(urth) AEG clones

[Roy C. Lackey]

James Wynn quoted from two different paragraphs I wrote and tied them
together with [...] (minus the brackets), which distorts the meaning:

> >Stupid me. Wolfe hid the answer in plain sight.
> >Reis did lie to Cassie, but his lie was in the attempt to cover up the
> >truth
> >about what she was wearing the first time he saw her. I knew there had to
> >be
> >a text-based solution...Sometime that night, presumably after Gid cast
the
> >glamour on her, Reis saw her and wanted her. That's why he went to India
at
> >noon before the play to become her "angel" in a big, new musical.

What I actually wrote was:
[begin quote]
> Reis did lie to Cassie, but his lie was in the attempt to cover up the
truth
> about what she was wearing the first time he saw her. I knew there had to
be
> a text-based solution, so I went looking for every mention of Cassie's
> clothes before the play. I found the green dress; I just didn't know the
> meaning of the word. "The warmer dress she had put on for the short walk
to
> Baskin-Robbins hung neatly beside it. Its loden wool held a sweet and
smoky
> aroma, with a bitter undercurrent." (43) Loden is a shade of green, as any
> woman could tell you. That is the dress Cassie was wearing when Reis first
> saw her.
>
> She had that dress on only from the time she dressed for the ice cream
> store, shortly before midnight, until Gideon (or someone) undressed her
> after taking her home. Sometime that night, presumably after Gid cast the
> glamour on her, Reis saw her and wanted her. That's why he went to India
at
> noon before the play to become her "angel" in a big, new musical.
[end quote]


> It's true that Cassie wears green prior to the party, but this solution is
> no more "text-based" than your prior theory.

The text-based solution I meant, as the remainder of my original paragraph
makes clear, is the solution to the question of what green dress Cassie wore
before the play that Reis could have seen her wearing.

> It is significantly less so,
> really, since it relies on reams of supposition about what might have or
> have not happened between the time Cassie reached the mountain and when
she
> got home. Rather than solving anything, it inelegantly raises an
> intimidating army of intractable mysteries.

Inelegantly? Oh, dear. As for the mysteries, they come with the territory.

> On the other hand, your prior theory succeeds in resolving the issue of
why
> Reis was lying up a storm about seeing her at the play.

Only if there really are clones of Reis in the story. No smoking gun has yet
been found. The loden dress doesn't kill the clone theory.

> Why *after the fact*
> would Reis need to lie about seeing her at the play?

I still have not seen a good answer for that, or I would have abandoned the
clone theory.

-Roy