“At the time?”
“Standard English is not well suited to talking about time travel. We use a few extra tenses to cover it all properly, but there isn’t any point in teaching you a new language right now. Suffice it to say that we had been operating for eight hundred subjective years on certain principles that always worked. That’s eight hundred years of my own life, as I lived it. Our medical people are quite advanced, you see. Anyway, we knew that you couldn’t change the time stream. We knew that time was a single, linear continuum and that nothing we could do could possibly change it. Furthermore, from the very beginning, we were very careful not to change things. We didn’t want to play God, after all. My partners and I are pretty staunch individualists, but we’re not crazy! We never tried to see what would happen if we killed off our grandfathers, for example. We’re not murderers, after all. Anyway, my grandfathers are both very fine gentlemen, and I wouldn’t dream of hurting them.”
“So you’re saying that you knew that you couldn’t change the past, so you never tried to?” I said. “That’s ridiculous! ”
“Is it? Tell me, what would happen to an engineer at your old Katowice Machinery Works if he started spending all of his time and the company’s money working on a perpetual-motion machine?”
“Why, they’d send him to a mental institution if they didn’t fire him first.”
“Right. And what if the boss of the outfit started working on the same project?”
“The same thing, I suppose, although they might take more time doing it. Everybody knows that perpetual-motion machines are impossible. They violate the second law of thermodynamics! ”
“True. And what if, say, the U.S. government started a major research effort to develop perpetual motion?”
“This is a stupid line of questions. No government would ever do anything like that! The second law is absolutely correct. We’ve been using it for a hundred years, and it’s always right!” I shouted.
“Fine. Then what if I told you that it was possible to build a machine that took in tap water and produced electricity and ice cubes?”
“I’d say that you were lying.”
“You’d be wrong. Such a type two perpetual-motion machine is quite possible, and in fact this ‘apartment’ that we’re in right now is powered by one. After all, we’re in a temporal loop here, so there’s no place we could possibly put a radiator. Without our ‘impossible’ power source, it would get pretty warm in here after a while. What I’m trying to tell you is that cultures all develop blind spots, things that they don’t even think about because they know the truth about them. Your blind belief in the absurd second law is a case in point. Something similar on a bigger scale stopped the ancient Romans from developing science at all, but that’s another story. Suffice it to say that for a time we fell into the same mental trap, until you shook us out of it.”
“It was all my doing?” I asked.
“Correct. You came along and threw all our theories right out of the window! Do you realize that you have created an entirely new world here? That you have not only duplicated most of the eastern hemisphere but that in some places you have shredded it? Made dozens of worlds? And that the shredding in some cases went back for thousands of years?”
“Huh. I think I follow you except for these ‘shreds’ going backward in time,” I said.
“They can do that if you are taking information, artifacts, and people from several parallel timelines back down to what had been a single line. When that happens, you shred the past, and oscillations can be set up.”
“Oh. Okay. So then the other thirteenth century, the one in my own past, still exists? I was worried about that,” I said.
“You should have been. You have caused us no end of trouble and damage. I managed to give you sufficient wealth for you to survive comfortably until we could pick you up. You didn’t have to tear a hole in the whole universe!”
“Tom, all I did was try to survive. If I’ve hurt you, well, I never asked to come here. The fault is yours, not mine.”
“You’re mostly right. But you could have just left for France and lived a pleasant life. Western Europe was fairly peaceful in this century. You never had to build factories and steamboats! ”
“You’re saying that I should have abandoned my country to the Mongols? That I should have stood by and watched half the babies born die because of a lack of simple sanitation? What kind of a man do you think I am?”
“I know exactly what kind of man you are, Conrad. You’re a hero, and you do the things that heroes do. Anyway, we’re getting a handle on the time-shredding problem, and things are starting to settle out.”
“I still don’t understand this multiple shredding that you’re talking about. What did I do to start things coming apart?”
“We don’t understand it all that well ourselves, and the math is such that even I have trouble following it. You see, the world we know isn’t just one single world. It’s a finite but astronomically large number of worlds, lying close to one another like the pages of a book. These worlds interact with one another and tend to keep one another identical. Philosophically, they are normally one single world with slight variations. As a crude analogy, think of a book that has been left out in the rain and then dried. The pages are wrinkled and dimpled, but they still fit into one another fairly well. That is to say, to a certain extent they interact with one another. What you did was to make two pages pop apart from each other and get some different dimples, to be slightly different from each other. Going down the page, in the direction of the normal direction of time, they continued to separate and become more different. It isn’t just one page, though. You seem to have taken half the book with you! In some places, especially around the battlefields, several pages came apart, although they are starting to converge now.”
“Somehow, this smacks of the Heisenberg uncertainty principle.”
“Uh, sort of, as a theory, although most people misunderstand Heisenberg. He was not saying that a thing can be and not be at the same time. He was only saying that there are limits to what we can know. One of the philosophical stupidities of the twentieth century was the confusion of what we think we know with what actually is, but that’s not what we should be talking about now. Yes, there is a divergence principle. Small changes happen all the time between the pages of that ruined book I was talking about. A coin comes up heads or tails, a seed is eaten by a bug of grows into a tree, and so on. It even happens all the time in our own human experience. Have you ever been sure that you had your keys in your pocket, only to find out that they were still on your dresser? Well, some of the time you really did both put them in your pocket and leave them behind.”
“You see, there is also a convergence principle operating here, analogous to the force that is trying to force the pages of the ruined book into the same shape. The vast majority of differences are soon smoothed out. In the end, the small changes settle out and make no difference at all. The time line is not so much a monolithic pillar as a rope made of millions of fibers that are all going in the same general direction.”
“Except where you are concerned. There’s something about you, cousin, that makes you different. We don’t know what it is, but with you, things don’t settle out. The first split that you caused happened a month after you got to this century, when you had to decide whether to abandon a child in a snowy woods or try to save her, even though it looked impossible. Well, you did both. And that’s the point where you split the world in half!”
“I remember that. I didn’t know if it was a boy or a girl, and I christened her Ignacy,” I said.
“Right. Now, before we go any further, there’s something I need to know. Conrad, I can take you home now. If you want, you can be back at your desk at the Katowice Machinery Works tomorrow morning. Do you want to go?”
Now, that was a kick in the head! Did I want to leave this brutal world and go back to my safe little home? I had to think about it, and Tom was silent while I thought
. The serving girl refilled our glasses and left in silence. There was my mother there. How would she take my loss? Yet there were so many people here that needed me, people that I loved. And while I really don’t care much about material things, could I go back to standing in lines at the government stores after my loyal troops had slaughtered millions of the enemy? Could I give up my wife and servants, my world-shaping plans, and go back to designing nothing but machine tool controls? Did I really want to become unimportant again? No, by God, I did not!
“I think that I have a better life here, Tom. I’ll stay. But try and do something for my mother, okay?”
“I’ll do better than that. I’ll give her back her son. You see, when you split the world in that snowy woods, you split yourself, too. Your mundane, less heroic self, the one who obeyed his employer and abandoned a child to freeze to death, did not make out as well as you did. I found him in poor straits in Legnica, and he was most eager to go home to his mother. He can warm your chair at the factory and tell himself that it was all some crazy dream.”
“Well, that’s settled, then. But look, Tom, I have a battle to conduct soon, and the morning is not far away.”
“We have all the time we want. It’s my stock-in-trade, after all. When you go out that door, not a minute will have gone by in the world outside. Why don’t you stick around for a while longer. There’s more to discuss, and I’d like you to have a medical checkup while I’m here. If you’re tired, there’s a spare bedroom with a modern bed, and the wench will get you anything you need.”
“Can I have a cup of coffee in the morning? You can’t imagine how many times I’ve dreamed of a cup of coffee.”
“We stock the best.”
“Then I’ll stay, cousin.”
I was deadly tired, and in my years in the Middle Ages I had never gotten around to making a really decent box spring mattress. The girl came out a poor third in my priorities, but then, I really hadn’t been offered her.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Tom was gone the next morning, but he’d left me a note saying that he would be away for a while. The girl served a gorgeous breakfast with maple syrup and real Jamaican Blue Mountain coffee. After that, there were books to read that I hadn’t written myself, a good stereo system, and a fine videotape library. Heaven after so many years in the wilds.
I tried repeatedly to strike up a conversation with the serving girl, but no luck, aside from getting her name, which was Maude. She was always smiling, but it was the fixed, artificial sort of smile that you see on a salesman or waitress, not a show of genuine pleasure. At first I thought it odd that Tom should choose such a strange person for a companion. Eventually I realized that she was not a companion in the ordinary sense but just another accessory in this place. She was certainly pretty and very useful, but she seemed to have about the personality of a tape deck. Still, I tried hard to be nice to her, even if she did seem to be emotionally handicapped. As the days went on, I discovered that she responded best when I treated her like Anna, my old mount, with lots of compliments and friendly banter. In time I even tried scratching her behind the ear the way Anna liked, and she smiled with a sort of twinkle in her eye that told me that she was really happy. Although she stayed naked, even of pubic hair, she never made any overt sexual advances, and while I thought that she would not reject mine, I felt it best simply to keep it friendly.
I spent seven days with her in the strange, windowless sealed-off apartment, reading up on all the bits of technology that I had needed and had forgotten or had never learned, listening to good music, and watching all the movies I had missed. It was a marvelously restful vacation, and it gave me time to think.
I got to considering the events of the past ten years, and it slowly sank into me how incredibly successful I had been in modernizing medieval Poland. I had started a primitive country on the way to industrialization and had done it without coercion, without fanaticism, and almost without pain. Looking back, I think we all had a good time doing it.
Compared to the bloodshed and suffering that Russia or almost any other country went through in turning a nation of peasants into a modem society, what I had done had been astoundingly easy and painless. I had gotten us going in ten years, not the fifty or seventy-five years that all the other nations had needed in trying to modernize. And I had done it without any outside help but a pocketful of seeds and the little knowledge that I had in my own head.
I had formulated no dogma, told no one of my long-term plans, and made as few speeches as possible. That is to say, I had made no promises. I had just gone ahead and done the best I could, and that had made all the difference.
When other people tried to change the world, Lenin and his crowd, for example, they started by publishing grandiose promises, outlining their program and claiming that all sorts of wondrous things would come of it if everybody went along in lockstep. They claimed that soon everyone would work only a few hours a week, because these silly academicians thought that work is something that no would want to do. Yet with their program, everybody would have free food, free medical help, free vacations, and so forth. They would move mountains, though nobody seems to have asked why a mountain should want to be someplace else.
Well, people are smart enough to notice after a while that magic doesn’t happen. If you want more things, you have to make and distribute more things, and that means that at least for the first few generations you have to work harder and more efficiently.
I just offered people a low-paying job with long hours and hard work and did what I could to make that work seem meaningful to them. Once a good man or woman sees that what he is doing is good and important, work becomes a pleasure, one far more enjoyable than any silly game or amusement. The only promise I made was that we would all eat the same, and I didn’t really even promise that. I just did it, and enough people responded to get the job done.
I never tried to get everybody into the program. I just took on those who wanted to help and never wasted any energy on the rest. In so doing, I made very few enemies, and I never had to set up a huge, expensive, and hated police force to coerce those who didn’t want to take part. The guilds, the nobility, and the Church all went their own ways with my blessings, except for those few occasions when they got in my way. My father told me that it takes all kinds, and I’ve always believed that.
I never published a vast scheme of things, so I was never blamed for anything when things didn’t go right. I made a lot of mistakes, but very few people noticed them, while my successes were fairly obvious.
I am convinced that the reason why things have gone so well is not so much the things that I have done but rather the things that I haven’t done.
I’ve just been an engineer, a simple man with a job to do.
Tom returned one day in time for supper, which was a pile of fresh Maine lobsters with all the trimmings. The apartment had a time locker that was used as a sort of refrigerator. It not only kept things fresh, it could keep them alive. The girl was an amazing cook, even if she couldn’t carry on a conversation.
“Where have you been, Tom?”
“Nowhere. I just went into stasis for a few days to give you a small vacation in a bit of the modem world.”
“Thank you. I’ve really enjoyed it, but it’s time to talk some more. A few days ago you said that you couldn’t come to get me until after the time you saw me at the Battle of Chmielnick. Well, I wasn’t at the Battle of Chmielnick. There wasn’t any Battle of Chmielnick! I was at the Battle of Sandomierz, and when I was there, I saw you get killed. There was a Mongol spear that went right through your eye and out the back of your helmet. You weren’t breathing, and you didn’t have a pulse. Do you want to explain these things?”
“It’s like I said, the shredding around the battlefields was the worst. Yes, that really was me, and I really did die. It was a me from some other subjective timeline, I hope, although it could possibly be a me from my own subjective future, so I avoid that time slot. As to whether
the Mongols were killed at Sandomierz or Chmielnick, well, in a thousand years it won’t make any difference. Maybe the historians will argue about it, maybe not.”
“Isn’t it confusing with a lot of you running around?” I said.
“No more than it is for you. There was one of you at Chmielnick, after all. And none of this shredding was ever noticed until you came along.”
“Is that why you waited a year after the battle before talking to me? To wait for the shredding to settle down?”
“Yes, of course,” he said.
“Then why do you come now on the eve of another battle? Won’t that cause problems?”
“This thing with the Crossmen isn’t a battle, it’s an execution, and they were all dead before you got back to your trailer. But now, if you are through with that chocolate eclair, we’ll give you a medical checkup.”
In a side room that had been locked before there was a thing that looked like Spock’s coffin, with an attached keyboard. In it was a frightening number of mostly concealed tubes, needles, and little knives.
“Are you sure that you know how to work this thing?” I said.
“Relax. It happens that among other thing, I’m a doctor of medicine. In nine hundred years you become a lot of things. Get in.”
I didn’t love the idea, but I’m supposed to be a hero, so I got in. The lid came down on me, and it got dark, and then the lid came up, and I got out.
“There, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” Tom said.
The first thing I noticed was my eyesight. I could see as well as I could when I was a teenager. I put a hand over my left eye, and I could see out of my right. I wasn’t half-blind anymore!
“It turned out to be easier to regrow a whole new right eye rather than trying to repair the severed optic nerve. And from there it was only a matter of hitting another button to regrow them both,” Tom said. “Your arthritis is gone, along with your hemorrhoids, and so is a small cancer that you didn’t know about.. Your immunizations have been updated, and I’ve done a general rejuvenation treatment on you. You look the same, but your ladies will be able to tell the difference.”
Lord Conrad’s Lady Page 25