The Life Of Your Time

In "Common Time" by James Blish, the test pilot of a faster than light interstellar drive experiences an unexpected discrepancy between subjective and objective durations. He subjectively experiences hours while his body physically endures and ages for mere seconds, then the discrepancy reverses. The first half of this discrepancy recurs for interstellar travelers in Poul Anderson's "The Life Of Your Time" (Dialogue With Darkness, New York, 1985).

Anderson sketches a background for this single short story:

there is an American Hegemony on Earth;

the Solar System and Alpha Centauri have been explored;

interstellar travel is by relativistic ramjets, fueled by interstellar hydrogen, as in his novel, Tau Zero;

radio messages have been received from Tau Ceti;

a ship crewed by four couples departs for Tau Ceti, accelerating to near light speed;

the crew learns the hard way that time dilation affects bodies, not minds, so that, as ship velocity increases, they experience hours for every bodily second;

one listens to speeded-up Beethoven;

with less external distractions, a crew member's telepathic potential increases;

thus, she both senses the temporarily continued existence of the space-time pattern that is the mind of another woman who has attempted suicide and awakens the telepathic potential in the other crew members;

there is time to revive the body that would otherwise have bled to death;

the crew will spend their subjectively long journey exploring this newly discovered mental realm.

Time dilation affecting bodies but not minds is an awesomely imaginative idea that was worth exploring in at least one short story. Fortunately, dilation did not work like that in Tau Zero where the crew of the relativistically accelerating ramjet were able to survive both physically and mentally into the next cosmic cycle.

In "The Life Of Your Time," the growing discrepancy between mental experience and bodily activity raises the philosophical question of the mind-body relationship. A musical pattern is communicable on paper or as sounds and can be played on different instruments or by different orchestras but cannot exist independently of any physical manifestation. It makes sense to speculate that mental patterns are similar.

I would add that, although someone who reads musical notation imagines sounds, there is no audible music. Similarly, if a mental pattern could be described in symbols, then someone able to understand the symbols would imagine the mind or personality described although the latter would not thereby become conscious. It would be like reading about a fictitious character.

Lastly, is the telepathic potential enabling the crew to cope with their predicament a deus ex machina?