What Might have Been
Volume 1
Alternate Empires
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
Gregory Benford
IN THE HOUSE OF SORROWS
Poul Anderson
REMAKING HISTORY
Kim Stanley Robinson
COUNTING POTSHERDS
Harry Turtledove
LEAPFROG
James P. Hogan
EVERYTHING BUT HONOR
George Alec Effinger
WE COULD DO WORSE
Gregory Benford
TO THE PROMISED LAND
Robert Silverberg
BIBLE STORIES FOR ADULTS, NO. 31: THE COVENANT
James Morrow
ALL ASSASSINS
Barry N Malzberg
GAME NIGHT AT THE FOX AND GOOSE
Karen Joy Fowler
THE RETURN OF WILLIAM PROXMIRE
Larry Niven
INTRODUCTION
Perhaps there is no more poignant theme than if only…
Certainly writers of many stripes and persuasions have wondered what might have been and attempted to rewrite history. This practice has been termed many things, some ambiguous, such as parahistory and metahistory. Academics have offered uchronia, by analogy with utopia. Some suggested allohistory and alternative history.
Whatever the term, this volume begins a series of stories devoted to refashioning history in a logical manner to explore what could or might have been. Other volumes will follow.
The theme has a considerable history itself. The first use of it was 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 the first world empire. In 1931 J. C. Squire gave the theme great momentum by assembling If: or History Rewritten. This volume was not fiction, but rather speculative essays by such luminaries as Winston Churchill, G. K. Chesterton, and Hilaire Belloc.
In a scholarly afterword to Alternative Histories (edited by Charles G. Waugh and Martin H. Greenberg), Gordon B. Chamberlain and Barton C. Hacker gave a rough count of which ideas have been most popular. The most common theme is World War II, Hitler, and the atomic bomb. We edited an entire volume of such stories, Hitler Victorious. The second most popular theme is the survival of Rome or Byzantium. Third is the American War of Secession and Lincoln. Then comes changes in the Spanish Armada and the Reformation, followed by switches in the lot of the Aztecs and other Native Americans. A bit less common are different outcomes for Napoleon and altered American Revolutions.
This series explores these and other avenues. We commissioned tales from writers we thought would most ingeniously use the great freedom the idea allows. We imposed one further constraint: the changed history had to be a failed event. This is a way to explore the fragility of human action. Can small tweaks and tunings wrench history onto utterly different tracks? Historians themselves have no clear answer to this question. The appeal of the notion lies in our suspicion that some crucial events have great leverage, yet seeming inconsequentialities can be the fulcrum. (My novel Timescape argues for the sensitivity of great events to minor changes, and that is my bias. I could not resist the impulse to take that view in my own story here. But in consulting with authors, we resisted imposing any of our opinions.) In science fiction alternative histories often arise from the device of time travel, where causal paradox can play a role. Within limits, this too was an allowed option for our contributors.
Given the theme of what might have been and asked to dwell upon grand events that failed to come about, our authors could write whatever they liked. Interestingly, three stories deal with changes in the great religions of the world, which then alter empires and world society with great effect. Others treat recent changes, some military.
We cajoled Larry Niven into writing the closing story as an homage to Robert Heinlein—and Heinlein read and approved it with real pleasure only a month before his death in the spring of 1988. The thought that a science fiction writer could prove crucial to history seems both amusing and, after reflection, quite plausible.
A later collection will treat the Great Man idea and explore the importance of individuals in the great sweep of history. We hope you will find this range of imaginative experiments thought-provoking and perhaps even unsettling.
—GREGORY BENFORD
OCTOBER 1988
IN THE HOUSE OF SORROWS
Poul Anderson
That is a very old land, full of wrongs that will not die. They weighted me like the noontime heat, and with the same stillness, but the names of many of them I had never known. My horse’s hoofs made the loudest noise, beneath it now and then a creak of saddle leather, once the twitter of a shepherd boy’s pipes. Dusty green orchards and kitchen gardens dappled summer-brown hills. Dwellings, mostly sun-baked brick, strewed themselves likewise. They grew thicker along the road as it wound upward. Men in shabby caftans stared at me from doorways, women and children from deeper inside, speaking no word. A few times I met laden camels, donkeys, oxcarts. The lips of their drivers closed when I came in sight.
It had been thus for the past day. Some news had flown abroad. Riding, I had glimpsed restlessness in the villages and between them. No longer did anybody hail me, rush forth to offer wares or beg for alms. Thrice I stopped to water my mount, my remount, and myself, and sought to ask what went on, but those I spoke to gave short, meaningless answers and slipped away. That was easy for them. I had little of either the Aramaic or the Edomite tongue.
That night I deemed it best not to seek a caravansary, but rolled up in my saddle blanket in a field well off the highway. At sunrise I ate what cheese and pita bread were left me, and quenched thirst with the last water in my flask. It’s hard for a Marklander to be without his morning coffee, but dead men can’t drink anyhow.
Now the walls of Mirzabad rose before me. Afar, they had shimmered hazy through the heat. Close, I saw the pockmarks of former wars in their gray-white stone. A flag drooped from a cross-armed staff above the gate. The Lion and Sun of Persia slackened a little the tightness in me. At least that much abided. My gaze sought after the hues of Ispanya and did not find them. However, I told myself, belike they were not seeable from here.
Lesser buildings, shops and worksteads, crowded the roadsides. They should have been alive with the racket of the East, hammers on iron, hooves thudding, wheels groaning, beasts lowing and braying, fowl cackling, folk shrilling. Smells should have thickened the heat, smoke, sweat, dung, oil. Instead, what drifted to me seemed eerily loud and sharp in its loneliness. Some traffic did move. Dust from it gritted my eyelids, nostrils, mouth. My horses must push their way among walkers, wagons, huge burdens on hairy backs. Yet this was scant, and all outbound. Faces were grim. The looks I got ran from sullen to hateful. Often men spat on my shadow.
A score of warders stood by at the gate. Sicamino itself posted only four at any inway. These were also Persians, also wearing striped tunics, breeches bagged into half-boots, turbans on bearded heads. They also bore old-time, muzzle-loading rifles and curved short-swords. They slouched with the same slovenliness, soldiers of what was today an empire in name only. But their wariness came to me like a stench of fear, and it was no astonishment when their overling shouted in bad Ispanyan, “Ho, you, Westman, stop! Haul over!”
I obeyed, careful to hold my hands on the reins, well away from pistol and broadsword. A paved space under the wall was kept clear. The head warder beckoned me to it and snapped, “Get off.”
Such a bearing toward a newcomer whom they must deem
a European boded ill. I swung down from the stirrups and stood before them, hoping I looked neither too haughty nor too lowly. My years among the Magyars and Turks had given me some understanding of warlike men whose kingdoms have lost greatness. “Ahura-Mazda be with you, sirdar,” I greeted in my best Persian.
The overling blinked, then turned and bowed low as another man trod from a door in the gateway. This was not an Ispanyan gunnaro, such as should have been on call. He was another Persian, tall and lean, grizzle-bearded, in white turban and flowing black robe. The soldiers dipped their heads and touched their breasts. To them, I saw, he was a holy man; but that was no outfit of an orthodox murattab. “Who are you and what would you, Frank?” he asked with a deadly kind of softness.
I laid palms together above my heart. “Venerable one, I am no Frank,” I said cat-footedly. “Nor, as you have perceived, am I an Ispanyan.” Sometimes a man of that kingdom is fair-haired and much taller than most are in Lesser Asia; but on the whole, the Visigothic blood has long since lost itself in the Iberian. “May it please you, I am a humble messenger, bringing a letter to the Mirzabad factor of the Bremer Handelsbund.”
The dark eyes smoldered against mine. I thought, though, that underneath, he was taken aback. Tales of the Saxonian strength off the Persian shores must have reached him, too. “Do they not trust our postal riders?” he asked slowly; and I saw wrath flare in the faces behind him.
Of course they didn’t. “I bring, as well, certain words from the consul of the Hauptmannsreich in Sicamino to the factor Otto Gneisberg here in Mirzabad, such words as go best by mouth. Your reverence will understand.” At least, he would be unsure whether I lied or no.
“Hm. Show me your papers.”
He muttered over my passport. “Ro Esbernsson from … New Denmark?” I could barely tell what sounds he was trying to utter.
I pointed to the notation and seal “Not a Saxonian myself, true, but in the service of the excellent consul, as bodyguard and courier.”
The letter itself was in a packet addressed to Gneisberg from von Heidenheim in the Latin, Greek, and Persian alphabets. This priest, or whatever he was, must feel a clawing wish to cut the thongs and take the writing to someone who could read it. For a heartbeat I thought he might, and wondered if I could shoot my way free, leap on my horse, and outgallop pursuit. Then he gave the things back to me, and my breath with them. The sweat prickled below my shirt. Not yet did anybody want to risk that war. He spoke a curt command and withdrew, his dignity gone stiff.
The soldiers took their time ransacking my baggage. Passersby stared; some jeered. In the end, they left me my papers and packet, money, a handbag with clothes and other everydayness, and my sword. The last was unwillingly, only because my being a consul’s handfast man gave me the standing of warrior and to take my steel would have been to blacken him. They kept my firearms, horses, and wayfaring gear. I got no token of claim, but was not about to question their honor.
Nor did it seem wise to ask what had happened. I was glad enough to leave them behind me and pass on into the city.
A bazaar lay just beyond the gate, booths around a square whose flagstones should have been decked by spread-out rugs, metalware, crockery, fabrics, farm produce, all the goods that vendors chanted the wonders of, while the crowd milled and chattered. Today it brooded well-nigh empty beneath the hard blue sky, between the hot blind walls. A few folk, so few, went among such dealers as still dared be there. Mostly they were after food. I kenned the women: Aramaics and Edomites loosely and fully clad, low-rank Persians in long, close-fitting gowns and flowing scarves, Turks short and sturdy in blouses and breeks. Most had a man of her breed at her side, who must be warding her.
The street bore a little more upon it than the market did: sandals, boots, slippers, shoes, hooves, wheels a-clatter over bumpy cobbles. Those all belonged to men. Among townsfolk and hinterland peasants I spied some from far parts of the Shandom, Kurds, Syrians, Badawi, with here and there an outlander, Greek, Egyptian, Afghan—but no Turk of the Sultandom, no Russian or other underling of the Grand Knyaz, no Frank or Saxonian or Dane—and with a chill in the white sunlight, I saw no Ispanyan either, be he tradesman or soldier of the Wardership. I was the one Westerner in that whole thin swarm.
“Master! Lord! Effendi!” A hand plucked my sleeve.
I looked down at a boy of maybe nine years, Edomite, all grime and rags, shock hair and big eyes. “Glorious master,” he cried in bad but swift Persian, “I am your servant, your guide in the name of the heavenly Yazata to safe lodging, fine food and wine, pleasure, everything my lord desires.” He jumped to worse Ispanyan: “Mestro, I show you good inn, eat, drink, beautiful girls.”
Such urchins ought to have overrun me, each eager to win a coin for bringing in me and my money. Now this one alone had the pluck. I liked that. Not that I was about to go where he hoped to take me. From my own childhood I remembered the stave that begins, “Gang warily in where wolves may lair.” Still, I could use a guide. The map that had been given me showed an utter tangle of streets. It did not mark at all that stead which I had decided I had better seek first. Let the lad earn his copper from me.
“Take me to the Mithraeum,” I said in Persian.
“Ah, to the house of your god, sirdar? I leap at your order, I, Herod Gamal-al-Mazda. In the Street of Ulun Begh it lies, near the Fountain of Herakles, and we shall go there swift as the wind, straight as the djinn, most glorious master. Only come!”
He tried to take my bag for me, but I didn’t trust him that much and he skipped ahead, doubtless happy not to have the weight dragging at his thin shoulders. The ways that he took twisted downward. The houses that hemmed them were shut. I had a feeling that the dwellers crouched within like hares in a burrow when the fox is a-prowl. The few men we met drew aside and watched me in the same wise. I saw from their neck rings that they were slaves, and from scrawniness and whip scars that they were worth little. The good ones their owners kept indoors, sending the trash out on such fetch-and-carry tasks as could not wait for a better time.
“You lead me widely about, do you not?” I said at last.
Herod threw an eye-glint backward. “My lord is shrewd,” he said. “The main thoroughfares are dangerous.”
As if to bear him out, a growl and mutter reached me. The walls and crooked lanes in between faintened it, but I knew that noise of old, and the hair stood up on my arms. It was the mouthings of a crowd adrift and angry.
Herod bobbed his head. “Many like them today.”
“What has happened here?” I blurted.
“It is not for an alley rat to speak about the mighty,” he said fast, and scuttled onward. Indeed so, I thought, when he did not know whose man I was. I bore a sword, and death walked under this hot heaven.
Well, but at the Mithraeum, once I had shown myself to be initiate in the Mysteries—I have reached the rank of Lion—its Father would tell me the truth. Then I could plan how best to bring Otto Gneisberg the word of his motherland. Merely fumbling to his house, I might well meet some foolish doom.
The ground canted sharply. Either the rubble that elsewhere underlay the city, yards deep, had never been piled here, or else an overlord had had it cleared away a few hundred years ago because there were things worth salvaging.
Housefronts showed workmanship of kingdoms long dead. In the basin of a dry fountain stood a statue that I reckoned was of Hercules and the Hydra, though as battered as it was, it might as well have been Thor and the Midgard Worm. Nearby crumbled a Roman temple or basilica, with columned portico and a frieze gone shapeless. The Turks in their day had made it over for their own worship, and their great-great-grandchildren still used it; through the doorless in-way I saw the Warrior Buddha, sword in left hand, right hand lifted in blessing, the bronze of him turned green.
How many breeds had owned this town? The Persians of now, on whom the Ispanyans had laid wardership lest other Europeans do more than that; Edomites; Turks; Syrians; Mongols; Old Persians; Romans;
Greeks—and how many before them, dust that scuffed up from my boots?
Wondering ended when Herod trilled, “Master, behold your sacred goal.” I could hardly have mistaken it. Nonetheless, it was not such as my fathers knew.
Mithraists have been few hereabouts since the last West Roman legions withdrew. The Ispanyan garrison surely had its own halidoms, though those would also be strange to me. They look on our Northern godword as heretical. Asiatic Mithraisms are at odds with both, but hold that different roads may lead to the same truth. In this, if naught else, the East is wiser than the West.
The building and its sister beside it bore shapes of their land. Both stood taller than any in Europe or Markland, whitewashed, roofs swelling into domes, red on the Mithraeum, blue on the Shrine of the Good Mother. Easterners celebrate the Mysteries in windowless rooms rather than underground. Mosaics above the doors glowed with his Bull, her Rose. That much spoke straight to my heart. No matter any otherness. On a narrow and rough-stoned street, pressed between dingy blanknesses of walls, these houses reared upright as the faith itself.
But— Suddenly, spear-sharp, came back to me the halidoms of my boyhood. They stand a little outside of Ivarsthorp, on a grassy bank where the Connecticut River gleams past farmsteads, shaws, meadows marked off by stone walls and flowering hedges; they are low beneath their three-tiered roofs, but the wood of them is richly carved, and dragons rear skyward from the beam ends. Within the Mithraeum, when you have gone by lionheaded Aeon and the holy water bowl, Odin and Thor flank the altars of the Tauroctony: as I was told Frigg and Freyja honor our forebears at the Mystery of the women.
Here in Mirzabad, the land I had forsaken hunted me down, dogwood white in springtime, yeomen in summer fields that had been rock and bramble when the Trekfolk first came, the blazing hues of New Denmark fall, winter starlight that seemed to ring as it struck the snow—outings to fish and swim in Lake Winnepesaukee, days in jouncing wains and nights in old inns till we came to Merrimack Haven and saw the masts of the ships at dock lift their yards like the boughs of Yggdrasil. What unrest had driven me overseas? Why had I drifted from land to land, calling to calling, master to master, war to war, while my years spilled out of me and left only emptiness behind?
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