Alternate Heroes

by Gregory Benford

  What Might Have Been

  VOLUME 2

  ALTERNATE HEROES

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Gregory Benford

  A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING

  Robert Silverberg

  THE OLD MAN AND C

  Sheila Finch

  THE LAST ARTICLE

  Harry Turtledove

  MULES IN HORSES’ HARNESS

  Michael Cassutt

  LENIN IN ODESSA

  George Zebrowski

  ABE LINCOLN IN MCDONALD’S

  James Morrow

  ANOTHER GODDAMNED SHOWBOAT

  Barry N Malzberg

  LOOSE CANNON

  Susan Shwartz

  A LETTER FROM THE POPE

  Harry Harrison and Tom Shippey

  RONCESVALLES

  Judith Tarr

  HIS POWDER’D WIG, HIS CROWN OF THORNES

  Marc Laidlaw

  DEPARTURES

  Harry Turtledove

  INSTABILITY

  Rudy Rucker and Paul Di Filippo

  NO SPOT OF GROUND

  Walter Jon Williams

  INTRODUCTION

  Poignant questions resound through history, beginning with that wistful phrase, if only….

  If only Kennedy had lived. If only Hitler had died in World War I. If only the Muslims had conquered Europe. If only a minor commander had not ordered the library at Alexandria burned, cutting us off from thousands of great works of antiquity….

  So many questions turn upon the presence of a particular figure at a crucial moment. Or do they?

  Do individuals matter? Did Napoleon truly shape the failing French Revolution into a dynamic, military phase by the strength of his personality? Or would some similar minor officer of the artillery have sufficed? Later revolutions seem to show a similar pattern, leading inevitably to a man on a white horse who resorts to military control while damping the political ardor which started it all; think of Stalin, Mao, Castro. Were they essentially replaceable?

  Nobody knows, of course, for history performs no repeatable experiments. But such riddles frame our own deep suspicions that perhaps even the currently high-and-mighty are but flotsam carried on the river of time, revealing the current’s passing but unable to deflect the stream of events in the slightest.

  This is the second volume exploring the fragility of history. The first, subtitled Alternate Empires, considered the importance of great events. This volume ponders the role of the Great Man (or Woman). Both are collections of original, commissioned fiction devoted to refashioning history in a logical manner, to exploring what could or might have been.

  The theme has a considerable history itself. The question of Napoleon’s role goes back to Louis-Napoleon Geoffroy-Chateau’s Napoleon and the Conquest of the World, 1812-1823. This nationalist vision, published in 1836, told how a crucial decision to not tarry in Moscow as winter drew on saved the French forces. Napoleon then had the entire planet on the run and established a lasting world empire. In a sense the book argues that a slightly different Napoleon would have made all the difference. It does not call into question whether Great Men really matter.

  Historians give no clear answer to this question. The appeal of the notion lies in our suspicion that some crucial figures have great leverage, yet seeming inconsequentialities can be the fulcrum.

  Given the theme of what might have been, and all the vivid figures of history, our authors could write whatever they liked. Interestingly, two of the three women authors take military figures as critical. The third, Sheila Finch, considers the quieter and probably more profound changes wrought by an ex-employee of the Swiss Patent Office. As we might have expected, the American Civil War remains a vexing matter, yielding three tales with very different approaches.

  In the end, there will always be a plausible argument for the impersonality of great historical movements. It probably did not matter whether Columbus or some other southern European sailed westward at the historically ripe moment. But were the extraordinary victories of Cortez inevitable? Sometimes, people really do matter. Our pains and pleasures carry weight.

  Or so we would like to think. We hope you will find this range of imaginative experiments thought-provoking and perhaps even unsettling.

  —GREGORY BENFORD

  A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING

  Robert Silverberg

  “Channeling?” I said. “For Christ’s sake, Joe! You brought me all the way down here for dumb bullshit like that?”

  “This isn’t channeling,” Joe said.

  “The kid who drove me from the airport said you’ve got a machine that can talk with dead people.”

  A slow, angry flush spread across Joe’s face. He’s a small, compact man with very glossy skin and very sharp features, and when he’s annoyed he inflates like a puff-adder.

  “He shouldn’t have said that.”

  “Is that what you’re doing here?” I asked. “Some sort of channeling experiments?”

  “Forget that shithead word, will you, Mike?” Joe sounded impatient and irritable. But there was an odd fluttery look in his eye, conveying—what? Uncertainty? Vulnerability? Those were traits I hadn’t ever associated with Joe Hedley, not in the thirty years we’d known each other. “We aren’t sure what the fuck we’re doing here,” he said. “We thought maybe you could tell us.”

  “Me?”

  “You, yes. Here, put the helmet on. Come on, put it on, Mike. Put it on. Please.”

  I stared. Nothing ever changes. Ever since we were kids Joe’s been using me for one cockeyed thing or another, because he knows he can count on me to give him a sober-minded commonsense opinion. Always bouncing this bizarre scheme or that off me, so he can measure the caroms.

  The helmet was a golden strip of wire mesh studded with a row of microwave pickups the size of a dime and flanked by a pair of suction electrodes that fit over the temples. It looked like some vagrant piece of death-house equipment.

  I ran my fingers over it. “How much curent is this thing capable of sending through my head?”

  He looked even angrier. “Oh, fuck you, you hypercautious bastard! Would I ever ask you to do anything that could harm you?”

  With a patient little sigh I said, “Okay. How do I do this?”

  “Ear to ear, over the top of your head. I’ll adjust the electrodes for you.”

  “You won’t tell me what any of this is all about?”

  “I want an uncontaminated response. That’s science talk, Mike. I’m a scientist. You know that, don’t you?”

  “So that’s what you are. I wondered.”

  Joe bustled about above me, moving the helmet around, pressing the electrodes against my skull.

  “How does it fit?”

  “Like a glove.”

  “You always wear your gloves on your head?” he asked.

  “You must be goddamn nervous if you think that’s funny.”

  “I am,” he said. “You must be too, if you take a line like that seriously. But I tell you that you won’t get hurt. I promise you that, Mike.”

  “All right.”

  “Just sit down here. We need to check the impedances, and then we can get going.”

  “I wish I understood at least a little bit about—”

  “Please,” he said. He gestured through a glass partition at a technician in the adjoining room, and she began to do things with dials and switches. This was turning into a movie, a very silly one, full of mad doctors in white jackets and sputtering electrical gadgets. The tinkering went on and on, and I felt myself passing beyond apprehension and annoyance into a kind of gray realm of Zen serenity, the way I sometimes do while sitting in the dentist’s chair waiting fo
r the scraping and poking to begin.

  On the hillside visible from the laboratory window, yellow hibiscus was blooming against a background of billowing scarlet bougainvillea in brilliant California sunshine. It had been cold and raining, this February morning, when I drove to Sea-Tac Airport thirteen hundred miles to the north. Hedley’s lab is just outside La Jolla, on a sandy bluff high up over the blue Pacific. When Joe and I were kids growing up in Santa Monica we took this kind of luminous winter day for granted, but I had lived in the Northwest for twenty years now, and I couldn’t help thinking I’d gone on a day trip to Eden. I studied the colors on the hillside until my eyes began to get blurry. “Here we go, now,” Joe said, from a point somewhere far away behind my left shoulder.

  It was like stepping into a big cage full of parakeets and mynahs and crazed macaws. I heard scratchy screeching sounds, and a harsh loony almost-laughter that soared through three or four octaves, and a low ominous burbling noise, as if some hydraulic device was about to blow a gasket. I heard weird wire-edged shrieks that went tumbling away as though the sound was falling through an infinite abyss. I heard queeblings. I heard hissings.

  Then came a sudden burst of clearly enunciated syllables, floating in isolation above the noise:

  —Onoodor—

  That startled me.

  A nonsense word? No, no, a real one, one that had meaning for me, a word in an obscure language that I just happen to understand.

  “Today,” that’s what it means. In Khalkha. My specialty. But it was crazy that this machine would be speaking Khalkha to me. This had to be some sort of coincidence. What I’d heard was a random clumping of sounds that I must automatically have arranged into a meaningful pattern. I was kidding myself. Or else Joe was playing an elaborate practical joke. Only he seemed very serious.

  I strained to hear more. But everything was babble again.

  Then, out of the chaos:

  —Usan deer—

  Khalkha, again: “On the water.” It couldn’t be a coincidence.

  More noise. Skwkaark shreek yubble gobble.

  —Aawa namaig yawuulawa—

  “Father sent me.”

  Skwkaark. Yabble. Eeeeesh.

  “Go on,” I said. I felt sweat rolling down my back. “Your father sent you where? Where? Khaana. Tell me where.”

  —Usan deer—

  “On the water, yes.”

  Yarkhh. Skreek. Tshhhhhhh.

  —Akhanartan—

  “To his elder brother. Yes.”

  I closed my eyes and let my mind rove out into the darkness. It drifted on a sea of scratchy noise. Now and again I caught an actual syllable, half a syllable, a slice of a word, a clipped fragment of meaning. The voice was brusque, forceful, a drill-sergeant voice, carrying an undertone of barely suppressed rage.

  Somebody very angry was speaking to me across a great distance, over a channel clotted with interference, in a language that hardly anyone in the United States knew anything about: Khalkha. Spoken a little oddly, with an unfamiliar intonation, but plainly recognizable.

  I said, speaking very slowly and carefully and trying to match the odd intonation of the voice at the other end, “I can hear you and I can understand you. But there’s a lot of interference. Say everything three times and I’ll try to follow.”

  I waited. But now there was only a roaring silence in my ears. Not even the shrieking, not even the babble.

  I looked up at Hedley like someone coming out of a trance.

  “It’s gone dead.”

  “You sure?”

  “I don’t hear anything, Joe.”

  He snatched the helmet from me and put it on, fiddling with the electrodes in that edgy, compulsively precise way of his. He listened for a moment, scowled, nodded. “The relay satellite must have passed around the far side of the sun We won’t get anything more for hours if it has.”

  “The relay satellite? Where the hell was that broadcast coming from?”

  “In a minute,” he said. He reached around and took the helmet off. His eyes had a brassy gleam and his mouth was twisted off to the corner of his face, almost as if he’d had a stroke. “You were actually able to understand what he was saying, weren’t you?”

  I nodded.

  “I knew you would. And was he speaking Mongolian?”

  “Khalkha, yes. The main Mongolian dialect.”

  The tension left his face. He gave me a warm, loving grin. “I was sure you’d know. We had a man in from the university here, the comparative linguistics department—you probably know him, Malmstrom’s his name—and he said it sounded to him like an Altaic language, maybe Turkic—is that right, Turkic?—but more likely one of the Mongolian languages, and the moment he said Mongolian I thought, that’s it, get Mike down here right away—” He paused. “So it’s the language that they speak in Mongolia right this very day, would you say?”

  “Not quite. His accent was a little strange. Something stiff about it, almost archaic.”

  “Archaic.”

  “It had that feel, yes. I can’t tell you why. There’s just something formal and old-fashioned about it, something, well—”

  “Archaic,” Hedley said again. Suddenly there were tears in his eyes. I couldn’t remember ever having seen him cry before.

  What they have, the kid who picked me up at the airport had said, is a machine that lets them talk with the dead.

  “Joe?” I said. “Joe, what in God’s name is this all about?”

  We had dinner that night in a sleek restaurant on a sleek, quiet La Jolla street of elegant shops and glossy-leaved trees, just the two of us, the first time in a long while that we’d gone out alone like that. Lately we tended to see each other once or twice a year at most, and Joe, who is almost always between marriages, would usually bring along his latest squeeze, the one who was finally going to bring order and stability and other such things to his tempestuous private life. And since he always needs to show the new one what a remarkable human being he is, he’s forever putting on a performance, for the woman, for me, for the waiters, for the people at the nearby tables. Generally the fun’s at my expense, for compared with Hedley I’m very staid and proper and I’m eighteen years into my one and only marriage so far, and Joe often seems to enjoy making me feel that there’s something wrong with that. I never see him with the same woman twice, except when he happens to marry one of them. But tonight it was all different. He was alone, and the conversation was subdued and gentle and rueful, mostly about the years we’d had put in knowing each other, the fun we’d had, the regret Joe felt during the occasional long periods when we didn’t see much of each other. He did most of the talking. There was nothing new about that. But mostly it was just chatter. We were three quarters of the way down the bottle of silky cabernet before Joe brought himself around to the topic of the experiment. I hadn’t wanted to push.

  “It was pure serendipity,” he said. “You know, the art of finding what you’re not looking for. We were trying to clean up some problems in radio transmission from the Icarus relay station—that’s the one that the Japs and the French hung around the sun inside the orbit of Mercury—and we were fiddling with this and fiddling with that, sending out an assortment of test signals at a lot of different frequencies, when out of nowhere we got a voice coming back at us. A man’s voice. Speaking a strange language. Which turned out to be Chaucerian English.”

  “Some kind of academic prank?” I suggested.

  He looked annoyed. “I don’t think so. But let me tell it, Mike, okay? Okay?” He cracked his knuckles and rearranged the knot of his tie. “We listened to this guy and gradually we figured out a little of what he was saying and we called in a grad student from U.C.S.D. who confirmed it—thirteenth-century English—and it absolutely knocked us on our asses.” He tugged at his earlobes and rearranged his tie again. A sort of manic sheen was coming into his eyes. “Before we could even begin to comprehend what we were dealing with, the Englishman was gone and we were picking up some woma
n making a speech in medieval French. Like we were getting a broadcast from Joan of Arc, do you see? Not that I’m arguing that that’s who she was. We had her for half an hour, a minute here and a minute there with a shitload of interference, and then came a solar flare that disrupted communications, and when we had things tuned again we got a quick burst of what turned out to be Arabic, and then someone else talking in Middle English, and then, last week, this absolutely incomprehensible stuff, which Malmstrom guessed was Mongolian and you have now confirmed. The Mongol has stayed on the line longer than all the others put together.”

  “Give me some more wine,” I said.

  “I don’t blame you. It’s made us all crazy too. The best we can explain it to ourselves, it’s that our beam passes through the sun, which as I think you know, even though your specialty happens to be Chinese history and not physics, is a place where the extreme concentration of mass creates some unusual stresses on the fabric of the continuum, and some kind of relativistic force warps the hell out of it, so that the solar field sends our signal kinking off into God knows where, and the effect is to give us a telephone line to the Middle Ages. If that sounds like gibberish to you, imagine how it sounds to us.” Hedley spoke without raising his head, while moving his silverware around busily from one side of his plate to the other. “You see now about channeling? It’s no fucking joke. Shit, we are channeling, only looks like it might actually be real, doesn’t it?”

  “I see,” I said. “So at some point you’re going to have to call up the secretary of defense and say, Guess what, we’ve been getting telephone calls on the Icarus beam from Joan of Arc. And then they’ll shut down your lab here and send you off to get your heads replumbed.”

  He stared at me. His nostrils flickered contemptuously.

  “Wrong. Completely wrong. You never had any notion of flair, did you? The sensational gesture that knocks everybody out? No. Of course not. Not you. Look, Mike, if I can go in there and say, We can talk to the dead, and we can prove it, they’ll kiss our asses for us. Don’t you see how fucking sensational it would be, something coming out of these government labs that ordinary people can actually understand and cheer and yell about? Telephone line to the past! George Washington himself, talking to Mr. and Mrs. America! Abe Lincoln! Something straight out of the National Enquirer, right, only real? We’d all be heroes. But it’s got to be real, that’s the kicker. We don’t need a rational explanation for it, at least not right away. All it has to do is work. Christ, ninety-nine percent of the people don’t even know why electric lights light up when you flip the switch. We have to find out what we really have and get to understand it at least a little and be two hundred percent sure of ourselves. And then we present it to Washington and we say, Here, this is what we did and this is what happens, and don’t blame us if it seems crazy. But we have to keep it absolutely to ourselves until we understand enough of what we’ve stumbled on to be able to explain it to them with confidence. If we do it right we’re goddamned kings of the world. A Nobel would be just the beginning. You understand now?”