The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Fifth Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  Knecht stooped and helped collect the scattered documents. Because he was a scout, however, he glanced at their contents as he did so; and as he absorbed their meaning, he read more and collected less.

  One sheet in particular held his attention. When he looked up from it, he saw Vonderberge waiting patiently behind his desk. He was leaning back in a swivel chair, his arms crossed over his chest. There was a knowing smile on the Kommandant’s thin aristocratic face.

  “Is this all…” Knecht began.

  “Ach, nein,” the Kommandant answered. “There is much, much more. However,” he added pointedly, “it is no longer in order.”

  “But, this is from the prisoner, Nando Kelly?”

  “Hernando is the name; not Herr Nando. It is Spanish, I believe.” Vonderberge clucked sadly over the documents and began setting them in order.

  Knecht stood over the desk. “But this is crazy stuff!” He waved the sheet in his hand. Vonderberge grabbed for it vainly. Knecht did not notice. “The man must be crazy!” he said.

  Vonderberge paused and cocked an eyebrow at him. “Crazy?” he repeated. “So says the Hexmajor. He can support his opinion with many fine words and a degree from Franklin University. I am but a simple soldier, a servant of the Commonwealth, and cannot state my own diagnosis in so impressive a manner. On what basis, Rudi, do you say he is crazy?”

  Knecht sputtered. “If it is not crazy to believe in countries that do not exist, I do not know what is. I have looked on all our world maps and have found no United States, not even in deepest Asia.”

  Vonderberge smiled broadly. He leaned back again, clasping his hands behind his neck. “Oh, I know where the United States are,” he announced smugly.

  Knecht made a face. “Tell me then, O Servant of the Commonwealth. Where are they?”

  Vonderberge chuckled. “If you can possibly remember so far back as your childhood history lessons, you may recall something of the Fourth Pennamite War.”

  Knecht groaned. The Pennamite Wars. He could never remember which was which. Both Connecticut and Pennsylvania had claimed the Wyoming Valley and had fought over it several times, a consequence of the English king’s cavalier attitude toward land titles. The fourth one? Let’s see … 1769, 1771, 1775 …

  “No,” he said finally. “I know nothing at all of the time between 1784 and 1792. I never heard of Brigadier Wadsworth and the Siege of Forty-Fort, or how General Washington and his Virginia militia were mowed down in the crossfire.”

  “Then you must also be ignorant,” continued the Kommandant, “of the fact that the same Congress that sent the General to stop the fighting was also working on a plan to unify the thirteen independent states. Now what do you suppose the name of that union was to be?”

  Knecht snorted. “I would be a great fool if I did not say ‘The United States.’”

  Vonderberge clapped. “Right, indeed, Rudi. Right, indeed. Dickinson was president of the Congress, you know.”

  Knecht was surprised. “Dickinson? John Dickinson, our first Chancellor?”

  “The very same. Being a Pennsylvanian, I suppose the yankee settlers thought he was plotting something by dispatching the supposedly neutral Virginians.… Well, of course, with Washington dead, and old Franklin incapacitated by a stroke at the news, the whole thing fell apart. Maryland never did sign the Articles of Confederation; and as the fighting among the states grew worse—over the Wyoming, over Vermont, over Chesapeake fishing rights, over the western lands—the others seceded also. All that Adams and the radicals salvaged was their New England Confederation; and even that was almost lost during Shay’s Rebellion and General Lincoln’s coup.…”

  Knecht interrupted. “So this almost-was United States was nothing more than a wartime alliance to throw the English out. It was stillborn in the 1780s. Yet Kelly’s map is dated this year.”

  “Ja, the map,” mused Vonderberge, as if to himself. “It is finely drawn, is it not? And the physical details—the mountains and streams—are astonishingly accurate. Only the man-made details are bizarre. Roads and dams that are not there. A great open space called an ‘airport.’ Towns that are three times their actual size. Did you see how large Easton is shown to be?”

  Knecht shrugged. “A hoax.”

  “Such an elaborate hoax? To what purpose?”

  “To fool us. He is a spy. If messages can be coded, why not maps?”

  “Ah. You say he is a spy. The Hexmajor says he is mad and the map is the complex working out of a system of delusions. I say…” He picked up a sheaf of papers from his desk and handed them to Knecht. “I say you should read Kelly’s notebook.”

  The scout glanced at the typewritten pages. “These are transcripts,” he pointed out. “They were done on the machine in your office. I recognize the broken stem on the r’s.” He made it a statement.

  Vonderberge threw his head back and laughed, slapping the arm of the chair. “Subtlety does not become you, Rudi,” he said looking at him. “Yes, they are transcripts. General Schneider has the originals. When I showed the journal to him, he wanted to read it himself. I made copies of the more interesting entries.”

  Knecht kept his face neutral. “You, and the General, and the Hexmajor. Ach! Kelly is my prisoner. I have yet to interview him. I gave you his possessions for safekeeping, not for distribution.”

  “Oh, don’t be so official, Rudi. What are we, Prussians? You were resting, I was bored, and the journal was here. Go ahead. Read it now.” Vonderberge waved an inviting hand.

  Knecht frowned and picked up the stack. The first few pages were filled with equations. Strange formulae full of inverted A’s and backward E’s. Knecht formed the words under his breath. “… twelve dimensional open manifold … Janatpour hypospace … oscillatory time…” He shook his head. “Nonsense,” he muttered.

  He turned the page and came to a text:

  “I am embarking on a great adventure. Does that sound grandiose? Very well, let it. Grandiose ideas deserve grandiose expression. Tomorrow, I make my first long range Jump. Sharon claims that it is too soon for such a field test, but she is too cautious. I’ve engineered the equipment. I know what it can do. Triple redundancy on critical circuits. Molecular foam memory. I am a certified reliability engineer, after all. The short Jumps were all successful. So what could go wrong?

  “Rosa could answer that. Sweet Rosa. She is not an engineer. She only sees that it is dangerous. And what can I say? It is dangerous. But when has anything perfectly safe been worth doing? The equipment is as safe as I can make it. I tried to explain about probabilities and hazard analysis to Rosa last night, but she only cried and held me tighter.

  “She promised to be in the lab a week from tomorrow when I make my return Jump. A week away from Rosa. A week to study a whole new universe. Madre de Dios! A week can be both a moment and an eternity.”

  Knecht chewed his moustache. The next page was titled “Jump #1” followed by a string of twelve “coordinate settings.” Then there were many pages which Knecht skimmed, detailing a world that never was. In it, the prehistoric Indians had not exterminated the Ice Age big game. Instead, they had tamed the horse, the elephant, and the camel and used the animal power to keep pace technologically with the Old World. Great civilizations arose in the river valleys of the Colorado and Rio Grande, and mighty empires spread across the Caribbean. Vikings were in Vinland at the same time the Iroquois were discovering Ireland. By the present day there were colonies on Mars.

  Knecht shook his head. “Not only do we have a United States,” he muttered.

  The next entry was briefer and contained the first hint of trouble. It was headed “Jump #2.” Except for the reversal of plus and minus signs, the coordinate settings were identical with the first set.

  “A slight miscalculation. I should be back in the lab with Rosa, but I’m in somebody’s apartment, instead. It’s still Philly out the window—though a shabbier, more run-down Philly than I remember. I must be close to my home timeline because I can
recognize most of the University buildings. There’s a flag that looks like the stars and stripes on the flagpole in front of College Hall. There’s something or other black hanging from the lamppost, but I can’t make it out. Well, work first; tourism later. I bet I’ll need a vernier control. There must be a slight asymmetry in the coordinates.”

  Knecht skipped several lines of equations and picked up the narrative once more.

  “I must leave immediately! That black thing on the lamppost kept nagging at the back of my mind. So I got out my binoculars and studied it. It was a nun in a black habit, hanging in a noose. Hanging a long time, too, by the looks of it. Farther along the avenue, I could see bodies on all the lampposts. Then the wind caught the flag by College Hall and I understood. In place of the stars there was a swastika …

  “Jump #3. Coordinates …

  “Wrong again. I was too hasty in leaving the Nazi world. The settings were not quite right, but I think I know what went wrong now. The very act of my Jumping has created new branches in time and changed the oscillatory time-distance between them. On the shorter Jumps it didn’t matter much, but on the longer ones …

  “I think I finally have the calculations right. This is a pleasant world where I am, and—thanks to Goodman deVeres and his wife—I’ve had the time to think the problem through. It seems the Angevin kings still rule in this world and my host has described what seems like scientific magic. Superstition? Mass delusion? I’d like to stay and study this world, but I’m already a week overdue. Darling Rosa must be frantic with worry. I think of her often.”

  The next page was headed “Jump 4” with settings but no narrative entry. This was followed by …

  “Jump #5. Coordinates unknown.

  “Damn! It didn’t work out right and I was almost killed. This isn’t an experiment any more. Armored samurai in a medieval Philadelphia? Am I getting closer to or farther from Home? I barely escaped them. I rode north on a stolen horse and Jumped as soon as my charge built up. Just in time, too—my heart is still pounding. No time for calculations. I don’t even know what the settings were.

  “Note: the horse Jumped with me. The field must be wider than I thought. A clue to my dilemma? I need peace and quiet to think this out. I could find it with Goodman deVeres. I have the coordinates for his world. But his world isn’t where I left it. When I jumped, I moved it. Archimedes had nothing on me. Haha. That’s a joke. Why am I bothering with this stupid journal?

  “I dreamed of Rosa last night. She was looking for me. I was right beside her but she couldn’t see me. When I awoke, it was still dark. Off to the north there was a glow behind the crest of the hills. City lights? If that is South Mountain, it would be Allentown or Bethlehem on the other side—or their analogs in this world. I should know by next night. So far I haven’t seen anyone; but I must be cautious.

  “I’ve plenty of solitude here-and-now. That slag heap I saw from the mountain must have been Bethlehem, wiped out by a single bomb. The epicenter looked to be about where the steelworks once stood. It happened a long time ago, by the looks of things. Nothing living in the valley but a few scrub plants, insects and birds.

  “I rode out as fast as I could to put that awful sight behind me. I didn’t dare eat anything. My horse did and is dead for it. Who knows what sort of adaptations have fit the grass for a radio-active environment? I may already have stayed too long. I must Jump, but I daren’t materialize inside a big city. I’ll hike up into the northern hills before I Jump again.”

  Knecht turned to the last page. Jump #6. Settings, but no notes. There was a long silence while Knecht digested what he had read. Vonderberge was watching him. Outside, the wind rattled the windows. A nearby lightning strike caused the lights to flicker.

  “Herr Festungskommandant…”

  “His last Jump landed him right in your lap out on the Wyoming Trail.”

  “Herr Festungskommandant…”

  “And instead of the solitude he sought, he’s gotten solitude of another sort.”

  “You don’t believe…”

  “Believe?” Vonderberge slammed his palm down on the desk with unexpected violence. He stood abruptly and walked three quick paces to the window, where he gazed out at the storm. His fingers locked tightly behind his back. “Why not believe?” he whispered, his back to the room. “Somewhere there is a world where Heinrich Vonderberge is not trapped in a border fort on the edge of a war with the lives of others heavy on his back. He is in a laboratory, experimenting with electrical science, and he is happy.”

  He turned and faced Knecht, self-possessed once more.

  “What if,” he said. “What if the Pennamite Wars had not turned so vicious? If compromise had been possible? Had they lived, might not Washington and Franklin have forged a strong union, with the General as king and the Doctor as prime minister? Might not such a union have spread west, crushing Sequoyah and Tecumseh and their new Indian states before the British had gotten them properly started? Can you imagine a single government ruling the entire continent?”

  Knecht said, “No,” but Vonderberge continued without hearing him.

  “Suppose,” he said, pacing the room, “every time an event happens, several worlds are created. One for each outcome.” He paused and smiled at Knecht. “Suppose Pennsylvania had not intervened in the Partition of New Jersey? No Piney War. New York and Virginia cut us off from the sea. Konrad Schneider does not become a great General, nor Rudi Knecht a famous spy. Somewhere there is such a world. Somewhere … close.

  “Now suppose further that on one of these … these moeglichwelten a man discovers how to cross from one to another. He tests his equipment, makes many notes, then tries to return. But he fails.”

  A crash of thunder punctuated the Kommandant’s words. Knecht jumped.

  “He fails,” Vonderberge continued, “because in the act of jumping he has somehow changed the ‘distance.’ So, on his return, he undershoots. At first, he is not worried. He makes a minor adjustment and tries again. And misses again. And again, and again, and again.”

  Vonderberge perched on the corner of his desk, his face serious. “Even if there is only one event each year, and each event had but two outcomes, why then in ten years do you know how many worlds there would have to be?”

  Knecht shook his head dumbly.

  “A thousand, Rudi, and more. And in another ten years, a thousand for each of those. Time is like a tree; a forest of trees. Always branching. One event a year? Two possible outcomes? Ach! I am a piker! In all of time, how many, many worlds there must be. How to find a single twig in such a forest?”

  Knecht could think of nothing to say. In the quiet of the office, the storm without seemed louder and more menacing.

  * * *

  In the morning, of course, with the dark storm only muddy puddles, Knecht could dismiss the Kommandant’s remarks as a bad joke. “What if?” was a game for children; a way of regretting the past. Knecht’s alert eye had not missed the row of technofiction books in Vonderberge’s office. “What if?” was a common theme in that genre, Knecht understood.

  When he came to Kelly’s cell to interrogate the prisoner, he found that others had preceded him. The guard at the cell door came to attention, but favored Knecht with a conspiratorial wink. From within the cell came the sound of angry voices. Knecht listened closely, his ear to the thick, iron door; but he could make out none of the words. He straightened and looked a question at the guard. The latter rolled his eyes heavenward with a look of resigned suffering. Knecht grinned.

  “So, Johann,” he said. “How long has this been going on?”

  “Since sun-up,” was the reply. “The Kommandant came in early to talk to the prisoner. He’d been in there an hour when the Hexmajor arrived. Then there was thunder-weather, believe me, sir.” Johann smiled at the thought of two officers bickering.

  Knecht pulled two cigars from his pocket humidor and offered one to the guard. “Do you suppose it is safe to leave them both locked in together?” He l
aughed. “We may as well relax while we wait. That is, if you are permitted…”

  The guard took the cigar. “The Kommandant is more concerned that we are experts in how to shoot our rifles than in how to sneak a smoke.” There was a pause while Knecht lit his cigar. He puffed a moment, then remarked, “This is good leaf. Kingdom of Carolina?”

  Knecht nodded. He blew out a great cloud of acrid smoke. “You know you should not have allowed either of them in to see the prisoner before me.”

  ‘Well, sir. You know that and I know that; but the Hexmajor and the Kommandant, they make their own rules.” The argument in the cell reached a crescendo. Johann flinched. “Unfortunately, they do not make the same rules.”

  “Hmph. Is your Kommandant always so … impetuous?” He wanted to know Heinrich Vonderberge better; and one way to do that was to question the men who followed him.

  The guard frowned. “Sir, things may be different in the Scout Corps, but the Kommandant is no fool, in spite of his ways. He always has a reason for what he does. Why, no more than two months ago—this was before you were assigned here—he had us counting the number of pigeons flying north. He plotted it on a daily chart.” Johann laughed at the memory. “Then he sent us out to intercept a raiding party from the Nations. You see, you know how the sachems still allow private war parties? Well…”

  There was a banging at the cell door and Johann broke off whatever yarn he had been about to spin and opened it. Vonderberge stalked out.

  “We will see about that!” he snapped over his shoulder, and pushed past Knecht without seeing him. Knecht took his cigar from his mouth and looked from the Kommandant to the doorway. Hexmajor Ochsenfuss stood there, glaring at the Kommandant’s retreating form. “Fool,” the Doctor muttered through clenched teeth. Then he noticed Knecht.

  “And what do you want? My patient is highly agitated. He cannot undergo another grilling.”

  Knecht smiled pleasantly. “Why, Herr Doctor. He is not your patient until I say so. Until then, he is my prisoner. I found him north of the Mountain. It is my function to interview him.”