Friday 6 May 2022

Any Difference?

In Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time, PART SIX, "Amazement of the World," Manse Everard and Wanda Tamberly are at the Time Patrol lodge in the Pleistocene Pyrenees in 18,244 B.C. They agree to meet next at New York HQ at noon on Thursday the tenth of April, 1987. Wanda leaves. Unattached Agent Komozino arrives and informs everyone at the lodge of a temporal upheaval during the European Middle Ages. Wanda arrives in 1989alpha. She returns to the lodge after rescuing Keith Denison from 1984alpha. From their base at the lodge, Patrol agents must delete first the alpha timeline, then the beta timeline, to restore the Danellian timeline. Mission completed, Everard and Wanda meet in the lobby of the St. Francis Hotel in San Francisco in early January, 1990. They have restored the timeline from which they themselves had departed from the twentieth century to take a vacation in the Pyrenees in 18,244 B.C.

Wanda asks:

"'History is back as it ought to be? Everywhere and everywhen?'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), p. 430.

Everard replies:

"'So I am told and what I've seen for myself bears it out.'" (p. 431)

When, suddenly concerned, he asks whether she has noticed any difference, she replies that she has not although she had returned both watchful and afraid.

"'Like maybe you'd find your father an alcoholic or your sister never born or something? You needn't have worried. The continuum doesn't take long to regain its form, right down to the finest details.' That didn't really make sense in English, but by tacit agreement they were avoiding Temporal." (ibid.)

Anderson cannot tell us how Everard would have phrased that sentence in Temporal. But there is another issue here. They and other Patrol agents have restored the timeline from which they themselves had departed to 18,244 B.C. Therefore, both of them remember the modern, post-medieval history of that timeline. Further, Wanda remembers what her father was like and that she had a sister. So there should not be any discrepancy between what they remember and what they discover on their return. If the twentieth century were still not as it was meant to be, then that would count as the gamma timeline, still requiring further restoration work by the Patrol back in the Middle Ages. 

5 comments:

S.M. Stirling said...

Yup, that seems to be the way it works. It's either-or; the original timeline is restored and (eventually) it's identical in every single detail. Or it isn't.

S.M. Stirling said...

Both the deviant timelines stem from one man's actions, but his actions at different (successive) times in his life.

The first results in a Papal triumph in the Church-State struggle; that's corrected, and everything runs exactly the same as "before", -until- Lorenzo does something else later in his personal timeline which flips it to the State triumphing over the Church.

S.M. Stirling said...

Note again how the Time Patrol's enormous presence in the pre-human past acts as a safety-net. It has -all- its records there, one way or another, so it can always check up on how things "should" be going.

S.M. Stirling said...

In fact, given the resources the Patrol has in prehuman times, it would be virtually impossible for a -historical- alteration to stick.

Sean M. Brooks said...

Kaor, Mr. Stirling!

There are some extremists who would prefer one side or the other to become completely dominant in conflicts between State and Church. My view is that of Anderson's, neither should be dominant. Albeit I think secular gov't's since 1914 has become too centralized and autocratic.

Ad astra! Sean