If the Exaltationists cause Euthydemus to die earlier and in different circumstances than those in which he dies in the Danellian timeline, then:
"'...the Patrol will be nothing, from the instant when Euthydemus dies...'" (p. 89)
The Patrol, "'Except for its remnants downtime...,'" (ibid.) will be nothing to the Exaltationists and to the divergent timeline that their intervention will have initiated. However, as far as I can see, the consequences within the Danellian timeline will be that:
Euthydemus will continue to live and to die later as it is recorded that he did;
Exaltationists who had maneuvered their way close to Euthydemus will disappear because their actions will have carried them into the divergent timeline.
These consequences are not how Anderson or his characters present the issue but I think that they follow necessarily from the concept of causality violations generating divergent timelines.
10 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
Yes, but what Manse and his colleagues feared that the wanton callousness of the Exaltationists as they PLAYED with the chaotic mutability of the time "fluxes" would somehow affect the very existence of the universe, including the universe leading to the Danellians.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
The Patrol has the idea that, if the Exaltationists succeed in Bactria, then the Danellian timeline, which they, the Patrol, are in, will never have existed in any sense whatsoever.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
That is, more concisely than what I said, was what I had in mind.
Ad astra! Sean
The problem with the "remnants" of the Patrol downtime of the change is that those "remnants" include -every single Patrol Agent- because the -Academy- is in the remote prehuman past.
This gives the Patrol a failsafe. A really effective attack would have to be staged -before- the establishment of the Academy... which would be different because that would be before human history.
An attack would have to be ecological in nature -- something that would prevent the evolution of human beings and throw the biological development of the terrestrial ecology off track.
If that was done, nothing would be left of the Patrol but a genuine "scattering", of scientists studying the very remote past. They could be mostly finished off with a series of surprise attacks.
That would have to be very carefully managed or the Exaltationists wouldn't have a world to rule.
That ties in with something I thought about an earlier Poul story, the one where Sicilian Normans have hijacked a time machine from historical researchers and established a bandit HQ in about the Academy's period (though this isn't a Time Patrol story).
What struck me as implausible in that story (though it's essential to the plot) is that the Normans set up their agricultural base by establishing plantations worked by slaves, who are abducted warriors, the same sort of people they recruit for their bandit forces.
Now, Norman Sicily -did- have slave-run agricultural enterprises, inherited from the North Africans who'd dominated Sicily before them (very complex history) but those were strictly limited to the production of sugar, a fantastically valuable specialty crop then.
It's not the way the Normans would have handled ordinary agriculture -- far too much hard work and too dangerous.
For that, you'd just abduct -peasants-, set them up with the animals and tools they needed, and then tax the surplus off them, which was essentially the way Norman Sicily (and most of the world) worked in the 12th century. They'd aim at a manorial society for their food supply. Much lower maintenance costs than slavery, and much less risky.
This loops back around to how the Exaltationists could manage to have a human world without the Patrol.
Simply kidnap humans at an appropriate level of technology and plant them in the remote past, before the emergence of the human race (and before the Academy). With them would be their domestic plants and animals, and anything else convenient.
With time travel, the Exaltationists could shape the development of their culture and its spread, moving in when it was big enough to be worth playing top-dog in.
I wish I'd though to discuss that with Poul when it was possible.
"The Nest," which I expect to reread.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Mr. Stirling: Yes, I see what you mean. Setting up a society based on a manorial system using serfs or tenants would be a vastly less high stress, high pressure system than one based on chattel slavery. It would have been more plausible for Anderson to have Duke Hugo and his goons kidnapping peasants precisely for that purpose.
And it would have made the revolt which eventually overthrew Hugo in "The Nest" much harder to trigger.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: yeah, slave societies (as opposed to those in which slavery is a minor institution) are not all that common -- ones like Barbados in 1700 or central Italy in the late Republican or early Imperial periods. It requires a particular set of circumstances to make slaves available on that scale and managing the result is tricky.
Eg., with a few exceptions (the American South is one) slave populations usually don't reproduce themselves naturally, so continued imports are necessary.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I think the wars and conquests of the Late Republic and Early Empire provided some of the circumstances which made slaves so widely available: the Romans hauled off vast numbers of people as war booty to be sold.
But mass chattel slavery is not an efficient way of using labor, as you have explained both here and in your books. Tenant farmers and salaried workers for factories was far better!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean: not necessarily. Slavery can be highly efficient but that requires a particularly intensive type of management, and also particular economic conditions -- for example, a very high degree of commercialization and production for the market. If the economic system is more subsistence-oriented, than large scale slavery just isn't worth the trouble. Many such systems have -small- scale slavery.
Using salaried workers wasn't a path available for the Romans (or the planters of 17th-century Barbados) because of cultural/economic factors.
Romans (or Classical Greeks) would not work for someone else consistently for wages; it was incompatible with being a free man. A free man could be dirt poor, or he could rent land, but he couldn't be, for example, a salaried factory manager. It wasn't the recompense that was the distinguishing factor, it was the degree of personal autonomy.
If you wanted to produce intensively for the market, agriculture beyond the family-farm level in ancient Rome required slave labor.
Likewise, indentured workers from England weren't really a competitive option in Barbados. Sugar plantations required a style of management that free Englishmen just wouldn't tolerate for long; throw in that they were much more vulnerable to tropical diseases, and it just wasn't cost-effective.
Caribbean sugar plantations in the slave era were among the most profitable investments going and made very good returns.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Thanks for your very interesting comments explaining WHAT would make plantation style slavery profitable: for both economic and cultural reasons.
I thought Rome and Greece did have many small to medium business enterprises, at least in cities and towns, requiring the use of some salaried workers. I guess I was wrong and such enterprises used either members of the owners families or a small number of slaves.
Ad astra! Sean
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