The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology] Read online

  * * * *

  The Mammoth Book of

  Alternate Histories

  Edited By Ian Watson

  & Ian Whates

  Scanned & Proofed By MadMaxAU

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  Contents

  Introduction

  James Morrow

  THE RAFT OF THE TITANIC

  Ken MacLeod

  SIDEWINDERS

  Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman

  THE WANDERING CHRISTIAN

  Suzette Hayden Elgin

  HUSH MY MOUTH

  Harry Harrison & Tom Shippey

  A LETTER FROM THE POPE

  Esther M. Friesner

  SUCH A DEAL

  A. A. Attanasio

  INK FROM THE NEW MOON

  Pat Cadigan

  DISPATCHES FROM THE REVOLUTION

  Fritz Leiber

  CATCH THAT ZEPPELIN

  Paul McAuley

  A VERY BRITISH HISTORY

  Rudy Rucker

  THE IMITATION GAME

  Keith Roberts

  WEINACHTSABEND

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  THE LUCKY STRIKE

  Marc Laidlaw

  HIS POWDER’D WIG, HIS CROWN OF THORNES

  Judith Tarr

  RONCESVALLES

  Ian R. MacLeod

  THE ENGLISH MUTINY

  Chris Roberson

  0 ONE

  Harry Turtledove

  ISLANDS IN THE SEA

  George Zebrowski

  LENIN IN ODESSA

  Pierre Gévart

  THE EINSTEIN GUN

  Robert Silverberg

  TALES FROM THE VENIA WOODS

  Gregory Benford

  MANASSAS, AGAIN

  Pamela Sargent

  THE SLEEPING SERPENT

  Frederik Pohl

  WAITING FOR THE OLYMPIANS

  Stephen Baxter

  DARWIN ANATHEMA

  * * * *

  Introduction

  “There is an infinitude of Pasts, all equally valid,” wrote Andre Maurois, the French novelist and biographer. “At each and every instant of Time, however brief you suppose it, the line of events forks like the stem of a tree putting forth twin branches.” This is quoted in Virtual History: Alternatives and Counterfactuals, edited by historian and political commentator Niall Ferguson. These days alternative history is almost respectable amongst historians, leading to such other recent well-received volumes of essays as Robert Cowley’s What If? Military Historians Imagine What Might Have Been or Andrew Roberts’ What Might Have Been: Leading Historians on Twelve “What Ifs” of History. Some other historians frown at counterfactuality; although, if the “Many Worlds” interpretation of Quantum Physics is correct, all possible alternatives might indeed occur in a branching multiverse. What’s more, was our own world’s history in any sense inevitable, or even highly plausible, simply because it actually happened? Who, for instance, in 1975 might have imagined that a few years later a female British prime minister would be sending a nuclear-armed armada all the way to the South Atlantic in a quarrel about some remote islands full of sheep? Who could have supposed that British counter-terrorism laws, provoked by planes flying into the World Trade Center, would be used for the first time bizarrely to seize the assets of a mild-mannered Icelandic bank, on account of mortgages stupidly sold to poor house buyers in the United States?

  Essays about What Might Have Been are already fascinating, but it has long been a delight of science fiction writers to put flesh upon the bones. Consequently, here you’ll find what might have happened if the Roman Empire had never declined and fallen; how Islam might have triumphed much more widely; how the Native American Indians might have repelled the European invasion; how the other Indians, of India, might have forged an empire in place of the British Empire; how the civilized Chinese might already have been ensconced in California when the uncouth Europeans first arrived there; how the Pope might really have offended King Alfred of the burnt cakes; and much much more that has surely happened elsewhere (or elsewhen) in alternity, even if it didn’t happen quite that way in our version of reality. You’ll find award-winning classics of the sub-genre nestling alongside equally worthy nuggets that might previously have escaped your notice and more recent gems, including three splendid, brand-new stories by special invitees James Morrow, Stephen Baxter and Ken MacLeod. These feature the alternative truth about the Titanic, the trial for heresy of Darwin’s bones along with one of his descendants, and a near-future Scotland that begins as far south as London.

  Ian Watson and Ian Whates

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  * * * *

  The Raft of the Titanic

  James Morrow

  15 April 1912

  Lat. 40°25’ N, Long. 51° 18’ W

  The sea is calm tonight. Where does that come from? Some Oxbridge swot’s poem, I think, one of those cryptic things I had to read in tenth form - but the title hasn’t stayed with me, and neither has the scribbler’s name. If you want a solid education in English letters, arrange to get born elsewhere than Walton-on-the-Hill. “The sea is calm tonight.” I must ask our onboard litterateur, Mr Futrelle of Massachusetts. He will know.

  We should have been picked up - what? - fourteen hours ago. Certainly no more than sixteen. Our Marconi men, Phillips and Bride, assure me that Captain Rostron of the Carpathia acknowledged the Titanic’s CQD promptly, adding, “We are coming as quickly as possible and expect to be there within four hours.” Since the Ship of Dreams sailed into the Valley of Death, sometime around 2.20 this morning, we have drifted perhaps fifteen miles to the southwest. Surely Rostron can infer our present position. So where the bloody hell is he?

  Now darkness is upon us once again. The mercury is falling. I scan the encircling horizon for the Carpathians lights, but I see only a cold black sky sown with a million apathetic stars. In a minute I shall order Mr Lightoller to launch the last of our distress rockets, even as I ask Reverend Bateman to send up his next emergency prayer.

  For better or worse, Captain Smith insisted on doing the honourable thing and going down with his ship. (That is, he insisted on doing the honourable thing and shooting himself, thereby guaranteeing that his remains would go down with his ship.) His gesture has left me en passant in command of the present contraption. I suppose I should be grateful. At long last I have a ship of my own, if you can call this jerry-built, jury-rigged raft a ship. Have the other castaways accepted me as their guardian and keeper? I can’t say for sure. Shortly after dawn tomorrow, I shall address the entire company, clarifying that I am legally in charge and have a scheme for our deliverance, though that second assertion will require of the truth a certain elasticity, as a scheme for our deliverance has not yet visited my imagination.

  I count it a bloody miracle that we got so many souls safely off the foundering liner. The Lord and all His angels were surely watching over us. So far we have accumulated only nineteen corpses: a dozen deaths during the transfer operation - shock, heart attacks, misadventure - and then another seven, shortly after sunrise, from hypothermia and exposure. Grim statistics, to be sure, but far better than the thousand or so fatalities that would have occurred had we not embraced Mr Andrews’ audacious plan.

  Foremost amongst my immediate obligations is to start keeping a record of our tribulations. So here I sit, pen in one hand, electric torch in the other. By maintaining a sort of captain’s log, I might actually start to feel like a captain, though at the moment I feel like plain old Henry Tingle Wilde, the Scouser who never got out of Liverpool. The sea is calm tonight.

  * *
* *

  16 April 1912

  Lat. 39°19 N, Long. 51°40 ‘W

  When I told the assembled company that, by every known maritime code, I am well and truly the supreme commander of this vessel, a strident voice rose in protest: Vasil Plotcharsky from steerage, who called me “a bourgeois lackey in thrall to that imperialist monstrosity known as White Star Line.” (I’ll have to keep an eye on Plotcharsky. I wonder how many other Bolsheviks the Titanic carried?) But on the whole my speech was well received. Hearing that I’d christened our raft the Ada, “after my late wife, who died tragically two years ago”, my audience responded with respectful silence, then Father Byles piped up and said, so all could hear, “Right now that dear woman is looking down from heaven, exhorting us not to lose faith.”

  My policy concerning the nineteen bodies in the stern proved more controversial. A contingent of first-cabin survivors led by Colonel Astor insisted that we give them “an immediate Christian burial at sea”, whereupon my first officer explained to the aristocrats that the corpses may ultimately have “their part to play in this drama”. Mr Lightoller’s prediction occasioned horrified gasps and indignant snorts, but nobody moved to push these frigid assets overboard.

  This afternoon I ordered a complete inventory, a good way to keep our company busy. Before floating away from the disaster site, we salvaged about a third of the buoyant containers Mr Latimer’s stewards had tossed into the sea: wine casks, beer barrels, cheese crates, bread boxes, foot-lockers, duffel bags, toilet kits. Had there been a moon on Sunday night, we might have recovered this jetsam in toto. Of course, had there been a moon, we might not have hit the iceberg in the first place.

  The tally is heartening. Assuming that frugality rules aboard the Ada - and it will, so help me God - she probably has enough food and water to sustain her population, all 2,187 of us, for at least ten days. We have two functioning compasses, three brass sextants, four thermometers, one barometer, one anemometer, fishing tackle, sewing supplies, baling wire, and twenty tarpaulins, not to mention the wood-fuelled Franklin stove Mr Lightoller managed to knock together from odd bits of metal.

  Yesterday’s attempt to rig a sail was a fiasco, but this afternoon we had better luck, improvising a gracefully curving thirty-foot mast from the banister of the grand staircase, then fitting it with a patchwork of velvet curtains, throw rugs, signal flags, men’s dinner jackets, and ladies’ skirts. My mind is clear, my strategy is certain, my course is set. We shall tack towards warmer waters, lest we lose more souls to the demonic cold. If I never see another ice floe or North Atlantic growler in my life, it will be too soon.

  * * * *

  18 April 1912

  Lat. 37°11’N, Long. 52°11’ W

  Whilst everything is still vivid in my mind, I must set down the story of how the Ada came into being, starting with the collision. I felt the tremor about 11.40 p.m., and by midnight Mr Lightoller was in my cabin, telling me that the berg had sliced through at least five adjacent watertight compartments, possibly six. To the best of his knowledge, the ship was in the last extremity, fated to go down at the head in a matter of hours.

  After assigning Mr Moody to the bridge - one might as well put a sixth officer in charge, since the worst had already happened - Captain Smith sent word that the rest of us should gather post-haste in the chartroom. By the time I arrived, at perhaps five minutes past midnight, Mr Andrews, who’d designed the Titanic, was already seated at the table, along with Mr Bell, the chief engineer, Mr Hutchinson, the ship’s carpenter, and Dr O’Loughlin, our surgeon. Taking my place beside Mr Murdoch, who had not yet reconciled himself to the fact that my last-minute posting as chief officer had bumped him down to first mate, I immediately apprehended that the ship was lost, so palpable was Captain Smith’s anxiety.

  “Even as we speak, Phillips and Bride are on the job in the wireless shack, trying to raise the Californian, which can’t be more than an hour away,” the Old Man said. “I am sorry to report that her Marconi operator has evidently shut off his rig for the night. However, we have every reason to believe that Captain Rostron of the Carpathia will be here within four hours. If this were the tropics, we would simply put the entire company in life-belts, lower them over the side, and let them bob about waiting to be rescued. But this is the North Atlantic, and the water is twenty-eight degrees Fahrenheit.”

  “After a brief interval in that ghastly gazpacho, the average mortal will succumb to hypothermia,” said Mr Murdoch, who liked to lord it over us Scousers with fancy words such as succumb and gazpacho. “Am I correct, Dr O’Loughlin?”

  “A castaway who remains motionless in the water risks dying immediately of cardiac arrest,” the surgeon replied, nodding. “Alas, even the most robust athlete won’t generate enough body heat to prevent his core temperature from plunging. Keep swimming, and you might last twenty minutes, probably no more than thirty.”

  “Now I shall tell you the good news,” the Old Man said. “Mr Andrews has a plan, bold but feasible. Listen closely. Time is of the essence. The Titanic has at best one hundred and fifty minutes to live.”

  “The solution to this crisis is not to fill the life-boats to capacity and send them off in hopes of encountering the Carpathia, for that would leave over a thousand people stranded on a sinking ship,” Mr Andrews insisted. “The solution, rather, is to keep every last soul out of the water until Captain Rostron arrives.”

  “Mr Andrews has stated the central truth of our predicament,” Captain Smith said. “On this terrible night our enemy is not the ocean depths, for owing to the life-belts no one - or almost no one - will drown. Nor is the local fauna our enemy, for sharks and rays rarely visit the middle of the North Atlantic in early spring. No, our enemy tonight is the temperature of the water, pure and simple, full stop.”

  “And how do you propose to obviate that implacable fact?” Mr Murdoch inquired. The next time he used the word obviate, I intended to sock him in the chops.

  “We’re going to build an immense platform,” said Mr Andrews, unfurling a sheet of drafting paper on which he’d hastily sketched an object labelled Raft of the Titanic. He secured the blueprint with ashtrays and, leaning across the table, squeezed the chief engineer’s knotted shoulder. “I designed it in collaboration with the estimable Mr Bell” - he flashed our carpenter an amiable wink - “and the capable Mr Hutchinson.”

  “Instead of loading anyone into our fourteen standard thirty-foot life-boats, we shall set aside one dozen, leave their tarps in place, and treat them as pontoons,” Mr Bell said. “From an engineering perspective, this is a viable scheme, for each lifeboat is outfitted with copper buoyancy tanks.”

  Mr Andrews set his open palms atop the blueprint, his eyes dancing with a peculiar fusion of desperation and ecstasy. “We shall deploy the twelve pontoons in a three-by-four grid, each linked to its neighbours via horizontal stanchions spliced together from available wood. Our masts are useless - mostly steel - but we’re hauling tons of oak, teak, mahogany and spruce.”

  “With any luck, we can affix a twenty-five-foot stanchion between the stern of pontoon A and the bow of pontoon B,” Mr Hutchinson said, “another such bridge between the amidships oarlock of A and the amidships oarlock of E, another between the stern of B and the bow of C, and so on.”

  “Next we’ll cover the entire matrix with jettisoned lumber, securing the planks with nails and rope,” Mr Bell said. “The resulting raft will measure roughly one hundred feet by two hundred, which technically allows each of our two thousand plus souls almost nine square feet, though in reality everyone will have to share accommodations with foodstuffs, water casks, and survival gear, not to mention the dogs.”

  “As you’ve doubtless noticed,” Mr Andrews said, “at this moment the North Atlantic is smooth as glass, a circumstance that contributed to our predicament - no wave broke against the iceberg, so the lookouts spotted the bloody thing too late. I am proposing that we now turn this same placid sea to our advantage. My machine could never be a
ssembled in high swells, but tonight we’re working under conditions only slightly less ideal than those that obtain back at the Harland and Wolff shipyard.”

  Captain Smith’s moustache and beard parted company, a great gulping inhalation, whereupon he delivered what was surely the most momentous speech of his career.

  “Step one is for Mr Wilde and Mr Lightoller to muster the deck crew and have them launch all fourteen standard life-boats - forget the collapsibles and the cutters - each craft to be rowed by two able-bodied seamen assisted where feasible by a quartermaster, boatswain, lookout, or master-at-arms. Through this operation we get our twelve pontoons in the water, along with two roving assembly craft. The AB’s will forthwith moor the pontoons to the Titanic’s hull using davit ropes, keeping the lines in place until the raft is finished or the ship sinks, whichever comes first. Understood?”

  I nodded in assent, as did Mr Lightoller, even though I’d never heard a more demented idea in my life. Next the Old Man waved a scrap of paper at Mr Murdoch, the overeducated genius whose navigational brilliance had torn a three-hundred-foot gash in our hull.