The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology]

by Edited By Ian Watson

  While British expeditions are bringing back treasures to the Science Museum, and the British government has built an extensive spaceport in Ceylon to service almost daily flights to Earth orbit and the Moon, the official US space program is still recovering from the political and economic fallout of the Second American Revolution. The Lunar colony founded by Harriman’s company had been taken over by the feds in 1977, and used as a dumping ground for dissidents after Nixon was elected to his third term as president. In 1979, a revolt by the imprisoned dissidents led to the foundation of the Lunar Republic and the fall of the Nixon government after a brief bombardment of the American mainland by rocks launched by the Lunar rail gun. Sir Bill’s account of the revolt, the former Lunar prison’s declaration of independence and the brief war quite rightly highlights the way mainstream history (heavily influenced by Heinlein’s colourful but disapproving popular account in The Moon is a Harsh Mistress, whose claims that libertarian heroes were suppressed by evil socialist radicals and drug-crazed hippies would be pitiful if they weren’t, thanks to the movie version, still so widely held) has unfairly dismissed the discreet but vital help given by the British Lunar colonists to the former prisoners. For as this writer can affirm from personal experience, the phlegmatic Brit scientists were surprisingly sympathetic to us hepcat hippie rebels.

  After the revolution, some of the rebels, including William Burroughs and Jack Kerouac, chose to return to Earth, but this wasn’t, as Sir Bill claims, a split in our ranks, merely a natural shakedown amongst a bunch of highly creative and mostly anarchic individuals. Many others, including Ken Kesey, Allen Ginsberg, Neil Cassady, Tom Hayden and Noam Chomsky, stayed on to found a new republic that attempted to marry the artistic impulses of many of its members with the technology required for survival. Very soon, we in the New Lunar Utope became expert at building habitats from scratch, and furnishing them with self-sufficient closed ecosystems; something we developed by ourselves by the way, despite Sir Bill’s crude hints that we were dependent on British expertise. It just wasn’t so, Bill: we had to learn to develop efficient closed-loop systems quickly or perish, and as this veteran of Ken Kesey’s magic bus tour of the Martian highlands can affirm from personal experience, it was all down to good old Yankee ingenuity.

  After the fall of Nixon and the election of Ronald Reagan, detente with the Russians swiftly followed, and the end of the cold war has led to a welcome diversion of funding from the US military space program to the construction of habitats and factories and solar power farms in Earth orbit and at the L5 point between Earth and the Moon. It’s a healthy sign, surely, that the habitats are not the transplanted whitebread suburbias of NASA’s drawing boards, but are designed by the New Lunar Utope as diverse multicultural centres for any artistic and scientific community that can afford the one-way ticket out of Earth’s gravity well.

  Meanwhile, the Russians have consolidated their exploitation of the vast resources of Mercury and have begun to mine many near-Earth asteroids. After the fall of Communism, Mercury declared itself an independent republic, and dozens of mining communities scattered through the asteroid belt have declared their autonomy too. Sir Bill’s explication of the political links between the former Soviet mining stations and the Free Lunar Utope is enjoyably disapproving. He’s forced to admit that the British hegemony is now strongly compromised by plans to extend the alliance to the outer reaches of the solar system by slingshotting seed colonies past Venus towards the newly discovered planetoids of the Kuiper Belt, and his speculation that the Free Lunar Utope and the Autonomous Space Republics have transformed the comet fragment Neo-8 into a multi-generation starship aimed at Tau Ceti reeks of panicky paranoia.

  It’s understandable that the Brits are nervous. It turns out that the bustling solar system hasn’t become the new British Empire after all, and it’s natural that they don’t want their tremendous investment in the first robot interstellar probes -due to be launched within the next two years towards the eight extra-solar systems with Earth-like planets discovered by the Newton space telescope on the far side of the Moon - to be upstaged. But hey, whatever happens, and here I’m in complete agreement with Sir Bill: we can only look back fondly and admiringly on the writings of the first prophets of the space age, and marvel at how timid their once outrageously optimistic predictions now seem. Let a thousand flowers bloom!

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  The Imitation Game

  Rudy Rucker

  It was a rainy Sunday night, June 6, 1954. Alan Turing was walking down the liquidly lamp-lit street to the Manchester train station, wearing a long raincoat with a furled umbrella concealed beneath. His Greek paramour Zeno was due on the 9pm coach, having taken a ferry from Calais. And, no, the name had no philosophical import, it was simply the boy’s name. If all went well, Zeno and Alan would be spending the night together in the sepulchral Manchester Midland travelers’ hotel—Alan’s own home nearby was watched. He’d booked the hotel room under a pseudonym.

  Barring any intrusions from the morals squad, Alan and Zeno would set off bright and early tomorrow for a lovely week of tramping across the hills of the Lake Country, free as rabbits, sleeping in serendipitous inns. Alan sent up a fervent prayer, if not to God, then to the deterministic universe’s initial boundary condition.

  ”Let it be so.”

  Surely the cosmos bore no distinct animus towards homosexuals, and the world might yet grant some peace to the tormented, fretful gnat labeled Alan Turing. But it was by no means a given that the assignation with Zeno would click. Last spring, the suspicious authorities had deported Alan’s Norwegian flame Kjell straight back to Bergen before Alan even saw him.

  It was as if Alan’s persecutors supposed him likely to be teaching his men top-secret code-breaking algorithms, rather than sensually savoring his rare hours of private joy. Although, yes, Alan did relish playing the tutor, and it was in fact conceivable that he might feel the urge to discuss those topics upon which he’d worked during the war years. After all, it was no one but he, Alan Turing, who’d been the brains of the British cryptography team at Bletchley Park, cracking the Nazi Enigma code and shortening the War by several years—little thanks that he’d ever gotten for that.

  The churning of a human mind is unpredictable, as is the anatomy of the human heart. Alan’s work on universal machines and computational morphogenesis had convinced him that the world is both deterministic and overflowing with endless surprise. His proof of the unsolvability of the Halting Problem had established, at least to Alan’s satisfaction, that there could never be any shortcuts for predicting the figures of Nature’s stately dance.

  Few but Alan had as yet grasped the new order. The prating philosophers still supposed, for instance, that there must be some element of randomness at play in order that each human face be slightly different. Far from it. The differences were simply the computation-amplified results of disparities among the embryos and their wombs—with these disparities stemming in turn from the cosmic computation’s orderly exfoliation of the universe’s initial conditions.

  Of late Alan had been testing his ideas with experiments involving the massed cellular computations by which a living organism transforms egg to embryo to adult. Input acorn; output oak. He’d already published his results involving the dappling of a brindle cow, but his latest experiments were so close to magic that he was holding them secret, wanting to refine the work in the alchemical privacy of his starkly under-furnished home. Should all go well, a Nobel prize might grace the burgeoning field of computational morphogenesis. This time Alan didn’t want a droning gas-bag like Alonzo Church to steal his thunder—as had happened with the Hilbert Entscheidungs problem.

  Alan glanced at his watch. Only three minutes till the coach arrived. His heart was pounding. Soon he’d be committing lewd and lascivious acts (luscious phrase) with a man in England. To avoid a stint in jail, he’d sworn to abjure this practice—but he’d found wiggle room for his conscience. Given t
hat Zeno was a visiting Greek national, he wasn’t, strictly speaking, a ‘man in England’, assuming that ‘in’ was construed to mean ‘who is a member citizen of’. Chop the logic and let the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil fall, soundless in the moldering woods.

  It had been nearly a year since Alan had enjoyed manly love—last summer on the island of Corfu with none other than Zeno, who’d taken Alan for a memorable row in his dory. Alan had just been coming off his court-ordered estrogen treatments, and thanks to the lingering effects of the libido-reducing hormones, the sex had been less intense than one might wish. This coming week would be different. Alan felt randy as a hat rack; his whole being was on the surface of his skin.

  Approaching the train station, he glanced back over his shoulder—reluctantly playing the socially assigned role of furtive perv—and sure enough, a weedy whey-faced fellow was mooching along half a block behind, a man with a little round mouth like a lamprey eel’s. Officer Harold Jenkins. Devil take the beastly prig!

  Alan twitched his eyes forward again, pretending not to have seen the detective. What with the growing trans-Atlantic hysteria over homosexuals and atomic secrets, the security minders grew ever more officious. In these darkening times, Alan sometimes mused that the United States had been colonized by the lowest dregs of British society: sexually obsessed zealots, degenerate criminals, and murderous slave masters.

  On the elevated tracks, Zeno’s train was pulling in. What to do? Surely Detective Jenkins didn’t realize that Alan was meeting this particular train. Alan’s incoming mail was vetted by the censors—he estimated that by now Her Majesty was employing the equivalent of two point seven workers full time to torment that disgraced boffin, Professor A.M. Turing. But—score one for Prof Turing—his written communications with Zeno had been encrypted via a sheaf of one-time pads he’d left in Corfu with his golden-eyed Greek god, bringing a matching sheaf home. Alan had made the pads from clipped-out sections of identical newspapers; he’d also built Zeno a cardboard cipher wheel to simplify the look-ups.

  No, no, in all likelihood, Jenkins was in this louche district on a routine patrol, although now, having spotted Turing, he would of course dog his steps. The arches beneath the elevated tracks were the precise spot where, two years ago, Alan had connected with a sweet-faced boy whose dishonesty had led to Alan’s conviction for acts of gross indecency. Alan’s arrest had been to some extent his own doing; he’d been foolish enough to call the police when one of the boy’s friends burglarized his house. “Silly ass,” Alan’s big brother had said. Remembering the phrase made Alan wince and snicker. A silly ass in a dunce’s cap, with donkey ears. A suffering human being nonetheless.

  The train screeched to a stop, puffing out steam. The doors of the carriages slammed open. Alan would have loved to sashay up there like Snow White on the palace steps. But how to shed Jenkins?

  Not to worry; he’d prepared a plan. He darted into the men’s public lavatory, inwardly chuckling at the vile, voyeuristic thrill that disk-mouthed Jenkins must feel to see his quarry going to earth. The echoing stony chamber was redolent with the rich scent of putrefying urine, the airborne biochemical signature of an immortal colony of microorganisms indigenous to the standing waters of the train station pissoir. It put Alan in mind of his latest Petri-dish experiments at home. He’d learned to grow stripes, spots and spirals in the flat mediums, and then he’d moved into the third dimension. He’d grown tentacles, hairs, and, just yesterday, a congelation of tissue very like a human ear.

  Like a thieves’ treasure cave, the wonderful bathroom ran straight through to the other side of the elevated track—with an exit on the far side. Striding through the room’s length, Alan drew out his umbrella, folded his mackintosh into a small bundle tucked beneath one arm, and hiked up the over-long pants of his dark suit to display the prominent red tartan spats that he’d worn, the spats a joking gift from a Cambridge friend. Exiting the jakes on the other side of the tracks, Alan opened his high-domed umbrella and pulled it low over his head. With the spats and dark suit replacing the beige mac and ground-dragging cuffs, he looked quite the different man from before.

  Not risking a backward glance, he clattered up the stairs to the platform. And there was Zeno, his handsome, bearded face alight. Zeno was tall for a Greek, with much the same build as Alan’s. As planned, Alan paused briefly by Zeno as if asking a question, privily passing him a little map and a key to their room at the Midland Hotel. And then Alan was off down the street, singing in the rain, leading the way.

  Alan didn’t notice Detective Jenkins following him in an un-marked car. Once Jenkins had determined where Alan and Zeno were bound, he put in a call to the security office at MI5. The matter was out of his hands now.

  The sex was even more enjoyable than Alan had hoped. He and Zeno slept till mid-morning, Zeno’s leg heavy across his, the two of them spooned together in one of the room’s twin beds. Alan awoke to a knocking on the door, followed by a rattling of keys.

  He sprang across the carpet and leaned against the door. “We’re still asleep,” he said, striving for an authoritative tone.

  ”The dining room’s about to close,” whined a woman’s voice. “Might I bring the gentlemen their breakfast in the room?”

  ”Indeed,” said Alan through the door. “A British breakfast for two. We have a train to catch rather soon.” Earlier this week, he’d had his housekeeper send his bag ahead to Cumbria in the Lake District.

  ”Very good, sir. Full breakfast for two.”

  ”Wash,” said Zeno, sticking his head out of the bathroom. At the sound of the maid, he’d darted right in there and started the tub. He looked happy. “Hot water.”

  Alan joined Zeno in the bath for a minute, and the dear boy brought him right off. But then Alan grew anxious about the return of the maid. He donned his clothes and rucked up the second bed so it would look slept in. Now Zeno emerged from his bath, utterly lovely in his nudity. Anxious Alan shooed him into his clothes. Fin-ally the maid appeared with the platters of food, really quite a nice-looking breakfast, with kippers, sausages, fried eggs, toast, honey, marmalade, cream and a lovely great pot of tea, steaming hot.

  Seeing the maid face to face, Alan realized they knew each other; she was the cousin of his housekeeper. Although the bent little woman feigned not to recognize him, he could see in her eyes that she knew exactly what he and Zeno were doing here. And there was a sense that she knew something more. She gave him a particularly odd look when she poured out the two mugs of tea. Wanting to be shot of her, Alan handed her a coin and she withdrew.

  ”Milk tea,” said Zeno, tipping half his mug back into the pot and topping it up with cream. He raised the mug as if in a toast, then slurped most of it down. Alan’s tea was still too hot for his lips, so he simply waved his mug and smiled.

  It seemed that even with the cream, Zeno’s tea was very hot indeed. Setting his mug down with a clatter, he began fanning his hands at his mouth, theatrically gasping for breath. Alan took it for a joke, and let out one of his grating laughs. But this was no farce.

  Zeno squeaked and clutched at his throat; beads of sweat covered his face; foam coated his lips. He dropped to the floor in a heap, spasmed his limbs like a starfish, and beat a tattoo on the floor.

  Hardly knowing what to think, Alan knelt over his inert friend, massaging his chest. The man had stopped breathing; he had no pulse. Alan made as if to press his mouth to Zeno’s, hoping to resuscitate him. But then he smelled bitter almonds—the classic sign of cyanide poisoning.

  Recoiling as abruptly as a piece of spring-loaded machinery, Alan ran into the bathroom and rinsed out his mouth. Her Majesty’s spy-masters had gone mad; they’d meant to murder them both. In the Queen’s eyes, Alan was an even greater risk than a rogue atomic scientist. Alan’s cryptographic work on breaking the Enigma code was a secret—the very existence of his work was unknown to the public at large.

  His only hope was to slip out of the country and take on a new life.
But how? He thought distractedly of the ear-shaped form he’d grown in the Petri dish at home. Why not a new face?

  Alan leaned over Zeno, rubbing his poor, dear chest. The man was very dead. Alan went and listened by the room’s door. Were MI5 agents lurking without, showing their teeth like hideous omnivorous ghouls? But he heard not a sound. The likeliest possibility was that some low-ranking operative had paid the maid to let him dose the tea—and had then gotten well out of the way. Perhaps Alan had a little time.

  He imagined setting his internal computational system to double speed. Stepping lively, he exchanged clothes with Zeno—a bit tricky as the other man’s body was so limp. Better than rigor mortis, at any rate.

  Finding a pair of scissors in Zeno’s travel kit, Alan trimmed off the pathetic, noble beard, sticking the whiskers to his own chin with smears of honey. A crude initial imitation, a first-order effect.

  Alan packed Zeno’s bag and made an effort to lift the corpse to his feet. Good lord but this was hard. Alan thought to tie a necktie to the suitcase, run the tie over his shoulder and knot it around Zeno’s right arm. If Alan held the suitcase in his left hand, it made a useful counterweight.