Other Earths Read online

  And he receives them and keeps receiving them, and he knows what they mean, eventually; he knows what they mean throughout his body.

  The aide says, his voice flecked with relief, “Mr. President, our scientists have solved it. It’s not time travel or far-sight. It’s alternate universes. The adepts have been staring into alternate universes. What happens there in September may not happen here. That’s why they’ve had such trouble with the intel. The machine isn’t a time machine.”

  Except, as soon as the aide opens his mouth, the words become a trigger, a catalyst, and it’s too late for him. A door is opening wider than ever before. The machine has already infected him.

  There are variations. A long row of them, detonating in his mind, trying to destroy him. A strange, sad song is creeping up inside him, and he can’t stop that, either.

  >>>He’s sitting in the chair, wearing a black military uniform with medals on it. He’s much fitter, the clothes tight to emphasize his muscle tone. But his face is contorted around the hole of a festering localized virus, charcoal and green and viscous. He doesn’t wear an eye patch because he wants his people to see how he fights the disease. His left arm is made of metal. His tongue is not his own, colonized the way his nation has been colonized, waging a war against bio-research gone wrong, and the rebels who welcome it, who want to tear down anything remotely human, themselves no longer recognizable as human.

  His aide comes up and whispers that the rebels have detonated a bio-mass bomb in New York City, which is now stewing in a broth of fungus and mutation: the nearly instantaneous transformation of an entire metropolis into something living but alien, the rate of change become strange and accelerated in a world where this was always true, the age of industrialization slowing it, if only for a moment.

  “There are no people left in New York City,” his aide says. “What are your orders?”

  He hadn’t expected this, not so soon, and it takes him seven minutes to recover from the news of the death of millions. Seven minutes to turn to his aide and say, “Call in a nuclear strike.”

  >>> . . . and his aide comes up to him and whispers in his ear, “It’s time to go now. They’ve moved up another meeting. Wrap it up.” Health insurance is on the agenda today, along with Social Security. Something will get done about that and the environment this year or he’ll die trying . . .

  >>>He’s sitting in the chair reading the book, and he’s gaunt, eyes feverish, military personnel surrounding him. There’s one camera with them, army TV, and the students are all in camouflage. The electricity flickers on and off. The schoolroom has reinforced metal and concrete all around it. The event is propaganda being packaged and pumped out to those still watching in places where the enemy hasn’t jammed the satellites. He’s fighting a war against an escaped, human-created, rapidly reproducing intelligent species prototype that looks like a chimpanzee crossed with a Doberman. The scattered remnants of the hated adept underclass have made common cause with the animals, disrupting communications.

  His aide whispers in his ear that Atlanta has fallen, with over sixty thousand troops and civilians massacred in pitched battles all over the city. There’s no safe air corridor back to the capital. In fact, the capital seems to be under attack as well.

  “What should we do?”

  He returns to reading the book. Nothing he can do in the next seven minutes will make any difference to the outcome. He knows what they have to do, but he’s too tired to contemplate it just yet. They will have to head to the Heartland and make peace with the Ecstatics and their god-missiles. It’s either that or render entire stretches of North America uninhabitable from nukes, and he’s not that desperate yet.

  He begins to review the ten commandments of the Ecstatics in his mind, one by one, like rosary beads.

  >>>He’s in mid-sentence when the aide hurries over and begins to whisper in his ear—just as the first of the god-missiles strikes and the fire washes over and through him, not even time to scream, and he’s nothing any more, not even an ossuary.

  >>>He’s in a chair, wearing a suit with a sweat-stained white shirt and he’s tired, his voice as he reads thin and raspy. Five days and nights of negotiations between the rival factions of the New Southern Confederacy following a month of genocide between blacks and whites from Arkansas to Georgia: too few resources, too many natural disasters, and no jobs, the whole system breaking down, although Los Angeles is still trying to pretend the world isn’t coming to an end, even as jets are falling out the sky. Except, that’s why he’s in the classroom: pretending. Pretending neighbor hasn’t set upon neighbor for thirty days, except with guns, not machetes. Bands of teenagers shooting people in the stomach, the head, and laughing. Extremist talk radio urging them on. A million people dead. Maybe more.

  His aide comes up and whispers in his ear: “The truce has fallen apart. They’re killing each other again. And not just in the South. In the North, along political lines.”

  He sits there because he’s run out of answers. He thinks: In another time, another place, I would have been a great president.

  >>>He’s sitting in the classroom, in the small chair, in comfortable clothes, reading the goat story. There are no god-missiles here, no viruses, no invasion. The Chinese and Russians are only on the cusp of being a threat. Adepts here have no real far-sight, or are not believed, and roam free. Los Angeles is a thriving money generator, not a husked-out shadow.

  No, the real threat here, besides pollution, is that he’s mentally ill, although no one around him seems to know it. This pale, vacuous replica has a head full of worms, insecurity, and pure, naked, selfish need. He rules a country called the United States, squandering its resources, compromising its ability to function with greed and corruption.

  When the aide comes up and whispers in his ear to tell him that terrorists have flown two planes into buildings in New York City, there’s blood behind his eyes, as well as a deafening silence, and a sudden leap from people falling from the burning buildings to endless war in the Middle East, bodies broken in blood and bullets and bombs. The future torques into secret trials, torture, rape, and hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, two million people displaced, a country bankrupted and defenseless, ruled ultimately by martial law and generals.

  He sits there for seven minutes because he really has no idea what to do.

  . . . and his fate is to exist in a reality where towers do not explode in September, where Islamic fundamentalists are the least of his worries.

  There is only one present, only one future now, and he’s back in it, driving it. Seven minutes have elapsed, with a graveyard in his head. Seven minutes, and he’s gradually aware that in that span he’s read the goat story twice and then sat there for thirty seconds, silent.

  Now he smiles, says a few reassuring words, just as his aide has decided to come up and rescue him from the yawning chasm. He’s living in a place where they’ll never find him, those children, where there’s a torrent of blood, and a sky dark with planes and helicopters, and men blown to bits by the roadside. Cities burn, and the screaming of the living is as loud as the screaming of the dying.

  He rises from his chair, and his aide claps, encouraging the students to clap, and they do, bewildered by this man about whom reporters will say later, “He doesn’t seem quite all there.”

  An endless line of presidents rises from the chair with him, the weight almost too much. He can see each clearly in his head. He can see what they’re doing and who they’re doing it to.

  Saying his goodbyes is like learning how to walk again, while a nightmare plays out in the background. He knows as they lead him down the corridor that he’ll have to learn to live with it, like and unlike a man learning to live with a missing limb: a multitude of phantom limbs that do not belong, that he cannot control, but are always there. And he’ll never be able to explain it to anyone. He’ll be as alone and yet as haunted as a person can be. The wall between him and his wife will be more unbearable than ever.


  He thinks of Peter’s pale, wrinkled, yearning face, and he knows two things: He’s going to make them release the man, put him on a plane somewhere beyond his country’s influence, and then he’s going to have them destroy the machine and end the adept project. Beyond that, he knows nothing and everything.

  Then he’s back in the wretched, glorious sunlight of a real, an ordinary day, and so are all of his reflections and shadows. Mimicking him. Forever.

  THE UNBLINKING EYE

  Stephen Baxter

  Under an empty night sky, the Inca ship stood proud before the old Roman bridge of Londres.

  Jenny and Alphonse, both sixteen years old, pressed their way through grimy mobs of Londres. As night closed in, they had slipped away from the dreary ceremonial rehearsals at Saint Paul’s. They couldn’t resist escaping to mingle with the excited Festival crowds.

  And, of course, they had been drawn here, to the Viracocha, the most spectacular sight of all.

  Beside the Inca ship’s dazzling lines, even the domes, spires and pylons of the Festival, erected to mark the anniversary of the Frankish Conquest in this year of Our Lord Christus Ra 1966, looked shabby indeed. Her towering hull was made entirely of metal, clinkered in some seamless way that gave it flexibility, and the sails were llama wool, colored as brilliantly as the Inca clothes that had been the talk of the Paris fashion houses this season.

  Jenny Cook was from a family of shipowners, and the very sight excited her. “Looking at her, you can believe she has sailed from the other side of the world, even from the south—”

  “That’s blasphemy,” Alphonse snapped. But he remembered himself and shrugged. What had been blasphemy a year ago, before the first Inca ships had come sailing north around the west coast of Africa, was common knowledge now, and the old reflexes did not apply.

  Jenny said, “Surely on such a craft those sails are only for show, or for trim. There must be some mighty engine buried in her guts—but where are the smoke stacks?”

  The prince said gloomily, “Well, you and I are going to have months to find that out, Jenny. And where you see a pretty ship,” he said darkly, “I see a statement of power.” Jenny was to be among the party of friends and tutors who would accompany sixteen-year-old Prince Alphonse during his years-long stay in Cuzco, capital of the Inca. Alphonse had a sense of adventure, even of fun. But as the second son of the Emperor Charlemagne XXXII, he saw the world differently from Jenny.

  She protested, “Oh, you’re too suspicious, Alphonse. Why, they say there are whole continents out there we know nothing about! Why should the Inca care about the Frankish empire?”

  “Perhaps they have conceived an ambition to own us as we own you Anglais.”

  Jenny prickled. However, she had learned some diplomacy in her time at court. “Well, I can’t agree with you, and that’s that,” she said.

  Suddenly a flight of Inca air machines swept over like soaring silver birds, following the line of the river, their lights blazing against the darkling night. The crowds ducked and gasped, some of them crossing themselves in awe. After all, the Viracocha was only a ship, and the empires of Europe had ships. But none of them, not even the Ottomans, had machines that could fly.

  “You see?” Alphonse muttered. “What is that but a naked demonstration of Inca might? And I’ll tell you something, those metal birds don’t scare me half as much as other tools I’ve seen. Such as a box that can talk to other boxes a world away—they call it a farspeaker—I don’t pretend to understand how it works. They gave one to my father’s office so I can talk to him from Cuzco. What else have they got that they haven’t shown us? . . . Well, come on,” he said, plucking her arm. “We’re going to be late for Atahualpa’s ceremony.”

  Jenny followed reluctantly.

  She watched the flying machines until they had passed out of sight, heading west up the river. When their lights had gone the night sky was revealed, cloudless and moonless, utterly dark, with no planets visible, an infinite emptiness. As if in response, the gas lanterns of Londres burned brighter, defiant.

  The Inca caravan was drawn up before the face of Saint Paul’s. As grandees passed into the building, attendants fed the llamas that had borne the colorful litters. You never saw the Inca use a wheel; they relied entirely on these haughty, exotic beasts.

  Inside the cathedral, Jenny and Alphonse found their places hurriedly.

  The procession passed grandly through the cramped candlelit aisles, led by servants who carried the Orb of the Unblinking Eye. These were followed by George Darwin, archbishop of Londres, who chattered nervously to Atahualpa, commander of the Viracocha and emissary of Huayna Capac XIII, Emperor of the Inca. In the long tail of the procession were representatives from all the great empires of Europe: the Danes, the Germans, the Muscovites, even the Ottomans, grandly bejeweled Muslims in this Christian church. They marched to the gentle playing of Galilean lutes, an ensemble supplied by the Germans. It was remarkable to think, Jenny reflected, that if the Inca had come sailing out of the south three hundred years ago, they would have been met by ambassadors from much the same combination of powers. Though there had always been border disputes and even wars, the political map of Europe had changed little since the Ottoman capture of Vienna had marked the westernmost march of Islam.

  But the Inca towered over the European nobility. They wore woollen suits dyed scarlet and electric blue, colors brighter than the cathedral’s stained glass. And they all wore facemasks as defense against the “herd diseases” they insultingly claimed infested Europe. The effect was to make these imposing figures even more enigmatic, for the only expression you could see was in their black eyes.

  Jenny, at Alphonse’s side and mixed in with some of the Inca party, was only a few rows back from Atahualpa and Darwin, and she could clearly hear every word they said.

  “My own family has a long association with this old church,” the bishop said. “My ancestor Charles Darwin was a country parson who, dedicated to his theology, rose to become dean here. The Anglais built the first Christian church on this site in the year of Christus Ra 604. After the Conquest the emperors were most generous in endowing this magnificent building in our humble, remote city . . .”

  As the interpreter translated this, Atahualpa murmured some reply in Quechua, and the two of them laughed softly.

  One of the Inca party walking beside Jenny was a boy about her age. He wore an Inca costume like the rest but without a face mask. He whispered in passable Frankish, “The emissary’s being a bit rude about your church. He says it’s a sandstone heap he wouldn’t use to stable his llamas.”

  “Charming,” Jenny whispered back.

  “Well, you haven’t seen his llamas.”

  Jenny had to cover her face to keep from giggling. She got a glare from Alphonse and recovered her composure.

  “Sorry,” said the boy. He was dark skinned, with a mop of short-cut, tightly curled black hair. The spiral tattoo on his left cheek made him look a little severe, until he smiled, showing bright teeth. “My name’s—well, it’s complicated, and the Inca never get it right. You can call me Dreamer.”

  “Hello, Dreamer,” she whispered. “I’m Jenny Cook.”

  “Pretty name.”

  Jenny raised her eyebrows. “Oh, is it really? You’re not Inca, are you?”

  “No, I just travel with them. They like to move us around, their subject peoples. I’m from the South Land . . .”

  But she didn’t know where that was, and the party had paused before the great altar where the emissary and the archbishop were talking again, and Jenny and Dreamer fell silent.

  Atahualpa said to Darwin, “I am intrigued by the god of this church. Christus Ra? He is a god who is two gods.”

  “In a sense.” Darwin spoke rapidly of the career of Christ. The Romans had conquered Egypt but had suffered a sort of reverse religious takeover; their pantheon had seemed flimsy before the power and sheer logic of the Egyptians’ faith in their sun god. The sun was the only point of st
ability in a sky populated by chaotic planets, mankind’s only defense against the infinite dark. Who could argue against its worship? Centuries after Christ’s execution His cult was adopted as the empire’s official religion, and the bishops and theologians had made a formal identification of Christ with Ra, a unity that had outlasted the empire itself.

  Atahualpa expressed mild interest in this. He said the worship of the sun was a global phenomenon. The Incas’ own sun god was called Inti. Perhaps Inti and Christ-Ra were mere manifestations of the same primal figure.

  The procession moved on.

  “ ‘Cook’,” Dreamer whispered. He was more interested in Jenny than in theology. “That’s a funny sort of name. Not Frankish, is it?”

  “I don’t know. I think it has an Anglais root. My family are Anglais, from the north of Grand Bretagne.”

  “You must be rich. You’ve got to be either royal or rich to be in this procession, right?”

  She smiled. “Rich enough. I’m at court as part of my education. My grandfathers have been in the coal trade since our ancestor founded the business two hundred years ago. He was called James Cook. My father’s called James too. It’s a mucky business but lucrative.”

  “I’ll bet. Those Watt engines I see everywhere eat enough coal, don’t they?”

  “So what do your family do?”

  He said simply, “We serve the Inca.”

  The procession reached a chapel dedicated to Isaac Newton, the renowned alchemist and theologian who had developed a conclusive proof of the age of the Earth. Here they prayed to their gods, the Inca prostrating themselves before Inti, and the Christians kneeling to Christ.

  And the Inca servants came forward with their Orb of the Unblinking Eye. It was a sphere of some translucent white material, half as tall as a man; the servants carried it in a rope netting and set it down on a wooden cradle before the statue of Newton himself.