In Poul Anderson's The Shield Of Time (New York, 1991), Part Five, Guion begins to brief Everard on some:
"'...anomalous variations in reality.'" (1990 A.D., p. 261)
Before Guion has disclosed any details, Everard yet again reflects first that negative feedback damps out the effects of most changes made by time travelers and secondly that nevertheless there are also nexuses where a single incident does determine the large-scale future.
However, Guion chillingly continues that these variations "'...have no known cause...,'" (p. 262) no identifiable "'...chronokinetic sources.'" (ibid.)
Let us consider just one of Guion's examples: the exact objects depicted on a scroll by Ma Yuan do not agree with what future scholars have recorded. But does this not show just that the scholars have got it wrong? The assumption seems to be that:
Ma Yuan depicted certain objects;
later scholars correctly recorded which objects he had depicted;
reality changed so that now different objects were depicted;
but the reality change affected only which objects were depicted, not also the scholars' accounts of which objects had been depicted.
That would be alarming. Imagine if, e.g., a violent incident had been filmed but investigative time travelers found that the incident as observed by them unaccountably differed from the incident as filmed.
These variations:
"'...indicate instability in those sections of history.'" (ibid.)
If small uncaused changes can occur, then so can a bigger one - and it will in Part Six.
6 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Another possibility, as regards Ma Yuan's scroll, is that the scholars who discussed that work of art, either got the details wrong or there was another scroll painted by Ma Yuan.
Sean
Or the scroll was recorded, the data stored somewhere in the remote past, and now the version stored in the remote past disagrees with the scroll and all future-ward records of it.
If I was the Patrol, I'd keep a complete databank int e prehuman past -- at the Academy, for example.
That would provide a master-template for detecting fluctuations.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
A very good idea! A data base kept at the Patrol's Oligocene era Academy would be kept so far back in the that it could reasonably be hoped to have escaped all or most "divergences." The only problem I can think of is that human history alone contains so much information that it's likely some details would not be recorded. Hence an element of doubt still creeps in.
Sean
Mr Stirling,
You have explained it.
Paul.
Sean: yeah, you could never be completely certain.
Also, the records themselves contain anomalies -- like that friend who retires from the Patrol to Victorian London -and- dies single after a long career.
But a template back in the Academy would be a necessity, I think.
Also, the fact that all Patrol agents train and graduate from the Academy is an ultimate fail-safe; if recorded history is altered, potentially -all the agents who ever serve- are available to patch it up... though you'd have to be very careful about screwing with their world-lines.
(If Everard had been called on as a recent graduate and killed in action before his missions on his personal world-line, think of the consequences!)
I think I've mentioned that if I was trying to wipe out the Patrol, I'd try to do something pastward of the Academy.
You couldn't interfere with history before humanity, but you could easily foul up the evolutionary history of the planet, simply by introducing organisms that hadn't evolved yet. Grass, for instance, or some avian disease to which the closely-related dinosaurs were very vulnerable.
Or set up your colony in the Oligocene prior to the Academy, combining that with spreading the disruptive organisms.
There would still be Patrol agents pastward of your disruption, but there wouldn't be nearly as many of them, and they wouldn't have the data and resources.
Dear Mr. Stirling,
Fascinating ideas that would pose nightmarish conundrums to the Patrol! It makes me wonder if difficulties like the ones you posed contributed to Poul Anderson deciding he had done as much as he reasonably could with the Time Patrol series and it was time to move on. After all, even tho interstellar travel is sometimes mentioned in the Patrol stories, we never SEE it--almost certainly because of the sheer difficulty in making it fit into the Patrol series without too many contradictions.
Sean
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