The Year's Best SF 13 # 1995

by Gardner Dozois (ed)

  Christian thumped the butt of his gun down on the stones. “Does Gaia let this go on?” he grated.

  Laurinda lifted her gaze to his. It pleaded. “She must. Humans must have free will. Otherwise they’re puppets.”

  “But how did they get into this mess?” Christian demanded. “Explain it if you can!”

  The amulet(s) replied with the same impersonality as before:

  “The Hellenistic era developed scientific method. This, together with the expansion of commerce and geographical knowledge, produced an industrial revolution and parliamentary democracy. However, neither the science nor the technology progressed beyond an approximate equivalent of your eighteenth century. Unwise social and fiscal policies led to breakdown, dictatorship, and repeated warfare.”

  Christian’s grin bared teeth. “That sounds familiar.”

  “Alexander Tytler said it in our eighteenth century,” Laurinda muttered unevenly. “No republic has long outlived the discovery by a majority of its people that they could vote themselves largesse from the public treasury.” Aloud: “Christian, they were only human.”

  Zoe hunched, lost in her sorrow.

  “You oversimplify,” stated the amulet voice. “But this is not a history lesson. To continue the outline, inevitably engineering information spread to the warlike barbarians of northern Europe and western Asia. If you question why they were granted existence, reflect that a population confined to the littoral of an inland sea could not model any possible material world. The broken-down societies of the South were unable to change their characters, or prevail over them, or eventually hold them off. The end results are typified by what you see around you.”

  “The Dark Ages,” Christian said dully. “What happens after them? What kind of new civilization?”

  “None. This sequence terminates in one more of its years.”

  “Huh?” he gasped. “Destroyed?”

  “No. The program ceases to run. The emulation stops.”

  “My God! Those millions of lives—as real as, as mine—”

  Laurinda stood up and held her arms out into the fouled air. “Does Gaia know, then, does Gaia know this time line would never get any happier?” she cried.

  “No,” said the voice in their brains. “Doubtless the potential of further progress exists. However, you forget that while Gaia’s capacities are large, they are not infinite. The more attention she devotes to one history, the details of its planet as well as the length of its course, the less she has to give to others. The probability is too small that this sequence will lead to a genuinely new form of society.”

  Slowly, Laurinda nodded. “I see.”

  “I don’t,” Christian snapped. “Except that Gaia’s inhuman.”

  Laurinda shook her head and laid a hand on his. “No, not that. Posthuman. We built the first artificial intelligences.” After a moment: “Gaia isn’t cruel. The universe often is, and she didn’t create it. She’s seeking something better than blind chance can make.”

  “Maybe.” His glance fell on Zoe. “Look, something’s got to be done for this poor soul. Never mind if we change the history. It’s due to finish soon anyway.”

  Laurinda swallowed and wiped her eyes. “Give her her last year in peace,” she said into the air. “Please.”

  Objects appeared in the room behind the doorway. “Here are food, wine, clean water,” said the unheard voice. “Advise her to return downhill after dark, find some friends, and lead them back. A small party, hiding in these ruins, can hope to survive until the invaders move on.”

  “It isn’t worthwhile doing more, is it?” Christian said bitterly. “Not to you.”

  “Do you wish to end your investigation?”

  “No, be damned if I will.”

  “Nor I,” said Laurinda. “But when we’re through here, when we’ve done the pitiful little we can for this girl, take us home.”

  * * *

  Peace dwelt in England. Clouds towered huge and white, blue-shadowed from the sunlight spilling past them. Along the left side of a lane, poppies blazed in a grainfield goldening toward harvest. On the right stretched the manifold greens of a pasture where cattle drowsed beneath a broad-crowned oak. Man and woman rode side by side. Hoofs thumped softly, saddle leather creaked, the sweet smell of horse mingled with herbal pungencies, a blackbird whistled.

  “No, I don’t suppose Gaia will ever restart any program she’s terminated,” Laurinda said. “But it’s no worse than death, and death is seldom that easy.”

  “The scale of it,” Christian protested, then sighed. “But I daresay Wayfarer will tell me I’m being sloppy sentimental, and when I’ve rejoined him I’ll agree.” Wryness added that that had better be true. He would no longer be separate, an avatar; he would be one with a far greater entity, which would in its turn remerge with a greater still.

  “Without Gaia, they would never have existed, those countless lives, generation after generation after generation,” Laurinda said. “Their worst miseries they brought on themselves. If any of them are ever to find their way to something better, truly better, she has to keep making fresh starts.”

  “Mm, I can’t help remembering all the millennialists and utopians who slaughtered people wholesale, or tortured them or threw them into concentration camps, if their behavior didn’t fit the convenient attainment of the inspired vision.”

  “No, no, it’s not like that! Don’t you see? She gives them their freedom to be themselves and, and to become more.”

  “Seems to me she adjusts the parameters and boundary conditions till the setup looks promising before she lets the experiment run.” Christian frowned. “But I admit, it isn’t believable that she does it simply because she’s … bored and lonely. Not when the whole fellowship of her kind is open to her. Maybe we haven’t the brains to know what her reasons are. Maybe she’s explaining them to Wayfarer, or directly to Alpha,” although communication among the stars would take decades at least.

  “Do you want to go on nonetheless?” she asked.

  “I said I do. I’m supposed to. But you?”

  “Yes. I don’t want to, well, fail her.”

  “I’m sort of at a loss what to try next, and not sure it’s wise to let the amulets decide.”

  “But they can help us, counsel us.” Laurinda drew breath. “Please. If you will. The next world we go to—could it be gentle? That horror we saw—”

  He reached across to take her hand. “Exactly what I was thinking. Have you a suggestion?”

  She nodded. “York Minster. It was in sad condition when I … lived … but I saw pictures and—It was one of the loveliest churches ever built, in the loveliest old town.”

  “Excellent idea. Not another lifeless piece of archive, though. A complete environment.” Christian pondered. “We’ll inquire first, naturally, but offhand I’d guess the Edwardian period would suit us well. On the Continent they called it the belle époque.”

  “Splendid!” she exclaimed. Already her spirits were rising anew.

  * * *

  Transfer.

  They arrived near the west end, in the south aisle.

  Worshippers were few, scattered closer to the altar rail. In the dimness, under the glories of glass and soaring Perpendicular arches, their advent went unobserved. Windows in that direction glowed more vividly—rose, gold, blue, the cool gray-green of the Five Sisters—than the splendor above their backs; it was a Tuesday morning in June. Incense wove its odor through the ringing chant from the choir.

  Christian tautened. “That’s Latin,” he whispered. “In England, 1900?” He glanced down at his garments and hers, and peered ahead. Shirt, coat, trousers for him, with a hat laid on the pew; ruffled blouse, ankle-length gown, and lacy bonnet for her; but—“The clothes aren’t right either.”

  “Hush,” Laurinda answered as low. “Wait. We were told this wouldn’t be our 1900. Here may be the only York Minster in all of Gaia.”

  He nodded. stiffly. It was clear that the node had never a
ttempted a perfect reproduction of any past milieu—impossible, and pointless to boot. Often, though not necessarily always, she took an approximation as a starting point; but it never went on to the same destiny. What were the roots of this day?

  “Relax,” Laurinda urged. “It’s beautiful.”

  He did his best, and indeed the Roman Catholic mass at the hour of tierce sang some tranquility into his heart.

  After the Nunc Dimittis, when clergy and laity had departed, the two could wander around and savor. Emerging at last, they spent a while looking upon the carven tawny limestone of the front. This was no Parthenon; it was a different upsurging of the same miracle. But around it lay a world to discover. With half a sigh and half a smile, they set forth.

  The delightful narrow “gates,” walled in with half-timbered houses, lured them. More modern streets and buildings, above all the people therein, captured them. York was a living town, a market town, core of a wide hinterland, node of a nation. It racketed, it bustled.

  The half smile faded. A wholly foreign setting would not have felt as wrong as one that was half homelike.

  Clothing styles were not radically unlike what pictures and historical dramas had once shown; but they were not identical. The English chatter was in no dialect of English known to Christian or Laurinda, and repeatedly they heard versions of German. A small, high-stacked steam locomotive pulled a train into a station of somehow Teutonic architecture. No early automobiles stuttered along the thoroughfares. Horse-drawn vehicles moved crowdedly, but the pavements were clean and the smell of dung faint because the animals wore a kind of diapers. A flag above a post office (?), fluttering in the wind, displayed a cross of St. Andrew on which was superimposed a two-headed gold eagle. A man with a megaphone bellowed at the throng to stand aside and make way for a military squadron. In blue uniforms, rifles on shoulders, they quick-marched to commands barked in German. Individual soldiers, presumably on leave, were everywhere. A boy went by, shrilly hawking newspapers, and Christian saw WAR in a headline.

  “Listen, amulet,” he muttered finally, “where can we get a beer?”

  “A public house will admit you if you go in by the couples’ entrance,” replied the soundless voice.

  So, no unescorted women allowed. Well, Christian thought vaguely, hadn’t that been the case in his Edwardian years, at any rate in respectable taverns? A signboard jutting from a Tudor façade read GEORGE AND DRAGON. The wainscoted room inside felt equally English.

  Custom was plentiful and noisy, tobacco smoke thick, but he and Laurinda found a table in a corner where they could talk without anybody else paying attention. The brew that a barmaid fetched was of Continental character. He didn’t give it the heed it deserved.

  “I don’t think we’ve found our peaceful world after all,” he said.

  Laurinda looked beyond him, into distances where he could not follow. “Will we ever?” she wondered. “Can any be, if it’s human?”

  He grimaced. “Well, let’s find out what the hell’s going on here.”

  “You can have a detailed explanation if you wish,” said the voice in their heads. “You would be better advised to accept a bare outline, as you did before.”

  “Instead of loading ourselves down with the background of a world that never was,” he mumbled.

  “That never was ours,” Laurinda corrected him.

  “Carry on.”

  “This sequence was generated as of its fifteenth century A.D.,” said the voice. “The conciliar movement was made to succeed, rather than failing as it did in your history.”

  “Uh, conciliar movement?”

  “The ecclesiastical councils of Constance and later of Basel attempted to heal the Great Schism and reform the government of the Church. Here they accomplished it, giving back to the bishops some of the power that over the centuries had accrued to the popes, working out a reconciliation with the Hussites, and making other important changes. As a result, no Protestant breakaway occurred, nor wars of religion, and the Church remained a counterbalance to the state, preventing the rise of absolute monarchies.”

  “Why, that’s wonderful,” Laurinda whispered.

  “Not too wonderful by now,” Christian said grimly. “What happened?”

  “In brief, Germany was spared the devastation of the Thirty Years’ War and a long-lasting division into quarrelsome principalities. It was unified in the seventeenth century and soon became the dominant European power, colonizing and conquering eastward. Religious and cultural differences from the Slavs proved irreconcilable. As the harsh imperium provoked increasing restlessness, it perforce grew more severe, causing more rebellion. Meanwhile it decayed within, until today it has broken apart and the Russians are advancing on Berlin.”

  “I see. What about science and technology?”

  “They have developed more slowly than in your history, although you have noted the existence of a fossil-fueled industry and inferred an approximately Lagrangian level of theory.”

  “The really brilliant eras were when all hell broke loose, weren’t they?” Christian mused. “This Europe went through less agony, and invented and discovered less. Coincidence?”

  “What about government?” Laurinda asked.

  “For a time, parliaments flourished, more powerful than kings, emperors, or popes,” said the voice. “In most Western countries they still wield considerable influence.”

  “As the creatures of special interests, I’ll bet,” Christian rasped. “All right, what comes next?”

  Gaia knew. He sat in a reactivation of something she probably played to a finish thousands of years ago.

  “Scientific and technological advance proceeds, accelerating, through a long period of general turbulence. At the termination point—”

  “Never mind!” Oblivion might be better than a nuclear war.

  Silence fell at the table. The life that filled the pub with its noise felt remote, unreal.

  “We dare not weep,” Laurinda finally said. “Not yet.”

  Christian shook himself. “Europe was never the whole of Earth,” he growled. “How many worlds has Gaia made?”

  “Many,” the voice told him.

  “Show us one that’s really foreign. If you agree, Laurinda.”

  She squared her shoulders. “Yes, do.” After a moment: “Not here. If we disappeared it would shock them. It might change the whole future.”

  “Hardly enough to notice,” Christian said. “And would it matter in the long run? But, yeh, let’s be off.”

  They wandered out, among marvels gone meaningless, until they found steps leading up onto the medieval wall. Thence they looked across roofs and river and Yorkshire beyond, finding they were alone.

  “Now take us away,” Christian ordered.

  “You have not specified any type of world,” said the voice.

  “Surprise us.”

  * * *

  Transfer.

  The sky stood enormous, bleached blue, breezes warm underneath. A bluff overlooked a wide brown river. Trees grew close to its edge, tall, pale of bark, leaves silver-green and shivery. Christian recognized them, cottonwoods. He was somewhere in west central North America, then. Uneasy shadows lent camouflage if he and Laurinda kept still. Across the river the land reached broad, roads twisting their way through cultivation—mainly wheat and Indian corn—that seemed to be parceled out among small farms, each with its buildings, house, barn, occasional stable or workshop. The sweeping lines of the ruddy-tiled roofs looked Asian. He spied oxcarts and a few horseback riders on the roads, workers in the fields, but at their distance he couldn’t identify race or garb. Above yonder horizon thrust clustered towers that also suggested the Orient. If they belonged to a city, it must be compact, not sprawling over the countryside but neatly drawn into itself.

  One road ran along the farther riverbank. A procession went upon it. An elephant led, as richly caparisoned as the man under the silk awning of a howdah. Shaven-headed men in yellow robes walked after, flanked by h
orsemen who bore poles from which pennons streamed scarlet and gold. The sound of slowly beaten gongs and minor-key chanting came faint through the wind.

  Christian snapped his fingers. “Stupid me!” he muttered. “Give us a couple of opticals.”

  Immediately he and Laurinda held the devices. From his era, they fitted into the palm but projected an image at any magnification desired, with no lenses off which light could glint to betray. He peered back and forth for minutes. Yes, the appearance was quite Chinese, or Chinese-derived, except that a number of the individuals he studied had more of an American countenance and the leader on the elephant wore a feather bonnet above his robe.

  “How quiet here,” Laurinda said.

  “You are at the height of the Great Peace,” the amulet voice answered.

  “How many like that were there ever?” Christian wondered. “Where, when, how?”

  “You are in North America, in the twenty-second century by your reckoning. Chinese navigators arrived on the Pacific shore seven hundred years ago, and colonists followed.”

  In this world, Christian thought, Europe and Africa were surely a sketch, mere geography, holding a few primitive tribes at most, unless nothing was there but ocean. Simplify, simplify.

  “Given the distances to sail and the dangers, the process was slow,” the voice went on. “While the newcomers displaced or subjugated the natives wherever they settled, most remained free for a long time, acquired the technology, and also developed resistance to introduced diseases. Eventually, being on roughly equal terms, the races began to mingle, genetically and culturally. The settlers mitigated the savagery of the religions they had encountered, but learned from the societies, as well as teaching. You behold the outcome.”

  “The Way of the Buddha?” Laurinda asked very softly.

  “As influenced by Daoism and local nature cults. It is a harmonious faith, without sects or heresies, pervading the civilization.”

  “Everything can’t be pure loving-kindness,” Christian said.

  “Certainly not. But the peace that the Emperor Wei Zhi-fu brought about has lasted for a century and will for another two. If you travel, you will find superb achievements in the arts and in graciousness.”