From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) PEACE: Coldhouse prank, facts and function
Date: Wed, 21 Aug 2002 09:30:52 -0500

mantis wrote:
>(Though I suppose one might argue that, via the "room" Weer has entered the
>actual timeline of reality . . . but such reasoning would seem to play hell
>with the idea of Charlie Turner being a unicorn, since Bill Baton saw him,
>and Miss Birkhead saw him, too . . . so unless Baton and Birkhead are being
>puppetized, doing things they didn't really do in real life, then maybe
>Charlie is real, his visit is real, and only his Doris letter is a
unicorn?)

Other characters are being "puppetized", to the extent that words are being
put into their mouths by frametale-Weer that could not possibly have been
uttered by them in real life. In addition to Sherry's noncommittal response
to Weer's comment about the stroke he hadn't had in real life, there is the
business with Lois questioning Weer's having given her a future phone
number, sans exchange letters, and his telling her that he had been waiting
for her at his desk (and he was, so to speak--in the frametale) when in real
life he had waited in his car. She asked if he meant he had propped a book
against the steering wheel. Such comments would never have been made by her
in real life. And, of course, the entire conversation 4-year-old Den had
with Dr. Black never happened outside of the frametale. Parts of Weer's
visit(s) with Dr. Van Ness contain dialogue that never happened except in
the memory mansion.

There's no doubting that Weer just made up stuff and wrote it down as truth,
as I've just shown. The question remains: how much of what he "wrote down"
didn't really happen quite that way, or didn't happen at all? Part of the
answer has to do with why he was writing and who he was writing for. Was he
writing for himself? God? For therapy? Penance? Other?

-Roy


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