Confusingly, Caleb Wallis time travels through the history of the Eyrie twice. Let us differentiate between "younger Wallis" and "older Wallis," although the dividing line will be indistinct.
Younger Wallis...
...founds the Eyrie;
makes an inspection tour of its two-hundred year history;
near the end of that time, meets older Wallis as a very old man;
makes one visit to the underground high tech Phase Two;
makes some exploratory trips to the very different further future which he believes is Phase Three;
returns to the early Eyrie;
writes a short history of the future;
makes some further trips to the later Eyrie;
learns that older Wallis and some of his lieutenants will disappear.
After older Wallis's disappearance, no one will see Wallis again apart from the single trip that younger Wallis has already made to Phase Two.
Older Wallis...
...having completed the inspection tour, lives through the two hundred year history of the Eyrie;
does not live for two hundred years but time hops in concert with his lieutenants;
is visited by younger Wallis;
disappears.
Younger Wallis on his inspection tour is not told of Havig's capture and escape. Older Wallis knows because he interrogated the captive on the day before his escape. However, not having been told by older Wallis, he does not tell younger Wallis.
11 comments:
It's sort of convenient that Walls2 doesn't tell Wallis1 about Havig.
Note that compared to, say, his near-contemporary Leopold of the Belgians, Wallis is virtually a saint.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Your first comment: that might have been because Wallis2 was the man who had been captured by Havig and turned into a drugged puppet. He would only tell Wallis1 what he's been programmed to say.
Re Wallis and Leopold II, another example of King Log and King Stork? (Sardonicism)
Ad astra! Sean
Both,
Havig's spell in the Eyrie is a hundred or so years after its founding whereas his capture of the Eyrie and drugging of Wallis is in the 177th year of the Eyrie's existence.
After Havig's escape, the next appearance of the younger Wallis was years ahead and nothing bad had happened meanwhile so why admit a failure? Also, even if older Wallis was present for that appearance of younger Wallis, maybe he didn't mention Havig's escape because he remembered he hadn't mentioned it? Time travelers would learn to remain on script.
Paul.
Sean: Leopold had a uniquely large canvas by the standards of the time -- over a million square miles of territory, probably at least 15,000,000 people, of whom his agents were responsible for the deaths of about half.
Wallis was interested in building a kingdom. This necessarily involved "building up". It didn't help him if his subjects starved.
Leopold was mainly interested in how much loot he could screw out of the Congo Free State, which he spent on expensive building projects in Belgium.
Note, Leopold was also one of the very few participants in the Scramble for Africa who actually made a profit out of it -- most of his contemporaries lost their shirts, and the governments involved usually ended up spending European taxpayers' money on Africa in great gob-lots.
Individuals made money out of Africa, but even then it generally wasn't the 'big names'.
By way of contrast, McKinnon of the British Imperial East Africa Company went bankrupt; the British government had to bail him out when he was about to give up and withdraw his agents from what became Kenya and Uganda.
Even Cecil Rhodes made his money out of gold and diamonds in the Cape and Transvaal; the Imperial British South Africa Company didn't declare a dividend until 1924, long after his death.
Rhodesia was where Rhodes -spent- his money.
Most of Africa in that period wasn't worth the price of conquering it; the few exceptions involved valuable minerals, and even those generally required expensive infrastructure investments before they could turn a profit.
Mind you, a lot of those involved in partitioning Africa -thought- they were going to get rich; the myth of "tropical riches" deceived them. What they mostly got was fever-ridden wasteland.
Kaor, Paul and Mr. Stirling!
Paul: Or maybe the older Wallis was the one captured by Havig? In that case he would be primed to say to the younger, undrugged Wallis only what Havig wanted him to say.
Mr. Stirling: I agree, Wallis wanted to found a STATE, a kingdom, and you can't really do that if you are going to mercilessly ground under your heel the people in it. So Wallis had to rule in ways most within the Eyrie's domains did not find too intolerable.
That was not the case with Leopold II of Belgium, a man vastly nastier than either his father Leopold I or his nephew Albert I. All he cared about, as you said, was squeezing as much loot as possible out of the Congo Free State.
Since most of the people and nations who took part in the "scramble for Africa" were nowhere as bad as Leopold II, it's no surprise most of the French, British, German, Portuguese, etc., possessions were net losses. And that the colonial powers ended up spending far more than they would have liked to on such things as maintaining law and order, putting a stop to tribal wars and slavery, and even building some roads, bridges, schools, etc.
As astra! Sean
Sean,
No. The drugged Wallis was later.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
Dang! Easy to lose track of all these complications. Anderson probably needed to write out detailed notes and plot outlines to keep track of them.
Ad astra! Sean
Infrastructure spending is more or less an inevitable part of taking over somewhere more primitive than your own state, because you can't -govern- in the ways you're accustomed to unless you do.
Eg., you needed telegraphs, literate clerks, a professional police force, and in larger areas a railway, to run a 19th-century colony even on a minimal basis. These were essential to doing the basic violence-management functions of a State as Europeans of the era conceived of it.
When Tippu Tib the Zanzibari slave/ivory trader took over the eastern Congo as his personal fief, he did try to "modernize" it on a Zanzibari basis -- when the Congo Free State took it over in the 'Slaver War', their officers noted the contrast with the mud-hut simplicity of the natives.
There were Arab-style mansions, well-stocked warehouses stuffed full of food and trade-goods like American textiles and European hardware, beds and furniture, spices and cooking facilities, extensive plantations, some roads, use of Indian Ocean style lateen sailing boats on the lakes and big rivers, commercial networks of the Zanzibari type, some written records, etc.
It was backward compared to most European colonies, but advanced compared to what it replaced.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
Exactly! Your comments about the war lord Tippu Tib fleshes out what I had in mind. More advanced rulers taking over primitive lands had to do SOME modernization simply to govern.
Ad astra! Sean
Post a Comment