add20$d4ce4a0c@rclackey>
References: <004f01ca3829$8a9add20$d4ce4a0c@rclackey>
Message-ID: <4AB397D1.2050305 at gmail.com>

Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> 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.
>   
Unless, as Adam Thornton suggested, she had learned to do a glamour by 
then (or some form of werewolf shape-shifting).
> 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.
>   
She could have considered doing that, but it might not have saved them 
from other dooms arranged by Gideon Chase. She seems to have decided 
that he needed to be eliminated very early on (after enhancing Cassie, 
of course). This is under the theory that Margaret was Chase's shooter.
> Why didn't Reis recognize her as his ex-wife? Yeah, she's aged, but still.
>   
Again I'll fall back on werewolf shape-shifting. I have no doubt that 
Margaret is a werewolf.
> 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.
>   
If the past cannot be changed there is no argument to be made. No matter 
if something else would have been more clever or worked better, Margaret 
will not be able to do it. Poor Cassie can't even think this over, 
decide it would be futile, and change her mind about going back as 
Margaret. She's trapped all the way through.
> 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?
>   
The personal replacement in FREE LIVE FREE was a one-book experiment, 
allowing huge amounts of time-rewriting without hundreds of copies 
running into each other. Pirate Freedom does allow temporal copies to 
meet, and it does allow for changing the past (I think; Ignacio's part 
could be a thought of as a stable time-loop, but Bram Burt and Lesage 
probably did some active changing and re-iterating to get things just 
right).

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