When we google the Indische Buurt, we understand why we are told that the Time Patrol has its Amsterdam office there because:
"...exotic-looking people drew scant attention." (p. 477)
There are sidewalk cafes and small bars in alleys off the Damrak which is a partially filled in canal. The red-light district is a dignified old part of town. (I have seen it.) The Oude Kerk is an Old Church which I should have realized. In the Vondelpark, water gleams, green growth glows, a young couple passes in a canoe while an old couple walks beneath older trees and bicyclists shout and laugh. To a Time Patrolman, all this pulsing life is:
"...a spectral flickering, diffraction rings across abstract, unstable space-time, a manifold brightness..." (p. 480)
We know that appearance and reality differ and also that understandings of reality differ. An apparently single static object is really many moving particles - or maybe a spatiotemporal diffraction ring.
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
Port cities tends to have lots of "exotics" coming and going, with the locals being so inured to them that they no longer notice them, most times. As was the case with Rax, a Merseian agent who set up a semi legitimate dope shop in Irumclaw Old Town, a space port on a border planet of the Terran Empire in A CIRCUS OF HELLS.
Ad astra! Sean
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