"...a reign over many becomes impossibly huge."
-Poul Anderson, "Hunters of the Sky Cave" IN Anderson, Sir Dominic Flandry: The Last Knight Of Terra (Riverdale, NY, 2012), pp. 149-301 AT III, p. 169.
Flandry's superior, Fenross, says that Intelligence is "'...chronically undermanned...'" (p. 173)
I am sure that Anderson intended his readers to recognize Fenross' phrase as an echo of the Time Patrol whose members somewhere joke that they are chronically undermanned or understaffed although I question this proposition in relation to the Patrol:
Time Patrolmen live for centuries unless they die by accident or violence. For the period 1850-1975 (or 2000), the Patrol has head offices in London, Moscow and Peiping in 1890-1910, with smaller offices in other decades. Thus, service in all three head offices for the entirety of their existences could be just one part of a Patroller’s career. At the Academy, Everard’s class numbers about fifty. His training is completed in three months by hypnotic conditioning. The Academy exists for half a million years before being carefully demolished so that no trace of it will remain. Does this mean that the Academy can have had one hundred million graduates with indefinite life spans? They guard a million years of history and claim to be chronically understaffed.
-copied from here.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
I don't think it was unreasonable of Manse Everard to worry about the Time Patrol being understaffed and undermanned for the job it was set to do, keep watch over at least a million years, to the past and future of Everard's birth. Think of how milieu offices needed at least minimal staffing over those million years, some would need more personnel and others less. And not all Patrol officers were field/Unattached agents like Everard, many would be plain old administrators and staffers. And others would be scientists and investigators tracking how history developed, not agents charged with solving problems of the kind handled by Unattached agents. Given all this, it made sense for Everard to fret about understaffed the Patrol was.
Sean
Most of the Time Patrol agents seem to spend their days living ordinary lives, as what intelligence services call "sleepers" -- doing other jobs, but keeping an eye out for temporal anomalies.
Everard mentions some involved in space programs, military intelligence, and so forth.
Even assuming very capable computers and lots of miniaturized clandestine surveillance, it's a very, very big job.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Exactly! And you brought out more clearly how "attached" Patrol agents were assigned to a single period/location for long spans of time. And they would often hold jobs or practice professions common to the milieu they were posted to.
Sean
Fitting into a location for long usually requires having a backstory.
This is true everywhere in small-scale settings, except under very unusual conditions -- the American or Australian frontiers in say 1870, for example, were fairly easy places to shed your past, not least because a lot of other people were trying to do the same. But a village in Sussex or Denmark, or still worse Japan, wouldn't be. You'd be under constant scrutiny forever.
In a modern state, you need a long paper trail -- school records, tax ID, credit records at a bank, possibly military service (or a good reason for not doing it) in countries with conscription.
A big trading city before formal ID registration would probably be best -- that's why the Time Patrol HQ's are in places like London and in 1890-1910.
In that period, you could come from anywhere, walk ashore in England, and do anything you wanted -- buy property, open a bank account, start a business, without accounting to anyone or supplying a passport and you didn't require any permission to stay.
After five years, you could naturalize with little difficulty -- you just had to show that you'd paid taxes if any were due, and that you hadn't committed a felony. Then it was automatic.
If you were a British subject -- from Bengal, or Jamaica, or Hong Kong or Natal -- you were immediately entitled to claim full citizen rights the moment your foot touched shore; you could be elected to Parliament (several people of Indian background were in that period) and you could, in theory, marry the heir to the Throne if you were an Anglican.
In a small town, you'd be regarded with considerable suspicion if you were an obvious outsider; even someone from elsewhere in Britain would be "foreign".
But in London, you'd be just another stranger -- and the British of the day had a horror of unwanted social contact, so nobody would think it very odd if you kept yourself to yourself.
You'd need to join (or be born in) social networks to do some things, though. Joining a British regiment as an officer, for example.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Exactly! Those British, Danish, or Japanese villages/small towns were impossible to be obscure in. Every body would know every body else, and probably most of your secrets and vices as well!
Yes, I can see how the American/Australian frontiers would good places to disappear into (or the French Foreign Legion, for that matter). And I REALLY like the idea of how the UK/London of circa 1890-1910 had so minimally intrusive a bureaucracy. Almost idyllic, the situation you described.
Sean
Sean: well, it was idyllic if you didn't fall through the cracks. If you could swim, you swam just as you pleased; if you couldn't, you sank, and that was your problem -- take a look at the conditions Jack the Ripper's victims came from, or read Jack London's "People of the Abyss".
Poul brings this up in A MIDSUMMER TEMPEST, when Rupert and Will run into the aged operator of the mechanical telegraph relay station, who's a staunch Royalist because his family has been ruined by the modernization the Puritans promote. As he says, Squire was no saint and his ancestors' lives were hard, but they had a place and it was secure. Under the new order, not only can they fall right into the pit, but the winners who climbed to the heights insist that they accept that it's all their own fault.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Granted what you said, in both of your comments above. I would only add that the heavy handed, cumbersome, often ineffective states of our times makes me think SOME of the "minimalism" seen in the London/UK of 1890-1910 would be good.
Sean
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