The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (90 page)

“The what? Oh,
that
thing. Nah. I haven’t even looked at it. I’ll buy it, naturally,” he said. “But what I’m talking about is
An Ass’ Olympiad.
The censors won’t stop it now, you know. In fact, all I want you to do now is make the Olympians a little dumber, a little nastier - you’ve got a biggie here, Julie! I think we can get a broadcast out of it, even. So when can you get back here to fix it up?”

“Why - well, pretty soon, I guess, only I haven’t checked the hover timetable—”

“Hover, hell! You’re coming back by fast plane - we’ll pick up the tab. And, oh, by the way, we’re doubling your advance. The payment will be in your account this afternoon.”

And ten minutes later, when I unsubjunctively proposed to Rachel, she quickly and unsubjunctively accepted; and the high-speed flight to London takes nine hours, but I was grinning all the way.

* * * *

Chapter 5

The Way It Is When You’ve Got It Made

To be a freelance writer is to live in a certain kind of ease. Not very easeful financially, maybe, but in a lot of other ways. You don’t have to go to an office every day, you get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing your very own words being read on hovers and trains by total strangers. To be a potentially
bestselling
writer is a whole order of magnitude different. Marcus put me up in an inn right next to the publishing company’s offices and stood over me while I turned my poor imaginary Olympian into the most doltish, feckless, unlikeable being the universe had ever seen. The more I made the Olympian contemptibly comic, the more Marcus loved it. So did everyone else in the office; so did their affiliates in Kiev and Manahattan and Kalkut and half a dozen other cities all around the world, and he informed me proudly that they were publishing my book simultaneously in all of them. “We’ll be the first ones out, Julie,” he exulted. “It’s going to be a mint! Money? Well, of course you can have more money - you’re in the big-time now!” And, yes, the broadcast studios were interested - interested enough to sign a contract even before I’d finished the revisions; and so were the journals, who came for interviews every minute that Marcus would let me off from correcting the proofs and posing for jacket photographs and speaking to their sales staff; and, all in all, I hardly had a chance to breathe until I was back on the highspeed aircraft to Alexandria and my bride.

Sam had agreed to give the bride away, and he met me at the airpad. He looked older and more tired, but resigned. As we drove to Rachel’s house, where the wedding guests were already beginning to gather, I tried to cheer him up. I had plenty of joy myself; I wanted to share it. So I offered, “At least, now you can get back to your real work.”

He looked at me strangely. “Writing sci-roms?” he asked.

“No, of course not! That’s good enough for me, but you’ve still got your extrasolar probe to keep you busy.”

“Julie,” he said sadly, “where have you been lately? Didn’t you see the last Olympian message?”

“Well, sure,” I said, offended. “Everybody did, didn’t they?” And then I thought for a moment, and, actually, it had been Rachel who had told me about it. I’d never actually looked at a journal or a broadcast. “I guess I was pretty busy,” I said lamely.

He looked sadder than ever. “Then maybe you don’t know that they said they weren’t only terminating all their own transmissions to us, they were terminating even our own probes.”

“Oh, no, Sam! I would have heard if the probes had stopped transmitting!”

He said patiently, “No, you wouldn’t, because the data they were sending is still on its way to us. We’ve still got a few years coming in from our probes. But that’s it. We’re out of interstellar space, Julie. They don’t want us there.”

He broke off, peering out the window. “And that’s the way it is,” he said. “We’re here, though, and you better get inside. Rachel’s going to be tired of sitting under that canopy without you around.”

* * * *

The greatest thing of all about being a bestselling author, if you like travelling, is that when you fly around the world somebody else pays for the tickets. Marcus’s publicity department fixed up the whole thing. Personal appearances, bookstore autographings, college lectures, broadcasts, publishers’ meetings, receptions - we were kept busy for a solid month, and it made a hell of a fine honeymoon.

Of course any honeymoon would have been wonderful as long as Rachel was the bride, but without the publishers bankrolling us we might not have visited six of the seven continents on the way. (We didn’t bother with Polaris Australis - nobody there but penguins.) And we took time for ourselves along the way, on beaches in Hindia and the islands of Han, in the wonderful shops of Manahattan and a dozen other cities of the Western Continents - we did it all.

When we got back to Alexandria the contractors had finished the remodeling of Rachel’s villa - which, we had decided, would now be our winter home, though our next priority was going to be to find a place where we could spend the busy part of the year in London. Sam had moved back in and, with Basilius, greeted us formally as we came to the door.

“I thought you’d be in Rome,” I told him, once we were settled and Rachel had gone to inspect what had been done with her baths.

“Not while I’m still trying to understand what went wrong,” he said “The research is going on right here; this is where we transmitted from.”

I shrugged and took a sip of the Falernian wine Basilius had left for us. I held the goblet up critically: a little cloudy, I thought, and in the vat too long. And then I grinned at myself, because a few weeks earlier I would have been delighted at anything so costly. “But we know what went wrong,” I told him reasonably. “They decided against us.”

“Of course they did,” he said. “But why? I’ve been trying to work out just what messages were being received when they broke off communications.”

“Do you think we said something to offend them?”

He scratched the age spot on his bald head, staring at me. Then he sighed. “What would
you
think, Julius?”

“Well, maybe so,” I admitted. “What messages were they?”

“I’m not sure. It took a lot of digging. The Olympians, you know, acknowledged receipt of each message by repeating the last hundred and forty groups—”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, they did. The last message they acknowledged was a history of Rome. Unfortunately, it was 650,000 words long.”

“So you have to read the whole history?”

“Not just
read
it, Julie; we have to try to figure out what might have been in it that wasn’t in any previous message. We’ve had two or three hundred researchers collating every previous message, and the only thing that was new was some of the social data from the last census—”

I interrupted him. “I thought you said it was a history.”

“It was at the
end
of the history. We were giving pretty current data - so many of equestrian rank, so many citizens, so many freedmen, so many slaves.” He hesitated, and then said thoughtfully, “Paulus Magnus - I don’t know if you know him, he’s an Algonkan - pointed out that that was the first time we’d ever mentioned slavery.”

I waited for him to go on. “Yes?” I said encouragingly.

He shrugged. “Nothing. Paulus is a slave himself, so naturally he’s got it on his mind a lot.”

“I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else?”

“Oh,” he said, “there are a thousand theories. There were some health data, too, and some people think the Olympians might have suddenly got worried about some new microorganism killing them off. Or we weren’t polite enough. Or maybe - who knows - there was some sort of power struggle among them, and the side that came out on top just didn’t want any more new races in their community.”

“And we don’t know yet which it was?”

“It’s worse than that, Julie,” he told me sombrely. “I don’t think we ever will find out what it was that made them decide they didn’t want to have anything to do with us.” And in that, too, Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus was a very intelligent man. Because we never have.

<>

* * * *

Darwin Anathema

Stephen Baxter

Trailed by a porter with her luggage, Mary Mason climbed down the steamer’s ramp to the dock at Folkestone, and waited in line with the rest of the passengers to clear security.

Folkestone, her first glimpse of England, was unprepossessing, a small harbour in the lee of cliffs fronting a dismal, smoke-stained townscape from which the slender spires of churches protruded. People crowded around the harbour, the passengers disembarking, stevedores labouring to unload the hold. There was a line of horse-drawn vehicles waiting, and one smoky-looking steam carriage. The ocean-going steamship, its rusting flank a wall, looked too big and vigorous for the port.

Mary, forty-five years old, felt weary, stiff, faintly disoriented to be standing on a surface that wasn’t rolling back and forth. She had come to England all the way from Terra Australis to participate in the Inquisition’s trial of Charles Darwin, a man more than a century dead. Back home in Cooktown it had seemed a good idea. Now she was here it seemed utterly insane.

At last the port inspectors stared at her passepartout, cross-examined her about her reasons for coming to England - they didn’t seem to know what a “natural philosopher” was - and then opened every case. One of the officials finally handed back her passepartout. She checked it was stamped with the correct date: 9 February 2009. “Welcome to England,” he grunted.

She walked forward, trailed by the porter.

“Lector Mason? Not quite the harbour at Cooktown, is it? Nevertheless I hope you’ve had a satisfactory voyage.”

She turned. “Father Brazel?”

Xavier Brazel was the Jesuit who had coordinated her invitation and passage. He was tall, slim, elegant; he wore a modest black suit with a white clerical collar. He was a good bit younger than she was, maybe thirty. He smiled, blessed her with two fingers making a cross sign in the air, and shook her hand. “Call me Xavier. I’m delighted to meet you, truly. We’re privileged you’ve agreed to participate in the trial, and I’m particularly looking forward to hearing you speak at St Paul’s. Come, I have a carriage to the rail station ...” Nodding at the porter, he led her away. “The trial of Alicia Darwin and her many-times-great-uncle starts tomorrow.”

“Yes. The ship was delayed a couple of days.”

“I’m sorry there’s so little time to prepare, or recover.”

“I’ll be fine.”

The carriage was small but sturdy, pulled by a pair of patient horses. It clattered away through crowded, cobbled streets.

“And I apologise for the security measures,” Xavier said. “A tiresome welcome to the country. It’s been like this since the 29 May attacks.”

“That was six years ago. They caught the Vatican bombers, didn’t they?” Pinprick attacks by Muslim zealots who had struck to commemorate the 550th anniversary of the Islamic conquest of Constantinople - and more than 120 years after a Christian coalition had taken the city back from the Ottomans.

He just smiled. “Once you have surrounded yourself with a ring of steel, it’s hard to tear it down.”

They reached the station where the daily train to London was, fortuitously, waiting. Xavier already had tickets. Xavier helped load Mary’s luggage, and led her to an upper-class carriage. Aside from Mary everybody in here seemed to be a cleric of some kind, the men in black suits, the few women in nuns’ wimples.

The train pulled away. Clouds of sooty steam billowed past the window.

A waiter brought coffees. Xavier sipped his with relish. “Please, enjoy.”

Mary tasted her coffee. “That’s good.”