The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (89 page)

“And that’s what you go by, the rabbinical writings?”

She looked thoughtful. “In a way. We’re a very traditional people, Julie. Tradition is what we follow, the rabbinical writings simply explain the traditions.”

She had stopped eating. I stopped, too. Dreamily I reached out to caress her cheek.

She didn’t pull away. She didn’t respond, either. After a moment, she said, not looking at me, “For instance, there is a Judaean tradition that a woman is to be a virgin at the time of her marriage.”

My hand came away from her face by itself, without any conscious command from me. “Oh?”

“And the rabbinical writings more or less define the tradition, you see. They say that the head of the household is to stand guard at an unmarried daughter’s bedroom for the first hour of each night; if there is no male head of the household, a trusted slave is to be appointed to the job.”

“I see,” I said. “You’ve never been married, have you?”

“Not yet,” said Rachel, beginning to eat again.

* * * *

I hadn’t ever been married, either, although, to be sure, I wasn’t exactly a virgin. It wasn’t that I had anything against marriage. It was only that the life of a sci-rom hack wasn’t what you would call exactly financially stable, and also the fact that I hadn’t ever come across the woman I wanted to spend my life with ... or, to quote Rachel, “Not yet.”

I tried to keep my mind off that subject. I was sure that if my finances had been precarious before, they were now close to catastrophic.

The next morning I wondered what to do with my day, but Rachel settled it for me. She was waiting for me in the atrium. “Sit down with me, Julie,” she commanded, patting the bench beside me. “I was up late, thinking, and I think I’ve got something for you. Suppose this man Jeshua had been executed, after all.”

It wasn’t exactly the greeting I had been hoping for, nor was it something I had given a moment’s thought to, either. But I was glad enough to sit next to her in that pleasant little garden, with the gentled early sun shining down on us through the translucent shades. “Yes?” I said noncommittally, kissing her hand in greeting.

She waited a moment before she took her hand back. “That idea opened some interesting possibilities, Julie. Jeshua would have been a martyr, you see. I can easily imagine that under those circumstances his Chrestian followers would have had a lot more staying power. They might even have grown to be really important. Judaea was always in one kind of turmoil or another around that time, anyway - there were all sorts of prophecies and rumours about messiahs and changes in society. The Chrestians might even have come to dominate all of Judaea.”

I tried to be tactful. “There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your ancestors, Rachel. But, really, what difference would that have made?” I obviously hadn’t been tactful enough. She had turned to look at me with what looked like the beginning of a frown. I thought fast, and tried to cover myself. “On the other hand,” I went on quickly, “suppose you expanded that idea beyond Judaea.”

It turned into a real frown, but puzzled rather than angry. “What do you mean, beyond Judaea?”

“Well, suppose Jeshua’s Chrestian-Judaean kind of - what would you call it? Philosophy? Religion?”

“A little of both, I’d say.”

“Religious philosophy, then. Suppose it spread over most of the world, not just Judaea. That could be interesting.”

“But, really, no such thing hap—”

“Rachel, Rachel,” I said, covering her mouth with a fingertip affectionately. “We’re saying
what if,
remember? Every sci-rom writer is entitled to one big lie. Let’s say this is mine. Let’s say that Chrestian-Judaeanism became a world religion. Even Rome itself succumbs. Maybe the City becomes the - what do you call it - the place for the Sanhedrin of the Chrestian-Judaeans. And then what happens?”

“You tell me,” she said, half-amused, half-suspicious.

“Why, then,” I said, flexing the imagination of the trained sci-rom writer, “it might develop like the kind of conditions you’ve been talking about in the old days in Judaea. Maybe the whole world would be splintering into factions and sects, and then they fight.”

“Fight
wars?”
she asked incredulously.

“Fight
big
wars. Why not? It happened in Judaea, didn’t it? And then they might keep right on fighting them, all through historical times. After all, the only thing that’s kept the world united for the past two thousand years has been the Pax Romana. Without that - why, without that,” I went on, talking faster and making mental notes to myself as I went along, “let’s say that all the tribes of Europe turned into independent city-states. Like the Greeks, only bigger. And more powerful. And they fight, the Franks against the Vik Northmen against the Belgiae against the Kelts.”

She was shaking her head. “People wouldn’t be so silly, Julie,” she complained.

“How do you know that? Anyway, this is a sci-rom, dear.” I didn’t pause to see if she reacted to the “dear”. I went right on, but not failing to notice that she hadn’t objected. “The people will be as silly as I want them to be - as long as I can make it plausible enough for the fans. But you haven’t heard the best part of it. Let’s say the Chrestian-Judaeans take their religion seriously. They don’t do anything to go against the will of their god. What Yahveh said still goes, no matter what. Do you follow? That means they aren’t at all interested in scientific discovery, for instance.”

“No, stop right there!” she ordered, suddenly indignant. “Are you trying to say that we Judaeans aren’t interested in science? That I’m not? Or my Uncle Sam? And we’re certainly Judaeans.”

“But you’re not
Chrestian
-Judaeans, sweet. There’s a big difference. Why? Because I say there is, Rachel, and I’m the one writing the story. So, let’s see - “ I paused for thought - “all right, let’s say the Chrestians go through a long period of intellectual stagnation, and then - “ I paused, not because I didn’t know what was coming next but to build the effect - “and then along come the Olympians!”

She gazed at me blankly. “Yes?” she asked, encouraging but vague.

“Don’t you see it? And then this Chrestian-Judaean world, drowsing along in the middle of a pre-scientific dark age - no aircraft, no electronic broadcast, not even a printing press or a hovermachine - is suddenly thrown into contact with a super-technological civilization from outer space!” She was wrinkling her forehead at me, trying to understand what I was driving at. “It’s terrible culture shock,” I explained. “And not just for the people on Earth. Maybe the Olympians come to look us over, and they see that we’re technologically backward and divided into warring nations and all that. . . and what do they do? Why, they turn right around and leave us! And . . . and that’s the end of the book!”

She pursed her lips. “But maybe that’s what they’re doing now,” she said cautiously.

“But not for that reason, certainly. See, this isn’t
our
world I’m talking about. It’s a
what if
world.”

“It sounds a little far-fetched,” she said.

I said happily, “That’s where my skills come in. You don’t understand sci-rom, sweetheart. It’s the sci-rom writer’s job to push an idea as far as it will go - to the absolute limit of credibility - to the point where if he took just one step more the whole thing would collapse into absurdity. Trust me, Rachel. I’ll make them believe it.”

She was still pursing her pretty lips, but this time I didn’t wait for her to speak. I seized the bird of opportunity on the wing. I leaned towards her and kissed those lips, as I had been wanting to do for some time. Then I said, “I’ve got to get to a scribe; I want to get all this down before I forget it. I’ll be back when I can be, and - and until then - well, here.”

And I kissed her again, gently, firmly and long; and it was quite clear early in the process that she was kissing me back.

* * * *

Being next to a rental barracks had its advantages. I found a scribe to rent at a decent price, and the rental manager even let me borrow one of their conference rooms that night to dictate in. By daybreak I had down the first two chapters and an outline of
Sidewise to a Chrestian World.

Once I get that far in a book, the rest is just work. The general idea is set, the characters have announced themselves to me, it’s just a matter of closing my eyes for a moment to see what’s going to be happening and then opening them to dictate to the scribe. In this case, the scribes, plural, because the first one wore out in a few more hours and I had to employ a second, and then a third.

I didn’t sleep at all until it was all down. I think it was fifty-two straight hours, the longest I’d worked in one stretch in years. When it was all done I left it to be fair-copied. The rental agent agreed to get it down to the shipping offices by the harbour and dispatch it by fast air to Marcus in London.

Then at last I stumbled back to Rachel’s house to sleep. I was surprised to find that it was still dark, an hour or more before sunrise.

Basilius let me in, looking startled as he studied my sunken eyes and unshaved face. “Let me sleep until I wake up,” I ordered. There was a journal neatly folded beside my bed, but I didn’t look at it. I lay down, turned over once, and was gone.

When I woke up, at least twelve hours had passed. I had Basilius bring me something to eat and shave me, and when I finally got out to the atrium it was nearly sundown and Rachel was waiting for me. I told her what I’d done, and she told me about the last message from the Olympians. “Last?” I objected. “How can you be sure it’s the last?”

“Because they said so,” she told me sadly. “They said they were breaking off communications.”

“Oh,” I said, thinking about that. “Poor Sam.” And she looked so doleful that I couldn’t help myself, I took her in my arms.

Consolation turned to kissing, and when we had done quite a lot of that she leaned back, smiling at me.

I couldn’t help what I said then, either. It startled me to hear the words come out of my mouth as I said, “Rachel, I wish we could get married.”

She pulled back, looking at me with affection and a little surprised amusement. “Are you proposing to me?”

I was careful of my grammar. “That was a subjunctive, sweet. I said I
wished we
could get married.”

“I understood that. What I want to know is whether you’re asking me to grant your wish.”

“No - well, hells, yes! But what I wish first is that I had the right to ask you. Sci-rom writers don’t have the most solid financial situation, you know. The way you live here—”

“The way I live here,” she said, “is paid for by the estate I inherited from my father. Getting married won’t take it away.”

“But that’s your estate, my darling. I’ve been poor, but I’ve never been a parasite.”

“You won’t be a parasite,” she said softly, and I realized that she was being careful about her grammar, too.

Which took a lot of willpower on my part. “Rachel,” I said, “I should be hearing from my editor any time now. If this new kind of sci-rom catches on - if it’s as popular as it might be—”

“Yes?” she prompted.

“Why,” I said, “then maybe I can actually ask you. But I don’t know that. Marcus probably has it by now, but I don’t know if he’s read it. And then I won’t know his decision till I hear from him. And now, with all the confusion about the Olympians, that might take weeks—”

“Julie,” she said, putting her finger over her lips, “call him up.”

* * * *

The circuits were all busy, but I finally got through - and, because it was well after lunch, Marcus was in his office. More than that, he was quite sober. “Julie, you bastard,” he cried, sounding really furious, “where the hells have you been hiding? I ought to have you whipped.”

But he hadn’t said anything about getting the aediles after me. “Did you have a chance to read
Sidewise to a Chrestian World,
?” I asked.