[What Might Have Been 01] Alternate Empires

by Anthology

  Once I get that far in a book, the rest is just work. The general idea is set, the characters have announced themselves to me, it’s just a matter of closing my eyes for a moment to see what’s going to be happening and then opening them to dictate to the scribe. In this case, the scribes, plural, because the first one wore out in a few more hours and I had to employ a second, and then a third.

  I didn’t sleep at all until it was all down. I think it was fifty-two straight hours, the longest I’d worked in one stretch in years. When it was all done I left it to be fair-copied. The rental agent agreed to get it down to the shipping offices by the harbor and dispatch it by fast air to Marcus in London.

  Then at last I stumbled back to Rachel’s house to sleep. I was surprised to find that it was still dark, an hour or more before sunrise.

  Basilius let me in, looking startled as he studied my sunken eyes and unshaved face. “Let me sleep until I wake up,” I ordered. There was a journal neatly folded beside my bed, but I didn’t look at it. I lay down, turned over once, and was gone.

  When I woke up, at least twelve hours had passed. I had Basilius bring me something to eat and shave me, and when I finally got out to the atrium it was nearly sundown and Rachel was waiting for me. I told her what I’d done, and she told me about the last message from the Olympians. “Last?” I objected. “How can you be sure it’s the last?”

  “Because they said so,” she told me sadly. “They said they were breaking off communications.”

  “Oh,” I said, thinking about that. “Poor Sam.” And she looked so doleful that I couldn’t help myself, I took her in my arms.

  Consolation turned to kissing, and when we had done quite a lot of that she leaned back, smiling at me.

  I couldn’t help what I said then, either. It startled me to hear the words come out of my mouth as I said, “Rachel, I wish we could get married.”

  She pulled back, looking at me with affection and a little surprised amusement. “Are you proposing to me?”

  I was careful of my grammar. “That was a subjunctive, sweet. I said I wished we could get married.”

  “I understood that. What I want to know is whether you’re asking me to grant your wish.”

  “No—well, hells, yes! But what I wish first is that I had the right to ask you. Sci-rom writers don’t have the most solid financial situation, you know. The way you live here—”

  “The way I live here,” she said, “is paid for by the estate I inherited from my father. Getting married won’t take it away.”

  “But that’s your estate, my darling. I’ve been poor, but I’ve never been a parasite.”

  “You won’t be a parasite,” she said softly, and I realized that she was being careful about her grammar, too.

  Which took a lot of willpower on my part. “Rachel,” I said, “I should be hearing from my editor any time now. If this new kind of sci-rom catches on—if it’s as popular as it might be—”

  “Yes?” she prompted.

  “Why,” I said, “then maybe I can actually ask you. But I don’t know that. Marcus probably has it by now, but I don’t know if he’s read it. And then I won’t know his decision till I hear from him. And now, with all the confusion about the Olympians, that might take weeks—”

  “Julie,” she said, putting her finger over my lips, “call him up.”

  The circuits were all busy, but I finally got through—and, because it was well after lunch, Marcus was in his office. More than that, he was quite sober. “Julie, you bastard,” he cried, sounding really furious, “where the hells have you been hiding? I ought to have you whipped.”

  But he hadn’t said anything about getting the aediles after me. “Did you have a chance to read Sidewise to a Chrestian World?“I asked.

  “The what? Oh, that thing. Nah. I haven’t even looked at it. I’ll buy it, naturally,” he said. “But what I’m talking about is An Ass’s Olympiad. The censors won’t stop it now, you know. In fact, all I want you to do now is make the Olympians a little dumber, a little nastier—you’ve got a biggie here, Julie! I think we can get a broadcast out of it, even. So when can you get back here to fix it up?”

  “Why—well, pretty soon, I guess, only I haven’t checked the hover timetable—”

  “Hover, hell! You’re coming back by fast plane—we’ll pick up the tab. And, oh, by the way, we’re doubling your advance. The payment will be in your account this afternoon.”

  And ten minutes later, when I unsubjunctively proposed to Rachel, she quickly and unsubjunctively accepted; and the high-speed flight to London takes nine hours, but I was grinning all the way.

  Chapter 5

  The Way It Is When You’ve Got It Made

  To be a free-lance writer is to live in a certain kind of ease. Not very easeful financially, maybe, but in a lot of other ways. You don’t have to go to an office every day, you get a lot of satisfaction out of seeing your very own words being read on hovers and trains by total strangers. To be a potentially best-selling writer is a whole order of magnitude different. Marcus put me up in an inn right next to the publishing company’s offices and stood over me while I turned my poor imaginary Olympian into the most doltish, feckless, unlikeable being the universe had ever seen. The more I made the Olympian contemptibly comic, the more Marcus loved it. So did everyone else in the office; so did their affiliates in Kiev and Manahattan and Kalkut and half a dozen other cities all around the world, and he informed me proudly that they were publishing my book simultaneously in all of them. “We’ll be the first ones out, Julie,” he exulted. “It’s going to be a mint! Money? Well, of course you can have more money—you’re in the big-time now!” And, yes, the broadcast studios were interested—interested enough to sign a contract even before I’d finished the revisions; and so were the journals, who came for interviews every minute that Marcus would let me off from correcting the proofs and posing for jacket photographs and speaking to their sales staff; and, all in all, I hardly had a chance to breathe until I was back on the highspeed aircraft to Alexandria and my bride.

  Sam had agreed to give the bride away, and he met me at the airpad. He looked older and more tired, but resigned. As we drove to Rachel’s house, where the wedding guests were already beginning to gather, I tried to cheer him up. I had plenty of joy myself; I wanted to share it. So I offered, “At least, now you can get back to your real work.”

  He looked at me strangely. “Writing sci-roms?” he asked.

  “No, of course not! That’s good enough for me, but you’ve still got your extrasolar probe to keep you busy.”

  “Julie,” he said sadly, “where have you been lately? Didn’t you see the last Olympian message?”

  “Well, sure,” I said, offended. “Everybody did, didn’t they?” And then I thought for a moment, and, actually, it had been Rachel who had told me about it. I’d never actually looked at a journal or a broadcast. “I guess I was pretty busy,” I said lamely.

  He looked sadder than ever. “Then maybe you don’t know that they said they weren’t only terminating all their own transmissions to us, they were terminating even our own probes.”

  “Oh, no, Sam! I would have heard if the probes had stopped transmitting!”

  He said patiently, “No, you wouldn’t, because the data they were sending is still on its way to us. We’ve still got a few years coming in from our probes. But that’s it. We’re out of interstellar space, Julie. They don’t want us there.”

  He broke off, peering out the window. “And that’s the way it is,” he said. “We’re here, though, and you better get inside. Rachel’s going to be tired of sitting under that canopy without you around.”

  The greatest thing of all about being a best-selling author, if you like traveling, is that when you fly around the world somebody else pays for the tickets. Marcus’s publicity department fixed up the whole thing. Personal appearances, bookstore autographings, college lectures, broadcasts, publishers’ meetings, receptions—we were kept busy for a solid
month, and it made a hell of a fine honeymoon.

  Of course any honeymoon would have been wonderful as long as Rachel was the bride, but without the publishers bankrolling us we might not have visited six of the seven continents on the way. (We didn’t bother with Polaris Australis—nobody there but penguins.) And we took time for ourselves along the way, on beaches in Hindia and the islands of Han, in the wonderful shops of Manahattan and a dozen other cities of the Western Continents—we did it all.

  When we got back to Alexandria the contractors had finished the remodeling of Rachel’s villa—which, we had decided, would now be our winter home, though our next priority was going to be to find a place where we could spend the busy part of the year in London. Sam had moved back in and, with Basilius, greeted us formally as we came to the door.

  “I thought you’d be in Rome,” I told him, once we were settled and Rachel had gone to inspect what had been done with her baths.

  “Not while I’m still trying to understand what went wrong,” he said. “The research is going on right here; this is where we transmitted from.”

  I shrugged and took a sip of the Falernian wine Basilius had left for us. I held the goblet up critically: a little cloudy, I thought, and in the vat too long. And then I grinned at myself, because a few weeks earlier I would have been delighted at anything so costly. “But we know what went wrong,” I told him reasonably. “They decided against us.”

  “Of course they did,” he said. “But why? I’ve been trying to work out just what messages were being received when they broke off communications.”

  “Do you think we said something to offend them?”

  He scratched the age spot on his bald head, staring at me. Then he sighed. “What would you think, Julius?”

  “Well, maybe so,” I admitted. “What messages were they?”

  “I’m not sure. It took a lot of digging. The Olympians, you know, acknowledged receipt of each message by repeating the last hundred and forty groups—”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Well, they did. The last message they acknowledged was a history of Rome. Unfortunately, it was six hundred and fifty thousand words long.”

  “So you have to read the whole history?”

  “Not just read it, Julie; we have to try to figure out what might have been in it that wasn’t in any previous message. We’ve had two or three hundred researchers collating every previous message, and the only thing that was new was some of the social data from the last census—”

  I interrupted him. “I thought you said it was a history.”

  “It was at the end of the history. We were giving pretty current data—so many of equestrian rank, so many citizens, so many freedmen, so many slaves.” He hesitated, and then said thoughtfully, “Paulus Magnus—I don’t know if you know him, he’s an Algonkan—pointed out that that was the first time we’d ever mentioned slavery.”

  I waited for him to go on. “Yes?” I said encouragingly.

  He shrugged. “Nothing. Paulus is a slave himself, so naturally he’s got it on his mind a lot.”

  “I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else?”

  “Oh,” he said, “there are a thousand theories. There were some health data, too, and some people think the Olympians might have suddenly gotten worried about some new microorganism killing them off. Or we weren’t polite enough. Or maybe—who knows—there was some sort of power struggle among them, and the side that came out on top just didn’t want any more new races in their community.”

  “And we don’t know yet which it was?”

  “It’s worse than that, Julie,” he told me somberly. “I don’t think we ever will find out what it was that made them decide they didn’t want to have anything to do with us.” And in that, too, Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus was a very intelligent man. Because we never have.

  THE RETURN OF

  WILLIAM PROXMIRE

  Larry Niven

  Through the peephole in Andrew’s front door the man made a startling sight.

  He looked to be in his eighties. He was breathing hard and streaming sweat. He seemed slightly more real than most men: photogenic as hell, tall and lean, with stringy muscles and no potbelly, running shoes and a day pack and a blue windbreaker, and an open smile. The face was familiar, but from where?

  Andrew opened the front door but left the screen door locked. “Hello?”

  “Dr. Andrew Minsky?”

  “Yes.” Memory clicked. “William Proxmire, big as life.”

  The ex-senator smiled acknowledgment. “I’ve only just finished reading about you in the Tribune, Dr. Minsky. May I come in?”

  It had never been Andrew Minsky’s ambition to invite William Proxmire into his home. Still—“Sure. Come in, sit down, have some coffee. Or do your stretches.” Andrew was a runner himself when he could find the time.

  “Thank you.”

  Andrew left him on the rug with one knee pulled against his chest. From the kitchen he called, “I never in my life expected to meet you face to face. You must have seen the article on me and Tipler and Penrose?”

  “Yes. I’m prepared to learn that the media got it all wrong.”

  “I bet you are. Any politician would. Well, the Tribune implied that what we’ve got is a time machine. Of course we don’t. We’ve got a schematic based on a theory. Then again, it’s the new improved version. It doesn’t involve an infinitely long cylinder that you’d have to make out of neutronium—”

  “Good. What would it cost?”

  Andrew Minsky sighed. Had the politician even recognized the reference? He said, “Oh … hard to say.” He picked up two cups and the coffeepot and went back in. “Is that it? You came looking for a time machine?”

  The old man was sitting on the yellow rug with his legs spread wide apart and his fingers grasping his right foot. He released, folded his legs heel to heel, touched forehead to toes, held, then stood up with a sound like popcorn popping. He said, “Close enough. How much would it cost?”

  “Depends on what you’re after. If you—”

  “I can’t get you a grant if you can’t name a figure.”

  Andrew set his cup down very carefully. He said, “No, of course not.”

  “I’m retired now, but people still owe me favors. I want a ride. One trip. What would it cost?”

  Andrew hadn’t had enough coffee yet. He didn’t feel fully awake. “I have to think out loud a little. Okay? Mass isn’t a problem. You can go as far back as you like if … mmm. Let’s say under sixty years. Cost might be twelve, thirteen million if you could also get us access to the proton-antiproton accelerator at Washburn University, or maybe CERN in Switzerland. Otherwise we’d have to build that too. By the way, you’re not expecting to get younger, are you?”

  “I hadn’t thought about it.”

  “Good. The theory depends on maneuverings between event points. You don’t ever go backward. Where and when, Senator?”

  William Proxmire leaned forward with his hands clasped. “Picture this. A Navy officer walks the deck of a ship, coughing, late at night in the 1930s. Suddenly an arm snakes around his neck, a needle plunges into his buttocks—”

  “The deck of a ship at sea?”

  Proxmire nodded, grinning.

  “You’re just having fun, aren’t you? Something to do while jogging, now that you’re retired.”

  “Put it this way,” Proxmire said. “I read the article. It linked up with an old daydream of mine. I looked up your address. You were within easy running distance. I hope you don’t mind?”

  Oddly enough, Andrew found he didn’t. Anything that happened before his morning coffee was recreation.

  So dream a little. “Deck of a moving ship. I was going to say it’s ridiculous, but it isn’t. We’ll have to deal with much higher velocities. Any point on the Earth’s surface is spinning at up to half a mile per second and circling the sun at eighteen miles per. In principle I think we could solv
e all of it with one stroke. We could scan one patch of deck, say, over a period of a few seconds, then integrate the record into the program. Do the same coming home.”

  “You can do it?”

  “Well, if we can’t solve that one we can’t do anything else, either. You’d be on a tight schedule, though. Senator, what’s the purpose of the visit?”

  “Have you ever had daydreams about a time machine and a scope-sighted rifle?”

  Andrew’s eyebrows went up. “Sure, what little boy hasn’t? Hitler, I suppose? For me it was always Lyndon Johnson. Senator, I do not commit murder under any circumstances.”

  “A time machine and a scope-sighted rifle, and me,” William Proxmire said dreamily. “I get more anonymous letters than you’d believe, even now. They tell me that every space advocate daydreams about me and a time machine and a scope-sighted rifle. Well, I started daydreaming too, but my fantasy involves a time machine and a hypodermic full of antibiotics.”

  Andrew laughed. “You’re plotting to do someone good behind his back?”

  “Right.”

  “Who?”

  “Robert Anson Heinlein.”

  All laughter dropped away. “Why?”

  “It’s a good deed, isn’t it?”

  “Sure. Why?”

  “You know the name? Over the past forty years or so I’ve talked to a great many people in science and in the space program. I kept hearing the name Robert Heinlein. They were seduced into science because they read Heinlein at age twelve. These were the people I found hard to deal with. No grasp of reality. Fanatics.”

  Andrew suspected that the senator had met more of these than he realized. Heinlein spun off ideas at a terrific rate. Other writers picked them up … along with a distrust for arrogance combined with stupidity or ignorance, particularly in politicians.

  “Well, Heinlein’s literary career began after he left the Navy because of lung disease.”

  “You’re trying to destroy the space program.”