"...long enough to graduate as many as the Time Patrol would require..."
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 2, p. 6.
The Patrol requires a finite number and that number is known. Imagine a Danellian whom we may call "Dan." He is based at Danellian HQ over a million years in the future. HQ has complete records of the lives and activities of every Patrol agent that ever was. Dan copies the entire contents of the records into a computer inside an enclosed time machine. In that machine, he travels pastward and spends a microsecond in the early pre-stellar universe. He returns to the Danellian era a microsecond after his departure from it. Then he checks for any discrepancies between HQ records and the records in his time machine. There is no discrepancy. Dan conducts this procedure periodically. Eventually, there is a discrepancy.
According to Dan's records:
Manson Everard and Piet Van Sarawak vacationed at the Patrol Pleistocene lodge. Growing bored there, they left the lodge, completed their vacation in New York in 1960, then returned separately to their Time Patrol duties.
According to HQ records:
Manson Everard and Piet Van Sarawak vacationed at the Patrol Pleistocene lodge, Growing bored there, they left the lodge but did not arrive in New York in 1960. Instead, they returned to the lodge half an hour after leaving it, accompanied by Deirdre Mac Morn who had never existed in this timeline before. Much Patrol activity was necessary for an intervention in the Second Punic War. Then Van Sarawak returned to twenty-fourth century Venus, taking Deirdre with him.
Observations
The Danellians now have records of two timelines and some information about an intermediate timeline where Deirdre originated.
Dan has travelled from Danellian timeline (i) to Danellian timeline (ii).
Deirdre has travelled from her home timeline to Danellian timeline (ii).
The Dan of Danellian timeline (ii) will also have travelled to the pre-stellar past and returned to his present.
Therefore there are now two Dans, unless we call one of them "Daniel."
11 comments:
I don't have a problem with people/events previously existing and no longer doing so.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Because there is nothing we can do about the people and events in now inaccessible time lines.
Ad astra! Sean
If you can't contact or even observe a purported timeline, in what sense does its existence or non-existence matter?
The Time Patrol characters live in an experiential universe that -acts- as if it has a single but mutable timeline.
I think that the existence of a "deleted" timeline matters to the people in it. If their 4D continuum recedes into the past of a 5D metaverse, then it is gone/past/no-longer-existent from the point of view of a time traveller who has travelled into a later 4D continuum but there is no moment within the earlier continuum when it ceases to exist.
If a book is thrown into a fire and burned to ashes, then it no longer exists after being burned but, first, it did exist before being burned and, secondly, it does not make sense to ask at what point within its own internal text the book ceased to exist - on what page and line? Similarly, people who did exist in a deleted timeline did exist and did not cease to exist at any moment in that timeline. They lived from their births to their deaths as we do.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Yes, but as Paul explained both here and in more detail elsewhere, his belief is that Anderson's Patrol stories best make sense by thinking of "deleted" timelines no longer being to travelers to or from the Danellian timeline.
Ad astra! Sean
"Mutable timeline" means changeable timeline. Change involves a relationship between a state changed from and a state changed to, a relationship of before and after. That is a temporal relationship and therefore a second temporal dimension although PA stops short of calling it that - even though he has Dard Kelm say that there are 4N dimensions in the Time Patrol universe.
A deleted timeline exists/did exist (Temporal tense needed) in the past of the second temporal dimension. Of something that exists or did exist, it is not correct to say that it never existed. Within the current timeline, it is valid to state that the events of a deleted timeline never happened. If we conceptualize two temporal dimensions at right angles to each other, then this makes sense.
Paul: it's not correct to say that it never existed if you leave time travel out of the equation. If it's in, then as far as I can see it makes perfect sense to say it never existed, save possibly in someone's memories of events that never happened.
You're imposing a linear temporal framework on a 'universe' in which, as the man said to Everard, infinite discontinuities in the world lines are perfectly possible.
Mr Stirling,
I do think that a discontinuous timeline is logically possible even though counterintuitive. Thus, I can see no logical contradiction in a single timeline where a man appears/arrives in or on a time machine and prevents the man and woman who would otherwise have been his parents from meeting. All of his memories of having lived into adulthood, got into or onto the time machine and departed into the past refer to no real events that have ever happened anywhere or anywhen.
However, I think that there is a contradiction in the Time Patrol series. Characters speak as if the the currently existent timeline might turn out never to have existed. On p. 107 of TIME PATROL, Everard says:
"'...you're not a suicidal type. Would you actually want the you of this instant never to have existed? Think for a minute precisely what that implies.'"
What does it imply? "...the you of this instant..." means "...the you [that exists] at this instant..." The proposition, "The you that does exist at this instant might turn out not to exist at this instant," is surely contradictory? There may, of course, be another/subsequent timeline in which you do not exist at this instant.
Paul.
Kaor to Both!
In this debate I think Paul has the better argument, that his proposals helps to best make sense of the Time Patrol stories.
Ad astra! Sean
It only makes sense if there's no time travel. If there -is- time travel, and there are -not- multiple timelines, then existence is, at all times, conditional. It may not just cease to be (which is the case now) but cease ever to have been.
In a sense in the TIME PATROL universe, everything is to a degree hypothetical.
If something first "is," then "never has been," then it "is" in timeline 1 and "never has been" in timeline 2. I think we are saying the same thing but in different ways. (I am out of here soon.)
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