Ravens

"Star of the Sea," 4.

Manse Everard of the Time Patrol, posing as a first century Goth, has to acknowledge that he is familiar with violence:

"'Whoever calls me coward will feed the ravens before nightfall.'" (p. 506)

Ravens eat corpses. In Neil Gaiman's The Sandman: The Kindly Ones, ravens, including Noah's, gather in the Dreaming because they know that the Furies are about to attack that realm - so there will be fine dining for ravens.

The title character of The Sandman owns one raven whereas Odin - a character both in The Sandman and in Poul Anderson's heroic fantasies - owns two. Sometimes everything connects. Or seems to. But that really is as far as we go tonight.

Tomorrow, gym and Zen.

Answer

"Star of Sea," 3.

Heidhin wants to sacrifice a Roman prisoner. Wael-Edh, the sybil, responds:

"'I have spent this while mutely calling on Niaerdh. Does she want yon blood or no? She has given me no sign. I believe that means no.'" (p. 500)

I agree. The goddess does not want blood or anything else either because she does not exist! But, even if she did exist, then why should she want blood? She would surely answer, "No." Lynx and Auri end blood sacrifice in The Corridors Of Time.

A Mormon advised me to pray. The outcome of that advice is recorded here.

The only honest prayer that I can offer is here.

It is getting late and that can make posting a little strange...

Time As Days And Seasons

Fiction reflects life which involves time. Even characters in a time travel story continue to experience time like the rest of us.

The Time Traveller tells his dinner guests that he has travelled into tomorrow. Two Time Patrol agents agree that tomorrow they will cope. Turning the page from Everard's and Floris' conversation, we return to a time when people lived with the seasons:

"Winter brought rain, snow, rain again, flogged by harsh winds, weather that raged on into the springtime."

-"Star of the Sea," 3, p. 494.

Rain, snow and wind - Anderson readers have learned to notice the wind and indeed this one plays an active role!

Rivers gorge, meadows flood, swamps overflow, grain is doled, livestock huddles, shivers and is killed, hunting is resumed, the attitude of the gods is questioned, wind drives clouds, skirls and snarls, stars flicker, branches toss and creak, night is clear and cold, fire roars, flames leap, sparks whirl, light gleams, divine images loom, a boar roasts and so on. People live with nature.

Keening And Chanting

"Star of the Sea," 1.

Poul Anderson lets us escape from time travel paradoxes into historical fiction within a single narrative. When Germanic barbarians besiege Old Camp, their women keen rhythmically:

"...ha-ba-da ha-ba, ha-ba-da-da." (p. 471)

Although Anderson spells it out for us, I cannot hear this beat in my head. However, it reminds me that I once saw a mass picket pushing policemen down a street as if in a big rugby scrum. The pickets were chanting something that I initially did not understand:

"Da - da-da-dadada!

"Da - da-da-dadada!

"Da - da-da-dadada!"

Then I discerned the words. It was an ironic reproach to the police:

"Job - only doin' it!

"Job - only doin' it!

"Job - only doin' it!"

Lupercus the Roman legate reminds (some of) us of Dominic Flandry involved in the suppression of the planet, Brae. Lupercus also has something in common with the viewpoint character of section 2, Manse Everard: two men doing a job. Both must respond to a threat to the Roman Empire albeit for different reasons. 

The Roman Empire exists in different timelines. In one, it is guarded by the Time Patrol. In another, it inspires the Terran Empire. The Romans know nothing of either.

The Patrol does recruit one Roman from Caesar's time who:

"'...never got it through his head that a machine can't be treated like a horse.'"

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 2, p. 14.

I did not expect to wind up with that when I began to write this post.

Time Patrol Records

 

See blog search result for Patrol records.

There must be two complete sets of records of all Time Patrol activities:

in the Danellian civilization over a million years in our future;

at the dawn of time when such records would be immune to any later reality alterations.

For the period, 1850-2000, the Patrol has three milieus, each with a headquarters in 1890-1910. Are 20 years long enough to handle business covering 150 years plus messages and visits from other milieus and periods? Automatic shunts prevent message shuttles or couriers from:

"...piling up at one instant."

-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol" IN Anderson, Time Patrol (Riverdale, NY, December 2010), pp. 1-53 AT 2, p. 13 -

- but would there not be just too many arrivals and messages at every instant?

In "Star of the Sea," the number of years guarded by the Patrol has shrunk from a million to:

"...half a million years or more..." (2, p. 485)

Is this an indication to us readers if not also to the Time Patrol agents that they are guarding a different timeline from that which they had guarded at the beginning of the series?

Who knows? ("Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men?")

The Time Patrol As An Organization

"Star of the Sea."

We have not yet exhausted all the differences between an individual temporal explorer and a time travelling organization. 

See:

Civilized Time Travel

Janne Floris, based in late twentieth century Amsterdam, does field research in the Netherlands and in neighbouring parts of Belgium and Germany during the Roman Iron Age. Other Specialists do similar work in the centuries before and after Floris' special period and as far apart as Russia and Ireland. Still others remain in the twentieth century to correlate and analyze the data gathered by field agents. When it becomes necessary to investigate inconsistencies found in a chronicle by Tacitus, Floris, born in 1950, must work with Unattached agent, Manse Everard, born in 1924. Not too big a gap between their birth years makes them almost contemporaries.

After an initial visit to the first century, Everard relaxes in twentieth century Amsterdam where he also spends time at the Time Patrol office retrieving data on history, anthropology, political and physical geography etc and imprints any essential information. Even the Patrol knows little about Germanic prehistory which had seemed to be unimportant. Floris lived with the Frisii from 22 to 37 AD because the Patrol had needed to know about Roman influence among the tribes. Only Floris and Everard have researched Claudius Civilis who led the Northern revolt.

Cease To Be?

"Star of the Sea," 2.

Everard and Floris agree that:

"'...tomorrow we shall cope.'" (p. 493)

But tomorrow might be too late if, as Everard had reflected earlier, the reality around him:

"...at any instant could not only cease to be but cease ever having been." (p. 480)

But that is not going to happen, is it? If events in the first century AD had prevented our familiar reality from ever having been, then that reality would not have existed from the first century until the present moment, then ceased to exist at the present moment, but would not have existed period. The fact that we exist now is sufficient to establish that we are not in a timeline where we never came into existence. If such a timeline does exist/has existed/will exist in some tense expressible in the Temporal language, then that timeline is not this one. This conceptual confusion continually lurks in the background of the Time Patrol series.

Events That Did Not Happen

Destiny: All this is destined to happen.

Destiny: Events that never did happen and now never shall, will cast their conclusions and occurrences out into the worlds.

Destiny: Cause and effect will jostle, unable to tell quite which came first. The event horizon will come closer and closer. Wrecks and mirages of time and occasion...

-Neil Gaiman, The Sandman: The Kindly Ones (New York, 1996), Part 11, p. 15, panel 1, panel 1, panel 2.

Sounds like the Time Patrol?

Guion reminds Wanda Tamberly that causality:

"'...can double back on itself, can even annul itself.'"

- and that the source of a disturbance:

"'...perhaps does not exist in our yet, our reality.'"

-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, July 1991), PART THREE, 31,275,389 B. C., p. 135.

Events that have not happened can have effects.

Tacitus One And Two

"Star of the Sea," 2.

By "Tacitus One," Everard and Floris mean the restored version of Tacitus' Histories that recounts history as we know it. By "Tacitus Two," they mean a different version that has been found by time travelling sociologists in the early second century and that recounts a very different outcome of the Northern revolt. The problem as I see it is: how can a Tacitus Two manuscript exist in the Tacitus One timeline? My suggested solution is that the sociologists were in the second century at a time when both Tacitus One and Tacitus Two were possible. When they wanted to borrow a contemporary copy of the Histories from a private library, they had to travel a short distance into the future in order to enter the library surreptitiously and this short journey took them into the then possible Tacitus Two timeline but then they returned pastward and forward again into the Tacitus One timeline. As far as I can remember, Poul Anderson indicated in private correspondence that he would accept this explanation. However, the problem that I still have with it is that I cannot fit it into any other theoretical framework to explain events as recounted in the Time Patrol series. But then I do not think that anything else fits either. 

Although:

"The Patrol speech had a grammar capable of handling chronokinesis, variable time, and the associated paradoxes..." (2, p. 482)

- Everard and Floris several times postpone speaking Temporal and prefer to stay with English because they do not want to go too deeply into the problem at their first meeting. We understand their English but not what they are trying to say with it.

I think that that is enough time travel for this evening, don't you?

Mythological Time

See Three Opening Passages, combox. 

The "Barbaricum" was the barbarian area outside the Roman Empire. The barbari, barbarians, were still living in mythological, not yet in historical, time. 

In SM Stirling's Emberverse, the loss of technology returns society to mythological time. The heroic killing of a bear, a biographical event for an individual, becomes a mythological event for his society.

I think that Christianity occupies the crossroads between the cyclical, seasonal time of agricultural societies and the linear, historical time of urban civilizations. Thus, the dying and rising god is no longer a recurrent myth but a unique event and his cross symbolizes eternal-temporal intersection.

Whatever happened in Jerusalem, the Time Patrol must preserve the history of the bifurcation between Judaism and Christianity:

"'Patrol units are concentrated on guarding Palestine.'"

-"Star of the Sea," 2, p. 492.

In 1986, Everard uses the present tense, "'...are...,'" when discussing events in 69-70 A.D. To time travellers, those Patrol units are always in place.