Enemies And Threats

Recently (here), I compared Poul Anderson's Time Patrol and his Terran Empire. Both have external enemies. Neldorians and Exaltationists try to change the history guarded by the Patrol. The Merseian Roidhunate (I said) tries to destroy the Empire. However, that was a British understatement. The Roidhunate aims not merely to destroy the Empire but also to domesticate or exterminate humanity, thus to destroy the very freedom and creativity that are what we value about being human. We can live with the loss of an Empire but not with its replacement by the Roidhunate. (We also learn that not all beings of Merseian descent support the Roidhunate any more than all Germans supported the Third Reich.)

The other parallels that I drew between Patrol and Empire were valid. Each faces an inner threat. Quantum processes in space-time-energy can change history. The Empire itself is a stage in the decline of Technic civilization caused by the cartelization of the Polesotechnic League. Are the Danellians and the Commonalty free from such threats? I would argue that the civilization represented by the Commonalty and its contemporary civilizations in other spiral arms have become so vast and widespread that no process of decay or decline can affect all of them simultaneously. I had thought that the Danellians somehow transcended time but, of course, that was an unwarranted assumption. We know nothing about them and their future civilization might also decline. Human beings are forbidden to travel to the Danellian Era let alone beyond it but what might there be beyond it?