经典科幻文学:《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
时间旅行是越来越不像话了。历史正在被污染。
关于时间旅行的理论和实践，《银河系百科全书》讲了很多。这些内容相当深奥，不学上八辈子的高等超级数学，是根本无法理解的。在时间旅行发明之前，人们做不到这一点，所以人们都很疑惑：时间旅行这个主意是怎么想出来的？有一种合理化的解释认为，时间旅行是在同一时间、在历史的所有时期自己被发现的。这种解释显然是胡扯。
麻烦的是，现在很多历史显然也是胡扯。
举个例子。这个例子，对于有些人可能不算什么，但对于有些人则至关重要。这件事是如此意义重大，正是因为它，导致了真实时间运动的首次发起（或是末次发起？要看你从哪个方向观察历史，这又是一个越来越纠缠不清的问题）。
有一位，或曾有一位诗人，他的名字叫拉拉法。他写出了被尊为银河系史上最优秀的作品——《长陆组歌》。
那些诗歌真是（曾是）好得难以言喻。这就是说，只有经历了如下情况，你才能言喻它：历尽了感情和现实的磨难，感受过事物的整体性和统一性，你需要立刻到街上散散心，或许在归途中、再到酒吧里啜一杯纯纯的苏打水，那些诗就有这么好。
拉拉法住在埃法星上、长陆的森林里。他在那儿生活，在那儿写诗。他把诗写在风干的哈布拉叶片上，没有删改的痕迹，也没用过修正液。他写了森林里的光明和他对此的感受。他写了森林里的黑暗，和他对此的感受。他写了离开自己的女孩，和他对此的切身感受。
在他辞世多年之后，那些诗被人发现，广为流传。它们像曙光一样普照四方。多少个世纪以来，他的诗照亮了、浇灌了无数人的心田——不然，他们的心田便会更黑暗、更干涸些了。
后来，时间旅行刚刚发明不久的时候，一些名牌修正液制造商便很好奇：假如他拥有高质量的修正液，他的诗会不会更好呢？他愿不愿意就修正液的功能谈点什么呢？
他们便回溯时间，找到了他，说明了情况——尽管有点难度——并且说服了他。实际上，他们搬说服他搬出了森林，住到小镇上的一座豪宅里。他还常常连线到未来世界，做一些访谈节目。在节目中，他妙语连珠，谈笑风生。
他再也没写过诗。当然，这成了一个问题，但很好解决。修正液制造商们只要每周送他到一个地方，给他一本他自己作品的最新版本，以及一叠风干的哈布拉叶片。他就把作品誊上去，抄写中还要故意犯点怪怪的小错误。
这时，很多人认为，那些诗已经不再有价值了。另一些人则坚持认为，它们与以前完全一样，有什么不同呢？那边的人又说，这不是重点。他们也不知什么是重点，但他们敢肯定决非这个。他们发起了“真实时间运动”，要阻止这种事再次发生。一周之后，另一事件的发生，激化了这一运动——为了修建一间离子提炼厂，夏尔森大教堂要被拆掉了。由于提炼厂工期太长，需要将修建时间往回推很久，以便让离子生产按时开工。最后，夏尔森大教堂变成根本不曾存在过了。这么一来，印有大教堂照片的明信片骤然巨幅升值。
就这样，很多的历史永远消失了。真实时间运动成员宣称这很简单，正如旅行消解了不同国家、不同星球之间的界限，时间旅行正是消解着不同时代的界限。
“过去的世界，”他们说，“如今就像外国一样。那儿和咱们这儿没什么不同。”