In "Brave To Be A King," Manse Everard is in a timeline where the Cyrus who should have become King of Persia was murdered in infancy and where Keith Denison of the Time Patrol has been obliged to play the role of the adult Cyrus. Everard intends to "delete" this timeline and to replace it with a more acceptable one in which the infant Cyrus was not murdered so that neither Denison nor anyone else is required to impersonate the adult Cyrus.
Before making this change, Everard speaks as if he is in a changeable timeline, i.e., in a timeline which clearly exists because he is in it yet can be changed into or replaced by an alternative. He is in this timeline but will replace it. The tensed verbs, "is" and "will replace" refer not to different moments within a single timeline but to a temporal relationship between two timelines. However, after making the change, Everard speaks as if he is in not a changeable but a discontinuous timeline. He speaks as if Denison's career as Cyrus has simply never occurred in any sense whatsoever. It is true that, after making the change, he and Denison are in a timeline where it is true to say that, within that timeline, Denison has never been Cyrus. But Denison's impersonation of Cyrus was in the previous timeline.
If there were only a single, discontinuous timeline, then it would be impossible to travel into the past and to change the timeline. In such a timeline, causality is violated not by time travellers who have travelled into the past but only by those who have appeared from nowhere and nowhen with the mistaken memory of having travelled into the past. In such a timeline, it would be unnecessary to fear that anyone who has travelled into the past has changed it.
5 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
And what happened, of course, as you argued elsewhere, was that the timeline in which Keith Denison impersonated the adult Cyrus the Great, became a separate timeline no longer accessible to time travelers from the history guarded by the Patrol.
Incidentally, this meant Denison/"Cyrus the Great" disappeared from the timeline in which he was king of Persia, thirteen years before the historical Cyrus died. That timeline must have changed in incalculable ways!
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
I think that you think of a deleted timeline as still existing now in the present of the current timeline. It doesn't. Someone who has died in the first temporal dimension is not still alive now in the present of the first temporal dimension. A timeline that has been deleted in the second temporal dimension does not still exist in the present of the second temporal dimension. But the point is that there was/is no moment within a deleted timeline when it ceases to exist.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
And I agree with you. Here you brought out more precisely the implications of your argument.
Ad astra! Sean
Though Everard's depiction of how the Patrol, if officially informed, would insist on Dennison remaining as "Cyrus" has a disqualifying weakness.
Because if they told him to stay there and make the best of it, he could simply reply:
"Oh, well, then, I if I have to stay here I'll just make myself comfortable... introduce stirrups, and paper, and printing, and yes, I -do- remember the formula for gunpowder. That'll help when we take over those pesky Greeks, but I bet they'll be useful on the expeditions I send across the Atlantic..."
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
I love this sardonic response to how Keith Dennison might have acted if he got really mad and dissatisfied! Yes, you pointed out a weakness in the plot, one I never thought of before.
Ad astra! Sean
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