Stranded in the past, Stephen Tamberly lives from 2937 to 2930 BC, initiates a mysterious line of pottery and has two children. Seven years is a tenth of the Biblical lifespan but a much shorter fraction of a Time Patrolman's artificially extended life. Seven years to Tamberly is probably more like seven months or even just seven weeks to an ordinary mortal.
The Time Patrol timeline must be full of such extratemporal anomalies, time travellers, not just Patrol agents, who are present for anything from minutes to years for all sorts of reasons, good, bad or indifferent. They can even include flotsam and jetsam from previous timelines as Manse Everard once thought he was:
"...things and events appear causelessly, meaningless flutters soon lost and forgotten. Such as Manse Everard, marooned in the past with a dead John Sandoval, after coming from a future that never existed as the agent of a Time Patrol that never was."
-Poul Anderson, "The Only Game in Town" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, 2010), pp. 129-171 AT 6, p. 161.
(Headings in Time Patrol stories vary. 18 August 2930 B.C. means what it says whereas 6 means just the sixth section of a narrative, not the year 6 BC or AD.)
1 comment:
Though in THE ONLY GAME IN TOWN, even if there's a divergence with the Mongol discovery of America, the Patrol still has vast resources pastward to reverse it -- and rescue Everard.
Post a Comment