From: "Roy C. Lackey" 
Subject: Re: (urth) Marble
Date: Thu, 21 Nov 2002 18:18:33 -0600

Crush asks:
>Question: Are you saying that Rose's prosthetics were custom made and did
>not come from any chem originally?

Exactly. She was in her mid-to-late forties when she got that hand and arm.
(Blood was born when she was forty; she lost touch with the foster mother
when Blood was nine.) She wasn't going to get any younger and she aged
badly. ("I was an old woman before you found out who I was, and I think I
must have looked older." [LS3: 10]) The hand was custom made to look like
that of an old woman, in anticipation of the need; she couldn't afford to
get new hands for every stage of aging.

>Do you really believe that technology
>existed?

Absolutely. Tarsier made custom chem bodies for the Ayuntamiento, plus, see
quote below.

>Then why did Marble take such care to retain even the fluids of the
>hand Blood cut off?

Replacements were hard to find by that stage of the _Whorl's_ decline. See
quote below.

--------------------------------
    "Digital arms and legs? That sort of thing?" Blood leaned forward,
interested. "There aren't too many of those around any more."
    "She got them some years ago; before I was born, really. There was some
disease requiring amputations." It occurred to Silk that he should know more
about Maytera Rose's history--about the histories of all three sibyls--than
he did. "They were still easily found then, from what she says." (LS1: 7)
--------------------------------

>Or do you assert that there were chems that were "old" in appearance?

No. There's no evidence of that in the text, nor would there have been any
real need to have artificially aged chem servants for aesthetic reasons.

-Roy


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