it is a crisp and brilliant autumn day in New York;
masonry and glass gleam high;
a few clouds scud on the breeze in a blue sky;
cars are few;
there is the aroma of roast chestnuts;
there are glamorous shops and diverse people.
(Three senses.)
Then Carl, who has just come from 372, thinks:
"...those Goths of mine were getting off lightly compared to, say, millions of European Jews and Gypsies, less than ten years futureward, or millions of Russians at this very moment."
-Poul Anderson, "The Sorrow of Odin the Goth" IN Anderson, Time Patrolman (New York, 1983), pp. 117-254 AT 1935, p. 129.
He is burdened with the knowledge of what is happening elsewhere now and also of what will happen a decade hence and later - and the Patrol must preserve all of it, even including what has already happened, as Carl will learn to his cost.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And all Carl had been trying to do, ORIGINALLY, was to investigate and trace the development of Gothic and Germanic legends and poetry! He never expected or wanted to become a SOURCE for those legends.
Ad astra! Sean
In a culture like the Goths -- or ancient Greece -- people believed in divine visits, but not as ordinary events. IIRC, there's an episode in the Bible where St. Paul is mistaken for Zeus at some minor Greek city in Anatolia.
It would be natural for Carl to be taken for someone supernatural.
He shows up with all sorts of interesting stuff -- yet he's alone, something inexplicable in contemporary terms. They'd soon know from neighboring settlements that nobody had seen him passing through, and from them about -their- neighbors. He has no horse or wagons or guards or attendants, yet his clothes are fine and clean and he's not starving.
Then he speaks and acts strangely, and knows things he couldn't know.
Furthermore, he -looks- just exactly like one of their deities, that deity is known to wander and seek out stories and knowledge, and he's enormously tall by contemporary standards.
Mr Stirling,
So it sounds like Carl screwed up. He should have covered his tracks better.
Paul.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling and Paul!
And Carl tells stories to his new Gothic friends about lands and peoples and rulers in suspicious detail. Such as stories about the Emperor Diocletian and his stern laws. Yes, Carl mucked up badly!
Ad astra! Sean
Not necessarily. it's mention elsewhere in the Patrol stories that as long as it's the type of supernatural encounter which is -expected- in that culture, Patrol agents often do things which lend themselves to supernatural explanations. They generally sink into the "noise level" of the culture and are assimilated memetically.
Eg., in the hunt for the Exaltationists in Bactria, Manse explains to a younger (Jamaican) agent that it's like having CIA agents swoop down in helicopters in a remote mountain valley in Jamaica in the 1960's and arrest some Communist agents, saying that they're doing it in cooperation with the Jamaican government.
He points out that the people there know that Communists exists, that the CIA exists, and that helicopters exist -- though they don't expect to see any of those things day-to-day.
Likewise, "everybody knows" in Hellenistic Bactria that the gods exist, and occasionally directly intervene in the affairs of mortals -- they've all been brought up on stories of that happening.
They don't -expect- it because it's rare and marvelous, but they know it happens.
Then the story is passed from person to person, but there are no analogues to our news media or Internet to spread it widely or quickly. They just become another gods-dropped-in story, and are assimilated by memetic pressure to the pattern and details that people expect with stories like that.
In Carl's case things blow up in his face; partly because he does this over and over again in the same community and with members of the same family, and also because he has the bad luck to match the archetypical structures so closely that things he says and does become incorporated into those structures and -- subtly -- modify them, altering the characteristics of the Wotan/Odin figure, and those changes spread via the poet's grapevine throughout the Germanic sphere.
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