Oaks And Acorns

British editions of James Blish's collection, Galactic Cluster, excluded "This Earth of Hours," which meant that, for a while, I had not yet read that story. I first read "This Earth of Hours," as well as Poul Anderson's "The Game of Glory" and "The Sky People," as reprints in the British edition of Venture Science Fiction.

"This Earth of Hours" refers to two other stories in Galactic Cluster and thus locates itself within Blish's non-linear "Haertel Scholium." However, neither "The Game of Glory" nor "The Sky People" gives any indication that it is part of something bigger. Not only is "The Sky People" the first of the three Maurai stories but also these three stories are discussed as works of fiction in Anderson's There Will Be Time!

We appreciate ingenious inter-textual connections and cross-references. The progression from the "Maurai" part of Maurai And Kith to There Will Be Time to the later Orion Shall Rise is particularly worthy of respect.

Introducing The Maurai

Poul Anderson, "The Sky People" IN Anderson, Maurai And Kith (New York, 1982), pp. 9-71.

"The Sky People" introduces the Maurai but obliquely. The first viewpoint character, Loklann sunna Holber, is the captain of a Sky People rover fleet about to attack Meyco Province, previously raided by the Mong from Tekkas, while a ship from the Maurai Federation also happens to be visiting Meyco.

The second narrative passage shifts from the viewpoint of Don Miwel Caraban, calde of S' Anton d' Inio, as he entertains his Maurai guests with a lavish feast to that of his principal guest, Captain Ruori Rangi Lohannaso, whose reflections inform us that the Maurai Federation stretches from Awaii to N'Zealann to Mlaya. Rightly are the Maurai called the Sea People.

Not two but three cultures are about to clash. 

The Future Of Humanity

St Paul wrote that he did not understand why he did the evil that he did not intend to do and did not do the good that he did intend to do. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote that the line between good and evil is not between groups of people but within each individual. A spokesperson for the future utopian society in William Morris's News From Nowhere says that of course social change was violent because what peace was there among those poor deluded wretches of the twentieth century? - or words to that effect. At the end of HG Wells's The Shape Of Things To Come, a radical transformation of social and environmental conditions is beginning to produce a new kind of human being, healthy, intelligent and inquiring, the opposite in every respect of their frightened and deluded twentieth century ancestors. The premise of Poul Anderson's Psychotechnic History is an organization that tries to tackle head on the "protean enemy" of psychological conflicts rooted in primitive resistance to civilization. It is unfortunate that the Psychotechnic Institute fails and is overthrown early in this future history but its aims seem to have been achieved in the much later Galactic civilization.

Spying Through Time

Spying in the further future of the Eyrie, Leonce sees Wallis old but still alive so no one has killed him before then. Therefore, Havig's group does not try to kill him before that date. However, if she had not spied and if they had tried to kill him before that date, then they might have succeeded in which case he would not still have been alive at that later date when Leonce did in fact see him still alive because they had not tried to kill him.

As Havig says, they need to preserve the unknown in which freedom of action remains possible.

Three Wars Through Time

Time Patrol versus Exaltationists.

 

Wardens versus Rangers.

 

Havig's group versus the Eyrie.

 

Interventions From Further Futures

The Danellians found the Patrol.

 

The time wardens help Malcolm Lockridge who must support neither the Wardens nor the Rangers.

Robert Anderson speculates that travelers from the remote future distribute a virus carrying the time travel gene through a chosen part of the past.

Three very different time travel narratives.

Seven Future History Beginnings

Wells and Stapledon: future historical text books that summarize current world affairs before moving into the future.

Heinlein: four stories about technological advances.

Anderson's Psychotechnic History: rapid socio-technological recovery from World War III.

Anderson's Technic History: four stories covering interplanetary and interstellar exploration, first contact and interstellar trade.

Niven: four stories about interplanetary exploration.

Cherryh: a chapter summarizing interplanetary and interstellar exploration, first contact and the beginning of interstellar trade.

The Further Future

Future history in Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time:

the War of Judgment

the Maurai period

post-Maurai rebellions

the Star Masters period

an unfathomable (post-?) civilization

 

Does that fifth period have time travel? Given that there has been a gene for time travel, can the effect be reproduced either biologically or technologically? If the empirical fact of time travel enables the Star Masters to develop FTL technology, can they also develop time travel tech?

 

Is Wallis right that the further future will also develop immortality? Might time travelers from that further future intercept the fleeing Wallis and fix him up not only physically but also mentally and morally? I mean education, not brainwashing - if someone like him is shown a successful and creative multi-racial and multi-species society?

If (i) there is a hereafter and (ii) it has any sort of moral basis, then I think that it has to be an opportunity for development, where each individual recognizes and learns from past mistakes. The bigot who expects to see heretics and skeptics damned should learn that there is more to the after-life than that. (In CS Lewis's The Great Divorce, materialists in the hereafter argue that it is an illusion.) 

From The Time Machine To There Will Be Time

In HG Wells's The Time Machine, it suffices that a single "Time Traveler" visits two far future periods and returns to the late nineteenth century, then departs a second time, never to return. End of story. In Poul Anderson's There Will Be Time, two rival organizations repeatedly move backwards and forwards in time and chronokinesis becomes the basis of interstellar travel. In a single operation, three thousand travelers from different periods come together to mount a military attack in the late twenty-second century. This includes parachutists jumping out of planes in the twentieth century and time traveling, while falling, until their "chronologs" indicate the target date.

Anderson's mutant time traveler Jack Havig receives advice from teams of non-time-traveling scholars and scientists both in the twentieth century and in the Maurai Federation even though such advisors are obliged to keep the secret of time travel. It would go against the grain for scientists to keep secrets.

Other examples in sf:

Martin Saunders suppresses his discovery of time projection in Anderson's "Flight to Forever";

the immortal Hanno confides in just one twentieth-century scientist in Anderson's The Boat Of A Million Years;

John Hillary Dane in some stories by James Blish orders his astronomers not to publish their discovery of Beta Solis.

Havig's advisors can be told that they are contributing to a transcendent future for mankind. Finally, for now, Anderson's time traveler, Caleb Wallis, like Wells's Time Traveler, disappears into time near the end of the story - and Wallis gave Wells the time travel idea. Their names are strikingly similar.

Yet Another Paradox

There Will Be Time.

It is wrong to think that, because the Eyrie was defeated in the twenty-second century in Chapter XV, Havig and Leonce are necessarily safe from it in 1971 in XVI. Earlier in its history, the Eyrie was hunting for Havig. An agent from that earlier section of Eyrie history might conceivably track Havig and Leonce to Robert Anderson's house in 1971. Such an agent might even kill them in 1971, then, thinking them dead, be off his guard when, later along his world-line, they lead an attack on the Eyrie in the twenty-second century. Two time traveling antagonists might each kill the other.

In the Time Patrol series, Manse Everard's several clashes with the Exaltationists occur in the same order for both sides but might not have done in which case the narrative would have become extremely complicated. 

The Telling Of the Tale

There Will Be Time, XVI.

"Their tale was hours in the telling. Sunset flared gold and hot orange across a greenish western heaven, beyond trees and neighbor roofs, when I had been given the skeleton of it. The wind had dropped to a mumble at my threshold." (p. 172)

The dialogue at the end of XV fits in here. 

The peaceful sunset signifies a satisfactory conclusion to their tale and to this novel. The wind dropping signifies an end to any threat from the Eyrie.

"Havig sought words. 'Doc,' he said after a bit, 'once we've left here, you won't see us again.'

"I sat quite quietly. Sunset in the windows was giving way to dusk." (p. 173)

 

Sunset becoming dusk signifies an even closer approach to the end. Havig might be referring to the imminence of Robert Anderson's death although Leonce immediately denies this.

 

Havig explains that in the future, after the Eyrie and the Maurai, his people prepare for interstellar travel:

 

"'We'll have started man on his way to infinity.'

"I stared past him. In the windows, the constellations were hidden by flamelight." (p. 174)

 

The hiding of the constellations signifies that that interstellar future is a long way beyond Anderson's lifetime.

 

When Leonce says that maybe they will raise their children on a New Earth or maybe they will wander the universe till they die:

 

"Silence fell. The clock on my mantel ticked aloud and the wind outside flowed past like a river." (p. 175)

 

Silence falls because there is nothing more to be said. They hear the passage of time both in the ticking of the clock and in the flowing of the wind. Time is both measured, divided into ticks, and continuous, endlessly flowing. See A Clock And The Wind.