OK. I have envisaged an "original" Tacitus Zero timeline without any extratemporal interference in the Northern revolt:
Edh is raped and killed in her teens;
thus, she never becomes Wael-Edh/Veleda;
the Germans revolt;
the details of the revolt differ since there is no Veleda to preach war and bring more tribes into the alliance;
although maybe some other sibyl fills her vacuum?;
Romans and rebels are reconciled without any Patrol help;
Tacitus records the revolt accurately;
no "Tacitus Two" manuscript is ever found;
the Patrol has no need to investigate and continues to concentrate its resources in Palestine during that period, 69-70 AD.
Everard's account of Tactitus One and Two is inadequate:
"'Since they don't have some improbable but safe explanation, like a forgery, these two variant texts are...a warning. An early sign, a ripple of change, something that may have had consequences which caused history to flow into a different channel till at last you and I and everything around us never existed - unless we heed the warning and take steps to see that this did not happen - Oh, Lord, we had better talk Temporal.'"
- Time Patrol (New York, 2006), pp. 492-493.
Much as we enjoy Anderson's prose about ripples in time, we know that this does not happen. There was a period when the Germans might have invaded England but no one found a history text describing the invasion.
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