The Other Nineteenth Century

by Avram Davidson

  Bestial, apish, and cunning, the Six (once they were Seven; one died, and is still mourned) have gathered together the runaways and renegades of In-Between and imposed upon them discipline and some mocking semblance of social order. Their ultimate objective is to avenge themselves upon the species that killed off all their kind but they Six—the human race.

  To exterminate the brutes.

  EXPERIMENTAL DRUGS OF AN ILLICIT NATURE

  California: Needless to say that Mr. Casey Swift never but never indulged in exotic herbs or experimental drugs of an illicit nature. He was heart and soul of the opinion of that noted jazz musician whose comment on the alleged innocuousness of such substances was, “What do you mean, ‘What can it do to you?’ It can put you in jail, that’s what it can do to you!”

  QUAINT AND CURIOUS IN ITS FASHIONING

  Elsewhere: The Great Rune-Stave had been carried off again from captivity, and had passed across The Gap, where no Jacks dared follow the bridge. Small wonder! Who, unprotected by runish magic, would venture to set foot upon a causeway that the winds palpably blew through, the stones of which were so unsolid as to be transparent? But Casey disbelieved in magic. All chance is but direction which thou canst not see. He believed that.

  The bridge materialized beneath his feet, revealing the simple fact that his bodily presence polarized its molecules into solidity. The runesmen had vanished into the darks and snows by the time he crossed the gap, but he kept on. He wanted them now more than ever. For, if they could do this, then—surely—they could get him out of In-Between. And home again.

  The awe of Mickelrede was great upon the land. But the plain people did not understand why it didn’t simply destroy the Jacks. And the Jacks, having found—when they’d had it—that they could not use it: had come over to a half-don’t-believe-in-it state … there was a serious chance they might destroy it.

  They caught up with it again about the time Casey did. The fight was hot and close—so close that Casey, fighting hard and side by side with the runesmen, caught a glimpse of the thing when its covering robes were momentarily torn away. And in that second he knew what it was. Mickelrede. “Great Counsel.” The Great Rune-Stave, the foundation of wisdom and power and technology. It was a slide-rule! The size of a man, quaint and curious in its fashioning—but a slide-rule!

  CREATOR OF THE STACKED EQUATIONS

  Interpolation: If it were written, ‘twere well it were written quickly. Nothing ages so fast as science fiction, and, having hesitated, there surely came a moment when AD realized that his fractional novel, partially prosed and roughly outlined, was never going to be written. That damned slide-rule! “Mickelrede” was written some thirty-five years ago on a manual typewriter, in those long ago halcyon days before personal computers crept into our homes to gladden our lives. At some point the very notion of an all-powerful slide-rule became ridiculous. Cumbersome. An embarrassment. Yet it was central to the plot. Excise it and all that depended upon it, and what remained? Damned little, sir. Very little more than what fuels your standard fantasy-unit (Book One, let us say, of the First Nounword Trilogy of Ye Encyklopedia of Magycke) today.

  And yet. And yet …

  Suppose it were not precisely a slide-rule, but rather something akin to Babbage’s stillborn yet demonstrably workable difference engine? (Which same gizmo was employed in Gibson and Sterling’s The Difference Engine. But they were not the first to bring it to public attention. Nor will they be the last.) Imagine a device of gleaming, intermeshing brass gears—a primitive cruncher of numbers, a handcranked equation mill.

  Such a device would need an operator, a programmer. And—since the invention and loss of such a technological chimera twice in human history is a monstrosity of unlikelihood so great as to derail even the most gullible reader—let that programmer be somebody connected to Babbage’s folly: Ada Byron, the daughter of the more famous George Gordon, Lord Byron, and creator of the stacked equations upon which the difference engine would have run, had its inventor only the sense to refrain from making improvements before the bloody thing was finished.

  Ada makes a particularly attractive heroine: a genius, a programmer, and beautiful to boot. And—since her personal history is quite adequately documented and it is known (or can easily be ascertained) that she did not fade softly and silently away from the world as we know it—let her be a mirror-Ada. A duplicate and splitting-away of the original such as can only occur under special conditions, when the deviating timelike arcs of quantum reality never reunite to cancel out their differences.

  I’ll also postulate—why not?—that by the nature of the event, Ada was made immortal, just as the Six (once Seven) were, before her. That the redesmen have elevated her in rank to a kind of priestess. And that Casey Swift falls in love with her.

  THE CRASH OF MATTER AND THE WRACK OF WORLDS

  California: So there he was, Richard Caswell Swift, white, American, male, early middle twenties in age, calm in spirit and sound in health, well-adjusted and well-contented; dusty-brown-blond of hair and modestly brown of eye, muscled without being muscle-bound, too fond of himself to spare much of him for others but canny enough not to spare none. It was, he thought, another stroke of luck that he was able to feel an interest in his work as a research assistant to Professor Brannard quite in addition to its utility for him in his own plans for himself. Not that he would have devoted less care and effort to it had it not been so. His work and studies dealt with “the crash of matter and the wrack of worlds” but he would have pursued them just as diligently had they been concerned with the statistics of industrial lard rendering.

  TIME AND ANTI-TIME

  California: Sometimes, more often than he was perhaps aware of, Dr. Galloway, that peripatetic natural philosopher, considered that he did not like fluorescent lighting. It was, he considered, as noisy as gaslight though less warm. Now, however, as he half-sat and halfcrouched, talking to his old friend and current colleague, Jack Brannard, it would have made no difference if the lab had been illuminated by slut-lamps or neon signs.

  Two-dimensional mirrors, i.e. our mirrors, leave out a dimension: depth. Is there a mirror which shows three dimensions? Yes—a moving picture film projected will show length, breadth, and time. But this is still losing one dimension: again, depth. A mirror which does display three dimensions is still leaving out one dimension, i.e. time.

  Dr. Brannard had built a sort of shadow-box or cloud-chamber which shows length, width, and depth—but not time: Action is in it suspended. It had some semblance or relation to a hologram, in which one can “look around the tree and see the man behind it.” Still, it was not the same thing: no.

  But then Casey poked or was pushed or fell into the box/chamber (an accident, seemingly, though not in reality), turned silvery/ opalescent around the edges, appeared flat and one-dimensional: vanished. The scene vanished. Casey Swift’s clothes were left behind. Witnesses assumed he was in all probability annihilated by the intraposition of time and anti-time.

  THE STATUS OF MECHANICS

  Elsewhere: He found the redesmen, battle over, and his knowledge confided to them, not about to pop with joy over him. It was certainly no matter of, “You who know the Secret are therefore of us.” Contrariwise. They were sour, suspicious. Unauthorized knowledge. Bad show. What does the County Medical Association do about an outsider who can perform appendectomies? Warn him he’d damnwell better not.

  In a way, he had finally broken the seal. He found the scientists reduced to the status of mechanics—in one way. Enhanced to the status of priests—in another. Obliged to treat with barbarians and tyrants to uphold the status quo … or, actually, to drag it backwards. Were they actually withdrawing devices, one by one? Why? Or were the devices merely falling from their failing grasp? Civilization sliding slowly backwards while the Servants of Mickelrede encouraged the petty kings to occupy themselves with games and petty wars? The Chief of the Servants should have been able to tell Casey. But it wasn’t protocol even to put the
question. Would (for example) the Pope see some tatterdemalion jackleg infidel who claimed to know all about transubstantiation? Not likely. But suppose that same also claimed to know where the bones of St. Peter lay …

  Casey saw him, he saw Casey, and he saw through Casey. Who, he flatly said, was a menace. With Swift’s dangerous knowledge, all Hell could break loose. Only when things in In-Between reached a low enough level, technologically, and there remained indefinitely, would there be hope of beginning to achieve moral improvements to provide a truly safe base for future physical advances. Against that day the Servants of Mickelrede would preserve their knowledge … the basis of which was the use of that instrument without which pre-computer technology is impossible. And thereunto they, in times before, captured Mickelrede in order to keep their world from the plunder and ravishment of industrialism, doling out its knowledge carefully, grudgingly. To all of this, Casey represented a threat.

  WITH CHINTZ CURTAINS AND A PIANOFORTE

  Interpolation: The miracle-bait AD had in mind for Casey to employ was Mickelrede’s location. But I’m going to do a little bait-andswitch here, and posit that Casey knows where Ada Byron, long believed slain, is being held prisoner.

  My own impulse would be to place her in a stone tower amid the cold vapors of some Ultimate dim Thule. Someplace archetypal. AD, I suspect, would more likely ensconce her in a comfortable suite of rooms, with chintz curtains and a pianoforte, warded by a gaoler who, while unbribable, can yet discuss Aeschylus and Calculus in the original Greek equations.

  So: Let it be both: In a stone tower in the cold North in a well-appointed room does Ada languish, whose single door is barred by a warden of perfect culture and bestial appearance: one of the Six.

  Casey tells of seeing Ada in the heated hand-to-hand fight for Mickelrede. He does not mention (so conflicted are his feelings: of loathing, of love) that her face is familiar to him from of old, for he has seen her before. Many times. In California. As Llewellyn—sometimes “Sadie”—Thompson. A girl who has been known to come out of the mist and fog as though she had invented them.

  ALL WAS STILL AND MOTIONLESS

  Neither Here nor There: He felt himself as though prisoned within a dream, and, as within a dream or nightmare (though otherwise there was nothing of the nightmare about it) when one knows or partly knows that the paralysis is of the same stuff as the dream and thus one by main effort forces motion upon the body, slowly, slowly, weighted down by some devilish and stifling gravity—so, that way, equally slowly, by heavy effort and with heavy weight opposing him, he forced himself to move. And as though the scene itself responded to his effort and was somehow acted upon and released by it, so, slowly, slowly, the scene melted into action.

  He felt a puff of slow, sluggish air upon his skin. He saw …

  Great glittering gouts of moisture hung from the strange mosses pendant from the stranger trees and refracted, diamond-like or crystalline, glittering and glowing. And yet no sun was visible as the source of this bejeweled light, but all was obscured by wraiths and shreds of mist. The great peacock-like birds stood on one leg each, the other leg drawn up body-close with foot dangling foppishly, tails partly unfanned in a display of brilliant color and fantastic design totally unearthly. The flock of white birds with crimson bills and scarlet feet and carmine pinion-plumes remained fixed and hovering in middle air and middle distance. The stand of flowers bowed their golden heads. The man in the strange green habit still inclined his head and still beckoned with his hand and finger. And all was still and motionless.

  A MULTITUDE OF KING STORKS

  Elsewhere: But the Jacks o’ the North represented a greater menace: a multitude of King Storks against the status quo of the petty few King Logs: Casey might (if allowed) tip the molten mixture out of the caldron before the mold was fixed. But the Jacks would destroy caldron and mixture and furnace and all. No safe, controlled descent towards watchful waiting. All-destroying savagery, instead. And Casey offered a package deal. Cancel his status as the chattel of the Green King, agree to return him whence he came, back him up all along the line—and he would rid them of the Jacks o’ the North.

  BUT THIS WAS LONG AGO AND FAR AWAY

  Neither Here nor There: Once, the only single once (but that was in another country), as one of a tiny company among whom the sacred cigarette with the greenish herb which was not tobacco circulated from hand to hand and mouth to mouth like a sacrament around the candlepoint of light in the darkness, and then, later, floating upon the sweet sea of euphoria (but this was long ago and far away and besides, the lad was young), something else began to happen to him. Time ceased to exist. That which he had just said, he had never said; that which he had just said, he had always been saying; that which he had just said, he was yet to say. He saw his words as though embossed on sand, he saw them vanish away as though absorbed in sand. Nothing happened, everything was about to happen, action was distilled into inaction, inaction was pregnant with action.

  Something not at all the same as that but yet inescapably reminiscent of that was in this strange compelling silently unmoving scene which drew and had drawn him in. Amazement still held him in thrall but now present was the sudden element of terror. Was he to remain here fixed and unmoving forever, another motionless figure in this scene neither living nor dead?

  DID HE INHALE?

  Exegesis: Did Casey smoke dope? And if he did, was it only once and long ago? Or was it often and recently? Did he inhale? Was it dope that brought him to the In-Between? Or was it the good Doctor Brannard’s ghost box? The Green King summoned him—would it have profited him one whit, had he steered a wide course of drugs and hard physics?

  The simplest demonstrable mindfuck in physics is the experiment in which a beam of light is revealed to be either wavelike or particulate in nature—whichever one the experimenter chooses. After which, and called upon to explain themselves, scientists split the difference and call it a “wavicle.”

  AD didn’t bother being consistent with the mechanism that swept Casey out of reality as we know it altogether, because it was a negligible matter, what Alexander Pope called the Machinery: that Part which the Deities, Angels or Daemons (or Scientists) were to play in the matter. Calling upon Deities, Angels, Daemons, or Scientists to do your enabling for you, is to admit that it cannot be done by sensible means.

  Besides, I like the thought that the story itself partakes of quantum uncertainty. Two plots diverge and race away from each other on timelike arcs, only to meet again somewhere In-Between.

  Let’s not reconcile them.

  THUMBS WERE PRICKED AND SQUEEZED

  Elsewhere: The Battle of the Plains of Quore had been of the illustrious and classical kind. Arquebusiers in black-and-gold, arquebusiers in red-and-gold, had filed and defiled to the music of drums and trumpets and oboes until they were within fire-shot of each other. Then the heralds had stepped forward, and the augurs. Thumbs were pricked and squeezed, blood was ceremoniously declared to have been shed, both sides were asked to accept this as sufficient. Both sides ceremoniously refused. The black and white bones were cast, the omens taken, the choice of first fire given and accepted. Heralds and augurs retired, walking backwards. Fifteen volleys were exchanged, the side with the fewest men then standing was adjudged to have lost and was permitted to retire with its wounded and its banners. Commissioners presently followed to accept its change of rule. Thus, the battle; thus the war.

  But this newest and latest battle by the Jacks o’ the North against the Seat of the King of the Yellow was something else again. The attack had actually occurred in the night! without heralds! without augurs! without warning—! The comment most frequently quoted was the Yellow King’s, “This isn’t war, this is chaos.” However, as he had said it in exile and defeat, it was doubtful if his was the ultimate and definitive comment after all.

  The chessboard “armies” of the Kings of the Colors were worthless in this new kind of warfare. But there was another body of disciplined fighte
rs: the gamesmen. The slayers.

  SHE WHO PROGRAMS

  Interpolation: The narrative seems to have lost sight of Ada: our heroine: She Who Programs. She is nobody to lose sight of. Too, there are no surprises in the late synopsis, and AD was a writer of ample and commodious surprises, the ground shifting underfoot, revelation abruptly veering into the Unknown. AD was saving his inventions for the actual writing. I, perforce, cannot wait that long.

  What is she doing in her well-appointed room in that stone tower in the Nordmost north of the frozen North? Her guardian watches over her, enamored and ignorant of his own infatuation (for it has been so long since the last female of his kind died that he has forgotten what that state feels like), and even he, shrewdest of anthropoids, does not know. To what purpose do her nimble fingers trip so lightly over the brass mill of fate, the cog-wheeled decoder of runes, which y-clept Mickelrede?

  Weaving.

  The brass gears and teeth of the mighty difference engine spin under her hands, and she looks upon their permutations with cool and knowing eyes. Which device she had tricked and politicked the Six into capturing for her. To what purposes does this warrior-faced woman, this chill and cerebral immortal, this long-experienced and deep-thinking minder of her own counsels weave?

  Why, to her own, of course.

  THE HAND THAT BINDS