What Might Have Been, page 48
What Might Have Been
Volume Two
Alternate Heroes
14 SF - Stories
Edited by
Gregory Benford & Martin H. Greenberg
About the Editors
Gregory Benford is the author of several acclaimed novels, including Tides of Light, Great Sky River, Heart of the Comet (with David Brin), In the Ocean of Night, Across the Sea of Suns, and Timescape, which won the Nebula Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the John W. Campbell Memorial Award, and the Australian Ditmar Award. Dr. Benford, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, is a professor of physics at the University of California, Irvine. He and his wife live in Laguna Beach.
Martin H. Greenberg is the editor or author of over 300 books, the majority of them anthologies in the science fiction, fantasy, horror, mystery, and western fields. He has collaborated editorially with such authors as Isaac Asimov, Robert Silverberg, Gregory Benford, and Frederik Pohl. A professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin, he lives with his wife and baby daughter in Green Bay.
Contents
About the Editors 2
Contents 3
A Sleep and a Forgetting 6
ROBERT SILVERBERG 6
The Old Man and C
16
SHEILA FINCH 16
The Last Article
22
HARRY TURTLEDOVE 22
Mules in Horses’ Harness
34
MICHAEL CASSUTT 34
I 34
II 38
Lenin in Odessa
42
GEORGE ZEBROWSKI 42
1 42
2 43
3 44
4 45
5 46
6 47
7 48
8 49
9 49
10 52
Abe Lincoln in McDonald’s
53
JAMES MORROW 53
Another Goddamned Showboat
58
BARRY N. MALZBERG 58
Loose Cannon
60
SUSAN SHWARTZ 60
A Letter from the Pope
74
HARRY HARRISON AND TOM SHIPPEY 74
Introduction 74
Roncesvalles
82
JUDITH TARR 82
I 82
II 85
Ill 89
His Powder’d Wig, His Crown of Thornes
92
MARC LAIDLAW 92
Departures
98
HARRY TURTLEDOVE 98
Instability
103
RUDY RUCKER AND PAUL DI FILIPPO 103
No Spot of Ground
108
WALTER JON WILLIAMS 108
Contents
A Sleep and a Forgetting
ROBERT SILVERBERG
The Old Man and C
SHEILA FINCH
The Last Article
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
Mules in Horses’ Harness
MICHAEL CASSUTT
I
II
Lenin in Odessa
GEORGE ZEBROWSKI
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Abe Lincoln in McDonald’s
JAMES MORROW
Another Goddamned Showboat
BARRY N. MALZBERG
Loose Cannon
SUSAN SHWARTZ
A Letter from the Pope
HARRY HARRISON AND TOM SHIPPEY
Introduction
Roncesvalles
JUDITH TARR
I
II
Ill
His Powder’d Wig, His Crown of Thornes
MARC LAIDLAW
Departures
HARRY TURTLEDOVE
Instability
RUDY RUCKER AND PAUL DI FILIPPO
No Spot of Ground
WALTER JON WILLIAMS
A Sleep and a Forgetting
ROBERT SILVERBERG
“Channeling?” I said. “For Christ’s sake, Joe! You brought me all the way down here for dumb bullshit like that?”
“This isn’t channeling,” Joe said.
“The kid who drove me from the airport said you’ve got a machine that can talk with dead people.”
A slow, angry flush spread across Joe’s face. He’s a small, compact man with very glossy skin and very sharp features, and when he’s annoyed he inflates like a puff-adder.
“He shouldn’t have said that.”
“Is that what you’re doing here?” I asked. “Some sort of channeling experiments?”
“Forget that shithead word, will you, Mike?” Joe sounded impatient and irritable. But there was an odd fluttery look in his eye, conveying—what? Uncertainty? Vulnerability? Those were traits I hadn’t ever associated with Joe Hedley, not in the thirty years we’d known each other. “We aren’t sure what the fuck we’re doing here,” he said. “We thought maybe you could tell us.”
“Me?”
“You, yes. Here, put the helmet on. Come on, put it on, Mike. Put it on. Please.”
I stared. Nothing ever changes. Ever since we were kids Joe’s been using me for one cockeyed thing or another, because he knows he can count on me to give him a sober-minded commonsense opinion. Always bouncing this bizarre scheme or that off me, so he can measure the caroms.
The helmet was a golden strip of wire mesh studded with a row of microwave pickups the size of a dime and flanked by a pair of suction electrodes that fit over the temples. It looked like some vagrant piece of death-house equipment.
I ran my fingers over it. “How much current is this thing capable of sending through my head?”
He looked even angrier. “Oh, fuck you, you hypercautious bastard! Would I ever ask you to do anything that could harm you?”
With a patient little sigh I said, “Okay. How do I do this?”
“Ear to ear, over the top of your head. Ill adjust the electrodes for you.” -
“You won’t tell me what any of this is all about?”
“I want an uncontaminated response. That’s science talk, Mike. I’m a scientist. You know that, don’t you?”
“So that’s what you are. I wondered.”
Joe bustled about above me, moving the helmet around, pressing the electrodes against my skull.
“How does it fit?”
“Lake a glove.”
“You always wear your gloves on your head?” he asked.
“You must be goddamn nervous if you think that’s funny.”
“I am,” he said. “You must be too, if you take a line like that seriously. But I tell you that you won’t get hurt. I promise you that, Mike.”
“All right.”
“Just sit down here. We need to check the impedances, and then we can get going.”
“I wish I understood at least a little bit about—”
“Please,” he said. He gestured through a glass partition at a technician in the adjoining room, and she began to do things with dials and switches. This was turning into a movie, a very silly one, full of mad doctors in white jackets and sputtering electrical gadgets. The tinkering went on and on, and I felt myself passing beyond apprehension and annoyance into a kind of gray realm of Zen serenity, the way I sometimes do while sitting in the dentist’s chair waiting for the scraping and poking to begin.
On the hillside visible from the laboratory window, yellow hibiscus was blooming against a background of billowing scarlet bougainvillea in brilliant California sunshine. It had been cold and raining, this February morning, when I drove to Sea-Tac Airport thirteen hundred miles to the north. Hedley’s lab is just outside La Jolla, on a sandy bluff high up over the blue Pacific. When Joe and I were kids growing up in Santa Monica we took this kind of luminous winter day for granted, but I had lived in the Northwest for twenty years now, and I couldn’t help thinking I’d gone on a day trip to Eden. I studied the colors on the hillside until my eyes began to get blurry.
“Here we go, now,” Joe said, from a point somewhere far away behind my left shoulder.
It was like stepping into a big cage full of parakeets and mynahs and crazed macaws. I heard scratchy screeching sounds, and a harsh loony almost-laughter that soared through three or four octaves, and a low ominous burbling noise, as if some hydraulic device was about to blow a gasket. I heard weird wire-edged shrieks that went tumbling away as though the sound was falling through an infinite abyss. I heard queeblings. I heard hissings.
Then came a sudden burst of clearly enunciated syllables, floating in isolation above the noise:
—Onoodor—
That startled me.
A nonsense word? No, no, a real one, one that had meaning for me, a word in an obscure language that I just happen to understand.
“Today,” that’s what it means. In Khalkha. My specialty. But it was crazy that this machine would be speaking Khalkha to me. This had to be some sort of coincidence. What I’d heard was a random clumping of sounds that I must automatically have arranged into a meaningful pattern. I was kidding myself. Or else Joe was playing an elaborate practical joke. Only he seemed very serious.
I strained to hear more. But everything was babble again.
Then, out of the chaos:
—Usan deer—
Khalkha, again: “On the water.” It couldn’t be a coincidence.
More noise. Skwkaark skreek yubble gobble.
—Aawa namaig yawuulawa— “Father sent me.” Skwkaark. Yabble. Eeeeesh.
“Go on,” I said. I felt sweat rolling down my back. “Your father sent you where? Where? Khaana. Tell me where.”
—Usan deer— “On the water, yes.”
Yarkhh. Skreek. Tshhhhhhh.
—Akhanartan—
“To his elder brother. Yes.”
I closed my eyes and let my mind rove out into the darkness. It drifted on a sea of scratchy noise. Now and again I caught an actual syllable, half a syllable, a slice of a word, a clipped fragment of meaning. The voice was brusque, forceful, a drill-sergeant voice, carrying an undertone of barely suppressed rage.
Somebody very angry was speaking to me across a great distance, over a channel clotted with interference, in a language that hardly anyone in the United States knew anything about: Khalkha. Spoken a little oddly, with an unfamiliar intonation, but plainly recognizable.
I said, speaking very slowly and carefully and trying to match the odd intonation of the voice at the other end, “I can hear you and I can understand you. But there’s a lot of interference. Say everything three times and I’ll try to follow.”
I waited. But now there was only a roaring silence in my ears. Not even the shrieking, not even the babble.
I looked up at Hedley like someone coming out of a trance.
“It’s gone dead.”
“You sure?”
“I don’t hear anything, Joe.”
He snatched the helmet from me and put it on, fiddling with the electrodes in that edgy, compulsively precise way of his. He listened for a moment, scowled, nodded. “The relay satellite must have passed around the far side of the sun. We won’t get anything more for hours if it has.”
“The relay satellite? Where the hell was that broadcast coming from?”
“In a minute,” he said. He reached around and took the helmet off. His eyes had a brassy gleam and his mouth was twisted off to the corner of his face, almost as if he’d had a stroke. “You were actually able to understand what he was saying, weren’t you?”
I nodded.
“I knew you would. And was he speaking Mongolian?”
“Khalkha, yes. The main Mongolian dialect.”
The tension left his face. He gave me a warm, loving grin. “I was sure you’d know. We had a man in from the university here, the comparative linguistics department—you probably know him, Malmstrom’s his name—and he said it sounded to him like an Altaic language, maybe Turkic—is that right, Turkic?—but more likely one of the Mongolian languages, and the moment he said Mongolian I thought, that’s it, get Mike down here right away—” He paused. “So .it’s the language that they speak in Mongolia right this very day, would you say?”
“Not quite. His accent was a little strange. Something stiff about it, almost archaic.”
“Archaic.”
“It had that feel, yes. I can’t tell you why. There’s just something formal and old-fashioned about it, something, well—”
“Archaic,” Hedley said again. Suddenly there were tears in his eyes. I couldn’t remember ever having seen him cry before.
What they have, the kid who picked me up at the airport had said, is a machine that lets them talk with the dead.
“Joe?” I said. “Joe, what in God’s name is this all about?”
We had dinner that night in a sleek restaurant on a sleek, quiet La Jolla street of elegant shops and glossy-leaved trees, just the two of us, the first time in a long while that we’d gone out alone like that. Lately we tended to see each other once or twice a year at most, and Joe, who is almost always between marriages, would usually bring along his latest squeeze, the one who was finally going to bring order and stability and other such things to his tempestuous private life. And since he always needs to show the new one what a remarkable human being he is, he’s forever putting on a performance, for the woman, for me, for the waiters, for the people at the nearby tables. Generally the fun’s at my expense, for compared with Hedley I’m very staid and proper and I’m eighteen years into my one and only marriage so far, and Joe often seems to enjoy making me feel that there’s something wrong with that. I never see him with the same woman twice, except when he happens to marry one of them. But tonight it was all different. He was alone, and the conversation was subdued and gentle and rueful, mostly about the years we’d had put in knowing each other, the fun we’d had, the regret Joe felt during the occasional long periods when we didn’t see much of each other. He did most of the talking. There was nothing new about that. But mostly it was just chatter. We were three quarters of the way down the bottle of silky cabernet before Joe brought himself around to the topic of the experiment. I hadn’t wanted to push.
“It was pure serendipity,” he said. “You know, the art of finding what you’re not looking for. We were trying to clean up some problems in radio transmission from the Icarus relay station—that’s the one that the Japs and the French hung around the sun inside the orbit of Mercury—and we were fiddling with this and fiddling with that, sending out an assortment of test signals at a lot of different frequencies, when out of nowhere we got a voice coming back at us. A man’s voice. Speaking a strange language. Which turned out to be Chaucerian English.”
“Some kind of academic prank?” I suggested.
He looked annoyed. “I don’t think so. But let me tell it, Mike, okay? Okay?” He cracked his knuckles and rearranged the knot of his tie. “We listened to this guy and gradually we figured out a little of what he was saying and we called in a grad student from U.C.S.D. who confirmed it—thirteenth-century English—and it absolutely knocked us on our asses.” He tugged at his earlobes and rearranged his tie again. A sort of manic sheen was coming into his eyes. “Before we could even begin to comprehend what we were dealing with, the Englishman was gone and we were picking up some woman making a speech in medieval French. Like we were getting a broadcast from Joan of Arc, do you see? Not that I’m arguing that that’s who she was. We had her for half an hour, a minute here and a minute there with a shitload of interference, and then came a solar flare that disrupted communications, and when we had things tuned again we got a quick burst of what turned out to be Arabic, and then someone else talking in Middle English, and then, last week, this absolutely incomprehensible stuff, which Malmstrom guessed was Mongolian and you have now confirmed. The Mongol has stayed on the line longer than all the others put together.”
