From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: (urth) Marble
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 03:22:35 -0600

Chris wrote:
>The easiest and most coherent explanation of what happens with Marble and
>Rose is exactly as you describe, that some of the attributes/personality of
>Rose came over with her parts when Marble scavenged them. This is what I
>intuited, at any event, even before Silk realizes what's going on. *But*
>then I got thrown a loop which I find disturbing. There's a passage where
>Rose/Marble is speaking as Rose, which basically implies that she was
>present in Marble *before* the parts came over. I this is the same passage
>where she uses the phrase "reclaim" (in reference to the prosthetics) which
>has led some people here to theorize that it was Marble speaking, and that
>Rose had originally taken those parts from Marble long ago. However, the
>sense of it was that Rose was explaining why she had to take back the parts
>from her old body, and it makes no sense for her to go through this thought
>process (even as a rationalization) unless she was present in Marble just
>beforehand.
>
>Of course, Rose/Marble could just be very confused by what she's gone
>through. I am uncomfortable dismissing it so easily, though.

I don't understand the confusion. The only passage I can find where
Marble/Rose speaks of "reclaimed" parts is in CALDE, chapter 10, where she
is speaking to Blood. Each "me", "I" and "my" in the passage refers to
Marble. Though the Rose personality dominates her private conversation with
Blood, the last two sentences of the quoted text clearly come from Marble.
The worn parts Marble exchanged were placed in Rose's coffin and burned.

---------------------------------
"It's hard to change hands yourself, Bloody, because you have to do it
one-handed. It was particularly hard for me, because by then I already had a
great many new parts. Or rather, I had reclaimed a great many old ones. They
worked better, that was why I wanted them, but I wasn't used to the new
assembly yet, which made changing hands harder. It would have been wasteful
to burn them, though. They were in much better condition than my old ones."
--------------------------------

Marble began her salvage operation by opening Rose's chest, then removing
and testing each part she took, before switching out those that were in
better condition. The "new parts" and "old ones" are the same parts. The
sentence "Or rather, I had reclaimed a great many old ones.", is a
refinement of the sentence before. The "new parts" are new to Marble, but
they are in fact "old ones", having previously been used by Rose. The
mixture of Rose's "new parts" with the worn parts retained by Marble made
her a bit clumsy, compounding the difficulties of changing hands with only
one hand to work with at a time. The passage makes clear that the hands were
changed only *after* many other parts had been changed, those parts having
come from Rose's torso.

The choice of the verb "reclaimed" is, I presume, what leads to the
confusion. But if you take the second and third sentences, together, as
referring to the difficulties Marble had with changing hands because she
hadn't yet learned to integrate the functionality of her old and new
hardware, and look at the larger context of the quoted text (Blood had asked
if that was the same hand he had first seen when he was a boy), then it
becomes clear that the personality speaking is Marble. "Reclaimed" in this
passage means something like "brought back into a state of productivity". It
does not refer to a prior claim of ownership, either by Marble or Rose.
Marble had her own parts; some of them just didn't work well anymore, so she
was hardly reclaiming parts she had surrendered to Rose in the past. Rose
had had her own prosthetic parts for less than fifty years; as a bio she was
hardly reclaiming them when she first got them.

Further, the passage refers to the act of changing hands. Marble could do
that, because she was a chem. Rose couldn't, because she was a bio. She
certainly didn't amputate a hand herself, then stick a prosthetic one on.
Besides, Blood mentions that she had gotten a whole new arm, not just a
hand. Given all her prosthetics, Rose would have to have had major-league
medical services in her day.

And, just to head off Crush, those hands Marble took from Rose *never*
belonged to any hypothetical martyred chem maid. Chem maids were made to
look like young female bios. The prosthetic hands Marble took from Rose are
specifically described as looking like "the bony blue-veined hands of an
elderly bio".

-Roy


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