[What Might Have Been 01] Alternate Empires

by Anthology

  “When you revise your proposition like that,” Ivan said, “you turn it into mine. Leaders are important, but they are leaders because we made them leaders. They are a collective phenomenon. They are expressions of us.”

  “Now wait just a minute! You’re going over the line again! You’re talking like heroic leaders are a dime a dozen, but if that were true it wouldn’t matter if Carter had lost in 1980, or if Lennon had been killed by that guy. But look at history, man! Look what happened when we did lose great leaders! Lincoln was shot; did they come up with another leader comparable to him? No way! Same with Gandhi, and the Kennedys, and King, and Sadat, and Olof Palme. When those folks were killed their countries suffered the lack of them, because they were special.”

  “They were special,” Ivan agreed, “and obviously it was a bad thing they were killed. And no doubt there was a short-term change for the worse. But they’re not irreplaceable, because they’re human beings just like us. None of them, except maybe Lincoln or Gandhi, was any kind of genius or saint. It’s only afterward we think of them that way, because we want heroes so much. But we’re the heroes. All of us put them in place. And there are a lot of capable, brilliant people out there to replace the loss of them, so that in the long run we recover.”

  “The real long run,” John said darkly. “A hundred years or more, for the South without Lincoln. They just aren’t that common. The long run proves it.”

  “Speaking of the long run,” Pierre-Paul said, “is anyone getting hungry?”

  They all were. The rushes were over, and Ivan had dismissed them as unusable. They climbed out of the pool and walked toward the changing room, discussing restaurants. There were a considerable number of them in the station, and new ones were opening every week. “I just tried the new Hungarian restaurant,” Melina said. “The food was good, but we had trouble, when the meal was over, finding someone to give us the check!”

  “I thought you said it was a Hungarian restaurant,” John said. They threw him back in the pool.

  The second time they ran through the rescue scene in the compound, Ivan had repositioned most of the minicams, and many of the lights; his instructions to the actors remained the same. But once inside the hallways of the set, John Rand couldn’t help hurrying in the general direction of Annette Bellows’s room.

  All right, he thought. Maybe Colonel Jackson had been a bit hasty to rush into the compound in search of hostages, leaving the group without a commander. But his heart had been in the right place, and the truth was, he had found a lot of the hostages without any help from Bellows at all. It was easy; they were scattered in ones and twos on the floor of almost every room he and his commandos entered, and stretched out along with the guards in the rooms and in the halls, paralyzed by the nerve gas. Damn good idea, that nerve gas. Guards and hostages, tough parts to play, no doubt, as they were getting kicked pretty frequently by commandos running by. He hustled his crew into room after room, then sent them off with hostages draped over their shoulders, pretending to stagger down the halls, banging into walls—really tough part to play, hostage—and clutching at gas masks and such; great images for the minicams, no doubt about it.

  When all his commandos had been sent back, he ran around a corner in what he believed to be the direction of Annette Bellows’s room. Over the racket of the helicopters, and the occasional round of automatic fire, he thought he could make out Melina’s voice, shouting hoarsely. So Pierre-Paul hadn’t gotten to her yet. Good. Now he could find her and be the one to follow her around rescuing the more obscurely housed hostages, just as De Niro had in the docudrama. It would give Ivan fits, but they could argue it out afterward. No way of telling what had really happened in that compound twenty years before, after all; and it made a better story his way.

  Their set was only one story tall, which was one of the things that John had objected to; the compound in Teheran had been four stories high, and getting up stairs had been part of the hassle. But Ivan was going to play with the images and shoot a few stair scenes later on, to achieve the effect of multiple floors. Fine, it meant he had only to struggle around a couple of narrow corners, jumping comatose Revolutionary Guards, looking fierce for the minicams wherever they were. It was really loud this time around; really loud.

  Then one of the walls fell over on him, the plywood pinning him to the ground, the boxes behind it tumbling down and filling the hallway. “Hey!” he cried out, shocked. This wasn’t the way it had happened. What was going on? The noise of the helicopters cut off abruptly, replaced by a series of crashes, a whooshing sound. That sound put a fine electric thrill down his spine; he had heard it before, in training routines. Air leaving the chamber. The dome must have been breached.

  He heaved up against the plywood. Stuck. Flattening himself as much as possible he slithered forward, under the plywood and out into a small space among fallen boxes. Hard to tell where the hallway had been, and it was pitch-dark. There wouldn’t be too much time left. He thought of his little gas mask, then cursed; it wasn’t connected to a real oxygen supply. That’s what comes from using fake props! he thought angrily. A gas mask with nothing attached to it. Open to the air, which was departing rapidly. Not much time.

  He found room among the boxes to stand, and he was about to run over them to the door leading out of the warehouse—assuming the whole station hadn’t been breached—when he remembered Melina. Stuck in her embassy room down the hall, wouldn’t she still be there? Hell. He groped along in the dark, hearing shouts in the distance. He saw lights, too. Good. He was holding his breath, for what felt like minutes at a time, though it was probably less than thirty seconds. Every time he sucked in a new breath he expected it to be the freezing vacuum, but the supply of rushing, cold—very cold—air continued to fill him. Emergency supply pouring out into the breach, actually a technique he had helped develop himself. Seemed to be working, at least for the moment.

  He heard a muffled cry to one side, began to pull at the boxes before him. Squeak in the gloom, ah-ha, there she was. Not fully conscious. Legs wet, probably blood, uh-oh. He pulled hard at boxes, lifted her up. Adrenaline and lunar gravity made him feel like Superman with that part of things, but there didn’t seem to be anywhere near as much air as before, and what was left was damned cold. Hurt to breathe. And harder than hell to balance as he hopped over objects with Melina in his arms. Feeling faint, he climbed over a row of boxes and staggered toward a distant light. A sheet of plywood smacked his shin and he cried out, then fell over. “Hey,” he said. The air was gone.

  When he came to he was lying in a bed in the station hospital. “Great,” he muttered. “Whole station wasn’t blown up.”

  His friends laughed, relieved to hear him speak. The whole film crew was in there, it seemed. Ivan, standing next to the bed, said, “It’s okay.”

  “What the hell happened?”

  “A small meteor, apparently. Hit out in our sector, in the shuttle landing chambers, ironically. But it wrecked our storage space as well, as you no doubt noticed.”

  John nodded painfully. “So it finally happened.”

  “Yes.” This was one of the great uncontrollable dangers of the lunar stations; meteors small and large were still crashing down onto the moon’s airless surface, by the thousands every year. Odds were poor that any one would hit something as small as the surface parts of their station, but coming down in such numbers… . In the long run they were reduced to a safety status somewhat equivalent to that of mountain climbers. Rockfall could always get you.

  “Melina?” John said, jerking up in his bed.

  “Over here,” Melina called. She was a few beds down, and had one leg in a cast. “I’m fine, John.” She got out of bed to prove it, and came over to kiss his cheek. “Thanks for the rescue!”

  John snorted. “What rescue?”

  They laughed again at him. Pierre-Paul pointed a forefinger at him.

  “There are heroes everywhere, even among the lowest of us. Now you have to admit Ivan’s
argument.”

  “The hell I do.”

  “You’re a hero,” Ivan said to him, grinning. “Just an ordinary man, so to speak. Not one of the great leaders at all. But by saving Melina, you’ve changed history.”

  “Not unless she becomes president,” John said, and laughed. “Hey Melina! Go out and run for office! Or save some promising songwriter or something.”

  Ivan just shook his head. “Why are you so stubborn? It’s not so bad if I’m right, John. Think about it. If I am right, then we aren’t just sitting around waiting for leaders to guide us.” A big grin lit his face. “We become the masters of our fate, we make our own decisions and act on them—we choose our leaders, and instruct them by consensus, so that we can take history any direction we please! Just as you did in the warehouse.”

  John lay back in his bed and was silent. Around him his friends grinned; one of them was bringing up a big papier-mâché medal, which vaguely resembled the one the Wizard of Oz pins to the Cowardly Lion. “Ah hell,” John said.

  “When the expedition reaches Mars, they’ll have to name something after you,” Melina said.

  John thought about it for a while. He took the big medal, held it limply. His friends watched him, waiting for him to speak.

  “Well, I still say it’s bullshit,” he told Ivan. “But if there is any truth to what you say, it’s just the good old spirit of the Alamo you’re talking about, anyway. We’ve been doing it like that in Texas for years.”

  They laughed at him.

  He rose up from the bed again, swung the medal at them furiously. “I swear it’s true! Besides, it’s all Robert De Niro’s fault, anyway! I was imitating the real heroes, don’t you see? I was crawling around in there all dazed, and then I saw De Niro’s face when he was playing Colonel Jackson in the Teheran embassy, and I said to myself, well hell, what would he have done in this here situation? And that’s just what I did.”

  COUNTING POTSHERDS

  Harry Turtledove

  The ship clung close to land, like a roach scuttling along a wall. When at last the coast veered north and west, the ship conformed, steering oars squealing in their sockets and henna-dyed wool sail billowing as it filled with wind to push the vessel onto its new course.

  When the ship had changed direction, the eunuch Mithredath summoned the captain to the starboard rail with a slight nod. “We draw near, then, Agbaal?” Mithredath asked. His voice, a nameless tone between tenor and contralto, was cool, precise, intelligent.

  The Phoenician captain bowed low. The sun sparked off a silver hoop in his left ear. “My master, we do.” Agbaal pointed to the headland the ship had just rounded. “That is the cape of Sounion. If the wind holds, we should be in Peiraieus by evening—a day early,” he added slyly.

  “You will be rewarded if we are,” Mithredath promised. Agbaal, satisfied, bowed again and, after glancing at his important passenger for permission, went back to overseeing his crew.

  Mithredath would have paid gold darics from his own purse to shorten the time he spent away from the royal court, but no need for that: he was come to this western backwater at the royal command, and so could draw upon the treasury of Khsrish, King of Kings, as he required. Not for the first time, he vowed he would not stint.

  The day was brilliantly clear. Mithredath could see a long way. The only other ships visible were a couple of tiny fishing boats and a slow, wallowing vessel probably full of wheat from Egypt. Gulls mewed and squawked overhead.

  Mithredath tried to imagine what the narrow, island-flecked sea had looked like during those great days four centuries before, when the first Khsrish, the Conqueror, had led his huge fleet to the triumph that subjected the western Yauna to Persia once for all. He could not; he was not used enough to ships to picture hordes of them all moving together like so many sheep in a herd on their way to the marketplace of Babylon.

  That thought, he realized with a wry nod, showed him what he was most familiar with: the baking but oh-so-fertile plain between the Tigris and Euphrates. He also knew Ektabana well, the summer capital of the Kings of Kings, nestled in the shade of Mount Aurvant, though he had never suffered through a winter there. But until this journey, he had never thought to travel on the sea.

  Yet to his surprise, Mithredath was finding a strange sort of beauty here. The water over which he sailed was a blue deep enough almost to be wine-purple, the sky another blue so different as to make him wonder how the same word could apply to both. The land rising steeply from sea to sky was by turns rocky and bare and shaggy with green-gray olive trees. The combination was peculiar but somehow harmonious.

  True to his promise, Agbaal brought Mithredath to his destination with the sun still in the sky. True to his, the eunuch pressed a pair of goldpieces into the captain’s palm. Agbaal bowed almost double; his swarthy face glowed with pride when Mithredath offered him a cheek to kiss, as if the two of them were near in rank.

  The docks swarmed with the merchant folk of the Western Sea: Phoenicians like Agbaal in turbans, tunics, and mantles; Italians wearing long white robes draped over one shoulder; and, of course, the native Yauna or, as they called themselves, Hellenes. Their slightly singsong speech was heard even more than Aramaic, the Empire’s common tongue understood everywhere from India to the edges of the Gallic lands.

  Mithredath’s rich brocaded robes, the gold bracelets on his wrists, and the piles of baggage his servants brought onto the docks drew touts—as a honeypot draws flies, he thought sourly. He picked a fellow whose Aramaic had less of a Hellenic hiss to it than most, said, “Be so good as to lead me to the satrap’s palace.”

  “Of course, my master,” the man said, but his face fell. He would still get his fee from Mithredath, but had just had his hopes dashed of collecting another from the innkeeper upon whom he would have foisted Mithredath. Too bad, Mithredath thought.

  He was used to Babylon’s sensible grid of streets; these small western towns had their narrow, stinking lanes running every which way—and sometimes abruptly petering out. He was glad he had hired a guide; no one not familiar with these alleys from birth could have found his way through them.

  Though larger than its neighbors, the satrap’s residence—palace, Mithredath discovered, was far too grand a word—looked like any other house hereabouts. It presented a plain, whitewashed front to the world. Mithredath sniffed. To his way of thinking, anyone who was someone should let the world know it.

  He paid the guide—well enough to keep him from sneering, but not extravagantly—and rapped on the door with his pomegranate-headed walking stick. A moment later, a guard opened the little eye-level observation window to peer out at him. “Who comes?” the fellow demanded fiercely.

  Mithredath stood where the man could see him clearly, and answered not with the accented Aramaic in which he had been challenged but in pure, clear Persian:

  “I am Mithredath, saris”—somehow, in his own tongue, eunuch became almost a word of pride—“and servant to Khsrish King of Kings, king of lands containing many men, king in this great earth far and wide, son of Marduniya the king, an Achaemenid, a Persian, son of a Persian, of Aryan seed. May Ahuramazda smile upon him and make long his reign. I am come to the satrapy of the Yauna of the western mainland upon a mission given me from his own royal lips. I would discuss this with your master, the satrap Vahauka.”

  He folded his arms across his chest and waited.

  He did not wait long. He heard a thump on the other side of the door, and guessed the guard had dropped his spear in surprise. Mithredath did not smile. Years at the court of the King of Kings had schooled him against revealing his thoughts to a dangerous world. His face was perfectly composed when the guard flung the door wide and shouted, “Enter, servant of the King of Kings!”

  The guard bowed low. Mithredath walked past him, returning the courtesy with a bow barely more than a nod. Some people, he thought, deserved to be reminded from time to time of their station.

  As he had intended, more folk in the s
atrap’s residence than the door guard heard his announcement. A majordomo came rushing to greet him in the outer hall. He wore the rectangular mantle of a Hellene over Persian trousers. His bow Mithredath returned in full; he would be a power in this miniature court.

  The majordomo said, “Excellent saris“—he was a cautious one too, Mithredath thought, again not smiling—“his highness Vahauka, great satrap of the Yauna of the western mainland, now dines with the secretary, with the ganzabara of the satrapy, and with the general of the garrison. He bids you join them, if your long journey from the court of the King of Kings, may Ahuramazda smile upon him and make long his reign, has not left you too tired.”

  “The gracious invitation honors me,” Mithredath said. “I accept with pleasure.” He was glad to get the chance to meet the ganzabara so soon; the financial official was the one who would have to meet his tablet of credit from the court.

  “Come this way, then.” The majordomo led Mithredath out to the central courtyard where the satrap and his officers were dining. Here at last the eunuch felt himself among Persians again, for most of the courtyard was given over to a proper paradise, a formal garden of roses, tulips, and other bright blooms. Their fragrance, mingled with the odors of cookery, made Mithredath’s nostrils twitch.

  “Lord Vahauka, I present the saris Mithredath, servant of the King of Kings,” the majordomo said loudly. Mithredath began to prostrate himself, as he would have before Khsrish, but Vahauka, a lean, gray-bearded Persian of about fifty, stopped him with a wave. The satrap turned his head, presenting his cheek to the eunuch.

  “My lord is gracious,” Mithredath said as he stepped up to Vahauka and let his lips brush the satrap’s beard.

  “We are both the King of Kings’ servants; how can our ranks greatly differ?” Vahauka said. His fellow diners nodded and murmured in agreement. He went on. “Mithredath, I present you to my secretary, Rishi-kidin”—a perfumed, sweating Babylonian in linen undertunic, wool overtunic, and short white cloak—“the ganzabara Hermippos”—a clean-shaven Hellene who, like the majordomo, wore trousers—“and the general of this satrapy, Tadanmu”—a Persian with a no-nonsense look in his eyes, dressed rather more plainly than suited his station.