"'That resilience of time is the reason travel is permitted at all. If you want to change things, you have to go about it just right and work very hard, usually.'"
-Poul Anderson, "Time Patrol," section 2, IN Time Patrol (New York, 2006), pp. 15-16.
All that matters to history is not that Booth killed Lincoln but that Booth is believed to have killed Lincoln. But does this entail that, in the timeline where Booth did kill Lincoln, some other guy was waiting to shoot Lincoln and would have done so if Booth had not beaten him to it?
This allows for a tremendous amount of freedom of action in the past. If a Patrolman is present at a time and a place where it was recorded that a rape occurred, must he stand idle while it occurs or can he prevent it secure in the knowledge that, unless this is a pivotal event, it will be erroneously recorded that the rape occurred anyway? Maybe it was known that someone set out to commit the rape so it was just assumed that he had succeeded?
Is this why the director of Jerusalem base thinks that, even if Hiram's Tyre is destroyed during Solomon's reign, it might be possible to damp down the consequences so that the Biblical record is preserved unchanged and subsequent history is not affected? It sounds as if time travelers might be able to get away with just about anything.
4 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I think the rape you had in mind was the one witnessed by Janne Floris and Manse Everard in "Star of the Sea." Janne forgot training and Patrol caution and tried to prevent the rape, and thus unwittingly set in motion the chain reaction of events she and Manse had been investigating. As you keep pointing out, there is so MUCH into Anderson's Time Patrol stories--implications, consequences, tangents, spin offs--that they seem inexhaustible.
Sean
Sean,
I was not thinking of that rape because it was not recorded. David had mentioned Boudicca's daughters being raped.
Paul.
Paul:
I think it would depend on how many (and how reliable) witnesses there were. While I never saw any specific details stated, my impression was that Boudicca's daughters were publicly GANG-raped. If so, any intervention would have to counter the fact that there were lots of people who COULD say, "Well, no, the soldiers were all set to have a good time, and then that what's-his-name, Martinus Paduei, paid the praefectus a whopping bribe and they let him take the girls away ... and it was pretty clear HE hadn't any intent of raping them...."
Granted, if many or all of the witnesses have a vested interest in promoting the story of the rape -- rabble-rousing Britunculi or the like -- you can get away with it. And it's not impossible even in the worst case. But the Patrol wouldn't be likely to encourage taking that sort of chance. "SHOULDN'T be likely," I should say.
Martinus Paduei!
Post a Comment