The Mammoth Book of Best New Science Fiction 18

by Gardner Dozois

  Here he shuttles us sideways in time for a slyly entertaining (if somewhat unlikely) look at how life might have turned out for a famous author in a somewhat different universe . . .

  ALBERT CAMUS WAS TIRED. Tired of his job. Tired of his life. Tired of the vast empire he daily helped, in however small a manner, to sustain.

  Yet he had no choice but to continue, he felt, like Sisyphus forever rolling his stone up the mountain. His future was determined, all options of flight or rebirth foreclosed.

  Sitting in his office in the Imperial Palace in Algiers, Camus held his weary head in his hands. He had been awake now for thirty-six hours straight, striving to manage all the preparations for the dual anniversary celebrations about to commence. This year of 1954 marked fifty years since the glorious discovery of N-rays, and forty years since the birth of the French Empire out of the insufficient husk of the Third Republic. All around the empire, from the palmy isles of the Caribbean to the verdant coasts of South America, from the steaming jungles of Indochina to the tranquil lagoons of Polynesia, across the tawny veldts and plains of Africa and into the lonely islands of the Indian Ocean, wherever the proud French flag flew, in scores of colonies and protectorates, similar preparations were under way.

  Poster-sized images of the stern-faced emperor and of the genius inventor René Blondlot, bald and Vandyked, had to be mounted everywhere under yards of tricolor bunting. The facades of public buildings had to be cleansed with a mild application of N-rays. Ballrooms had to be decorated, caterers consulted, parade routes mapped, permits for vendors stamped, invitations issued. Indigent street Arabs had to be rounded up and shipped to the provinces. The narrow, stepped streets of the Casbah had to be locked down to prevent any awkward demonstrations, however small and meek, against the French and their festivities. (Listening to the complaints of merchants whose trade was preemptively hurt in advance of any unlawful gatherings was infinitely preferable to answering the questions of cynical reporters concerning the corpses of demonstrators charred to cinders by the N-ray cannons of the police.) And perhaps most importantly, security measures for the visit of the emperor had to be checked and double-checked.

  And of course, Camus’ superior, Governor-General Merseault, was absolutely no help. The fat, pompous toad was excellent at delivering speeches once they were written for him, and at glad-handing businessmen and pocketing their bribes. But for achieving any practical task the unschooled Merseault (an appointee with relatives in high places back in France) relied entirely on his underling, Camus, trained in the demanding foreign-service curriculum of the prestigious Ecole Nationale d’Administration.

  Camus lifted his head from the cradle of his hands and smiled grimly, his craggily handsome face beneath a thick shock of oiled black hair seamed with the lines of stress. Ah, Mother and Father, he thought, if only you could see your little boy today, for whom you scraped and saved so that he might get the best education in the ancestral homeland. At a mere forty-one years of age, he has become the power behind a certain small throne, yet finds himself utterly miserable.

  But of course Camus’ parents could not witness today his abject state. They had both perished in Algiers in the antipiednoir riots of 1935, roughly twenty years into the existence of the empire, when Camus himself had been safely abroad in Paris. So many had died in that holocaust, both Europeans and Arabs, before the soldiers of the Empire with their fearsome N-ray weapons and N-ray-powered armored vehicles had managed to restore order. Since that harsh exercise of power, however, peace and harmony had reigned in Algeria and across the Empire’s many other possessions, several of which had received similar instructional slaughters.

  Camus’s sardonic smile faded as he contemplated the bloody foundations of the current era of global peace and prosperity emanating from Paris. He reached for a pack of cigarettes lying next to an overflowing ashtray, secured one and lit up. An abominable, necessary habit, smoking, but one that was slightly excusable in these days when lung cancer could be cured by medically fractionated N-rays, as easily as the rays had cured Camus’ childhood tuberculosis – at least if the patient was among the elite, of course. Puffing his cigarette, leaning back in his caster-equipped chair, Camus permitted himself a few minutes of blissful inactivity. Two flies buzzed near the high ceiling of his small, unadorned, spartan office. The blinding summer sunlight of Algiers, charged with supernal luminance by reflection off Camus’ beloved ancient Mediterranean, slanted in molten bars through the wooden Venetian blinds, rendering the office a cage of radiance and shadow. Yet the space remained cool, as N-ray-powered air conditioners hummed away.

  Camus’ mind had drifted into a wordless place when the screen of the interoffice televisor on his desk pinged, then lit up with the N-ray-sketched face of his assistant, Simone Hié, an austere woman of Camus’ own years.

  “M’sieur Camus, the American ambassador is here to see you.”

  Camus straightened up and stubbed out his cigarette. “Send him in, please.”

  As the door opened, Camus was already on his feet and moving around his desk to greet the diplomat.

  “Ah, Ambassador Rhinebeck,” said Camus in his roughly accented English as he shook the American’s hand, “a pleasure to see you. I assume your office has received all the necessary ducats for the various celebrations. There will be no admission to events without proper invitations, you understand. Security demands – ”

  The silver-haired, jut-jawed Rhinebeck waved away the question in a gruff manner. Not for the first time, Camus was simultaneously impressed and appalled by the American’s typical bluntness.

  “Yes, yes,” the ambassador replied, “all that paperwork is being handled by my assistants. I’m here on a more important matter. I need to see the governor-general immediately, to register a formal protest.”

  One of Camus’ many duties was, if at all possible, blocking just such annoying demands on Merseault’s limited capacities. “A formal protest? On what matter? Surely such a grave step is not required between two nations with the amiable relations that characterize the bonds between the United States and the Empire. I’m certain I could be of help in resolving any trivial matter that has arisen.”

  Rhinebeck’s blue eyes assumed a steely glint against his sun-darkened skin. Despite the air-conditioning, Camus began to sweat. The two flies that had been hovering far above had now descended and were darting about Camus’ head, making an irritating buzz. Camus wanted to swat at them, but refrained, fearing to look foolish.

  “This is not a trivial matter,” said Rhinebeck. “Your Imperial soldiers have detained a party of innocent American tourists on the southern border with Niger. They are refusing to release them until they have been interrogated by your secret service. There’s even talk of transferring them to Paris. These actions are in violation of all treaties, protocols, and international standards. I must see Merseault immediately to demand their release.”

  Camus considered this news. There was a large military installation on the border with Niger, where N-ray research deemed too hazardous to be permitted in the homeland took place. Was it possible that these “innocent American tourists” were spies, seeking to steal the latest developments in the technology that had granted France uncontested global supremacy? Quite possibly. And if so, then Merseault, in his amateurish, naïve, blundering way, might very well cave in to Rhinebeck’s demands and grant the American concessions that would prove damaging to the best interests of the Empire. This possibility Camus could not permit. Best to let the military and the omnipresent Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure handle this affair.

  Camus was tired of the Empire, yes. But when all was said and done, he knew nothing else. His course became clear, and any hesitancy vanished.

  Time to push the rock uphill once again.

  “Ambassador Rhinebeck, I regret that I cannot forward your request for an audience to the governor-general. However, you may rest assured that I will personally monitor the situation and keep you inform
ed as to the fate of your countrymen. ”

  Rhinebeck’s resolve and bluster seemed to evaporate in a moment, in the face of Camus’ brusqueness. He suddenly looked older than his years. “So, more stonewalling. I had hoped for better from you, Albert, since I thought we were friends. But ultimately I should have expected such a response from someone in your superior position of strength. You realize that America is toothless against the Empire. There’s nothing we have to offer in exchange, nothing we can do, no threat we can make, to sway the Empire toward our point of view.”

  “Oh, come now, Henry, don’t take that tack. Surely you exaggerate – ”

  “Do I? Maybe you know something about my country’s international stature that I don’t. We face French outposts on all sides of our nation, limiting our actions, forbidding our natural expansion. Quebec, Cuba, Mexico, the Sandwich Islands, all of them under French control and bristling with N-ray armaments. Our trade deficit with France and its possessions grows more burdensome every year. Our allies are equally weak. Spain, Germany, even the formerly majestic United Kingdom have all proven powerless in the face of French conquests. Your Empire has become something totally unprecedented in human history. Let’s call it a superpower. No, no – a hyperpower. There is no nation left to offer a counterweight to your actions. You do exactly as you please, in any situation, and tell the rest of the world to be damned. Yet frustrating as the political situation is, we could contend with fair competition in international matters. But it’s your cultural dominion back home that’s really killing us. Our young people are aping French fashions, watching French cinema reading French books. Our own domestic arts are dying. We’re being colonized mentally by your Empire. And that’s the most insidious threat of all.”

  Camus was about to attempt to refute Rhinebeck’s unblinkingly real-politik analysis of global affairs, when he realized that everything the ambassador had said was absolutely true. Disdaining hypocrisy, Camus merely said, “I am sorry, Henry, that the world is as it is. But we must both make the best of the reality presented to us.”

  “Easy enough to say from where you sit, in the catbird seat,” said Rhinebeck. The ambassador turned away sharply then and exited.

  The encounter left Camus unsettled. He had to get away from his desk. Consulting his watch, Camus saw that it was past one pm. He would go have lunch at Céleste’s restaurant.

  Camus activated the televisor. “I will be out of the office for the next hour.”

  “Yes, M’sieur.”

  Outside, the heat of the July day and the sheer volume of the sunlight smote Camus brutally, yet with a certain welcome familiarity. Born and raised here, Camus had integrated the North African climate into his soul. He recalled his time in Paris as years of feeling alien and apart, distressed by the city’s foreign seasons almost as much as by the natives’ hauteur when confronted by a colonial upstart. At graduation he had been most relieved, upon securing his first posting, to discover that he had been assigned to the land of his birth. He had never left in all the years since. The love he shared with Algiers, a place open to the sky like a mouth or a wound, was a secret thing in his life, but also the engine that sustained him through all his angst and anomie.

  Walking easily down the broad boulevard of the Rue d’Isly, with its majestic European-style buildings nearly a century old, Camus felt his spirit begin to expand. If only he had time for a swim, his favorite pastime, life would begin to taste sweet again. But he could not permit himself such indulgences, not at least until after the Emperor’s visit. Flanked by sycamores, the Rue d’Isly boasted parallel sets of trolley tracks running down its middle. At one point the tracks bellied outward to accommodate a pedestaled statue of Professor Blondlot, holding aloft the first crude N-ray generator.

  Camus enjoyed watching the cool-legged women pass, the sight of the sea at the end of every cross street. He purchased a glass of iced lemonade flavored with orange flowers from an Arab vendor (license prominently displayed). Sipping the cool beverage, Camus was attracted to a public works site where other onlookers congregated. From behind the site’s fence spilled the edges of a crackling glare. Camus knew the source of the radiance. N-ray construction machinery was busy slicing through the earth to fashion Algiers’s first Metro line, running from Aïn Allah through downtown and on to Aïn Naadja. Camus looked through a smoked-glass port at the busy scene for a moment, then continued on his way. He hoped the new Metro would not mean the extinction of the nostalgia-provoking trolley cars, and made a mental note to arrange some subsidies for the older system.

  A few blocks further on, Camus arrived at his destination.

  In the doorway of the restaurant, his usual place, stood Céleste, with his apron bulging on his paunch, his white mustache well to the fore. Camus was ushered into the establishment with much to-do and seated at his traditional table. He ordered a simple meal of fish and couscous and sat back to await it with a glass of cold white wine. When his lunch came, Camus consumed it with absentminded bodily pleasure. His thoughts were an unfocused kaleidoscope of recent problems, right up to and including Rhinebeck’s visit. But eventually, under the influence of a second glass of wine, Camus found his thoughts turning to his dead parents. He recalled specifically his father’s frequent anecdotes surrounding the elder man’s personal witnessing of the birth of the Empire.

  The year was 1914, and the Great War was newly raging in Europe. Camus’ father was a soldier defending France. Far from his tropical home, Lucien Camus and his comrades were arrayed along the River Marne, preparing for a titanic battle against the Germans, and fully expecting to die, when the miracle happened that saved all their lives. From the rear lines trundled on their modified horse-drawn carriages came curious weapons, guns without open bores, strange assemblages of batteries and prisms and focal reflectors. Arrayed in an arc against the enemy, the uncanny weapons, upon command from Marshal Joffre himself, unleashed deadly purple rays of immense destructive power, sizzling bolts that evaporated all matter in their path. The German forces were utterly annihilated, without any loss of life on the French side.

  After this initial trial of the new guns, the Great War – or, as most people later ironically called it, “The Abortive Great War” – continued for only another few months. Impressive numbers of the futuristic weapons were deployed on all fronts, cindering all forces who dared oppose the French. The Treaty of Versailles was signed before the year was over, and the troops of the Triple Entente occupied Germany, with the French contingent predominant, despite objections from partners England and Russia. (Just four years ago, Camus had watched with interest the results of the very first postwar elections allowed the Germans. Perhaps now the French civil overseers in the defeated land could be begin to be reassigned to other vital parts of the Empire.) The transition from Third Republic to Empire was formalized shortly thereafter, with the ascension of the emperor, the dimwitted, pliable young scion of an ancient lineage.

  Of course, the question on all tongues at the time, including Lucien’s and his comrades’, concerned the origin of the mystery weapons. Soon, the public was treated to the whole glorious story.

  Ten years prior to the Battle of the Marne, Professor René Blondlot had been a simple teacher of physics at the University of Nancy when he became intrigued by the newly discovered phenomenon known as X-rays. Seeking to polarize these invisible rays, Blondlot assembled various apparatuses that seemed to produce a subtle new kind of beam, promptly labeled N-rays, in honor of the professor’s hometown of Nancy. At the heart of the N-ray generator was an essential nest of prisms and lenses.

  In America, a physicist named Robert Wood had tried to duplicate Blondlot’s experiments and failed to replicate the French results. He journeyed to Nancy and soon concluded quite erroneously that Blondlot was a fraud. Seeking, in the light of his false judgment, to “expose” the Frenchman, Wood had made a sleight-of-hand substitution during a key demonstration, inserting a ruby-quartz prism of his own construction in place of Blondlot�
��s original. When, as Wood expected, Blondlot continued to affirm results no one else could see, the American would step forward and reveal that a crucial portion of the apparatus was not even consistent with the original essential design.

  Ironically and quite condignly, the ravening burst of disruptive violet energy that emerged from the modified projector when it was activated incinerated Wood entirely, along with half of Blondlot’s lab.

  Accepting this fortuitous modification, the scorched but unharmed Blondlot was able to swiftly expand upon his initial discovery. Over the next several years, he discovered dozens of distinct forms of N-rays, all with different applications, from destructive to beneficent. Eventually his work came to the attention of the French government. When hostilities commenced in June of 1914, the French military had already secretly been embarked on a program of construction of N-ray weapons for some time. Under the stimulus of war, the first guns were hastily finished and rushed to the Marne by September.