“Run for your life!” a woman screams. “It really is Bridezilla!”
How can she tell? Simple. On the second digit of Kate’s left forepaw (not the fourth, because the forepaw has only two digits once the genetic recodifying gets done) still sparkles Archie Kidder’s two-carat rock.
And when people aren’t running, they’re aiming cell-phone cameras at Kate and zapping the stills and videos to every TV station and newspaper in town (lots of the former; not much left of the latter). Some of them even think to call the police, the fire department, and the SPCA.
Media frenzies have been built from less. From much less, to tell you the truth. Cars, vans, and all the helicopters not covering the latest freeway chase—say, about as many as the Brazilian Air Force owns—converge on the Northridge Mall. “Dinosaur runs amok!” a blow-dried airhead shouts breathlessly into his mike. “Details after this message!”
Before the impotence-drug commercial can even finish, Professor Tesla Kidder’s cell phone blorps. Mm, how would you describe the noise a theremin makes? And what else would a mad scientist use for a ring tone?
“Yes?” he says.
“No,” his wife tells him firmly. “I don’t know what you’ve done, but stop doing it. Undo it, if you can—and you’d better be able to.” She hangs up before he can get out even one more word.
And, before he can put the phone back in his pocket (no, not the pocket the mouse came from—mice gnaw on phones), it blorps again. Once more, he raises it to the side of his head. “Yes?”
“Dad!” Archie sounds reproachful, not firm. That may be even worse. “Fix it, will you please? Kate’ll be fine as soon as the ceremony’s over and the pressure’s off. C’mon!”
So much for Make sure they can’t trace it back to you. His family sure doesn’t have any trouble. The police and fire department don’t know him as well. Even so … How much damage can a real Bridezilla do in a mall? How expensive will that damage be? Tesla Kidder is a mad scientist, but he isn’t a stupid scientist. No way, José.
His calculations take but a moment. “Oh, all right,” he says, and, if he sounds a trifle sulky, it’s only because he is. Back into the pocket goes the phone.
He recalibrates the long-range genetic recodifier. The police don’t call. The fire department doesn’t, either. No one pounds on the laboratory door. (Remembering Moscow nights, even Moscow nights under perestroika and glasnost, Igor is relieved.) No reporters show up asking for comments. They’re all too busy trying to sound blasé about this Mesozoic irruption into the bastion of modern American capitalism.
Prof Kidder pushes the button on his device again. No annoying extraneous beam of light this time. Tesla Kidder beams himself. He’s fixed that, anyhow.
We return, then, to the mall to await developments. The Kateosaurus with the flashy engagement ring has just flamed a Cadillac Escalade in the parking lot. The SUV’s fuel tank, a reservoir containing the essence of Lord knows how many dinosaurs, sends a column of greasy black smoke into the sky to mark their final return to the environment.
After a roar of triumph, the Creature from the Lime Soap Lagoon advances purposefully on a van even bigger than the Escalade (and they said it couldn’t be done!). On the side of the van is blazoned EYEWITLESS NEWS. Another burbling roar. Another blast of flame. But—disappointingly, at least to Prof Kidder—only a small one. The news van gets scorched, but does not become as one with Nineveh and Tyre and the unmourned Escalade.
Kidder sighs. “I should have waited another minute or two. Oh, well.”
For Bridezilla is undergoing another transformation—another recodification, if you will. Not from real-estate whiz and investment banker’s kid to fire-breathing monster, but the reverse. To Tesla Kidder, who is thinking about Archie, going this way may be the more frightening. With a fire-breathing monster, at least, you know ahead of time what you’re getting. You don’t have to find out later, the hard way.
In the Northridge parking lot, Kate—yes, she’s Kate again—looks vaguely confused. She doesn’t remember a whole lot of what just happened. As Bridezilla, she had a brain about the size of a walnut. Most MBA candidates come with a little more cranial capacity than that.
Most reporters? It’s an open question. Anyone watching the subsequent interview between the TV guy and the recently ex-dinosaur would doubt that the intelligence level of the planet’s dominant species has changed much over the past 65,000,000 years.
Professor Tesla Kidder puts the long-range genetic recodifier back on the shelf. Maybe he’ll need it again one of these days. “Well, Igor,” he says, “what shall we work on next?”
Igor is still watching the aftermath of chaos on TV. Maybe staying in Moscow would have been better than this, or at least less wearing. But maybe not, too. That may be the scariest thought of all.
The wedding is a great success. If everything smells a bit too strongly of lime, well, you can live with lime. After the vows, before the minister tells Archie he may kiss the bride, he beats the guy to the punch. “Kiss me, Kate!” he says, and she does. If she doesn’t quite grok why he’s got that kind of smile on his face while he says it, you have to remember she’s only someone who’s finishing an MBA.
At the reception, Kate’s mother comes up to Tesla Kidder, champagne flute in hand. “Hey, listen,” she says, “you didn’t have anything to do with the, ah, unfortunate incident, didja?” That’s what Kate’s family—and their lawyers—have taken to calling the scaly, incendiary rampage through the mall.
“How could I possibly?” Professor Kidder answers. “I was in my laboratory the whole time. You can ask Igor, if you like. He was there with me.”
Actually, Kate’s mom can’t ask Igor right this second. He’s out on the dance floor with Stacey (who smells, defiantly, of frangipani). Kate’s mother nods, as if in wisdom. “Okay,” she says. “That’s what I already heard, anyways.” You have to remember, she’s only an investment banker. Mad scientists? They’re right out of her league.
WE INSTALL
This one is my daughter Rebecca’s fault. Living in sunny Southern California, we put up with visits from, among other people, solar-power-company salespeople hawking their outfits’ products door-to-door. After I sent yet another one of them away without buying, I noticed that she was giggling.
“What’s funny?” I asked.
“Didn’t you hear what he said?” she answered. “He said, ‘We install solar systems.’”
I thought about that. “Oh.” I laughed, too, and went on, “Well, if I write the story, I’ll give you a chunk of the check.” A few days later, I wrote it, and she did get a piece of what I got for it.
So the doorbell rings. So for a wonder it’s twenty minutes before dinner, not during. So okay, I heave my butt out of the recliner and go to the door. There’s a kind of dweeby-looking guy on my front porch. Khakis. Dark blue polo shirt with a company logo on the left breast. Plastic badge on a lanyard around his neck. Clipboard.
Not likely to be a home-invasion robber. Possible, sure, but not likely. So I open the door. “Yes?” I say.
“Hi.” He smiles almost like he means it. “My name’s Eric.” He holds up his badge. The badge’s name is Eric, anyway.
I nod. I say, “And?” I wait.
“I’m with Superior Solar.” He taps the logo on his chest. “We install solar systems, and we’re going through your neighborhood now offering some very attractive discounts. Putting in a new solar system can save you some serious money, you know.”
When I open the door, I expect I’ll listen to his spiel and go We’re not interested, thanks. It’s like there’s a tape in my head. A salesman comes, I listen to his spiel, I go We’re not interested, thanks, and I shut the door. Spiel runs long, I shut it before he finishes.
Only not today. I turn and I yell, “Debbie! Hey, Debbie!”
“What?” my wife yells from the kitch
en. That’s where the good smells come from. Twenty minutes till dinnertime, remember?
“There’s a guy from Superior Solar on the porch.” When she’s in the kitchen, she can’t hardly hear the bell ring. “He says they got good deals on new solar systems.”
“Well, talk to him, for crying out loud,” she says. “The one that came with this place is old as the hills, and it’s a piece of junk.”
She’s right, no two ways about it. She is. That old solar system’s given us nothing but trouble ever since we moved in here. And when she goes talk to him, that means we can finally afford to replace the miserable thing. Debbie minds the checkbook around here. Tell me it’s not like that at your house, pal.
So okay, I say, “C’mon in, Eric. Let’s talk abut these deals of yours.”
So he spreads his pictures and his price list out on the dining-room table. And right away I see a system I like. It’s got good power, and the price looks okay to me. I call Debbie over to make sure I’m not getting us in too deep. She thinks for a minute. Then she says, “Yeah, we can swing that.”
“We will swing that,” I tell Eric. “How soon can you install it?”
“We’ve got a tech crew in the neighborhood,” he says. “We’ll start tomorrow morning. If it’s a straightforward job, we should be done by late afternoon. Any chance I can get up on your roof now so I can see what we’ll have to do in the replacement process?”
I ask Debbie a question with my eyebrows. She goes, “I’ll turn supper down.”
I lean the ladder against the side of the house. We both go up there (I check to see Eric’s insured first). He’s good and careful on the slope; it’s not like he’s never done this before. He steps over the oorts and kuipers out at the edge (smart—those little bastards’ll freeze your ankles off if you give ’em half a chance) and bends down to take a look at the power unit in the center of the system.
He kinda grunts. “You could do with a new one, all right. This one here’s gotta be close to 5X10E9.”
“I told you—this system was in place when we bought the house,” I say.
“They don’t usually last past 1X10E10, not ones this size. They blow up on you, make all kinds of trouble. You’re smart to replace while it’s still kinda working.” Eric takes out a loupe and inspects the sixth wanderer. “What happened here? What’s up with the ring?”
“A couple of the outliers smashed together a while ago and broke up. Didn’t seem to hurt anything much, so I just left it alone.”
“Sloppy workmanship, though.” Eric switches to another loupe, one with a longer lens. “Same with this grit between Five and Four. We make ’em a lot better now, we really do. You’ll like your new one. It’s clean, man.”
“Cool,” I say. “Um, could you take a peek at Three? It’s been kinda funny-like for a while.”
He does, with the strongest lens yet. He’s frowning when he looks up. “Hate to tell you, but I think it’s gone moldy.”
“I was afraid of that. Now I’m extra glad we’re ripping this one out.”
“Yeah, that stuff can be nasty,” Eric agrees. “Sometimes it even spreads to systems up and down the block.” He writes on his clipboard. “Gotta make sure we sterilize it before we recycle.”
I nod. “Sounds like a plan.” He fiddles around up there while I get hungrier. So I say, “You want to have dinner with us? Debbie always makes plenty.”
That gets him moving. “No, thanks,” he says. “Still got more ground to cover today. Let’s go down, shall we?” And we do.
I stow the ladder in the garage. We go into the house again. Debbie says, “I heard you guys clomping around up there. Everything all set?”
“Sure is,” Eric answers. “Good thing I went up. Wanderer Three’s got mold on it, and it’ll need steam cleaning before they can reuse it.”
“Ewww.” Debbie hates gross stuff. She asks, “No extra charge?” She hates that, too.
But he says, “Nah—comes with the install. The crew’ll be here between nine and eleven tomorrow. It’ll be kinda noisy, but not too bad. Look, here’s my card.” He sets it on the table. “Any trouble at all, call me, hear? Now I’m gonna run. Thanks, folks.” And away Eric goes. He’s got more solar systems to sell.
ALTERNATE HISTORY:
THE HOW-TO OF WHAT
MIGHT HAVE BEEN
When Michael Knost put together his Writers Workshop of Science Fiction & Fantasy (Seventh Star Press, 2013), he asked me for a piece on how to write alternate history, since I’ve done a fair amount of it. The question faintly alarmed me, since I usually don’t think about how I do what I do, any more than a centipede thinks about how it keeps all those legs going. I just do it. I worried that, if I started taking apart what I did, I might start having trouble doing it, the way a contemplative centipede might end up with its feet all tangled together. But the prospect of a check got me going again, as I suspected it would. And I’m still writing stories, too, which is nice.
It’s mildly surprising that, these days, alternate history is mostly a subgenre of science fiction. Up through the first third of the twentieth century, it was the province—more accurately, the playground—of historians and politicians on a lark. As far as I know, it was invented by a historian on a lark, and not one notorious for larkishness, either. Writing around the time of Christ, the Roman scissors-and-paste specialist Livy wondered what might have happened had Alexander the Great not died in 323 BC, but turned west and loosed his Macedonians against the Roman Republic. Livy’s opinion was that his long-dead ancestors would have handled Alexander’s hoplite band just fine. My opinion is that Livy was a wild-eyed optimist, but that’s neither here nor there. He wrote about not what had been but what might have been, and the die, as another Roman said, was cast.
More recent examples also have authors better known for things other than cranking out alternate history. In 1931, Winston Churchill published “If Lee Had Not Won the Battle of Gettysburg” in editor J.C. Squire’s If It Had Happened Otherwise: Lapses into Imaginative History. Churchill wasn’t in the British government at the time, but he had been, and, as some of you will recall, he would be again. Three years later, Arnold J. Toynbee, a historian of considerably greater acumen than Livy, wrote “The Forfeited Birthright of the Abortive Western Christian Civilization” as part of the second volume of A Study of History. This examines what a world where Celtic Christianity triumphed over the Roman variety and the Muslims succeeded in invading the Frankish Kingdom could have looked like. Both of these essays are party tricks, games intellectuals play.
So how did a-h become part of sf, then? Well, for one thing, sf writers have written a devil of a lot of alternate history. Those in our field who’ve turned their hand to a-h include Murray Leinster, L. Sprague de Camp (whose “The Wheels of If” dramatizes the results of Toynbee’s speculation), Poul Anderson, H. Beam Piper, Philip K. Dick, John Brunner, yours truly, S.M. Stirling, Kim Newman, William Sanders. … I could go on, but you get the idea.
And it’s not surprising that this should be so, either. Alternate history uses the same extrapolative technique as other science fiction. It just plants the extrapolation at a different place on the timeline. Most sf changes something in the present or the nearer future and works out its consequences in the more distant future. A-h, by contrast, changes something in the more distant past and examines the effects of that change on the nearer past or the present. The tools are identical. Their placement, though, makes for different kinds of stories.
Outsiders still do pick up these tools every now and again. Over the past couple of generations, interesting alternate histories have come from writers as diverse as MacKinlay Kantor, Len Deighton, Richard Harris, and Philip Roth. In comments about The Plot Against America, Roth made it plain that he thought he was inventing something new and different with this whole what-might-have-been thing. He wasn’t, but he produced an important book anyhow.
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So you’ve decided you’re going to write an alternate history this time around. How do you go about writing a good one, one that will entertain and interest your readers (without which, all else fails) and, with luck, make them think a bit, too? The first thing I need to warn you of is, it’s not about Being Right. By the nature of things, you can’t know if you’re right. You are conducting a Gedankenexperiment, nothing more (and nothing less). You can reasonably hope to be plausible. Often—though not always—in this kind of story you will want to be plausible. We’ll talk about how to manage that in a little bit. First, though, another word of warning.
Who and what you are will influence what you find interesting. This is not a hot headline; it is, in fact, inevitable. All fiction—not just a-h, not just sf, but all fiction—is not about the world you’re creating. It’s about the world you’re living in. It’s no accident that Livy speculated about an Alexandrian-Roman encounter. It’s no accident that several nineteenth-century French novelists wondered what the world would have looked like had Napoleon won. It’s no accident that Americans write so much a-h about their Civil War: it shaped who and what our country became. It’s no accident that everybody seems to write a lot of alternate history about World War II; it’s drowned out World War I in public perception of what made the rest of the twentieth century (and now the twenty-first) the way it is. Look at a different war and you look at a different world. A-h gives you a funhouse mirror in which to examine the real world and distort it in ways you can’t do with any other kind of fiction.
Okay. Well and good. You can’t help being who and what you are. History—real history—made you that way. Neverthenonetheless, using your a-h story to bang a big drum for your political views has about as much chance of succeeding as using any other kind of story for the same purpose. People who already agree with you will go “Well, sure!” or, if they’re old farts, “Right on!” People who don’t will say less kindly things. Converting them ain’t gonna happen. And selling your birthright for a pot of message (thank you, Ted Sturgeon) is almost always a bad idea. On second thought, delete “almost.”
We Install Page 2