(urth) The eyes of a clone

[Roy C. Lackey]

>It is possible that the carved brown face is made of wood -- the
>experience is pretty dreamy.
>
>David Duffy.

Ah, David, I see that you have preceded me. My apologies.

Crush quoted:
>The calde's carved countenance rose again before his mind's eye, and it
>seemed to him that he had seen it someplace else only a day or two
>before...had seen the caldee outside, because even without his lost glasses
>he had noticed the powder on the cheeks and flaws that the powder tried to
>cover--had seen him, in that case, under the auspices of the Outsider, in a
>sense.
>Epiphany of the Long Sun pg 287 (Calde)

There is another line of text immediately following the word "before" in the
above quote that starts a new paragraph and which makes things clearer:

"Streaming sunlight, and cheeks that were not smooth wood but blotched and
lightly pocked."

He was thinking of Chenille's face as he had seen it in a patch of sunlight
when he talked to her in the arbor a day or two before. Her face was pocked,
probably from acne, and she used facial powder to cover it up. Her face was
so red in the second quoted scene because she had been badly sunburned while
naked in the boat on the lake, when she was possessed by Scylla. The wood
the bust had been carved from was naturally reddish-brown, as the second
quote you gave shows. There is no way to determine the color of the
complexion of the face represented on the bust, no way to distinguish it
from the rest of the wood.

-Roy