Times Without Number
Encyclopedia
Times Without Number is a time travel
/alternate history novel by John Brunner
.
: "Spoil of Yesterday" in #25, "The Word Not Written" in #26, and "The Fullness of Time" in #27.
In the same year, a considerably different version appeared as a fix-up
novel under the title "Times Without Number" which was published as an Ace Double together with "Destiny's Orbit" by David Grinnell (Donald A. Wollheim
).
In 1969, Ace Books published the book again, in a version considerably revised and expanded by Brunner, different from both the magazine stories and the 1962 novel.
under the command of the Duke of Parma
successfully invaded England in 1588. This success was especially due to Parma's second-in-command, the Earl of Barton - the illegitimate son of a Catholic Scottish nobleman, who entered the service of Spain and turned out to be one of the great military talents of history (at the end of the book it is explained why our history knows no such person).
After subduing England, Barton went on the Netherlands, where in a lightning campaign he put down their rebellion and perpetuated Spanish rule and the Catholic religion. At some unspecified later time Spain also managed to conquer and absorb its long-time rival France
. But while having their hands full in the north, the Spaniards neglected the defense of their own Iberian homeland, which was reconquered by Islamic forces of "The New Khalifate" (presumably linked to the Ottoman Empire
), reversing the reconquista
(Brunner provides no details on exactly how this happened).
Spanish refugees moved to Britain, which became the new base of their empire and whose inhabitants were gradually assimilated. Spanish displaced English, which barely survived as "a debased peasant tongue". The Spanish-speaking people of the capital Londres
called themselves "Imperials" rather than "Spaniards", and except for a few diehard English nationalists regarded the Armada's victory as a blessing.
Having already conquered South and Central America, the Empire did not have a great need of North America. Rather than conquer and colonize it themselves, the Imperials armed the Mohawk
s and encouraged them to embark on a great campaign of conquest until the Pacific. The Mohawk leaders, ruling from New Madrid (on the site of our New York City
) were taken into the Empire's highest nobility. However, other Native American
tribes felt resentful of Mohawk dominance and the European backing for it - a resentment which would turn out to have a crucial importance in the book's later part.
Meanwhile, in Europe the Habsburg Monarchy
transformed itself into the powerful "Confederacy of the East", ruling the whole of central and eastern Europe and becoming the long-lasting rival of the Londres-based Western Empire. In 1892, an Italian named Boromeo discovered the secret of time-travel, though otherwise the overall level of technology remained not much higher than it was in the 16th Century, with people traveling primarily on horseback and cities lit by open fires.
It was quickly realized that time-travel can become in effect a weapon of mass destruction, of which careless or ruthless use might undo the whole of present reality - and in particular, that it might provide the two great powers, locked in a long-lasting cold war
, with a means of utterly destroying each other (similar to nuclear weapons in our world). To avert this danger, use of time travel was strictly regulated by the carefully worded "Treaty of Prague
" and limited to two elite bodies - the Western Empire's "Society of Time" and its eastern counterpart - both of which are overseen by the Catholic Church in accordance to a special Papal Bull
(of which Brunner provides part of the Latin text). Both great powers want to preserve their monopoly of time-travel and are concerned about the attempts of Cathaian savants to achieve it (much as, at the time of writing, Americans and Soviets tried to avert Chinese achievement of nuclear arms).
Though slavery still exists, and democracy never appeared, the dominant Catholic Church is less intolerant and harsh than it was at the time of the Armada. Protestantism, surviving only in Scandinavia, is regarded more with curiosity than hostility, and though the Inquisition
still exists it has long since abandoned the use of torture in favor of hypnotism. Moreover, there is mention of a movement for Women's equality, at least among upper-class women. (Swedish women are mentioned as more assertive than those of other countries - as they were famous for being, in our own world at the time of writing).
In all, the alternate 20th Century depicted by Brunner is significantly more humane than that in Keith Roberts
' " Pavane
", written a few years later and also based on a victory of the Spanish Armada.
, his host shows off a gold Aztec
mask she had recently received as a gift. Recognizing it instantly as contraband, Don Miguel launches an investigation that eventually leads to the unmasking and arrest of Don Arcimboldo Ruiz, a prominent nobleman (and a cunning and skillful villain) engaged in the illegal acquisition of goods from the past. Don Miguel is then entrusted with returning it to the exact spot in the past from which it was taken, in time for it to be used in the Aztec bloody rites of mass human sacrifice
- with which he is duty bound not to interfere but which leave him shaken. Because of his success, Don Miguel is honored and marked as a coming man.
Some time later, while attending a New Year's Eve ball at the palace of the Prince of New Castile, a prince of the blood
and the Commander of the Society of Time, Don Miguel meets Lady Kristina, the daughter of the Swedish ambassador. At her prompting, the two leave the party to explore the city of Londres
for themselves. While walking down one of the city's streets, however, they encounter an unusually dressed woman who proceeds to immobilize a number of men before Don Miguel is able to knock her unconscious (the reader can easily recognize that she is adept at some kind of martial art, but in Don Miguel's world these are unknown in the West).
Taking the woman to the Society's headquarters, he attempts to return to the prince's palace in search of Father Ramón, the society's master theoretician, but is stopped by a panicked mob clogging the streets. There he learns of the burning of the palace and the deaths of all of the assembled dignitaries at the hands of dozens of female warriors (transported, it turns out, from an alternate timeline in which a Mongol King rules all of Asia and Europe and which senior members of the Society of Time secretly contacted). After encountering Father Ramón, the two return to Society Headquarters, where they use a special cross-temporal Mass
to contact an earlier version of Father Ramón and prevent the massacre from taking place. However, though seeming to end well, the episode leaves Don Miguel with a mounting feeling of anxiety, having found out that his superiors engage in dangerous experiments and realizing by what a thin thread the entire reality he knows hangs.
Needing a vacation, Don Miguel travels to California, a backwater rarely visited by Europeans. While relaxing at a hacienda
near a local mine, his host, a Native American
engineer named Two Dogs, shows him a steel bit from a rock drill discovered in a recently started mine. (In this timeline, there had been no California Gold Rush
and gold mining is a govenmental monopoly.)
Fearing a violation of the treaty between the Empire and the Confederacy of the East
regulating time travel, Don Miguel alerts the Society, which launches a full-scale investigation. When Father Ramón arrives on the scene, however, he insists that no violation has taken place, even though a scouting expedition confirms that there is indeed a group from the 20th Century mining the land in the past. Traveling to the site, Don Miguel and Father Ramón converse with the leader of the group and convince him to end the operation; Father Ramón is clearly determined to defuse the tension and avoid at virtually any price an escalation in the two great powers' relations.
The reason for that becomes clear upon their return: Don Miguel finds out that the "discovery" had in fact been planted by Two Dogs, who is spearheading a conspiracy of anti-Mohawk native Americans
seeking to bring down the Empire, and who manipulate the Eastern Confederacy and make use of it but have their own far-reaching agenda. In the ensuing melee, Two Dogs escapes and Father Ramón is killed. It is assumed that, having failed in his carefully-crafted plot, Two Dogs would seek to travel into the past and deal the Empire's past a grieveous blow.
Determined to preserve their history, the Society sends Don Miguel and dozens of other Licentiates into the past to prevent Two Dogs from disrupting the pivotal event of the Armada, but while undercover in 1588 Cadiz
Don Miguel discovers to his horror that Two Dogs has already succeeded; Parma's second-in-command, the military genius Earl of Barton, no longer exists - having evidently been assassinated by two Dogs while still an obscure young adventurer - and Parma himself is no longer the commander of the fleet. Urgently rushing back to the present, Don Miguel hopes to still sound a last minute warning - but is overtaken by the forwardly proceeding wave of changing reality (a highly painful experience) and arrives not in New Madrid but its analogue, New York City
, emerging in Central Park
to the amazement of passers-by.
From this Don Miguel realizes that people of the changed timeline have no knowledge of time-travel, which would have given them a clear explanation for a man appearing out of thin air, and that he is the only person in this timeline who knows the secret of time travel. Reflecting upon this he concludes that timelines where time travels exists eventually collapse on themselves, when somebody changes the reality leading to the invention of time-travel itself. He decides to accept developments as God's will and to begin a new life as "the most lonely of all exiles" in the world where he now finds himself, keeping time travel a secret and never disclosing his knowledge of how to build a working time machine. And meanwhile, Two Dogs' ruthless act against the Empire turns out to have boomeranged against Two Dogs' own people, creating a timeline where Native Americans fared much worse than in the one he destroyed.
Time travel
Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the...
/alternate history novel by John Brunner
John Brunner (novelist)
John Kilian Houston Brunner was a prolific British author of science fiction novels and stories. His 1968 novel Stand on Zanzibar, about an overpopulated world, won the 1968 Hugo Award for best science fiction novel. It also won the BSFA award the same year...
.
Publication History
Originally Brunner wrote three stories published in 1962 in consecutive issues of the British magazine Science Fiction AdventuresScience Fiction Adventures
Science Fiction Adventures may refer to one of several science fiction magazines.* Science Fiction Adventures , an American magazine published between 1952 and 1954...
: "Spoil of Yesterday" in #25, "The Word Not Written" in #26, and "The Fullness of Time" in #27.
In the same year, a considerably different version appeared as a fix-up
Fix-up
A fix-up is a novel created from short stories that may or may not have been initially related or previously published. The stories may be edited for consistency, and sometimes new connecting material—such as a frame story—is written for the new novel. The term was coined by the science fiction...
novel under the title "Times Without Number" which was published as an Ace Double together with "Destiny's Orbit" by David Grinnell (Donald A. Wollheim
Donald A. Wollheim
Donald Allen Wollheim was an American science fiction ' editor, publisher, writer, and fan. As an author, he published under his own name as well as under pseudonyms, including David Grinnell....
).
In 1969, Ace Books published the book again, in a version considerably revised and expanded by Brunner, different from both the magazine stories and the 1962 novel.
Historical background to the plot
The book's plot takes place in the years 1988-1989 in a timeline where the Spanish ArmadaSpanish Armada
This article refers to the Battle of Gravelines, for the modern navy of Spain, see Spanish NavyThe Spanish Armada was the Spanish fleet that sailed against England under the command of the Duke of Medina Sidonia in 1588, with the intention of overthrowing Elizabeth I of England to stop English...
under the command of the Duke of Parma
Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma
Alexander Farnese was Duke of Parma and Piacenza from 1586 to 1592, and Governor of the Spanish Netherlands from 1578 to 1592.-Biography:...
successfully invaded England in 1588. This success was especially due to Parma's second-in-command, the Earl of Barton - the illegitimate son of a Catholic Scottish nobleman, who entered the service of Spain and turned out to be one of the great military talents of history (at the end of the book it is explained why our history knows no such person).
After subduing England, Barton went on the Netherlands, where in a lightning campaign he put down their rebellion and perpetuated Spanish rule and the Catholic religion. At some unspecified later time Spain also managed to conquer and absorb its long-time rival France
France
The French Republic , The French Republic , The French Republic , (commonly known as France , is a unitary semi-presidential republic in Western Europe with several overseas territories and islands located on other continents and in the Indian, Pacific, and Atlantic oceans. Metropolitan France...
. But while having their hands full in the north, the Spaniards neglected the defense of their own Iberian homeland, which was reconquered by Islamic forces of "The New Khalifate" (presumably linked to the Ottoman Empire
Ottoman Empire
The Ottoman EmpireIt was usually referred to as the "Ottoman Empire", the "Turkish Empire", the "Ottoman Caliphate" or more commonly "Turkey" by its contemporaries...
), reversing the reconquista
Reconquista
The Reconquista was a period of almost 800 years in the Middle Ages during which several Christian kingdoms succeeded in retaking the Muslim-controlled areas of the Iberian Peninsula broadly known as Al-Andalus...
(Brunner provides no details on exactly how this happened).
Spanish refugees moved to Britain, which became the new base of their empire and whose inhabitants were gradually assimilated. Spanish displaced English, which barely survived as "a debased peasant tongue". The Spanish-speaking people of the capital Londres
Londres
Londres may refer to:* Londres, the French, Portuguese, Spanish and Tagalog language name for London, capital of the United Kingdom* Londres, Catamarca, Argentina, formally 'San Juan de la Ribera de Londres' or 'Londres de la Nueva Inglaterra'...
called themselves "Imperials" rather than "Spaniards", and except for a few diehard English nationalists regarded the Armada's victory as a blessing.
Having already conquered South and Central America, the Empire did not have a great need of North America. Rather than conquer and colonize it themselves, the Imperials armed the Mohawk
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
s and encouraged them to embark on a great campaign of conquest until the Pacific. The Mohawk leaders, ruling from New Madrid (on the site of our New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
) were taken into the Empire's highest nobility. However, other Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
tribes felt resentful of Mohawk dominance and the European backing for it - a resentment which would turn out to have a crucial importance in the book's later part.
Meanwhile, in Europe the Habsburg Monarchy
Habsburg Monarchy
The Habsburg Monarchy covered the territories ruled by the junior Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg , and then by the successor House of Habsburg-Lorraine , between 1526 and 1867/1918. The Imperial capital was Vienna, except from 1583 to 1611, when it was moved to Prague...
transformed itself into the powerful "Confederacy of the East", ruling the whole of central and eastern Europe and becoming the long-lasting rival of the Londres-based Western Empire. In 1892, an Italian named Boromeo discovered the secret of time-travel, though otherwise the overall level of technology remained not much higher than it was in the 16th Century, with people traveling primarily on horseback and cities lit by open fires.
It was quickly realized that time-travel can become in effect a weapon of mass destruction, of which careless or ruthless use might undo the whole of present reality - and in particular, that it might provide the two great powers, locked in a long-lasting cold war
Cold War
The Cold War was the continuing state from roughly 1946 to 1991 of political conflict, military tension, proxy wars, and economic competition between the Communist World—primarily the Soviet Union and its satellite states and allies—and the powers of the Western world, primarily the United States...
, with a means of utterly destroying each other (similar to nuclear weapons in our world). To avert this danger, use of time travel was strictly regulated by the carefully worded "Treaty of Prague
Prague
Prague is the capital and largest city of the Czech Republic. Situated in the north-west of the country on the Vltava river, the city is home to about 1.3 million people, while its metropolitan area is estimated to have a population of over 2.3 million...
" and limited to two elite bodies - the Western Empire's "Society of Time" and its eastern counterpart - both of which are overseen by the Catholic Church in accordance to a special Papal Bull
Papal bull
A Papal bull is a particular type of letters patent or charter issued by a Pope of the Catholic Church. It is named after the bulla that was appended to the end in order to authenticate it....
(of which Brunner provides part of the Latin text). Both great powers want to preserve their monopoly of time-travel and are concerned about the attempts of Cathaian savants to achieve it (much as, at the time of writing, Americans and Soviets tried to avert Chinese achievement of nuclear arms).
Though slavery still exists, and democracy never appeared, the dominant Catholic Church is less intolerant and harsh than it was at the time of the Armada. Protestantism, surviving only in Scandinavia, is regarded more with curiosity than hostility, and though the Inquisition
Inquisition
The Inquisition, Inquisitio Haereticae Pravitatis , was the "fight against heretics" by several institutions within the justice-system of the Roman Catholic Church. It started in the 12th century, with the introduction of torture in the persecution of heresy...
still exists it has long since abandoned the use of torture in favor of hypnotism. Moreover, there is mention of a movement for Women's equality, at least among upper-class women. (Swedish women are mentioned as more assertive than those of other countries - as they were famous for being, in our own world at the time of writing).
In all, the alternate 20th Century depicted by Brunner is significantly more humane than that in Keith Roberts
Keith Roberts
Keith John Kingston Roberts , was an English science fiction author. He began publishing with two stories in the September 1964 issue of Science Fantasy magazine, "Anita" and "Escapism.Several of his early stories were written using the pseudonym...
' " Pavane
Pavane (novel)
Pavane by Keith Roberts is an alternate history science fiction fix-up novel first published by Rupert Hart-Davis Ltd in 1968. Most of the original stories were published in Science Fantasy...
", written a few years later and also based on a victory of the Spanish Armada.
Plot summary
In 1988, Don Miguel Navarro is a "Licentiate in Ordinary" of the Society of Time. As a Licentiate, Don Miguel's primary duty is to ensure the preservation of history, lest an alteration undo the empire. While at a party held by the Marquesa di JorqueYork
York is a walled city, situated at the confluence of the Rivers Ouse and Foss in North Yorkshire, England. The city has a rich heritage and has provided the backdrop to major political events throughout much of its two millennia of existence...
, his host shows off a gold Aztec
Aztec
The Aztec people were certain ethnic groups of central Mexico, particularly those groups who spoke the Nahuatl language and who dominated large parts of Mesoamerica in the 14th, 15th and 16th centuries, a period referred to as the late post-classic period in Mesoamerican chronology.Aztec is the...
mask she had recently received as a gift. Recognizing it instantly as contraband, Don Miguel launches an investigation that eventually leads to the unmasking and arrest of Don Arcimboldo Ruiz, a prominent nobleman (and a cunning and skillful villain) engaged in the illegal acquisition of goods from the past. Don Miguel is then entrusted with returning it to the exact spot in the past from which it was taken, in time for it to be used in the Aztec bloody rites of mass human sacrifice
Human sacrifice
Human sacrifice is the act of killing one or more human beings as part of a religious ritual . Its typology closely parallels the various practices of ritual slaughter of animals and of religious sacrifice in general. Human sacrifice has been practised in various cultures throughout history...
- with which he is duty bound not to interfere but which leave him shaken. Because of his success, Don Miguel is honored and marked as a coming man.
Some time later, while attending a New Year's Eve ball at the palace of the Prince of New Castile, a prince of the blood
Prince du Sang
A prince of the blood was a person who was legitimately descended in the male line from the monarch of a country. In France, the rank of prince du sang was the highest held at court after the immediate family of the king during the ancien régime and the Bourbon Restoration...
and the Commander of the Society of Time, Don Miguel meets Lady Kristina, the daughter of the Swedish ambassador. At her prompting, the two leave the party to explore the city of Londres
London
London is the capital city of :England and the :United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its...
for themselves. While walking down one of the city's streets, however, they encounter an unusually dressed woman who proceeds to immobilize a number of men before Don Miguel is able to knock her unconscious (the reader can easily recognize that she is adept at some kind of martial art, but in Don Miguel's world these are unknown in the West).
Taking the woman to the Society's headquarters, he attempts to return to the prince's palace in search of Father Ramón, the society's master theoretician, but is stopped by a panicked mob clogging the streets. There he learns of the burning of the palace and the deaths of all of the assembled dignitaries at the hands of dozens of female warriors (transported, it turns out, from an alternate timeline in which a Mongol King rules all of Asia and Europe and which senior members of the Society of Time secretly contacted). After encountering Father Ramón, the two return to Society Headquarters, where they use a special cross-temporal Mass
Mass (liturgy)
"Mass" is one of the names by which the sacrament of the Eucharist is called in the Roman Catholic Church: others are "Eucharist", the "Lord's Supper", the "Breaking of Bread", the "Eucharistic assembly ", the "memorial of the Lord's Passion and Resurrection", the "Holy Sacrifice", the "Holy and...
to contact an earlier version of Father Ramón and prevent the massacre from taking place. However, though seeming to end well, the episode leaves Don Miguel with a mounting feeling of anxiety, having found out that his superiors engage in dangerous experiments and realizing by what a thin thread the entire reality he knows hangs.
Needing a vacation, Don Miguel travels to California, a backwater rarely visited by Europeans. While relaxing at a hacienda
Hacienda
Hacienda is a Spanish word for an estate. Some haciendas were plantations, mines, or even business factories. Many haciendas combined these productive activities...
near a local mine, his host, a Native American
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
engineer named Two Dogs, shows him a steel bit from a rock drill discovered in a recently started mine. (In this timeline, there had been no California Gold Rush
California Gold Rush
The California Gold Rush began on January 24, 1848, when gold was found by James W. Marshall at Sutter's Mill in Coloma, California. The first to hear confirmed information of the gold rush were the people in Oregon, the Sandwich Islands , and Latin America, who were the first to start flocking to...
and gold mining is a govenmental monopoly.)
Fearing a violation of the treaty between the Empire and the Confederacy of the East
Habsburg Monarchy
The Habsburg Monarchy covered the territories ruled by the junior Austrian branch of the House of Habsburg , and then by the successor House of Habsburg-Lorraine , between 1526 and 1867/1918. The Imperial capital was Vienna, except from 1583 to 1611, when it was moved to Prague...
regulating time travel, Don Miguel alerts the Society, which launches a full-scale investigation. When Father Ramón arrives on the scene, however, he insists that no violation has taken place, even though a scouting expedition confirms that there is indeed a group from the 20th Century mining the land in the past. Traveling to the site, Don Miguel and Father Ramón converse with the leader of the group and convince him to end the operation; Father Ramón is clearly determined to defuse the tension and avoid at virtually any price an escalation in the two great powers' relations.
The reason for that becomes clear upon their return: Don Miguel finds out that the "discovery" had in fact been planted by Two Dogs, who is spearheading a conspiracy of anti-Mohawk native Americans
Indigenous peoples of the Americas
The indigenous peoples of the Americas are the pre-Columbian inhabitants of North and South America, their descendants and other ethnic groups who are identified with those peoples. Indigenous peoples are known in Canada as Aboriginal peoples, and in the United States as Native Americans...
seeking to bring down the Empire, and who manipulate the Eastern Confederacy and make use of it but have their own far-reaching agenda. In the ensuing melee, Two Dogs escapes and Father Ramón is killed. It is assumed that, having failed in his carefully-crafted plot, Two Dogs would seek to travel into the past and deal the Empire's past a grieveous blow.
Determined to preserve their history, the Society sends Don Miguel and dozens of other Licentiates into the past to prevent Two Dogs from disrupting the pivotal event of the Armada, but while undercover in 1588 Cadiz
Cádiz
Cadiz is a city and port in southwestern Spain. It is the capital of the homonymous province, one of eight which make up the autonomous community of Andalusia....
Don Miguel discovers to his horror that Two Dogs has already succeeded; Parma's second-in-command, the military genius Earl of Barton, no longer exists - having evidently been assassinated by two Dogs while still an obscure young adventurer - and Parma himself is no longer the commander of the fleet. Urgently rushing back to the present, Don Miguel hopes to still sound a last minute warning - but is overtaken by the forwardly proceeding wave of changing reality (a highly painful experience) and arrives not in New Madrid but its analogue, New York City
New York City
New York is the most populous city in the United States and the center of the New York Metropolitan Area, one of the most populous metropolitan areas in the world. New York exerts a significant impact upon global commerce, finance, media, art, fashion, research, technology, education, and...
, emerging in Central Park
Central Park
Central Park is a public park in the center of Manhattan in New York City, United States. The park initially opened in 1857, on of city-owned land. In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted and Calvert Vaux won a design competition to improve and expand the park with a plan they entitled the Greensward Plan...
to the amazement of passers-by.
From this Don Miguel realizes that people of the changed timeline have no knowledge of time-travel, which would have given them a clear explanation for a man appearing out of thin air, and that he is the only person in this timeline who knows the secret of time travel. Reflecting upon this he concludes that timelines where time travels exists eventually collapse on themselves, when somebody changes the reality leading to the invention of time-travel itself. He decides to accept developments as God's will and to begin a new life as "the most lonely of all exiles" in the world where he now finds himself, keeping time travel a secret and never disclosing his knowledge of how to build a working time machine. And meanwhile, Two Dogs' ruthless act against the Empire turns out to have boomeranged against Two Dogs' own people, creating a timeline where Native Americans fared much worse than in the one he destroyed.