Tuesday, 26 July 2022

What Everard Knows

"The Sorrow of Odin the Goth."

Carl Farness reflects:

"Looking at [Everard's] dark, bowed head, I had the eerie knowledge that he must have read everything I would write. He knew my personal future as I did not - as I would not until I had been through it." (1980, p. 385)

The climax of this story is that Farness must appear in his role as Wodan and betray his descendants. Will he write a report of that? He must do. He had set out to discover the origin of the story of Wodan/Odin betraying his descendants. But, in that case, Everard must know all that now. He will not have:

"'...to steep myself in knowledge of that milieu, and rove it from end to end, over and over, before the situation was clear to me.'" (1935, p. 448)

What the Patrol sets out to learn, it already knows. This is a contradiction.

1 comment:

S.M. Stirling said...

Not really. The world-lines can be discontinuous, from an "objective" point of view, but they're continuous from an -individual- point of view.