The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology]

by Edited By Ian Watson

  After climbing the bulwark, I slipped and fell to the deck right at the feet of the tall, ghost-faced captain! We stared at each other with moonbright eyes for a startled moment, and I swear I saw avidity in his features as malefic as a temple demon’s. I bolted upright even as he shouted. Blessedly, the entire crew was busy trying to control the strange new ship, and I eluded the grasp of the Colonizer and darted across the deck to the gangway.

  Death had been my intent from the first. When I plunged into the hold and collapsed among coils of hempen rope, I had but one thought: to reach the weapons bin and ignite the powder. I blundered in the dark, slammed into a bulkhead, tripped over bales of sorghum, and reached the weapons bin in gasping disarray. Shouts boomed from the gangway, and the hulking shapes of the Big Noses filled the narrow corridor.

  Wildly, I grasped for the flintstriker I knew lay somewhere near the bin. Or did it? Perhaps that was too dangerous a tool to keep near the powder. The Big Noses closed in, and I desperately bounded atop the bin and shoved open the hatch there. Moonlight gushed over me, and I confronted the horrid faces of the barbarians rushing towards me - and there, at my elbow, a sheaf of matches.

  I seized the fire-sticks and rattled them at the Big Noses, but this did not thwart them. The oafs had no idea what these were! Those brutes dragged me down, barking furiously. I gaped about in the moonglow, spotted a flintstriker hanging from a beam. Kicking like a madman, I twisted free just long enough to snatch the flintstriker. Alas, I had inspired their fury, and heavy blows knocked me to the planks.

  Stunned, I barely had the strength to squeeze the lever of the flintstriker. My feeble effort elicited only the tiniest spark, though that proved sufficient to ignite a match. The sulfurous flare startled my assailants, and they fell back. Immediately, I lurched about and held high the burning pine stick while gesturing at the powder kegs behind me. The Big Noses pulled away.

  With my free hand, I grabbed a bamboo tube I recognized as a Beard-the-Moon rocket. I lit the fuse and pointed it at the open hatch. In a radiant whoosh, sparks and flames sprayed into the night. The cries of the Big Noses sounded from the deck, and the men who had seized me fled. A laugh actually tore through me as I fired two more Beard-the-Moon rockets. I was going to die, and now death seemed a fate worthy of laughter.

  Perhaps the longtime company of Buddhists and Taoists had affected me after all, for I had no desire to kill the Big Noses. I waited long enough for them to throw themselves into the sea before I ignited the fuses on several heaven-shaking Thunderclap bombs. My last thought, while waiting for the explosion to hurl me into the Great Inane, focused on you, Heart Wing. Once I had committed myself to using death as a doorway, your ghost had actually come back for me, to lead me to the ancestors in a way that would serve the Kingdom. I thanked you, and the Thunderclap bombs exploded.

  Yet, I did not die - at least, not in an obvious way. Later, when I could think clearly again, I realized that your ghost had not yet done with me. Who else but you could have placed me just where I stood so that my body hurtled straight upward through the open hatch and into the lustrous night? I remember none of that; however, the watch, who had made it to shore, claims that when the Imperial ship burst into a fireball, he witnessed me flying, silhouetted against the moon.

  He found me unconscious in the shallows, unscathed except for singed beard and eyebrows and clothes torn. Like a meteor, I had fallen back to earth, back to life. I had fallen the way stars fall, from the remote darkness where they have shivered in the cold down into the warm, close darkness of earthly life. That night, I fell from the gloom of my solitary grief into the dark of terrestrial life, where we all suffer together in our unknowing.

  Slapped alert by the watch, I sat up in the moon-dappled shallows and experienced my forty summers fall away into emptiness. The ship was gone - just as you are gone, Heart Wing, and our daughter gone into that emptiness the Buddhists call sunyata, which is really the void of our unknowing, the mystery that bears everything that lives and dies.

  How foolish to say all this to you, who dwells now in the heart of this emptiness. But I, I have been ignorant, asleep. I needed reminding that time and the things of felling shall not fall into darkness but into a new freedom we cannot name and so call emptiness. All of reality floats in that vacancy, like the spheres in the void of space, like these words floating in the emptiness of the page. Words try to capture reality, yet what they actually capture are only more words and deeper doubts. Mystery is the pre-eminent condition of human being - and so, it is also our freedom to be exactly who we are, free to choose the words our doubts require.

  No one in the delegation understood this when I returned to the mission to account for myself. Grateful as they were for my stopping the theft of the Imperial ship, they believed the explosion had addled me. I think the monks knew what I meant, but these monks belong to the “just so” sect of Ch’an Buddhism, so they would be the last to let on.

  Be that as it may, I sat there quite agog and amazed, awakened to the knowledge that the freedom to be who I am means, quite simply, that I am alone - without you. For now, it is meant that this is so. For reasons I will never truly understand, death is denied me. So, what am I to do with this life, then, and this loneliness? This freedom to be, this freedom whose chances bleed from us, creates new imperatives. In the place of my failure and shame waits a gaping emptiness wanting to be filled with what I might yet be.

  As I meditated on this, the delegation wrote an official missive admonishing the Big Noses for their attempted thievery and threatening to report them to the Emperor. The Big Noses, all of whom had escaped the explosion and fled to their ship, replied with a terse letter of halfhearted apology. With no other Imperial vessel anywhere in the vicinity and none of the Autocracies’ forces nearby, our host, the monastery’s abbot, urged us to accept the apology.

  The delegation decided, in an effort to both placate and hurry the Colonizer on his way, to load his ships with all the porcelain in the mission, several remarkable landscape paintings, a jade statue of Kwan Yin, goddess of serenity, as well as bales of crops the Big Noses had never before seen, notably tobacco, peanuts, and potatoes. By then, inspired by my lack of family and career, I had decided to take the poison cure required by my sorrow: I have, dear wife, forsaken my return to the Middle Kingdom to go with the Colonizer on his return voyage across the Storm Sea to his homeland.

  Do you chastise me for being so foolish? Indeed, the decision weighed heavily, as I had hoped to return to our homeland and administer the rites myself at your gravesite. But if what I have learned of the emptiness is true, then you are no more there than here. The path of the Way is a roadlessness without departure or arrival. I have decided, Heart Wing, to follow that path, to fit the unaccomplished parts of my life to the future and embrace the unknown.

  The delegation strove in vain to dissuade me. They fear that I have gone truly mad. But I do not care at all. I know you would understand, Heart Wing, you whom I first won with the bride-bait of stories written by the lamp of lightning. So, as absurd as this may be, I sit here now, writing to you on the quarterdeck of a leaky vessel named Santa Maria.

  I can tell from the way he looks at me that the Colonizer is still angry that I deprived him of his booty, and I know he has only taken me on board with the expectation of getting useful information from me. However, for now, our ignorance of each other’s language offers me a chance to win the Big Noses’ respect by my deeds - and to watch and learn about these barbarians.

  In time, I will understand their language. I will inform their monarch of the wonders of the Middle Kingdom, of the achievements of the Unified Sandalwood Autocracies, of the glory of our people. And I will write again from the far side of the world, from so far east it is the west, where sun and moon meet. And from there, I will send back to the Kingdom and the USA stories everyone will read, stories of another world, written in ink from the new moon.

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  * * * *


  Dispatches From the Revolution

  Pat Cadigan

  Dylan was coming to Chicago.

  The summer air, already electric with the violence of the war, the assassination attempts successful and unsuccessful, the anti-war riots, became super-charged with the rumor. Feeling was running high, any feeling about anything, real high, way up high, eight miles high and rising, brothers and sisters. And to top it all off, there was a madman in the White House.

  Johnson, pull out like your father should have! The graffito of choice for anyone even semi-literate; spray paint sales must have been phenomenal that summer. The old bastard with a face like the dogs he lifted up by their ears would not give it up, step aside, and graciously bow to the inevitable. He wuz the Prezident, the gaw-damned Prezident, hear that, muh fellow Amurrieans? Dump Johnson, my ass, don’t even think about it, boys, the one we ought to dump is that candy-assed Humphrey. Gaw-damned embarrassment is what he is.

  And the President’s crazy, that’s what he is, went the whispers all around Capitol Hill, radiating outward until they became shouts. Madman in the White House—the crazy way with LBJ! If you couldn’t tell he was deranged by the way he was stepping up the bombing and the number of troops in Vietnam, his conviction that he could actually stand against Bobby Kennedy clinched it. Robert F. Kennedy, sainted brother to martyred Jack, canonized in his own lifetime by an assassination attempt. Made by the only man in America who was obviously crazier than LBJ, frothed-up Arab with a name like automatic-weapons-fire, Sirhan Sirhan, ka-boom, ka-boom. The Golden Kennedy had actually assisted in the crazed gunman’s capture, shoulder to shoulder with security guards and the Secret Service as they all wrestled him to the floor. Pity about the busboy taking that bullet right in the eye, but the Kennedys had given him a positively lovely funeral with RFK himself doing the eulogy. And, needless to say, the family would never want for anything again in this life.

  But Johnson the Madman was going to run! Without a doubt, he was a dangerous psychotic. Madman in the White House—damned straight you didn’t need a Weatherman to know the way the wind blew.

  Nonetheless, there was one—after all, hadn’t Dylan said the answer was blowin’ in the wind? And if he was coming to Chicago to support the brothers and sisters, that proved the wind was about to blow gale force. Storm coming, batten down the hatches, fasten your seatbelts, and grab yourself a helmet, or steal a hardhat from some redneck construction worker.

  Veterans of the Civil Rights Movement already had their riot gear. Seven years after the first freedom ride stalled out in Birmingham, the feelings of humiliation and defeat at having to let the Justice Department scoop them up and spirit them away to New Orleans for their own protection had been renewed in the violent death of the man who had preached victory through nonviolence. He’d had a dream; the wake-up call had come as a gunshot. Dreaming was for when you were asleep. Now it was time to be wide-awake in America…

  Annie Phillips:

  “There were plenty of us already wide-awake in America by that late date. I’d been to Chicago back in ‘66, two years to the month in Marquette Park. If I was never awake any other day in my life before April ‘68, I was awake that day. Surrounded by a thousand of the meanest white people in America waving those Confederate flags and those swastikas, screaming at us. And then they let fly with rocks and bricks and bottles, and I saw when Dr. King took one in the head. I’d thought he was gonna die that day and all the rest of us with him. Well, he didn’t and we didn’t, but it was a near thing. After, the buses were pulling away and they were chasing us and I looked back at those faces and I thought, ‘There’s no hope. There’s really no hope.’

  “When Daley got the court order against large groups marching in the city, I breathed a sigh of relief, I can tell you. I felt like that man had saved my life. And then Dr. King says okay, we’ll march in Cicero, it’s a suburb, the order doesn’t cover Cicero. Cicero. I didn’t want to do it, I knew they’d kill us, shoot us, burn us, tear us up with their bare hands and teeth. Some of us were ready to meet them head-on. I truly believe that Martin Luther King would have died that day if Daley hadn’t wised up in a hurry and said he’d go for the meeting at the Palmer House.

  “Summit Agreement, yeah. Sell-Out Agreement, we called it, a lot of us. I think even Dr. King knew it. And so a whole bunch of us marched in Cicero anyway. I wasn’t there, but I know what happened, just like everybody else. Two hundred dead, most of them black, property damage in the millions though I can’t say I could ever find it in me to grieve for property damage over people damage. Even though I wasn’t there, something of me died that day in Cicero and was reborn in anger. By ‘68, I had a good-sized bone to pick with good old Chi-town, old Daley-ville. I don’t regret what I did. All I regret is that the bomb didn’t get Daley. It had his name on it, I put it on there myself, on the side of the pipe. ‘Richard Daley’s ticket to hell, coach class.’

  “Looking back on it, I think I might have had better luck as a sniper.”

  Excerpt from an interview

  conducted covertly at Sybil Brand,

  published in

  The Whole Samizdat Catalog, 1972

  exact date unknown

  Veterans of the Free Speech Movement at Berkeley also knew what they were up against. Reagan’s tear-gas campaign against campus protestors drew praise from a surprising number of people who felt the Great Society was seriously threatened by the disorder promoted by campus dissidents. The suggestion that the excessive force used by the police caused problems rather than solving any was rejected by the Reagan administration and by its growing blue-collar following as well.

  By the time Reagan assumed the governorship, he had already made up his mind to challenge Nixon in ‘68. But what he needed for a serious bid was the Southern vote, which was divided between Kennedy and Wallace. Cleverly, the ex-movie actor managed to suggest strong parallels between campus unrest and racial unrest, implying that both groups were seeking the violent overthrow and destruction of the government of the United States. Some of the more radical rhetoric that came out of both the student left and the civil rights movement, and the fact that the student anti-war movement aligned itself with the civil rights movement only seemed to validate Reagan’s position.

  That the Southern vote would be divided between two individuals as disparate as Robert F. Kennedy and George C. Wallace seems bizarre to us in the present. But both men appealed to the working class, who felt left out of the American dream. Despite the inevitable trouble that Wallace’s appearances resulted in, his message did reach the audience for which it was intended—the common man who had little to show for years, sometimes decades, of hard work beyond a small piece of property and a paycheck taxed to the breaking point, and, as far as the common man could tell, to someone else’s benefit. Wallace understood that the common man felt pushed around by the government and exploited this feeling. In a quieter era, he would have come off as a bigoted buffoon; but in a time when blacks and students were demonstrating, rioting, and spouting unthinkable statements against the government, the war, and the system in general, Wallace seemed to be one of the few, if not the only political leader who had the energy to meet this new threat to the American way of life and wrestle it into submission.

  Some people began to wonder if McCarthy hadn’t been right about Communist infiltration and subversion after all… and that wasn’t Eugene McCarthy they were wondering about. By the time of the Chicago Democratic Convention, Eugene McCarthy had all but disappeared, his student supporters a liability rather than an asset. They undermined his credibility; worse, they could not vote for him, since the voting age at that time was a flat twenty-one for everyone…

  Carl Shipley:

  “I hadn’t been around Berkeley long when the Free Speech Movement started. Like, the university— Towle, Kerr, all of them were so out-to-lunch on what was happening with us. They thought they were dealing with Beaver Cleaver and his Little League team, I guess. And with us, it was, ‘Gu
ess what, Mr. Man, the neighborhood’s changing, it ain’t Beaver Cleaver anymore, it’s Eldridge Cleaver and Wally just got a notice to report for his physical and maybe he doesn’t want to go get his ass shot off in southeast Asia and maybe we’ve had enough of this middle-American conservative bullshit.’ That’s why they wanted to shut down Bancroft Strip. That was the first place I went to see when I got there and it was just like everybody said, all these different causes and stuff, the Young Republicans hanging in right along with the vegetarians and the feminists and people fund-raising for candidates and I don’t know what-all.

  “So we all said fuck this shit, you ain’t closing us down, we’re closing you down. And we did it, we closed the university down. We had the power and we kept it—and then in comes Ronald Reagan two years later in ‘66 and he says, Relax, Mr. and Mrs. America, the cavalry’s here. I know you’re worried about the Beave, but I’ve got the solution.