Everard to Tamberly:
"'It could turn out that you and I never had this talk today, that we and our whole world never were...'" (p. 31)
Here is the absurdity made explicit. They are having this talk today. There could be another timeline in which they are not.
"'It's harder to imagine and harder to take than the idea of personal annihilation when we die.'" (ibid.)
Is it? We can imagine a world in which we never were. We can reflect on this world as it will be after we are gone. But we are here and now to do the imagining and reflecting.
Later in The Shield Of Time, Everard warns Novak that, if he remains in a timeline that is to be deleted, then he will be deleted with it:
"'Then it'll never have been. You won't exist anymore.'
"'How's that different from the usual death?'"
-PART SIX, 1245beta A. D., p. 412.
The beta timeline will never have been? But it is now while they are in it, having this conversation. Novak won't exist in the subsequent timeline but he will live out the rest of his life in the beta timeline. Unlike Everard speaking to Tamberly, Novak does not see any difference between deletion and death. Someone who has died is in the past of the first temporal dimension. Someone who has been deleted is in the past of the second temporal dimension. The Temporal language will recognize this with two kinds of past tense.
8 comments:
Kaor, Paul!
A pity Anderson never received your objections and arguments before writing THE SHIELD OF TIME. From what you've said elsewhere, Anderson agreed with much of your critique and said he would have to keep it in mind if he ever wrote any further Time Patrol stories after "Death and the Knight."
Ad astra! Sean
Note that language is not "neutral". Its grammatical structure embodies a belief-system about the nature of physical reality -- for example English, like most Indo-European languages, embodies a unidirectional, linear view of time and an assumption that space is "flat".
Often what we think of as self-evident truth is just the linguistic structure we're using to think with.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
The work of both Eratosthenes and practical observations of ships gradually below the horizon must have shown to many how incomplete was that assumption of space being flat. Because they demonstrated the sphericity of the world.
Ad astra! Sean
Sean,
Flat Earth and flat space are different concepts, though.
Paul.
Kaor, Paul!
I agree. I was thinking of how they had some "similarities."
Ad astra! Sean
For example, in Navajo, time is expressed in a very different way than it is in English; there aren't really any tenses as we use the term, and a sentence may contain no direct temporal location at all, just a verb-root with mode-prefixes
It's rather difficult to say that something happening in a distant place takes place at the "same time" as something happening near enough to directly observe; the language assumes that time is relative to the observer. Futurity can only be used in conjunction with a process, not an event.
Eg.,
Mary yiskÇÇ! go bil hodoozho¢o¢l
Mary tomorrow 3-with areal.3subj-fut-happy
"Mary, tomorrow, will-conditionally-undergo-the process of becoming happy"
(More or less, it's complex).
In English, the tense structure assumes a uniformity of time in all places.
Kaor, Mr. Stirling!
And an English speaker might "instinctively" say: "Tomorrow, Mary will be happy"?
Ad astra! Sean
Kaor, Mr. Stirling! I think Tolkien would have loved these philological comments! And a native English speaker might have said: "Mary will be happy tomorrow." Ad astra! Sean
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