(urth) AEG: Bill's wives

[Dave Tallman]

Roy C. Lackey wrote:
> 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.
>   
Going back that far into the past probably required a long hopper trip, 
and fuel rods are expensive. She also may not have taken much wealth 
back with her.

> 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.
>   
Was it coincidence that Cassie ran into Margaret in the large city, or 
did Margaret know she would be there? Margaret may have wanted to see 
her younger self one more time. Margaret had no reason to clear out the 
diamonds before Cassie can get them. She wanted Cassie to have her 
experiences. I'm reminded of Margaret easily locating the bracelet in 
the hotel safe and knowing the combination when Cassie had forgotten she 
even used the safe. Perhaps she didn't forget -- it was Margaret who put 
them away for her. If so, Margaret could have taken them that night, and 
she refrained.
> 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.
>   
At the end, Maraget knows she's powerless to change the past except in 
minor ways. It might be she wanted to see her younger self one more time 
out of nostalgia. She didn't attempt to change anything -- she just 
looked and pretended not to recognize her.

> 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.
>   
The play seems to have been written with an evil motive toward Cassie. 
The very title suggests a woman who will be sacrificed, thrown into a 
volcano. Call this state of mind Killer Bill. I think it was Killer Bill 
who went back into the past as soon as he heard that Chase would be 
using Cassie. He wanted to buy himself some time to destroy her. From 
Chase's point of view, Killer Bill would have acted with frightening 
speed. perhaps frightening enough for Chase to join Bill's camp (p. 125).

Killer Bill had the bracelet made and worked with someone to write the 
play. He met with India and got tickets, but he didn't go see Cassie 
perform that night. After the play, he bribed Jimmy to take a gift to 
Cassie (the radioactive bracelet). If that had worked, he would have 
been able to plant the deadly gold on her with less of a back-trail to 
himself. Jimmy failed, so Killer Bill eliminated him as a witness.

He went to the party in person and gave Cassie the bracelet in a way she 
couldn't easily refuse. But now he had seen her face-to-face, and her 
star-power began to work on him. He soon began to regret his plans. He 
doubled back in time and watched the performance. Now he was really 
hooked, and went from Killer Bill to Wooing Wally. He got the bracelet 
back and asked Cassie out. When he said he first saw her in green, he 
was telling the truth. The party, not the play, was where he first saw her.

None of this time-travel gives Bill any foreknowledge of his death. His 
description of an execution scene to Cassie was accurate (this is how 
they executed people on the island, with the "permission" of the Queen), 
but I don't think he knew at the time it would be applied to himself. 
This is just dramatic irony.