Xenograffiti (3 page)

KEITH ROBERTS AND THE
PAVANE
OF HISTORY
(1979)

One of the more interesting and peculiar subgenres of science fiction is the alternate history, in which the known facts of past human existence are changed just enough to bring about a different result in the modern world. Hence, we have worlds in which the South won the Civil War (Ward Moore’s
Bring the Jubilee
and MacKinlay Kantor’s
If the South Had Won the Civil War
); in which the Nazis won World War II (Eric Norden’s
The Ultimate Solution
and Philip K. Dick’s
The Man in the High Castle
); in which the atom bomb never worked and the United States actually invaded the Japanese mainland (David Westheimer’s
Lighter Than a Feather
); and even a novel in which the Arabs defeated the Israelis (
If Israel Lost the War
, by Richard Z. Chesnoff, Edward Klein, and Robert Littell). But perhaps the best-conceived and most human of these enterprises in destiny is Keith Roberts’s masterpiece,
Pavane
.

In 1588 Queen Elizabeth I is shot and killed by a Catholic fanatic. As a result the Spanish Armada successfully invades England, Spain’s Philip II becomes King, and the Catholic Church is restored to a position of pre-eminence. With the power of the English people now behind them, the Popes are able to subdue the forces of Protestant resistance throughout Europe, and once again make themselves political masters of the civilized world. The inquisition is introduced into England and the other ex-Protestant states. The American colonists remain permanently under Spanish rule.

Roberts choreographs his stately dance into six “Measures,” each originally published separately, loosely connecting them to form a picture of a society in transition. The first story, “The Lady Margaret,” is set in 1968, but this is a time that bears little resemblance to the year in which Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy were assassinated. The Church has retarded technological progress: electricity is outlawed, and the internal combustion engine is banned. Society is restricted and controlled through a series of closed guilds and family enterprises.

Strange and Sons is one such business, a shipping firm which hauls its goods over the English countryside in six- or ten-car rail-less steam-powered trains.
The Lady Margaret
is the magnificent engine being driven by Jesse Strange, owner of the company, on the last run to the coast for the winter season. Jesse’s father, Eli Strange, has recently died, and with the death of one driver, the firm is shorthanded; Jesse himself must make the final trip. The hauler’s twin enemies are the cold and the
Routiers
, Norman bandits who roam the countryside looking for easy prey. But Jesse is intensely loyal to the ideals of hard work, tradition, and responsibility to his company, and he pushes on in spite of the danger and harsh conditions. Near the end of his journey he is attacked by the brigands, led by one of his old school chums; Jesse lets them have the last carriage in line, thereby saving the rest of his train. As he drives off through the night, the darkness is lit by a flash of light and a loud explosion: the bandits have been destroyed through their own greed.

The second measure, “The Signaller,” is the tale of Rafe Big-land, a poor boy who has always been fascinated by the semaphore station located near his town. With electronic communication devices banned by the Church, the Popes and the state maintain chains of semaphore stations running throughout all of Europe. The Guild governing the signallers is one of the strongest in England; only twelve commoners are allowed admittance annually into the Guild’s training school. Rafe is determined to become one of the twelve, and with the help of the friendly sergeant at his local station, he obtains the proper forms, studies diligently, and wins a place in the school through a nationwide exam. The College is located in Londinium (the Latin name for London), and there Rafe learns all of the basic languages spoken in the realm—Norman French for the upper classes, Latin for the Church, modern English for commerce and trade, middle English, Celtic, Welsh, Gaelic, and Cornish for the peasant classes—in addition to signal codes and techniques, mechanics, and composition.

After several years of work, Rafe passes his exams, and is posted to a training station, a major switching center called St. Adhelm’s. The final test is a daylong ordeal in which two trainees must transmit from one to the other an entire book of the Bible, signing on and off at the end of each verse. Rafe has finally become a Signaller, and is posted to his first assignment, a small personal station located in one of the great family estates. After a year’s service there, he receives his first independent command, a small station located in the hills of Dorset, a lonely outpost isolated from the next nearest station by two rugged miles. The winters are harsh in the uplands, but the Signallers must still maintain vigilance. On one of his daily walks during an off-duty period, Rafe is suddenly attacked by a wildcat, and badly clawed. He crawls back to his station, falling into his bed. There he is comforted by the Fairies, a race older than mankind, before succumbing to his wounds and the bitter cold. His body is found in the spring by his replacement.

The third tale, “Brother John,” examines more closely the workings of the Church. John is an engraver in the monastery of St. Adhelm in Dorset. One day he is summoned by his Abbot, and told to report to the head of the Court of Spiritual Welfare, as the Inquisition is now called in England. The Church wants a record made of the torture sessions used to extract “truth” from heretics, criminals, and political dissidents. But the sessions with the Court destroy John’s artistic sense, and nearly drive him mad. When he leaves the city, John heads for the hills, plagued by visions, noises, and memories of the screams and pleadings of the victims whose sufferings he so faithfully recorded for the Pope. There he starts a revolution aimed at Church and state alike, and quickly gathers a following among the peasant class. Soldiers are assaulted and insurrections spring up around the countryside. The Cardinal Archbishop of England excommunicates the monk and puts a price upon his head in a letter dated June 21, 1985. But John escapes his pursuers when the commoners hide him from the searching soldiers, and the bounty on his body quickly escalates to two thousand pounds. John gathers a huge peasant army and marches to the coast, where he addresses the people, telling them of the great new age approaching when the Catholic Church will ease its grip upon the land, and when progress will ease the lot of the people. He turns to the sea, steps into a boat, and sails into the storm-tossed waves, on his way, he says, to see the Pope. The boat’s keel is found washed upon the shore the next morning.

“Lords and Ladies” features Margaret Strange, niece to Jesse Strange, and the heir to the firm after her own father. Jesse is dying, and Margaret remembers her own adventurous life as she waits for the old man to expire. As a young woman, she had helped a poor fisher boy whose hand had been mangled in a winch. Her erstwhile companion, Robert Purbeck, son of Lord Purbeck, had then driven her home to his castle, which dominated the pass called Corfe Gate. After a brief courtship, Margaret found herself in Robert’s bed, but when she awoke, Robert had been called away on the King’s business. As she rode away from the massive walls, she spied an old man sitting amid the ruing pillars. This representative of the Old Ones, the Fairies, told her that the Church has a purpose and a place in this world that must be fulfilled, and it should not therefore be despised: “The great Dance finishes, another will begin.” And then he vanished. She returned home to find her uncle dying. Now she sits reminiscing. After Jesse’s death, Lord Robert comes for her, flogging his horse to a frenzy. One life ends, another begins.

“The White Boat,” the fifth measure, was published a year after the main sequence of stories, and was not included in the British edition of
Pavane
, perhaps because its tone and texture differs markedly from its five companion pieces. Becky, a young peasant girl, lives on the coast not far from the point where Brother John had met his untimely end. One day she sees a white boat sneak into the harbor, unload some cargo, and then move off. This pattern continues for several weeks, off and on. Finally the girl, driven away by her father’s brutality at home, sneaks aboard the craft, and is taken by it to France, where a cargo is loaded and the men paid. They are obviously smuggling some secret goods into England. When she pries open a case, she finds a heretic device, a manufactured object not sanctioned by the Church; she hides one under her clothing, and takes it with her when she leaves. She shows it to her priest; he calls in the government troops to intercept the boat on its next pass. But Becky has second thoughts, and grabs the lanyard of a waiting cannon, setting it off prematurely. The white boat, now warned, turns away from the coast, laughing at the hapless guns of the enemy.

The sixth and final tale, “Corfe Gate,” was actually the first written. Eleanor Purbeck, daughter and heir of Lord Robert Purbeck and Lady Margaret Strange, both now deceased, and granddaughter and sole heir of Timothy Strange, Jesse’s sole remaining brother and head of Strange and Sons, has succeeded temporarily to Lordship of Corfe Gate on her father’s accidental death; pending her marriage, when she will lose her independence, she rules the great castle standing astride the pass into Dorset. Shortly after her accession, Pope John XL levies new taxes on an already strained economy, and Eleanor declines to pay: her people, she says, will starve if she hands over the grain. A rakish knight is sent against her, but she meets him at the portcullis, and when he threatens Eleanor and her people, she herself ignites the cannon that kills a score of Papal soldiers. Soon the castle is invested, and the countryside is in arms. Sir John Falconer, Seneschal to Eleanor and her late father, is one of the Old Ones, the Fairies, a nonhuman race which has been helping man from before recorded history.

In the end King Charles returns to his lands and appears before the Castle, and Eleanor surrenders it to her Lord; Corfe Gate is dismantled, and Eleanor retires to obscurity, later being assassinated in her old age by the King’s agents. In a brief “Coda,” Sir John Falconer ties together the loose ends of the story: the Church deliberately slowed technological progress until man’s racial maturity had advanced to the point where atomic power would not result in mass destruction. There had been an earlier rise of mankind, an earlier Renaissance, an earlier Armada, and a civilization which had ended in flames. Only the Popes and the Old Ones knew the whole story. The siege of Purbeck had been the Church’s last gasp: within ten years, Charles had gained sufficient independence to throw off his chains, and much of Europe had followed. A new Utopian Age had dawned.

Roberts’s lyrical story cycle is intensely British in theme and outlook. Much of the story derives directly from the real-life history of the Isle of Purbeck, which is still dominated by the enormous ruin of Corfe Castle. During the English Civil War, Lord Bankes had placed the defense of Corfe in the hands of his wife, Lady Mary; her courage and resourcefulness were such that she was allowed to retain her lands at the end of the struggle. The castle itself was destroyed. Roberts imbues his tale with the best qualities of the English people, a curious blend of honesty, loyalty, love of tradition, and ironic dourness. Throughout the cycle we continually experience the loyalty of major characters to strongly-felt beliefs: Jesse Strange follows his ideals, even when they result in the death of his friend; Rafe Bigland is loyal unto death to the Guild of Signallers; Brother John follows his vision into the sea; Margaret Strange returns to her uncle’s deathbed; and Robert Purbeck follows his love as far as he must; Eleanor surrenders her castle only to her liege lord, the King.

Indeed, the very title of the book suggests its theme: the stately dance between Church and state holds together an artificially retarded society that would otherwise disintegrate. In six clearly delineated snapshots, Roberts combines his love for the Dorset people with the grand theme of societal and cultural regeneration. “The great Dance finishes, another will begin.” And so it has always been.

FREE WILL IN WARD MOORE’S
BRING THE JUBILEE
(1979)

The philosophical debate between determinism and free will has been argued in science fiction stories and novels from the very beginning of the genre, and never more fiercely than in stories dealing with time. Can man affect the course of history? Or will the tide of events smother the most potent attempts of individuals to alter the nature of recorded reality?

Ward Moore answers these questions in
Bring the Jubilee
(1953) by having his hero, Hodge Backmaker, accidentally alter his world’s history into one we recognize as our own. In Hodge’s time track, the course of the Civil War was changed when Southern troops occupied Cemetery Hill and Round Top prior to the Battle of Gettysburg, thereby gaining a strategic advantage that won the battle for the Confederacy and altered the course of the war. The North was forced to surrender on July 4, 1863, leaving the nation permanently divided into two rival states. But the South, as victor, exacted a heavy price from the Federal government, forcing it to pay war indemnities that crippled its economy for decades and left it permanently impoverished, demoralized, and embittered. The South generously allowed the North to keep all the states above the old Mason-Dixon Line, but occupied Kansas, Missouri, and California, and also annexed Mexico at a later date. The political rearrangement of North America affected other parts of the globe as well: France remained an Empire under the Bonaparte dynasty, and Germany became the German Union (not Empire). World War I was called the Emperors’ War of 1914-1916. Still, the key event for Hodge and his fellow Northerners was always the “War of Southern Independence,” as it came to be called.

Moore delineates the plight of the Northern states through the tale of Hodge’s upbringing. Backmaker’s family is poor, rural, ignorant, and penny-pinching. Hodge’s only prospects are more of the same, or selling himself into indentured bondage to one of the small manufacturers or great landowners. Neither of these prospects is particularly appealing, so Hodge leaves home in 1938 at the age of seventeen, seeking his fortune in the great metropolis of New York. The United States has no public transportation except an expensive and inefficient railway system, and the roads are virtually impassible to anything but horse and carriage (minibiles—steam cars—do exist, but are confined to the wealthiest classes), so Hodge must walk the eighty miles to town. New York is the largest city in the United States, nearly a million strong, filled with second-rate technological marvels: cable cars, horse-cars, express steam trains, bicycles, gas lights on every corner, an intricate network of telegraph wires to every office and large household (providing instant Morse code communication from and to all central points), pneumatic lifts, and balloon airships running overhead. It also has its share of impoverished slums, tenement houses, and crime. Hodge has no sooner arrived in the Big City than he is robbed of his three dollars—a fortune in an era when 50¢ is the normal day’s wage for a grown man—and left for dead. He is rescued and left with a bookseller named Roger Tyss, and Hodge’s real education begins.

Tyss is a strange man, widely read, self-educated, but misanthropic, with a fatalistic philosophy of life. He takes the boy in and gives him a home, but also engages his mind in a running series of debates, queries, dialogues, and discussions. In one of the most interesting of these encounters, Tyss propounds his philosophy, a Calvinistic creed which denies the possibility of free will. “The whole thing is an illusion,” he says. “We do what we do because someone else has done what he did; he did it because still another someone did what he did. Every action is the rigid result of another action.” This is a key passage in Moore’s novel, the setting of the problem which Hodge will ultimately resolve. For Backmaker (and Moore) clearly believe the antithesis, that if “choice exists once, it can exist again.”

One of the visitors to Tyss’s shop is the Black consul for the Republic of Haiti, the sole remaining independent state south of the Mason-Dixon Line. African-Americans were ostracized from the North after the defeat of the United States, either being sent back to Africa or lynched outright—Monsieur Enfandin’s position, even with diplomatic status, is not an easy one. But Enfandin is a cultured man, and makes an effort to read widely; in Hodge’s life he becomes the counterbalance to the bookseller’s bitter philosophy, a positive factor in Hodge’s coming-of-age. Hodge decides to devote his life to history, and Enfandin is the first to hear of his decision. In the discussion which follows, the Haitian expounds his own theory of life, saying that free will is man’s greatest gift. He later tells the boy that one cannot escape the responsibility of decisions merely because one fears the consequences: “Not acting is also action.” Enfandin, in keeping with his philosophy, offers to help the boy gain admission to one of the few Northern colleges; when Hodge gives Tyss two weeks’ notice, the bookseller points out that Backmaker has once again proved that nothing is left to chance. Hodge is a spectator type: “The part written for you does not call for you to be a participant.” These words will later come back to haunt the boy with their irony.

Unfortunately, Enfandin is assaulted and returns to Haiti before fulfilling his promise; Hodge writes to the universities on his own, and receives a strange reply from Thomas Haggerwells of Haggershaven, York, Pennsylvania. Decades before, Haggerwells’s grandfather had established a refuge for itinerant scholars on his farm, and over the years a center of learning and study for scientists, teachers, and researchers had developed. Haggerwells’s daughter Barbara travels to the city to meet Hodge (now twenty-three), and soon Backmaker is making the tedious train journey to rural Pennsylvania. Haggershaven proves to be the refuge he has been seeking all his life, a genial commune whose members work for the common good, contributing their financial earnings to the group in return for a secure place to pursue their researches. The farm had originally been settled by Major Herbert Haggerwells, a Confederate officer in the invading army of Robert E. Lee, who had so liked the country that he had never returned to his Southern home.

Barbara is a high-strung girl, an emotional tyrant to her men, but simultaneously the world’s leading theoretical physicist, a scientist whose primary interest is the nature of time, energy, and space, and their interrelationship. They are, she says, interchangeable elements; theoretically, it should be possible to translate matter-energy into space-time. Once resolved into its component parts, anything, including man himself, could be reassembled at another point of the space-time continuum.

During the next eight years Hodge and Barbara each pursue their research independently, little realizing how their findings will ultimately converge. Backmaker begins publishing scholarly articles on the War of Southern Independence (his chosen field of study) in respected Southern and European journals (there are no such publications in the United States). The culmination of his studies is the publication of the first volume of his monumental history,
Chancellorsville to the End
. He receives a curious letter from the leading historian of his day, Polk, praising the book but questioning one of its conclusions. Hodge had mentioned in his work the key Battle of Gettysburg, the beginning of the end for the Northern forces, and how fortuitous it was that the Southern troops had occupied the Round Tops overlooking the battle site on July 1, 1863. Polk puts forth his own theory, ascribing the move to Lee’s military genius, “regarding the factors of time and space not as forces in themselves but as opportunities for the display of his talents.” Polk’s letter so disturbs Hodge that he temporarily abandons the second volume of his work, suddenly beset with doubts. Has he indeed missed some key factor in his assemblage of the facts?

Meanwhile, Barbara has gone from theory to demonstration, persuading the community to support her efforts to build a machine that will travel through time. And now the drama comes together: when she hears Hodge is having difficulties completing his work, she offers him the chance of verifying each detail personally, by watching the battle unfold as it happens. He will be able to write history as no man has done before, from the perspective of the impartial observer actually present at the event. Initial tests confirm that the machine works within a range of one hundred years. Man can go back in time and return. Convinced by Barbara’s arguments, Hodge agrees to the experiment, in which he will be sent back to midnight on June 30, 1863, the night before the battle began, and will return on midnight, July 4th.

York is about thirty miles from the battle site, and Hodge walks the distance during the night. He takes his position near the road where the Southern troops, pursuing the fleeing Federals, will push on to occupy the Round Tops, the key strategic positions on the battlefield. Before he realizes what is happening, the Rebel soldiers spot this unlikely civilian lurking in the brush, and start questioning him. Their captain rides up, and attempts to interrogate Hodge. But Backmaker is stunned by these events, because he
knows
from his research that no such pause in the Southern advance is recorded anywhere. When he fails to respond to the officer’s questions, the soldiers panic and attempt to flee; the captain, whose face looks familiar to Hodge, tries to stop the turncoats, but is shot and killed by one of his own men. Hodge is left lying in the sun, alive but shaken. The battle which ensues is nothing like the one he knows: the Southern soldiers never gain a decisive advantage, and are eventually decimated in Pickett’s crucial charge. The South loses the Civil War as a result. Somehow Hodge makes his way back to the barn in York by midnight of the 4th, but nothing happens. And as the sun of a new day dawns, he suddenly realizes who the captain was: Herbert Haggerwells.

Hodge’s life is in direct counterpoint to the state of the Union. In the backward wreck of the twenty-six
dis
-United States, Hodge thrives and grows and becomes a man, in every sense of the word. He finds love, peace, a haven for his studies, and companionship. But he, like all men, must take responsibility for his actions, and in attempting to learn more about the battle than he really needs to know, in attempting to become greater than history, the supremely impartial observer, he unwittingly becomes the key element in changing it. He destroys
his
history, and in the process restores the Union. The remainder of his life is spent, like most of the inhabitants of his old world, in wondering why. He lives as a ward and worker on the farm that would have been Haggershaven, and leaves these memoirs to be found by a skeptical farmer. Enfandin was right, after all: man may choose, or choose not to choose, but even that is a choice, and the consequences of man’s abdication of his free will can be far more disastrous than an action purposely taken.

Moore’s novel is a powerful philosophical discussion of man’s place in the universe, and without a doubt the best fiction he ever penned. In posing the question of time and man’s relation to it, he probes the nature of life itself. The man who waits for changes to happen to him, says the author, deserves no more than he gets. And what is true for one man is also true for the race as a whole.