However, regardless of their skills, the up-time physicians routinely cursed themselves upon losing a patient, as if they expected the power of the Creator Himself to be manifest every time they treated a patient. And this, Ruy realized as his wife continued to squeeze his hand tightly, was the key to the up-timers’ “risk-aversion”: they had become utterly unaccustomed to taking the chances that were unavoidable in this “down-time” world. Most of the threats they faced now had been eliminated by the sciences of their future world, so they had to continually remind themselves that they were dwelling in a much more dangerous time-and that adjustment did not come easily to most of them.
As an attitude, it shared common psychological roots with the frustration he had observed among many of the more accomplished up-timers. Although they did not intend to demean down-timers or the technical limitations of the world of 1635, one could often hear Americans mutter deprecations upon its crude tools, interspersed with bitter longing for the devices of the future. Except, of course, that the future they remembered would never come to pass, now. In their world, no American town had ever arrived in the midst of the Thirty Years’ War, radically changing its outcome, and the history and technology of Europe along with it. So whatever the coming days held, they would not lead to the future the Americans had come from. Their own arrival had undone the possibility that the world they called home would ever exist.