經典科幻文學:《生命 宇宙及一切》第17章

Chapter 17
Time travel is increasingly regarded as a menace. History is being polluted.
The Encyclopedia Galactica has much to say on the theory and practice of time travel, most of which is incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t spent at least four lifetimes studying advanced hypermathematics, and since it was impossible to do this before time travel was invented, there is a certain amount of confusion as to how the idea was arrived at in the first place. One rationalization of this problem states that time travel was, by its very nature, discovered simultaneously at all periods of history, but this is clearly bunk.
The trouble is that a lot of history is now quite clearly bunk as well.
Here is an example. It may not seem to be an important one to some people, but to others it is crucial. It is certainly significant in that it was the single event which caused the Campaign for Real Time to be set up in the first place (or is it last? It depends which way round you see history as happening, and this too is now an increasingly vexed question).
There is, or was, a poet. His name was Lallafa, and he wrote what are widely regarded throughout the Galaxy as being the finest poems in existence, the Songs of the Long Land.
They are/were unspeakably wonderful. That is to say, you couldn’t speak very much of them at once without being so overcome with emotion, truth and a sense of wholeness and oneness of things that you wouldn’t pretty soon need a brisk walk round the block, possibly pausing at a bar on the way back for a quick glass of perspective and soda. They were that good.
Lallafa had lived in the forests of the Long Lands of Effa. He lived there, and he wrote his poems there. He wrote them on pages made of dried habra leaves, without the benefit of education or correcting fluid. He wrote about the light in the forest and what he thought about that. He wrote about the darkness in the forest, and what he thought about that. He wrote about the girl who had left him and precisely what he thought about that.
Long after his death his poems were found and wondered over. News of them spread like morning sunlight. For centuries they illuminated and watered the lives of many people whose lives might otherwise have been darker and drier.
Then, shortly after the invention of time travel, some major correcting fluid manufacturers wondered whether his poems might have been better still if he had had access to some high-quality correcting fluid, and whether he might be persuaded to say a few words on that effect.
They travelled the time waves, they found him, they explained the situation with some difficulty to him, and did indeed persuade him. In fact they persuaded him to such an effect that he became extremely rich at their hands, and the girl about whom he was otherwise destined to write which such precision never got around to leaving him, and in fact they moved out of the forest to a rather nice pad in town and he frequently commuted to the future to do chat shows, on which he sparkled wittily.
He never got around to writing the poems, of course, which was a problem, but an easily solved one. The manufacturers of correcting fluid simply packed him off for a week somewhere with a copy of a later edition of his book and a stack of dried habra leaves to copy them out on to, making the odd deliberate mistake and correction on the way.
Many people now say that the poems are suddenly worthless. Others argue that they are exactly the same as they always were, so what’s changed? The first people say that that isn’t the point. They aren’t quite sure what the point is, but they are quite sure that that isn’t it. They set up the Campaign for Real Time to try to stop this sort of thing going on. Their case was considerably strengthened by the fact that a week after they had set themselves up, news broke that not only had the great Cathedral of Chalesm been pulled down in order to build a new ion refinery, but that the construction of the refinery had taken so long, and had had to extend so far back into the past in order to allow ion production to start on time, that the Cathedral of Chalesm had now never been built in the first place. Picture postcards of the cathedral suddenly became immensely valuable.
So a lot of history is now gone for ever. The Campaign for Real Timers claim that just as easy travel eroded the differences between one country and another, and between one world and another, so time travel is now eroding the differences between one age and another.
The past, they say, is now truly like a foreign country. They do things exactly the same there.

17
時間旅行是越來越不像話了。歷史正在被污染。
關於時間旅行的理論和實踐，《銀河系百科全書》講了很多。這些內容相當深奧，不學上八輩子的高等超級數學，是根本無法理解的。在時間旅行發明之前，人們做不到這一點，所以人們都很疑惑：時間旅行這個主意是怎麼想出來的？有一種合理化的解釋認爲，時間旅行是在同一時間、在歷史的所有時期自己被發現的。這種解釋顯然是胡扯。
麻煩的是，現在很多歷史顯然也是胡扯。
舉個例子。這個例子，對於有些人可能不算什麼，但對於有些人則至關重要。這件事是如此意義重大，正是因爲它，導致了真實時間運動的首次發起（或是末次發起？要看你從哪個方向觀察歷史，這又是一個越來越糾纏不清的問題）。
有一位，或曾有一位詩人，他的名字叫拉拉法。他寫出了被尊爲銀河系史上最優秀的作品——《長陸組歌》。
那些詩歌真是（曾是）好得難以言喻。這就是說，只有經歷瞭如下情況，你才能言喻它：歷盡了感情和現實的磨難，感受過事物的整體性和統一性，你需要立刻到街上散散心，或許在歸途中、再到酒吧裏啜一杯純純的蘇打水，那些詩就有這麼好。
拉拉法住在埃法星上、長陸的森林裏。他在那兒生活，在那兒寫詩。他把詩寫在風乾的哈布拉葉片上，沒有刪改的痕跡，也沒用過修正液。他寫了森林裏的光明和他對此的感受。他寫了森林裏的黑暗，和他對此的感受。他寫了離開自己的女孩，和他對此的切身感受。
在他辭世多年之後，那些詩被人發現，廣爲流傳。它們像曙光一樣普照四方。多少個世紀以來，他的詩照亮了、澆灌了無數人的心田——不然，他們的心田便會更黑暗、更乾涸些了。
後來，時間旅行剛剛發明不久的時候，一些名牌修正液製造商便很好奇：假如他擁有高質量的修正液，他的詩會不會更好呢？他願不願意就修正液的功能談點什麼呢？
他們便回溯時間，找到了他，說明了情況——儘管有點難度——並且說服了他。實際上，他們搬說服他搬出了森林，住到小鎮上的一座豪宅裏。他還常常連線到未來世界，做一些訪談節目。在節目中，他妙語連珠，談笑風生。
他再也沒寫過詩。當然，這成了一個問題，但很好解決。修正液製造商們只要每週送他到一個地方，給他一本他自己作品的最新版本，以及一疊風乾的哈布拉葉片。他就把作品謄上去，抄寫中還要故意犯點怪怪的小錯誤。
這時，很多人認爲，那些詩已經不再有價值了。另一些人則堅持認爲，它們與以前完全一樣，有什麼不同呢？那邊的人又說，這不是重點。他們也不知什麼是重點，但他們敢肯定決非這個。他們發起了“真實時間運動”，要阻止這種事再次發生。一週之後，另一事件的發生，激化了這一運動——爲了修建一間離子提煉廠，夏爾森大教堂要被拆掉了。由於提煉廠工期太長，需要將修建時間往回推很久，以便讓離子生產按時開工。最後，夏爾森大教堂變成根本不曾存在過了。這麼一來，印有大教堂照片的明信片驟然巨幅升值。
就這樣，很多的歷史永遠消失了。真實時間運動成員宣稱這很簡單，正如旅行消解了不同國家、不同星球之間的界限，時間旅行正是消解着不同時代的界限。
“過去的世界，”他們說，“如今就像外國一樣。那兒和咱們這兒沒什麼不同。”