Analog SFF, November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  He laughed and drew his broadsword.

  He dispatched the chimera, but not before it had scorched him a bit. In the meantime, Gale molded clay and breathed life into an army of animals. As soon as he had lopped off all three of the chimera's heads, he was attacked by a saber-toothed tiger. Lions, bears, rhinoceros, and an elephant or two waited for him. And when he was done with those, she made new ones: gryphons, giant wolves, minotaurs, and centaurs. Each fearsome creation was easier to make.

  This was fun. She felt more confident, more daring, with each one. She built giants and a cyclops and mighty clay warriors as large as he. He killed them all.

  "This is great!” he yelled. “Keep them coming!"

  It was too easy. He could kill anything she threw at him and the points were evenly split between them. She had to do something different, something he would have done to her.

  It was her dragon that finally stopped him.

  The body was huge and green and it belched scarlet flames tinged with gold. She had made the skull large enough to climb inside and control it as he used to control her. Once she had set it to her liking, making its claws sharper, arching its neck just so, she lumbered straight at him and snaked her neck from side to side, looking for a soft spot to burn. Her scales were too slippery for him to climb, so he couldn't behead her. While he hacked at one leg, she ripped him open with the talons of another. Great waves of pain washed over her. Her tail writhed in agony and black blood ran copiously down her leg and between her toes. The wound was as painful as she could have wished, and she had done it. He lay gasping on the ground still clutching his broadsword, covered in his own blood as well as hers.

  Gale stepped out of her dragon and snapped her fingers. They were alone in her unfinished landscape again. She limped over and knelt close by his side as he coughed up blood. She gently unfurled his fingers from his broadsword, laid it along his chest, folded his arms over it.

  He whispered her name, begged her to heal him.

  "Game over,” she said softly in his ear and took the gold trophy brooch from his hair while he watched her, the light fading from his pale blue eyes.

  She stood and twisted her own hair back from her face and fastened the brooch to hold it.

  She was tired of the petite brunette. She made herself taller again, taller than he, and looked down at him.

  "Next time you want to make something perfect, ask."

  She sent him out of the system then, back to wherever it was, this “reality” of his. Let him start over as a new player, claw his way back as she had. Let him learn to play straight, no hidden tricks that gave him advantage. Oh, yes. They had been there in his notes, secret ways to gain points over other players, even herself.

  Gale's arms became wings, the cloth of her tight dress split to reveal a body covered in feathers. She began to flap and lifted off the ground, her feet curled into talons. She could see better from the air, see all of her creation, choose what and whom to play, choose whether to let him come back again or to make her own version of him.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Oz Drummond

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  Novelette: UNBURNING ALEXANDRIA by Paul Levinson

  * * * *

  Illustration by William Warren

  * * * *

  When you're tinkering with time, progress can be really hard to measure....

  * * * *

  Part I

  [Alexandria, 413 ad]

  Sierra walked quickly past the Library in Alexandria, sandals slapping on stones.

  No clocks were on its walls. But if there had been an hour hand and a minute hand, in alabaster or some other white mineral that matched the walls, she knew the minute would be pressing the hour and the hour would be twelve. The Library was at its end—

  "Hypatia!"

  She turned around. “Synesius, an unexpected pleasure! You should have sent word. Ptolemais to Alexandria is a long way to travel for a surprise visit.” She knew he was desperately in love with her. She was in love with no one likely alive in this world.

  "The winds were kind. I boarded the ship four mornings ago, and here I am."

  The Sun had just set behind him. Synesius was about the same age as Sierra—he would have been about ten years younger than the original Hypatia. He had been Sierra's student for an intense year, shortly after she had first replaced Hypatia, dead of a swift fever. Today Synesius looked older than both of them put together. Dark pouches anchored his eyes, deep creases mapped his forehead.

  "What is wrong?” she asked him.

  "People of my faith are angrier than ever about you and your pagans. I am concerned about your safety."

  Sierra scoffed. “Why, if you have such confidence that yours is the one true inevitable faith, do you have such anger toward others? Surely, if your faith is right, all others including mine will fade of their own accord."

  "Not all of us want to kill you,” Synesius replied. “I certainly do not.” He blushed slightly. “Most of us indeed believe that in time the whole world will be Christian. But there are fanatics among us—Nitrian young men—who see their mission as cleansing the world of all impurities immediately, including the purveyors of impure thoughts. Your beauty and your intelligence make you the most dangerous purveyor of all. They burn with hatred—I have seen it."

  Sierra turned from Synesius and the colors behind him and looked again at the Library. It was bronzed and dignified in this light. “My father did his best to stave off the bloodshed, to contest with ideas not knives, but he lost that battle.” She was talking about Theon, who was Hypatia's, not her, biological father. Theon had succumbed to the same fever as Hypatia, which had cut short Sierra's attempt to locate the cure for Socrates’ illness. But when Hypatia's death was imminent, Sierra had taken some of Hypatia's DNA, traveled to Athens and the future, and reconstructed her face so that she looked like Hypatia. Sierra returned and took Hypatia's place.

  For the Alexandrian world of 410 AD and all subsequent history, Hypatia had recovered. If she looked slightly different, if she behaved a little oddly, that was ascribed to grief over the loss of her father and her own close encounter with death....

  Unfortunately, that same history had Hypatia dying by vicious assassination in 415 AD. But that was still nearly two years away. Sierra had crucial work to do, but no intention of staying in Alexandria that long.... But what, then, was the cause of this visit from Synesius today? Some translucent danger that her reading of history had not disclosed?

  "Your father was a wise man, as you his daughter are wise,” Synesius said. “Indeed, you are wiser still—you have an understanding, a perspective, that speaks of centuries, not just years."

  "Thank you,” Sierra replied. “A high compliment from the Bishop of Ptolemais."

  "Yes, a compliment,” Synesius said, “but a warning, too. In return for your wisdom, the awe you evoke in people, you court death from the Christian fanatics."

  "What would you have me do?"

  "Leave with me,” Synesius said. “Come with me to Ptolemais. There is nothing here for you now. Just scrolls and memories. You can take the memories with you. And the scrolls are dwindling...."

  "I am devoted to saving them and to stemming the exodus of scholars from Alexandria,” Sierra said. And finding the curefor Socrates, if it exists. She had deliberately come back here near the end of Theon's life, in case he had not learned about the cure until his last years. But she had not counted on Hypatia dying at the same time, and now she was obliged to pursue this phantom cure without their assistance.

  "Come with me,” Synesius repeated. “You will be safe in Ptolemais. Under my protection. I will care for you."

  Sierra reminded herself that, in this age, bishops were not celibate. “No,” she said. “The Library requires—and deserves—my attention.” But it wasn't just Synesius's desire that she wished to avoid, or the dwindling holdings of the Alexandrian library that she yearned to protect, or the possible cure for Socrates that she want
ed to find. Alcibiades was long overdue in Alexandria....

  "Very well.” Synesius lowered his head in acceptance of Sierra's decision. “I will spend the night with my brothers—at quarters generously provided by Marcellinus—and leave for Ptolemais in the morning."

  "Marcellinus of Carthage? Your importance has grown since the last time we met. That makes me happy.” Marcellinus was not only Proconsul of Africa, but speaker for the Emperor himself. But she also knew that Honorius ruled only over half an empire now, and the weaker, crumbling half at that—

  "If only my importance were enough to convince you.” Synesius reached into his robe and extracted a small bundle of scrolls. “These were recently recovered in a house that the Nitrians set on fire. They were written by your father."

  * * * *

  Sierra looked up at the pastel ceiling of her bedroom in the Library late that night and shook her head slowly.... But if Alcibiades was coming here, why wasn't he here already?

  Where was he? She asked herself this question every night as she lay tossing and turning, waiting for sleep. She could put it out of her mind, barely, sometimes, during the day, but not in the night. She looked at the little digi-locket she had picked up in the future and now kept by her bed. It was a painting—by Jean Baptiste-Regnault from 1785, “Socrates Dragging Alcibiades from the Embrace of Sensual Pleasure.” A stern Socrates dragged a young fair-haired man from a blond woman. Nothing about the picture was right. Socrates of course looked nothing like Socrates, Alcibiades bore no resemblance to the real man, and she in all her disguises had never been blonde. But someone, something, had dragged him away from her....

  Was he waiting for the time closest to her advertised death—the time of Hypatia's murder as recorded in history—so that he could show up at the last minute and be sure she, Sierra playing Hypatia, was here?

  A very dangerous game. But she was playing it, too. Attracted like some fluttering insect to this hot Venus flytrap of a place and time. For Alcibiades? Yes. For finding the elusive cure for Socrates, if it ever existed—even though Theon, its reported author, was gone? Yes. Even though the biblia Synesius had given her had proved to be another dead end, containing nothing new, at least on her first heart-pounding reading.

  She thought about those scrolls—and then about all the scrolls still left in this Library. She picked up a scroll she had left near the side of her bed. It was by Alcman of Sardis, a seventh-century-BC Spartan. He and his poetry were known in her future age, but this work was not. It would not survive the final destruction of the Library by the Caliph Omar some two hundred years from this past.

  But Alcman and his world of potential readers were the lucky ones—at least some of his work had endured. Most books that survived into the age of the printing press in the West—the world of Gutenberg in the 1450s and the mass copies it would produce—were home free. Certainly everything that had made it into her digital age in the twenty-first century would likely be available to please and inform and infuriate readers for as long as there were humans on Earth and other planets.

  But what of those ancient authors whose very names became soot in the burnings of Alexandria? She had encountered many of their scrolls back here.... She thought of another poem—Thomas Gray's “Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard” from the 1700s—and its paean to the “mute, inglorious Miltons” who were buried in the graveyard, great poets and thinkers whose works had never made it to the light of day and publication. How many mute, inglorious Homers and Platos lay in the halls outside her room, not mute and unknown now, but soon and irrevocably to be?

  No ... nothing was irrevocable when it came to time travel....

  * * * *

  She heard familiar footsteps in the hall as she perused an unknown variant of Aristotle's Politics early the next morning—who knows, it could have been a copy of one of the scrolls from Aristotle's famed personal library itself, said to be the seed of this great Library of Alexandria.

  The steps were too slow to belong to Synesius. She carefully rewound and returned the scroll to its compartment.

  "Hello,” a kind voice said to her. William Henry Appleton looked worn. This was the third trip the great publisher had taken back to Alexandria. But he was here, Sierra knew, on behalf of friendship, not business or scholarship. He was probably the best friend she had, in this or any time.

  "When you go back to your family and home on the Hudson this time, you should stay with them,” she told him tenderly.

  "I wish I had better news for you, my dear. There is no sign of Alcibiades anywhere. It is as if he entered a realm of invisibility when he left the Hippocrates Medical Center that morning in the future."

  Sierra nodded. The unhappy news was not unexpected. “Have you eaten?"

  "Yes,” Appleton replied. “One of the library staff was good enough to fetch cheese and fruit for me.” He patted his stomach. “I think your staff are getting to know me! The food was quite good!"

  "I'm glad,” Sierra said. “Why don't you rest?” She gestured to her suite of rooms, which included a sleeping chamber for guests that Appleton used on his visits. “We can talk more later."

  "Yes, I could do with a little nap.” Appleton kissed her on the cheek. “It's funny how I feel so at home with you, even with your new face,” he said softly. “Spirit does triumph over flesh, I guess.” He retired to her room.

  Sierra returned to her scrolls. She looked again at several of the papyri Synesius had provided. Nothing about a cure for any illness of the brain. Just scholia by Theon on mathematics....

  This cure was like Alcibiades. Neither seemed to exist in this Alexandria.

  Where was he now? Dead somewhere in a time that was not his?

  The world, of course, still thought that Alcibiades had been murdered in Phrygia, a few years before the death of Socrates. Little did the world know the infinity of alternatives that time travel afforded. Alternities, she thought that some science-fiction writer in the future had called them....

  The complexities of time travel still taunted her, as always. Mr. Appleton here three times, Alcibiades none—could that have been just another accident of an imprecise Chair that Alcibiades had attempted to take back here to some time in the past three years? Would he arrive instead a week, a month, a year from now?

  She had become accustomed to this world. As Hypatia, she had developed quite a reputation as a logician, a mathematician, a Neo-Platonic philosopher. That part had been easy.... She had, after all, already conversed with Socrates and with Plato. She had already had an interest in Pythagoras, Euclid, and the ancient theorists of numbers, inherited from her mother, a professor of mathematics. She already had read many of the relevant ancient treatises and commentaries in her younger days in the distant future. The mathematics was child's play to her, just as the realities of time travel so exquisitely were not.

  She even had written several scrolls under Hypatia's name. She wondered: might some of those have been among the treatises she had read years earlier? Maybe that's why she had been attracted to them. Maybe Benjamin Jowett had been right, after all, that it didn't matter who got the credit for your accomplishments.

  She returned to Theon's scrolls. Her father of sorts was an optimistic man. He looked for hope. He had no idea he was glimpsing the first gray rays of what would become the deep, Dark Ages. He would have been delighted to discover a cure for any illness. But none were in these writings.

  She rubbed her eyes and wearily picked up another scroll. This one had been badly damaged by the fire. It seemed more of a diary than a scholarly commentary, and she had quickly discarded it last night. It apparently had been written a few years prior to Sierra's arrival. It spoke of Theon's boundless love for Hypatia, his fatherly pride in her great work and potential, and—

  Sierra slowly unrolled the scroll further. She reread a section that now caught her attention. She traced the words with her index finger, in the ancient style of reading that she had adopted and now often employed without consc
ious decision:

  "A visitor from the East. We had wine by the harbor. We spoke of the brain, and his belief that it was the seat of the soul. We spoke of an illness that could extinguish the soul. How it might be reversed."

  There were no further entries like that in the charred scroll. She flicked the black from the tip of her finger.

  A thin reed to hang hopes upon, but better than nothing.

  * * * *

  She awoke the next morning and thought about the scroll. Synesius had given it to her. She needed to question him. Her best chance was to try to meet him at his boat in the harbor—possibly it had not yet left for Ptolemais.

  She checked on Appleton—he was sleeping soundly. She left him a note, written in English. It said she would be back soon. That is what she intended, but the words looked like lies as soon as they dried on the page.

  She walked quickly to the water. She could see in the sky that it was about eight in the morning. She got lucky—

  "Hypatia!” Synesius called out to her. He was standing by his boat, chatting with several priests. “You changed your mind and have accepted my invitation!"

  "No.” Sierra walked up to him, smiling. “I just need to talk to you for a few minutes."

  The bishop frowned. He looked up at the sky as a man pressed for time in a future millennium might look down at his watch. “Very well. How can I help you?"

  Sierra produced the charred scroll. “This contains some text that might be of great value to me. What can you tell me about the person in whose burned house it was found?"

  "Very little, I am afraid. He was a wealthy merchant of the Jewish faith. He valued knowledge, obviously. I do not know why the Nitrians burned his home—I do not know if they killed him. They are fanatics, as I told you. Which is why I worry about you.” He shook his head.