(urth) An Evil Guest: is

[Roy C. Lackey]

Gwern wrote:
> 'pretty young woman'? Hold on, isn't Cassie's age late thirties-early
> forties?

No. She was "thirtyish" (207).

> She can still be attractive, but by that age the adjectives
> have usually dropped the 'young' bit and replaced 'pretty' with
> 'beautiful' or 'handsome'. We can only describe her - as Ambassador
> Klauser does - as a 'young woman' and 'luscious' because of the mojo.
> (We expect sex idol stars who wear 3-square inch bikinis to be in
> their 20s, after all.)

Pretty and young were my terms. Merely pretty, as she was pre-mojo, as
distinguished from mojo beautiful. Young as seen from the perspective of
someone my age -- or Klauser's. As you point out below, the Cassie who came
to see Klauser looked so much older than the Cassie he had seen on video
that he thought she might be beautiful Cassie's mother.

> By the time Cassie has, months later, recovered from the island and
> consulted beauticians (who would do much, but not 'enough'; presumably
> 'enough' would be Cassie mojo level of beauty), and go to Klauser, who
> is scrutinizing her, hazards a guess that Cassie is her mother. Going
> by the usual ~20 age bracket, and remembering that Cassie is ~40, it
> works perfectly. But if Cassie is washed out and dry as dust and has
> dirty pale hair - looks like Margaret - then who would guess that she
> was Cassie's mother? The circumstances don't make 'mother' the
> overwhelmingly obvious guess. If Cassie is back to her usual self,
> though...

Cassie's usual self was thirtyish. Margaret, iirc, was said to be in her
fifties. The woman Klauser was looking at had obviously aged so much that he
could think of her as old enough to be Cassie's mother. In my experience, I
have never seen a thirtyish woman in modern times who looked old enough to
be her own mother. <g> I don't think that even Gideon could have transformed
a talented woman who looked anything like Margaret into the most beautiful
and desirable woman in the world.

> Margaret seems only to have known Cassie pre-mojo in passing - as
> someone she saw occasionally from a distant and heard a reasonable bit
> about. She then spends *months* with Cassie post-mojo, and like
> everyone else, seems to forget about ordinary pre-mojo Cassie.

Margaret had worked backstage for another actress in "The Red Spot"; she
knew perfectly well what pre-mojo Cassie looked like.

-Roy