Sense of Wonder: A Century of Science Fiction (383 page)

“Well do it,” said Gregory. “Our world has become something of a fat slob; it cloys; it has bothered me all evening. We will find whether purely intellectual attitudes are of actual effect. We’ll leave the details to Epikt, but I believe the turning point was in the year 1323 when John Lutterell came from Oxford to Avignon where the Holy See was then situated. He brought with him fifty-six propositions taken from Ockham’s Commentary on the Sentences, and he proposed their condemnation. They were not condemned outright, but Ockham was whipped soundly in that first assault, and he never recovered. Lutterell proved that Ockham’s nihilism was a bunch of nothing. And the Ockham thing did die away, echoing dimly through the little German courts where Ockham traveled peddling his wares, but he no longer peddled them in the main markets. Yet his viewpoint could have sunk the world if, indeed, intellectual attitudes are of actual effect.”

“We wouldn’t have liked Lutterell,” said Aloysius. “He was humorless and he had no fire in him, and he was always right. And we would have liked Ockham. He was charming, and he was wrong, and perhaps we will destroy the world yet. There’s a chance that we will get our reaction if we allow Ockham free hand. China was frozen for thousands of years by an intellectual attitude, one not nearly so unsettling as Ockham’s. India is hypnotized into a queer stasis which calls itself revolutionary and which does not move—hypnotized by an intellectual attitude. But there was never such an attitude as Ockham’s.”

So they decided that the former chancellor of Oxford, John Lutterell, who was always a sick man, should suffer one more sickness on the road to Avignon in France, and that he should not arrive there to lance the Ockham thing before it infected the world.

* * * *

“Let’s get on with it, good people,” Epikt rumbled the next day. “Me, I’m to stop a man getting from Oxford to Avignon in the year 1323. Well, come, come, take your places, and let’s get the thing started.” And Epiktistes’s great sea-serpent head glowed every color as he puffed on a seven-branched pooka-dooka and filled the room with wonderful smoke.

“Everybody ready to have his throat cut?” Gregory asked cheerfully.

“Cut them,” said Diogenes Pontifex, “but I haven’t much hope for it. If our yesterday’s essay had no effect, I cannot see how one English schoolman chasing another to challenge him in an Italian court in France, in bad Latin, nearly seven hundred years ago, on fifty-six points of unscientific abstract reasoning, can have effect.”

“We have perfect test conditions here,” said the machine Epikt. “We set out a basic text from Cobblestone’s
History of Philosophy.
If our test is effective, then the text will change before our eyes. So will every other text, and the world.

“We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world,” the machine Epiktistes said, “ten humans and three machines. Remember that there are thirteen of us. It might be important.”

“Regard the woild,” said Aloysius Shiplap. “I said that yesterday, but it is required that I say it again. We have the world in our eyes and in our memories. If it changes in any way, we will know it.”

“Push the button, Epikt,” said Gregory Smirnov. From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent out an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. And along about sundown on the road from Mende to Avignon in the old Languedoc district of France, in the year 1323, John Lutterell was stricken with one more sickness. He was taken to a little inn in the mountain country, and perhaps he died there. He did not, at any rate, arrive at Avignon.

* * * *

“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Aloysius asked.

“Let’s look at the evidence,” said Gregory.

The four of them, the three humans and the ghost Epikt who was a kachenko mask with a speaking tube, turned to the evidence with mounting disappointment.

“There is still the stick and the five notches in it,” said Gregory. “It was our test stick. Nothing in the world is changed.”

“The arts remain as they were,” said Aloysius. “Our picture here on the stone on which we have worked for so many seasons is the same as it was. We have painted the bears black, the buffalos red and the people blue. When we find a way to make another color, we can represent birds also. I had hoped that our experiment might give us that other color. I had even dreamed that birds might appear in the picture on the rock before our very eyes.”

“There’s still rump of skunk to eat and nothing else,” said Valery. “I had hoped that our experiment would have changed it to haunch of deer.”

“All is not lost,” said Aloysius. “We still have the hickory nuts. That was my last prayer before we began our experiment. ‘Don’t let them take the hickory nuts away,’ I prayed.”

They sat around the conference table that was a large flat natural rock, and cracked hickory nuts with stone fist-hammers. They were nude in the crude, and the world was as it had always been. They had hoped by magic to change it.

“Epikt has failed us,” said Gregory. “We made his frame out of the best sticks, and we plaited his face out of the fine weeds and grasses. We chanted him full of magic and place all our special treasures in his cheek pouches. So, what can the magic mask do for us now?”

“Ask it, ask it,” said Valery. They were the four finest minds in the world—the three humans, Gregory, Aloysius and Valery (the only humans in the world unless you count those in the other valleys), and the ghost Epikt, a kachenko mask with a speaking tube.

“What do we do now, Epikt?” Gregory asked. Then he went around behind Epikt to the speaking tube.

“I remember a woman with a sausage stuck to her nose,” said Epikt in the voice of Gregory. “Is that any help?”

“It may be some help,” Gregory said after he had once more taken his place at the flat-rock conference table. “It is from an old (What’s old about it? I made it up myself this morning) folk tale about the three wishes.”

“Let Epikt tell it,” said Valery. “He does it so much better than you do.” Valery went behind Epikt to the speaking tube and blew smoke through it from the huge loose black-leaf uncured stogie that she was smoking.

“The wife wastes one wish for a sausage,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery. “A sausage is a piece of deer-meat tied in a piece of a deer’s stomach. The husband is angry that the wife has wasted a wish, since she could have wished for a whole deer and had many sausages. He gets so angry that he wishes the sausage might stick to her nose forever. It does, and the woman wails, and the man realized that he had used up the second wish. I forget the rest.”

“You can’t forget it, Epikt!” Aloysius cried in alarm. “The future of the world may depend on your remembering. Here, let me reason with that damned magic mask!” And Aloysius went behind Epikt to the speaking tube.

“Oh yes, now I remember,” Epikt said in the voice of Aloysius. “The man used the third wish to get the sausage off his wife’s nose. So things were the way they had been before.”

“But we don’t want it the way it was before!” Valery howled, “That’s the way it is now, rump of skunk to eat, and me with nothing to wear but my ape cape. We want it better. We want deer skins and antelope skins.”

“Take me as a mystic or don’t take me at all,” Epikt signed off.

“Even though the world has always been so, yet we have intimations of other things,” Gregory said. “What folk hero was it who made the dart? And of what did he make it?”

“Willy McGilly was the folk hero,” said Epikt in the voice of Valery, who had barely got to the speaking tube in time, “and he made it out of slippery elm wood.”

“Could we make a dart like the folk hero Willy made?” Aloysius asked.

“We gotta,” said Epikt.

“Could we make a slinger and whip it out of our own context and into—”

“Could we kill an Avatar with it before he killed somebody else?” Gregory asked excitedly.

“We sure will try,” said the ghost Epikt who was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube. “I never did like those Avatars.”

You think Epikt was nothing but a kachenko mask with a speaking tube! There was a lot more to him than that. He had red garnet rocks inside him and real sea salt. He had powder made from beaver eyes. He had rattlesnake rattles and armadillo shields. He was the first Ktistec

machine.

“Give me the word, Epikt,” Aloysius cried a few moments later as he fitted the dart to the slinger.

“Fling it! Get that Avatar fink!” Epikt howled.

* * * *

Along about sundown in an unnumbered year, on the Road from Nowhere to Eom, an Avatar fell dead with a slippery-elm dart in his heart.

“Did it work, Epikt? Is it done?” Charles Cogsworth asked in excitement. “It must have. I’m here. I wasn’t in the last one.”

“Let’s look at the evidence,” Gregory suggested calmly.

“Damn the evidence!” Willy McGilly cussed. “Remember where you heard it first.”

“Is it started yet?” Glasser asked.

“Is it finished?” Audifax O’Hanlon questioned.

“Push the button, Epikt!” Diogenes barked. “I think I missed part of it. Let’s try it again.”

“Oh, no, no!” Valery forbade. “Not again. That way is rump of skunk and madness.”

* * * *

Copyright © 1967, 1995 by R. A. Lafferty; first appeared in
Galaxy
; from
Nine Hundred Grandmothers
; reprinted by permission of the author’s Estate and the Estate’s agent, the Virginia Kidd Agency, Inc.

Time travel allows us to think of ourselves as unshackled by our own time. Because it creates a new experience outside of what would be human experience, the concept of intentional time travel requires the invention of new vocabularies. Unfortunately authors and critics do not agree on what they call time travel, but the kinds of time travel narratives can nonetheless be described, even if they do not always get named the same way. Before we discuss the kinds of time travel and their examples, though, we should consider the idea that time travel shares quite a bit with other forms of fiction.

Time travel is an invented idea, a literary device. It was invented in works that became labeled as the genre of science fiction, but at the time it developed, it was part of, and remains part of a continuum of literary devices such as the flashback, the dream, the alternate history, and the utopian journey. In any work of literature one can find examples from this continuum. These devices work to shape how the plots moves, to explore the emotional landscape of the characters, and to juxtapose two very different modes of living. In the case of being in the service of the plot, authors will sometimes want the audience to begin in the middle of the story, and then to find out how the plot has moved to where the audience finds it. The flashback device is in both classical literature like
The Odyssey
or modern literature like
Slaughterhouse-Five
. Flashbacks or dreams also allow the exposition of an emotional landscape. In Remembrance of Things Past the protagonist recalls his childhood to the reader from the taste of an almond cookie. These are examples of a kind of time travel that happens in spite of any intention of the characters. Time travel in this sense is often an involuntary function of the mind where the remembered past and the hoped-for or dreaded future come together in the present. We are all time travelers through our emotions in this sense, but we move in only one direction, and it is only in emotional resonance that we can travel.

There are genres other than science fiction more closely related to time travel narratives without quite being time travel narratives. Historical fiction like Crane’s “The Red Badge of Courage” or anything by James A. Michener are structurally similar because they offer the world-building aspects of travel to the reader. Utopian fiction like More’s
Utopia
or Atwood’s
The Handmaid’s Tale
ask their audiences to compare the utopian world to their own, and to consider the implications of that comparison. Alternate histories come the closest to time travel because the genre asks the audience to imagine what if something changed, and things had turned out differently? Gardner Dozois and Stanley Schmidt point out in
Roads Not Taken
that Livy (59 B.C.E.–17 C.E.) asked in Ab Urbe Condita “What if Alexander the Great had conquered westward instead of eastward?” and answers his own question. In contemporary writing, Robert Fry’s Making History asks what if we prevented Adolf Hitler from coming to power? Some of the texts above even contain time travel mechanisms to carry out the alternate history, but the emphasis here is on the consequences of the changed timeline rather than the changing of the timeline.

We have explicit time travel narratives because H. G. Wells wrote about time travel as a scientific fact. The ability to travel in time sets H.G. Wells’
The Time Machine
apart from the literature that comes before it. In the novel, the time traveler (always called that by the other characters) is an otherworldly-prophet character who learns about the future, but cannot make any changes in the world based on what he knows. The time travel has a melancholy feel, not unlike the involuntary travels that our emotions take in other forms of literature. This kind of time travel is virtually identical to that of the utopian journey that occurs in Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
, in which the protagonist falls asleep and wakes up in the future. In these stories, while the audience benefits from the knowledge gained by the comparison between future worlds and the present, the characters do not generally get to change their own times, though sometimes they are allowed to stay in the time they have traveled to.

When time travel becomes literalized after H.G Wells invents the quasi-scientific conception of time travel in
The Time Machine
, the vocabulary and stakes change somewhat, at least for the genre of science fiction. We enter what Samuel R. Delany refers to in
The Jewel-hinged Jaw
as the “subjunctivity” of science fiction. He writes that in science fiction an author can literalize what would otherwise remain a figure of speech, but the audience must accept what that literalization brings. When a science fiction narrative depicts time travel, then someone or something must cause it to happen. We have to ask about the changing of time. If people are the cause of the change, then we have to ask how people respond to a situation in which they are taken out of their humanity. The literalization of time travel raises the questions of what happens when time changes? Who changes time? and Who controls the flow of time? (Or flows if there is more than one timeline.) Causality and the role of human will are often a central element in science fiction time travel narratives because the literalization of time travel requires us to think about these questions.

Not all narratives of time travel challenge our sense of what it means to be human. Some narratives affirm our sense of humanity and concentrate on other topics like sociology or history. Particular theories of human agency determine how much of a threat time travel is to our identity. Do we control time, or do we just go along for the ride? If we control it, what are the consequences for who we are, and what we can do? There are three kinds of time travel narratives that follow
The Time Machine
: in the first, time travel is a form of travel back and forth across a time line that is unified, that is, for which there is only one “right” series of events; in the second, time travel can cause changes that can lead to “paradoxes” or “loops”; and in the third, time is not only relative to a particular perspective, but it is also dis-unified, that is there are multiple possible timelines that erupt out of the multiple possibilities of events.

In the first kind of narrative, time travel is almost like any other form of travel: someone controls time, or similarly, time is depicted as a stable and unchanging line, through which we can move forward and backward. Connie Willis’ To Say Nothing of the Dog and the first version of the BBC television serial Dr. Who both depict this kind of time travel, though the second more recent version of Dr. Who launched in 2005 sometimes has a more complicated relationship to time. In this kind of narrative, the characters more or less control the time travel or at least the time line across which they travel. The characters may meddle, but they do so to protect the time line. Time itself is a relatively mundane problem in this kind of narrative. It is something challenging, but something that can be controlled eventually. There are some challenging outliers, though. Kage Baker’s nine Company Novels and the related novellas and short stories are an outlier example of this kind of narrative. In it, cyborgs are taken from the past to capture and preserve artifacts that will be “discovered” later and exploited for profit. The Short story “Noble Mold” included in this anthology is the first published story from this storyline. In this world, time travel can only happen backwards (except for messages they can get from the future), and so the origin of the cyborgs in the future is cloudy. These stories enable juxtaposition and particularly interesting plots because of the infinite array of settings time travel makes possible, but the issue of purity of the time line is mostly irrelevant to the novels, which slowly explain who is really behind the company initiating the time travel. Poul Anderson’s “Time Patrol” series is also something of an outlier because it is about the threat of pollution of the time line, but the timeline is unified and linear, making it less complex than the other two types of time travel narratives. One final outlier is the Orson Scott Card novel Pastwatch, in which his characters meddle over and over again until the most palatable future is created.

In the second kind of narrative, time travel leads to problems because changing aspects of the past lead to changes in the future. The changes might seem linear. To borrow Robert Fry’s example from
Making History
, we could prevent Adolf Hitler from coming to power, which would mean that he does not lead Germany on its destructive course up through World War II; however, stopping Hitler does not prevent another like-minded German from rising to prominence who is perhaps more competent then Hitler was. In other words, time travel may have unanticipated effects. Ray Bradbury’s “The Sound of Thunder” uses this convention to suggest that the tiniest change in the past might cause huge changes in the present. To continue with Fry’s example, if Hitler is killed before he had children who are supposed to be alive, then we have an impossible situation: the father of someone currently alive dies before conceiving the child. This situation is often called a temporal paradox, in which we have two conflicting realities in one timeline. One story about temporal paradox in this anthology comments indirectly on “The Sound of Thunder.” “A Gun for a Dinosaur” offers a particularly violent resolution to the temporal paradox. Danger comes from the lack of control over the time line in temporal paradox stories. Once the timeline is fixed, though, the danger from the travel is gone.

In
The Time Machine
by H.G. Wells, the time traveler (always called that by the other characters) is an otherworldly-prophet character who learns about the future, but cannot make any changes in the world based on what he knows. The time travel has a melancholy feel, not unlike the involuntary travels that our emotions take in other forms of literature. This kind of time travel is virtually identical to that of the utopian journey that occurs in novels like Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s
Herland
in which a journey takes place or Bellamy’s
Looking Backward
, in which the protagonist falls asleep and wakes up in the future. In these stories, while the audience benefits from the knowledge gained by the comparison between future worlds and the present, the characters do not generally get to change their own times, though sometimes they are allowed to stay in the time they have traveled to. Connie Willis’
To Say Nothing of the Dog
and the BBC television serial
Dr. Who
both depict this kind of time travel, but in it the human characters more or less control the time travel or at least the time line across which they travel. The characters may meddle, but they do so to protect the time line. Time itself is a relatively mundane problem in this kind of narrative. It is something challenging, but something that can be controlled eventually by the characters. In these stories it enables juxtaposition and particularly interesting plots because of the infinite array of settings time travel makes possible.

A slightly different version of the second form of time travel depicts a causal loop, in which a step outside of the linear time line produces an event that leads back to the original step outside the time line, also called a temporal paradox. In this case the time travel itself turns out to be necessary for the present to turn out the way it has. The characters gain enough control over the time travel that they can reestablish their own time line, or sometimes, like the movie trilogy
Back to the Future
, they tweak the timeline a bit. The characters experience changes in the timeline, but the eventual climax of the plot unfolds so that the proper time travel sequence of events actually protects the original time line or the desired outcome, so that the danger of time travel—the pollution of the timeline—is eliminated. Other examples of this kind of narrative would include the Philip K. Dick short story “A Little Something for Us Tempunauts” in which time travelers encounter knowledge in the future that they will die upon returning from their time travel, and they must decide whether to go back to their present, “Twelve Monkeys” in which the main character’s obsession with a scene in an airport he witnesses as a child eventually turns out to be , and his attempts to change it fail, perhaps ofor the protection of the time line, or perhaps because he is not the one who controls the time travel. Or in another example, The Star Trek TNG episode “Cause and Effect,” directed by Jonathan Frakes depicts a story in which the crew accidently destroys the Enterprise in a way that results in a loop in which the crew repeats its ownthe destruction over again until one of them breaks the cycle and prevents the accident. In this form of time travel, there is only one proper timeline that is eventually protected from the original accident by the incidents of time travel, and everyone returns to where they had been immediately before the accident.

Sometimes, information rather than people do the actual traveling—one can see this in Steven Spielberg’s
The Minority Report
(based on a short story by Philip K. Dick), in which a time loop is set up through the ability to see into the future.
The Minority Report’s
plot begins with an experimental police unit that is working with a corporation headed by Lamar Burgess, which has created the technology to see into the future by exploiting altered humans who are too mentally ill to live in the outside world.
Minority Report
brings closure to the plot when John Anderton, one of the police officers, discovers that Burgess forced the altered humans to see into the future for his own profit. Burgess tries to cover up his original crime against the altered humans by framing Anderton for a murder Burgess himself committed. Anderton was able to solve the crime and to set the altered humans free by exploiting a temporal paradox. The problem of how to use the tainted technology of time travel goes away in the solving of the crime. The loop closes, and time can proceed as before. The temporary power that the characters gained over time is removed, and causality can once again be understood as it was before information traveled through time. In this example, while control of time challenges the moral order of humanity, the hero removes this control to save himself and the people around him.