The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology]

by Edited By Ian Watson

  It is an unpleasant fact of life that Sam’s sci-roms sell better than mine do. It is a tribute to Sam’s personality that I don’t hate him. He has an unfair advantage over the rest of us, since he is a professional astronomer himself. He only writes sci-roms for fun, in his spare time, of which he doesn’t have a whole lot. Most of his working hours are spent running a space probe of his own, the one that circles the Epsilon Eridani planet, Dione. I can stand his success (and, admit it! his talent) because he is generous with his ideas. As soon as we had agreed to share the hoverflight compartment, I put it to him directly. Well, almost directly. I said, “Sam, I’ve been wondering about something. When the Olympians get here, what is it going to mean to us?”

  He was the right person to ask, of course; Sam knew more about the Olympians than anyone alive. But he was the wrong person to expect a direct answer from. He rose up, clutching his robe around him. He waved away the masseur and looked at me in friendly amusement, out of those bright black eyes under the flyaway eyebrows and the drooping lids. “Why do you need a new sci-rom plot right now he?” asked.

  “Hells,” I said ruefully, and decided to come clean. “It wouldn’t be the first time I asked you, Sam. Only this time I really need it.” And I told him the story of the novel the censors obstatted and the editor who was after a quick replacement - or my blood, choice of one.

  He nibbled thoughtfully at the knuckle of his thumb. “What was this novel of yours about?” he asked curiously.

  “It was a satire, Sam. An Ass’ Olympiad. About the Olympians coming down to Earth in a matter transporter, only there’s a mix-up in the transmission and one of them accidentally gets turned into an ass. It’s got some funny bits in it.”

  “It sure has, Julie. Has had for a couple dozen centuries.”

  “Well, I didn’t say it was altogether original only—”

  He was shaking his head. “I thought you were smarter than that, Julie. What did you expect the censors to do, jeopardize the most important event in human history for the sake of a dumb sci-rom?”

  “It’s not a dumb—”

  “It’s dumb to risk offending them,” he said, overruling me firmly. “Best to be safe and not write about them at all.”

  “But everybody’s been doing it!”

  “Nobody’s been turning them into asses,” he pointed out. “Julie, there’s a limit to sci-rom speculation. When you write about the Olympians you’re right up at that limit. Any speculation about them can be enough reason for them to pull out of the meeting entirely, and we might never get a chance like this again.”

  “They wouldn’t—”

  “Ah, Julie,” he said, disgusted, “you don’t have any idea what they would or wouldn’t do. The censors made the right decision. Who knows what the Olympians are going to be like?”

  “You do,” I told him.

  He laughed. There was an uneasy sound to it, though. “I wish I did. About the only thing we do know is that they don’t appear to be just any old intelligent race; they have moral standards. We don’t have any idea what those standards are, really. I don’t know what your book says, but maybe you speculated that the Olympians were bringing us all kinds of new things - a cure for cancer, new psychedelic drugs, even eternal life—”

  “What kind of psychedelic drugs might they bring, exactly?” I asked.

  “Down, boy! I’m telling you not to think about that kind of idea. The point is that whatever you imagined might easily turn out to be the most repulsive and immoral thing the Olympians can think of. The stakes are too high. This is a once-only chance. We can’t let it go sour.”

  “But I need a story,” I wailed.

  “Well, yes,” he admitted, “I suppose you do. Let me think about it. Let’s get cleaned up and get out of here.”

  While we were in the hot drench, while we were dressing, while eating a light lunch, Sam chattered on about the forthcoming conference in Alexandria. I was pleased to listen. Apart from the fact that everything he said was interesting, I began to feel hopeful about actually producing a book for Mark. If anybody could help me, Sam could, and he was a problem addict. He couldn’t resist a challenge.

  That was undoubtedly why he was the first to puzzle out the Olympians’ interminably repeated squees and squabs. If you simply took the dit to be numeral one, and the squee to be plus sign, and the squab to be an equals sign, then “Dit squee dit squab dit dit” simply came out as “One plus one equals two.”

  That was easy enough. It didn’t take a super brain like Sam’s to substitute our terms for theirs and reveal the message to be simple arithmetic - except for the mysterious “wooooo”:

  Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab wooooo.

  What was the “wooooo” supposed to mean? A special convention to represent the numeral four?

  Sam knew right away, of course. As soon as he heard the message he telegraphed the solution from his library in Padua:

  “The message calls for an answer. ‘Wooooo’ means question mark. The answer is four.”

  And so the reply to the stars was transmitted on its way:

  Dit squee dit squee dit squee dit squab dit dit dit dit.

  The human race had turned in its test paper in the entrance examination, and the slow process of establishing communication had begun.

  It took four years before the Olympians responded. Obviously, they weren’t nearby. Also obviously, they weren’t simple folk like ourselves, sending out radio messages from a planet of a star two light-years away, because there wasn’t any star there; the reply came from a point in space where none of our telescopes or probes had found anything at all.

  By then Sam was deeply involved. He was the first to point out that the star folk had undoubtedly chosen to send a weak signal, because they wanted to be sure our technology was reasonably well developed before we tried to answer. He was one of the impatient ones who talked the collegium authorities into beginning transmission of all sorts of mathematical formulae, and then simple word relationships to start sending something to the Olympians while we waited for radio waves to creep to wherever they were and back with an answer.

  Sam wasn’t the only one, of course. He wasn’t even the principal investigator when they got into the hard work of developing a common vocabulary. There were better specialists than Sam at linguistics and cryptanalysis.

  But it was Sam who first noticed, early on, that the response time to our messages was getting shorter. Meaning that the Olympians were on their way towards us.

  By then they’d begun sending picture mosaics. They came in as strings of dits and dahs, 550,564 bits long. Someone quickly figured out that that was the square of 742, and when they displayed the string as a square matrix, black cells for the dits and white ones for the dahs, the image of the first Olympian leaped out.

  Everybody remembers that picture. Everyone on Earth saw it, except for the totally blind - it was on every broadcast screen and news journal in the world - and even the blind listened to the atomical descriptions every commentator supplied. Two tails. A fleshy, beard-like thing that hung down from its chin. Four legs. A ruff of spikes down what seemed to be the backbone. Eyes set wide apart on bulges from the cheekbones.

  That first Olympian was not at all pretty, but it was definitely alien.

  When the next string turned out very similar to the first, it was Sam who saw at once that it was simply a slightly rotated view of the same being. The Olympians took forty-one pictures to give us the complete likeness of that first one in the round . . .

  Then they began sending pictures of the others.

  It had never occurred to anyone, not even Sam, that we would be dealing not with one super race, but with at least twenty-two of them. There were that many separate forms of alien beings, and each one uglier and more strange than the one before.

  That was one of the reasons the priests didn’t like calling them Olympians. We’re pretty ecumenical about our gods, but none of them looked anything like any of those, and
some of the older priests never stopped muttering about blasphemy.

  Halfway through the third course of our lunch and the second flask of wine, Sam broke off his description of the latest communiqué from the Olympians - they’d been acknowledging receipt of our transmissions about Earthly history - to lift his head and grin at me.

  “Got it,” he said.

  I turned and blinked at him. Actually, I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to his monologue because I had been keeping my eye on the pretty Kievan waitress. She had attracted my attention because - well, I mean, after attracting my attention because of her extremely well-developed figure and the sparsity of clothing to conceal it - because she was wearing a gold citizen’s amulet around her neck. She wasn’t a slave. That made her more intriguing. I can’t ever get really interested in slave women, because it isn’t sporting, but I had got quite interested in this woman.

  “Are you listening to me?” Sam demanded testily.

  “Of course I am. What have you got?”

  “I’ve got the answer to your problem.” He beamed. “Not just a sci-rom novel plot. A whole new kind of sci-rom! Why don’t you write a book about what it will be like if the Olympians don’t come?”

  I love the way half of Sam’s brain works at questions while the other half is doing something completely different, but I can’t always follow what comes out of it. “I don’t see what you mean. If I write about the Olympians not coming, isn’t that just as bad as if I write about them doing it?”

  “No, no,” he snapped. “Listen to what I say! Leave the Olympians out entirely. Just write about a future that might happen, but won’t.”

  The waitress was hovering over us, picking up used plates. I was conscious of her listening as I responded with dignity, “Sam, that’s not my style. My sci-roms may not sell as well as yours do, but I’ve got just as much integrity. I never write anything that I don’t believe is at least possible.”

  “Julie, get your mind off your gonads” - so he hadn’t missed the attention I was giving the girl - “and use that pitifully tiny brain of yours. I’m talking about something that could be possible, in some alternative future, if you see what I mean.”

  I didn’t see at all. “What’s an alternative future?”

  “It’s a future that might happen, but won’t,” he explained. “Like if the Olympians don’t come to see us.”

  I shook my head, puzzled. “But we already know they’re coming,” I pointed out.

  “But suppose they weren’t! Suppose they hadn’t contacted us years ago.”

  “But they did,” I said, trying to straighten out his thinking on the subject. He only sighed.

  “I see I’m not getting through to you,” he said, pulling his robe around him and getting to his feet. “Get on with your waitress. I’ve got some messages to send. I’ll see you on the ship.”

  * * * *

  Well, for one reason or another I didn’t get anywhere with the waitress. She said she was married, happily and monogamously. Well, I couldn’t see why any lawful, free husband would have his wife out working at a job like that, but I was surprised she didn’t show more interest in one of my lineage -

  I’d better explain about that.

  You see, my family has a claim to fame. Genealogists say we are descended from the line of Julius Caesar himself.

  I mention that claim myself, sometimes, though usually only when I’ve been drinking - I suppose it is one of the reasons that Lidia, always a snob, took up with me in the first place. It isn’t a serious matter. After all, Julius Caesar died more than two thousand years ago. There have been sixty or seventy generations since then, not to mention the fact that, although Ancestor Julius certainly left a lot of children behind him, none of them happened to be born to a woman he happened to be married to. I don’t even look very Roman. There must have been a Nordiman or two in the line, because I’m tall and fair-haired, which no respectable Roman ever was.

  Still, even if I’m not exactly the lawful heir to the divine Julius, I at least come of a pretty ancient and distinguished line. You would have thought a mere waitress would have taken that into account before turning me down.

  She hadn’t, though. When I woke up the next morning - alone - Sam was gone from the inn, although the skipship for Alexandria wasn’t due to sail until late evening.

  I didn’t see him all day. I didn’t look for him very hard, because I woke up feeling a little ashamed of myself. Why should a grown man, a celebrated author of more than forty bestselling (well, reasonably well-selling) sci-roms, depend on somebody else for his ideas?

  So I turned my baggage over to the servant, checked out of the inn, and took the underground to the Library of Rome.

  Rome isn’t only the imperial capital of the world, it’s the scientific capital, too. The big old telescopes out on the hills aren’t much use any more, because the lights from the city spoil their night viewing, and anyway the big optical telescopes are all out in space now. Still, they were where Galileus detected the first extrasolar planet and Tychus made his famous spectrographs of the last great supernova in our own galaxy, only a couple of dozen years after the first space-flight. The scientific tradition survives. Rome is still the headquarters of the Collegium of Sciences.

  That’s why the Library of Rome is so great for someone like me. They have direct access to the Collegium data base, and you don’t even have to pay transmission tolls. I signed myself in, laid out my tablets and stylus on the desk they assigned me, and began calling up files.

  Somewhere there had to be an idea for a science-adventure romance no one had written yet. . .

  Somewhere there no doubt was, but I couldn’t find it. Usually you can get a lot of help from a smart research librarian, but it seemed they’d put on a lot of new people in the Library of Rome - Iberians, mostly; reduced to slave status because they’d taken part in last year’s Lusitanian uprising. There were so many Iberians on the market for a while that they depressed the price. I would have bought some as a speculation, knowing that the price would go up - after all, there aren’t that many uprisings and the demand for slaves never stops. But I was temporarily short of capital, and besides you have to feed them. If the ones at the Library of Rome were a fair sample, they were no bargains anyway.

  I gave up. The weather had improved enough to make a stroll around town attractive, and so I wandered towards the Ostia mono-rail.

  Rome was busy, as always. There was a bullfight going on in the Coliseum and racing at the Circus Maximus. Tourist buses were jamming narrow streets. A long religious procession was circling the Pantheon, but I didn’t get close enough to see which particular gods were being honoured today. I don’t like crowds. Especially Roman crowds, because there are even more foreigners in Rome than in London, Africs and Hinds, Hans and Northmen - every race on the face of the Earth sends its tourists to visit the Imperial City. And Rome obliges with spectacles. I paused at one of them, for the changing of the guard at the Golden House. Of course, the Caesar and his wife were nowhere to be seen - off on one of their endless ceremonial tours of the dominions, no doubt, or at least opening a new supermarket somewhere. But the Algonkian family standing in front of me were thrilled as the honour Legions marched and countermarched their standards around the palace. I remembered enough Cherokee to ask the Algonkians where they were from, but the languages aren’t really very close and the man’s Cherokee was even worse than mine. We just smiled at each other.

  As soon as the Legions were out of the way I headed for the train.

  I knew in the back of my mind that I should have been worrying about my financial position. The clock was running on my thirty days of grace. I didn’t, though. I was buoyed up by a feeling of confidence. Confidence in my good friend Flavius Samuelus, who, I knew, no matter what he was doing with most of his brain, was still cogitating an idea for me with some part of it.

  * * * *

  It did not occur to me that even Sam had limitations. Or that something s
o much more important than my own problems was taking up his attention that he didn’t have much left for me.

  I didn’t see Sam come onto the skip-ship, and I didn’t see him in our compartment. Even when the ship’s fans began to rumble and we slid down the ways into the Tyrrhenian Sea he wasn’t there. I dozed off, beginning to worry that he might have missed the boat; but late that night, already asleep, I half woke, just long enough to hear him stumbling in. “I’ve been on the bridge,” he said when I muttered something. “Go back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  When I woke, I thought it might have been a dream, because he was up and gone before me. But his bed had been slept in, however briefly, and the cabin steward reassured me when he brought my morning wine. Yes, Citizen Flavius Samuelus was certainly on the hover. He was in the captain’s own quarters, as a matter of fact, although what he was doing there the steward could not say.

  I spent the morning relaxing on the deck of the hover, soaking in the sun. The ship wasn’t exactly a hover any more. We had transited the Sicilian Straits during the night and now, out in the open Mediterranean, the captain had lowered the stilts, pulled up the hover skirts, and extended the screws. We were hydrofoiling across the sea at easily a hundred miles an hour. It was a smooth, relaxing ride; the vanes that supported us were twenty feet under the surface of the water, and so there was no wave action to bounce us around.