Various Fiction

by Robert Sheckley

  On the morning our replay battle was to begin, I went to the control room of Antenna 0, our main Rumanian television facility, located in its own steel-and-glass building behind and slightly to the left of the Brancoveanu Palace.

  The place was filled with cadre from the Rumanian Science Fiction Collective in their pale rose blazers. With them was the usual mix of Israeli technicians in short-sleeved shirts with open necks. Matrix 7, the gigantic machine that stored the latest version of the rerun, had been wheeled out of its cryogenic vault where temperatures near absolute zero kept it from displaying some, though by no means all, of the Heisenbergian effects that reality reruns inevitably accumulate, and which provide a not always welcome note of the unexpected to the yearly performances.

  This was the year we were putting forward a new people’s president. Our nominee was in one of the back rooms. When we paged him, he came out smelling of eau de cologne, silk tie loosely knotted around his neck, trying to button the top button of his French-cuffed shirt. Although he was freshly shaven, his stubble was so dark that it looked like he needed a shave again. But no one objected; it was a good politician’s look. This one would make a good president.

  Several young men of the Science Fiction Party questioned him to make sure he understood what he was supposed to do. When we told him that he was to go out now in front of the microphones and announce the annulment of the pig tax, he thought we were joking with him.

  “You can’t be serious! It’s a useful tax! It brings you a lot of money! With money, you can buy gear!”

  He was referring to the Star Wars, Star Trek, and Babylon 5 paraphernalia, sold on the Internet, the ultimate status symbols.

  “No, we’re forgoing that,” we told him. “We have to give up the pig tax for a while.”

  This guy’s memory was so short-term, he didn’t even remember that the tax has been rescinded and reimposed four times in the last three years.

  We were sick of this guy already, but we needed him as a figurehead. He was popular: people thought he was too dumb to be corrupt.

  He went out there and made his announcement. The farmers, with memories as short as his, were elated. Freedom at last! Pork sausages for everyone.

  Everything was going all right. The people, in their cities, towns, and villages all over the country, had gathered around their big TV sets. The meters were ticking, people shoveled bills and coins into them to keep them running. The meters took any coins, bills of any nationality. They’re miracles of modem interchangeability. This was the money that kept science fiction alive and in power throughout Rumania, and in most of the rest of the civilized world.

  Everything was going fine with our Civil War replay. But then we got the zany at South Mountain.

  This guy had evaded our checkpoints and gotten into McClellan’s army. Without giving himself away, either to us or to his fellow soldiers, he had remained quiet and unnoticed until the battle of the Bloody Angle began. No one had remarked on his clumsy accent: there were plenty of foreigners in the Federal armies. This one was a ringer from our century, taking advantage of an illegal bootleg process that we hadn’t yet been able to filter out. He had bided his time, passing as a Union volunteer, and, when the action grew hot, he began to preach.

  “Come, my brothers,” he cried. “All men are one! Embrace, embrace, my sons, be foes no more!” And more words to that effect. All accompanied by the usual rolling eyes and floating hair.

  Most of the Feds laughed at this fellow. Zanies and zealots are easy to laugh at. But there was something about him—maybe connected to the emanation jewel he carried concealed in his hair—that radiated a numinous, uncanny quality. It infected one of the soldiers—a real Unionist, not a ringer—who fell to his knees and cried out, “I see the vision!”

  Other soldiers turned away from the fight and stared at them. Soldiers going crazy during a battle is not so unusual. Most combatants get used to it after a while. And ignore it. But sometimes it can set off a general panic. And, in the way panics can have, that can be communicated to the other side really fast, and with unpredictable consequences.

  The Southern soldiers had been firing steadily, picking off Northerners. But now they, too, realized that something was wrong. These Southerners were young recruits. They hadn’t been bloodied yet, weren’t determined to kill yet at any cost. That would come later, after their side had taken horrendous casualties, after their generals and clergymen had said thrilling words and made poignant appeals to their patriotism, their love of country, of family, of whatever. But that hadn’t happened yet.

  A few of those boys of Lee’s army began to listen rather than shoot, and then a few more, and then more after that. They saw that something strange was happening in the Federal lines. They could hear the bluecoat officers bellowing their orders, and they saw that those orders were not being obeyed. And when their own officers, dressed in beechnut and gray, began to give their own orders, some few of them began to hesitate, as though they were reverting to a previous conditioning, and from hesitation it was only a step to disobedience.

  Firing died down all along the lines of battle. It looked like something big was happening, something unprecedented, and our audience picked up on it at once.

  At Civil War Replay Headquarters in Bucharest, the response came quickly.

  “Who is that son of a bitch?” asked Eitan, one of the Israeli technicians hired to put on the replay.

  No one could answer him. We sat at our banks of computers and watched the battle of South Mountain fall apart in a riot of good feeling that was losing us audience share by the minute.

  “Get me an infraprint on him pronto!” Eitan cried.

  “Pronto” was pretty fast, but nowhere near as fast as Eitan wanted. The technicians had to pull the Thru-Phaser out of the closet, plug it in, set it up. Then more time was lost adjusting the machine. All this took only seconds, a minute at most, but that’s a lot of time when you’re on the air broadcasting live to an audience all over Rumania and extending as far as western Hungary. Already lights were winking out on the big panel as viewers started flipping the dial. As luck would have it, Timosoara was playing Bratislava in Prague that afternoon. Some of our peasants, finding themselves yanked out of the enjoyable stupor you get from watching men kill other men, were switching.

  It’s one of the risks of replaying the American Civil War. You go back in time and get it all down in living solidovision at unbelievable expense, and you’d think it would replay the same way every time. But unlike film or tape, reality replays are subject to Heisenbergian uncertainty effects. Each time we replay the American Civil War, we get a different and a tamer one. This is due to UHP—Underlying Harmonization Principle—which has been called the moral equivalent of entropy, the heat-death of the universe.

  Each time reality is replayed, it gets tamer. It’s hard to face, but someday we’re going to lose our Civil War entirely. The combatants will make peace before the war is even properly begun. Sweet reason will prevail, and we’ll lose more than audience share, we’ll lose the audience, period, because only really twisted types want to watch Northerners and Southerners getting together for a picnic, which is what you get if you don’t get a war.

  The technicians got the zany’s infoprint pretty quickly. He was Andreu Timm-Sachs from a village near Bucharest. He was a junior programmer with unstable tendencies. Once Eitan had his identity locked in, he directed us to post a number 3 instant blurbogram. A blurbogram is an instant message, piped to the brain as a packet and expanding with near-simultaneous speed. It opens up in your mind like a bomb, and the aftereffects can be severe.

  This one warned Timm-Sachs to cease and desist. It told him in no unmistakable terms and in full color what was going to happen to him and his wife and his children if he didn’t pull out of there like instantly only faster. His brain was flooded with this message, and it takes a stronger person than most to stand up to a grade 3 blurbogram.

  But Timm-Sachs was that one. God knows
how long he’d been getting himself up for this moment, rehearsing it in the silent recesses of his brain, pretending to be like everyone else but all of the time knowing he was one in a million, in ten million, one who didn’t go with the flow, who cared nothing for consensual reality and the nice way things were going now, with the Romanian science-fiction cadres running central European reality and the peasants selling their pigs in the free market. No, that wasn’t good enough for Timm-Sachs, he was going to upset the apple cart because of some unknown program lodged in his diseased brain. Not everyone breeds true, it’s one of the sorrows of humanity.

  When it became clear that Timm-Sachs wasn’t listening, wasn’t responding, wasn’t reacting as he was supposed to do, but on the contrary, was continuing his preaching and his proselytizing and wasn’t about to quit, Eitan nodded grimly and said, “Okay, he’s had fair warning, send this sucker the black blurbogram.”

  Well, the black blurbogram, that’s the big one, and we don’t like to do it, take out one of our own countrymen, even if he is a diseased one, but Eitan was glaring at us and he had a small plastic zapper in his hand in case we didn’t obey, or didn’t obey quickly enough, so we had no choice, we delivered the black blurbogram.

  We stared at our screens. On the replay battlefield, Timm-Sachs twirled in his steps once, clapped his hands to his head, shouted hoarsely, and collapsed. Terminal winkout. The Federal army surgeons would discover later that his brain had been whipped into black tapioca, if they ever got around to dissecting him: Antietam was the bloodiest single day of the Civil War, no time to study how one man bought it, and anyhow, we expected to snatch his body out of there at a convenient moment.

  The Federals watched Timm-Sachs or whatever they knew him as collapse and they just stood around, staring at him and not knowing what to do, but they sure didn’t look like they were about to start fighting again, and our panel lights were still going off.

  “Send in one of our ringers,” Eitan said. “Tell him to get them moving.”

  Standard procedure. But as luck would have it, there wasn’t a ringer available closer than three miles. It was an unaccounted lapse. But Eitan was ready for it. He ordered our stand-in for General Joe Hooker to rouse himself from his drunken stupor and get out there and rally the troops. We use cut-outs for some of the leading generals, because sometimes you have to take a hand in these battles if you want to keep the troops killing each other.

  We picked up Hooker at the Dunker farm with a half-finished bottle of brandy in his hand, all unshaven with his jacket buttoned up wrong. People pay a lot to get these roles in the Civil War Replay, but some of the moxie goes out of them when they actually find themselves under fire. The real Joe Hooker survived the Civil War, but several of our cut-outs have been killed.

  We managed to get our Hooker sobered up, and he went in to the troops and gave a pretty good speech. Meanwhile, on the Rebel side, Longstreet, the real one, had been in the neighborhood and had noticed something was wrong and he harangued his own troops, and soon enough everyone was fighting again just like they were supposed to.

  But the Anomaly Meter was ringing insistently. People were asking, “What about those three cigars? How do they fit in?”

  I asked an aide, “Who are those guys?”

  I was referring to three brown-faced men in pastel clothing and wide-brimmed hats sitting in one of the studio’s little anterooms.

  “I have no idea. Shall I ask?”

  “No! They’re provincial observers, maybe. At least they aren’t bothering us.”

  I wanted no distractions, and above all no surprises on this day of days.

  Quick sampling surveys around the country showed that 89.3 percent of the population of Rumania was gathered around their home television sets, or around the big displays mounted in village squares. We were doing well. But I kept my fingers crossed. A Civil War can go either way, especially when it’s a replay. It’s the Heisenbergian effects. The war keeps on playing differently each time we run it. There’s always the risk that the participants are going to make peace. That would be a catastrophe from our point of view. We’d lose audience share. Lose enough of it, and the Science Fiction Party might be thrown out of power. And it would be back to politics as usual.

  Someone tapped my shoulder. It was one of the three men who had been waiting in the anteroom. “I beg your pardon, sir . . .”

  I whirled, snapping at the man. “What do you want?”

  “Katya said we could go on soon . . .”

  “What?” I looked at him. “You talked to Katya? About the cigars?”

  “Yes, sir. We are here to provide an explanation.”

  I stared at him. “Show me some identification.”

  He took out his wallet, flipped it open. There was a blue-and-gold badge inside. Unmistakable. The badge of a time-traveler.

  “What do you want?” I asked.

  “We’re here to take care of the matter of the three cigars.”

  At last, a provenance!

  Christopher Columbus looked up and saw three men standing at the open flap of his tent. They wore broad-brimmed Panama hats, and fine coats in pleasing pastel colors. They came into the tent, and Columbus cowered back, because there was no telling who these guys were or what they wanted.

  “Hello, Christopher Columbus.”

  At least they spoke Spanish.

  “Good morning,” Columbus said. Noncommittal. He wished he’d kept a guard around headquarters that morning. But his men were all out sporting with the Arawak women. Probably burning a few villages, too.

  “Welcome to the New World,” the leading figure said.

  “Not so new,” Columbus said. “This is Japan, isn’t it?”

  “Afraid not,” the man said. “I am Emmanuel Partagas. I welcome you to a new continent. It lies between Europe and Asia.”

  “I wasn’t looking for a new continent,” Columbus said.

  “No, but you found one. You’re the first white man ever seen in these parts. Aside from us. And a few Norsemen in the far north. But they don’t count. You get the credit. And the privilege.”

  Columbus hadn’t been feeling well for the last few days. The fever he’d picked up, probably in Genoa, had started to rage again. He was light-headed, dizzy, he was getting hot flashes, and the strangest ideas kept coming into his head. Also, he was on this weird island that was a riot of color and a pandemonium of birdcalls. There were brown-skinned people here who walked around in next to nothing and blew smoke at him out of long tubes. Given all that, Columbus wasn’t a bit surprised to find that he was having hallucinations. He decided to try to relax and enjoy them.

  “You fellows are European, aren’t you?” he asked.

  “That’s right, Chris, we’re Spanish. But we live here, well, not here exactly, but nearby, on a big island we call Cuba.”

  “Nice name,” Columbus commented.

  “Thanks. As you’ve probably surmised, we come from a time rather farther down the line, timewise, than your own.”

  That was the craziest thing Columbus had ever heard. But what the hell, it was all a dream or a hallucination, so he decided to play along.

  “Down the line? Do you mean you’re from the future?”

  “That’s it. You catch on pretty fast, Chris.”

  “Hey, no problem. What can I do for you gents?”

  “Chris, there are a couple of things you need to know. This island, and the other islands around it, and the various continents they pertain to, are shortly going to enter history in a big way. They’ll be called The Americas, and they’re going to be very important in the scheme of things.”

  “The Americas? Not the Columbuses?”

  The man shook his head. “They should have been named for you. But history has a way of tripping up our expectations. You’re very important, though, and, as the discoverer, you have a lot of say in how things are going to go.”

  “That’s good,” Columbus said. “Would you mind passing me that cup of wine
?”

  “Not at all. But why not try some of our local brew?”

  He nodded to one of the men behind him. The man stepped forward and handed Columbus a cup made of delicate china. It was filled with a fragrant black liquid.

  “What’s this?”

  “We call it coffee. It’s going to become world-famous. Try it, it’s good.”

  Columbus sipped cautiously. The taste was different, curious, delightful.

  “What we want to do,” Partagas said, “is put up some advertising for the future. You have been declared the universal patron of cigar-smoking, and so we need your permission. Just sign here and here—” He whipped out a parchment and unrolled it, “—and we’ll put these cigars where they’ll do the most good. Right in the middle of the bloodiest battle of the American Civil War.”

  “I don’t think I know about that war,” Columbus said. “I’m not even sure I know what Americans are.”

  “We explained about Americans,” Partagas said. “They are the inhabitants of the continent that will take its place on the world stage in a hundred years or so. No time to go into all that now.”

  “What do you want to do with the cigars?” Columbus asked.

  “Insert them into a good moment in the opening engagement of the war.”

  “But why?”

  “For their advertising value, of course. An audience of millions will see those cigars. They’ll be curious. They’ll want some for themselves. Our industry, you see, will have fallen on hard times by then. Cigarettes will have surpassed our product in popularity. Efforts to ban these cigarettes will only increase their appeal. We need something to get cigars, our product, back in people’s minds. This, we are convinced, will do it.”

  “What do I get out of it?” Columbus asked.

  “A twenty-percent share of advertising revenues. That’s handsome. I advise you to take it.”

  “But this you say will take place hundreds of years from now? How will I get to use any of the money?”