A post to Mr. Donaldson in his "Gradual Interview"

[native]

Maybe the Ur-viles went back to get the Waynhim, and possibly the Demondim? All three will have major impact on the last cron. I believe!

And Vain as well, within the staff. It's a regular family reunion.

So where are the Viles?

[wayfriend]

Maybe not; but going back the whole 3000 years to retrieve it left a catastrophic hole. In fact, it's pretty clear that Linden herself caused the Staff to go missing by going back in time to retrieve it. If it had never been missing, it would never have gone missing: a lovely example of time-travel paradox in action, a.k.a. Ouroboros biting himself on the backside.

You cannot make the conclusion that this created a catastrophic hole. You only do so because you are looking at one side.

There is no telling what would have happened on some alternate timeline where the Staff is never moved through time. There is no way to know if that would be the worst case. What would happen to an undefended Staff - perhaps Foul would be open to corrupting it directly? Perhaps Esmer could lead the Demondim directly to it? Perhaps the Waynhim, in a last desperate attempt before they die, attempt to use the Staff, and thereby some unanticipated disaster occurs?

So you have to recognize that it is equally possible that Linden's actions may have been the best possible thing.

Donaldson has spoken about choices in his past. 'Good' choices (saving the girl from the rattlesnake) produce good results, even when they look wrong. 'Bad' choices (manipulating Elena to avoid responsibility) produce bad results, even when they look right. If Lindens choice was a 'good' one (which we could debate) would Donaldson have this turn into a 'bad' result? No - it would undercut the meaning of his story.

Finally, another point seldom comes up: there is a Law of Time; Law rules Time, Law encompasses Time within it's ambit.

So why would Law be weakened by moving the Staff in Time? The Staff was not destroyed, it was only moved. If Law spans Time, why should Law be weakened thereby? Creating a paradox, yes, that harms Law. But just moving the Staff about, with no paradox created, no, Law should remain intact. In other words, Law should function irrespective of Time.

And, finally, this is not the same Staff. We should never assume that the implications of this Staff are the same as the first. The first Staff was created in such a way that removing it harmed Law. But was the second Staff created in the same way? It wasn't. Is it the same kind of staff? No, it is not - this time it is a 'living staff'. It is semi-sentient. This means that it takes care of itself, repairs itself, does things for its own survival. If Linden moves the Staff, the Staff would do what was needed to preserve Law when this occurs, as a reflex.

[Variol Farseer]

Maybe not; but going back the whole 3000 years to retrieve it left a catastrophic hole. In fact, it's pretty clear that Linden herself caused the Staff to go missing by going back in time to retrieve it. If it had never been missing, it would never have gone missing: a lovely example of time-travel paradox in action, a.k.a. Ouroboros biting himself on the backside.

You cannot make the conclusion that this created a catastrophic hole. You only do so because you are looking at one side.

Linden herself perceived it to be catastrophic. That was what motivated her to risk violating the Law of Time, to say nothing of trying to ride a caesure when she didn't even know whether such a thing was possible. By acting to repair the consequences of losing the Staff, she caused it to become lost.

There is no telling what would have happened on some alternate timeline where the Staff is never moved through time. There is no way to know if that would be the worst case. What would happen to an undefended Staff - perhaps Foul would be open to corrupting it directly? Perhaps Esmer could lead the Demondim directly to it? Perhaps the Waynhim, in a last desperate attempt before they die, attempt to use the Staff, and thereby some unanticipated disaster occurs?

That's hardly the point. The point is that Linden herself was personally responsible for the Staff's absence during those 3000 years, and any damage that actually did cause. If she had not intervened, something else would have happened, but that would not have been her doing, and would not have been part of her story. (As Aslan said, nobody is ever told what would have happened; and nobody is ever told any story but their own.)

Donaldson has spoken about choices in his past. 'Good' choices (saving the girl from the rattlesnake) produce good results, even when they look wrong. 'Bad' choices (manipulating Elena to avoid responsibility) produce bad results, even when they look right. If Lindens choice was a 'good' one (which we could debate) would Donaldson have this turn into a 'bad' result? No - it would undercut the meaning of his story.

I don't think it's even meant to be a 'good' choice. My personal suspicion is that Linden is setting herself up to be another Hile Troy, only with far worse consequences this time.

Until we have read the entire story, it's hardly safe to make any assumptions about what SRD intends it to mean.

Finally, another point seldom comes up: there is a Law of Time; Law rules Time, Law encompasses Time within it's ambit.

So why would Law be weakened by moving the Staff in Time? The Staff was not destroyed, it was only moved. If Law spans Time, why should Law be weakened thereby? Creating a paradox, yes, that harms Law. But just moving the Staff about, with no paradox created, no, Law should remain intact. In other words, Law should function irrespective of Time.

To my mind, it's not moving the Staff that weakens the Law of Time; it's monkeying with the caesures. The Falls themselves are obvious violations of the Law of Time, because their effects can precede their causes. My suspicion is that deliberately riding a Fall into the remote past is rather like feeding the Banefire: it increases the available energy for the violation of Law to feed on.

And, finally, this is not the same Staff. We should never assume that the implications of this Staff are the same as the first. The first Staff was created in such a way that removing it harmed Law. But was the second Staff created in the same way? It wasn't. Is it the same kind of staff? No, it is not - this time it is a 'living staff'. It is semi-sentient. This means that it takes care of itself, repairs itself, does things for its own survival. If Linden moves the Staff, the Staff would do what was needed to preserve Law when this occurs, as a reflex.

But it can't, because it did not exist in the Land for the 3000 years during which those effects took place. To scale things down to 'real-world' time, if you walk away from your job for 10 years, no matter how well you prepared for your departure at the time, you can't come back and expect everything still to be going according to plan.

[Loredoctor]

Donaldson has spoken about choices in his past. 'Good' choices (saving the girl from the rattlesnake) produce good results, even when they look wrong. 'Bad' choices (manipulating Elena to avoid responsibility) produce bad results, even when they look right. If Lindens choice was a 'good' one (which we could debate) would Donaldson have this turn into a 'bad' result? No - it would undercut the meaning of his story.

I don't think it's even meant to be a 'good' choice. My personal suspicion is that Linden is setting herself up to be another Hile Troy, only with far worse consequences this time.

I am inclined to agree with you.

[wayfriend]

Linden herself perceived it to be catastrophic.

Your confusing the issues. Linden perceived that altering past history would be catestrophic. She perceived that creating ceasures would be catestrophic. She never perceived that a span of years with no Staff would be catestrophic.

That's hardly the point. The point is that Linden herself was personally responsible for the Staff's absence.

Your out of bounds telling me my point is not the point. It's the point of my reply because I say it's the point. Thank you.

Anyway, I know that that alternate timeline never happened. What I am saying is that there's no way you or I can assume that Linden's action to remove the Staff didn't avert a worse disaster. It may have been the best possible outcome.

My personal suspicion is that Linden is setting herself up to be another Hile Troy, only with far worse consequences this time.

You don't understand Hile Troy then. He was an Anti-Covenant. He wasn't a Landwaster. Linden's already learned too much from Covenant to be a Hile Troy. And besides, Donaldson already told that story once.

To scale things down to 'real-world' time, if you walk away from your job for 10 years, no matter how well you prepared for your departure at the time, you can't come back and expect everything still to be going according to plan.

Yes, I definitely and willfully can. Law rules Time, Time does not rule Law. Therefore, the work that the Staff does to uphold Law doesn't have to be constrained to operate only in the Staff's present. Like caesures, it's Sphere of influence could span Time, and would be bound only by when it was created and when/if it is destroyed. It doesn't need to exist in those 3000 years to protect them. The Staff is part Elohim -- just like Esmer - Time need not be an obstacle to it.

So if I leave my job for ten years, but I maintain my influence over the job for the whole ten years via my wireless phone, everything could remain ok.

[Loredoctor]

My personal suspicion is that Linden is setting herself up to be another Hile Troy, only with far worse consequences this time.

You don't understand Hile Troy then. He was an Anti-Covenant. He wasn't a Landwaster. Linden's already learned too much from Covenant to be a Hile Troy. And besides, Donaldson already told that story once.

No, but Foul manipulates people so as to cause great harm - witness the near-destruction of the Land at the Isle of the One Tree. I think Linden's actions to retrieve the Staff of Law were arranged by Foul and so she is being set up to cause more harm than good - to the Land and to herself.

[wayfriend]

No, but Foul manipulates people so as to cause great harm

Agreed. But that applies to many characters besides Hile Troy. When you say 'another Hile Troy', I think of someone who made Troy's mistake, which was not understanding the bad consequences of good intentions (or however you care to describe Hile in one sentence).

But if you mean she's being manipulated by Foul, well, yes. I'd even have to say, duh. Foul, during his chatty phase, as much as spelled that out. But, again, I think Linden has learned from Covenant - she knows that the answer is not in trying to 'avoid his snares'.

[Variol Farseer]

Your confusing the issues. Linden perceived that altering past history would be catestrophic. She perceived that creating ceasures would be catestrophic. She never perceived that a span of years with no Staff would be catestrophic.

Let me quote exactly where Linden perceived that the absence of the Staff itself was a catastrophe:

"But the Staff of Law which you formed was soon lost. Doubtless if it had remained in wise hands, the peril of the Earthpower would be diminished.

"You are Linden —"

"Just a minute." Without knowing what she did, she covered her ears to close out his words; as if she might cause them to be unsaid. "Give me a minute."

The Staff was lost? That explained —

It explained too much.

But it should have been impossible. Soon lost — People like Sunder and Hollian would not have been careless with something so precious. And after his defeat Lord Foul would have needed centuries, millennia, to recover his strength.

The touch of hope which she had felt earlier fell to ashes as she lowered her hands. Without the Staff of Law, the Land was effectively defenseless. Cryptic evils like the caesures and Kevin's Dirt might prove as ruinous as the Sunbane had ever been.

You see? It was Linden's belief that these new evils arose because the Staff was lost: because there was nobody in the Land who could use Earthpower to prevent them. Yet the reason the Staff was lost for so long is that Linden herself removed it from its hiding-place in the Land.

Your out of bounds telling me my point is not the point. It's the point of my reply because I say it's the point. Thank you.

I wasn't talking about that. I mean that you missed Linden's point. Which I have pointed out in detail above, so that you may not miss it a second time.

Anyway, I know that that alternate timeline never happened. What I am saying is that there's no way you or I can assume that Linden's action to remove the Staff didn't avert a worse disaster. It may have been the best possible outcome.

That's pure wishful thinking, and I can see no warrant for it in the text.

My personal suspicion is that Linden is setting herself up to be another Hile Troy, only with far worse consequences this time.

You don't understand Hile Troy then. He was an Anti-Covenant. He wasn't a Landwaster. Linden's already learned too much from Covenant to be a Hile Troy. And besides, Donaldson already told that story once.

You don't understand metaphors. I do not mean that Linden will be a danger to the Land in the same way that Hile Troy was, or that her failure will be of a similar kind. What I mean is this: Because she trusts her own power too much, she lacks the wisdom to see that certain things cannot be accomplished by any given power. She cannot do things that are self-contradictory.

To scale things down to 'real-world' time, if you walk away from your job for 10 years, no matter how well you prepared for your departure at the time, you can't come back and expect everything still to be going according to plan.

Yes, I definitely and willfully can.

No, you can't. Because if you walked away for those 10 years, you were not on the job. That's what the expression 'walk away from your job' means. You cannot be both doing your job and not doing your job at the same time.

Law rules Time, Time does not rule Law. Therefore, the work that the Staff does to uphold Law doesn't have to be constrained to operate only in the Staff's present. Like caesures, it's Sphere of influence could span Time, and would be bound only by when it was created and when/if it is destroyed. It doesn't need to exist in those 3000 years to protect them. The Staff is part Elohim -- just like Esmer - Time need not be an obstacle to it.

Sophistry. In the Land, the most important Law is the Law of Time. And if the Staff need not be present to uphold the Law, then the first Staff, though destroyed over 6000 years ago, should still be doing its work; or else the second Staff, though not made until 3000 years ago, should have been able to project its power into the past. Either way, the Sunbane never happened. That directly contradicts the story as we know it, so your hypothesis must not be correct. QED.

So if I leave my job for ten years, but I maintain my influence over the job for the whole ten years via my wireless phone, everything could remain ok.

If you are doing your job by wireless phone, that is exactly the same as if you were doing it in person. (Assuming it's a job that can be done that way. If not, the phone won't help and your example falls down.) Lots of people telecommute; that doesn't mean they are on vacation. You are playing fast and loose with the definition of terms, and thereby stretching analogies to cases they were never meant to fit.

I repeat: Linden herself perceived that the absence of the Staff allowed the new evils to grow. And Linden herself, by going back in time to remove the Staff, caused the Staff to be absent.

By the way, it is irrelevant to claim that it continued to exist during those 3000 years because it was travelling through the caesure. For one thing, a caesure appears to be sort of an event horizon. Things go in, but normally they do not come out — including Earthpower. Without a special power to perceive temporal effects, such as the Ranyhyn (and apparently the Demondim) possess, anything inside a caesure is as good as gone, until it emerges at the other end. They are somewhat analogous to wormholes in this respect.

But even that is a moot point. Suppose the Staff existed during the whole 3000 years, travelling through the caesure. The trouble is that it was in Linden's hands for that whole time, and she never used it. Its power was not accessible to anyone else, and was not used to defend the Land. So the Earthpower became corrupted again.

[ur-bane]

By the way, it is irrelevant to claim that it continued to exist during those 3000 years because it was travelling through the caesure. For one thing, a caesure appears to be sort of an event horizon. Things go in, but normally they do not come out — including Earthpower. Without a special power to perceive temporal effects, such as the Ranyhyn (and apparently the Demondim) possess, anything inside a caesure is as good as gone, until it emerges at the other end. They are somewhat analogous to wormholes in this respect.

But even that is a moot point. Suppose the Staff existed during the whole 3000 years, travelling through the caesure. The trouble is that it was in Linden's hands for that whole time, and she never used it. Its power was not accessible to anyone else, and was not used to defend the Land. So the Earthpower became corrupted again.

The trouble with this is that you are overlooking one important aspect of the caesure and Linden's travels through it.

Caesures encompass all moments of time that have ever passed in their ambit at once. But someone "travelling" through a caesure does not experience all those moments. Linden left one moment, and arrived 3000 years in the past, at one specific moment. She then spent several consecutive moments searching for, and retrieving, the Staff. On her return, she arrived at another specific moment. But she did not travel to/experience any other moments.

What I am trying to say is that Linden traveled to the past after the "new evils began to grow." In the moment she left, the evils were already there, but the Staff had not yet traveled through the caesure with her. Therefore, when she arrived in the Land, the Staff was not "absent" by Linden's hand. It was still just "lost" by Anele.(Which we find was actually "taken" by the waynhim.) And it then follows that Linden's actions are the result rather than the cause of the "evils."
Now, when she returned, then and only then could the "new" absence be felt. Because the moment of time during which Linden removed the Staff has now passed through its ambit.

[I'm Murrin]

By your arguiment, ur-bane, then time can be altered, alternate futures occur wherein the staff was taken. Linden arrived in a Land where the staff was lost, but when she travelled back into the future it was into a Land where the staff had been gone completely because of her. Altering history in such a way that there were two different futures would surely break the Law of Time, so it is logical to conclude that the Land into which Linden first came was one where she had already removed the staff.

[Cail]

Well thank God she was able to make sure her parents met and fell in love, otherwise she never would have existed.

Oh wait, that was Back To The Future......

[ur-bane]

By your arguiment, ur-bane, then time can be altered, alternate futures occur wherein the staff was taken. Linden arrived in a Land where the staff was lost, but when she travelled back into the future it was into a Land where the staff had been gone completely because of her. Altering history in such a way that there were two different futures would surely break the Law of Time, so it is logical to conclude that the Land into which Linden first came was one where she had already removed the staff.

Not at all. Linden did not alter the past in that way. What she did was insert a moment. All the moments prior to and after her new moment still existed as they were.
The alteration does not take place during the 3000 year interval, but after the 3000 year interval.

Because the moments after her taking of the staff had already existed, Linden did in fact create a new timeline. This in itself is an attack on the law of time. But in order for a caesure to travel through time, multiple timelines have to already exist. She simply added another string in the weave.



And even if the new timeline is not a tangent to the inserted moment, as in the image, the "new" moments created after her removal of the Staff would simply push the existing moments further up the same timeline. But they would still exist as they were.

[wayfriend]

Let me quote exactly where Linden perceived that the absence of the Staff itself was a catastrophe:

You're mistake in a nutshell. This is where Linden thought the Staff was lost - as in, gone, destroyed, fell into Fouls hands, disappeared, irredeemably, hoplessly, ain't coming back, L-O-S-T. She had no way at that time of imagining it was moved.

[Loredoctor]

so it is logical to conclude that the Land into which Linden first came was one where she had already removed the staff.

I agree with this.

Ur-Bane - I think we may be over analysing this, and falling into the same 'time paradox' discussion. It may just be that Linden was fated to take the staff, therefore removing it from the past. She simply fulfilled her destiny.

[Variol Farseer]

Let me quote exactly where Linden perceived that the absence of the Staff itself was a catastrophe:

You're mistake in a nutshell. This is where Linden thought the Staff was lost - as in, gone, destroyed, fell into Fouls hands, disappeared, irredeemably, hoplessly, ain't coming back, L-O-S-T. She had no way at that time of imagining it was moved.

That was HER mistake, not mine. And it doesn't matter, because the whole point is that the Staff was not available to be used. It doesn't matter whether it was moved, lost, or destroyed: any of those things would prevent it from being used to defend the Earthpower.

You just aren't getting my point, and I'm beginning to think you are incapable of it. Either that, or you're stonewalling because you're incapable of admitting that your first guess was incorrect.

Either way, I'm sick of arguing with you. Forget it.

[Variol Farseer]

What I am trying to say is that Linden traveled to the past after the "new evils began to grow." In the moment she left, the evils were already there, but the Staff had not yet traveled through the caesure with her. Therefore, when she arrived in the Land, the Staff was not "absent" by Linden's hand. It was still just "lost" by Anele.(Which we find was actually "taken" by the waynhim.) And it then follows that Linden's actions are the result rather than the cause of the "evils."

They are in fact both. This is a classic time-travel paradox: A can be both the cause and the result of B. If it is possible to travel into the past, that in itself is a violation of the normal order of causality: because your arrival in the past, which is the effect of your travelling, occurs before your departure from the present, which is the cause.

So you can't base your argument on an either-or view of cause and effect.

Now, when she returned, then and only then could the "new" absence be felt. Because the moment of time during which Linden removed the Staff has now passed through its ambit.

You are assuming the parallel existence of multiple timelines. I am not, and I don't think SRD is either. I contend that when Linden arrived in the Land, the Staff was missing because she was present 3000 years before to remove it via the caesure. And she was present because she rode the caesure back into the past.

I see no evidence at all that SRD deals in the idea of multiple timelines. Everything in Runes can be explained with a single timeline, and unless something different turns up, Occam's Razor demands that we stick with that.

For a classic example of what I'm on about, read the Heinlein story 'All You Zombies'. It deals with time-travel paradoxes on a single timeline, and all the issues being discussed here come up in a much simpler form.

Or if that's too much, check out the time-travel paradoxes in Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, which are handled in essentially the same way.

[Loredoctor]

Edit

[dlbpharmd]

Whoa, let's step back a bit here. There has been condescension from more than one member lately so let's not tell anyone to leave Runes forum, OK?

I'm going to temporarily lock this thread to allow some time for tempers to cool, before this gets out of hand.

[dlbpharmd]

Unlocked, thanks everyone!

[Loredoctor]

Edited my post as VF and myself have sorted out things.