Chapters I, VIII and XIV are narrated from an alien pov;
everything else, culminating in Chapter XVII, is extracts from Guild Captain Felipe Argens' autobiography.
Chapter II begins:
"On another evening, very far away, I had heard another song. This was when I got back to City." (p. 7)
We are distracted by Argens' account of the colonized planet, Landomar, and do not return to the song in City until the bottom of p. 9. By then, we have forgotten the haunting quality of that two-sentence opening paragraph. Is Argens writing in an evening and remembering that other evening in City? Or has he just discussed one evening, then remembered that "other evening"?
An evening is an ending. An evening remembered is a past ending. And the evening referred to was "very far away." It is distant in space as well as in time. So Argens is not writing in City, where (we soon learn) he had a portwife called Lute and a young daughter called Wenli, so where is he and what has happened in between?
An autobiography is about the auto, the self, but these extracts have been selected to tell us about Valland, not about Argens. The latter tells us that immortality makes people patient but also eccentric and even crazy:
"We don't have the heart to edit certain things out of our memories, and so they grow in the psyche till we no longer have a sense of proportion about them. Like my own case - but no matter." (II, p. 16)
No matter, indeed. We never learn what bugs Argens but this remark about not editing certain memories is a clue to Valland's psyche.
The narrator of Anderson's "The Problem of Pain" looked into the abyss once, saw nothing and stopped looking. However, he tells us not his own story but that of Peter Berg who continues to seek answers. Similarly, Argens, at least in these extracts, tells us not about himself but about the millennia-old Hugh Valland.
Argens, Valland and their contemporaries:
live indefinitely extended lifespans;
but never retain more than an ordinary life-time's worth of memories;
therefore (maybe), keep journals and write autobiographies, like Argens;
can make instantaneous jumps between galaxies;
therefore, theoretically, could continue to travel outward through the universe throughout historical ages.
Anderson's Time Patrolers:
live indefinitely extended lifespans;
can spend years in the past or the future yet return to their "present" the moment after they left;
remember some events that "did not happen," at least not in the current timeline;
know the general course of future history and of human evolution;
can learn languages electronically, then erase the linguistic memories when they are no longer needed.
How would both groups perceive time? Would they remain human?
1 comment:
Kaor, Paul!
And, as we will find out, there were certain things Hugh Valland did not have removed from his memories, the retention of which could arguably be called insane or at least non-rational.
Assuming something as implausible as the "antithanatic," I can see the writing and reading of autobiographies as becoming popular. Many people would write memoirs as a means of retaining some coherent sense of themselves over long periods of time. And curiosity over how other people did so would lead to many memoirs being published. POSTHUMOUSLY, btw, in Captain Argens case. That "posthumous" being a reminder that the antithanatic had not abolished death.
Sean
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