From: "James Wynn" 
Subject: RE: (urth) Poor Moly
Date: Tue, 3 Dec 2002 10:34:24 -0600

>Crush wrote before:
>If one femchem was as good as another to Hammerstone, why did he leave
>Marble and have the child they were making broken up when she revealed that
>she was Magnesia?

Roy responded:
I probably shouldn't even ask, but **where, in or out of the whorl, did you
get such an idea???**

Crush answers:
LS4:16
Maytera Mint talks to Marble in the ruins of Viron:
"Moly! Oh, oh, Moly! May I call you Maytera Marble, just once? I've missed
you so!"
"Be quick. I'm **about** to become an abandoned woman."
"You, Moly?"
"Yes, I am." Maytera Marble's voice was firm as granite. "And don't call me
Moly, please. It's not my name. It never was. My name's Magnesia. Call me
Maggie. Or Marble, if it makes you happy. My husband will --- never mind.
Have you met my granddaughter, sib? This is she, but I don't think she'll
talk right now. You must excuse her."
"Mucor?" Maytera Mint knelt beside the emancipated girl. "Our calde
described you to me, and I'm an old friend of your grandmother's."
"Wake up." Mucor's pinched face grinned without meaning. "Break it." There
was no hint of intelligence in her star. She said nothing further..."
[Scleroderma and Shrike approach and talk to Marble and Mint then Marble
says]
"I am not a sibyl anymore," the slender, shining figure declared. "I **have
become** an abandoned woman, as I warned you I would."

Call me crazy but Marble must have received some sort of information,
between her warning that she would become an abandoned woman and her
declaration that she **was** an abandoned woman. Since Marble was
**abandoned** then Hammerstone has left her. In terms of logic, that is a
"consistency by equivalence". The only information I can see that could have
led her to that conclusion is what Mucor said - channeling Hammerstone the
same way she spied on Potto in the house of Blood. The only interpretation I
can derive from Mucor's words is that he is having another soldier "break"
the child they said they would start on immediately (at their wedding).

Perhaps you have information that Hammerstone and Marble worked things out,
or that illuminates this scenario further...

Roy wrote:
Sure, [Hammerstone] met [Moly], but not at Sun Street. Moly didn't work at a
cenoby. She
was a **housemaid** (LS3: 3), according to Hammerstone, and is so described
in the list of characters, as distinguished from a "maid-of-all-work", which
is how Marble, nee Magnesia, is described in the list of characters in LS4.

Crush responds:
I suppose its **possible** to play with the text to allow this, but it is
hard to square that with Hammerstone's assertion that he lost track of her
during his last 74 year nap. That pretty firmly suggests a change in the
status of their relationship. If he didn't know where she was during the
entire voyage and then he didn't know where she was after, he can hardly say
he lost track of her.

Perhaps you know the difference between a "housemaid" and a
"maid-of-all-work."  I don't' really know what it would be, unless one
assumes a housemaid dusts and cleans and MOAW also gardens and cooks. Hmm.
This would explain why Marble's parts wore out faster than Moly's but it
doesn't prevent Moly from working at the cenoby which is, after all, the
HOUSE of the sibyls.

Roy wrote:
Nope. What I actually said on the subject was: "Rose didn't receive all her
prosthetics at the same time, that's all; she would have scared the hell out
of that boy if she had. Much of her face was prosthetic, both arms and both
legs, her "ears", one eye, and a host of internal organs."

And, actually, Rose got her first prosthetics (the hand and arm Blood saw as
a boy) **more** than forty years ago. Blood was born when she was 40. She
lost touch with him when he was 9. She was about 94 when she died.

Two generations _is_ many years, in terms of a human life span.

Crush responds:
Fine. Rose got her first prosthetics less than **50** years. 50 years IS NOT
a long time in terms of craftsmanship and knowledge. It is the amount of
time most commonly associated with the career of ONE person. 40 years is the
amount of time most typically associated with ONE generation. LESS THAN 50
years is not nearly enough time for a valuable, vital craft to become rare
when it was common, barring some catastrophe akin to the fall of Rome - and
even that took hundreds of years. Imagine losing the technology of the
internal combustion engine in the next 50 years (except to a favored few) so
that almost everyone has to go back to horses. It's that plausible.

Roy wrote:
[As for Crush's theories regarding Betel's association with Moly] You have
an analogy. Not even a slingshot, much less a smoking gun. I'll grant you
that Wolfe doesn't always leave a smoking gun in plain sight, but I want to
at least smell the smoke.

Crush responds:
We clearly are of different constitutions regarding smoke. This smoke makes
me cough. It's just my way to ask myself (when reading) "why did he write
this?" But more importantly, I tend to test my theories on Wolfe's stories
against plausibility.

Prosthetics made to look old for no apparent reason...

Hammerstone "loses track" of someone when he was never sure where she was in
the first place...

Silk saying (as Rose totters by with her half mechanical body) wouldn't it
be nice if we could build Rose some prosthetics... or even fly!...

A common, valuable, useful technology (as opposed to merely artifacts)
becomes rare...just because.

I'm not seeing it.




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