Worlds That Weren't

by Walter Jon Williams

  He looked at the carved black walking stick beside him, and with his free hand eased at the muscles above his knee.

  “Well, now.”

  With some awkwardness, he shifted the baby out from under his arm, and plumped her astride his other knee. She kicked her heels against his old, patched hose. The sun, even through this fog, would scald her, and he looked up for Joanie’s return—and saw no sign of the wet nurse—and then back at the baby.

  Knowing my luck, it’s about to piss down my leg….

  The master gunner, Ortega, appeared out of the port gangway, two or three of his officers with him, and stood talking energetically, gesturing.

  “Well, why not?” Guillaume said aloud. “The pay’s as good, as a gunner. What do you think?”

  The baby, supported under her armpits by his hands, blinked at him with her human eyes. She weighed less than a weaner piglet, although she was weeks older.

  “Maybe I’ll put a few shillings in, with Yolande,” he said quietly, his eyes scanning the deck. “A few a month. Joanie’ll probably soak me dry, telling me you’ve got croup, or whatever infants have.” His mouth twisted into a grin he could feel. “At least until I’m killed in a skirmish, or the Italian diseases get me…”

  The salt wind blew tangles in his hair. He wiped his wrist across his mouth, rasping at stubble. Joanie, coming back, was accosted by Ortega. Guillaume heard her laugh.

  “Fortuna,” Guillaume said, prodding the baby’s naked round belly. The infant laughed. “The chain of choices? It’s not a chain, I think. Choices are free. I believe.”

  The baby yawned, eyes and nose screwing up in the sunshine. Feeling self-conscious, Guillaume brought the infant to his chest and held her against his doublet, with both his arms around her.

  The weight of her increased—becoming boneless, now, with sleep, and trust. She began a small, breathy snore.

  “It’s not all sitting around in the gunners, you know,” Guillaume lectured in a whisper, watching Italy appear from the mist. “I’ll be busy. But I’ll keep an eye on you. Okay? I’ll keep a bit of a watch. As long as I can.”

  1477 AND ALL THAT

  Sellars and Yeatman’s wonderful book 1066 and All That says that History is all you can remember from your schooldays. Ash: A Secret History, of which “The Logistics of Carthage” is a piece of flotsam, says that History is all you can remember…and it’s wrong.

  The links between alternate history and secret history fiction run deep. With Ash, I wanted not only to consider a moment at which history as we think we know it might have turned out differently, but to think about the nature of history itself. History as narratives that we make up—aided, of course, by things we take to be evidence—to tell ourselves, for one or another reason. “History” as distinct from “the past,” that is.

  The past happened. It’s just that we can’t recover it. History is what we can recover, and it’s a collection of fallible memories, inconvenient documents, disconcerting new facts, and solemn cultural bedtime stories.

  I went a stage further with Ash—the past didn’t happen, either, not as we’re told it did, and the scholar Pierce Rat-cliff uses history to work that out. Well, history plus those inconvenient things upon which history is based: memoirs, archaeological artifacts, fakes, scholarship tussles, and quantum mechanics. It’s different for a writer, thinking of an alternate history point of departure in these terms. History is not a road on which we can take a different turning. The road itself is made of mist and moonbeams.

  And then there’s A.D. 1477. And A.D. 416. And between the two of them is A.D. 1453, which is where “The Logistics of Carthage” got its genesis, even though the story itself takes place four years later in A.D. 1457.

  In A.D. 1477, Burgundy vanished.

  This is straightforward textbook history. The country that had been Burgundy—a principality of France, according to France; an independent country, according to the princely dukes of Burgundy—vanishes out of history in January of 1477—1476 in the pre-Gregorian calendar. Duke Charles the Bold (or “Rash,” as 20:20 hindsight has it) lost a battle to the Swiss, was inconveniently found dead without leaving a male heir, and, to cut a short story shorter, France swallowed Burgundy with one gulp.

  And rich and splendid and powerful Burgundy vanishes instantly from the history books. You would never know that for large periods of medieval history, Western Europe was not solely divided between the power blocs of Germany, Spain, and France. I’m not the only writer to be fascinated by this phenomenon. M. John Harrison’s splendid and non-alternate-universe novel The Course of the Heart, for example, revolves around it in an entirely different way. Tropes of history and the past and memory are endlessly valid. But it was my starting point for Ash: A Secret History, which is, of course, the real story of why Burgundy vanished out of history in A.D. 1477, and what took its place.

  Of course it’s the real story: would I lie to you?

  I am shocked—shocked!—that you think I would….

  And then there’s A.D. 429. In history as we know it, this is the start of Gothic North Africa. A Vandal fleet sails over from mainland Europe under Gaiseric, who kicks the ass of the Roman inhabitants, and—becoming pretty much Roman himself in the process—establishes the rich and powerful kingdom of Vandal North Africa, with its capital established in Carthage by A.D. 439. In A.D. 455, Gaiseric sails east and sacks great Rome itself.

  For Ash, I thought it would be neat if it hadn’t been the Vandals who invaded North Africa.

  I preferred the Visigoths—a rather different Gothic people who had ended up conquering the Iberians and running Spain, and whose elective-monarchy system by the early medieval period is, as one of the characters in Ash says, “election by assassination.” I decided I’d have a Visigoth North Africa instead.

  Then, while wandering through a book on post-Roman North Africa, I discovered there had indeed been a vast Visigoth invasion fleet that set off toward North Africa. Thirteen years before the Vandals.

  It was sunk by a storm.

  So I had A.D. 416, a concrete and inarguable point of departure for an alternate universe that I would have been perfectly happy to set up as a hypothetical what-if. History plays these wonderful tricks, always. I love it.

  And then we come to A.D. 711, when in our timeline the Muslims decided, quite reasonably as they thought, to invade Visigoth Spain. This resulted in a long occupation of chunks of Spanish kingdoms, a number of taifa buffer states that were part-Christian and part-Muslim, and a self-defined “entirely beleaguered and all-Christian” north. It’s a story that doesn’t end until A.D. 1492, when the last of the Moors leave Granada, and one of the most fascinating mixed cultures of Western Europe goes belly-up.

  However, for Ash, having had my earlier point of departure set up as a non-Arabic North Africa, I ended up with a Visigoth Arian Christian invasion of a Spain that was part of the Church of the Green Christ. That rumbled along nicely from A.D. 711 until the 1470s, with the North African Visigoths largely taking the place of the Byzantines in our history. It may say in the KJV that nations have bowels of brass, but we know that history is endlessly mutable….

  And then there’s “The Logistics of Carthage.” Which I had not intended to write, after Ash. No way! When a 500,000-word epic is over and done, trust me, you do not want to see any more of it. Two walk-on characters tugging at one’s elbow and remarking that they, too, have their story that they would like to tell, is something guaranteed to have the writer running off gibbering.

  So I gibbered, and I decided I wouldn’t write it, because the story of Ash is over. Over over, not here-is-a-sequel over. Not nearly over, but really sincerely over.

  Ah yes, they said to me: but this isn’t a sequel. For one thing, it’s set twenty years before the main action of the book. For another, one of the people whose story it is was a minor character, and the other appears solely for a half sentence in one place in the book. And it’s set somewhere we didn’t get to in Ash. A
nd, and…

  And there’s the Fall of Constantinople, you see.

  A.D. 1453, and one of the defining points of Western European history. The great capital of the Byzantine empire, Constantinople, falls to the Turks and becomes Istanbul. Among the things that come out of the city with the flood of refugees are all the Hermetic writings of Pico and Ficino, who themselves have what amounts to an alternate-universe history of what the world is really like. The fall of Constantinople (in some theories) turbo-charges the Italian Renaissance, which kicks off the Renaissance in the rest of Europe, and leads to the Scientific Revolution, the Industrial Revolution, and hello modern world.

  But “The Logistics of Carthage” isn’t about that.

  It’s about the war afterA.D. 1453, when the Turks move on the next obvious enemy in the Ash history: the Gothic capital of Carthage, under the Visigoth king-caliphs. A war taking place on the coast of North Africa, where a troop of European mercenaries heading toward Carthage in the pay of the Turks find themselves with a corpse they cannot bury because of a religious dispute, and we start to get a look at a love story—and pigs—and the mechanisms of atrocity.

  Carthage, you will note, is another entity that vanishes out of history. Frequently. There isn’t anything particularly mysterious about it. The Punic city of Carthage gets flattened by the Romans in 146 B.C., in a very marked manner, and sown with salt. Roman Carthage gets sacked, in turn; Gothic Carthage is taken by the Arabs in A.D. 698. Tunis grows up in the same area, and has its own troubles. History has a way of happening to cities.

  But, mystery or not, Carthage has fascinated me for rather the same reasons as Burgundy does: here is something completely gone, its people do not remain, and how do we know that the history we hear is anything like what really happened?

  In “The Logistics of Carthage,” one of the soldiers has what she takes to be dream visions, sent by God. It wasn’t possible to bring on stage, in a novella, the reasons why they’re not dreams—they are glimpses of the real future, five hundred years ahead from where she is—but the rationale is present in Ash, and for the purposes of these people, it doesn’t matter whether what Yolande sees is scientific or theological. What she feels about it is real.

  And I get to push the history that runs from these points of departure on a stage further, which I naturally couldn’t do in Ash, and am therefore glad to have the chance. Yolande sees future-Carthage, future–North Africa, and they are not our twenty-first-century Carthage and North Africa, just the up-to-date version of what the history would become, if it was to become our time.

  But the alternate-universe story isn’t always about “Cool, a POD!” Stories of people’s experience are only rarely about seeing history turn. This story, which wouldn’t let me go until I wrote it, is about a woman who followed her son to the wars, and how it feels to her then to be working for the worshipers of the child-eater goddess Astarte (which is where, in this history, the Turks get their red Crescent Moon flag). Military history gives short shrift to mothers—but then, Guillaume, finding himself with a reluctant appreciation of a woman’s usual role in history, is as much a mother as Yolande.

  And pigs. Never forget the pigs.

  They don’t know a damn thing about history, pigs.

  They just become its victims—as people without power tend to.

  And for those readers who have read Ash…yes, you do recognize a few names. And, yes, this is the early life of those particular people. I didn’t know it either, until I came to write the story.

  Oh, and the baby is precisely who you think she is. But she isn’t important to this narrative. For these people, it could have been any nameless baby at all.

  For most of us, after all, names are the first thing lost by history.

  Mary Gentle was born in 1956, in England; one of her mothers was a housewife and local cinema employee, the other is a professional astrologer. She left school at sixteen, but has since returned three times; the first time for a BA in politics and English, the second for an MA in seventeenth-century studies, and the third for an MA in war studies.

  Her first book, A Hawk in Silver, was written when she was eighteen. After an initial period in the workforce, she has been a full-time professional writer since 1979, and considers it very well said that the self-employed person has an idiot for a boss. However, since this beats having any other idiot for a boss, she plans to stay self-employed as long as she can get away with it.

  After her books having been regularly on the short list of more awards than she cares to think about, she is extremely pleased that Ash: A Secret History won the British Science Fiction Award and the Sidewise Award for Alternate History. Ash was also one of the Locus listed fantasy books for 2000. She is immensely cheered by having science fiction, fantasy, and alternate history accolades for the same book.

  THE LAST RIDEOF GERMAN FREDDIE

  WALTER JON WILLIAMS

  “ECCE homo,” said German Freddie with a smile. “That is your man, I believe.”

  “That’s him,” Brocius agreed. “That’s Virgil Earp, the lawman.”

  “What do you suppose he wants?” asked Freddie.

  “He’s got a warrant for someone,” said Brocius, “or he wouldn’t be here.”

  Freddie gazed without enthusiasm at the lawman walking along the opposite side of Allen Street. His spurred boots clumped on the wooden sidewalk. He looked as if he had somewhere to go.

  “Entities should not be multiplied beyond what is necessary,” said Freddie, “or so Occam is understood to have said. If he is here for one of us, then so much the worse for him. If not, what does it matter to us?”

  Curly Bill Brocius looked thoughtful. “I don’t know about this Occam fellow, but as my mamma would say, those fellers don’t chew their own tobacco. Kansas lawmen come at you in packs.”

  “So do we,” said Freddie. “And this is not Kansas.”

  “No,” said Brocius. “It’s Tombstone.” He gave Freddie a warning look from his lazy eyes. “Remember that, my friend,” he said, “and watch your back.”

  Brocius drifted up Allen Street in the direction of Hafford’s Saloon while Freddie contemplated Deputy U.S. Marshal Earp. The man was dressed like the parson of a particularly gloomy Protestant sect, with a black flat-crowned hat, black frock coat, black trousers, and immaculate white linen.

  German Freddie decided he might as well meet this paradigm.

  He walked across the dusty Tombstone street, stepped onto the sidewalk, and raised his gray sombrero.

  “Pardon me,” he said. “But are you Virgil Earp?”

  The man looked at him, light eyes over fair mustache. “No,” he said. “I’m his brother.”

  “Wyatt?” Freddie asked. He knew that the deputy had a lawman brother.

  “No,” the man said. “I’m their brother, Morgan.”

  A grin tugged at Freddie’s lips. “Ah,” he said. “I perceive that entities are multiplied beyond that which is necessary.”

  Morgan Earp gave him a puzzled look. Freddie raised his hat again. “I beg your pardon,” he said. “I won’t detain you.”

  It is like a uniform, Freddie wrote in his notebook that night. Black coats, black hats, black boots. Blond mustaches and long guns in the scabbards, riding in line abreast as they led their posse out of town. As a picture of purposeful terror they stand like the Schwarzreiter of three centuries ago, horsemen whom all Europe held in fear. They entirely outclassed that Lieutenant Hurst, who was in a real uniform and who was employing them in the matter of those stolen army mules.

  What fear must dwell in the hearts of these Earps to present themselves thus! They must dress and walk and think alike; they must enforce the rigid letter of the dead, dusty law to the last comma; they must cling to every rule and range and feature of mediocrity­­­. It is fear that drives men to herd together, to don uniforms, to impose upon others a needless conformity. But what enemy is it they fear? What enemy is so dreadful as to compel them to wear uniforms and arm the
mselves so heavily and cling to their beliefs with such ferocity?

  It is their own nature! The weak, who have no power even over themselves, fear always the power that lies in a free nature—a nature fantastic, wild, astonishing, arbitrary—they must enslave this spirit first in themselves before they can enslave it in others.

  It is therefore our duty—the duty of those who are free, who are natural, valorous, and unafraid, those who scorn what is sickly, cowardly, and slavish—we must resist these Earps!

  And already we have won a victory—won it without raising a finger, without lifting a gun. The posse of that terrible figure of justice, that Mr. Virgil Earp, found the mules they were searching for in Frank McLaury’s corral at Baba Comari—but then the complainant Lieutenant Hurst took counsel of his own fears and refused to press charges.

  It is wonderful! Deputy Marshal Earp, the sole voice of the law in this part of Arizona, has been made ridiculous on his first employment! How his pride must have withered at the joke that fortune played on him! How he must have cursed the foolish lieutenant and his fate!

  He has left town, I understand, returned to Prescott. His brothers remain, however, stalking the streets in their dread black uniforms, infecting the town with their stolid presence. It is like an invasion of Luthers.

  We must not cease to laugh at them! We must be gay! Laughter has driven Virgil from our midst, and it will drive the others, too. Our laughter will lodge, burning in their hearts like bullets of flaming lead. There is nothing that will drive them from our midst as surely as our own joy at their shortcomings.

  They are afraid. And we will know they are afraid. And this knowledge will turn our laughter into a weapon.

  Ike Clanton was passed out on the table. The game went on regardless, as Ike had already lost his money. It was late evening in the Occidental Saloon, and the game might well go on till dawn.

  “It’s getting to be hard being a Cowboy,” said John Ringo. “What with having to pay taxes now.” He removed cards from his hand, tossed them onto the table. “Two cards,” he said.