(urth) Wolfe at Dragon*Con (AEG)

[James Wynn]

 Roy says:
> Reis was a big man; Gideon was not. A conventional disguise or one that
> involves a "glamour", to say nothing of shape shifting, would have to
> account for Gid's missing leg.

I haven't started re-reading so I don't know if anyone mentioned whether the 
Gideon Chase who went to Woldercon had one or two legs. Few people knew he 
had lost it.

>Shape shifting involves a certain
> conservation of mass, such that the subject will weigh the same after the
> transformation as before.

You have me at a disadvantage. I'm not an expert on the limits of Gideon's 
nor Reis's ability to shape-shift. However, a prosthetic leg that looks 
realistic on a guy in pants is neither magic nor speculative fiction.

> Cassie told Klauser that Reis was dead, and at the end of the book, when
> there was no one to hear her and she was on the way to Woldercan, she
> bemoaned his death. Who was she fooling?

It was you who first pointed out that Reis seemed to be more than one. Which 
Reis are we talking about? It's true she says "Bill...why did you have to 
die" but then she says "Come back to me Wally!"

> She had been in perfect position to see the body that had been clubbed to
> death, and she had been forced to watch.
>Shape-changers and glamour-casters
> lose control at death.

Do they? I can't do it and so I don't know much about it. In any case, the 
natives did not have long to study the body before Cassie smoked the king, 
and was carried away by the bat things.

>Who did Cassie--and more importantly the
> islanders--see dead at her feet, if not Bill Reis?

Wolfe said Cassie went to Woldercon to find Reis.
If he didn't die on the island, then obviously Cassie knew it. Why wouldn't 
she?  Since Cassie was swept away immediately after killing the king, we 
cannot know what happened among the natives afterward.

>I don't think it is
> possible for it to have been one-legged Gideon Chase.

You are freely conclusion jumping. I don't see how you found your way to be 
so emphatically sure about all this based on what you have offered here.

Look, Roy, Reis and Cassie were about to be married. But Bill Reis --who 
loved Cassie as much for the way she adorned himself as anything else--  
could not arrange to have either his oldest friend there nor his own son to 
watch the big event. He was practically eloping with her. Does that seem 
likely? Why would he do that? The whole thing stinks. On the other hand, why 
would Chase disguised as Reis do that? Lots of reasons.

I guess there are other explanations too. But, remember how you mentioned 
that it is suspicious that we never meet Reis's son? Well how much weirder 
that we never see Chase again either....the Pygmalion to Cassie's Galatea. 
By the way...Pygmalion *did* marry Galatea, no one else.

I'm sure there are plenty of adequate explanations for Wolfe's assertion 
that Cassie went to Woldercon to find Bill Reis. I'll have to re-read it. 
But it fits like much else does not.