(urth) AEG: Bill's wives

[Roy C. Lackey]

Judging from Klauser's picture, Bill Reis had a wife but no children by her
when he first went to Woldercan as ambassador. He was ambassador for eight
years. In the year he met Cassie, he seems to have been back on Earth for
something more than two years; call it three. Rian was then sixteen. That
would make Rian about five when Bill became ambassador, eleven years
earlier.

So, Rian's mother must have been Bill's first wife, and the wife he had when
he went to Woldercan was his second. Judging from the picture comments about
the South Seas he made when he was replaced as ambassador, he had no wife
when he returned to Earth, or if he did he would soon be quit of her. Either
way, there is a good chance that the second wife was wealthy Madame
Pavlatos.

Though we know little of Pavlatos, I think what we do know matches up well
with what we know about Cassie: both liked to sleep late, both were skinny
when they met, both had once been great beauties, and neither liked for
people around them to cry. There is a contradiction about Pavlatos: she
arrived on a fancy yacht with an oversized stateroom, yet is described as
austere. She was mistress of a billion dollars and comforted broken Cassie
like a mother. Klauser wondered if broken Cassie was starlet Cassie's
mother.

If Cassie went to Woldercan to find Bill, how could she have known that such
a thing was even possible? Ethermails arriving out of sequence *suggest*
that the flow of time is not always linear. Still, time travel is not
demonstrated in the story, and Cassie is not all that bright. But she may
have had proof of it. If Pavlatos is an older Cassie, Cassie may have
recognized herself. Or, Pavlatos may have told her. Chance alone is not
enough for Pavlatos to have been in the right place at the right time to
rescue Cassie.

It may have unfolded this way: Cassie went to Woldercan as planned. She
*had* to go there because of the ethermail she got from Gideon telling her
it was okay to come. She had to send an ethermail telling him she was
coming. To do otherwise would invite those problematic "complications". If
unaccounted for ethermails can cause problems, trips into the past that have
not yet been made would cause even bigger problems. So she went to Woldercan
and Gideon used his magic to make her beautiful again, though probably not
as beautiful as she had been. She hopped back to Earth and arrived before
she left, after the birth of Rian but before Bill was appointed ambassador.

She met and married Bill, who would then have been about her own age, and
went to Woldercan with him as his wife. Bill was a known womanizer, with a
weakness for beautiful women. As her new-found beauty began to fade or the
novelty wore off, he lost interest in her. They broke up, and he paid a
steep price to be rid of her. That was the basis of the Pavlatos fortune.

Cassie went back to Earth and took the name Pavlatos. She knew exactly when,
where and how Bill would die, but there was nothing she could do about it.
She knew exactly where to find Cassie, her younger self. She had to wait all
those months for Cassie to be broken, otherwise she herself would not have
existed as she was. In other words, she was stuck in a time loop. Everything
*must* play out exactly as it *had* played out in her past.

It is not a "happily ever after" ending, but there was never going to be
one. Cassie's beauty would have faded anyway, no matter what happened to
Bill, and he was too self-centered and ego-bound to have stayed with a faded
rose. Cassie was aware of Bill's fickle nature, having experienced it as his
second wife. There may have been an element of vindictiveness in her passive
role as Pavlatos, or at least resignation.

-Roy