The Time Surgeons

Not everyone in the shelter was happy with their proposal; not everyone was happy that it had been taken as far as it had without there even being a proposal.

But they were intelligent people and they knew why they were here. If they feared death, they knew their deaths should have been years in the past, had they or their parents not been saved by moving into the Egg to do the very project that might now erase them from reality. They also knew their history. If Pachmeny, Arragath and Baronak had acted in secret in order to follow the only solution they could see: well, exactly the same process was why they were now breathing.

Some thought the plan insane and refused to have anything to do with it. Others thought the plan had merit but hoped for a better way. But a clear majority agreed to its necessity, while delaying the final decision until all knew what that decision actually entailed. They all knew that no good choices would be available.

And so the thrust of most work in the shelter moved toward a way to repair the past, in order to buy as much time as possible for people they would never know and who would never know them.

The problems were immense. Before they could start they needed some idea of what to start on. Baronak called all the group leaders to a meeting to clarify the issues.

“All right,” he said, “here is where we are now.

“We know we can send objects, even a person, back through time. Our goal is to send one or the other back to some point where they can do something to save the future. There are all sorts of possibilities. But what we know is that the more we change then, the more we alter the future and the more we risk making things worse. Our problem is we simply don’t know enough, and we don’t have the time to find out enough to be safe making radical changes. Earth as a home that can nurture mankind is already gone. We will be following it soon enough.

“Our first risk is time. We have run out of time to solve the problem of escaping the supernova. And the more time that passes, the more our equipment degrades and the more our own bodies degrade. We must act soon, and decide sooner.

“But our biggest risk is that we can only do this once. We can’t try one thing, look, evaluate, then try something else. Once we change the past we will no longer be here to try again.

“Against that, our biggest advantage is that before we change the past we can safely spy on it. We can do that at a self-repairing quantum level, so mere spying will not change the future.

“However our spying is limited. There is much we do not understand and problems we don’t know how to solve. We can send our burrows through time, anchored to the gravity well of Earth, and peek around at any location on Earth. But not all times and spaces are available to us. Spacetime is complex, and parts of it are inaccessible to the precision of our technology, or the amount of energy we can apply, or both. And the equipment cannot be run continuously. Between probes we must recalibrate it, and also allow the disturbed quantum spacetime to recover. So we can’t learn just anything we want to. We can’t go everywhere and we can go only a limited number of times.

“We are also severely limited in what we can do, which constrains what is worth learning how to do. Anything we send back will not last long in the past. We cannot send a library of all our knowledge back to the start of our re-ascent as a technological species: even if they could read it, and knew what to do with it, it would be gone before they could read or copy a fraction of it.

“So all we can do is send a person back: an emissary who is not passive, but active and reactive. A person who can do enough in the limited time they have to change the future. And not just change the future – that is guaranteed. But change it in a way that makes things better.

“We cannot project enough power into the past to shift the great forces of history. But if we can find the right point, a cusp upon which the future turns, then we have a chance. We cannot be time engineers, but we can be time surgeons. Able to make one small incision: small enough that it is within our power, but big enough in its consequences to save the world.”

The room was silent.

“That is all for now. Take this to your people and discuss it. Any questions, you know where to find us.” He gave a faint smile. “We aren’t going anywhere.”

Over the next weeks the arguments raged. Even those who opposed the program on principle joined in on a debate too interesting to ignore.

The essence of human beings, our distinctive feature that distinguishes us from all other animals, is our ability to think. With that come the intellectual pleasures of problem-solving in our own mind and intellectual debate with other minds outside it. Inside our minds our own opinions are undisputed king; outside it are many other kings. Yet when our king essays out on his battles it is rare that he is defeated: usually returning victorious or bloody but unbowed, at least in the court of our own mind.

It is a curious phenomenon of evolution that traits evolved for survival can, in the course of time, become a drive in their own right, no longer inherently linked to survival. And thus the need to eat becomes the pleasure of high cuisine, sought even after the needs of survival are met. Thus sex becomes an end in itself, even past the age of reproduction; even if the one you love is sterile; even if, for some, your lover is the same sex and your copulations incapable of producing a child. Love, evolved as the handmaiden of sex, is now a supreme value in its own right.

And so the fascination of the problem drew most of the population into the argument, even though whatever they did their doom was certain; even though the better their solution, the sooner that doom might descend upon them.

The most obvious solution was to prevent the Burning, the disastrous war that had destroyed the Ancients. The Burning had set humanity’s progress back by tens of millennia. If it had not occurred, who knew what powers mankind might now possess? And if the powers of millennia of uninterrupted scientific progress were not enough to save mankind, then nothing was.

Hope began to grow in the collective consciousness of the people of the shelter. An ironic hope, as none of them would be its beneficiaries, but hope nonetheless.

A hope that would be dashed.

“I only wish it were possible,” Arragath told the assembled crowd. “But we have seen in their ruins the scale of the war that claimed the Ancients. How could we hope to prevent it?”

“So we give up?” cried a voice from the back. “All this, all we have endured, all that we have done: and we give up, because it is too hard?”

Then Baronak spoke.

“I agree we should not give up. Must not give up. But we cannot stop the Burning.”

He looked around the crowd, seeing their eyes watchful upon him.

“Even if we found the power to turn aside ruin at that scale, still we could not stop their war: because it is beyond our reach. The war was nuclear. Nuclear energy is fundamentally a quantum process. Such concentrated power as unleashed during nuclear explosions disturbs the quantum foam that fills spacetime. The war of the Burning disturbed it too much. It created instabilities, that like our own burrows propagate through time. We have tried, but we cannot create a stable endpoint during the war or for months before or after it. And if we cannot create a stable endpoint, we cannot open a burrow.

“At the times we have been able to reach there is tension in the world but nothing special, no more than there had been for years. No drumbeats building to war. Its origin is lost in a fog we cannot penetrate.

“The barrier is not absolute. If we had higher energy levels available, or more advanced and precise technology, I believe we could send our burrows even to the center of the war. The equations allow it. But we do not have it. Now, we can never have it. We are out of time.”

First there was silence; then a low murmur, like an ocean restlessly surging against a shore. Finally someone gave voice to their mood.

“Then what can we do? If we cannot stop the Burning, we have failed. Our great project is for nothing. Our lives have been spent on nothing. What would you have us do?”

Again Baronak looked around the room.

“I too hoped we could stop the war. As did Arragath. As did Pachmeny. If you feel despair now, know we have already felt it.

“But there is hope. What we lack is time. Perhaps we can create some. Not for ourselves: it is too late for that. But if we cannot stop the Burning, what if we can accelerate the rediscovery of science after it? So that instead of the mere years our people had, those who will live in our place will have decades or centuries more to find a solution?

“We have been thinking about this, ever since we found that we could not pierce the barrier around the Burning. Do not damn us for not telling you. Until two days ago our hope remained alive. For those two days we have lived with the despair you feel now. Would you have thanked us if all we brought you was our own desolation?

“No. So first we had to think ourselves. We would rather offer hope than despair.”

He looked at his mother. “You all know Pachmeny. Our destroyers are named after her. I think this is properly her tale.”

Pachmeny stood and, like her son, let her gaze wander over the crowd. Her friends. Some, her enemies. But all her people. All traveling with her on a dangerous journey whose stakes were the highest in the world.

“This is what we think,” she said. “We must provide our ancestors with enough information to make a meaningful difference to their scientific progress.

“We can only give them simple, minimal information: small enough that we can impart it in the short time we have in the past, yet enough for one or a few people to understand, believe and act on. We cannot tell them everything. We can only tell them enough, and leverage their own actions in order to do the rest.

“We cannot send back enough of our own scientific knowledge to achieve that. Thus our own ancestors since the Burning cannot be taught. But the Ancients themselves already knew what we know, and often more.

“Therefore, we must find a way to preserve and then recover the knowledge of the Ancients faster than happened in our own history. This knowledge has to somehow survive the end of the Ancients themselves, then the millennia of the Dark Ages, in a form their descendants – people who will be like our own ancestors – will be able to understand.

“And we have to do that in a single, brief meeting between a person from the future and one from the past.

“So here is what we have to do, all of us. We already know how the language of the ancients was written. Now we need to learn how it was spoken.

“We have to find a person, or perhaps a small group, from the past who will not only believe our story but be able to do something about it.

“Then someone has to go back, and persuade them.”

After much discussion, finally a consensus was reached.

And so the final generation of the human race began their last and greatest project.

Pachmeny looked up from her desk at the faint, timid tapping at her open door. Tired as she was, she could not help the smile that came to her face when she saw her visitor.

She recognized the diffident young woman who stood there. She had known her as an intelligent but deeply shy girl whose dark eyes, on the few occasions she allowed you to look into them, dragged you down into depths whose bottom was only hinted at, never seen. Pachmeny had watched her grow into a beautiful and still very private woman. But despite the mark of genius the perceptive could discern, she had not excelled in any one field. Instead she appeared content to flitter from place to place, like a butterfly who found the variety of flowers in her world too beguiling to settle for long on any one kind.

If she lacked depth of knowledge in any one field, her breadth of knowledge was unmatched. And her peculiar talent was an ability to think of creative solutions and to see connections that nobody else suspected. Thus she had been given, or more accurately taken, a kind of roving commission to go over the growing body of data from the spy burrows that had been sent back to pepper the timeline in the decades leading up to the death of the Ancients, and to follow its clues wherever she would.

“Greetings, Emmerline,” she said. “Come in. Sit. What can I do for you?”

“Greetings, Pachmeny. I found a snippet of information that caught my attention. I booked some time on the Burrower to learn some more. I think I have found something. Someone.”

“Explain.”

“I came across a story about a man. It was not a complimentary story. He founded a new religion, one that many people did not like.”

Emmerline paused and seemed to turn her gaze inward, as if trying to disassemble an idea she held in its interlinked totality, into a narrative that would make sense to another. Pachmeny could tell from her face that this was no idle exercise to her; that Emmerline felt the future might depend on her ability to persuade others of what she saw.

“So this religion,” Pachmeny asked to help her out, “was it plausible? Was it successful?”

Emmerline made an ironic face. “In the world of religion, those are two separate questions. Plausible? From my understanding of it, it was one of the silliest religions ever invented, and it’s not as if there’s no competition there. No, I cannot understand why anybody would be as fanatical about it as many were. But whatever formula he hit on, he was either very lucky or knew a lot about human psychology. Somehow it became very successful, rich and powerful, in mere decades. So strong that even powerful enemies failed to bring them down despite numerous attempts.”

Now Emmerline leaned forward, her eyes finally boring into Pachmeny’s, as if willing her to follow her thoughts and to understand.

“Then I remembered those famous relics, the works of the great Newton and Einstein preserved in the Abbey of the Caves. It occurred to me that religion can generate a level of loyalty, if not fanaticism, well beyond reason. That where reasonable men might doubt or waver, men of faith can maintain their belief not only beyond what is reasonable, but against reason itself. I wondered whether those relics would have been preserved at all over all those millennia if they had been left in the care of reasonable men seeking reasonable goals, and not entrusted to a cult hiding in the mountains.

“If that was all, I would have run with this idea in other directions. But the story mentioned something else. This was an unusual man. He wasn’t the typical founder of a religion, neither mystic nor rebel priest. He was a writer. He wrote stories in what the Ancients called ‘science fiction’: a kind of speculative tale or fantasy based on scientific facts or theories. And he claimed his religion was based on science.

“So understandably, some of his opponents accused him of making the whole thing up. Of realizing that an idea that might earn him a modest amount as the plot of just another of his works of fiction, soon forgotten, could bring him far more if he used it to found a religion, and possibly bring him everlasting fame as well.

“But it occurred to me that such a man might be receptive to our tale. That a man steeped in both flights of imagination and an interest in scientific reality might possess the perfect combination of traits. Intelligence, knowledge, and above all flexibility of thinking.

“On its own, that isn’t much. The poets and storytellers of our own history were not renowned for building monuments. But his man also had the boldness to take on the entire world.

“On its own, a religion isn’t much either. They have their own hierarchy and politics. Their own faith, which can blind them to what we need them to understand and do. To subvert an established religion can fail in so many ways. To take over a minor sect is risky in so many others.

“But the two together? Here we have a rich religion, founded by a single man of imagination and brilliant boldness. Run by a hierarchy bound by layers of secret doctrine, where the higher you rise, the more arcane secrets are revealed to you.”

Now she leaned forward, the palms of her hands on Pachmeny’s desk. “Pachmeny, our entire theory assumes that history is not some vast, deterministic monolith. That for all the forces that drive it and cannot be turned, yet still it might pivot on one man or one action. That it is chaotic, like some say of the weather: that the chirping of a cricket somewhere across the ocean can trigger a hurricane on our shores.

“This is the man. This is the time. Maybe what we are trying is impossible. But this is our best chance.”

Then she fell silent, her idea now woven complete in the air between them. She noticed herself leaning on Pachmeny’s desk and straightened to just stand there, biting her lower lip in anxiety.

Pachmeny stood up slowly and extended her hand. “Emmerline, that is brilliant. We need to study some more and learn some more. But Emmerline… perhaps you have saved the world.”

The crowd was silent as Salidor walked slowly up the main promenade of the public area.

Many had volunteered for this trip, but unless some grave tragedy had befallen him Salidor was always going to be the chosen one. He was a genius in a world of geniuses, and his particular talent was language. Nobody could equal his facility with other tongues, the speed with which he could grasp the essentials of another language’s grammar and idioms, or his power to mimic accents.

Now he would be their emissary to the past.

Not everyone was here. Some had chosen not to see, but to spend the next minutes or hours with their loved ones, their favorite activity, or simply communing with the universe. But most were here, drawn by the same need. Displays had been set up, but there was no feed yet and they were dark except for a faint deep blue radiance.

Their eyes followed his journey toward the entrance to the prime Burrow Generator, which had been examined, calibrated and refined to as great a peak of perfection as their technicians could achieve. Pachmeny, Arragath and Baronak stood there, as silently watchful as the crowd. When Salidor reached them, he grasped each of their arms in turn; none felt the need to speak. All the words that could ever be said had been said, and now nothing remained but to act.

He turned toward the crowd and waved his arm slowly in farewell. They raised their arms in silent salute. Then he turned and went inside.

Pachmeny sat with her family, as they watched the nearest display. It sprang to life, showing the scene they knew so well, and then the meeting that might change fate. Then she could watch no longer, and for all that she had understood and planned and believed, the finality of it broke out in some last gasp of struggle, and she convulsively grasped Arragath, burying her head in his chest. He stroked her hair as she sobbed into his shirt.

Oh Arragath, my love! Baronak, my son! It is so hard. Soon we shall be no more, not now, not ever. Yet it is real. It was real. I feel you, my love; I remember it all. How can it not be real, when it is so real? Hold on, my love. Hold on as long as our breath continues. Hold on! Hold on! Hold