The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (15 page)

The topics of Greg Bear’s science fiction have ranged from nanotechnology run amok in
Blood Music
, to the translation of souls into awesome energy fields in the SF-horror hybrid
Psychlone
, and future evolution in
Darwin’s Radio
. He is the author of the
Songs of Earth and Power
heroic diptych, comprised of
The Infinity Concerto
and
The Serpent Mage
, and two collections of short fiction,
The Wind from a Burning Woman
and
Tangents
, which include his stories “Hardfought” and “Blood Music,” each of which won both the Hugo and Nebula Awards. Renowned for his hard science-fiction epics, Bear has written the trilogy that includes
Legacy
,
Eon
, and
Eternity
, which features a multiplicity of alternate worlds and timelines accessed through the interior of a hollow asteroid. Novels of equally impressive scope include the alien contact story
The Forge of God
and its sequel,
Anvil of Stars
; the nanotechnology opus
Queen of Angels
, and its follow-up,
Slant
; and the Nebula Award–winning
Moving Mars
, which chronicles the fifty-year history of Earth’s Mars colony and its revolt against the mother planet. Bear has also written
Dinosaur Summer
, a sequel to Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s
The Lost World
, and
Foundation and Chaos
, which builds on the concepts of Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation
trilogy.

The long black Mercedes rumbled out of the fog on the road south from Dijon, moisture running in cold trickles across its windshield. Horst von Ranke moved the military pouch to one side and carefully read the maps spread on his lap, eyeglasses perched low on his nose, while Waffen Schutzstaffel Oberleutnant Albert Fischer drove. “Thirty-five kilometers,” von Ranke said under his breath. “No more.”

“We are lost,” Fischer said. “We’ve already come thirty-six.”

“Not quite that many. We should be there any minute now.”

Fischer nodded and then shook his head. His high cheekbones and long, sharp nose only accentuated the black uniform with silver death’s heads on the high, tight collar. Von Ranke wore a broad-striped gray suit; he was an undersecretary in the Propaganda Ministry, now acting as a courier. They might have been brothers, yet one had grown up in Czechoslovakia, the other in the Ruhr; one was the son of a coal miner, the other of a brewer. They had met and become close friends in Paris, two years before.

“Wait,” von Ranke said, peering through the drops on the side window. “Stop.”

Fischer braked the car and looked in the direction of von Ranke’s long finger. Near the roadside, beyond a copse of young trees, was a low thatch-roofed house with dirty gray walls, almost hidden by the fog.

“Looks empty,” von Ranke said.

“It is occupied; look at the smoke,” Fischer said. “Perhaps somebody can tell us where we are.”

They pulled the car over and got out, von Ranke leading the way across a mud path littered with wet straw. The hut looked even dirtier close up. Smoke rose in a darker brown-gray twist from a hole in the peak of the thatch. Fischer nodded at his friend and they cautiously approached. Over the crude wooden door letters wobbled unevenly in some alphabet neither knew, and between them they spoke nine languages. “Could that be Rom?” von Ranke asked, frowning. “It does look familiar—Slavic Rom.”

“Gypsies? Romany don’t live in huts like this, and besides, I thought they were rounded up long ago.”

“That’s what it looks like,” von Ranke said. “Still, maybe we can share some language, if only French.”

He knocked on the door. After a long pause he knocked again, and the door opened before his knuckles made the final rap. A woman too old to be alive stuck her long, wood-colored nose through the crack and peered at them with one good eye. The other was wrapped in a sunken caul of flesh. The hand that gripped the door edge was filthy, its nails long and black. Her toothless mouth cracked into a wrinkled, round-lipped grin. “Good evening,” she said in perfect, even elegant German. “What can I do for you?”

“We need to know if we are on the road to Dôle,” von Ranke said, controlling his repulsion.

“Then you’re asking the wrong guide,” the old woman said. Her hand withdrew and the door started to close. Fischer kicked out and pushed her back. The door swung open and began to lean on worn-out leather hinges.

“You do not treat us with the proper respect,” he said. “What do you mean, ‘the wrong guide’? What kind of guide are you?”

“So
strong
,” the old woman crooned, wrapping her hands in front of her withered chest and backing away into the gloom. She wore colorless, ageless gray rags. Worn knit sleeves extended to her wrists.

“Answer me!” Fischer said, advancing despite the strong odor of urine and decay in the hut.

“The maps I know are not for this land,” she sang, stopping before a cold and empty hearth.

“She’s crazy,” von Ranke said. “Let the local authorities take care of her later. Let’s be off.” But a wild look was in Fischer’s eye. So much filth, so much disarray, and impudence as well; these made him angry.

“What maps do you know, crazy woman?” he demanded.

“Maps in time,” the old woman said. She let her hands fall to her side and lowered her head, as if, in admitting her specialty, she was suddenly humble.

“Then tell us where we are,” Fischer sneered.

“Come, we have important business,” von Ranke said, but he knew it was too late. There would be an end, but it would be on his friend’s terms, and it might not be pleasant.

“You are on a through road no whither,” the old woman said.

“What?” Fischer towered over her. She stared up as if at some prodigal son returned home, her gums shining spittle.

“If you wish a reading, sit,” she said, indicating a low table and three battered wood chairs. Fischer glanced at her, then at the table.

“Very well,” he said, suddenly and falsely obsequious. Another game, von Ranke realized. Cat and mouse.

Fischer pulled out a chair for his friend and sat across from the old woman. “Put your hands on the table, palms down, both of them, both of you,” she said. They did so. She lay her ear to the table as if listening, eyes going to the beams of light coming through the thatch. “Arrogance,” she said. Fischer did not react.

“A road going into fire and death,” she said. “Your cities in flame, your women and children shriveling to black dolls in the heat of their burning homes. The death camps are found and you stand accused of hideous crimes. Many are tried and hanged. Your nation is disgraced, your cause abhorred.” Now a peculiar light came into her eye. “And many years later, a comedian swaggers around on stage, in a movie, turning your Führer into a silly clown, singing a silly song. Only psychotics will believe in you, the lowest of the low. Your nation will be divided among your enemies. All will be lost.”

Fischer’s smile did not waver. He pulled a coin from his pocket and threw it down before the woman, then pushed the chair back and stood. “Your maps are as crooked as your chin, hag,” he said. “Let’s go.”

“I’ve been suggesting that,” von Ranke said. Fischer made no move to leave. Von Ranke tugged on his arm but the SS Oberleutnant shrugged free of his friend’s grip.

“Gypsies are few, now, hag,” he said. “Soon to be fewer by one.” Von Ranke managed to urge him just outside the door. The woman followed and shaded her eye against the misty light.

“I am no gypsy,” she said. “You do not even recognize the words?” She pointed at the letters above the door.

Fischer squinted, and the light of recognition dawned in his eyes. “Yes,” he said. “Yes, I do, now. A dead language.”

“What are they?” von Ranke asked, uneasy.

“Hebrew, I think,” Fischer said. “She is a Jewess.”

“No!” the woman cackled. “I am no Jew.”

Von Ranke thought the woman looked younger now, or at least stronger, and his unease deepened.

“I do not care what you are,” Fischer said quietly. “I only wish we were in my father’s time.” He took a step toward her. She did not retreat. Her face became almost youthfully bland, and her bad eye seemed to fill in. “Then, there would be no regulations, no rules—I could take this pistol”—he tapped his holster—“and apply it to your filthy Kike head, and perhaps kill the last Jew in Europe.” He unstrapped the holster. The woman straightened in the dark hut, as if drawing strength from Fischer’s abusive tongue. Von Ranke feared for his friend. Rashness would get them in trouble.

“This is not our fathers’ time,” he reminded Fischer.

Fischer paused, the pistol half in his hand, his finger curling around the trigger. “Old woman”—though she did not look half as old, perhaps not even old at all, and certainly not bent and crippled—“you have had a very narrow shave this afternoon.”

“You have no idea who I am,” the woman half-sang, half-moaned.

“Scheisse,”
Fischer spat. “Now we will go, and report you and your hovel.”

“I am the scourge,” she breathed, and her breath smelled like burning stone even three strides away. She backed into the hut but her voice did not diminish. “I am the visible hand, the pillar of cloud by day and the pillar of fire by night.”

Fischer’s face hardened, and then he laughed. “You are right,” he said to von Ranke, “she isn’t worth our trouble.” He turned and stomped out the door. Von Ranke followed, with one last glance over his shoulder into the gloom, the decay.
No one has lived in this hut for years,
he thought. Her shadow was gray and indefinite before the ancient stone hearth, behind the leaning, dust-covered table.

In the car von Ranke sighed. “You
do
tend toward arrogance, you know that?”

Fischer grinned and shook his head. “You drive, old friend.
I’ll
look at the maps.” Von Ranke ramped up the Mercedes’s turbine until its whine was high and steady and its exhaust cut a swirling hole in the fog behind. “No wonder we’re lost,” Fischer said. He shook out the Pan-Deutschland map peevishly. “This is five years old—1979.”

“We’ll find our way,” von Ranke said. “I wouldn’t miss old Krum-nagel’s face when we deliver the plans. He fought so long against the antipodal skip bombers.... And you delay us by fooling with an old woman.”

“It is my way,” Fischer said. “I hate disarray. Do you think he will try to veto the Pacific Northwest blitz?”

“He won’t dare. He will know his place after he sees the declarations,” von Ranke said. The Mercedes whined its way toward Dôle.

From the door of the hut the old woman watched, head bobbing. “I am not a Jew,” she said, “but I loved them, too, oh, yes. I loved all my children.” She raised her hand as the long black car roared into the fog.

“I will bring you to justice, whatever line you live upon, and all your children, and their children’s children,” she said. She dropped a twist of smoke from her elbow to the dirt floor and waggled her finger. The smoke danced and drew black figures in the dirt. “As you wished, into the time of your fathers.” The fog grew thinner. She brought her arm down, and forty years melted away with the mist.

High above a deeper growl descended on the road. A wide-winged shadow passed over the hut, wings flashing stars, invasion stripes and cannon fire.

“Hungry bird,” the shapeless figure said. “Time to feed.”

A professor of physics at the University of California at Irvine, Gregory Benford is also regarded as one of science fiction’s “killer B’s” for the award-winning novels and short fiction he has written since 1965. His novel
Timescape
, winner of the Nebula and John W. Campbell Awards, mixed the themes of alternate history and time travel in its account of a physicist attempting to avert global disaster by manipulating events that happen decades earlier. Benford is considered one of the preeminent modern writers of hard science fiction for such novels as
Eater
, which works cutting-edge astronomy into its story of first human contact with aliens in the 21st century. He has also been praised for his explorations of humanist themes, notably in his
Galactic Center
sextet of novels of human-alien contact and human-machine interface comprised of
In the Ocean of Night
,
Across the Sea of Suns
,
The Stars in Shroud
,
Great Sky River
,
Tides of Light
, and
Furious Gulf
. His short fiction has been collected in
In Alien Flesh
and
Matter’s End
. He is the author of
Foundation’s Fear
, a novel set in Isaac Asimov’s
Foundation
milieu; has collaborated on
Beyond the Fall of Night
, a sequel to Arthur C. Clarke’s
Against the Fall of Night
; and has written a popular science book
Deep Time: How Humanity Communicates Across Millennia
. His work as an anthologist includes Nuclear War, the alternate history compilation
Hitler Victorious
, and four volumes in the
What Might Have Been
series. The publication of his novel
The Martian Race
, about the first manned mission to the Red Planet, was timed to coincide with the 1999 touchdown of the Mars Polar Lander.

There were worse things than getting swept up in the first battle of the first war in over a century, but Bradley could not right away think of any.

They had been out on a lark, really. Bradley got his buddy Paul to go along, flying low over the hills to watch the grand formations of men and machines. Bradley knew how to keep below the radar screens, sometimes skimming along so close to the treetops that branches snapped on their understruts. They had come in before dawn, using Bradley’s dad’s luxury, ultraquiet cruiser—over the broad fields, using the sunrise to blind the optical sensors below.

It had been enormously exciting. The gleaming columns, the acrid smoke of ruin, the distant muffled coughs of combat.

Then somebody shot them down.

Not a full, square hit, luckily. Bradley had gotten them over two ranges of hills, lurching through shot-racked air. Then they came down heavily, air bags saving the two boys.

They had no choice but to go along with the team that picked them out of their wreckage. Dexter, a big, swarthy man, seemed to be in charge. He said, “We got word a bunch of mechs are comin’ along this road. You stick with us, you can help out.”

Bradley said irritably, “Why should we? I want to—”

“Cause it’s not safe round here, kid,” Dexter said. “You joyriding rich kids, maybe you’ll learn something about that today.”

Dexter grinned, showing two missing teeth, and waved the rest of his company to keep moving into the slanting early-morning glow.

Nobody had any food and Bradley was pretty sure they would not have shared it out if they had. The fighting over the ridge to the west had disrupted whatever supply lines there were into this open, once agricultural land.

They reached the crossroads by midmorning and right away knocked out a servant mech by mistake. It saw them come hiking over the hill through the thick oaks and started chuffing away, moving as fast as it could. It was an R class, shiny and chromed.

A woman who carried one of the long rods over her shoulder whipped the rod down and sighted along it and a loud boom startled Bradley. The R mech went down. “First one of the day,” the woman named Angel said.

“Musta been a scout,” Dexter said.

“For what?” Bradley asked, shocked as they walked down the slope toward the mech in air still cool and moist from the dawn.

Paul said tentatively, “The mech withdrawal?”

Dexter nodded. “Mechs’re on their way through here. Bet they’re scared plenty.”

They saw the R mech had a small hole punched through it right in the servo controls near the back. “Not bad shootin’,” a man said to Angel.

“I
tole
you these’d work,” Angel said proudly. “I sighted mine in fresh this mornin’. It helps.”

Bradley realized suddenly that the various machined rods these dozen people carried were all weapons, fabrications turned out of factories exclusively human-run.
Killing tools,
he thought in blank surprise.
Like the old days. You see them in dramas and stuff, but they’ve been illegal for a century.

“Maybe this mech was just plain scared,” Bradley said. “It’s got software for that.”

“We sent out a beeper warning,” Dexter said, slapping the pack on his back. “Goes out of this li’l rig here. Any mech wants no trouble, all they got to do is come up on us slow and then lie down so we can have a look at their programming cubes.”

“Disable it?”

“Sure. How else we going to be sure?”

“This one ran clear as anything,” Angel said, reloading her rifle.

“Maybe it didn’t understand,” Bradley said. The R models were deft, subtle, terrific at social graces.

“It knew, all right,” Angel said, popping the mech’s central port open and pulling out its ID cube. “Look, it’s from Sanfran.”

“What’s it doing all the way out here, then, if it’s not a rebel?” a black man named Nelson asked.

“Yeah,” Dexter said. “Enter it as reb.” He handed Bradley a wrist comm. “We’re keepin’ track careful now. You’ll be busy just takin’ down score today, kid.”

“Rebel, uh, I see,” Bradley said, tapping into the comm. It was reassuring to do something simple while he straightened out his feelings.

“You bet,” Nelson said, excitement lacing his voice. “Look at it. Fancy mech, smarter than most of them, tryin’ to save itself. It’s been runnin’ away from our people. They just broke up a big mech force west of here.”

“I never could afford one of these chrome jobs,” Angel said. “They knew that, too. I had one of these classy R numbers meanmouth me in the market, try to grab a can of soybean stew.” She laughed sarcastically. “That was when there was a few scraps left on the shelves.”

“Elegant thing, wasn’t it?” Nelson kicked the mech, which rolled farther downhill.

“You messed it up pretty well,” Bradley said.

Dexter said, “Roll it down into that hollow so nobody can see it from the road.” He gestured at Paul. “You go with the other party. Hey, Mercer!”

A tall man ambled over from where he had been carefully trying to pick the spines off a prickly pear growing in a gully. Everybody was hungry. Dexter said to him, “Go down across the road and set up shot. Take this kid—Paul’s your name, right?—he’ll help with the gruntwork. We’ll catch ’em in a crossfire here.”

Mercer went off with Paul. Bradley helped get the dead mech going and with Angel rolled it into the gully. Its flailing arms dug fresh wet gouges in the spring grass. The exposed mud exhaled moist scents. They threw manzanita brush over the shiny carcass to be sure, and by that time Dexter had deployed his people.

They were setting up what looked like traps of some kind well away from the blacktop crossroads. Bradley saw that this was to keep the crossroads from looking damaged or clogged. They wanted the mechs to come in fast and keep going.

As he worked he heard rolling bass notes, like the mumbles of a giant, come from the horizon. He could see that both the roads leading to the crossroads could carry mechs away from the distant battles. Dexter was everywhere, barking orders, Bradley noted with respect.

The adults talked excitedly to each other about what the mechs would make of it, how easy they were to fool about real-world stuff, and even threw in some insider mech slang—codes and acronyms that meant very little to mechs, really, but had gotten into the pop culture as hip new stuff. Bradley smiled at this. It gave him a moment of feeling superior to cover his uneasiness.

It was a crisp spring morning now that the sun had beamed up over the far hill at their backs. The perfect time for fresh growth, but the fields beyond had no plowing or signs of cultivation. Mechs should be there, laying in crops. Instead they were off over the rumpled ridgeline, clashing with the main body of humans and, Bradley hoped secretly, getting their asses kicked. Though mechs had no asses, he reminded himself.

Dexter and Bradley laid down behind a hummock halfway up the hill. Dexter was talking into his hushmike headset, face jumping with anticipation and concern. Bradley savored the rich scents of the sweet new grass and thought idly about eating some of it.

Dexter looked out over the setup his team was building and said, “Y’know, maybe we’re too close, but I figure you can’t be in too close as long as you have the firepower. These weapons, we need close, real close. Easier to hit them when they’re moving fast but then it’s easier for them to hit you, too.”

Bradley saw that the man was more edgy here than he had been with his team. Nobody had done anything like this within living memory. Not in the civilized world, anyway.

“Got to be sure we can back out of this if it gets too hot,” Dexter went on.

Bradley liked Dexter’s no-nonsense scowl. “How did you learn how to fight?”

Dexter looked surprised. “Hobby of mine. Studied the great Roman campaigns in Africa.”

“They used ambushes a lot?”

“Sometimes. Of course, after Sygnius of Albion invented the steam-driven machine gun, well sir, then the Romans could dictate terms to any tribes that gave them trouble.” Dexter squinted at him. “You study history, kid?”

“I’m Bradley, sir. My parents don’t let me read about battles very much. They’re always saying we’ve gotten beyond that.”

“Yeah, that Universal Peace Church, right?”

“Yessir. They say—”

“That stuff’s fine for people. Mechs, they’re different.”

“Different how?”

Dexter sucked on his teeth, peering down the road. “Not human. Fair game.”

“Think they’ll be hard to beat?”

Dexter grinned. “We’re programmed for this by a couple million years of evolution. They been around half a century.”

“Since 1800? I thought we’d always had mechs.”

“Geez, kids never know any history.”

“Well, sir, I know all the big things, like the dates of American secession from the Empire, and the Imperial ban on weapons like the ones you’ve got here, and how—”

“Dates aren’t history, son. They’re just numbers. What’s it matter when we finally got out from under the Romans? Bunch of lily-livers, they were. ‘Peace Empire’—contradiction in terms, kid. Though the way the 3D pumps you kids full of crap, not even allowin’ any war shows or anything, except for prettified pussy historicals, no wonder you don’t know which end of a gun does the business.”

This seemed unfair to Bradley but he could see Dexter wasn’t the kind of man he had known, so he shut up.
Fair game?
What did that mean? A fair game was where everybody enjoyed it and had a chance to win.

Maybe the world wasn’t as simple as he had thought. There was something funny and tingly about the air here, a crackling that made his skin jump, his nerves strum.

Angel came back and lay beside them, wheezing, lugging a heavy contraption with tripod legs they had just assembled.

Nelson was downslope, cradling his rifle. He arranged the tripod and lifted onto it a big array of cylinders and dark, brushed-steel sliding parts unlike anything Bradley had ever seen. Sweating, Nelson stuck a long, curved clip into all this freshly made metal and worked the clacking mechanism. Nelson smiled, looking pleased at the way the parts slid easily.

Bradley was trying to figure out what all the various weapons did when he heard something coming fast down the road. He looked back along the snaky black line that came around the far hills and saw a big shape flitting among the ash trees.

It was an open-topped hauler filled with copper-jacketed mechs. They looked like factory hands packed like gleaming eggs in a carton.

Dexter talked into his hushmike and pointed toward three chalk-white stones set up by the road as aiming markers. The hauler came racing through the crossroads and plunged up the straight section of the road in front of Bradley. The grade increased here so they would slow as they passed the stones.

Bradley realized they had no way of knowing what the mechs were doing there, not for sure, and then he forgot that as a pulse-quickening sensation coursed through him. Dexter beside him looked like a cat that knows he has a canary stashed somewhere and can go sink his teeth into it any time he likes.

When the hauler reached the marker stones Angel opened fire. The sound was louder than anything Bradley had ever heard and his first reaction was to bury his face in the grass. When he looked up the hauler was slewing across the road and then it hit the ditch and rolled.

The coppery mechs in the back flew out in slow motion. Most just smacked into the grass and lay still. The hauler thumped solidly and stopped rolling. A few of the factory mechs got up and tried to get behind the hauler, maybe thinking that the rifle fire was only from Angel, but then the party from across the road opened up and the mechs pitched forward into the ditch and did not move. Then there was quiet in the little valley. Bradley could hear the hauler’s engine still humming with electric energy and then some internal override cut in and it whined into silence.

“I hit that hauler square in the command dome, you see that?” Angel said loudly.

Bradley hadn’t seen it but he said, “Yes ma’am, right.”

Dexter said, “Try for that every time. Saves ammo if we don’t have to shoot every one of them.”

Nelson called up the slope, “Those’re factory mechs, they look like Es and Fs, they’re pretty heavy-built.”

Angel nodded, grinning. “Easier just to slam ’em into that ditch.”

Dexter didn’t hear this as he spoke into his hushmike next to Bradley. “Myron, you guys get them off the road. Use those power-override keys and make them walk themselves into that place where the gully runs down into the stream. Tell ’em to jump right in the water.”

“What about the hauler?” Bradley asked, and then was surprised at his own boldness.

Dexter frowned a moment. “The next batch, they’ll think we hit it from the air. There was plenty of that yesterday to the west.”

“I didn’t see any of our planes today,” Bradley said.

“We lost some. Rest are grounded because some mechs started to catch on just about sunset. They knocked three of our guys right out of the sky. Mechs won’t know that, though. They’ll figure it’s like yesterday and that hauler was just unlucky.” Dexter smiled and checked his own rifle, which he had not fired.

“I’ll go help them,” Bradley said, starting to get up.

“No; we only got so many of those keys. The guys know how to use ’em. You watch the road.”

“But I’d like to—”

“Shut up,” Dexter said in a way that was casual and yet was not.

Bradley used his pocket binoculars to study the road. The morning heat sent ripples climbing up from the valley floor and he was not sure at first that he saw true movement several kilometers away and then he was. Dexter alerted the others and there was a mad scramble to get the mechs out of sight.

They were dead, really, but the humans could access their power reserves and make them roll down the road on their wheels and treads and then jounce down the gully and pitch into the stream. Bradley could hear laughter as the team across the road watched the mechs splash into the brown water. Some shorted out and started flailing their arms and rotors around, comic imitations of humans swimming. That lasted only a few seconds and then they sank like the rest.

Nelson came running back up the hill, carrying on his back a long tube. “Here’s that launcher you wanted. Rensink, he didn’t look too happy to let go of it.”