Alt.History 101 (Alt.Chronicles)

by Ken Liu

  * * *

  Michael hit the power on the car before she could even open the door, so the ghostly blue lights on the dash lit his face and shadowed the lines of nervous worry on his face. As Eldora slid in and lifted her arms for the restraints to lock in place, Michael asked, “Well? How did it go?”

  Eldora took a deep breath and lowered her hands to her lap as the click of her restraints locking sounded out. She studied the dash rather than look up at Michael and hesitated too long with her answer.

  “That bad, huh? Do you think she’s going to turn us in?”

  Disappointment was what she heard in his voice. She’d been married to Michael for seven years and in that time, she’d learned it was better to face whatever troubles they encountered than go with her natural inclination to ignore trouble until it went away...or blew up in her face.

  “Honestly, I don’t know,” she admitted reluctantly.

  “We have to go. We should go now. Let’s not even go home. We’ll just go straight to the airport…” The rest of his words hummed below the level of her hearing, her pounding heartbeat drowning out all but the peaks of sound in his tense words.

  The car was driving itself and as a result, Michael was left with nothing to occupy his hands. That, in turn, meant that he talked with his hands, often saying far more than his words with his meaningful waves and stiff fingers. Eldora watched those eloquent hands as he spoke, reading in them more than worry. He was afraid for her, for himself and most of all, for the future baby she carried within.

  As they left the enclave that her mother lived in and entered the vast green spaces between that enclave and their own, Eldora realized how grave her mistake had been. But the truth, if she looked hard at it, was that she didn’t just want to have a child in the way her ancestors had, but that she wanted approval for it. She wanted to share it and receive support for her decision from those she loved. And she’d wanted it from her mother most of all, a woman whose beliefs were as strong as her will. But those beliefs did not mirror Eldora’s, so this had been a mistake. Still…

  Eldora interrupted Michael’s increasingly alarmed diatribe with, “Calm down, Michael! She’s still my mother! I’m her daughter and she loves…”

  Her words trailed off as the car veered to the right, steering itself to the road’s shoulder. The power died and a voice rang out from the speakers. “Please remain calm. This is a legal stop. Law enforcement will be on scene in approximately eight minutes.”

  They both gaped at the console for a few precious seconds, but when Eldora looked up at Michael, the unnatural pause broke wide open.

  “Quick! Honey, grab the thingie!” Michael said aloud. Then he cupped his hand around the side of his mouth facing the camera and mouthed, “The breaker thing.”

  She understood him and began pawing through the glove box for the little orange hammer meant to cut restraints using one side and shatter car glass with the other. It was a safety tool, meant to be used in such dire emergency that not even the car could assist the occupants. The tool had been in their glove box since the day they bought the car. At least, she hoped it was still in there.

  The car responded to their spoken words belatedly, perhaps not understanding the context of the word “thingie”. “Do you require additional assistance?”

  “No,” Michael said, his voice surprisingly calm, but his hands making grabbing motions toward Eldora that were anything but calm.

  Her hand closed around the plastic handle of the tool and she yanked it out, passing it to Michael below the level of the car’s camera. He didn’t hesitate. Pressing her chest back into the seat, he lifted the harness buckle and severed the first strap with one sharp tug of the blade. A second strap followed the first and Eldora lifted the harness over her head as he freed himself.

  “Hurry!” Eldora whispered.

  “Assistance will be on scene within seven minutes. Do you wish me to alert them that you require more immediate assistance?” the car asked.

  “No!” Eldora shouted, then swallowed and said, “No, thank you. We’re fine.” Now it was her turn to motion with her hands, urging Michael to hurry and smash the glass. The doors would not open for them. There was no sense in even trying. They were as effectively under arrest as if Enforcement had already arrived to pack them off.

  Michael removed his jacket and stuffed it up against the dash where the microphone was inset, then he whispered, “Hold this tight.” She did, pressing the bunched fabric to the dash with so much force she thought it might break the plastic.

  Her husband covered his eyes—and Eldora shielded her own by pressing her eyes into the crook of her elbow—as he swung the ridiculously small hammer with its sharp metal tip at the glass on his side of the car. She didn’t see how such a small tool could possibly work, but the sound of breaking glass followed the impact instantly. She let out an involuntary “eep” of surprise.

  The car apparently didn’t need to hear the break to know something had happened, because it said, “An impact has been registered on the left side of the vehicle. Contacting emergency services.”

  Eldora snatched the jacket away from the microphone and said, “No! We don’t need services. It was just a bird hitting the glass. You parked us near a bunch of birds and caused it.”

  Michael’s eyebrows shot up and his look told her that he was impressed. Eldora shrugged it off. The car would now spend time trying to figure out a better place to move so that it didn’t cause any further damage to the environment. It was that whole hierarchy of rules the car had to obey finally working in their favor.

  She stuffed the jacket back against the microphone while Michael pushed away the small chunks of glass. They weren’t shards so much as crumbles, thanks to the safety glass, but she still wouldn’t want to press any part of her body into any of those chunks. With a woof of effort, Michael heaved himself out of the window and dropped to the roadside.

  After a quick look at the sporadic traffic passing by, he leaned back in and said, “Hand me the pack.”

  Eldora tossed him the jacket, the microphone no longer her concern, and scrambled between the seats to push the emergency pack up and out to him. She’d teased him about it, but he was a man of thought, a man who always considered consequences and ways to prevent bad things. It was one of the reasons she loved him. Now, she was glad of it. There were thirty, largely uninhabited miles between enclaves. The airport lay at least fifteen miles in one direction and the harbor—their last ditch plan—was the same distance in another direction. No matter which way they went, they were certainly in an emergency.

  “Hurry!” Michael whispered. He took his communicator off his wrist and punched in a few numbers—no doubt a coded text to their emergency contact—then tossed it into the car. Nothing electronic would be able to go with them. They would be on their own.

  The car started in on its questions about their welfare and again Eldora answered, but this time she shoved everything of value she could get to out of the window as she did. Michael almost lifted her up as she climbed up onto the edge of the open window, setting her down as gently as if they were at home in their garden, playing in the way they did sometimes. He planted a kiss on the tip of her nose and whispered, “Now, run into the forest. Go straight in, I’ll catch up. I’m going to blow up the car.”

  Blow up the car? What could she say to that? Her entire, well-ordered life had just descended into the realms of the surreal. There would be time to absorb it all later. She grabbed the tote Michael had stuffed with all the miscellaneous she’d pushed out of the car and ran.

  The trees edged close to the road with only the space required for safe passage, a decent shoulder, and a drainage ditch between the road and the forest. Within seconds, she was immersed in forest, her footsteps muffled by the carpet of pine needles underfoot. Even the boom as car exploded sounded farther away than it could possibly be.

  She didn’t stop, but she did slow and glance behind her every few steps. When she heard him call h
er name, she finally did stop and returned his call. The flash of color as his bright blue jacket showed briefly between the trees was enough to flood her system with relief. She waved the equally bright pink tote bag above her head and called his name again.

  Michael was a tall man, bigger than the current fashion dictated, but she adored him for his long legs and broad shoulders even if he did eat so much they had to have a garden sized for a family to keep him in fresh vegetables. His long, loping strides and the ease with which he hopped over patches of something that looked suspiciously like poison ivy filled her with pride and, strangely enough considering their situation, desire. He closed the space between them with barely a sound. Her fingers pressed against her belly again as she wondered if this child would inherit his grace and power. She hoped so.

  “Why are you grinning, El?” he asked as he reached her, not even remotely out of breath.

  “Because you just blew up a car and are incredibly handsome. Kiss me,” she said and flung her arms around him, bumping him with her bulky tote.

  He did, but she could feel him looking back the way they came, so she let it be a brief kiss, promising herself a million more kisses once they were gone and free.

  “I’m a battery engineer. It wasn’t hard,” he said as their lips broke contact, one side of his mouth turned up in a half smile. He gently pinched her chin with his thumb, and said, “I think this would be classified as an emergency, so we should go to the harbor. It’s going to be rough. It’s a small boat and a long voyage. You going to be okay? Is our little princess going to be okay?”

  Eldora gripped his hand, twining his fingers with hers as they set out walking. She said, “Our little lumberjack is going to be just fine.”

  SIX YEARS LATER

  “Are you sorry we can’t go back? Sometimes, on days like this, I am. But only a little,” Michael said as he packed leftover birthday cake into the cooler between their beach chairs. “I suppose I just wish the rest of our families could see him and he could have them in his life.”

  “That’s their choice, not ours,” Eldora murmured, eyes closed as she soaked in the sunshine and the sounds of the water.

  “For now, anyway. People can change,” Michael answered as he closed the cooler lid.

  Eldora opened one eye lazily and looked at the blue ocean rhythmically washing the sand in a way that always made her want to take a nap. Her feet—now beginning to tan a little as the level of her sun exposure far exceeded her altered chemistry’s ability to absorb it—framed the image of her boy as he ran along the beach. He and his friends were absorbed in pressing footprints into the wet sand only to watch them be washed away.

  As each little wavelet came, the small group of children ran back the way they had come, creating a new array of footprints and squealing merrily. Each one of the children was like her son. In this island nation, one of the few places where radical actions like natural birth were still legal, they could be themselves and free. While she watched, today’s babysitter scolded another boy for letting the gentle waves wash over his feet.

  Even here, there were rules. At least here the rules were mostly reasonable ones.

  “Maybe they will change, but if they don’t, we’ll still be fine right here,” she said.

  And they were fine. It had been hard at first, with their belongings gone, their savings confiscated, and both of them jobless, but they had made it through. Finland—of all places—was working on designs for batteries more capable of enduring extended cold for their ships and had eventually hired Michael, relieving them both of the necessity to work whatever small jobs they could land on this small island. Her art was now considered somewhat revolutionary, and while illegal to sell in most countries due to her fugitive status, it still fetched modest sums from tourists that came to the island.

  Their house was small, just four small rooms with a questionable roof and a big garden, but they loved it. It was filled to bursting with the only things Eldora really needed in this life; her husband and son.

  Well, maybe not everything she needed.

  “You didn’t answer the question,” Michael said. “Are you ever sorry we can’t go back?”

  Instead of answering her husband, she reached out a hand for him to take and smiled into his eyes. When she looked back toward the water, the children were making yet another path of prints. She saw her beautiful boy, with his strong shoulders—broad even for a boy of five—his tanned skin, and his wild, dark hair. She felt anything but sorry.

  “Never,” she whispered, feeling the roughness in her throat as emotions bubbled to the surface. “Not once.”

  Michael gave her hand a squeeze and let it go. He fished around in their tote and brought out the tube of sunscreen. Such a thing was almost extinct in their old world, but this was a new world and their son needed sunscreen.

  “Mikey!” Michael called out. When the boy turned toward them, Michael waggled the tube of sunscreen.

  Mikey ran toward them, calling to his friends that he would be right back. He bounced on his toes in the sand, impatient to return to his playmates as his father covered him in white cream.

  Michael gave the boy a playful smack on his butt when he was done and said, “Go on, Tiger, but keep out of the water unless I come with. I saw you getting closer.”

  “Aww, Dad!” Mikey complained, then shrugged and tried a different tact, putting on his most adorably pleading look. It was overdone, but very hard to resist. “Then will you come in the water soon?”

  Eldora laughed and said, “You’d better do it before his lip gets stuck like that!”

  Mikey pulled his pouting lip back in immediately—this was something they teased him with regularly—and grinned in success. Michael lifted himself from his beach chair with a dramatic groan.

  “Do I get a kiss for helping you out, little man?” Eldora asked, holding out her arms.

  She let out an eep that brought a laugh from Mikey as his cold, wet hair made contact with her hot shoulder, but she hugged him close nonetheless. After dropping a kiss on his salty lips, she let him go.

  Rather than immediately run off, Mikey asked, “Can I hug the baby?”

  Eldora braced herself for another dosing of his wet hair and nodded. Mikey hugged her huge, towel-draped belly and planted a kiss there. “Hurry up, baby, so you can come swimming, too!”

  She watched as Michael scooped up their son and ran toward the water, both of them letting out shouts of anticipated delight as they grew closer. She rubbed the rough textured towel on her middle, doubled up to shield the baby from the bright sunlight and said, “Yes. Hurry up, baby. We’re waiting.”

  A Word from Ann Christy

  Alternate history is out of my normal wheelhouse—no doubt—but I’m an explorer as much as a writer, so I relished the challenge of finding something in our history and changing our future by tweaking that single event. I was also told that I should step out of my comfort zone. As a general rule, I follow the rules of polite conversation in my writing. I never write of real politics, real money, or real religion. I just make them up instead. In Unnatural, I broke my rules. I took the untimely death of a pope that many only remember from mafia movies and combined it with an event many don’t realize happened just before that death: the birth of the first “test-tube baby”.

  What you may not know is that there was a substantial delay before any papal guidance was released on In-Vitro Fertilization (IVF). To this day, it is still not permitted within the Catholic Church. I decided it was time to imagine that series of events differently. Please believe me when I say that I mean no offense to anyone and I hope you enjoy the story.

  Ann Christy is a recently retired navy commander and secret science fiction writer. She lives by the sea under the benevolent rule of her canine overlords and assorted unruly family members. She’s the author of the popular Silo 49 series set in the WOOL universe and assorted novels and series. Her latest work, the Between Life and Death series, is a new and entirely novel take on
the zombie genre equally popular with teens and adults. It includes The In-Betweener, Forever Between and the upcoming final book in the trilogy, Between Life and Death.

  You can find out more about Ann Christy and read extended sneak peeks of her books at http://www.annchristy.com.

  Old Ventures, New Partners

  Nicolas Wilson

  ONE - IAN

  EAST GERMANY, 11/22/63. 5:32 PM LOCAL TIME

  MOST BRITISH AGENTS WOULDN'T CONSIDER waking up in East Berlin next to a Soviet spy a regular occurrence, but Ian called it Friday. She was sleeping soundly; they usually did. Still, he wasn't taking chances, not after last year. He remembered how the bullet burned, like bourbon, only like bourbon whose sting never softened.

  He thumbed the bullets out of the Soviet's gun, then slipped it back inside her pillow. He wondered if they'd kill her for giving him information. Likely. But that was why he was going to stay in Berlin, and offer to take her back to the west with him – in exchange for any other secrets she hadn't already blabbed.

  But first he had a phone call to make. Protocol said he should get a message to the local field office, that they would pass back to MI6 headquarters, that they would then pass, as part of the special relationship, to the Americans. Probably the CIA, since they were MI6's opposite number. That would filter back to the CIA director, who would pass it to the Secret Service. Eventually; probably sometime late Monday morning. If he was calling about the Red Army crossing the Oder, tanks would roll inside ten minutes, but if anything, his bosses were likely to say a dead President would give the Americans more skin in the game, maybe even get them to stop using Europe as a backstop against the Soviets.