Table of Contents
Title Page
Copyright Page
Acknowledgements
Introduction
THE RESONANCE OF LIGHT
OUT OF CHINA
SITE FOURTEEN
SILENT LEONARDO - by Kage Baker
A CALL FROM THE WILD
AXIAL AXIOMS
THE TERMINAL SOLUTION
THE ASHBAZU EFFECT
A WORD FOR HEATHENS
A GHOST STORY - by Jihane Noskateb
THE EXECUTIONER’S APPRENTICE
SWIMMING UPSTREAM IN THE WELLS OF THE DESERT
UNWIRER
WHEN THE MORNING STARS SANG TOGETHER
HERD MENTALITY
ABOUT THE AUTHORS
DISCOVERIES THAT CAN CHANGE THE WORLD—
Timing and knowledge can make all the difference. Down through the time line of our world there have been any number of moments and events that could have changed the whole course of history. The fifteen stories included in ReVisions more than live up to the name of this volume, looking at a number of scientific discoveries, and exploring how different history might have been if certain of these discoveries had never occurred, or if they had happened earler, or in another culture.
What if:—the nature of the Black Plague had been understood centuries earlier?
—our mandate had been to colonize the oceans rather than to reach the Moon?
—the human genome was mapped out in the time of the Mayans?
These are just a few of the fascinating “what ifs” you’ll find in ReVisions.
More Imagination-Expanding Anthologies Brought to You by DAW:
SPACE, INC. Edited by Julie E. Czerneda. Here are fourteen tales of the challenges, perils, and responsibilities that workers of the future may have to face—from a librarian who could determine the fate of an alien race . . . to a pair of space mechanics assigned a repair job for a species that despises humankind . . . to a ballet instructor who must find a way to tailor human dance forms for multilimbed sentient beings. . . . Includes stories by James Alan Gardner, Isaac Szpindel, Josepha Sherman, Nancy Kress, Robert J. Sawyer, Tanya Huff, and more.
SPACE STATIONS Edited by Martin H. Greenberg and John Helfers. Fourteen top chroniclers of the day after tomorrow—including Timothy Zahn, Alan Dean Foster, Robert J. Sawyer, Julie E. Czerneda, Jack Williamson, and Gregory Benford—offer stories of space stations, both human and alien. From space stations linked only by a black hole . . . to a long obsolete space fort that is about to be caught in its first and only battle . . . to a space station AI that must choose between obeying its programming and saving a human life . . . to a first contact space station café where the alien owner knows the value of a good trade . . . here are unforgettable tales of the perils, profits, and adventures that await us in space.
CONQUEROR FANTASTIC Edited by Pamela Sargent. From Michelle West, Pamela Sargent, Jack Dann, Ian Watson, George Zebrowski, and their fellow visionaries come thirteen tales of “what might have been” if history had taken different paths. The stories included in this volume range from the ancient world to the modern, from legends to historical people . . . from Alexander the Great, Genghis Khan, and Saladin to the Native American leader Metacomet, an Aztec princess, Napoleon, Hitler, John Wayne, Lyndon B. Johnson, and the Kennedys.
Copyright © 2004 by Julie E. Czerneda, Isaac Szpindel, and Tekno Books.
eISBN : 978-1-101-16685-7
All Rights Reserved.
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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Introduction © 2004 by Julie E. Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel.
The Resonance of Light © 2004 by Geoffrey Landis.
Out of China © 2004 by Julie Czerneda.
Site Fourteen © 2004 by Laura Anne Gilman.
Silent Leonardo © 2004 by Kage Baker.
A Call from the Wild © 2004 by Doranna Durgin.
Axial Axioms © 2004 by James Alan Gardner.
The Terminal Solution © 2004 by Robin Wayne Bailey.
The Ashbazu Effect © 2004 by John G. McDaid.
A Word for Heathens © 2004 by Peter Watts.
A Ghost Story © 2004 by Jihane Noskateb.
The Executioner’s Apprentice © 2004 by Kay Kenyon.
Swimming Upstream in the Wells of the Desert © 2004 by Mike Resnick and Susan R. Matthews.
Unwirer © 2004 by Cory Doctorow and Charles Stross.
When the Morning Stars Sang Together © 2004 by Isaac Szpindel.
Herd Mentality © 2004 by Jay Caselberg.
INTRODUCTION
by Julie E. Czerneda and Isaac Szpindel
GEORGE Santayana, the Spanish-American philos opher and novelist, is famous for having penned the oft-quoted statement, “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” While this is often interpreted as a warning, it can also be considered an invitation to create a better future by learning from the mistakes of the past. Indeed, Santayana himself may well have borrowed from the past words of the Greek dramatist Euripides, who wrote, “Whoso neglects learning in his youth, loses the past and is dead for the future.”
Whatever the case, it is clear both dramatists and philosophers recognize the continuum that is time. Past, present, and future—interdependent and part of each other. Science fiction has been acknowledged as the literature of the future, but that future is built on our past as much as on our present.
The past. Our history is a tapestry of events, social and political. Within the weave is scientific development and technological invention, sometimes as a background, sometimes to the forefront, as during the Industrial Revolution. In turn, these sciences and technologies are influenced intimately by the geography, politics, and timing of their occurrence. Most significantly, they are influenced by human nature.
We glimpse history through its records, interpreted by present-day minds. We acknowledge the impact of that aspect of our past through laws, treaties, customs, and traditions. Yet the science and technology we employ today has a history as well, which should be understood. Our sciences and methods may be objective, but the ways in which we have discovered and applied them are not.
Science and technologies are tied to their discovery times and places, to their inventors and innovators. They are fluid and dynamic, a living process subject to change, influence, and time, as much as the historical actions of empires still impact the political framework of today’s world.
Science fiction, while not always predictive of the future, has certainly taken an informed and interested look at its possible direction. It is only fitting, then, that we apply that same speculative tool back on itself and ask what if scientific or technological discoveries had happened differently, in different cultures or times. Where would we be now? Where would we be going? The stories you will read in this
anthology consider many variables, both historic and scientific, to answer that question. More so, they answer it in ways that, whether subtle or overt, are essentially provocative. Why? Because they force us to examine and accept responsibility for ourselves, for our scientific discoveries, and for the consequences of those discoveries.
For there is one evocative and compelling question raised by an alternate science history anthology such as this: of all the complex variables that have shaped the new and increasingly scientific world around us, does human nature remain the only constant?
THE RESONANCE OF LIGHT
by Geoffrey Landis
“Full many a gem of purest ray serene . . .”
—Thomas Gray, 1750
“We can concentrate any amount of energy upon a minute button . . . which glowed with a most intense light. To illustrate the effect observed with a ruby drop . . . magnificent light effects were noted, of which it would be difficult to give an adequate idea.”
—Nikola Tesla, 1897
WHEN I think of Nikola Tesla, I see the pigeons. He was always surrounded by pigeons. I think, sometimes, that the pigeons were his only real love, that he lavished upon his pigeons the romantic affection that we ordinary mortals have for the opposite sex. Certainly he had a way with them. He would whistle, and they would come, from nowhere, surrounding him like an electrical aura, fluttering like the iridescent discharge from an ethereal fire.
“Pigeons,” I once told him, “are the scourge of the city, spreading filth and disease. They are no more than rats with wings.”
That was, I think, back in 1912 or ’13, before the long shadow of coming war stole across the world, and we could gaily talk about pigeons. Nikola Tesla looked at me with eyes of fire, with that intensity of soul that I have seen in no other man, before or since. “Surely you are but teasing, Katharine,” he told me, “yet some things should not be taken in jest. Look at them! Ah, they soar on wings of angels.” He was silent for a moment, watching, and then continued, “Do you believe, then, that men are so pure? The scourge of cities—would you not say that for every disease that pigeons spread, men spread a plague? The scourge of man is most certainly man, Kate, and not the harmless pigeon. Do doves slaughter doves in vast wars, would you say? Do they starve one another?”
“Men build cities,” I said. “Men have art in their souls and aspire to higher things, as mere fowl cannot.”
“Some men, perhaps,” he said. “But few, few indeed, raise themselves above the mud.” He sowed a handful of his peanuts forth, and the air exploded into frantic motion, birds wheeling overhead as others waddled on the ground like winged pigs, shoving each other shamelessly for position to peck for their supper.
Nikola, though, seemed not to notice the greed. “Perhaps the feathery tribe build no cities, but neither have they the need,” he said. “As for art, can you say that a pigeon has no art, nor aspirations? What do you know of the feathered heart? Are not they, perhaps, themselves the embodiment of art, the very winged soul of art incarnate? Say no more of pigeons, then, for I tell you that a pigeon can feel, can even love, as a man can.”
And, as bidden, I was silent.
Surrounded by his pigeons, Nikola Tesla would forget himself, and be as delighted as a child, and how could I begrudge him that loss of self?
Do you think that I was myself smitten with the prodigal genius? Of course I was, but then, no woman who ever met him was not. Still, I do believe that I was his closest female companion, indeed, his closest companion of either sex, for despite all his personal magnetism, Nikola was not a man who easily allowed himself to open to others.
Robert, of course, could see my infatuation with Nikola; I was ever quite transparent to him. But we had long ago made an agreement that our marriage was to be a loose one. In that bygone gay era when we were both young, we had held to the ideal of a partnership of the soul, and we promised to understand and forgive each other wanderings of the flesh. Over the years it was Robert who most took advantage of that looseness of bonds, and I, holding to our long understanding, never took him to task for the girls he took as mistresses, nor the young men.
Robert quite encouraged my companionship with Mr. Tesla, and even urged us closer. I think that Robert, too, was smitten by Nikola’s tremendous personal magnetism, although if that were so, Mr. Tesla seemed oblivious to any overtones.
Tesla had his playful side. He had a tendency to hold his inventions secret, remembering all too well the controversy over the priority for the invention of wireless telegraphy. But to me he showed many of his inventions, judging me, perhaps, too little schooled in the sciences to accidentally reveal his secrets.
One day he admired a pendant that I wore about my neck. This was unusual for Tesla, who usually disdained jewelry of all sorts. “It is a ruby,” I said, “a small one, but well colored, and prettily cut. A gift from Robert.” I think Robert had intended it as a silent token of gratitude for my forbearance, or mayhap for forgiveness. He had given it to me while he was conducting a liaison with a woman by the name of Miss Kurz (a coarse young woman quite unworthy of his attention, in my opinion, but I made no indication of such belief to Robert who, in any case, became bored with her attention after another week or two).
Tesla smiled a mischievous grin. “If you should like to come up to my laboratory,” he said, “I will show to what use I employ such a mineral. I believe that you shall be amazed.”
“I should be delighted,” I said.
His laboratory was upon the third floor of a building with windows that looked down across Forty-Second Street. It was early evening, and the electric streetlights were just beginning to glow.
As always, his laboratory was cluttered with electrical equipment, from enormous generating dynamos to tiny crystals bedecked with wires thinner than a mouse’s whiskers. On the workbench in front of the window he had a ruby of his own, but rather than a jewel, this was a ruby in the shape of a small rod, about the size of a cigarette. In the form of a cylinder a ruby becomes quite ordinary, looking like nothing other than colored glass, for it is the gem-cutter’s art that gives a jewel its sparkle. I had never before seen a gemstone cut in such a shape, and commented on it.
“It is not of a gem quality,” he said dismissively, “but it is a mineral specimen adequate for my purposes.”
He had earlier showed me an invention of his which utilized a high pressure spark in a rarified-gas lamp to produce a sharp blue-white flash, brilliant as lightning. This momentary illumination is quite startling, having the illusion of stopping time in a frozen moment. Now he placed the ruby cylinder into a mirrored box, surrounded with the flashlamps, with more mirrors to concentrate the flash upon the ruby cylinder, and attached the entire apparatus to a system of condensers and coils.
He then darkened the room with black velvet over the windows. “Watch the wall,” he said, indicating not the box with the ruby hidden within, but the empty white wall a dozen yards across the laboratory.
With a turn of a rheostat, there was a sudden snapping noise. A flash of white seeped out from the box that held the cylindrical gem, but this was not the light which captivated my attention. Upon the wall opposite the workbench had appeared a sudden glowing spot of a brilliant, pure red. I clapped my hands in startlement, and Tesla smiled in pleasure.
“What is it?” I cried.
He triggered the electrical flash again, and once again the mysterious glowing spot appeared. It was a crimson so intense, of a shade so unalloyed in hue, that I realized that every shade that I had hitherto considered to be red was a muddy, washed-out shade compared to this pigment of unblemished purity. I remarked on the color to Mr. Tesla.
“Your eye is accurate,” he said. “If you were to take the finest spectroscope, and analyze the color of the ray I have produced for you, you would find it to be a single shade indeed. All other lamps produce a spread of spectrum, but my new beam is a ray of unalloyed purity.”
With that he set the ray to flashing automatical
ly, and the dot appeared as an unmoving, although flickering, spot of brilliance. He passed his hand in front of it, and the spot on the wall disappeared, moving to his hand, which now seemed to cup the glowing spot in his palm. For a moment I had to suppress a gasp of fright, for the spot was so bright I worried that it would burn a hole entirely through his hand. He laughed. “No need to worry. It is mere light.”
He lit a cigar, and the smoke from the cigar made the beam visible, a ghostly line of crimson. “The secret,” he said, “is resonance. I have contrived to trap light between two parallel mirrors, so that it must resonate against itself as a standing wave, and so intensify until it escapes.”
His explanation made no sense to me, for as I have said, I have no training in the sciences, but I nodded my assent, as if he had clarified everything. After a bit of coaxing, I was persuaded to put my own hand in front of the beam and, although it seemed too bright to look at directly, it was completely intangible—the beam had no force to it at all. I bent to look directly at it, but before I could put my eye to the ray, Tesla seized me and jerked me away.
“The eye is a delicate instrument,” he said somberly, “and my ray is a thousand times, no, ten thousand times brighter than the sun. You would not look into it a second time.”
Although we had known each other for many years, we had never before touched. His arms had quite surprising strength, considering that he was slender and almost womanish of figure; I could still feel the heat where his hand had been upon my arms.
I placed my hand upon the spot where his hand had been, and tried to feel again how he had touched me. Mistaking my gesture, he looked down, and said, “I apologize most humbly for my ungentlemanly conduct, Mademoiselle Kate. I acted only by instinct, I assure you, worried about your safety.”
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