My Object All Sublime

My Object All Sublime

By Poul Anderson

Once upon a time, a very, very long time in the future, there was a civilization. I shall not describe it to you, for that would not be possible. Could you go back to the time of the Egyptian pyramid builders and tell them about this city below us? I don't mean they wouldn't believe you;, of course they wouldn't, but that hardly matters. I mean they would not understand. Nothing you said could make sense to them. And the way people work and think and believe would be less comprehensible than those lights and towers and machines. Not so? If I spoke to you of people in the future living among great blinding energies, and of genetic changelings, and imaginary wars, and talking stones, and a certain blind hunter, you might feel anything at all, but you would not understand.

So I ask you only to imagine how many thousands of times this planet has circled the sun, how deeply buried and forgotten we are; and then also to imagine that this other civilization thinks in patterns so foreign that it has ignored every limitation of logic and natural law, to discover means of traveling in time. So, while the ordinary dweller in that age (I can't exactly call him a citizen, or anything else for which we have a word, because it would be too misleading), the average educated dweller, knows in a vague, uninterested way that millenia ago some semi-sauvages were the first to split the atom – only one or two men have actually been here, walked among us, studied and mapped us and returned with a file of information for the central brain, if I may call it by such a name. No one else is concerned with us, any more than you are concerned with early Mesopatamian archology. You see?

He dropped his gaze to the tumbler in his hand and held it there, as if the whisky were an oracular pool. The silence grew. At last I said, “Very well. For the sake of the story, I'll accept the premise. I imagine time travelers would be unnoticeable. They'd have techniques of disguise and so on. Wouldn't want to change their own past”.

“Oh, no danger of that,” he said. “It's only that they couldn't learn much if they went around insisting they were from the future. Just imagine.”

I chuckled.

Michaels gave me a shadowed look. “Apart from the scientific,” he said, “can you guess what use there might be for time travel?”

He shook his head. “Think again. They'd only want a limited number of Minoan statuettes, Ming vases, or Third World Hegemony dwarfs, chiefly for their museums. If “museum” isn't too inaccurate a word. I tell you, they are not like us. Af for natural resources, they're beyond the point of needing any; they make their own.”

He paused, as if before a final plunge. Then: “What was this penal colony the French abandoned?”

“Devil's Island?”

“Yes, that was it. Can you imagine a better revenge on a condemned criminal than to maroon him in the past.”

Punishment is a catharsis of society as a whole. Photo by Elena.