[What Might Have Been 03] Alternate Wars Read online

  What Might have Been

  Volume 3

  Alternate Wars

  CONTENTS

  INTRODUCTION

  Gregory Benford

  AND WILD FOR TO HOLD

  Nancy Kress

  TUNDRA MOSS

  F.M. Busby

  WHEN FREE MEN SHALL STAND

  Poul Anderson

  ARMS AND THE WOMAN

  James Morrow

  READY FOR THE FATHERLAND

  Harry Turtledove

  THE TOMB

  Jack McDevitt

  TURPENTINE

  Barry N. Malzberg

  GODDARD’S PEOPLE

  Allen Steele

  MANASSAS, AGAIN

  Gregory Benford

  THE NUMBER OF THE SAND

  George Zebrowski

  IF LEE HAD NOT WON THE BATTLE OF GETTYSBURG

  The Right Honourable Winston S. Churchill, M.P

  OVER THERE

  Mike Resnick

  INTRODUCTION

  No matter how good a story might be, no one will continue reading it if a fistfight breaks out in the same room.

  Conflict focuses the mind wonderfully. When we consider the possible variations of history, war looms as the obvious mechanism for decisive change.

  I personally feel that inventions and scientific progress are the most effective ways of changing the world, and the most lasting, but they are usually not very dramatic. And one can usually argue that if Watt, say, had not invented the steam engine, somebody else would have done so rather soon after. (An interesting countercase is paper, invented once by a Chinese monk and never independently reinvented. The secret was eventually stolen by Arabs, who tortured the secret out of a Chinese papermaker.) Wars, on the other hand, often yield unique, quirky results. The fate of an entire society can hinge on a single line of infantry. Those who proclaim that wars never settle anything should ask the inhabitants of Carthage for their opinion, or perhaps the adherents of Nazi Germany.

  To be sure, many conflicts do not prove truly decisive. The problem of Germany’s role in modern Europe was settled by the Second World War, not by the First; or arguably, by the Cold War that followed. But World War I did disrupt the deep foundations of European society, beginning its erosion of influence—which may prove to be the deeper issue, historically.

  Wars do often afford us a clear look at interesting questions. Poul Anderson’s classic short story “Delenda Est” shows us a world where Carthage defeated Rome; often his Time Patrol has to patch up conflicts gone (from our point of view) awry. In science fiction, alternative outcomes for World War II and the American Civil War top the list of most-studied events. (We earlier collected the notable Axis-triumph short stories in Hitler Victorious.) Like most science fiction, this view of history expresses an American outlook.

  Probably the best novel that treats alternative wars is Ward Moore’s Bring the Jubilee, which recalls life in the twenty-six states after Lee won at Gettysburg. It portrays a defeated, backwater North and a rigid South. Things have generally gone badly abroad, for the world missed the revolutionary impact of the United States. This allowed Moore to use a utopian-didactic mode, commenting indirectly on the crucial role of the War of Secession in our country, and of the United States in the world. To my taste it is immensely satisfying, packed with detail, precise in its ideas and plotting, rich in feeling for its era. The best World War II alternative novel is probably Brad Linaweaver’s Moon of Ice, in which the Nazis do get the atomic bomb.

  In assembling this collection of original studies of alternative wars, we have tried to span a wide range of outcomes. World War II gets the expected attention in “Tundra Moss,” “Goddard’s People,” and “Ready for the Fatherland,” which differ markedly in viewpoint and ambience. “Arms and the Woman” and “The Number of the Sand” consider ancient conflicts, each with an interesting, fresh spin.

  Each author takes a different tack. Indeed, “The Number of the Sand” explicitly shows us the infinite possibilities implied by the Everett model of quantum mechanics, in which every physical event yields a spectrum of outcomes—with an entire alternative universe to suit.

  Nancy Kress reflects on just what war means to us, and what the power to “correct” the past would mean, in a strong story, “And Wild for to Hold.” It forms an interesting counterpoint with the fevered remembrance (for he was there) of Barry N. Malzberg for the greatest year of domestic violence in our time: 1968. An American propensity for foreign engagements, and their often unanticipated effect on us, appear as well in “Over There.” Some alternatives, no matter how gaudy, may not add up to much.

  I could scarcely neglect what my grandmother called the War of Northern Aggression. My own story here uses a vastly different context for a civil war that might have resulted from a Roman Empire that survived well through the 1200s. I argue that in many ways we would have advanced farther technologically, and it would have been a better world—though not one without uncomfortable resonances with our own. The Civil War was a breakdown of our greatest skill: compromise. We will need it again.

  “The Tomb” considers the outcome if events in the closing acts of Roman history had gone differently—and makes a poignant point about the fate of historians as well. The breakup of empires and the fall of great nations are not always bad news, however. Poul Anderson portrays in evocative prose how the fresh, young United States would have fared if it had been faced with a far more powerful France, one that did not sell off the Louisiana Territory for quick cash and thereafter leave the distant revolutionaries alone. He reflects an opinion many have of the United States—that we have been not so much wily, savvy, and brave but instead, just plain lucky.

  Bring the Jubilee was not the first study of an alternative American Civil War. For the most intriguing precursor to it, I have reached far back into 1931, when a politician many considered permanently finished as a major figure was struggling along, ignored in Parliament, making ends meet with his pen. He wrote histories, current commentary, and just about any odd free-lance piece he could. The diligent J. C. Squire commissioned a short essay from this back-bench figure for If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginary History. (A curious word choice; I find historical speculations do not make anything “lapse” but rather illuminate.) The rest, as they say, is history.

  Squire produced a remarkable book of rather scholarly essays by such noted literary figures as Belloc, Chesterton, and Harold Nicholson. It remains the classic essay collection of its kind. My favorite of them all is the piece that concludes this volume. World War I dominated the minds of many in 1931, and this vision of a Southern victory at Gettysburg performs the unusual feat of projecting a better world than our real one. I personally do not find the argument quite compelling, but it is fun, well done, and worth considering. It expresses a wish that a decade later animated history itself, at the hands of its author.

  That is the purpose of such fiction, whether couched in overt drama or in the pseudofactual essay style. War is inevitably a calamity for some. Pondering its true impact is the obligation of all.

  GREGORY BENFORD

  AND WILD FOR TO HOLD

  Nancy Kress

  The demon came to her first in the long gallery at Hever Castle. She had gone there to watch Henry ride away, magnificent on his huge charger, the horse’s legs barely visible through the summer dust raised by the king’s entourage. But Henry himself was visible. He rose in his stirrups to half-turn his gaze back to the manor house, searching its sun-glazed windows to see if she watched. The spurned lover, riding off, watching over his shoulder the effect he himself made. She knew just how his eyes would look, small blue eyes under
the curling red-gold hair. Mournful. Shrewd. Undeterred.

  Anne Boleyn was not moved. Let him ride. She had not wanted him at Hever in the first place.

  As she turned from the gallery window, a glint of light in the far corner caught her eye, and there for the first time was the demon.

  It was made all of light, which did not surprise her. Was not Satan himself called Lucifer? The light was square, a perfectly square box such as no light had ever been before. Anne crossed herself and stepped forward. The box of light brightened, then winked out.

  Anne stood perfectly still. She was not afraid; very little made her afraid. But nonetheless she crossed herself again and uttered a prayer. It would be unfortunate if a demon took up residence at Hever. Demons could be dangerous.

  Like kings.

  Lambert half-turned from her console toward Culhane, working across the room. “Culhane—they said she was a witch.”

  “Yes? So?” Culhane said. “In the 1500s they said any powerful woman was a witch.”

  “No, it was more. They said it before she became powerful.” Culhane didn’t answer. After a moment Lambert said quietly, “The Rahvoli equations keep flagging her.”

  Culhane grew very still. Finally he said, “Let me see.”

  He crossed the bare, small room to Lambert’s console. She steadied the picture on the central square. At the moment the console appeared in this location as a series of interlocking squares mounting from floor to ceiling. Some of the squares were solid real-time alloys; some were holo simulations; some were not there at all, neither in space nor time, although they appeared to be. The project focus square, which was there, said:

  TIME RESCUE PROJECT

  UNITED FEDERATION OF UPPER SLIB, EARTH

  FOCUS: ANNE BOLEYN

  HEVER CASTLE, KENT ENGLAND, EUROPE

  1525: 645:89:3

  CHURCH OF THE HOLY HOSTAGE TEMPORARY PERMIT #4592

  In the time-jump square was framed a young girl, dark hair just visible below her coif, her hand arrested at her long, slender neck in the act of signing the cross.

  Lambert said, as if to herself, “She considered herself a good Catholic.”

  Culhane stared at the image. His head had been freshly shaved, in honor of his promotion to project head. He wore, Lambert thought, his new importance as if it were a fragile implant, liable to be rejected. She found that touching.

  Lambert said, “The Rahvoli probability is .798. She’s a definite key.” Culhane sucked in his cheeks. The dye on them had barely dried. He said, “So is the other. I think we should talk to Brill.”

  The serving women had finally left. The priests had left, the doctors, the courtiers, the nurses, taking with them the baby. Even Henry had left, gone … where? To play cards with Harry Norris? To his latest mistress? Never mind—they had all at last left her alone.

  A girl.

  Anne rolled over in her bed and pounded her fists on the pillow. A girl. Not a prince, not the son that England needed, that she needed … a girl. And Henry growing colder every day, she could feel it, he no longer desired her, no longer loved her. He would bed with her—oh, that, most certainly, if it would get him his boy, but her power was going. Was gone. The power she had hated, despised, but had used nonetheless because it was there and Henry should feel it, as he had made her feel his power over and over again … her power was going. She was queen of England, but her power was slipping away like the Thames at ebb tide, and she just as helpless to stop it as to stop the tide itself. The only thing that could have preserved her power was a son. And she had borne a girl. Strong, lusty, with Henry’s own red, curling hair… but a girl.

  Anne rolled over on her back, painfully. Elizabeth was already a month old, but everything in Anne hurt. She had contracted white-leg, so much less dreaded than childbed fever but still weakening, and for the whole month had not left her bedchamber. Servants and ladies and musicians came and went, while Anne lay feverish, trying to plan…. Henry had as yet made no move. He had even seemed to take the baby’s sex well: “She seems a lusty wench. I pray God will send her a brother in the same good shape.” But Anne knew. She always knew. She had known when Henry’s eye first fell upon her. Had known to a shade the exact intensity of his longing during the nine years she had kept him waiting: nine years of celibacy, of denial. She had known the exact moment when that hard mind behind the small blue eyes had decided: It is worth it. I will divorce Katherine and make her queen. Anne had known before he did when he decided it had all been a mistake. The price for making her queen had been too high. She was not worth it. Unless she gave him a son.

  And if she did not…

  In the darkness Anne squeezed her eyes shut. This was but an attack of childbed vapors; it signified nothing. She was never afraid, not she. This was only a night terror, and when she opened her eyes it would pass, because it must. She must go on fighting, must get herself heavy with a son, must safeguard her crown. And her daughter. There was no one else to do it for her, and there was no way out.

  When she opened her eyes a demon, shaped like a square of light, glowed in the corner of the curtained bedchamber.

  Lambert dipped her head respectfully as the high priest passed.

  She was tall and wore no external augments. Eyes, arms, ears, shaved head, legs under the gray-green ceremonial robe—all were her own, as required by the charter of the Church of the Holy Hostage. Lambert had heard a rumor that before her election to high priest she had had brilliant, violet-augmented eyes and gamma-strength arms, but on her election had had both removed and the originals restored. The free representative of all the hostages in the solar system could not walk around enjoying high-maintenance augments. Hostages could, of course, but the person in charge of their spiritual and material welfare must appear human to any hostage she chose to visit. A four-handed spacer held in a free-fall chamber on Mars must find the high priest as human as did a genetically altered flier of Ipsu being held hostage by the New Trien Republic. The only way to do that was to forego external augments. Internals, of course, were a different thing.

  Beside the high priest walked the director of the Time Research Institute, Toshio Brill. No ban on externals for him: Brill wore gold-plated sensors in his shaved black head, a display Lambert found slightly ostentatious. Also puzzling: Brill was not ordinarily a flamboyant man. Perhaps he was differentiating himself from Her Holiness. Behind Brill his project heads, including Culhane, stood silent, not speaking unless spoken to. Culhane looked nervous: He was ambitious, Lambert knew. She sometimes wondered why she was not.

  “So far I am impressed,” the high priest said. “Impeccable hostage conditions on the material side.”

  Brill murmured, “Of course, the spiritual is difficult. The three hostages are so different from each other, and even for culture specialists and historians … the hostages arrive here very upset.”

  “As would you or I,” the high priest said, not smiling, “in similar circumstances.”

  “Yes, Your Holiness.”

  “And now you wish to add a fourth hostage, from a fourth time stream.”

  “Yes.”

  The high priest looked slowly around at the main console; Lambert noticed that she looked right past the time-jump square itself. Not trained in peripheral vision techniques. But she looked a long time at the stasis square. They all did; outsiders were unduly fascinated by the idea that the whole building existed between time streams. Or maybe Her Holiness merely objected to the fact that the Time Research Institute, like some larger but hardly richer institutions, was exempt from the all-world taxation that supported the Church. Real-estate outside time was also outside taxation.

  The high priest said, “I cannot give permission for such a political disruption without understanding fully every possible detail. Tell me again.”

  Lambert hid a grin. The high priest did not need to hear it again. She knew the whole argument, had pored over it for days, most likely, with her advisers. And she would agree; why wouldn’t
she? It could only add to her power. Brill knew that. He was being asked to explain only to show that the high priest could force him to do it, again and again, until she—not he—decided the explanation was sufficient and the Church of the Holy Hostage issued a permanent hostage permit to hold one Anne Boleyn, of England Time Delta, for the altruistic purpose of preventing a demonstrable, Class One war.

  Brill showed no outward recognition that he was being humbled. “Your Holiness, this woman is a fulcrum. The Rahvoli equations, developed in the last century by—”

  “I know the Rahvoli equations,” the high priest said. And smiled sweetly.

  “Then Your Holiness knows that any person identified by the equations as a fulcrum is directly responsible for the course of history. Even if he or she seems powerless in local time. Mistress Boleyn was the second wife of Henry the Eighth of England. In order to marry her, he divorced his first wife, Katherine of Aragon, and in order to do that, he took all of England out of the Catholic Church. Protestantism was—”

  “And what again was that?” Her Holiness said, and even Culhane glanced sideways at Lambert, appalled. The high priest was playing. With a research director. Lambert hid her smile. Did Culhane know that high seriousness opened one to the charge of pomposity? Probably not.

  “Protestantism was another branch of ‘Christianity,’ ” the director said patiently. So far, by refusing to be provoked, he was winning. “It was warlike, as was Catholicism. In 1642 various branches of Protestantism were contending for political power within England, as was a Catholic faction. King Charles was Catholic, in fact. Contention led to civil war. Thousands of people died fighting, starved to death, were hung as traitors, were tortured as betrayers…”

  Lambert saw Her Holiness wince. She must hear this all the time, Lambert thought. What else was her office for? Yet the wince looked genuine.

  Brill pressed his point. “Children were reduced to eating rats to survive. In Cornwall, rebels’ hands and feet were cut off, gibbets were erected in market squares and men hung on them alive, and—”