The Best Alternate History Stories of the 20th Century (38 page)

Rice sat naked on the edge of the canopied bed, shivering a little in the air conditioning. Past the jutting window unit, through clouded panes of eighteenth-century glass, he saw a lush, green landscape sprinkled with tiny waterfalls.

At ground level, a garden crew of former aristos in blue-denim overalls trimmed weeds under the bored supervision of a peasant guard. The guard, clothed head to foot in camouflage except for a tricolor cockade on his fatigue cap, chewed gum and toyed with the strap of his cheap plastic machine gun. The gardens of Petit Trianon, like Versailles itself, were treasures deserving the best of care. They belonged to the Nation, since they were too large to be crammed through a time portal.

Marie Antoinette sprawled across the bed’s expanse of pink satin, wearing a scrap of black-lace underwear and leafing through an issue of
Vogue
. The bedroom’s walls were crowded with Boucher canvases: acres of pert silky rumps, pink haunches, knowingly pursed lips. Rice looked dazedly from the portrait of Louise O’Morphy, kittenishly sprawled on a divan, to the sleek, creamy expanse of Toinette’s back and thighs. He took a deep, exhausted breath. “Man,” he said, “that guy could really paint.”

Toinette cracked off a square of Hershey’s chocolate and pointed to the magazine. “I want the leather bikini,” she said. “Always, when I am a girl, my goddamn mother, she keep me in the goddamn corsets. She think my what-you-call, my shoulder blade sticks out too much.”

Rice leaned back across her solid thighs and patted her bottom reassuringly. He felt wonderfully stupid; a week and a half of obsessive carnality had reduced him to a euphoric animal. “Forget your mother, baby. You’re with
me
now. You want ze goddamn leather bikini, I get it for you.”

Toinette licked chocolate from her fingertips. “Tomorrow we go out to the cottage, okay, man? We dress up like the peasants and make love in the hedges like noble savages.”

Rice hesitated. His weekend furlough to Paris had stretched into a week and a half; by now security would be looking for him. To hell with them, he thought. “Great,” he said. “I’ll phone us up a picnic lunch. Foie gras and truffles, maybe some terrapin—”

Toinette pouted. “I want the modern food. The pizza and burritos and the chicken fried.” When Rice shrugged, she threw her arms around his neck. “You love me, Rice?”

“Love you? Baby, I love the very
idea
of you.” He was drunk on history out of control, careening under him like some great black motorcycle of the imagination. When he thought of Paris, take-out quiche-to-go stores springing up where guillotines might have been, a six-year-old Napoleon munching Dubble Bubble in Corsica, he felt like the archangel Michael on speed.

Megalomania, he knew, was an occupational hazard. But he’d get back to work soon enough, in just a few more days....

The phone rang. Rice burrowed into a plush house robe formerly owned by Louis XVI. Louis wouldn’t mind; he was now a happily divorced locksmith in Nice.

Mozart’s face appeared on the phone’s tiny screen. “Hey, man, where are you?”

“France,” Rice said vaguely. “What’s up?”

“Trouble, man. Sutherland flipped out, and they’ve got her sedated. At least six key people have gone over the hill, counting you.” Mozart’s voice had only the faintest trace of accent left.

“Hey, I’m not over the hill. I’ll be back in just a couple days. We’ve got—what, thirty other people in Northern Europe? If you’re worried about the quotas—”

“Fuck the quotas. This is serious. There’s uprisings. Comanches raising hell on the rigs in Texas. Labor strikes in London and Vienna. Realtime is pissed. They’re talking about pulling us out.”

“What?” Now he was alarmed.

“Yeah. Word came down the line today. They say you guys let this whole operation get sloppy. Too much contamination, too much fraternization. Sutherland made a lot of trouble with the locals before she got found out. She was organizing the Masonistas for some kind of passive resistance and God knows what else.”

“Shit.” The fucking politicals had screwed it up again. It wasn’t enough that he’d busted ass getting the plant up and on line; now he had to clean up after Sutherland. He glared at Mozart. “Speaking of fraternization, what’s all this
we
stuff? What the hell are you doing calling me?”

Mozart paled. “Just trying to help. I got a job in communications now.”

“That takes a Green Card. Where the hell did you get that?”

“Uh, listen, man, I got to go. Get back here, will you? We need you.” Mozart’s eyes flickered, looking past Rice’s shoulder. “You can bring your little time-bunny along if you want. But hurry.”

“I... oh, shit, okay,” Rice said.

Rice’s hovercar huffed along at a steady 80 kph, blasting clouds of dust from the deeply rutted highway. They were near the Bavarian border. Ragged Alps jutted into the sky over radiant green meadows, tiny picturesque farmhouses, and clear, vivid streams of melted snow.

They’d just had their first argument. Toinette had asked for a Green Card, and Rice had told her he couldn’t do it. He offered her a Gray Card instead, that would get her from one branch of time to another without letting her visit Realtime. He knew he’d be reassigned if the project pulled out, and he wanted to take her with him. He wanted to do the decent thing, not leave her behind in a world without Hersheys and
Vogue
s.

But she wasn’t having any of it. After a few kilometers of weighty silence she started to squirm. “I have to pee,” she said finally. “Pull over by the goddamn trees.”

“Okay,” Rice said. “Okay.”

He cut the fans and whirred to a stop. A herd of brindled cattle spooked off with a clank of cowbells. The road was deserted.

Rice got out and stretched, watching Toinette climb a wooden stile and walk toward a stand of trees.

“What’s the deal?” Rice yelled. “There’s nobody around. Get on with it!”

A dozen men burst up from the cover of a ditch and rushed him. In an instant they’d surrounded him, leveling flintlock pistols. They wore tricornes and wigs and lace-cuffed highwayman’s coats; black domino masks hid their faces. “What the fuck is this?” Rice asked, amazed. “Mardi Gras?”

The leader ripped off his mask and bowed ironically. His handsome Teutonic features were powdered, his lips rouged. “I am Count Axel Ferson. Servant, sir.”

Rice knew the name; Ferson had been Toinette’s lover before the Revolution. “Look, Count, maybe you’re a little upset about Toinette, but I’m sure we can make a deal. Wouldn’t you really rather have a color TV?”

“Spare us your satanic blandishments, sir!” Ferson roared. “I would not soil my hands on the collaborationist cow. We are the Freemason Liberation Front!”

“Christ,” Rice said. “You can’t possibly be serious. Are you taking on the project with these popguns?”

“We are aware of your advantage in armaments, sir. This is why we have made you our hostage.” He spoke to the others in German. They tied Rice’s hands and hustled him into the back of a horse-drawn wagon that had clopped out of the woods.

“Can’t we at least take the car?” Rice asked. Glancing back, he saw Toinette sitting dejectedly in the road by the hovercraft.

“We reject your machines,” Ferson said. “They are one more facet of your godlessness. Soon we will drive you back to hell, from whence you came!”

“With what? Broomsticks?” Rice sat up in the back of the wagon, ignoring the stink of manure and rotting hay. “Don’t mistake our kindness for weakness. If they send the Gray Card Army through that portal, there won’t be enough left of you to fill an ashtray.”

“We are prepared to sacrifice! Each day thousands flock to our worldwide movement, under the banner of the All-Seeing Eye! We shall reclaim our destiny! The destiny you have stolen from us!”

“Your
destiny
?” Rice was aghast. “Listen, Count, you ever hear of guillotines?”

“I wish to hear no more of your machines.” Ferson gestured to a subordinate. “Gag him.”

They hauled Rice to a farmhouse outside Salzburg. During fifteen bone-jarring hours in the wagon he thought of nothing but Toinette’s betrayal. If he’d promised her the Green Card, would she still have led him into the ambush? That card was the only thing she wanted, but how could the Masonistas get her one?

Rice’s guards paced restlessly in front of the windows, their boots squeaking on the loosely pegged floorboards. From their constant references to Salzburg he gathered that some kind of siege was in progress.

Nobody had shown up to negotiate Rice’s release, and the Masonistas were getting nervous. If he could just gnaw through his gag, Rice was sure he’d be able to talk some sense into them.

He heard a distant drone, building slowly to a roar. Four of the men ran outside, leaving a single guard at the open door. Rice squirmed in his bonds and tried to sit up.

Suddenly the clapboards above his head were blasted to splinters by heavy machine-gun fire. Grenades whumped in front of the house, and the windows exploded in a gush of black smoke. A choking Masonista lifted his flintlock at Rice. Before he could pull the trigger a burst of gunfire threw the terrorist against the wall.

A short, heavyset man in flak jacket and leather pants stalked into the room. He stripped goggles from his smoke-blackened face, revealing Oriental eyes. A pair of greased braids hung down his back. He cradled an assault rifle in the crook of one arm and wore two bandoliers of grenades. “Good,” he grunted. “The last of them.” He tore the gag from Rice’s mouth. He smelled of sweat and smoke and badly cured leather. “You are Rice?”

Rice could only nod and gasp for breath.

His rescuer hauled him to his feet and cut his ropes with a bayonet. “I am Jebe Noyon. Trans-Temporal Army.” He forced a leather flask of rancid mare’s milk into Rice’s hands. The smell made Rice want to vomit. “Drink!” Jebe insisted. “Is koumiss, is good for you! Drink, Jebe Noyon tells you!”

Rice took a sip, which curdled his tongue and brought bile to his throat. “You’re the Gray Cards, right?” he said weakly.

“Gray Card Army, yes,” Jebe said. “Baddest-ass warriors of all times and places! Only five guards here, I kill them all! I, Jebe Noyon, was chief general to Genghis Khan, terror of the earth, okay, man?” He stared at Rice with great, sad eyes. “You have not heard of me.”

“Sorry, Jebe, no.”

“The earth turned black in the footprints of my horse.”

“I’m sure it did, man.”

“You will mount up behind me,” he said, dragging Rice toward the door. “You will watch the earth turn black in the tireprints of my Harley, man, okay?”

From the hills above Salzburg they looked down on anachronism gone wild.

Local soldiers in waistcoats and gaiters lay in bloody heaps by the gates of the refinery. Another battalion marched forward in formation, muskets at the ready. A handful of Huns and Mongols, deployed at the gates, cut them up with orange tracer fire and watched the survivors scatter.

Jebe Noyon laughed hugely. “Is like siege of Cambaluc! Only no stacking up heads or even taking ears any more, man, now we are civilized, okay? Later maybe we call in, like, grunts, choppers from ’Nam, napalm the son-of-a-bitches, far out, man.”

“You can’t do that, Jebe,” Rice said sternly. “The poor bastards don’t have a chance. No point in exterminating them.”

Jebe shrugged. “I forget sometimes, okay? Always thinking to conquer the world.” He revved the cycle and scowled. Rice grabbed the Mongol’s stinking flak jacket as they roared downhill. Jebe took his disappointment out on the enemy, tearing through the streets in high gear, deliberately running down a group of Brunswick grenadiers. Only panic strength saved Rice from falling off as legs and torsos thumped and crunched beneath their tires.

Jebe skidded to a stop inside the gates of the complex. A jabbering horde of Mongols in ammo belts and combat fatigues surrounded them at once. Rice pushed through them, his kidneys aching.

Ionizing radiation smeared the evening sky around the Hohensalzburg Castle. They were kicking the portal up to the high-energy maximum, running cars full of Gray Cards in and sending the same cars back loaded to the ceiling with art and jewelry.

Over the rattling of gunfire Rice could hear the whine of VTOL jets bringing in the evacuees from the US and Africa. Roman centurions, wrapped in mesh body armor and carrying shoulder-launched rockets, herded Realtime personnel into the tunnels that led to the portal.

Mozart was in the crowd, waving enthusiastically to Rice. “We’re pulling out, man! Fantastic, huh? Back to Realtime!”

Rice looked at the clustered towers of pumps, coolers, and catalytic cracking units. “It’s a goddamned shame,” he said. “All that work, shot to hell.”

“We were losing too many people, man. Forget it. There’s plenty of eighteenth centuries.”

The guards, sniping at the crowds outside, suddenly leaped aside as Rice’s hovercar burst through the ages. Half a dozen Masonic fanatics still clung to the doors and pounded on the windscreen. Jebe’s Mongols yanked the invaders free and axed them while a Roman flamethrower unit gushed fire across the gates.

Marie Antoinette leaped out of the hovercar. Jebe grabbed for her, but her sleeve came off in his hand. She spotted Mozart and ran for him, Jebe only a few steps behind.

“Wolf, you bastard!” she shouted. “You leave me behind! What about your promises, you merde, you pig-dog!”

Mozart whipped off his mirrorshades. He turned to Rice. “Who is this woman?”

“The Green Card, Wolf! You say I sell Rice to the Masonistas, you get me the card!” She stopped for breath and Jebe caught her by one arm. When she whirled on him, he cracked her across the jaw, and she dropped to the tarmac.

The Mongol focused his smoldering eyes on Mozart. “Was you, eh? You, the traitor?” With the speed of a striking cobra he pulled his machine pistol and jammed the muzzle against Mozart’s nose. “I put my gun on rock and roll, there nothing left of you but ears, man.”

A single shot echoed across the courtyard. Jebe’s head rocked back, and he fell in a heap.

Rice spun to his right. Parker, the DJ, stood in the doorway of an equipment shed. He held a Walther PPK. “Take it easy, Rice,” Parker said, walking toward him. “He’s just a grunt, expendable.”

“You
killed
him!”

“So what?” Parker said, throwing one arm around Mozart’s frail shoulders. “This here’s my boy! I transmitted a couple of his new tunes up the line a month ago. You know what? The kid’s number five on the
Billboard
charts! Number five!” Parker shoved the gun into his belt. “With a bullet!”

“You gave him the Green Card, Parker?”

“No,” Mozart said. “It was Sutherland.”

“What did you do to her?”

“Nothing! I swear to you, man! Well, maybe I kind of lived up to what she wanted to see. A broken man, you know, his music stolen from him, his very soul?” Mozart rolled his eyes upward. “She gave me the Green Card, but that still wasn’t enough. She couldn’t handle the guilt. You know the rest.”

“And when she got caught, you were afraid we wouldn’t pull out. So you decided to drag
me
into it! You got Toinette to turn me over to the Masons. That was
your
doing!”

As if hearing her name, Toinette moaned softly from the tarmac. Rice didn’t care about the bruises, the dirt, the rips in her leopard-skin jeans. She was still the most gorgeous creature he’d ever seen.

Mozart shrugged. “I was a Freemason once. Look, man, they’re very uncool. I mean, all I did was drop a few hints, and look what happened.” He waved casually at the carnage all around them. “I knew you’d get away from them somehow.”

“You can’t just
use
people like that!”

“Bullshit, Rice! You do it all the time! I
needed
this siege so Realtime would haul us out! For Christ’s sake, I can’t wait fifteen years to go up the line. History says I’m going to be
dead
in fifteen years! I don’t want to die in this dump! I want that car and that recording studio!”

“Forget it, pal,” Rice said. “When they hear back in Realtime how you screwed things up here—”

Parker laughed. “Shove off, Rice. We’re talking Top of the Pops, here. Not some penny-ante refinery.” He took Mozart’s arm protectively. “Listen, Wolf, baby, let’s get into those tunnels. I got some papers for you to sign as soon as we hit the future.”

The sun had set, but muzzle-loading cannon lit the night, pumping shells into the city. For a moment Rice stood stunned as cannonballs clanged harmlessly off the storage tanks. Then, finally, he shook his head. Salzburg’s time had run out.

Hoisting Toinette over one shoulder, he ran toward the safety of the tunnels.