Making History

by Rick Wilber

  “‘Keep close to the earth!’” a voice boomed. Radio jumped. Amelia, she noticed, did not. Then she saw that there were radios set in brackets to either end of the room. “Such was the advice of the preeminent international airman, Alberto Santos-Dumont, and they were good enough words for their time.” The familiar voice chuckled and half-snorted, and the radio crackled loudly as his breath struck the sensitive electroacoustic transducer that had captured his voice. “But his time is not my time.” He paused briefly; one could almost hear him shrug his shoulders. “One is never truly tested close to the earth. It is in the huge arching parabola of an aeroplane finding its height and seeking a swift descent from it that a man’s courage is found. It is there, in acts outside of the quotidian, that his mettle is tested.”

  A televideon camera ratcheted about, tracking their progress. Were the New Brains watching them, Radio wondered? The thought gave her the creeps.

  Then they were put in an elevator (only two guards could fit in with them, and Radio thought that for sure Amelia would make her play now; but the aviatrix stared expressionlessly forward and did nothing) and taken down to the flight deck. There the exterior walls had been removed, as would be done under wartime conditions when the ‘planes and wargyros had to be gotten into the air as soon as possible. Cold winds buffeted and blustered about the vast and empty space.

  “A young man dreams of war and glory,” the voice said from a dozen radios. “He toughens his spirit and hardens his body with physical activity and discomfort. In time, he’s ready to join the civil militia, where he is trained in the arts of killing and destruction. At last, his ground training done, he is given an aeroplane and catapulted into the sky, where he discovers . . .” The voice caught and then, when it resumed, was filled with wonder, “. . . not hatred, not destruction, not war, but peace.”

  To the far side of the flight deck, unconcerned by his precarious location, a tall figure in a flyer’s uniform bent over a body in greasy coveralls, which he had dragged right to the edge. Then he flipped it over. It was Grimy Huey, and he was dead.

  The tall man stood and turned. “Leave,” he told the guards.

  They clicked their heels and obeyed.

  “He almost got me, you know,” the man remarked conversationally. “He came at me from behind with a wrench. Who would have thought that a mere mechanic had that much gumption in him?”

  For a long moment, Amelia Spindizzy stood ramrod-straight and unmoving. Radio Jones sank to the deck, crouching by her side. She couldn’t help herself. The cold and windy openness of the flight deck scared her spitless. She couldn’t even stand. But, terrified though she was, she didn’t look away. Someday all this would be in the history books; whatever happened, she knew, was going to determine her view of the world and its powers for the rest of her natural life, however short a time that might be.

  Then Amelia strolled forward toward Eszterhazy and said, “Let me help you with that.” She stooped and took the mechanic’s legs. Eszterhazy took the arms. They straightened, swung the body - one! two! three! - and flung it over the side.

  Slapping her hands together, Amelia said, “Why’d you do it?”

  Eszterhazy shrugged in a self-deprecating way. “It had to be done. So I stepped up to the plate and took a swing at the ball. That’s all.” Then he grinned boyishly. “It’s good to know that you’re on my team.”

  “That’s you on the radios,” Amelia said. They were still booming away, even though the buffeting winds drowned out half the words that came from them.

  “Wire recording.” Eszterhazy strode to a support strut and slapped a switch. The radios all died. “A little talk I prepared, being broadcast to the masses. Radio has been scandalously underutilized as a tool of governance.”

  Amelia’s response was casual - even, Radio thought, a bit dunderheaded technologically. “But radio’s everywhere,” she said. “There are dozens of public sets scattered through the city. Why, people can hear news bulletins before the newspapers can even set type and roll the presses!”

  Eszterhazy smiled a thin, tight, condescending smile. “But they only tell people what’s happened, and not what to think about it. That’s going to change. My people are distributing sets to every bar, school, church, and library in the city. In the future, my future, everyone will have a bank of radios in their home - the government radio, of course, but also one for musical events, another for free lectures, and perhaps even one for business news.”

  Radio felt the urge to speak up and say that fixed-frequency radios were a thing of the past. But she suppressed it. She sure wasn’t about to hand over her invention to a bum the likes of which Eszterhazy was turning out to be. But what the heck was the matter with Amelia?

  Amelia Spindizzy put her hands behind her, and turned her back on her longtime archrival. Head down, deep in thought, she trod the edge of the abyss. “Hah.” The word might have meant anything. “You’ve clearly put a lot of thought into this . . . this . . . new world order of yours.”

  “I’ve been planning this all my life,” Eszterhazy said with absolute seriousness. “New and more efficient forms of government, a society that not only promotes the best of its own but actively weeds out the criminals and the morally sick. Were you aware that before Lycurgus became king, the Spartans were a licentious and ungovernable people? He made them the fiercest warriors the world has ever known in the space of a single lifetime.” He stopped, and then with a twinkle in his eye said, “There I go again, talking about the Greeks! As I started to say, I thought I would not be ready to make my move for many years. But then I got wind of certain experiments performed by Anna Pavlova which proved that not only were the Naked Brains functionally mad, but that I had it in my power to offer them the one thing for which they would give me their unquestioning cooperation - death.

  “In their corruption were the seeds of our salvation. And thus fell our oppressors.”

  “I worked with them, and I saw no oppressors.” Amelia rounded her course strolling back toward Eszterhazy, brow furrowed with thought. “Only nets of neurological fiber who, as it turned out, were overcome by the existential terror of their condition.”

  “Their condition is called ‘life,’ Millie. And, yes, life makes us all insane.” Eszterhazy could have been talking over the radio, his voice was so reassuring and convincing. “Some of us respond to that terror with useless heroics. Others seek death.” He cocked a knowing smile at Amelia. “Others respond by attacking the absurdity at its source. Ruled by Naked Brains, humanity could not reach its full potential. Now, once again, we will rule ourselves.”

  “It does all make sense. It all fits.” Amelia Spindizzy came to a full stop and stood shaking her head in puzzlement. “If only I could understand-”

  “What is there to understand?” An impatient edge came into Eszterhazy’s voice. “What have I left unexplained? We can perfect our society in our lifetimes! You’re so damnably cold and analytic, Millie. Don’t you see that the future lies right at your feet? All you have to do is let go of your doubts and analyses and intellectual hesitations and take that leap of faith into a better world.”

  Radio trembled with impotent alarm. She knew that, small and ignored as she was, it might be possible for her to be the wild card, the unexpected element, the unforeseeable distraction that saves the day. That it was, in fact, her duty to do so. She’d seen enough Saturday afternoon kinescope serials to understand that.

  If only she could bring herself to stand up. Though it almost made her throw up to do so, Radio brought herself to her feet. The wind whipped the deck, and Eszterhazy quickly looked over at her. As though noticing her for the first time. And then, as Radio fought to overcome her paralyzing fear, Amelia acted.

  She smiled that big, easy Amelia grin that had captured the hearts of proles and aristos alike. It was a heartfelt smile and a wickedly hoydenish leer at one and the same time, and it bespoke aggression and an inner shyness in equal parts. A disarming grin, many people called it.


  Smiling her disarming grin, Amelia looked Eszterhazy right in the eye. She looked as if she had just found a brilliant solution to a particularly knotty problem. Despite the reflexive decisiveness for which he was known, Eszterhazy stood transfixed.

  “You know,” she said, “I had always figured that, when all the stats were totted up and the final games were flown, you and I would find a shared understanding in our common enthusiasm for human-controlled-”

  All in an instant, she pushed forward, wrapped her arms around her opponent, and let their shared momentum carry them over the edge.

  Radio instantly fell to the deck again and found herself scrambling across it to the edge on all fours. Gripping the rim of the flight decking with spasmodic strength, she forced herself to look over. Far below, two conjoined specks tumbled in a final flight to the earth.

  She heard a distant scream - no, she heard laughter.

  ***

  Radio managed to hold herself together through the endless ceremonies of a military funeral. To tell the truth, the pomp and ceremony of it - the horse-drawn hearse, the autogyro fly-by, the lines of dignitaries and endlessly droning eulogies in the Cathedral - simply bored her to distraction. There were a couple of times when Mack had to nudge her because she was falling asleep. Also, she had to wear a dress and, sure as shooting, any of her friends who saw her in it were going to give her a royal ribbing about it when next they met.

  But then came the burial. As soon as the first shovel of dirt rattled down on the coffin, Radio began blubbering like a punk. Fat Edna passed her a lace hanky - who’d even known she had such a thing? - and she mopped at her eyes and wailed.

  When the last of the earth had been tamped down on the grave, and the priest turned away, and the mourners began to break up, Radio felt a hand on her shoulder. It was, of all people, Rudy the Red. He looked none the worse for his weeklong vacation from the flesh.

  “Rudy,” she said, “is that a suit you’re wearing?”

  “It is not the uniform of the oppressor anymore. A new age has begun, Radio, an age not of hierarchic rule by an oligarchy of detached, unfeeling intellects, but of horizontally-structured human cooperation. No longer will workers and managers be kept apart and treated differently from one another. Thanks to the selfless sacrifice of-”

  “Yeah, I heard the speech you gave in the Cathedral.”

  “You did?” Rudy looked strangely pleased.

  “Well, mostly. I mighta slept through some of it. Listen, Rudy, I don’t want to rain on your parade, but people are still gonna be people, you know. You’re all wound up to create this Big Rock Candy Mountain of a society, and good for you. Only - you gotta be prepared for the possibility that it won’t work. I mean, ask any engineer, that’s just the way things are. They don’t always work the way they’re supposed to.”

  “Then I guess we’ll just have to wing it, huh?” Rudy flashed a wry grin. Then, abruptly, his expression turned serious, and he said the very last thing in the world she would have expected to come out of his mouth: “How are you doing?”

  “Not so good. I feel like a ton of bricks was dropped on me.” She felt around for Edna’s hanky, but she’d lost it somewhere. So she wiped her eyes on her sleeve. “You want to know what’s the real kicker? I hardly knew Amelia. So I don’t even know why I should feel so bad.”

  Rudy took her arm. “Come with me a minute. Let me show you something.”

  He led her to a gravestone that was laid down to one side of the grave, to be erected when everyone was gone. It took a second for Radio to read the inscription. “Hey! It’s just a quotation. Amelia’s name ain’t even on it. That’s crazy.”

  “She left instructions for what it would say quite some time ago. I gather that’s not uncommon for flyers. But I can’t help feeling it’s a message.”

  Radio stared at the words on the stone for very long time. Then she said, “Yeah, I see what you mean. But, ya know, I think it’s a different message than what she thought it would be.”

  The rain, which had been drizzling off and on during the burial, began in earnest. Rudy shook out his umbrella and opened it over them both. They joined the other mourners, who were scurrying away in streams and rivulets, pouring from the cemetery exits and into the slidewalk stations and the vacuum trains, going back home to their lives and families, to boiled cabbage and schooners of pilsner, to their jobs, and their hopes, and their heartbreaks, to the vast, unknowable, and perfectly ordinary continent of the future.

  “It followed that the victory would belong to him who was calmest, who shot best, and who had the cleverest brain in a moment of danger.”

  - Baron Manfred von Richthofen (1892-1918)

  Gregory Benford is an emeritus professor of astrophysics at the University of California-Irvine and an award-winning novelist, short-story writer, and editor, who has published dozens of short stories and some twenty-five novels, including the recent alternate-history novel, The Berlin Project, about an alternate World War II where Berlin is the target for an American atomic bomb. In this story, Benford’s alternate-history gives us a close look at a very different kind of civil war.

  There were worse things than getting swept up in the first battle of the first war in over a century, but Bradley could not right away think of any.

  They had been out on a lark, really. Bradley got his buddy Paul to go along, flying low over the hills to watch the grand formations of men and machines. Bradley knew how to keep below the radar screens, sometimes skimming along so close to the treetops that branches snapped on their understruts. They had come in before dawn, using Bradley’s Dad’s luxury, ultra-quiet cruiser–over the broad fields, using the sunrise to blind the optical sensors below.

  It had been enormously exciting. The gleaming columns, the acrid smoke of ruin, the distant muffled coughs of combat.

  Then somebody shot them down.

  Not a full, square hit, luckily. Bradley had gotten them over two ranges of hills, lurching through shot-wracked air. Then they came down heavily, air bags saving the two boys.

  They had no choice but to go along with the team which picked them out of their wreckage. Dexter, a big swarthy man, seemed to be in charge. He said, “We got word a bunch of mechs are comin along this road. You stick with us, you can help out.”

  Bradley said irritably, “Why should we? I want to-”

  “Cause it’s not safe round here, kid,” Dexter said. “You joyriding rich kids, maybe you’ll learn something about that today.”

  Dexter grinned, showing two missing teeth, and waved the rest of his company to keep moving into the slanting early morning glow.

  Nobody had any food and Bradley was pretty sure they would not have shared it out if they had. The fighting over the ridge to the west had disrupted whatever supply lines there were into this open, once agricultural land.

  They reached the crossroads by mid-morning and right away knocked out a servant mech by mistake. It saw them come hiking over the hill through the thick oaks and started chuffing away, moving as fast as it could. It was an R class, shiny and chromed.

  A woman who carried one of the long rods over her shoulder whipped the rod down and sighted along it and a loud boom startled Bradley. The R mech went down. “First one of the day,” the woman named Angel said.

  “Musta been a scout,” Dexter said.

  “For what?” Bradley asked, shocked as they walked down the slope toward the mech in air still cool and moist from the dawn.

  Paul said tentatively, “The mech withdrawal?”

  Dexter nodded. “Mechs’re on their way through here. Bet they’re scared plenty.”

  They saw the R mech had a small hole punched through it right in the servo controls near the back. “Not bad shootin,” a man said to Angel.

  “I tole you these’d work,” Angel said proudly. “I sighted mine in fresh this mornin. It helps.”

  Bradley realized suddenly that the various machined rods these dozen people carried were all weapons,
fabrications turned out of factories exclusively human-run. Killing tools, he thought in blank surprise. Like the old days. You see them in dramas and stuff, but they’ve been illegal for a century.

  “Maybe this mech was just plain scared,” Bradley said. “It’s got software for that.”

  “We sent out a beeper warning,” Dexter said, slapping the pack on his back. “Goes out of this li’l rig here. Any mech wants no trouble, all they got to do is come up on us slow and then lie down so we can have a look at their programming cubes.”

  “Disable it?”

  “Sure. How else we going to be sure?”

  “This one ran, clear as anything,” Angel said, reloading her rifle.

  “Maybe it didn’t understand,” Bradley said. The R models were deft, subtle, terrific at social graces.

  “It knew, all right,” Angel said, popping the mech’s central port open and pulling out its ID cube. “Look, it’s from Sanfran.”

  “What’s it doing all the way out here, then, if it’s not a rebel?” a black man named Nelson asked.

  “Yeah,” Dexter said. “Enter it as reb.” He handed Bradley a wrist comm. “We’re keepin track careful now. You’ll be busy just takin down score today, kid.”

  “Rebel, uh, I see,” Bradley said, tapping into the comm. It was reassuring to do something simple while he straightened out his feelings.

  “You bet,” Nelson said, excitement lacing his voice. “Look at it. Fancy mech, smarter than most of them, tryin to save itself. It’s been runnin away from our people. They just broke up a big mech force west of here.”

  “I never could afford one of these chrome jobs,” Angel said. “They knew that, too. I had one of these classy R numbers mean-mouth me in the market, try to grab a can of soybean stew.” She laughed sarcastically. “That was when there was a few scraps left on the shelves.”

  “Elegant thing, wasn’t it?” Nelson kicked the mech, which rolled further downhill.

  “You messed it up pretty well,” Bradley said.

  Dexter said, “Roll it down into that hollow so nobody can see it from the road.” He gestured at Paul. “You go with the other party. Hey, Mercer!”