Other Earths

by edited by Nick Gevers; Jay Lake

  Another passage from The Tea Forest occurred to me:

  “. . . He had tried to make an architectural statement of his life after the tea forest, to isolate a geometric volume of air within a confine whose firm foundations and soaring walls and sculptural conceits reflected an internal ideal, a refinement of function, a purity of intent. Though partially successful in this, though he had buried his memories of the forest beneath the process of his art, he became aware that the task was impossible. One journey begat another. Even if you were to remain in a single place, the mind traveled. His resolves would fray, and, eventually, everything he had accomplished and accumulated—the swan of leaded crystal keeping watch from the windowsill, the books, the Indonesian shadow puppets that haunted his study, the women, his friends, the framed Tibetan paintings, the madras curtains that gaudily colored the bedroom light, his habit of taking morning tea and reading the Post at Damrey’s stall in the Russian Market, the very idea of having possessions and being possessed—these things would ultimately become meaningless, and he would escape the prison he had fashioned of them into the larger yet no less confining prison of his nature, and he would begin to wonder, What now? When would the monster next appear and for what purpose? How could he, who had been granted the opportunity to understand so much, know so little?”

  It was a dreary prospect that Cradle Two painted, one I chose to deny. Unlike him, I had performed a redemptive act by saving the man—that signaled hope for improvement, surely—and I believed that, with Kim’s help, I could shape a world that would contain more than my ego and ambition. I would learn to make do with life’s pleasures no matter how illegitimate they were. And if I thought too much about the forest, why then I could write about it. The Tea Forest need not be a stand-alone book. A sequel might be in order, one that further explored the nature of the animal; perhaps a trilogy, a spiritual odyssey with a well-defined and exalting ending. I smelled awards, large advances. Small things, yet they delighted me.

  The sun was up and the air steamy, baking the weeds and the little houses, when we came to Phu Tho. A putrid stench proceeded from the pale green house where the fat Cradle had died, and the innumerable ruined and stranded boats looked almost festive in the morning light, like the remnants of a regatta at which too good a time had been had by all. We had reached the banks of the canal when I remembered something. I told the man to wait, that I had left certain of my possessions in the fat man’s house. He sank to the grass, grateful to have a rest. I walked back to the house and peeked in the door. Bian had fled and taken her records. I tied my T-shirt about my nose and mouth to cut the smell and steeled myself. It promised to be a disgusting business, retrieving the notebooks of my dead brothers, but I had my career to think of.

  NINE ALTERNATE ALTERNATE HISTORIES

  Benjamin Rosenbaum

  1. The point of convergence. If any given event may have two subtly different alternate causes, perhaps both may obtain. If history books from two alternate timelines that arrive at the same place have different reasons to tell the same lies, convergence is possible, maybe inevitable.

  2. The point of convergence, theological. Perhaps we evolved from apes, from shambling lichen molds, were molded out of corn after the destruction of our elder mud siblings, coalesced out of wishes, lost our way in the unused back service hallways of the fifth floor of a metadepartment store in the dreamlands and took the wrong elevator, were created by a loving god, were trapped here by an evil demiurge, were banished here to unlearn false ideas, are dreams in the mind of the Red King, made up this game and forgot we were playing it. Or all these at once, and this is the point of convergence, the point at which the histories become indistinguishable, and, as of today, it no longer matters what story we tell.

  3. The point of divergence, personal. It’s raining now in Freie Strasse. Without moving my head, I see five hundred new white explosions every instant: rain-drops punishing the dark sidewalk, the dark street, five hundred tiny fists, and then five hundred more. Had I left Starbucks fifteen minutes ago, I would be at the office now. Dry.

  We humor ourselves that these decisions matter.

  Or else we console ourselves that they don’t.

  4. The point of convergence, personal. Instead of asking, “Had I but . . . ?” or “Had I not . . . ?” ask “Did I really?”

  You broke his doll. He cried. And then there are stories as to why. You maintained your innocence; you thought you had a right to play with this doll in this way. You were accused of insensitivity. He argued for malice. Secretly you suspected yourself of an irrepressible caprice, a wild demonic hunger for the world to go bang. Like a beast inside you that was beyond your control. But maybe that was not how it was at all.

  You know the one you kissed when you shouldn’t have? You had a headache. There was not really time. Also, it was too early, not right. And it ended badly. Did you really want that kiss? What were you thinking? Maybe you were showing off. Maybe you were about to cry, and the kiss stopped it. Maybe you would have done anything just to feel something. Maybe you were giddy. Maybe you were angry. It’s hard to recall. Was it really you who broke the doll? Sometimes you take an old photograph out of a box, or compare two dates in your mind, and suddenly fall into a new history.

  Maybe you have an army of pasts, crowding around each of those moments. Maybe an army of ghost-yous were cheated, tricked into sharing a future, when they could have lived so many different lives.

  5. The pandemonic history. You made every decision, you took every choice. You kissed and killed and greeted meekly and ignored everyone you ever saw. You ate rocks, tossed babies out of windows. Broke and mended every doll. At every moment you were conscious of a choice, you made all choices. At every moment when you thought you had no choice, that circumstances forced your hand, you chose everything then too, you kept and broke and ignored and rein-vented every promise, incurred and evaded every consequence. At every moment your memory elides, because you were sunk into habitual action, just getting from point A to point B, you did every possible thing then too—crashed the car, stopped and stared out at the marsh, sang country songs in languages you don’t even know.

  In fact, you speak every language, even languages that don’t exist, because right now, right this moment, you are in the midst of using your tongue and throat in every possible way. It makes a huge howl filling the space of all those yous.

  And every person and pigeon and raindrop makes all choices too, filling the space. Filling the possible space.

  The history of all this destroys narrative; it is a sculpture, a thick fabric, each instant a knot exploding into a flower of threads.

  And you are tracing your finger over one thread, choosing a life. But you could stop right now.

  Isn’t that restful?

  Isn’t that a restful thing to think?

  6. The alternate history is here, it is just not evenly distributed. There are places the South won the war. There are places the Nazis won the war. There are places the Revolution succeeded and lapsed into the everyday. There are places the rightful king was restored. There are stacks of skulls. There are clusters of adobe buildings in the sun, where water runs, cold and clear, in secret shaded places, and the women’s hands sift the grains of corns and there is peace. There is just government and technical brilliance and magic. There are those who heal with their hands, and there are places where superstition was banished by the light of Reason. There are lithe, furry, upright creatures with heads the size of softballs who carry spears, running among the vines.

  7. The definite history.

  We love choice. Choice is liberty, choice is the bounty of the common man. When we tell ourselves alternate histories, we are reassuring ourselves of the profaneness of events. We might have lost the war, we tell ourselves. We might have lost. And then everything would be different. There was a point of divergence. For want of a nail.

  (If you had kissed the other one, instead . . .)

  And so too in this moment:
For want of will, for want of clarity, for want of love, we could lose this moment, this war, this choice. We stand at a fork in the road, and one road leads down into darkness and the other up into light. Choose, choose, choose, choose, choose wisely.

  We stand in the supermarket aisle and read ingredients. These cookies have partially hydrogenated vegetable oil; these do not. Plus they are made with organic flour. This stock has a P/E of 15. This browser has better security. This job is nearer to my house. This one loves me best.

  But perhaps this cry of “choose” is like the hooting of an owl. Perhaps choice is limited to the Planck radius, and damping effects make of our macroscopic world a clockwork machine. Perhaps God guides the nail from the shoe, dropping the horse, grounding the king, losing the battle, because God wants the war lost. Perhaps this is all overdetermined by historical inevitability. Perhaps the date of your death is written already in the pages of the Book of the Norns, partially hydrogenated vegetable oil or no.

  Perhaps this history is the only history, perhaps it is a series of equations with definite solutions, perhaps it commands our obedience. And this is to say that it is sacred, that there are secret numbers behind apparent choices, that if we could see the world finally, we would not see choices but only things. And then when we wrote alternate history, we would only write: No.

  8. The provisional history. Conceivably, the world is a machine designed to solve some problem. Perhaps it is a problem that cannot be solved analytically or intuitively; it requires a world, it requires a sequence of events. The solution cannot be apprehended from afar, all at once; instead, a tree of possibilities must be exhaustively traversed. Moments must be gone through, one after the other, each moment the startling, unpredictable result of the last, a chain of events followed until it becomes clear that the chain is not approaching a solution. Then the machine must back-track, erasing the events, resetting the state, and then embarking down a different path.

  So this time you are living in now, perhaps it has no durability. Unless it yields results, it will be erased. Your choices are provisional; if they work out, they will be retained. Otherwise, you will choose again. We may say, adjusting the framing of our narration to the bounds of your phenomenological experience: You will have the chance to choose again.

  You will have a chance to unbreak the doll, unkiss the kiss. On the other hand, all this will be lost.

  What is it like, then, to tell such a tale, to tell a story that turns out to have no consequences? A story of a draft universe, a narrative transaction that is rolled back and eliminated, of deaths postponed, shadow lives swirling and then clearing, as a mist, until the final, the correct life is found?

  (If the machine ever even halts; some problems are insoluble).

  Restful, restful.

  9. The provisional history, theological. I am crying for you, Beloved. I am killing you, and I am crying. And then you are here again. And on and on, until you have done your duty. Until I have understood. Thank you. Thank you. I am sorry. Thank you.

  About the Authors

  Robert Charles Wilson is the author of more than a dozen novels, including the Hugo Award-winning Spin and its sequel, Axis, as well as A Bridge of Years, Darwinia, Mysterium, Blind Lake, and Bios. His next novel will be Julian Comstock: A Story of the 22nd Century. Born in California, he currently lives near Toronto.

  Award-winning novelist Jeff VanderMeer is the author of the best-selling City of Saints & Madmen, set in his signature creation, the imaginary city of Ambergris, in addition to several other novels from Bantam, Tor, and Pan Macmillan. He has won two World Fantasy Awards, an NEA-funded Florida Individual Writers’ Fellowship, and, most recently, the Le Cafard Cosmique Award in France and the T̈htifantasia Award in Finland, both for City of Saints & Madmen. He has also been a finalist for the Hugo Award, Bram Stoker Award, IHG Award, Philip K. Dick Award, and many others. Other novels such as Veniss Underground and Shriek: An Afterword have made the year’s best lists of Amazon.com, The Austin Chronicle, The San Francisco Chronicle, and Publishers Weekly, among others. His work, both novels and short stories, has been translated into over twenty languages. The Thackery T. Lambshead Pocket Guide to Eccentric & Discredited Diseases may be his most famous anthology and is considered a cult classic, still in print along with his Leviathan original fiction series.

  Stephen Baxter was born in Liverpool. He holds degrees in mathematics and engineering and has worked as a teacher of math and physics and in information technology. He is also a Chartered Engineer. In 1991, Baxter applied to become a cosmonaut, aiming for the guest slot on Mir eventually taken by Helen Sharman, but fell at an early hurdle. His first professionally published short story appeared in 1987 and his first novel in 1991. Baxter has been a full-time author since 1995, with over forty science fiction novels published around the world. He is the President of the British Science Fiction Association, a Vice President of the H.G. Wells Society, and Fellow of the British Interplanetary Society. Baxter and his family moved to Northumberland in 2004. His current project is a pair of books describing a catastrophic inundation of the Earth: Flood and Ark.

  Gene Wolfe grew up in Houston, Texas, where he attended Edgar Allan Poe Elementary School. He dropped out of Texas A&M and got a CIB in Korea. In 1956, he graduated from the University of Houston. He and his wife, Rosemary, were married that year; they have two sons and two daughters, three grand-daughters, a step-granddaughter and a step-grandson. Wolfe has written The Fifth Head of Cerberus, Peace, The Devil in a Forest, The Book of the New Sun, Castleview, There Are Doors, Soldier of the Mist, Soldier of Arete, Soldier of Sidon, The Book of the Long Sun, The Book of the Short Sun, and others. His work has won two Nebula Awards, three World Fantasy Awards, the Deathrealm Award, the British Science Fiction Award, the British Fantasy Award, and others. His short fiction is collected in The Island of Doctor Death And Other Stories, Castle of Days, Endangered Species, Storeys From the Old Hotel, Strange Travelers , Innocents Aboard, and Starwater Strains. A two-volume fantasy, The Wizard Knight, is complete with the publication of The Wizard. He’s been the Guest of Honor at a Worldcon, a World Horror Convention, and a World Fantasy Convention. His latest novel is An Evil Guest.

  Liz Williams’ mother is a Gothic novelist, and her father was a part-time conjuror, so she didn’t have a hope. She’s been a science fiction fan since the age of ten, and she started writing seriously about ten years ago. Jack Vance’s Planet of Adventure series was responsible, and she’s still a huge fan of Vance. Other favorites include Ursula K. Le Guin, Ray Bradbury, Mary Gentle, George R.R. Martin, C.J. Cherryh, Tanith Lee, and Marion Zimmer Bradley. She now writes full time, but she has had various incarnations. Her background is in history and philosophy of science; having done degrees in philosophy and artificial intelligence at the Universities of Manchester and Sussex, she did a doctorate at Cambridge, graduating in 1993. She held a variety of part-time jobs, including a now-infamous stint on Brighton’s pier as a tarot reader, before full-time work in Kazakhstan. She also spent a year running an IT program at Brighton Women’s Centre, then became a full time writer in 2002.

  Theodora Goss was born in Hungary and spent her childhood in various European countries before her family moved to the United States. Although she grew up on the classics of English literature, her writing has been influenced by an Eastern European literary tradition in which the boundaries between realism and the fantastic are often ambiguous. She lives in Boston, where she is completing a Ph.D. in English literature. Her short story collection, In the Forest of Forgetting, which includes World Fantasy Award nominee “The Wings of Meister Wilhelm” and Nebula Award nominee “Pip and the Fairies,” was published in 2006. Interfictions , an anthology she coedited with Delia Sherman, was published in 2007. Her short stories and poems have been reprinted in a number of Year’s Best anthologies, including Year’s Best Fantasy, The Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, and The Year’s Best Science Fiction and Fantasy for Teens. Visit her website at www.theodoragoss
.com.

  Greg van Eekhout’s stories have appeared in places such as Year’s Best Science Fiction, Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, and Realms of Fantasy. His debut novel, Norse Code, will be released in May 2009. Greg lives in San Diego and blogs at http://www.writingandsnacks.com.

  Alastair Reynolds was born in Barry, South Wales, in 1966. After getting a Ph.D. in astronomy he moved to the Netherlands to work for the European Space Agency. He turned full-time writer in 2004. He and his wife have returned to South Wales, near Cardiff. His first fiction sale appeared in Interzone in 1990, and he published his first novel, Revelation Space, in 2000. Revelation Space was shortlisted for the BSFA and Clarke awards, and his second novel, Chasm City, went on to win the BSFA. Subsequent works include another six novels, of which the most recent are Pushing Ice (2005), The Prefect (2007), and the far-future space opera House of Suns (2008), as well as the linked novellas “Diamond Dogs,” “Turquoise Days” (2003), and two collections of short fiction, Galactic North and Zima Blue (2006). Forthcoming are stories in Galactic Empires and The Starry Rift. His story in Other Earths stems from a long fascination and love affair with the music of Ralph Vaughan Williams and his contemporaries.

  Paul Park lives in Massachusetts with his family and occasionally teaches at Williams College. Since finishing four novels set in an alternate version of eastern Europe (the Roumania Quartet—A Princess of Roumania, The Tourmaline, The White Tyger, The Hidden World), he has been writing short fiction. “A Family History” came out of a fundraiser for the Clarion West workshops, during which he auctioned off on eBay certain elements of an as yet unwritten story—the theme, the title, the various locations, the characters, the genre, etc. The winners would provide these things, and he would write a story that incorporated them. “A Family History” is the result.