(urth) AEG: Bill's wives

[Roy C. Lackey]

Dave Tallman quoted and wrote:

> > 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.
> >
> This theory keeps the best of the Cassie/Pavlatos connection without the
> extra complications of time-travel to get Rian's age right. I think it's
> good as far as it goes (I still want the Cassie/Margaret connection).

Whereas I was trying to avoid any Cassie/Margaret connection, for reasons
previously given. <g> If Pavlatos is a future Cassie, she would be just
about midway in age between Cassie and Margaret. If Margaret is also a
future Cassie, she would have the memories of Pavlatos, and her wealth. What
happened to the money? Reis supposedly checked out Margaret's past, and so
would the FBI after the kidnapping. It's hard to believe that she could have
faked it convincingly.

It bothers me that Margaret was on the street near the bank when Cassie got
back to Kingsport, and Cassie says she knows Margaret didn't recognize her.
Why not? Why was Margaret even there? Without the diamonds, there would be
no money to buy the hopper to get to Woldercan and the past. Any future
Cassie would have the same retina scans that gave access to the diamonds.

Okay, Cassie/Margaret was an actress, so she could have faked the lack of
recognition. But why be there at all? If she had been both Pavlatos and
Cassie, she knew that she had failed twice to thwart Bill's death and
Cassie's ordeal. And, if she had been Cassie/Pavlatos, then she had gotten
Bill back, after a fashion, and nothing is forever.

> Does Pavlatos alone account for the reality-warping around Cassie
> (addresses, changes in what she remembers)? Or are there more
> time-travelers to worry about? Bill's travels in time are pretty well
> established (he couldn't have put together a play to trap her without
> more time).

I agree that Bill needed more time than seems possible to have put together
the play that is centered on Cassie. He had to have known about her long
before the day he went to the cast party. Though indirect, this may be the
best indicator of time travel in the story. So why give her the radioactive
gold? One answer is that he didn't. That is, this leads back to previous
theories of more than one version of him operating at the same time, the
Wally vs. Bill bit and the seemingly pointless point of whether or not he
was in the audience and what color dress she was wearing when he first saw
her.

But this opens up another can of worms. If Bill is a time traveler, then he
probably knows he will die on that island. In fact, it seems that he does
know the circumstances of his death -- he gave a rather accurate
foreshadowing of exactly what Cassie would see happen at her feet. He told
her the night he gave her the diamonds (145-46). This gets hairy. If he is
trying to change the past, so they can be happy together, he probably had no
better luck than Cassie. And how did he get back to the past if he was dead?
Cassie must be the answer. She went to Woldercan and into the past to find a
living version of him. That version wrote the play.

And the mention of clones is a red herring.

> Is reality warping to keep things on track, the "If I don't
> send mine, his will have to be accounted for in some other way and it's
> liable to get complicated" of a universe that fights back against
paradoxes?

That may be all there is to it. Both Cassie and Bill try to change things
for the better, but they find themselves stuck in an immutable time loop.
That is, the big things can't be changed, just some minor details that don't
affect the big picture.

-Roy