Io Deceneus: Journal of a Time Traveler (The Living Universe)
Page 45
“The grandfather paradox.”
“For the grandfather paradox, things are simple. The time gradient does not allow a predetermined future to be its own past. Any such attempts like this will result in an automatic return to your own time. I gave you once the example of the Waterloo historical event. We are simply not able to alter the situation for many tens of years before, even centuries, in case we tried to modify something touching Napoleon or Wellington. Once an event of this magnitude happens they are meant to meet at Waterloo whatever distortions are attempted over their past. The Universe's rules are constructed in such a manner that experiments have a chance to fulfill their destiny.”
“Why are you so obsessed with that event?”
“Obsessed? That is quite a human trait. Let us say we are only a bit frustrated that it was not possible to have it both ways; a variant with Napoleon as winner and the actual one. In simulations, the Napoleon being the winner situation would have made you advance faster, forty years of social and technological gain. You would have been now in around 2050, technologically speaking, and in a very different society. That was the point when an unstable financial system started to take over the world, another by-product of your complicated, but still young, mind-set which will give you a lot of headaches.”
“What if someone tries to help one of the parties in that battle?”
“That would be an interesting exercise of the imagination which we can discuss in the future. Before you protest you have to rest now as that time has yet to come.”
“I changed tens of thousands of years of history. I don’t see the rules in all this.” I struggled, not really sure that I wanted to know more.
“Who told you about these fantastic long changes? We need the energy of many suns to create such alternate timelines, in the hypothetical case that we can trick Time or have his approval.” There is a trick somewhere, I mumbled, but I found none.
“In your first mission you altered roughly several minutes of their timeline.”
“And the last one?”
“Two months, two discontinued months to be more precise. All the deer you hunted before arriving at the volcano were still alive when you prepared the meat. Most of the changes occurred when traveling with the librarians and fighting that band of thieves. And of course the big stuff started in the volcano valley before meeting the Travelers.” She stopped for a while, letting me absorb it all. “By the way, we still don’t know exactly what or who that entity is but we know why it does not have a photo album of you.” I answered her with a frown. “Travelers’ memories were wiped by The Field, they ... forgot your face. Some things are still there ... we are watching them. Now let’s go back to your ‘time’,” she smiled.
“What’s the trick?” I sensed something, a kind of relativity ruling the game, but I was not yet sure.
“Okay, let’s call it a trick: changes are not determined by the time of the explorer sent on these missions.”
“You did not send me from here directly to the Prime’s planet.”
“Correct, you were sneaked from your time into the timeline when the intervention was decided before starting the real events. They turned the galaxy up-side down to find you, that period of time of course.” The next moment the ‘why’ question born after the SAT-mine episode resurfaced in my mind with a short apologizing memo from Houston, and I did not complain. She was right to hide it. Some other memories resurfaced also, surprising memories. She smiled.
“We were able to rebuild some things lost in the SAT-mine explosion; the design did not fully match the Saurian technology. Only some.” How much had I lost in that event? I did not ask, some memories just filled my mind. The vanished horse was the first to come.
*
“Nice terrace,” she always has good taste I had to recognize, or she is only setting landscapes that I would enjoy. This time it was an authentic, family Greek restaurant, lost on a tiny island, with a spectacular view of the sea and where time was flowing like in Dali’s ‘Persistence of memory’. Difficult to say where and when exactly the place was. For the sake of a bet, I decided the nineteen-twenties or thirties, a chunk of Greece not yet polluted by hordes of tourists, and I am not talking about material pollution. Houston gave me the gift of understanding the Greek language and communicating with the nice young woman serving there. We were the only customers, certainly by plan and not by chance.
“It seems that I’ve got a promotion,” I said, raising my glass to her.
“We don’t think in terms of promotions, but let’s say that your recent experiences are seen in a favorable way. I hope that I have chosen the right wine to celebrate this.”
It was my turn to say something: “I am glad that this representative of a low-level civilization met your high standards.”
“Well, to make it clearer, nobody said anything about high standards. You met the standards we expected from a low-level civilization, nothing else.” It looked like our old quarrels were returning, but thin smiles sprung on both our faces.
“How would a request for a kind of longer vacation be considered, here at home?”
“The standard policy is that we do not impose anything on our collaborators. If you want an answer out of the book, I understand your desire for a, let’s say, less agitated and complicated period in your life.”
“I am alone again. My life in Dava was full of colors and warmth I had never felt before and this makes loneliness less endurable than in the past. A part of me will linger there forever. My beloved wife Altamira, my children, who are now rulers, wise ones I hope. Forty years of fond memories are more than enough to write a book. But, I have somehow to reconstruct who I am first: an average citizen on Earth, chief of a 'monkey tribe', a medieval warrior, King of the Baragans, in order to reconcile the thoughts of having a family here, a family there. I am too split to be sure that I can handle this in the future without starting to drink too much wine. What began as an interesting mission of exploring new worlds ended with creating other ‘me’s, struggling now to find a life in the same house which is my mind.” I have only one bad feeling I wanted to say. I kept it inside, too personal and too much anger about it. I was never able to take back Peldava. The agreement brokered in the Galactic Council kept that ‘experiment’ alive: The Banking Republic of Peldava. Factions obtained it because of the Erin experiment. The Baragan civilization split in two, and I was sure that the wound would never heal. They will not allow it. They: the Factions.
“I can help by erasing or shadowing the memories you no longer want to keep. I am not sure that it will really help but it can be done.”
“Thank you, but this will work only if I am able to choose something, and what to choose for deletion? Altamira? Maug? Duras? My children here, or there? If I have to delete something, I would have to go for an entire mission with all the events and the thought of deletion itself. And then what would become of me? Would I still be me even after I erased parts of me? A poorer version for sure, but would I be the same? Is it worth living only to vanish life from your life? In a very deep part of my mind I would still be aware of all this. I need time to let things settle somehow, to let it pass slowly and painfully. I have to mourn. But, I will probably survive. If not, I am sure that you will interfere, incognito, in all this. In the end I am too valuable an experiment to be lost,” I smiled at her.
She did not smile back. “We choose people like you for their strong empathic capacity with the subjects in these so-called missions. We need to be sure that they will not consider them a simple adventure. You have to integrate there to make a new life. Only in this way will the best solutions for that particular world arrive. It must be a solution made by 'them', not made in our simulations, as there were a lot of mistakes in the past because of this. When you go there you must become them. So indeed, we will interfere, incognito. Not because you are a valuable experiment, not even because you are part of a higher civilization, but because you are an invaluable person. I fully understand yo
ur desire for a rest, and to be me again, I will now say something to make your life even more complicated. You observed other civilizations, their problems, their aspirations, and you helped them. There are issues here on Earth; not so pressing as to require our intervention, but still. The next few years will bring a civilization paradigm shift, with no guarantee of the best outcome as things look now. In any world heading toward the brink, there is the strange thing: most of the time, that brink stays hidden; when evident, it is already too late.
“It lived when still unknown to us,
“Now gone - we see it yet.
“You know the author: Eminescu. Technological advances will enhance your civilization to levels found only in books, and you will even cure death. Your world is waiting to be fully reborn; in the next ten-year time frame humanity will face the choice between two divergent paths; leading to a completely new situation on the ground.”
“The first opportunity offers independence and decentralization, away from this archaic and unjust system that advances in cycles of economic crisis, while the second is a path of distress and scarcity which favors financial and corporate oppression, a society that is only formally democratic, subverted by the concentration of political power. Societies that are split in a tiny super-wealthy elite and an impoverished mass always fail. You will never be really free if in twenty years you have not dismantled those big networks now driving the Earth. If in twenty years they are still there, be they banks, pharma, the arms industry, electronics, Internet giants, then you have to know that you have lost and no one can guarantee a next train to catch … or it will bloody.” They are too strong. We cannot… “The industrial chain will change; with nanotechnologies and additive manufacturing, the power of progress shifted to smaller players. They will disrupt the current command and control hierarchies and undermine the strength of a leadership still anchored into a past that is moving away. This is your opportunity. I have never found you having it in mind to use your experience here on Earth, your home. Do not protest that it is hard. In some places the evolutionary process has already begun, you already know an example, Iceland. You don't really have to fight, only to set up the new system to replace them.” She smiled before disappearing.
Far away now, ready to be embraced by the sea, a lukewarm disc of red witnesses a speechless me.
~End of Book 1~
* * *
[1]The Fox in the Romanian language
Table of Contents
Copyright
Prologue
Rite of passage
Desert Brothers
The road to Dava
Dava
Munti
Fallen masks
This is not the end