The Other Nineteenth Century

by Avram Davidson

Slowly the woman drew nearer, then slowly she wandered on away. Eventually I formed the thought, and leaned over and asked my host, “Who is that?” and I gestured. It was a small gesture.

  He gave her only the slightest of glances, smiled (so it seemed, fondly), and then he said to me, “That is my great-aunt Bertha. She never goes out, and socially she sees almost no one.” Scarcely had I engaged this answer to my question than another question formed, for the young—as I had thought, hunter or farmer, perhaps—who had, save for occasionally touching his very slight moustache, and smoking his cigarette, hardly moved; he had gotten up and, walking through the lower part of the garden, had come face to face with the old woman. She looked up as he stood before her, and then in a rush she held out her hands, and he took them. “Oh, Tony!” she cried, “Oh, Tony! You never grow old!”

  AFTERWORD TO “EL VILVOY DE LAS ISLAS”

  This poignant tale of the miseries of old age was written when Davidson was in his mid-sixties and confined to a wheelchair. His linguistic and narrative acrobatics give form and history to a character unique in fantasy literature. The vilvoy’s antecedents are complex: one can discern traces of Rousseau’s Noble Savage, Melville’s “The Encantadas” (sketches of life in the Galapagos), a clear nod to the Tarzan novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs, a satire of the Swiss Family Robinson, etc. “What if Henry James wrote Tarzan with a wacky foreshadowing of magic realism?” is how Don Webb described the story. Howard Waldrop has observed that “El Vilvoy de las Islas” is like a Tarzan “archetype written by a Spanish-surnamed magic realist … Davidson’s stories were usually lots wider and deeper than they were long.”

  —Henry Wessells

  MICKELREDE; OR, THE SLAYER AND THE STAFF: A GHOST-NOVEL BY AVRAM DAVIDSON

  edited, with interpolations,

  by Michael Swanwick

  OUTLINE IN WHITE GIRDERS

  Introduction: Here and there and everywhere: AD set out to write a novel and failed to complete it. No surprise in that. How many books are begun and not finished? How many stars are in the sky? How many broken hearts on Broadway? Fragments, notes, and a cursory outline, however, he left behind. Enough to provide a taste, a holographic glimpse of what might have been.

  I lifted these pages from a box full of such: bits and shards, stories begun and galleons launched for faraway cities of gold; but never, alas, arrived at; nor readily made publishable, alack, any of them. Save this. With a little shuffling and a few speculative additions, I’ve arranged a construct something like Philadelphia’s famous Ghost House, which is a three-dimensional outline in white girders of the long-gone house wherein Benjamin Franklin dwelt, not a reconstruction but a map of our knowledge, and of our ignorance as well.

  Here: See, taste, enjoy. In the theater of your mind, reconstruct the whole. AD’s ghost-novel is laid before you like a brass horn upon the table; put your ear to its mouth. Let it speak.

  NONMYSTICAL MOTIONS OF TEMPERATURE AND PRESSURE

  California: The campus had begun to be shrouded with fog which, seemingly, had ridden on high, mad winds, all the way from the Pacific, past the crag and sea-flung Farallones, over the tide-rushed Golden Gate, across the darkened Bay; before swooping down and settling on the trees and lawns and buildings gathered there on the hills rimming round them. But it was all illusion, Casey Swift knew. The fogs had not ridden in from anywhere—not from the ocean, not from their legendary breeding ground in a particular potato patch in Marin County there north across the straits from Frisco—they were forming right here now in front of his eyes, changing out of one state of vapor invisible into another state of vapor coalescent in response to certain nonmystical motions of temperature and pressure. My doctrine shall drop as the rain, my speech shall distill as the dew.

  ALONG CURVED TIMELIKE ARCS

  Explication: They are born of course, are the fogs, when worlds collide. Which happens more often than you might think. Every day, on every continent, new timelines are constantly being split off underfoot. The universe reaches an instant in which two outcomes of a choice are equally likely and, in the spirit of a greedy three-year-old confronted with a choice of two equally large slices of cake, reaches for both. But unlike the three-year-old, the universe is by this very act ripped in two. The two scion timelines race away from each other along curved timelike arcs of virtual existence that may last anywhere from 2.225 nanoseconds to (in rare cases, admittedly) three weeks before their divergent paths again converge and, like quarreling lovers, they fall into each other’s arms, kiss, and are reconciled.

  These secret divergences sometimes leave their mark in divergent memories. “You remember the time …” you begin, and “It wasn’t like that at all!” your Significant Sweetie says. He said, she said. Maybe you’re both right.

  Maybe not.

  BUDDHIST BEGGARS WITH BOWLS OUTSTRETCHED

  California: “We’re not where we were the last time you were here,” he said to the other man in the car. “They finally broke down and gave us the new facilities we asked for.”

  “The Regents?” asked Dr. Galloway. His ego did not much at all miss the sir but his ears noticed its absence immediately; at the British “redbrick” university where he had spent the recent year it had so invariably been forthcoming that now a sort of visible or auditory lacuna seemed to take shape. He was faintly bothered that he should in any way be bothered by it, so asked the question in whose answer he had no great interest. Facilities were either existent or nonexistent; where they were not, there was not Herbert Galloway. Mildly he pitied the scholars of the permanent faculties, obliged to come like Buddhist beggars with bowls outstretched.

  LIKE A LEOPARD-FISH OR A MORAY EEL (I)

  Elsewhere: He saw something moving through the star-lit sky, moving oddly, oddly, very oddly, its outlines and its markings as faint as the faintest star. A plane? No plane moved in that curious, sinuous, curving fashion. Nor were birds shaped like that, nor did birds have markings like a leopard-fish or a moray eel.

  He stood amazed.

  This strange place was an In-Between. It lay in-between times, spaces, dimensions, worlds: by itself and of its own. But it wasn’t hermetically sealed. There was a certain … seepage … not much; enough to have seeded the place with the elements of its present population. A band of women and children who, following too slowly after their men-folk who were hunting down a woolly rhino, took a wrong turn and left the Aurignacian forever. A group of veterans of the Varingarian Guard, returning from long service in Byzantium, never reaching their old homes in Norseland. The last of the Martians. Other. Others. And, at length, Casey Swift.

  “Do you often … just have people stolen … like this? Simply for your own use or pleasure or convenience?” Casey asked.

  “Of course. Oh, quite often, said the Green King.”With my arcane powers, it’s easy.” He chuckled fatly.

  “Oh. Then … uh … how come you don’t just, well, take over? The Earth, I mean.”

  The Green King shrugged. “A headache,” he said. “Who needs it?”

  THE PERPETUAL ODDITIES OF MANY GREAT MEN

  California: Casey guided the little MG along roads already glistening wet and black, still rather amused that he had only had to go as far as the railroad station and not all the way to the airport to pick Galloway up. Not for the first time he considered the perpetual oddities of many great men: Galloway, for instance, whose professional climate was one in which the jet plane was already as good as obsolete, crossing the continent by train. Casey hadn’t even known that the trains, whose rattle and honk he was sometimes aware of as background sounds on quiet nights, still stopped here for passengers at all.

  “The Regents, yes,” he said; “plus about two and a half rich old alumni who’d been considering the matter for a couple of years. Fortunately the money came through before the enthusiasts started getting enthusiastic and the demonstrators started to demonstrate, or we’d never have seen a penny of it … Do you know what I’m talking about? I suppose it must have
made the papers over there—people who want the University run by a Committee of Workers, Peasants, and Students.”

  Galloway watched the fog swallow up a grove of eucalyptus trees. “Your characterization seems a bit severe,” he suggested. “Of the Free Speech Movement, I mean.”

  THE RITUALIZED POLITICS OF THEIR WORLD

  Elsewhere: He took the stuff for kicks, despite the yatatata about “expanding his horizons and perceptions” with which he justified it. Stepping through the jeweled mists he came upon a place frozen still … then moving slowly … then in full motion. He was In-Between, though he didn’t know it yet. Nor did he know that he’d been procured by the Green King to be a gamesman for him: a “slayer.” He learned that quite quickly, though.

  The Kings did not spend all their time watching games. Politics, the ritualized politics of their world, was their main occupation. They had no actual countries, they had their seats, and outside of them—in province and in city—they worked endlessly, sometimes in alliance, sometimes in enmity, for control. In Iddinan, where the Green King had a palace, he currently held six places on the council against the nine of the Yellow King and the six divided between three other kings. It was impossible for him to move openly, nakedly, for greater strength. He had to juggle the status quo in a dozen cities and a score of provinces against such factors as his own liberality in holding games and the niggardliness of his current ally, the Yellow. And, always, the great imponderable of the runesmen or redesmen, the Servants of Mickelrede.

  THE PEDIATRIC BURN WARD

  Interpolation: Why would the Green King select an academic to be a slayer? On this AD was silent. Surely, though, R. Caswell Swift was chosen for his mathematical skills, which will prove decisive to his meteoric rise through training to stardom as a gamesman. Never particularly physical, much less the object of popular adulation, Casey will experience the heady intoxication of the intellectual who finds himself magically transformed into a jock.

  But every self-absorbed hero needs a wake-up call. I’ll let Casey’s be a post-coital conversation with a woman of affordable virtue (provided him by a grateful home-team booster), who lets drop the info that this particular gig is, among whores, just about as popular as assignment to the Pediatric Burn Ward is among nurses. Soon as you get attached to one, she says, he dies.

  For the first time, Casey applies his mathematical insights to the game as a whole, and sees what should have been blindingly obvious all along: it’s a zero-sum game, a rigged wheel. For every winner, there’s a loser. For every game, so many deaths. As an individual gamesman, he’s doing fine; as a statistical gamesman he’s already half-dead.

  A TIGER BY THE TAIL

  California: The younger man laughed—not scornfully—said, “Oh, I suppose they would run the store about as well as the Regents and the two and a half rich old alumni who run it now. Differently, of course, but no worse. I frankly don’t care. I’m like the Vicar of Bray … We park here.” He showed something in his wallet to the attendant, slid the car smoothly into the space between the white lines, briefly displayed the items in the wallet to Galloway. “My neck-verses,” he commented, grinning. And got out and walked away.

  Such frankness might well be disarming had I arrived armed, Galloway thought. Young Swift’s British equivalent would surely have gone around and opened the door for the newly-arrived savant. But then he wouldn’t have had a car of his own to drive. Anyway, it was an attempt to compare incomparable categories. Mr. Caswell Swift had no foreign equivalents. It didn’t matter. The junior must be competent enough, or Brannard wouldn’t have him. And it was only competence that counted. Galloway got out of the little car and followed. He wanted to meet Brannard again after all this time, but even more than that he wanted to see for himself something of what Brannard had been doing here. He wanted this so much he could almost taste it. Time enough after for trifles like his baggage, where he was going to stay, or washing after his journey.

  I’ve got a tiger by the tail, Brannard had written; and I don’t know whether it’s going to turn out to be a camera or a cannon. Maybe you’ll know. Somebody had damned well better.

  THINGS AFAR OFF …

  Elsewhere: Casey, doing his own juggling, heard of the redesmen. Heard, too, of Mickelrede, the great, holy, and numinous rune-stave, the source of all knowledge. Including technical knowledge. For this world did have its technology. There were firearms, forges, mills, engines … There was a science, a science sealed. Not for a while did Casey realize that he had to break the seal. Much more to the immediate moment was learning to handle the lance and the sword and the other implements of the games; that the users of local technology did not stand as employers vis-a-vis the technicians, that the technicians were redesmen, consulted like oracles—he pieced this together later.

  The world of the gamesmen was abrupt, a mixture of brutality, cunning, vainglory—and occasional sparks of love and mercy. True, one of his fellow-gladiators, surprising Casey in the chance act of scribbling in the sand, then and forever after insisted that Casey was—must be—an outcast redesman. Other than such odd bits, the Servants of Great Mickelrede remained as vague in Swift’s mind as the Jacks o’ the North: rulebreakers, these: rebels, raveners, rabble, rioters, owing fay to no king, no color. Things afar off …

  AS THOUGH SHE HAD INVENTED THEM

  California: Coming out of the mist and fog as though she had invented them Casey Swift saw the girl the same second she saw him; he looked at her straight on, but she only peeped at him out of the corners of her eyes as she went on along, perhaps not quite so serenely self-pleased now. Llewellyn Thompson, or so she incredibly called herself—perhaps she was really so, officially and actually, a product of the creeping custom of giving male names to female children, although with the increasing emancipation of the masculine sex little boys might soon enough find themselves being christened Margaret or Mary. Likelier, though, Miss Thompson had merely co-opted to become Llewellyn as part of her own personal make-yourself-more-interesting program. Casey Swift, in a burst of anger which had surprised him as much as it could have her, had once told her that “Sadie” would go much better with her last name than any other. It had flown straight home, too, and she showed it whenever she met him; but of course that didn’t do Joe Foyle any good. Not a bit of good.

  Because Joe Foyle had gone right to pot when Llewellyn T. began putting him through the wringer. Joe Foyle had flunked out, been fired, rusticated, sent down. And had in consequence lost his neck-verses and was semi-immediately conscripted and sent to East Iridium or some such hellhole rich in bullets and beriberi and where the West Iridiumese were now trying to blow his ass off, which had been made for better things.

  Casey was damned sorry for Joe, but he was (he felt) manageably sorry, which meant being damned sure not to make the same mistake. No medieval student was ever more careful of the scrap of parchment bearing a Latin verse or two of the Psalms, ability to read which would obtain him benefit of clerical privilege if accused of any of the many capital offenses and thus save his neck from the gallows or the block (hence “neck-verses”), than Casey Swift was of the card which declared him a graduate student in physics or the card which stated his consequentially deferred draft status. He fooled around with girls, true; he drank on occasion into merriment ; true; he fenced and skied and swam in due season, true. But he never allowed any of these things, or any other things, to bring down his marks by a hair or a minus-sign. He avoided political activity not only of the far right or of the far left but of the bland and ever-shifting center as well. You never knew. There were only a few years to carry him beyond draft age and into some well-furnished and well-paying corporation lab of the sort which was always so roomy along its constantly expanding sides as to make the presence or absence of room at the top a matter of indifferent definition only.

  THE ANNUAL FREE AND FOLLY

  Elsewhere: The tricorn crouched in the shadow almost beneath the Royal Seat and it glared and it growled. The sl
ayer held out his lance, shaft under armpit, and hissed invitingly. His free hand swung loose in an almost effeminate gesture. But it never swung very far from the short sword in the short scabbard. And then the tricorn charged.

  Oh, it was an episode … only an episode. Of more import were those previously-mentioned Things afar off … Which abruptly came close without pausing to be merely closer. For it was Jack-wards that Casey and his small group of fellows headed after their escape from the barracks-lodge during the annual Free and Folly.

  For the Jacks were on the move again. And so, Casey learned, was Mickelrede. Moved to avoid capture, it was nevertheless captured. Freed. Re-captured. Experience, though brief, with the Jacks o’ the North had convinced Casey Swift of two things: One, that they were no mere rabble. Two, that they were not for him, whatever they were. Things might be no better with the redesmen, but he had to try them and see.

  BANDY-LEGGED AND HEAVY OF BROW

  Interpolation: The Jacks o’ the North are only vaguely described in the sixty grams of typescript (fourteen pages, xerographed, cover page and two copies of page 1 inclusive) that AD left behind. Presumably he was saving the fun of creating them for that happy day when he held a living contract in his hand.

  So I shall insert six tyrants seated upon seven thrones (one empty), who command the absolute allegiance of all Jacks. They are large and brooding creatures, bandy-legged and heavy of brow, capacious of skull and yet lacking the high foreheads we ourselves rejoice in: Neanderthalers. They are also, through a process that will be explained later, immortal.