We Have Not Ceased To Exist

(Wanda Tamberly phoning Manse Everard.)

"The Year of the Ransom," 3 November 1885.

A Patrol agent, Julio Vasquez, having investigated on the spot, reports to Everard that, in 1533, a friar and a soldier disappeared in the building where Atahualpa's ransom was kept. In that year, when he left it, sorcery was suspected and unrecorded hysteria was growing. Although the Conquest is a key part of world events, the significance of this one episode is not known. Vasquez comments:

"'We have not ceased to exist, in spite of being uptime of it.'" (p. 679)

Nor will anyone cease to exist. Vasquez and Everard converse in the 1885 of a timeline where the Conquest and subsequent history up until 1885 occurred as recorded. There might be a divergent timeline where the Conquest proceeded differently, therefore where the subsequent history also differed and finally where Vasquez and Everard neither existed nor conversed in 1885. However, there cannot possibly be a timeline where the Conquest went differently and the subsequent history was also different yet, despite all this, Vasquez and Everard existed in 1885, then ceased to exist!

Despite the logic of my remarks, Everard replies:

"'Which doesn't mean we can't cease to exist,' said Everard roughly. We can have never been, ourselves and the whole world that begot us. It's a perishing more absolute than death." (ibid.)

There can be a world where Everard has never been but the world in which he lives, breathes, thinks and speaks is not such a world. To cease to exist or to perish is not the same as never to have been. However, if we disbelieve in a hereafter, then what is the difference to me between a world in which I was never born and this world after I have died? One of Everard's colleagues asks this question in The Shield Of Time.