Alternate Americas

by Gregory Benford

  Joseph shook his head. “We’ll try diplomacy first.”

  “Diplomacy.” Sitting Bull spat. “To a paleface diplomacy is just another word for a stab in the back.”

  The hours passed slowly. Red Cloud watched the ground crew rearming his Eagle and wondered if these missiles would wind up ditched in the Hudson like the others, or if they would find human targets this time instead. A slow anger had been building in him all afternoon, to the point where he wasn’t sure which he preferred.

  “We’re going back,” a voice said. It took him a moment to realize it was real. Red Cloud turned to see Sitting Bull grinning in anticipation, and Brave Joseph beside him wearing a more somber expression.

  “I take it the meeting didn’t go well,” Red Cloud said.

  Brave Joseph shook his head. “When Tecumseh told Lee we’d blockade the Island, all hell broke loose. Everybody in the meeting room started shouting at once, until Lee took off his shoe and banged it on the table and outshouted everyone.”

  “What’d he say?”

  “He said, ‘We will bury you.’”

  “‘We will bury you?’” Red Cloud could hardly believe his ears. Joseph nodded. “That’s right.”

  “Wonderful. So when are we making the raid?”

  “As soon as your planes are ready. You two will make the actual run; we’ll have a dozen other planes ahead of you for a lure.”

  Sitting Bull smacked fist into palm. “We’ll get the bastards.”

  “Just the missile silos,” Joseph cautioned him. “We don’t want any unnecessary loss of life. We want to come out of this looking clean as spring water to the rest of the world, so think of this as a surgical strike, not a bombing run.”

  “Gotcha.”

  Red Cloud nodded, feeling adrenaline surge through his blood again. A “surgical strike” on the Island. He’d known this moment was coming, known it since the day he’d left the plains to join the peacekeeping forces. Standing, he reached out and slapped his wing man on the shoulder. “Let’s do it,” he said.

  The Manhattan skyline once again loomed before them; this time higher than ever. They were approaching from the south, over the bay, but only a dozen feet or so above the water. Ahead of them flew the lure: an even dozen planes whose pilots would engage the palefaces and draw them away from the true action. It was an old trick, but the palefaces never seemed to learn; they were all too eager to get themselves an “Injun.”

  Sure enough, as the squadron approached the southern end of the Island, a swarm of paleface fighters swooped downriver toward them. The Indians accelerated to attack speed, banked hard right, and led the chase east over Long Island. Within a minute Red Cloud’s radar screen was clear.

  But just in case it wasn’t as clear as it looked, they had another plan….

  The buildings drew closer. Red Cloud climbed a couple hundred feet, but he was still well below even the average-sized ones. “Drop behind and watch your wingtips,” he said as the twin towers of the Roanoke Memorial reached out to swat them down. “Geronimo!” he shouted, nervously eyeing the gap between them, but just when he was sure the plane wouldn’t fit, the buildings seemed to move aside, and he shot through like a spit watermelon seed. A jumble of older streets rushed by below, then Fifth Avenue stretched out before him, leading straight to the target. Red Cloud shoved the throttles forward and streaked toward it at Mach 1, windows no doubt shattering in his wake.

  A loud ping in his headphones warned him of another aircraft. He glanced at the radar screen, saw that the trace was dead ahead, but when he looked up, he saw only the street and a stockade of buildings flashing by. The paleface had ducked down another street.

  “Go evasive step one,” Red Cloud said. “I think we’re about to be surprised.”

  “Evasive one,” said Sitting Bull.

  Red Cloud pulled back on the stick, banked, and rolled over the top of the block to drop down into the Amerigo’s Avenue canyon. Before the buildings separated them, he saw Sitting Bull doing the same in the opposite direction.

  Seconds later a bloodcurdling yell came over the radio. “Yeow! I just about clipped his tail. The bastard’s on Madison!”

  “Evasive two,” Red Cloud said, rolling left and high again, but this time he continued the bank and dropped down over an east-west street. His radar pinged again on the way over the top; the paleface was above the skyline, too, no doubt turning to follow.

  Red Cloud flew a few blocks, then popped up and over and down to head north again, toward Central Park. His radar pinged at him again. For a moment he hesitated, wondering whether to try more evasive maneuvers, but at last he decided to stay low and hope the paleface would pick the wrong street. “Making my run,” he said.

  “Me too,” said Sitting Bull. “Coming up behind you.”

  The last mile or so passed in a descending blur, the buildings growing shorter as he neared the park. Red Cloud set his targeting radar to its narrowest field and searched for the “apartment complex” housing the missiles, but when Sitting Bull shouted, “Look out! He’s on you!” he abandoned the search and banked hard right. His headphones squealed with the enemy radar warning, but not with the intensity that would indicate a weapons lock-on.

  “I’m on him,” Sitting Bull said, and seconds later he shouted, “Tomahawk away!”

  Red Cloud craned his neck to see if he could spot the paleface by eye, and saw him just as the missile hit. Paleface planes were tough, he’d give them that; the right engine erupted in flame, but the plane stayed in one piece, trailing thick smoke as it dropped out of the sky. The pilot even seemed to have some control over it.

  “He’s going for the lake,” Sitting Bull said.

  “Let him go. Let’s take out the silos and go home.” Red Cloud once again scanned for targets, locked onto the proper building, and fired a radar-guided Warpath at it. When the rocket hit, nothing happened for a second; then the explosion reached the missiles inside and the whole thing erupted in a ball of flame.

  Sitting Bull’s rocket took out the building next to it. Unfinished, it didn’t hold any missiles, but the concussion brought it down just as effectively. Red Cloud retargeted and fired again at the next building in line, and at the next. Sitting Bull took out the last two.

  They circled the paleface on their way out. He rocked back and forth beneath his parachute, long yellow hair spilling out from beneath his helmet. He held his right arm extended toward them, and Red Cloud could see tiny flashes from his service revolver.

  Sitting Bull saw it, too. “Boy, that guy doesn’t know when to give up, does he?”

  Red Cloud laughed. “Palefaces never do.” He banked away from the downed pilot and headed for home, triggering the switch that would draw his signature across the sky as he did so. Watching Sitting Bull draw his own signature beside him, he said, “Let me tell you, kid, we’ve borrowed a lot of things from the palefaces—their technology, some of their ways of life—but the sum total of what we’ve actually learned from them can be stated in one sentence.” He paused, amusedly aware that they were flying directly into the autumn sunset.

  “What? Shoot first, ask questions later?” Sitting Bull asked.

  “Nope. Try again.”

  “Walk softly, but carry a big stick?”

  “Closer.” Red Cloud grinned, imagining the next step in the technology war. The palefaces would probably try longer-range missiles so they could launch from Europe. The Indians would have to develop them, too, as well as better surveillance techniques to watch over the situation on the other side of the world. That meant either strengthening the navy to provide a base of operations or using the improved missile technology in a new way: to go for the high ground. Red Cloud looked out the canopy, straight up. Was that where his future lay?

  “So what’s the line, O fount of wisdom?”

  “Huh? Oh, that.” Red Cloud quoted the Aztec, Montezuma, who’d first warned of the paleface threat: “‘The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.’”


  SUCH A DEAL

  Esther M. Friesner

  Hisdai ibn Ezra, noted merchant of Granada (retired), did his best to conceal his amusement when his servant entered and announced, “There—there is a visa visitor to see you, sidi. A—a Castilian, he said to tell you.”

  How you twist your face and stammer, Mahmoud! the old Jew thought. You are jumpy as a flea-ridden monkey. This unexpected guest of mine has you at a loss, I see. Well, you are young yet, and it is no common thing for foreigners to frequent this house since I left the trader’s calling. I still recall what a hubbub we had when the Genoese navigator first arrived, and that was supposed to be a secret visit. Lord of Hosts, whatever has become of that one? And of Daud …

  He banished the thought, dreading the despair it must bring him. Better to study Mahmoud’s confusion and hold back laughter instead of tears.

  Mahmoud was obviously waiting for his master to summon guards, or send word to Sultan Muhammad’s palace of the infidel interloper’s presence. When Hisdai did neither—only turning another leaf in his Maimonides—the servant seemed ready to jig out of his skin.

  The old Jew swallowed a chuckle. You look as if you could do with a little reading from the “Guide for the Perplexed” yourself, boy. You did not expect this, did you? One of those cause-mad Christians in the house of a Jew who lives quite comfortably under the reign of an Islamic lord? Least of all when the armies of Ferdinand and Isabella are camped before our walls, laying siege to Granada. No, you have every right to wear that astonished expression. If only it were not so comical!

  He sighed and set aside his book. “Are there any refreshments in this house worthy of so exalted a caller, Mahmoud? A little spiced wine? A handful of dates not too wizened? Some other delicacies that Cook may have secreted away from happier times, may the Lord bless him for the prudent ant he so wisely emulates?”

  Mahmoud knit his brows, his bewilderment mounting visibly. “Come, lad!” Hisdai said, trying to hearten his servant into action. “There is no mystery here. For me to expect Cook to have secret stores of exotic tidbits despite the passage of nearly a year and a half since the Christians have come before our gates—that is just my knowing Cook’s character.”

  “Oh, it is not that, sidi; it is only…” Mahmoud paused, his tongue caught in a snare set by his discretion.

  “Only what?” Hisdai ibn Ezra could not restrain a mildly cynical smile. “Fear nothing; I have heard all the whispering my servants do about me for more years than you have been alive.” He stroked his silvery beard. “They call me master-merchant to my face, but behind my back I vow that more than one idle tongue wags that I have trafficked less with human clientele and more with dijinn and Iblis. Is this not so?”

  Very reluctantly Mahmoud nodded. Hisdai laughed. “Therefore, why stand amazed at our unheralded visitor? Give thanks that he merely comes from our enemies’ ranks and not from the fiery Pit itself!”

  Mahmoud made it his business to say, “O sidi, I do not believe the tales. How can I, who behold you daily, give credence to such lies?”

  Hisdai lifted one gray and shaggy brow. “Are you quite certain they are lies, Mahmoud?”

  Like most new servants, Mahmoud took everything his master said at face value. “They must be lies, O sidi. For one thing, you do not even look like a wizard.”

  The boy spoke truth, and Hisdai ibn Ezra knew it. If he flattered himself that he resembled the dark magicians of legend, any good mirror would disabuse him at once. He knew himself to be a small, crinkle-faced cricket-chirp of a man. White hairs—sparse beneath his turban, lush upon his chin—held constant argument with brown eyes of a youthful sparkle. Long hours of study of the driest and most petrified of scholarly subjects, which drifted off into longer hours of heavy-headed sleep, painted him old. Then he would wake and speak with such lively insight and interest of current affairs near and far that he left younger men panting to follow the lightning path of his wit and insight.

  True that Paradox had long made her scruffy nest beneath the roof of the onetime merchant prince, but for a Castilian to come a-calling in these times—! That was too much for even the most seasoned of servants to bear without dashing away at once to auction off the news to his comrades’ eager ears.

  Now that Mahmoud’s initial startlement had faded, Hisdai could see that he was avid to have his duty done and be whisking this tale with him to the kitchens, and so the old Jew gently urged him on his way, saying, “Go now, haste. It does not do to keep demons or Castilians waiting.”

  Mahmoud departed. He returned not much later, followed by a gentleman whose decidedly simple European clothes were in startling contrast to the splendor of Hisdai ibn Ezra’s flowing Moorish robes.

  “Pelayo Fernández de Santa Fe, O sidi,” Mahmoud announced, bowing. Hisdai recognized that the lad was a skilled-enough servitor to lower his eyes to the very stones while still observing absolutely everything around him. This time, as others, that talent would provide Mahmoud with a most instructive spectacle.

  Then Hisdai ibn Ezra gazed from the clothes before him to the face above and turned to a lump of ice as solid as any to be found on the summit of snow-capped Mulhacé. He felt the color ebb from his face like a fleeing tide, felt for the first time the palsy of age cause his outstretched hands to tremble. The old man’s breath rushed into his lungs with an audible rasping, a sound too near the final deathbed croak for any servant who valued his pay to remain unmoved.

  Yet when Mahmoud rushed forward, a wail of paid loyalty on his lips, the strength gushed back into Hisdai’s body. He stood straight as a poplar and sharply motioned Mahmoud away. “Unworthy servant, where are your manners? Our honored guest will think himself to be still among his own barbarous people. Go, fetch scented water and soft towels! Bread and salt! My finest wine! Why are you gawking? You’ll gape less when one of King Ferdinand’s men drives a pike through your gizzard. Go, I say!”

  Mahmoud did not wait for further instructions. He had more than enough meat for meditation, and the other servants would treat him royally for it. Any diversion not connected with the infernal siege was worth its weight in gold, especially to folk who lacked anything more precious than copper.

  Hisdai ibn Ezra watched Mahmoud scamper off, listening until he judged his servant’s pattering footsteps had retreated a sufficient distance for his liking. Then and only then did he turn to give his visitor a proper welcome.

  “You idiot!” He snatched the man’s hat from his hands and flung it out the window into the courtyard below The visitor flew after his hat, but wisely halted his own flight short of the abyss. Leaning over the tiled sill, he remarked, “I see that you’ve kept the false awning in place down there. I thought that since you retired, you wouldn’t need to maintain such emergency measures in case of dissatisfied royal customers.”

  “I may not deal with Sultan Muhammad anymore, nor need to provide for the possibility of—ahem!—expeditious departures, but only a fool dreams any peace is permanent,” Hisdai growled. “Most definitely not in these times.”

  His guest was unmoved by the old man’s peevishness. He was still admiring Hisdai’s escape stratagem, with which he seemed to be disconcertingly familiar. “To be able to jump from this height and land safely—! Ah, one day I must try it, just to see how it feels. Unfortunately my hat missed the awning and the cushions under it and landed right in the fishpond. Was that necessary? I was rather attached to that hat.”

  “Would that your brain were as attached to the inside of your skull! Do you realize what you risked, coming here in the teeth of the siege like this?”

  “Unless I misremember,” Hisdai’s guest drawled, “it was not ten months ago that I found you entertaining a certain Genoese in this very room. When I asked you how Master Columbus had managed to breach the siege, you only smiled and said, ‘I have my ways. One key opens many gates, if that key be made of gold.’” He winked at Hisdai. “For once, I recalled your wisdom and used it well, particularly now that I have more
of your precious keys than any locksmith.”

  “What is this blather of keys?” Hisdai snorted. “When Mahmoud informed me that there was a Castilian come calling—all Christians are Castilians to him—I expected to greet a common seaman bringing word from the admiral. That Genoese is no fool. He has more sense than to venture his neck for nothing!”

  The young man murmured into his beard, “There you speak a greater truth than you know.”

  His words went unheard. As suddenly as it had erupted, Hisdai’s burst of sour temper vanished altogether. He rushed to fling the silken wings of his sleeves around the “Castilian.”

  “Ah, Daud! Daud, my son, it is I who am the fool! If you are back, what else matters? My Daud—or shall I call you by that abominable Castilian name you bestowed upon yourself?”

  Daud pretended to take umbrage. “I thought it a very good alias, and most handy for getting past the more officious of the Catholic Monarchs’ sentries. Stop a man named for don Pelayo, he who began the reconquest of this land from the Moors? Most ill-omened at this juncture.” He shook his head solemnly. “Now that Ferdinand and Isabella are about to retake the last Iberian foothold of our Moorish rulers, that would be most ill-omened indeed.”

  Hisdai beamed over his son’s resourcefulness. “Still the clever rogue, my pride! Blessed be the Lord, the God of Israel, for bringing me to this season. My heart, my child, I never thought to see your face again.”

  The young man laughed out of a face that was a less-wrinkled version of his sire’s. His beard was somewhat shorter, the hair on his head summer midnight to Hisdai’s winter dawn, but the eyes held the same fire.

  “Indeed, my father, there were moments in the voyage when I myself questioned whether the next face I saw would be yours or Elijah’s!” He sighed. “May Heaven witness, our valiant admiral suffered celestial visions enough for us all. There must be truth in what they say, that madness is but a divinely given spark of genius that burns with the most peculiar flame. That man has a sufficiency of such embers to burn all al-Andalus to ashes.” Laughter departed his lips as he added, “As he may yet do.”