"Southward the Caucasus walled heaven with snowpeaks."
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 277.
I have returned to this earlier episode of Keith Denison's adventures both for the beauty of Poul Anderson's prose and for the appropriateness of the attached image - which is in fact of the Caucasus.
Any blog reader who has been following Denison's adventures through my summaries might prefer to learn what happens next in Paris rather than to revisit the Caucasus. However, Anderson does not give us a direct account of Denison's captivity under Albin. The author juggles with three characters:
Denison, as we have seen, is captured in the alpha timeline;
Wanda Tamberly remains free in that timeline and decides to explore it before returning downtime;
Manse Everard, back in 18,244 BC, is informed of the alpha timeline and marshals his resources to restore the timeline guarded by the Patrol.
All this is far more sophisticated than "Delenda Est," the original culmination of the Time Patrol series. All that happened there was that Everard and van Sarawak entered a divergent timeline and had some adventures there/then before returning downtime to rectify the situation. And they succeeded on the first attempt, which Everard does not do in The Shield Of Time. "Deleting" the alpha timeline generates a beta timeline...
Wells' The Time Machine, Anderson's The Guardians Of Time and Anderson's The Shield Of Time are three successive levels of complexity in time travel fiction.
3 comments:
Re Denison. After spending 16 years as Cyrus the Great, he returns to his wife in the 20th C soon after his departure. Cynthia said "I didn't realise your looks would have changed that much". With Patrol longevity techniques, he shouldn't have looked visibly older after 16 years.
John,
Maybe... Maybe he needed regular access to an anti-senescence drug? Maybe his experiences changed his appearance in ways other than just aging? You raise an important question, though.
Paul.
Gentlemen:
Recall how "Brave To Be A King" mentions how often Keith Denison had been in the field, either hunting, campaigning, or simply traveling to different parts of the widespread empire he had won as Cyrus the Great. I would assume Keith/Cyrus was deeply weathered in appearance, at the very least. Perhaps with hair and beard lightened by the sun. That can make a man look older than his true age or what an antisenescence treatment would have given him.
Sean
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