"'What they showed me, though, the records -'
"He nodded. 'Consequences of time gone awry. Bad.'"
-Poul Anderson, The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), Part Four, 1990, p. 253.
The Time Patrol has records of events that did not happen in the current timeline. Which such alternative records do we know of?
(i) In the current timeline, Charles Whitcomb resigned from the Patrol after his first case, to live with his wife Mary in Victorian London, yet the Patrol has records of Whitcomb remaining a bachelor and eventually being killed on active duty. Whatever cases he would have worked on in that alternative career must have been worked on by other agents in the current timeline.
(ii) There was a timeline in which Patrolman Keith Denison played the role of Cyrus the Great for sixteen years.
(iii) There was a timeline in which Carthage won the Second Punic War.
(iv) At this stage of Wanda's career, the Patrol would not have been able to inform her of either the alpha or the beta timeline with their alternative versions of medieval history. The alpha timeline resulted from a quantum fluctuation and the beta timeline resulted from the Patrol's first attempt to prevent the alpha timeline. Patrol members had not yet experienced either of these divergent timelines.
(v) Maybe the Patrol has records of timelines generated by the Nine, the discoverers of time travel, or by other time criminals "before" the Danellians appeared and set up the Patrol to police the time lanes?
16 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
But, as regards your point (v), it was definitely said that immediately after the invention of time traveling, the Danellians appeared and confiscated the first time cycles and began setting up the Patrol. So, I don't think the Patrol has records of "alternative" timelines for that particular event. But, yes, there would be records of "deleted" timelines such as the Carthaginian case.
But trying to make sense of the idea of time traveling in mutable timelines is brain numbing!
Sean
Sean,
"Time travel was old when [the Danellians] emerged, there had been uncountable opportunities for the foolish and the greedy and the mad to go back and turn history inside out." ("Time Patrol" IN TIME PATROL, section 2, p. 11)
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree that time travel was an ancient technology by the time the Danellians emerged, but the Danellians still acted WHEN time travel was invented. Thousands of years in the future, a group called the Nine discovered time travel, and I now quote Dard Kelm: "Let's not stray from the subject. You'll learn the details in other classes. I'm only giving you a general background. The Nine saw the possibility of going back in time and preventing their enemies from ever having getting started, even from ever being born. But then the Danellians appeared." And to quote from the same paragraph you quoted: "The Nine were prevented from carrying out their schemes. And the Patrol was set up to police the time lanes."
So I would still argue for believing that, at the moment time traveling became practical, the Danellians appeared to thwart the Nine. Naturally, being so far in the future of the Nine, the Danellians would be careful to find out who had invented time traveling. And act to prevent the Nine from taking actions that would threaten the time line leading to the Danellians.
Sean
Sean,
But there is a succession of timelines. By travelling back in time and preventing the Nine from carrying out their schemes, the Danellians deleted a timeline in which the Nine had carried out their schemes.
Paul.
If time is mutable and time travel possible, the logical consequence is a succession of changes until a timeline arises in which time travel is -never discovered-. At that point, the situation becomes stable.
I've often felt that the Patrol's opponents are insufficiently imaginative. Mere historical changes (like the Neldorian bandits in "Delenda Est") aren't going to stop the Patrol, because the Patrol exists -before- the changes. In fact, all the Patrol agents ever trained are present at the Academy, which exists before the evolution of humanity. If you really wanted to destroy the Patrol, you'd have to do something that upset history before history, before humanity itself, so that all or nearly all the Patrol was "down-time" from the change point. My favorite would be to go back a really long way and scatter grass seeds, which would impact the ecology drastically. The rise of the grasses -did- revamp the ecology of the world, so if you'd introduced them before then everything afterwards would be different. You'd have to do this very carefully, of course.
And of course the impact of -mature, highly evolved- grasses would be catastrophic, much more so than even the rapid post-Cretaceous process of evolution we got. (For example, early grasses didn't have the drought tolerance, open-country preference and very high silica content of the more modern varieties.)
Huge areas would almost instantly be coated with vegetation no animal had evolved to eat, choking out the competition. Changes would ripple through the global ecosystem in a series of shocks, probably causing mass extinctions and then the very rapid emergence of new species of animal from among the surviving generalist types.
Poul had something like that happen on Altai ("A Message in Secret") which is colonized by humans after its long-established icecaps have retreated due to its star warming and native plant are trying to readapt to the equatorial and temperate zones.
Terran grasses are seeded, and in an eyeblink -- less than centuries -- they blanket everything north and south of the remaining glacial zones.
Kaor, Paul!
That is true. The Danellians acted to preserve the timeline leading to THEM.
Sean
Dear Mr. Stirling,
VERY interesting comments. I had not realized before how important grasses were to the Earth's ecology. And, yes, I recall how similarly important were the introduction of grasses were to Altai. And we also see rapid, unintended emergence of new species of Terran descended animals there. Simply recall how Flandry and his friends had a most unpleasant experience with disturbingly intelligent animals descended from RATS.
Sean
Mr Stirling,
Yes. Larry Niven's argument in "THe Theory and Practice of Time Travel."
Paul.
Fred Hoyle said in THE BLACK CLOUD that grass is important because it covers the surface, can be cropped down to ground level without being killed, graziers live on it and predators live on them.
Neither Neldorians nor Exaltationists would set out to introduce grass at an earlier stage because the result would be unpredictable, thus not necessarily profitable to them.
True for the Neldorians, but I thought the Exaltationists might have tried it, save for their arrogant overconfidence -- that seems to be their besetting weakness.
You'd need to take everything you wanted to preserve back before the change too, "before" you did it; then you could jump forward and modify the development of the environment to suit.
Poul did an early story called, "The Nest", in which Sicilian-Norman nobles seize an explorer's time machine and set up a base in the remote past to launch plundering expeditions.
I realize that it's a very early story, but there are a number of things about it that bug me and one of them is the ecological consequences.
The Normans bring crops, plants and animals back to a period long before they evolved. Even if after the Nest is dismantled, they'd remain and some of them would escape and breed; horses always go feral in situations like that, and so do domestic swine and rats and mice. So would weeds and pests and things like sparrows. The Normans wouldn't have even the concept of being cautious about ecological upsets, and they'd probably introduce wild animals for fun -- boar for hunting, for example.
Also, the way they go about establishing the Nest is a bit odd. For example, they start farming -- logical, given their limited capacity to move cargo through time. But why set up a plantation-style operation? And why are they using captured warriors as slaves? They seem to use the same sort of people as slaves as the ones they recruit for their own armed bands.
There were plantations in Norman Sicily and in the Crusader kingdoms, "Outremere", but they were restricted to very high value commercial crops. Likewise, prisoners of war were used for labor, but this was always recognized as very dangerous and done only because they were available and cheap.
The Nest could have simply have taken peasant families from some appropriate period of war and chaos -- say the 30 Years War -- and then transported them back and got them established, afterwards skipping ahead to a period when they'd multiplied suitably, with visits in between to keep them impressed.
The peasants might well have welcomed an escape from war and devastation and famine, with plenty of good land available, and they'd have been from the same culture and religion and used to obeying aristocrats.
Then the Nest could just take a share of the crops as taxes and draw on them for labor needs.
Much less risky and far lower overhead costs than keeping a resentful all-male group of experienced fighters under control and organizing their labors yourself.
Ooops, already made that point elsewhere. Sorry!
Mr Stirling,
The Normans were just not able to think systematically about how to exploit time travel. I think they thought that, if they spent 8 hours elsewhen, then they had to return to the Nest 8 hours after they had departed from it.
Paul.
Dear Mr. Stirling and Paul,
Very interesting, these comments of yours about Anderson's "The Nest." Yes, I would not expect the Sicilian Normans to understand the ecological risks of carelessly introducing the plants and animals we see them doing. Yes, again, it would have made more sense for Duke Hugo to have brought in peasant families and set up a tenant farming system, not plantations staffed by resentful slaves who were trained fighters.
Paul, I agree, Duke Hugo did not NEED to come back eight hours after he left the Nest if that was how long he had spent elsewhere. However shrewd he was in other things, I think he never truly understood time traveling.
Sean
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