The Best Of Times

I envisage a single collection of the very few very best works of time travel fiction, which I suggest are:

The Time Machine by HG Wells;
"A Stitch In Time" by John Wyndham;
"By His Bootstraps" by Robert Heinlein;
"The Sorrow Of Odin The Goth" by Poul Anderson.

These happen to comprise two British literary works and two American genre stories.

Wells implies but otherwise avoids the issue of causality paradoxes. The other three works are circular causality stories although the last is set in a causality violation scenario. The four works present a good balance of past, present and future -

Wells: nineteenth century to 702,601 AD, then the furthest future of Earth, and return;
Wyndham: time travel within a character's life time;
Heinlein: twentieth century to far future;
Anderson: twentieth century to the Dark Ages.

The Time Traveler interacts with Morlocks and Eloi. Anderson's Time Patrolman interacts with Goths and Huns. The Time Patrol's mass produced, streamlined, futuristic timecycles are conceptual descendants of the Time Traveller's elaborate nineteenth century contraption. The time traveler sits on, instead of being enclosed by, each of these vehicles. Both Wyndham and Heinlein instead envisage a machine that sends people through time instead of moving past- or future-wards, taking them with it.

Circular Causality I

We appreciate the ingenuity of circular causality paradoxes in time travel fiction but usually forget the details. Here are some examples.

"The Chronic Argonauts" (1888) by HG Wells

The Chronic Argonaut, an earlier version of the Time Traveller, moves into an empty and shunned house, moves backwards in time while remaining in the house, is attacked as an intruder by the house's then occupants, a man and his two sons, defends himself and flees back to his present, leaving the father dead. With no evidence of an intruder, the sons are convicted of their father's murder which is why their house is later empty and shunned.

"Stitch in Time" (1961) by John Wyndham

A young man approaching a country house in order to propose to a young woman is pulled fifty years into the future by scientists who are then experimenting with time in the house. The woman, now in a wheelchair, still lives in the house and greets the young man who, after his initial shock, recognises her and, when returned to his present, does not propose to her. Not having received the expected proposal, she marries someone else and has a son whose organisation buys the house, letting her stay in it, and conducts the time experiments.

"Chronoclasm" (1953) by Wyndham

A man has an affair with a woman from his future. When she has returned to the future for the last time, he writes letters to her which will be found and will cause her to travel into her past to find him.

"By His Bootstraps" (1941) by Robert Heinlein

In 1952, Bob Wilson, now drunk, had locked himself in his apartment all day to finish his thesis. A strangely familiar man exiting a disc of nothing threw Wilson's only hat into this "Time Gate" and urged Wilson to follow because an older man would offer a deal enabling all three to run the country. A similar man exiting the Gate argued against. They were interrupted by a nuisance phone call, then by a call from a woman, Genevieve, claiming that Wilson had left his hat in her apartment that afternoon. In a three-sided fight, Wilson was punched unconscious through the Gate. Waking, he was greeted by an older, bearded man, Diktor, who gave him a drugged drink to help him sleep off fatigue, drunkenness and shock. Waking again, he received from Diktor a list of reference books and other resources to bring from 1952. Diktor, benevolent despot of a peaceful society, needed Wilson's help to maintain his position. A young woman, Arma, served food and drink.

Diktor sent Wilson to 1952 to persuade someone, his younger self, to come through the Gate. An older Wilson arrived to argue against. Wilson followed his punched self through the Gate where Diktor showed him his sleeping form. Wilson questioned Diktor's motives and went through the Gate to dissuade his younger self from going through. Having failed, he was rung again by Genevieve who thought that they had become engaged that afternoon. Later, hearing footsteps stop outside his door, he went through the Gate to see Diktor and himself receding down a corridor. Retrieving his hat and appropriating Diktor's hand-written English-future dictionary, he made a Gate appear in 1952 outside his apartment and went to buy the items on Diktor's list. Because the outside Gate disappeared in his absence, he had to use the one in his apartment after his younger selves had left. Meanwhile, he visited Genevieve and made a nuisance phone call.

Ten years before his encounter with Diktor, he impressed the tribespeople with modern music played on a mechanical recorder, then used his tabu status and sociological knowledge to control society. He occupied Diktor's apartments, grew a Diktor-style beard, named a servant Arma, copied from the old dictionary into a new one when the old one wore out and was called "Diktor" which meant "chief." Watching his apartment through a Gate, he saw a hat and an unconscious body exit the Gate. He placed the hat and dictionary where Wilson would find them, started to plan a list for Wilson, then spoke to him.

Time and Eternity

Introduction

Indian "sutras," telegrammic statements recited or written in lists, conveniently summarize philosophical propositions and arguments. "Time and Eternity" is a suitable subject for sutras because Indian philosophy addresses eternity although less can be said about it than about time. Time, a consequence of motion, is commonly but mistakenly regarded as also a direction of motion. HG Wells' Time Traveler propagates this error before introducing the machine that supposedly accelerates along time. Thus, discussion of time includes discussion of alleged motion along time and thus also discussion of fictitious time travel.

The sutras are grouped in fours for convenience but the beginning of a line of thought does not always correspond to the beginning of a new quatrain. This experimental format has limits. 
 

Time

Space is relationships between material objects.
Motion is change of spatial relationships.
Time is the relationship between relationships changed from and relationships changed to.
A static reality would be atemporal.

Three dimensions of space and one of time account for experience.
We perceive space but presuppose time.
Perceiving one three dimensional state, we remember others.
To remember a material state is to recognize it as previously perceived.

Recognition presupposes temporal endurance.
The temporal presupposition transforms immediate sensations into coherent experiences.
Objects extend and move through space but endure through time.
Extension is spatial, endurance is temporal and motion is spatiotemporal.

Motion involves both distance covered and time taken.
Endurance resembles extension, not motion.
A human body extends but does not move from its feet to its head.
It endures but does not move from its birth to its death.

To occupy adjacent points in space simultaneously is to extend between them.
To occupy adjacent points successively is to move between them.
To occupy successive moments is to endure between them.
To occupy adjacent moments successively would be to move between them.

Motion Through Time?

But we do not move through time.
However, our experience of motion and time makes us speak of motion through time.
I have heard it said that we move into the future at the rate of sixty minutes per hour.
This proposition reflects our experience but is conceptually confused.

Comparing endurance to extension entails imagining successive moments as cross-sections of the body.
Instead, we imagine succession as motion, like an insect crawling up the body.
To move is to occupy different places successively.
To endure is to occupy different moments successively.

We think that successive occupation is motion.
However, we successively occupy places because we move from place to place.
But we successively occupy moments because they succeed each other.
We exist in each successive moment without moving between them.

We do not move from one o'clock to two o'clock but exist at and between them.
There is no two o'clock before we reach it or one o'clock after we have left it.
But there is a Paris before we reach it and a London after we have left it.
"When I reach 65..." and "When I reach Paris..." have different meanings.

The age of 65 is not now waiting somewhere else until I move to it.
I can reach it by existing for another five years.
To exist is also to move but through space, not time.
We do not experience the Earth's motion through space.

Thus, we can reach 65 without apparently moving even through space.
Places co-exist in space while we move between them.
Moments succeed each other in time while we exist in them.
We experience moment 1 when it occurs, then 2 when it occurs.

We do not experience 1 while it co-exists with 2, then 2 while it co-exists with 1.
Moments do not co-exist in one spatial dimension while we successively experience them in a separate temporal dimension.
Physicists postulate extra dimensions but not to explain motion along time.
At 60 mph, 60 miles is distance covered and one hour is time taken.

At 60 minutes per hour, 60 minutes is not distance covered.
60 minutes and one hour are both time taken.
If there is no distinction between distance covered and time taken, then there is no motion.
60 miles alone are distance.

60 minutes or one hour alone is duration.
Only 60 miles in 60 minutes is motion.
Thus, 60 minutes in one hour is a period of duration, not a rate of motion.
We can reduce speed to 50 mph but not time to 50 minutes per hour.

We feel that we move through time but not around the Sun or the galactic center.
Therefore, feeling is an inadequate criterion of motion.
Four co-ordinates describe our occupation of a place at a time.
Changing the temporal co-ordinate changes the time at which we are in that place.

One co-ordinate describes a moment.
Changing the temporal co-ordinate merely changes the moment.
There is no sense in which it can change the time at which we are in the moment.
Every moment in which there is consciousness is seen as the present moment in that moment but only in that moment.

However, no single moment has any unique status.
Subjectively, the present divides time into past and future.
Objectively, there are only temporal relations of before and after.
Objective time is divisible into natural or artificial periods.

A day in 3000 CE is unchangeably later than us and earlier than our successors in 4000 CE.
Accumulating memory generates the illusion that the present moves along time so that the past grows while the future shrinks.
However, perception of a subjective present occurs in every moment of consciousness.
Therefore, it does not move from each moment to its successor.

A conscious subject and present objects are interdependent.
"Present", whether contrasted with "past and future" or with "absent," means "presented to consciousness."
Therefore, there is no moment of consciousness that the present has vacated or not yet reached.
That past moments are not now conscious might suggest that consciousness has moved from them to the present.

However, past moments were conscious.
And they do not now exist unconsciously elsewhere.
The present tense refers to the subjective present, to current periods or to several times if a single proposition is equally applicable.
Multiple applications of the present tense neither negate succession nor entail simultaneity.

Real simultaneity between apparently successive events would eliminate succession.
But alleged motion of consciousness between simultaneous events re-introduces succession.
Experience is successive.
Therefore, accounts of experience need not eliminate succession, especially not to re-introduce it.


That consciousness is present in only one moment at a time is tautologous or false.
That it is present in each moment only in that moment is tautologous.
That all moments co-exist with consciousness occupying them one at a time is false.
The latter implies that past events are still occurring now but without consciousness.

HG Wells' Time Traveler identifies endurance with extension in a fourth dimension.
He adds that immaterial subjects of consciousness successively observe three dimensional cross-sections.
However, consciousness is an organism-environment interaction.
It is not an immaterial entity intersecting otherwise unconscious four dimensional objects.

The Time Traveler identifies the fourth dimension with time.
In fact, it would be a fourth dimension of space.
Motion along it would take time.
JW Dunne argued for an infinite regress of temporal dimensions which would surely be static at infinity.

The Time Traveler also inconsistently identifies endurance with motion of objects along the fourth dimension.
The totality of objects has no external spatial relationship.
Therefore, it cannot move.
Even if it could, its motion would take time.

Therefore, the dimension moved through would not be time.
Also, such motion would not explain changes occurring within the universe.
But it is these changes that generate time.
Therefore, time is an internal feature of the universe.

Time Travel

It is not an external dimension.
A time traveler who did somehow move faster than a moving universe would leave it behind.
Therefore, he would not find it waiting for him on arrival.
He would have to wait for it to catch up.

But the Time Machine moves only through space like everything else.
It remains stationary on the Earth's surface.
It endures indefinitely with decelerated internal processes.
Returning, it reverses the direction of its endurance or duration.

Its increased speed is supposed to explain its invisibility and intangibility in transit.
But it has no speed.
Also, a bullet or propeller accelerated to invisibility remains lethally tangible.
The Time Traveller's physical and mental processes are decelerated in relation to his environment.

He sees the sun moving so fast that it becomes an arch across the sky.

A new drug does accelerate another Wells character's physical and mental processes.
Consequently, he sees his environment as immobile.
The Time Traveler in transit should be visible and tangible but apparently static.

This condition is "stasis" or time dilation, not time travel.

His sensation of speed is unaccounted for.
Dr Who's TARDIS disappears at one place and time and appears at another.
Its occupants experience reduced duration in another realm.

Poul Anderson's Time Patrolmen and Audrey Niffenegger's time travelers merely disappear and re-appear.

Twain's Connecticut Yankee finds himself in the Arthurian period and returns to the nineteenth century by suspended animation.
Preceding Wells, he uses the phrase "transposition of epochs."
Anderson's mutant time travelers sense motion but merely endure in an attenuated form.

None of these "time travelers" moves through time.

However, language has incorporated Wellsian "time traveling" terminology.
Anderson's Wardens and Rangers walk or drive along corridors that have been rotated onto the temporal axis.
Thus, they do move along time.

The height, width and length of a "time corridor" are spatial.

However, its length has been made to extend in the direction along which Earth endures.
People arriving in a corridor from different times should be separated on arrival only by spatial distances.
Therefore, they should arrive simultaneously in the corridor's temporal dimension.

But for story purposes, travelers along corridors rarely meet.

So Anderson explains merely that duration occurs in the corridors but on a different plane.
Rangers entering a corridor from a time several seconds after the central character also arrive inside it several seconds later.
This contradicts the premise that temporal intervals outside the corridor correspond only to spatial intervals within it.

The direction of endurance within a time corridor may be a fifth dimension.
Or it may correspond to an external spatial dimension.
In the latter case, a spatial corridor could give access to different periods of the corridor's internal history.
Like Twain and Wells, Anderson presents a story, not a treatise.

The speed of light is 186,000 miles per second.
Accordingly, the relativistic space time equivalence is 186,000 miles to one second.
However, the corridor equivalence is about a foot to a month.
Thus, a 6000 year time corridor need not extend for 6000 light years before it is rotated onto the temporal axis.

Paradoxes

The time travel paradoxes are circular causality and causality violation.
An effect causes or prevents its cause.
A timeline is a single sequence of events occurring along one temporal dimension, T1.
A single timeline can incorporate circular causality.

At least four alternative scenarios incorporate causality violation.
One scenario is branching timelines.
However, this involves creating universes ex nihilo.
A time traveller "changing the past" disappears into a new universe branching away from the original universe.

This is logically possible but physically questionable.
Parenthetically, timelines might diverge without time travel.
Divergence would occur at every moment of indeterminacy, not at arbitrary moments of extratemporal interference.
If divergence does occur, there is no contact between divergent universes.

Such contact does occur in fiction.
But parallel universe travel is not time travel.
Men Like Gods is not The Time Machine. 
Piper's Paratime Police regulates traffic between parallel Earths with alternative histories.

Anderson's Time Patrol regulates traffic and prevents causality violations along a single timeline.
Asimov's Eternals violate causality to increase human happiness.
Heinlein's temporal bureau closes causal circles.
One temporal agent is her own parents.

Some fictitious organizations fight wars by changing history.
But most such narratives are logically inconsistent.
Premises are ambiguous or events contradict them.
Asimov's Eternals need to complete a causal circle in a no longer existent timeline (see below).

Wardens and Rangers fight a war by manipulating the history of a single timeline.
They hope to influence their future from which they are barred by their successors.
Anderson's mutant time travelers divide into warring factions in a single timeline.
One group, the Eyrie, recruits Jack Havig, Boris and others on the original Good Friday.

When Havig organizes against the Eyrie, he sends Boris to infiltrate the Eyrie on Good Friday.
Thus, Boris must have recognized his fellow Eyrie recruit as his future anti-Eyrie organizer.
The Eyrie has evidence of its future success.
Therefore, Havig's group fakes the evidence.

Thus, not events but their significance is changed.
In the second causality violation scenario, timelines succeed each other along a second temporal dimension, T2.
Like spatial dimensions, temporal dimensions are at right angles to each other.
To travel backwards or forwards in T1 is always to travel forwards in T2.

Thus, a time traveler never returns to his original timeline.
He enters the past or future of a subsequent timeline.
He cannot complete a causal circle in his original timeline.
Timelines are identical except for changes made by a time traveler.

The first such change is his arrival.
Asimov's "Realities" are timelines and his "physiotime" is T2.
His Eternals have altered many successive timelines.
Their original timeline is far in the past of T2.

In the present of T2, it no longer exists.
Thus, return to it is impossible.
Yet such a return is necessary for the existence of the Eternals.
Of course, a text may bear other interpretations.

Attempted clarification of The End of Eternity suggests internal inconsistencies.
This problem applies to several works about frequent causality violations.
In one unproblematic text, a single time traveler deliberately prevents the Dark Ages.
Thus, a timeline of uninterrupted civilization succeeds the Dark Ages timeline.

In another novel, a fictitious time traveler accidentally prevents Confederate victory at Gettysburg.
Thus, the American Civil War timeline succeeds a "War of Southron Independence" timeline.
In the third causality violation scenario, a single timeline contains discontinuous events.
Thus, a time traveler with counterfactual memories appears ex nihilo at Gettysburg.

Such macroscopic quantum events are possible because time travel is.
Confederates should have occupied a position ensuring victory at Gettysburg.
But their advance was halted by the arrival of a time traveller from the independent Confederate States.
Thus, a potential future generates a time traveller who prevents that future.

In this scenario, if we perceive or remember an event, then we know that it has not been prevented from occurring.
But, if a time traveler arriving in his past remembers an event, then he does not know that it has not been prevented from occurring.
Thus, the meaning of "memory" is widened.
This scenario is counterintuitive though not logically contradictory.

Scenarios without time travel preclude any potential futures from which time travelers could arrive.
Thus, without time travel, the Confederates would have won at Gettysburg.
In the first causality violation scenario, Southron Independence occurred in the original timeline.
In the second, it occurred in the past of T2.

In the third, it never occurred.
The fourth causality violation scenario is specific to the Time Patrol series.
This scenario may not be distinct or coherent.
Patrolmen speak of one mutable timeline, not of many branching timelines.

They do not believe that a temporal round trip takes them between timelines.
They speak as if their current timeline can be prevented from existing.
Therefore, none of the first three scenarios applies.
T1/T2 terminology is not used but is implicit.

T1 is a single timeline.
T2 is the relationship between successive timelines.
Or T2 is the relationship between successive states of a single mutable timeline.
The difference is terminological.

We can say either that one timeline succeeds another or that the single timeline changes its content.
In either case, there is a relationship between a state changed from and a state changed to.
This summary uses the term "timeline", not the phrase "state of a timeline".
In the Time Patrol scenario, most time travel is along a single timeline.

Thus, it occurs within a single moment of T2.
The timeline incorporates circular causality.
Most time travelers are already a part of the past that they visit.
However, they can change past events.

 

Usually, other events change to counteract a change made by a time traveler.
However, at nexus points, a small change can alter the entire future.
Occasionally in T2, there is a quantum change to another timeline.
Quantum changes result either from time travelers or from random fluctuations in space-time-energy.

Small changes in the life of one medieval knight affect the outcome of the European church-state conflict.
Therefore, the knight is a personal causal nexus to be eliminated by the Patrol.
Unpredictable fluctuations remain when organizations of time criminals have been apprehended.
By guarding the timeline, the Patrol preserves cosmic order.

Cyrus the Great is killed in infancy.
Later, a captured Time Patrolmen is forced to play the role of the adult Cyrus.
Sixteen years into his reign, he is rescued by a fellow Patrolman.
They travel further back in time to prevent the murder of the infant Cyrus.

Thus, despite changing events, they preserve Cyrus's pivotal role in the Patrol-protected timeline.
But they leave behind in T2 a timeline in which Cyrus disappeared sixteen years into his reign.
Patrolmen claim that that timeline simply does not exist.
Therefore, they claim to inhabit the third scenario.

This entails that some passages in the story describe events that did not occur.
Even while experiencing an event, Patrolmen claim that the event may be prevented from occurring.
However, if the event is being experienced, then it is occurring.
If it is occurring, then it has not been prevented from occurring.

A timeline can be prevented from currently existing in T2.
Then that the events of that timeline never occurred is true in T1.
In Finney's second Time novel, characters who have not time traveled partially remember prevented events.
Former timelines are remembered sporadically and indistinctly, like dreams.

Finney's fifth scenario seems to be that events unwind and rewind in an altered sequence but with indistinct memories of the original sequence.
But preventing events should prevent any memory of them.
Usually in fiction, former timelines are remembered only by time travelers from them.
Causality violation entails unintended self-duplication of time travelers.

Thus, at time t1, a time traveler experiences event A.
Disliking A, he travels from t2 to t1 in order to change A to A~.
Thus, at t1, his younger self experiences A~.
The time traveler who changed A to A~ returns to t2.

At t2, the time traveler who had experienced A~ has no reason to travel back to t1.
Thus, at t2 the traveler who experienced A~ coexists with the traveler who changed A to A~.
The problems of self-duplication are probably greater than the problem of leaving A unchanged.
In the timeline guarded by the Patrol, Roger II of Sicily died in 1154 (Timeline 1).

Volstrup was a Patrolman based in Palermo during Roger's reign.
In an aberrant timeline, Roger died in battle in 1137 (Timeline 2).
The appalled Volstrup informed an earlier Patrol base.
He visited that base for consultation.

After consultation, Patrol intervention saved Roger's life at the battle in 1137 (Timeline 3).
Ostensibly, the preferred timeline was restored.
However, Timelines 1 and 3 differ in detail.
Unlike Timeline 1, Timeline 3 has Volstrup visiting an earlier base and Patrolmen intervening at the battle in 1137.

Like Timeline 1, Timeline 3 has Volstrup in Palermo not hearing about Roger's death.
That Volstrup neither informs nor visits an earlier base.
But the Volstrup who did visit an earlier base and who does remember Roger's death returns to Palermo in the 1137 of Timeline 4.
At that point, Volstrup is duplicated.

Yet Anderson writes as if there is only one Volstrup in Palermo after the battle in 1137, the one who remembers Roger's death.
Volstrup thinks that at any moment he and his environment can cease ever having been.
But that is not a consequence of causality violation.
There are potential timelines in which Volstrup was not born and therefore does not exist in adulthood.

But there is no timeline in which he was not born and therefore ceases to exist in adulthood.
Nothing can exist until a particular moment, then, at that moment, cease having existed until that moment.
An entire timeline can cease to exist in T2.
But that affects no one's experience in T1.

A time traveler departing on a successful mission to end our timeline will think that we have ceased to exist.
But he will think this in a temporal dimension at right angles to ours.
There is no cessation of existence at any moment in our T1.
It is difficult to make the Time Patrol series fully coherent.

The Literature

The time travel writers whose works are worthiest of analysis are Wells and Anderson.
The Time Machine addresses the nature of time and the future of mankind.
Anderson's six volumes address time travel paradoxes, history and the future.
The Time Patrol is the only sustained high quality time travel series.

Thus, Anderson supersedes his immediate predecessor, Robert Heinlein.
Heinlein perfected the circular causality paradox in three works with futuristic American settings.
Wells' "The Chronic Argonauts" and two short stories by John Wyndham developed this paradox in contemporary British settings.
Harry Harrison linked circular causality to history and humor.

Richard Matheson and Audrey Niffenegger each wrote one novel integrating a love story into circular causality.
Jack Finney perfected nostalgic time travel fiction focused on the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
L Sprague de Camp and Ward Moore each wrote one definitive historical causality violation novel.
There have been two or three good time travel films but several atrocious ones.

Eternity

By attending fully to the objects of immediate awareness, we enter "the eternal present".
Approaching death, we may also approach "the light of eternity", the perception of life as complete.
Hypothetical beings perceiving all human life as eternal would necessarily endure in a second temporal dimension.
Duration-less perception, beginning and ending simultaneously, would be unconsciousness.

"Eternal" means endless, changeless, timeless/atemporal or transtemporal.
Thus, energy is endless, the past is changeless, mathematics is timeless and the eternal present transcends time.
Thus also, several meanings of "eternal" would remain applicable even if the future were known to be finite.
We live in time and eternity.

A temporal process is a sequence of incomplete syntheses between change and resistance to it.
Thus, masses are more resistant then gasses, organisms more dynamic then inanimate objects etc.
A complete synthesis would be changeless but ever-new.
This might correspond to some mystical accounts of eternity.

Mundaka Upanishad: "Even as a spider sends forth and draws in its thread, even as plants arise from the earth and hairs from the body of a man, even so the whole creation arises from the Eternal."
The Dhammapada: "All things indeed pass away, but the Buddhas are for ever in Eternity."
Blake: "To see a world in a grain of sand and heaven in a wild flower, hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour."
Engels: "Nothing is eternal but eternally moving, eternally changing matter and the laws by which it eternally moves and changes."

Yossi, the Time Traveller

After the High Ones left, some of us searched their Palace for humanly usable (or even just comprehensible) technologies. I was looking after my two-year old granddaughter, Yossi, on the lawn outside the Palace while members of our group searched different Chambers inside. Yossi kept running behind bushes, then went up the ramp into the Building.

Knowing that her father, Rick, was checking computers in the first Chamber, I took my time about following her. When I got inside, however, Rick was alone, absorbed in machinery. Yossi must have gone further in. Passing Rick, I found myself in a corridor with openings to several Chambers. Becoming alarmed, I hurried forward and suddenly noticed a young woman who momentarily reminded me of my daughter, Aileen. Smiling, she pointed to a particular opening. Thanking her, I dashed inside and immediately saw Yossi on a dangerously high platform without a railing: typical High Ones architecture, not designed for human use. Someone had erected a humanly usable ladder to the platform but Yossi could not possibly have climbed it, especially not in the time she had been out of my sight.

More startling was another Yossi, sitting on the floor at the foot of the platform. Standing back, I could see two Yossis simultaneously. This was not quite as surprising as you might think. I knew that, theoretically at least, time travel was possible inside the Palace. After all, it was believed that the High Ones had gone away into Time, not into Space, and there was evidence to support this belief. First, there was the “Hall of the Time Gate” which no one knew how to operate and some thought was merely ceremonial. Secondly, there was the peculiar architecture of the Palace: not just unprotected platforms but openings into thin air high in the impossibly curving walls of uninhabitable, floorless Chambers, as if the Builders could fly or as if we perceived only a cross-section of a multi-dimensional structure. Extra dimensions could be used for space warps or time warps. If Yossi had travelled even a minute into the past, then she would obviously coexist with her younger self until the younger self disappeared at the end of that minute. And, if she had stumbled onto time travel, then she had definitely made the breakthrough that we were all looking for. Was the platform a time machine?

My first thought was that the Yossis had better be prevented from seeing each other in case they became alarmed but, before I could move, the Yossi on the platform stood, pointed and addressed me with:

“Oh, look, there’s Yossi!”

She spoke! She spoke in a sentence! She pronounced her name correctly: “Yossi”, not “Sossi”! She was older than the one I had been looking after who, I hoped, was the one on the floor. I didn’t want three of them. I needed to get to the older Yossi. She was in greater danger because she was on the platform and (I reasoned) the younger Yossi could be presumed to be safe because it was known that she would survive to become the older Yossi. I raced up the ladder and, addressing Yossi from the top of it while pointing to the figure on the floor, asked:

“Is she your…”

(Could I say “your younger self”?)

“…your little Yossi?”

“Yes. I played with her.”

When? There had not been time.

I continued: “When there are two of you, you must tell me which is older because that is the one I must look after.”

“I know.”

She knew! She already knew something about the intricacies of time travel. I climbed up and picked her up. Then, as we looked down at the younger Yossi, that one disappeared while the one I was holding said:

“Bye bye, Yossi.”

The disappearance was more like the fading of a memory than the departure of an object. Had I really seen her there a moment ago or had it been ages ago?

I asked:

“Do you remember being her?”

“Yes.”

“Where did she…you go?”

“To a lady.”

She was not going to say any more and I was already starting to realise that I should not enquire too closely. The events were already safely past for Yossi. 

My first hypothesis had been that this older Yossi had come back to us from our future. Now it seemed that the younger Yossi had travelled perhaps a month into the past and had grown into the Yossi I was now holding. During that month, she had been looked after by someone, a “lady,” had improved her speech, learned something about time travel and possibly played with her younger self without our knowledge. I was learning to reinterpret chronokinetic events continually. Yossi could have travelled backwards or forwards in time in a more complicated sequence than the one I had just hypothesised but it was at least the simplest explanation for what I had seen so far. 

As I carried her through the Palace to rejoin Aileen and her friends, I wondered if Yossi and I could just cover up what had happened but this was impossible. I began to notice that she was bigger and was dressed differently and, as soon as she saw her mother, she ran towards her, speaking in a way that showed she had changed.

That was how it began. Since then, we have had to become used to Yossi’s time travelling. Sometimes she just disappears. When that happens, we know that she has gone forward for a day or two. Then, we just have to wait for her to reappear, unaged, unchanged, sometimes even in mid-sentence. Sometimes, she is seen in the distance, talking to her older or younger selves. When that happens, we do not interact with them unless one of them invites us to. 

Events which the oldest Yossi present regards as past must be allowed to unfold as she remembers them. If she remembers that she did not tell us something that we wanted to know, then so be it. We can probably be told it later but obviously did not need to know it at the time.

Once, Aileen glimpsed a taller figure that could have been the “lady” who interacts with Yossis. Sometimes, events are chaotic. Once, Sheila answered the door late at night to be confronted with a twelve year old Yossi who handed over her younger, sleeping self and immediately disappeared. We wanted to tell her that this was unacceptable but had to wait until we saw a Yossi who was old enough to say it to. We had a day of looking after a very small baby again and now suspect that she had been taken from her pram at a very early age and returned to it before our younger selves were able to notice that she had gone.

On another occasion, several Yossis walked past my half open door, saying, “Hello, Granda” in descending order of height. The smallest could only manage, “Lo, Wawa.” I was astounded that they had managed to involve one so young but I knew that she was perfectly safe so I resisted the temptation to run down the corridor after them. I expect that we will be seeing younger Yossis as guests at the older ones’ birthday parties for years to come but I will have to live through each twelve month period consecutively in order to find out.

As you know, Anderson and others have significantly advanced time travel theory by studying Yossi’s reported comings and goings: having disappeared, she either reappears (travels into the future) or turns out to have appeared earlier (travelled into the past). In the latter case, an effect (appearance/arrival) precedes its cause (disappearance/departure) and sometimes causes it (which is the paradox of circular causality) but apparently never prevents it (which would be the paradox of causality violation). When Yossi knows that her older self has been seen to appear or to act in a particular way at an earlier time, she simply accepts that, at some point in her personal future, she will have reason to appear or to act as her older self is already known to have done. She usually forgets about her reported actions until she finds herself performing them although, occasionally, she sets out to do what she is known to have done in order to complete a particular series of events. Thus, there is both circular causality and deliberate avoidance of causality violation.

She seems to have learned at an early age that, if she attempts the opposite, deliberate causality violation, even just by appearing at a time and a place at which she did not appear, then events outside her control, possibly including a fatal accident, will prevent her, so she doesn’t try.

We do not know whether she subjectively experiences anything between objectively disappearing and (re)appearing or how she controls her time of arrival. In fact, I think she is still learning how to control it. Certainly her earliest temporal journeys were controlled by her older selves or by hypothetical time travelling colleagues, not by the travelling self. The theoreticians’ first mistake was to think that the Yossi whom I followed into the Palace had accidentally discovered time travel. Rather, one of her older selves had carefully arranged for that Yossi to travel back a month or so in order to get the process started. Even an early trip to the past that seems to us completely pointless is, to her, a remembered part of her learning experience and therefore must be allowed or even caused to have occurred. The platform is not a time machine but she was put on it in order to get me away from the younger Yossi who was scheduled to disappear soon after I entered the Chamber.

Yossi is obviously protecting and instructing her younger selves while preparing her present self for longer journeys and a greater purpose. She has visited periods before and during High Ones rule which is a bit nervous-making but:

she only embarks on such a journey after she has seen herself return from it so she knows it is safe to go;
the periods visited are the safest in human or superhuman history;
she assures us that, while she is in such periods, she automatically disappears at the first sign of potential danger.

(I think that a time traveller can develop a sixth sense for danger and disappear before consciously realising what the threat was, especially if all that she is trying to avoid is detection. This would explain some reported apparitions in and around the Palace.)

A Yossi from several years in our future mentioned that, after she had extended her range, she provisionally decided to visit a particular pre-High Ones period called “the twentieth century” but took the usual precaution of waiting to see herself return before setting off. Since she did not return, she did not go and now avoids that period like the plague. I have subsequently confirmed that it was a lethal period of social conflicts that have since been resolved and transcended. As for our future, Yossi’s knowledge is, of course, limited and she is understandably reluctant to share it except to say that we have some surprises ahead of us.

She could, if she wanted, spend several consecutive years in a chosen historical period and return to us at the moment from which she left but then we would miss those years of her development so she will not let this happen yet. If she does eventually settle down in an earlier period, then she could already be one of her own ancestors (bequeathing a gene for time travel?). Scientists and historians want information on the High Ones, who concealed themselves during the latter years of their “reign” when they did not rule human beings directly but did alter our environment and influence our culture, fundamentally for the better, but Yossi has a different agenda which I have only recently begun to understand.

I had been confident from the start that the younger Yossi was safe because I knew that she would survive to become the older one. I now have reason to believe that the older Yossi was safe for a similar reason. The clue was the identity of the woman who pointed to the Chamber of the Platform. None of the other exploratory groups in the Palace had a young female member who remotely resembled Aileen and, when I thought about it, the woman had literally appeared in front of me. The corridor had been empty when I entered it but I had been too concerned about Yossi, then grateful for the woman’s help, to think about where she had come from. So who was she? Not a disguised High One, I hope. The one man who thought he saw a High One, by ingeniously but only temporarily adopting the Time Gate as a chronoscope, has since been too overawed to talk about it. Besides, I now know that we have an advantage even over the High Ones. I have listened carefully to Yossi’s remarks about her temporal journeys and have even overheard some of her conversations with her teenage selves.

Thus, I have pieced together an understanding of what my mysterious woman, Yossi’s “lady,” will do after she has made her last remembered visit to her younger selves. She, the adult Yossi, will travel into the far past and lead the human beings who became the High Ones and built the Palace. 

Acknowledgements

This story:

was inspired by a dream about my granddaughter, Yossi Clark;
incorporates her parents and grandparents as supporting characters;
derives its terminology and crucial aspects of its setting from Robert Heinlein’s classic science fiction story, “By His Bootstraps”;
pays tribute to another master of time travel literature, Poul Anderson,
and incorporates part of a phrase from Action Comics, no. 591, cover-dated August 1987, where, in an episode entitled “Past Imperfect,” scripted and drawn by John Byrne, Superman describes the return of a time machine into the time stream as “…more like the fading of a memory than the movement of a vessel!” (This memorable phrase stayed in my mind until February 1996, when I wrote about Yossi.)