Poul Anderson - The Shield of Time

“I am—I’m glad, grateful, you’ve come to me this soon on my own lifeline.”

“Well, you told me the date you’d arrive. I figured I should allow you a couple of days to be with your folks and unwind. Doesn’t seem you have.”

“Could we talk later?” Tamberly switched the radio on and tuned in to KDFC. Mozart lilted around them.

Today was a midweek early in January, overcast and chill. When they reached Highway One, theirs was almost the sole car winding north upon it. In Olema they bought a takeout lunch of sandwiches and beer. At Point Reyes Station he turned into the national seashore. Beyond Inverness they had the great sweep of land practically to themselves. He parked at the coast. They made their way down to the beach and walked along it. Her hand found his.

“What’s haunting you?” he asked after a while.

“You know, Manse,” she said, “you observe a lot more and a lot closer than you let on.”

The wind nearly stole her words from him, as low as they were. It shrilled and boomed above rumbling surf, sheathed faces in cold, laid salt on lips, ruffled hair. Gulls took off, soared, mewed. The tide was flowing but had not yet come far in and they walked on the darkened solidity of the wet sand. Occasionally underfoot a shell crunched, a kelp bladder popped. On their right, and immensely ahead and behind, dry dunes lapped the cliffs. On their left the maned waves marched inward from the edge of sight. A single ship yonder looked very alone. The world was all whites and silvery grays.

“Naw, I’m just an old roughneck,” Everard said. “You’re the sensitive one.” He hesitated. “Lorenzo—is that the trouble? The first violent death, maybe the first death of any kind, of a human, that you ever saw?”

She nodded. Her neck felt stiff.

“I thought so,” he said. “It’s always hideous. You know, that’s what’s obscene about the violence on the screens these days. They gloat over the messiness, like Romans watching gladiators, but they ignore—maybe the producers are too stupid to imagine, maybe they haven’t the balls to imagine—the real meaning. Which is a life, a mind, a whole world of awareness, stamped out, forever.”

Tamberly shivered.

“Nevertheless,” Everard went on, “I’ve killed before, and probably I will again. I wish to Christ things were otherwise, but they aren’t, and I can’t afford to brood over it. Nor can you. Sure, you’d grown fond of Lorenzo. So had I. We wanted to spare his life. We believed we could. Things got away from us. And our first duty was, is, to everybody and everything we really love. Right? Okay, Wanda, you’ve had a horrible experience, but you came through like a trouper, and you’re too healthy not to start putting it behind you.”

She stared down the empty miles before her. “I know,” she answered. “I’m doing that much.”

“But?”

“But we didn’t only kill a man—cause his death—get ourselves involved in his death. We destroyed how many hundreds of billions?”

“And restored how many? Wanda, those worlds we saw never existed. We and some others in the Patrol carry memories; a few of us carry scars; a few lost their own lives. Regardless, what we remember has not happened. We didn’t actually abort the different futures. That’s the wrong word. We kept them from ever being conceived.”

She clung to his hand. “That’s the horror that won’t leave me,” she said thinly. “At first it was theory, something they taught at the Academy along with a lot else that was much more understandable. Now I’ve felt it. If everything is random and causeless—if there is nothing out there, no firm reality, only a mathematical shadow show that for all we can tell keeps changing and changing and changing, with us not even dreams within it—”

Her voice had been rising into the wind. She snapped it off, gulped air, strode hard.

Everard bit his lip. “Not easy,” he agreed. “You’ll have to learn to accept how little we know and how much less we can ever be sure of.”

They jarred to a halt. Where had the stranger been? They should have seen him from the first, he too walking by the shore, slowly, hands folded, gazing out to sea and then down to the small relics of life strewn on the beach.

“Good day,” he said.

The greeting was soft, melodious, its English bearing an accent they couldn’t identify. Nor were they certain, at second glance, that this was a man. A robe, cowled like a Christian monk’s, dull yellow like a Buddhist’s, enveloped a medium-sized frame. The face was not epicene—strong-boned, full-lipped, slightly aged—but it might be either male or female, as might the voice. Nor was the race clear; he, if he it was, seemed to blend white, black, Oriental, and more in harmony.

Everard drew a long breath. He let go of Tamberly’s hand. For an instant his fists doubled. He opened them and stood not quite at attention. “How do you do,” he said tonelessly.

Did the stranger address the woman more than him? “Your pardon.” How mild was the smile. “I overheard your conversation. May I suggest a few thoughts?”

“You’re of the Patrol,” she whispered. “You’ve got to be, or you wouldn’t have heard, nor known what it meant.”

A barely perceptible shrug. Quiet, calm: “In these times, as in many elsewhen, moral relativism is the sin that besets folk of goodwill. They should realize, taking an example familiar today, that the death, maiming, and destruction of the Second World War were evil; so were the new tyrannies it seeded; and yet the breaking of Hitler and his allies was necessary. Humans being what they are, there is always more evil than good, more sorrow than joy; but that makes it the more needful to protect and nourish whatever gives worth to our lives.

“Some evolutions are, on balance, better than others. This is simply a fact, like the fact that some stars shine brighter than others. You have seen a Western civilization in which the Church engulfed the state, and one in which the state engulfed the Church. What you have rescued is that fruitful tension between Church and state out of which, despite every pettiness, blunder, corruption, farce, and tragedy—out of which grew the first real knowledge of the universe and the first strong ideal of liberty. For what you did, be neither arrogant nor guilt-laden; be glad.”

The wind cried, the sea growled nearer.

Tamberly had never seen Everard so shaken. Somehow the word he used was right: “Rabbi, was this, this thing we went through, was it truly an accident, a quirk in the flux, that we, we had to straighten out?”

“It was. Komozino explained matters to you correctly, as far as you and she are capable of comprehension.” More toward Tamberly: “Think, if you wish, of diffraction, waves reinforcing here and canceling there to make rainbow rings. It is incessant, but normally on the human level it is imperceptible. When it chanced to converge powerfully on Lorenzo de Conti, yes, then that became like a kind of fate. Do not let it overawe you that you, exercising your free will, have overcome doom itself.”

She, with her background, though she knew not what she confronted, begged, “Sensei, tell me. Is that the meaning?”

A smile, a gentleness beneath which lay steel and lightning: “Yes. In a reality forever liable to chaos, the Patrol is the stabilizing element, holding time to a single course. Perhaps it is not the best course, but we are no gods to impose anything different when we know that it does at last take us beyond what our animal selves could have imagined. In truth, left untended, events would inevitably move toward the worse. A cosmos of random changes must be senseless, ultimately self-destructive. In it could be no freedom.

“Has the universe therefore brought forth sentience, in order to protect and give purpose to its own existence? That is not an answerable question.