Alternate Empires

by Gregory Benford

  “No, that’s all right,” Papa Joe said. “I think I can show up now, too. Family is all right after the nomination, right?”

  I stood. Little waves of nausea battled with the other stuff in me, the nausea winning. The senator was nominated and I was going to throw up. In the small, cold, contracting spaces of the room, now dwindling around me to bind me like a blanket, I began to sense the crux of the betrayal.

  But no time, no time for that.

  In the small, cluttered room in Dallas, the senator’s first major appearance after the convention, Connally’s city, Connally’s state, Connally’s option, hunched with the senator over the table, going over the text of the speech, the corrected draft run off frantically on the copier only moments before, I say to him, “You can’t say this about the war. Not even in Dallas. Not even here. It will cost you the election.”

  “No, it won’t,” the senator says. His eyes are lustrous, convincing. “It won’t cost me anything. It’s the right statement in the right place. When we get in we can do whatever we want, Lee, but this is Texas; we’ve got an election here. I’m not going to turn into Nixon, not going to go in for any foolishness. It’s the right place, right now, and it will pay dividends.” He brushes me idly, absently on the shoulder. “If you’re so upset, we’ll talk about it later some more.”

  “I won’t have it! You can’t do it!”

  He stares at me; in his face I can see now what Dave Powers once called the cleaver. Others have been looked at that way, I understand that now, but never to this moment me. “Lee,” he says, “what is wrong with you?”

  “You’re the antiwar candidate! Your acceptance speech—”

  “Lighten up, Lee,” the senator says, “or quit. This is politics. This is a national campaign.” He turns, moves toward the door, his gait smooth and casual, brisk and contained. “If you don’t want to deal with it,” he says, “see Bobby and turn your keys in. I have no time for this crap now, I really don’t.”

  He leaves the room, the door swings behind him, in the distance the dim and convulsive roar of the crowd; and standing there I feel it break over me, all of it, not only these years in his employ but the years before, the wandering, the exploration, the horrors of Moscow. It is betrayal, that is what has stalked me all these years just as I have stalked it, betrayal and I meeting at last, all masks off in this room in Dallas, and what I feel like now—and this has been waiting all my life—is like a twat from Framingham. Local talent, regionally wrought. And nationally dismembered.

  How could I have known? But I should have known. I did know; it was only a matter of placement.

  I must make plans, I think. Plans. He is a dangerous man, an evil man; he is a man capable of anything. If he will allow the war, then he will allow the demons, the true and terrible burning of justice; he will let through all of the gnomes and fires of the apocalypse, he is a man capable of imprinting the mark of the beast savagely, savagely—

  Plans.

  I still had my credentials, I had not quit. I was close to him, as close as I had ever been. No one but I knew what must be done.

  Old point-thirty-eight Smith & Wesson, a souvenir from the Fair Play Committee upon my departure. Point-thirty-eight Smith & Wesson, close in, close in, a winging shot as he and Connally embrace upon the rostrum, get them both, two shots, get them—

  Big plans.

  GAME NIGHT AT

  THE FOX AND GOOSE

  Karen Joy Fowler

  The reader will discover that my reputation, wherever I have lived, is endorsed as that of a true and pure woman.

  —Laura D. Fair

  Alison called all over the city trying to find a restaurant that served blowfish, but there wasn’t one. She settled for Chinese. She would court an MSG attack. And if none came, then she’d been craving red bean sauce anyway. On the way to the restaurant, Alison chose not to wear her seatbelt.

  Alison had been abandoned by her lover, who was so quick about it, she hadn’t even known she was pregnant yet. She couldn’t ever tell him now. She sat pitifully alone, near the kitchen at a table for four. You’ve really screwed up this time, her fortune cookie told her. Give up. And in small print: Chin’s Oriental Palace.

  The door from the kitchen swung open, so the air around her was hot for a moment, then cold when the door closed. Alison drank her tea and looked at the tea leaves in the bottom of her cup. They were easy to read. He doesn’t love you, they said. She tipped them out onto the napkin and tried to rearrange them. You fool. She covered the message with the one remaining wonton, left the cookie for the kitchen god, and decided to walk all by herself in the dark, three blocks up Hillside Drive, past two alleyways, to have a drink at the Fox and Goose. No one stopped her.

  Alison had forgotten it was Monday night. Sometimes there was music in the Fox and Goose. Sometimes you could sit in a corner by yourself listening to someone with an acoustic guitar singing “Killing Me Softly.” On Monday nights the television was on and the bar was rather crowded. Mostly men. Alison swung one leg over the only empty bar stool and slid forward. The bar was made of wood, very upscale.

  “What can I get the pretty lady?” the bartender asked without tak ing his eyes off the television screen. He wore glasses, low on his nose.

  Alison was not a pretty lady and didn’t feel like pretending she was. “I’ve been used and discarded,” she told the bartender. “And I’m pregnant. I’d like a glass of wine.”

  “You really shouldn’t drink if you’re pregnant,” the man sitting to Alison’s left said.

  “Two more downs and they’re already in field goal range again.” The bartender set the wine in front of Alison. He was shaking his head. “Pregnant women aren’t supposed to drink much,” he warned her.

  “How?” the man on her left asked.

  “How do you think?” said Alison.

  “Face-mask,” said the bartender.

  “Turn it up.”

  Alison heard the amplified thwock of football helmets hitting together. “Good coverage,” the bartender said.

  “No protection,” said the man on Alison’s right.

  Alison turned to look at him. He was dressed in a blue sweater with the sleeves pushed up. He had dark eyes and was drinking a dark beer. “I asked him to wear a condom,” she said quietly. “I even brought one. He couldn’t.”

  “He couldn’t?”

  “I really don’t want to discuss it.” Alison sipped her wine. It had the flat, bitter taste of House White. She realized the bartender hadn’t asked her what she wanted. But then, if he had, House White was what she would have requested. “It just doesn’t seem fair.” She spoke over her glass, unsure that anyone was listening, not really caring if they weren’t. “All I did was fall in love. All I did was believe someone who said he loved me. He was the liar. But nothing happens to him.”

  “Unfair is the way things are,” the man on her right told her. Three months ago Alison would have been trying to decide if she were attracted to him. Not that she would necessarily have wanted to do anything about it. It was just a question she’d always asked herself, dealing with men, interested in the answer, interested in those times when the answer changed abruptly, one way or another. But it was no longer an issue. Alison was a dead woman these days. Alison was attracted to no one.

  Two men at the end of the bar began to clap suddenly. “He hasn’t missed from thirty-six yards yet this season,” the bartender said.

  Alison watched the kickoff and the return. Nothing. No room at all. “Men handle this stuff so much better than women. You don’t know what heartbreak is,” she said confrontationally. No one responded. She backed off anyway. “Well, that’s how it looks.” She drank and watched an advertisement for trucks. A man bought his wife the truck she’d always wanted. Alison was afraid she might cry. “What would you do,” she asked the man on her right, “if you were me?”

  “Drink, I guess. Unless I was pregnant.”

  “Watch the game,” said the man on her l
eft.

  “Focus on your work,” said the bartender.

  “Join the foreign legion.” The voice came from behind Alison. She swiveled around to locate it. At a table near a shuttered window a very tall woman sat by herself. Her face was shadowed by an Indiana Jones-type hat, but the candle on the table lit up the area below her neck. She was wearing a black T-shirt with a picture on it that Alison couldn’t make out. She spoke again. “Make new friends. See distant places.” She gestured for Alison to join her. “Save two galaxies from the destruction of the alien armada.”

  Alison stood up on the little ledge that ran beneath the bar, reached over the counter, and took an olive, sucking the pimiento out first, then eating the rest. She picked up her drink, stepped down, and walked over to the woman’s table. Elvis. That was Elvis’s face on the T-shirt right between the woman’s breasts. ARE YOU LONESOME TONIGHT? the T-shirt asked.

  “That sounds good.” Alison sat down across from the woman. She could see her face better now; her skin was pale and a bit rough. Her hair was long, straight, and brown. “I’d rather time travel, though. Back just two months. Maybe three months. Practically walking distance.”

  “You could get rid of the baby.”

  “Yes,” said Alison. “I could.”

  The woman’s glass sat on the table in front of her. She had finished whatever she had been drinking; the maraschino cherry was all that remained. The woman picked it up and ate it, dropping the stem onto the napkin under her glass. “Maybe he’ll come back to you. You trusted him. You must have seen something decent in him.”

  Alison’s throat closed so that she couldn’t talk. She picked up her drink, but she couldn’t swallow, either. She set it down again, shaking her head. Some of the wine splashed over the lip and onto her hand.

  “He’s already married,” the woman said.

  Alison nodded, wiping her hand on her pant leg. “God.” She searched in her pockets for a Kleenex. The woman handed her the napkin from beneath the empty glass. Alison wiped her nose with it and the cherry stem fell out. She did not dare look up. She kept her eyes focused on the napkin in her hand, which she folded into four small squares. “When I was growing up,” she said, “I lived on a block with lots of boys. Sometimes I’d come home and my knees were all scraped up because I’d fallen or I’d taken a ball in the face or I’d gotten kicked or punched, and I’d be crying and my mother would always say the same thing. ‘You play with the big boys and you’re going to get hurt,’ she’d say. Exasperated.” Alison unfolded the napkin, folded it diagonally instead. Her voice shrank. “I’ve been so stupid.”

  “The universe is shaped by the struggle between two great forces,” the woman told her.

  It was not really responsive. It was not particularly supportive. Alison felt just a little bit angry at this woman who now knew so much about her. “Good and evil?” Alison asked, slightly nastily. She wouldn’t meet the woman’s eyes. “The Elvis and the anti-Elvis?”

  “Male and female. Minute by minute, the balance tips one way or the other. Not just here. In every universe. There are places”—the woman leaned forward—“where men are not allowed to gather and drink. Places where football is absolutely illegal.”

  “England?” Alison suggested and then didn’t want to hear the woman’s answer. “I like football,” she added quickly. “I like games with rules. You can be stupid playing football and it can cost you the game, but there are penalties for fouls, too. I like games with rules.”

  “You’re playing one now, aren’t you?” the woman said. “You haven’t hurt this man, even though you could. Even though he’s hurt you. He’s not playing by the rules. So why are you?”

  “It doesn’t have anything to do with rules,” Alison said. “It only has to do with me, with the kind of person I think I am. Which is not the kind of person he is.” She thought for a moment. “It doesn’t mean I wouldn’t like to see him get hurt,” she added. “Something karmic. Justice.”

  “‘We must storm and hold Cape Turk before we talk of social justice.’” The woman folded her arms under her breasts and leaned back in her chair. “Did Sylvia Townsend Warner say that?”

  “Not to me.”

  Alison heard more clapping at the bar behind her. She looked over her shoulder. The man in the blue sweater slapped his hand on the wooden bar. “Good call. Excellent call. They won’t get another play in before the half.”

  “Where I come from she did.” Alison turned back to the woman. “And she was talking about women. No one gets justice just by deserving it. No one ever has.”

  Alison finished off her wine. “No.” She wondered if she should go home now. She knew when she got there that the apartment would be unbearably lonely and that the phone wouldn’t ring and that she would need immediately to be somewhere else. No activity in the world could be more awful than listening to a phone not ring. But she didn’t really want to stay here and have a conversation that was at worst too strange, and at best too late. Women usually supported you more when they talked to you. They didn’t usually make you defensive or act as if they had something to teach you, the way this woman did. And anyhow, justice was a little peripheral now, wasn’t it? What good would it really do her? What would it change?

  She might have gone back and joined the men at the bar during the half. They were talking quietly among themselves. They were ordering fresh drinks and eating beernuts. But she didn’t want to risk seeing cheerleaders. She didn’t want to risk the ads with the party dog and all his women, even though she’d read in a magazine that the dog was a bitch. Anywhere she went, there she’d be. Just like she was. Heartbroken.

  The woman was watching her closely. Alison could feel this, though the woman’s face remained shadowed and she couldn’t quite bring herself to look back at her directly. She looked at Elvis instead and the way his eyes wavered through her lens of candlelight and tears. Lonesome tonight? “You really have it bad, don’t you?” the woman said. Her tone was sympathetic. Alison softened again. She decided to tell this perceptive woman everything. How much she’d loved him. How she’d never loved anyone else. How she felt it every time she took a breath, and had for weeks now.

  “I don’t think I’ll ever feel better,” she said. “No matter what I do.”

  “I hear it takes a year to recover from a serious loss. Unless you find someone else.”

  A year. Alison could be a mother by then. How would she find someone else, pregnant like she was or with a small child? Could she spend a year hurting like this? Would she have a choice?

  “Have you ever heard of Laura D. Fair?” the woman asked.

  Alison shook her head. She picked up the empty wineglass and tipped it to see if any drops remained. None did. She set it back down and picked up the napkin, wiping her eyes. She wasn’t crying. She just wasn’t exactly not crying.

  “Mrs. Fair killed her lover,” the woman told her. Alison looked at her own fingernails. One of them had a ragged end. She bit it off shorter while she listened. “He was a lawyer. A. P. Crittenden. She shot him on the ferry to Oakland in November of 1870 in front of his whole family because she saw him kiss his wife. He’d promised to leave her and marry Mrs. Fair instead, and then he didn’t, of course. She pleaded a transient insanity known at that time as emotional insanity. She said she was incapable of killing Mr. Crittenden, who had been the only friend she’d had in the world.” Alison examined her nail. She had only succeeded in making it more ragged. She bit it again, too close to the skin this time. It hurt and she put it back in her mouth. “Mrs. Fair said she had no memory of the murder, which many people, not all of them related to the deceased, witnessed. She was the first woman sentenced to hang in California.”

  Loud clapping and catcalls at the bar. The third quarter had started with a return all the way to the fifty-yard line. Alison heard it. She did not turn around, but she took her finger out of her mouth and picked up the napkin. She folded it again. Four small squares. “Rules are rules,” Alison said. />
  “But then she didn’t hang. Certain objections were made on behalf of the defense and sustained, and a new trial was held. This time she was acquitted. By now she was the most famous and the most hated woman in the country.”

  Alison unfolded the napkin and tried to smooth out the creases with the side of her palm. “I never heard of her.”

  “Laura D. Fair was not some little innocent.” The woman’s hat brim dipped decisively. “Mrs. Fair had been married four times, and each had been a profitable venture. One of her husbands killed himself. She was not pretty, but she was passionate. She was not smart, but she was clever. And she saw, in her celebrity, a new way to make money. She announced a new career as a public speaker. She traveled the country with her lectures. And what was her message? She told women to murder the men who seduced and betrayed them.”

  “I never heard of her,” said Alison.

  “Mrs. Fair was a compelling speaker. She’d had some acting and elocution experience. Her performance in court showed training. On the stage she was even better. ‘The act will strike a terror to the hearts of sensualists and libertines.’” The woman stabbed dramatically at her own breast with her fist, hitting Elvis right in the eye. Behind her hand, Elvis winked at Alison in the candlelight. “Mrs. Fair said that women throughout the world would glory in the revenge exacted by American womanhood. Overdue. Long overdue. Thousands of women heard her. Men, too, and not all of them entirely unsympathetic. Fanny Hyde and Kate Stoddart were released in Brooklyn. Stoddart never even stood trial. But then there was a backlash. The martyred Marys were hanged in Philadelphia. And then…” the woman’s voice dropped suddenly in volume and gained in intensity. Alison looked up at her quickly. The woman was staring back. Alison looked away. “And then a group of women hunted down and dispatched Charles S. Smith in an alley near his home. Mr. Smith was a married man and his victim, Edith Wilson, was pregnant, an invalid, and eleven years old. But this time the women wore sheets and could not be identified. Edith Wilson was perhaps the only female in Otsego County, New York, who could not have taken part.”