(urth) AEG again

[David Stockhoff]

Of course you're right about the storm. That's much better.

The only necessary time travel I see so far is that Cassie will use the hopper to Woldercan to return to an earlier time to meet Reis and bear his son and introduce Reis to Chase (whether she reveals herself to Chase at that point or not). This explains all that, and is supported by Cassie's comment to the effect that you often need to act to avoid paradox---by sending an email to justify a previous response, in that case. She may in fact suspect that she has already succeeded. 

So that would make this another novel that ends in the characters achieving a kind of transcendence. No doubt Reis has already used this trick many times. Would Pavlatos then be a remarried future-past Cassie? I am uncertain how marriage to a (deceased) time-traveler works, and therefore how remarriage would work, especially from a legal perspective. ;)

To be honest, I'm skeptical of going much farther---I think there's enough going on in the novel without resorting to that. However, in reading up on the Lovecraft mythos, I found a reference to a universe where time runs oddly; the description sounds similar in vagueness to Wolfe's, and the phrase "it is almost impossible for two beings to have a shared sense of time" caught my eye:

*Chronosphere*

        * Dimesion mentioned in A Matter of Time
        * Chronosphere was just the name used by the author, the name
          used by the inhabitants is unknown.
        *  From the description of the inhabitants found in the book,
          one could surmise that they are Dimensional Shambler
          <http://members.shaw.ca/csstrowbridge/Tulzscha/Information.htm#DimensionalShambler>.

        * According to Professor Kairos
          <http://members.shaw.ca/csstrowbridge/Tulzscha/Cults.htm#ProfKairos>,
          time moves slower the larger the scale. The smaller the
          object, the faster it moves through time. Also, the farther
          apart two objects are, the slower time moves for them.
        * Because of this, it is almost impossible for two beings to
          have a shared sense of time.
        * Traveling through this dimension is very disorienting and the
          time it takes to do so is from an outside perspective is
          impossible to judge in advance. If a traveller spends what
          felt like 3 months in this dimension, him might return home to
          find centuries have passed, or it could be just a few seconds,
          or he could have even return /before/ he had left.



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Message: 3
Date: Wed, 25 Nov 2009 08:58:25 -0600
From: "James Wynn" <crushtv at gmail.com>
To: "The Urth Mailing List" <urth at lists.urth.net>
Subject: Re: (urth) AEG again
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> >5) Madame Pavlatos may be Cassie, come from the future.
>   

I now think this is absolutely true, and it is quite likely that Sharon knew 
it.  Sharon says that the boy Chase healed was "a little piece of the man 
[his mother] loved and lost." I think this is the meaning of Wolfe's 
statement that "Cassie loved Bill Reis and at the end of the novel she goes 
to Woldercon to look for him."
But of course where she gets him and how she Time travels is totally left in 
the air.

Yeah, Nightgaunts. And one is involved in Cassie's transformation.

J. 



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