Everard, in conversation with Wanda Tamberly, confirms the chaotic potential of the Exaltationists:
"'Selfishness like that generally turns on itself. Battles through time, a chaos of changes - I wonder how much flux the space-time fabric could survive...
"'How does it feel knowing you may have saved the universe?'"
-Poul Anderson, "The Year of the Ransom" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 641-735 AT 23 May 1987, pp. 718-719.
Guion, a mysterious agent operating within the Patrol and currently interviewing Everard, searches for something beyond the arrest of the last Exaltationists:
"'...beyond that necessity, perhaps, a larger meaning, a direction and an ending -'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), PART ONE, 1987 A. D., p. 8.
Guion tells Wanda that the Exaltationists, all by now either caught or killed:
"'...could be related to something larger... Not a larger organization or conspiracy, no. We have no reason to suspect that. But chaos itself has a basic coherence.'"
-The Shield Of Time, PART THREE, 31,275,389 B. C., pp. 135-136.
Finally, a Danellian explains to Everard and Wanda that:
"'In a reality forever liable to chaos, the Patrol is the stabilizing element, holding time to a single course.'"
-The Shield Of Time, PART SIX, 1990 A. D., p. 435.
Thus, the Exltationists are an expression of chaos just as, in Three Hearts And Three Lions, the Middle Worlders are servants of Chaos.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And in that sense I can see the Time Patrol and the Danellians (despite having some reservations about the latter) as serving Law.
But, what of other worlds, both "here" and in other timelines? What prevents anyone or anything on those worlds from throwing the entire multicosmos into Chaos? Does the Patrol acts on those worlds too? Or do they have they their own Time Patrols?
Ad astra! Sean
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