The Time Surgeons

When Ravan had first heard the verdict from Vickie Gray, he was appalled. No wonder you wept, he’d thought. All that blood, all the death: on the wavering head of one man.

He had been silent for long moments.

“Vickie,” he had said slowly at last, “I have a suggestion to make, and a request.”

“Certainly, Ravan. I value your opinions.”

“Your finding raises some interesting theoretical questions in my own field, and I would like some time to study them. If I’m right, the results will round out your findings rather well. So may I suggest you submit your original draft, without the extra information on the pivotal role of your third man? Once I have my results, you can add the complete story to your final report.”

“Oh! Well… maybe,” she replied dubiously. “Might that not be better as a later commentary?”

“Of course it’s entirely up to you, but I think the result will be worth the wait. I think there are aspects of that final piece of the puzzle that could be… misunderstood… if presented without some more exact science. It shouldn’t delay your final submission unduly. They will want to read a first draft anyway. Most of your findings are in the original story, are they not? You can just say that we are working on some additional aspects to complete the picture.”

She nodded, still looking a little dubious but apparently swayed by his reasoning. “Yes… yes… if you think so. I must say that I’ve been fascinated by the results, but thinking about how I got them makes my head hurt. I shall do as you ask. You’re the quantum mechanic.”

Alone in his office, Ravan had sat back, feeling the sweat under his armpits despite the perfect cool of the air. When he had heard her conclusions the first thing he had felt, after the vast if impersonal pity, was a wordless certainty that she must not relay those words to the Protectorate.

On the heels of that certainty came another: that he must not alert her to its importance either. She was ambitious, he knew that. And ambition can lead to betrayal. He did not think she would betray him: the night they had spent together, and the depths of character which had led her to it, would not allow such venality. But perhaps he was a fool and her words on that night had just been a game, the same way his were today: not the feelings of a soul laid bare, but a mask over a shallow desire for the trophy of bedding a famous man. He could not risk it. More, there may have been other listeners: the Protectorate was ever alert for forbidden thoughts, and even he might not be immune from their oversight.

The last thing he wanted was to shine a spotlight on that which he sought to hide. So he had chosen his words with care, and would have to hope it was enough to disguise whatever truly lay behind his dread certainty.

Now he stared at the certainty, seeking to find that truth himself.

The first layer of the onion was a simple one, and it took little introspection to arrive at the answer. The very question brought up images of a wild-eyed student speaking of dangerous thoughts, and his own attempts, when first he started on this path, to deflect any suspicion that the past could be changed. Attempts so successful I almost believe them myself.

But as soon as he thought it, he looked at his own inner vision, appalled.

Who would think anything could be done? Who could imagine they might divert the great forces of history, the sum of so many interlocking and often unknowable influences? But what if the fulcrum rested on one man, and what tipped one way could be tipped the other? That to change history, this once, might not need the powers of a god, but just the smallest push in the right direction?

It was insane. He knew it. But the siren call of the hints he had seen in the equations, suppressed even in his own mind, would not let him go. For he could not let go the image he had seen of a mushroom cloud rising above what had moments before been a peaceful sea, nor escape the images in his head of over a billion dead.

I will do nothing, he assured himself. I dare not assume such a responsibility. I will simply prepare, and see if it is possible. Perhaps then I will take it to my masters, and trust in their wisdom. I am just being prudent. Thorough. I will not act upon it.

He wondered why he felt the need to keep telling himself that.

The whirling in his mind stopped again, caught on another point, like eddying seaweed washed to and fro by the sea but pinned by a rock. But even if one were to try, he thought, then stopped, grimly amused at the defanging of his own thoughts. At least have the honesty to name the players, Ravan. Yes, even if I were to try, risking my career, if not my life, if not the world: am I really risking anything, or was I right all along? And it truly cannot be changed?

He sat still, trying to impose order on the confusion in his mind. On the small scales we act at now we cause local changes, but the wave functions are repaired by equal and opposite forces: stresses created by the conservation of energy shaped by the changes themselves. Perhaps that is true at all scales. Perhaps we cannot change decisions made in the past. Or if we did change this one decision, maybe all we would achieve is the same outcome with a slightly different immediate cause, and the only effect that would ripple through to our age is a slightly different report from Dr Gray, of no consequence to their future or our past.

He leant back in his chair, staring into space for long moments.

And if we stop this disaster, if the War never happens: then what? Perhaps the next month, or the next year, there would just be another one.

Then he thought of the mushroom cloud, and the billion dead.

But I could give them a chance. They could have peace in their time. Perhaps having come so close to the brink, they will learn what we learned without having to fall into the abyss. And if they do not learn without disaster, maybe our race is doomed to learn only from it. Maybe I cannot save the human race, because we don’t deserve to be saved. Peace in their time is all that is in my power to give. I can only hope that they know what to do with it.

If I can even give them that.

Had some judge pronounced a verdict on the people of his age, Ravan Harlington would not have been declared the most superlative of them.

His beauty was irrelevant, and perhaps would even cost him some points for daring to contaminate him with its impertinence.

His intellect was relevant: not that brilliance was an end in itself, and had Ravan treated it as such he would have been disqualified; but that brilliance could bring boons to his fellow man. And indeed Ravan had applied himself to do just that.

But chief among the criteria would have been his character. If he was not the best among men, certainly he was one of the most exceptional. For what the Protectorate cared for most was empathy. What the Protectorate made sure was inculcated in all youth as key to their education and personal development was empathy and caring. And in these things Ravan had few peers and fewer superiors.

The Protectorate was founded on a philosophy that to a past world would have appeared a strange syncretism, born in the collision of the ideals of the West with the traumas of the War. The rugged individualists of America’s birth and the intellectual champions who followed them would have called the Protectorate collectivist, built on the ideal that the community was all, and the individual nothing. But the Protectorate would have called them wrong.

The Protectorate valued the individual. That is why an ambitious woman like Vickie Gray would bother being ambitious, and could be so without the soul-eroding contamination of hypocrisy. The ambitious, at least those who earned the arrogance of their ambition, could hope for rewards commensurate with their talents. If one gave great value to society surely society should give great value in return: especially when the equations of such trade meant that society could never repay more than a fraction of the value it had received. And if those capable of such gifts knew that the greater they applied their gifts the more fabulous their rewards, then surely that would encourage them to greater and greater heights, lifting all of society with them. Gifts were valuable only if they were applied, and then they were invaluable.

But the Protectorate was born of contradictions. It needed ambition but feared an ambition that might serve dark desires or fears. How to stop this, its founders had wondered? How to reward ambition that did good, without enabling its darker side? They had a solution. If those in power, whether it be political, economic or social, had true empathy for all people, then of necessity they would serve those people. Whatever talents and ambition might circle it, if at the core of their being lay empathy, then they would not seek their own advantage at the price of pain to others: they would feel that pain too keenly in their own souls. The Protectorate needed no laws to stop men plunging their own hands into a fire or a knife into their own breast: they would gladly stop themselves, and fight any who tried to force them to do it. And what prophet would urge their disciples to kill the unbelievers, and what conqueror would lead their armies to invade the world, if they felt the terror, pain and grief of their victims wailing inside their own soul – and what armies would serve them, feeling the same?

And thus the Protectorate taught its children that empathy was not only the highest virtue but also the surest sign of a healthy mind.

If the Protectorate erred, still their error was close enough to the truth to succeed. They did not try to suppress the individual. They did not try to tell people to bury their own loves and desires for the contradictory sake of others’ loves and desires. They did not tell people to sacrifice themselves for society. They told people to live for their own joy: but to feel the joys and pains of others as well. Able to feel no joy if it were at the price of another’s misery.

In the philosophy of the Protectorate there was no conflict between the good of society and the good of the individual. An individual could only achieve his or her own good by being rewarded for doing what was good for others.

It is true that all people are fundamentally the same, so that none deserve to be sacrificed to the ambitions of others, and none deserve to succeed by means of destroying others. It is true that in a society of people seeking their own good, nobody needs to be sacrificed and all can gain. Perhaps the way to achieve that is not through empathy: perhaps simple justice is a better way. But it is the way the Protectorate chose, and it worked well.

If Ravan had all his beauty and all his brilliance but insufficient empathy, he would never have risen to the peak he reached. The Protectorate would not have allowed it. The Protectorate did not merely attempt to imbue empathy in its children. It measured and sifted it. Without it Ravan would have become a valued and useful lower-echelon physicist, his talents contributing to society but never achieving heights of his own. He would have been happy; perhaps wishing for greater glory than he could reach, perhaps in the darkness of his heart begrudging those of lesser intellect who soared above him; but forever cut off from power. In the absence of enough empathy, the Protectorate had decided, power was too dangerous a thing to grant or unleash.

But Ravan had always excelled in empathy scores. No doubt his education had helped, but it was also his natural aptitude. He saw himself in other people; he knew they felt joys and sorrows in the same way he did, and more: he felt them keenly. Perhaps not quite as keenly as his own, for who can feel a burn in another’s skin as intensely as one’s own? But he could no more watch another’s pain than ignore his own, nor could he see another’s joy without feeling their happiness in his own soul and being glad for it.

And now he sat, staring at the deaths of over a billion souls. Now he sat, unable to fully grasp it, yet unable to resist its enormity.

And now he sat, mere weeks after his conversation with Vickie Gray, knowing he could save them all.

So now I know. I can do nothing. I can pass the decision to the higher reaches of government. Or I can act.

He considered his options. He felt as if he stood under a spotlight, under the eyes of a billion dead, the eyes of the billions more left behind to suffer and to mourn, and knew he could not do nothing.

And if I pass this decision to others? What will happen then? They will not act. They will be too afraid, it is their nature. They will choose, and as they must take the science on faith, not knowledge, then fear of acting will set their choice. I can tell myself it is my duty to pass the decision to them. But that is just a coward’s way of choosing to do nothing.

He could feel himself being drawn to an inexorable result, like a ship caught on the edges of a whirlpool it lacked the power to escape, and felt icy terror of what must come.

But if I save them, at what price? To change history is to wipe the present from existence.

He stared at the horror of it, feeling fear that it would swallow his very soul. So to save the world as it was, I must wipe out the world as it is. But the billions suffered in pain and fear and grief, and their horror still reverberates today. And I can save them, and there will be no pain or fear or grief then, and no pain or fear or grief now. We today are the inheritors and beneficiaries of their agony, and can we hold our own existence as our excuse to let theirs end in such a way? And perhaps we will simply come to be in another form. A better form. But will it really be gone? How can it not have been, when it has been?

He gazed into his own past. He remembered a scene when he was a young boy, crouched in a field, intensely studying a flower and the blue butterfly shimmering upon it. Being comforted in the folds of his mother’s dress, the bruises and cuts from a fall throbbing. The shyness, fumbling and too rapidly overpowering ecstasy of the first time he had slept with a girl. That memory led to another, of the unexpected and strangely immaculate meeting of bodies with Vickie Gray on the night of his triumph.

More than a meeting of bodies, it had been a meeting of souls, and so his thoughts jumped to her soul, feeling her life beating in his arteries as he felt his own. She also had lived her youth, her joys and her pains. A lifetime of actions and feelings, sifted by time and memory into the unique consciousness she now possessed, the unrepeatable person that was Vickie Gray. Those joys included the one shared with him when their world lines so briefly intersected, and the longer term union with her husband, a braiding of two world lines scattering an infinity of threads to who knew where. Her husband too was the sum of a lifetime of thoughts and happiness and sorrow. And so on, forever, to their friends, their parents, their lovers, a whole network stretching throughout the world today, reaching back through the centuries and millennia past, and forward into the unknowable millennia ahead.

All those people of past centuries lived. But they no longer exist, not even in memories, except for a few fragments held in living minds and dead recordings. Yet they existed. Yet now they do not. Perhaps now they will never have. But how is that different to them now?

If I do this the people of the past are no more dead; if anything they are less dead, if that has any meaning. The people of the present will feel no pain, no sorrow, no terror and no loss. But all those billions then will be saved.

He looked at the images of spacetime manifolds summoned by equations: images and equations his great mind had itself conjured and understood. And here I am, now, the heir of the past, a living mind, remembering the life that brought me here. And then it will never have been. And yet it is, and was. The sharpness of its existence cannot be denied, so how could it never be?

His mind tried to chase the contradictions, but they led in circles, never to a resolution that made the slightest sense. It is so, I know that. But how is it possible? To be yet never have been?

In his mind’s eye he looked at the images he had conjured, knowing the answer lay within, and came to a realization.

Smythed if I know.