Alternate Wars

by Gregory Benford

  Even when the cliometricon uncovered quantum history, access to the infinity of historical variants only continued to lessen the importance of history in human affairs. Everything had happened and was going to happen; no lesson that could be extracted from the past had any meaning to an accelerating history. All previously false histories of the past became true in some world. Lessons could be applied, imperfectly, to restricted sequences of human experience, in which the time of one generation and the next was essentially unchanged; but to be led by the past in a quickening time would shackle the future, if it could even be done. The universe was not a closed, self-consistent system; it was open, unfinished, and infinite in all directions, including time. Its true nature was mirrored in the incompleteness of both natural and mathematical languages, and in the failure of human law to keep up with emergent circumstances.

  The cliometricon’s ability to retrieve decaying, fading information from the cosmic background had extended the history machine’s capabilities, but without any clear advantage for humanity beyond the satisfaction of scholarly curiosity. Meanwhile, the history machine’s ability to show the past, even the immediate, fleeing past measured in seconds and minutes, made possible the emergence, after a stormy transition, of the first panoptic human culture. This transition included the so-called privacy wars, and led to the acceptance of peeping as the right of every human being. Since there was no way to blind the all-seeing eye, humankind had simply faced up to the fact of peeping with a new social stability based on informational nakedness, in which everyone was rewarded. The price of peeping was to be peeped. For the first time in its history, humankind revealed itself to itself in a systematic way, settling many questions of individuality and human nature. Past humanity had only glimpsed itself through its poetries, fictions, and visual dramas; but now all curiosities were satisfied, and the result was greater understanding and compassion for some, and boredom for others.

  Cliometricians continued to pursue greater issues, even though they routinely used linear history machines to verify the priority of their colleagues’ areas of interest, personal as well as professional, and avoided poaching on all staked claims. But the profession always avoided facing up to the question of its legitimacy, which seemed irresolvable.

  There could be no complete history of histories. Events ran to infinity in all directions, diverging at every moment, at every fraction of a moment, at every point in each variant of space-time. Yet this process always meant something to the interiors that were intelligent entities; even when it seemed to make no sense, meaning was felt. The cliometrician watched the embarrassment of the old historians as they were confronted with the living past—and their denials as they drowned in the ocean of truth, claiming that it was all a simulation constructed from massed data by imaging programs. They could not accept that human history was one of the masks of chaos, behind which there was nothing.

  In the first hour of horizon light, a sleepless Hannibal watches from a hillock as the elephants stir and begin to advance. Behind them are Mago’s men—silent Ligurians, complaining Gauls, wild Moors, and a small group of Spaniards. Well drilled, heavily armed and battlewise, the men advance shoulder to shoulder. A second force of Carthaginian recruits, led by the aging Hanno, advances behind the elephants, followed by the third force, Hannibal’s veterans, the army of Bruttium, which deliberately lags behind, and is all but invisible to the Romans in the gray morning light.

  Only Hannibal and his waiting messengers know why this is not his usual long battle line. If all goes according to plan, three separate battles will be fought at Dama.

  But despite the starlight start of his first force, Hannibal sees that the Roman force is already moving across the valley, its standards a slow moving fence, flanked by horsemen. Three ranks of machinelike infantry—front, spearmen, and supporting legions of triarii—come forward. There are puzzling breaks in the line, which are defended by only a few javelin-throwers.

  As the armies collide in the same place where Scipio and Hannibal had met, the Roman horns and trumpets cry out, startling Hannibal’s elephants. Many of the beasts panic and rush into the openings in the Roman lines, where they are greeted with swarms of missiles and herded through the lines to the rear. Confused, the remaining elephants turn and charge the Carthaginian cavalry. Scipio’s mounted force scatters Hannibal’s horsemen. They struggle to regroup and fight, but are too few for Laelius’s and Masinissa’s squadrons. The massed riders move off as a single storm, out of sight.

  Hannibal watches as Mago’s Gauls and Ligurians lock man to man with the first Roman line and bring it to a stop; but the triarii slip through the openings, and the Roman line surges forward again. The second wave, Carthaginian recruits from the city itself, fail to relieve Mago’s force, because Hannibal has ordered his three forces to keep apart. The survivors of the first wave retreat and turn with rage on the Carthaginian recruits, who push them back as the Roman line drops its spears and javelins and advances with shields and swords, supported by second-rank spearmen.

  Desperately, the Carthaginians hold back the legions, but by late morning the last of Hannibal’s two forces breaks to the sides of the valley, leaving the ground strewn with the dead and dying.

  On his hillock, Hannibal knows that he must now send in his third force, the ten thousand veterans of Italy, who stand waiting for the moment when Scipio can no longer retreat, while on either side the survivors of the first two waves regroup.

  Trumpets command the Romans to remove their wounded, recover weapons, and clear away debris. The standards still fly as the men drink water and rest.

  Then, in response to swift new orders from Scipio, the three lines reform. Spearmen move off to one flank of the front line; the triarii take the other. The Roman line lengthens far beyond Hannibal’s, and closes it on the weak Carthaginian flanks. The armies are equally matched now, except that Hannibal’s veterans are fresh, and they have never known defeat at the hands of the Romans.

  Suddenly the Roman cavalry returns—and charges into the rear of Hannibal’s veterans. There is no Carthaginian cavalry left to stop them. The army of Italy is caught between the infantry and horsemen. The Bruttians turn to defend their flanks and rear.

  They fight and die across the afternoon, until nearly all are killed. Hannibal sends a message to Carthage, counseling acceptance of all surrender terms, and with a few survivors flees eastward.

  The historian returned to the first meeting between Scipio and Hannibal, and listened again to their great-souled but hopeless words. Then he crossed the lines, watching the variations.

  A servile Hannibal admitted his crimes against Rome to a pompous Scipio, mouthing the words of Livy’s history, which was true here and a lie elsewhen. The Tunisian landscape seemed frozen. Grains of sand hung suspended in the air at Dama. Hannibal’s headcloth disappeared. He wore a patch over one eye. He became stooped, then stood taller and lost an arm. Scipio appeared, now wearing his helmet. Insignias of rank appeared on his breastplate. The two leaders spoke only through their interpreters, who seemed changeless. The viewtank flashed as the historian paused. Scipio and Hannibal were conversing from horseback. “They hate me back in Rome,” Scipio says in Greek, “and that hate will only increase if I defeat you here. There are those who fear my success.”

  Hannibal smiles and says, “I too am disappointed with the city I left behind as a boy. The fat rich rule it for their sons and daughters. Honor is dead.”

  “You might restore it,” Scipio answers, “if you became its just ruler.” Hannibal laughs. “Your Senate will not tolerate a Carthage with me at its head!”

  “But it might not fear a Carthage without you,” Scipio answers. Hannibal considers, then says, “You and I will not fight, then. Will you give me your word that Carthage will not burn?”

  Scipio nods. The two men clasp arms, then turn and ride away.

  The historian cut across the variants and found Hannibal alone again, looking out across the empty valley of Za
ma, where there had been no battle. Was Hannibal thinking of how he could have won? Was this aging soldier still in love with the craft of battle as he rode away, hoping for peace?

  But in this variant Rome betrays Scipio, replaces him as commander of its forces in Africa, and burns Carthage to the ground. Scipio commits suicide. In Bithynia, far to the east, Hannibal receives the double news with sorrow, and drinks poison in the garden of his house as Roman soldiers approach. A servant flees north with his memoirs, forgetting the last piece of parchment, which lies on the table before the dead Carthaginian. In this variant, the writing reads: “The anxiety of the Romans is at an end. I am the old man for whose death you have waited so long. There will be only one Rome, but it might have been Rome or Carthage…”

  While at Zama, the three battles that became one defeat flare across infinity, and each of its three struggles is an infinity, changing through infinitesimal steps. The Roman horsemen do not return, having been ambushed by the sons of Syphax and their Numidian cavalry, leaving Hannibal to an honest test of his Bruttians against Scipio’s weary infantry. A few variants earlier, the Roman cavalry had arrived, but too late to save Scipio; and before that only at half-strength; and before that…

  The historian watched Carthage destroyed, then built up into a Roman city because the site was too good a center for commerce to be ignored. He watched Rome leveled and raised into a Carthaginian city, for the same reason. The variants ran through endless minor differences in these two outcomes, until he left these lines behind.

  He could have of probability what he wanted—but what was it? An endless flickering structured out of nothing, differentiated into individual things by measurementlike interactions among components, copying itself endlessly, providing examples but no prescriptions. These could be studied definitively and forever, but to no end. There was no wall around past quantum-transitional time, so he could have of it what he wanted, even though he could not stand apart from its infinity and see it whole. Only the quantum future was forbidden, even to licensed historical observers, whose linear and quantum history machines were restricted by basic design. There had been a time when the study of history had called for a concern with the future, then with alternate futures, extending the study of the past toward the creation of desirable futures; but the quantum-transitional cliometricon had stifled that new history. Futurity’s informational influx into the past was feared and prevented; and yet there had to be variants in which it was embraced, where cultures of past and future mingled informationally without fear, because they understood that the stuff of being was blossoming into 100100+N directions, matter and living flesh metamorphosing toward distant, ever more tenuous and mysterious states, and that these conscious innards of time must huddle all their histories together… .

  He imagined history whole—as a writhing, boiling cloud. Cliometricians hurled themselves through the enigma but could not stand away from it, which was what it would take to penetrate its mystery. Objectivity was ruinously relative, after all; no one could have history as a separate object of study, even though it seemed that way in the viewtank, without remaining part of it…

  In Spain, a year before crossing the Alps into Italy, Hannibal marries a princess of Castulo, a dark-tressed woman of the Olcades people, to help secure the frontier between the Silver Mountains, the Iberians, and Carpetanians, to strengthen the Carthaginian presence in Spain.

  On their wedding night, Hannibal mounts Imilce from the rear, but after a few powerful strokes reveal her discomfort, he turns her over on her back. She receives him again and wraps her legs around his middle. Her long hair is at her sides down to her waist. Her lips and pale breasts swell as she nears completion. The dark-skinned Hannibal cries out, bringing joy to her face.

  “Come with me!” she whispers as he relaxes and strokes her neck. “At Carthage we’ll take passage to Greece, where you can take up the life of study that you have desired.”

  The Carthaginian shakes his head in denial. “War is coming. My city will perish without me.”

  “You flatter yourself,” she says. “Others also understand what needs to be done. They will step into your place.”

  “But they don’t love the craft of war as I do. They will never see what is possible, and fail.”

  “The Romans are not fools,” she says, and closes her eyes.

  A year later, high in a stone tower, Imilce gives birth to a son. Hannibal puts wife and child on a ship for Carthage and marches his army toward the Alps. All through the sixteen-year raid on the Roman peninsula, he carries with him his wife’s parting gift—a small Greek statue of Hercules—and rejects the enjoyment of captive women…

  But across the variants, Imilce prevails. Word by word, their discussion in the bridal chamber changes through a thousand small steps, until finally Hannibal travels with her and his son to Greece, where he perfects his use of the language and writes a series of dialogues encompassing the experience of Mediterranean peoples. Carthage withdraws from Spain. Rome is not roused from its republican state. The two cities prosper and make treaties of friendship, delaying the Punic Wars and the rise of imperial Rome by a century….

  The historian asked himself, what could it all ever mean? The significance of these varying moments had peaked when they were happening. No one else could ever have them from the inside except the original players. All historians tacitly entered the minds of past figures and imagined direct knowledge of their thoughts and feelings. Cliometricians were the extreme of panoptic humankind, which observed itself endlessly, down to the smallest details of life, displaying itself to itself, but never able to become one … .

  Perhaps there should be walls around time, he told himself, and greater ones around individuals. The long-lived should practice periodic amnesia, following the way of the past’s short-lived generations, because history is only important while it is being made … but there is never an empty moment. History is being made all the time, so it is always important, even though he could not say how Being was adding to itself endlessly, an infinite growing thing, branching, probing through a greater infinity of probability, springing from no soil and obeying no tropism…

  In the endless array of gossamer display tanks, each one an event horizon on quantum-transitional times that can be observed but not entered, the historian watches himself contemplating history from the center of an infinite web of information. Once in a while he glances over his shoulder at his unseen alternates, who see him turn his head; but he can only see into the regress of variants in front of him. Do all the cliometricians glance back simultaneously, as if the entire infinite set were one mind? He imagines that vast intelligence sitting at the privileged observer’s point, where all regress stops, even though he knows there can be no such point. He could traverse billions of variants and still hope to reach the privileged point on the next try. Attempted passages across an infinity always generated the question: Is this an infinity, or only very large? Aristotle had denied infinity because it could only be defined, but never possessed.

  The historian knows that he has lost his struggle with history. Infinities are tractable only when treated as wholes, but the mathematician’s way could never encompass the complexities of human events. He sits in his cul-de-sac and yearns for the closure that would end the dismay of infinities, the final, firm place to stand, from which there is no one to glance back to, where all perspectives converge into the sleepless eternity of perfect knowing that would never belong to him. He would never awake from the dream of history in which he was embedded and see it whole.

  In the twenty years of wandering exile after his defeat at Dama, Hannibal is told by a Greek oracle that he will be buried in African soil. Untroubled that he will die before returning home, he writes his brief study of history in the house given to him by the king of Bithynia.

  Across a million variants he glances out the window and sees Roman soldiers closing their circle around the house. He hides his manuscript in the hollow doorstone, then swallo
ws the poison in his ring. In the billionth variant he learns too late that there is a place in Bithynia called Africa, and that this house stands on it. He smiles as he sits back in his chair, perhaps at the cleverness of the Greek oracles, and his life slips away before the Romans reach the house…

  In the same year, across the sea, Scipio also dies, and is buried outside Roman territory, in compliance with his last wishes….

  The soldiers break into the house in Bithynia … at the thousandth variant they find the manuscript in the stone … in the trillionth the room is empty, but under the table there is an open door into a tunnel that runs through the hillside to the harbor. Quinctius Flamininus, the Roman commander, notices that there is a note on the table addressed to him. He picks it up and reads:

  You are hardly a worthy descendant of the men who warned Pyrrhus against the poison prepared for them.

  —HANNIBAL

  He grimaces, peers into the hole under the table as if it were a tunnel out of history, then hurries outside to the cliff’s edge and searches the sea. Hannibal’s ship is halfway to the horizon, running with wind and tide to fulfill the Greek oracle’s prophecy.

  IF LEE HAD NOT WON

  THE BATTLE

  OF GETTYSBURG

  The Right Honourable

  Winston S. Churchill, M.P.

  The quaint conceit of imagining what would have happened if some important or unimportant event had settled itself differently, has become so fashionable that I am encouraged to enter upon an absurd speculation. What would have happened if Lee had not won the Battle of Gettysburg? Once a great victory is won it dominates not only the future but the past. All the chains of consequence clink out as if they never could stop. The hopes that were shattered, the passions that were quelled, the sacrifices that were ineffectual are all swept out of the land of reality. Still it may amuse an idle hour, and perhaps serve as a corrective to undue complacency, if at this moment in the twentieth century—so rich in assurance and prosperity, so calm and buoyant—we meditate for a spell upon the debt we owe to those Confederate soldiers who by a deathless feat of arms broke the Union front at Gettysburg and laid open a fair future to the world.