Futures Past

by Gardner Dozois

  Perhaps ten years old, he needs to make two trips from his station wagon, carrying the minimal groceries to the porch and no farther. I'm standing on my porch waiting for the second load. Fresh air feels pleasant. The lawn has grown shaggy and seedy, the old furniture and carpeting rotting without complaint amidst the greenness. A quick calculation tells me that this is late autumn, early winter. The trees should have changed and lost their leaves by now. Yet the world smells and tastes like spring, both climate and vegetation under some kind of powerful control.

  The boy struggles with a numbered sack. Not only is he small, he looks malnourished. But he brings my food with a fanatical sense of purpose, and when I ask about the other boy, the older boy, he merely replies:

  "He's done."

  What does that mean?

  "Done," he repeats, angry not to be understood.

  Hearing our voices, the woman wakes and comes to the door. "Get back in here," she snaps. "I'm warning you!"

  One last look at the improved world, then I retreat, taking both sacks with me. Meanwhile the boy fires up the station wagon, black smoke dispersing in all directions. He looks silly, that fierce little head peering through the steering wheel. He pulls into the next driveway, and I wonder who lives in that house. And what do they dream about?

  The woman is complaining about my attitudes, my carelessness. Everything. I'm a safer subject than the lousy quality of today's barley and rice.

  "Come here," she tells me.

  Perhaps I will, perhaps I won't.

  "Or I'll pick up the phone and complain," she threatens.

  She won't. First of all, I terrify her. What if I extracted some kind of vengeance in response? And secondly, the thought of being entirely alone must disturb her. I know it whenever I stare at her, making her shrink away. As much as she hates me, without my presence she might forget that she's genuinely alive.

  THE FUTURE DOOMED itself.

  Then it packed its bags, intending to save itself.

  But like a weather system, the future is too large and chaotic to be of one mind, holding to a single outcome. Some of its citizens argued that they didn't have the right to intrude on the past. "Why should we supplant these primitive people?" they asked. "We screwed up, and if we were any sort of hominids, we would accept our fate and be done with it."

  But most of their species felt otherwise. And by concentrating the energies of two earths, present and past, they felt there was a better than good chance of success.

  Unaware of the secret movement in their midst.

  Never guessing that there was a second surreptitious Voice.

  ALARMS WAKE ME, and I rush downstairs just as the man-child is born. With a slow majesty, he sits up in the bathtub, the thick fluids sliding off his slick and hairy body. The beep-beep of the alarms quit, replaced with a scream from the woman. "Look at you," she says. "Oh, look at you!"

  The man couldn't look more pissed, coughing until his lungs clear, then screwing up his face, saying something in that future language. A nearby machine activates itself, translating his words. "I want water. Cold water. Get me water."

  "I'll get it," I say.

  The woman is too busy grinning and applauding herself. "You're a darling lovely man, sir. And I took care of you. Almost entirely by myself, I did"

  The man-child speaks again.

  "I'm still thirsty," the machine reports, both voices impatient.

  In the kitchen, propped next to the back door, is the same crow bar that I used on the bathtub. That's what I bring him. A useful sense of rage has been building, probably from the beginning; this stranger and his ilk have destroyed my world. It's only fair, only just, to take the steel bar in my hands and swing, striking him before he has the strength or coordination to fight me.

  The woman wails and moans, too stunned to move.

  That elongated skull is paper-thin, demolished with the first blow and its jellylike contents scattered around the room.

  Too late, she grabs at me, trying to wrestle the crowbar from my hands. I throw her to the floor, considering a double homicide. But that wouldn't be right. Even when she picks up the phone and begs for help, I can't bring myself to kill her. Instead I demolish the wall above her head, startling her, and when she crawls away I lift the receiver, grinning as I calmly tell whoever is listening, "You're next, friend. Your time is just about done."

  OUTDOORS IS THE smell of sweet chemicals and smoke. Strange robotic craft streak overhead, probably heading for crisis points. They ignore me. Maybe too much is happening; maybe their mechanisms were sabotaged at the factory. Either way, I'm left to move up the street, entering each house and killing the just-born invaders where I find them. It's messy, violent work, but in one living room I find the "parents" slain, presumably by their thankless "child." The ceiling creaks above their bodies. I climb the stairs on my toes, catching the murderer as she tries on spare clothes, pants around her knees and no chance for her to grab her bloody softball bat.

  From then on I'm a demon, focused and confident and very nearly tireless.

  Finishing my block, I start for the next one. Rounding the corner of a house, I come face-to-face with a stout woman wielding a fire axe. The two of us pause, then smile knowingly. Then we join forces. Toward dawn, taking a break from our gruesome work, I think to ask:

  "What's your name?"

  "Laverne," she replies, with a lifelong embarrassment. "And yours?"

  "Harold," I confess, pleased that I can remember it after so long. "Good to meet you, and Laverne is a lovely name."

  Later that day, she and I and twenty other new friends find the invaders barricaded inside a once-gorgeous mansion. Once it's burned to the ground, the city is liberated.

  Where now?

  Laverne suggests, "How about north? I once heard that they were building something in that direction."

  I hug her, no words needed just now.

  WE NAME OUR daughter Unique.

  The three of us are living in a city meant for the extinct future, in a shelter made from scraps and set between empty buildings. The buildings themselves are tall and clean, yet somehow very lonely edifices. They won't admit us, but they won't fight us either. And the climate remains ideal. Gardens thrive wherever the earth shows, and our neighbors are scarce and uniformly pleasant.

  One night I speak to my infant daughter, telling her that perhaps someday she'll learn how to enter the buildings. Or better, tear them down and use their best parts.

  She acts agreeable, babbling something in her baby language. Laveme stretches out before me, naked and agreeable in a different sense. With a sly grin, she asks:

  "Care to ride the chaos, darling?"

  Always and gladly, thank you. And together, with every little motion, we change the universe in ways we happily cannot predict.

  Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne

  R. A. Lafferty

  The late R. A. Lafferty started writing in 1960, at the relatively advanced age (for a new writer, anyway) of forty-eight, and in the years before his retirement in 1987 and his eventual death, he published some of the freshest and funniest short stories ever written in the genre, as well as a string of vivid and unforgettable books such as the novels Past Master, The Devil Is Dead, The Reefs of Earth, Okla Hannali, The Fall of Rome, Arrive At Easterwine, and The Flame Is Green, and landmark collections such as Nine Hundred Grandmothers, Strange Doings, Does Anyone Else Have Something Further to Add?, Golden Gate and Other Stories, Ringing the Changes, Iron Star, Lafferty In Orbit, Iron Tears, and The Early Lafferty. Lafferty won the Hugo Award in 1973 for his story "Eurema's Dam," and in 1990 received the World Fantasy Award, the prestigious Life Achievement Award. He died in 2002.

  Here he delivers a sharp and funny cautionary tale for those determined to alter the past to improve the present—maybe sometimes it's better to leave well-enough alone …

  "WE'VE BEEN ON some tall ones," said Gregory Smirnov of the Institute, "but we've never stood on the edge of a bigger one t
han this, nor viewed one with shakier expectations. Still, if the calculations of Epiktistes are correct, this will work."

  "People, it will work," Epikt said.

  This was Epiktistes the Ktistec machine? Who'd have believed it? The main bulk of Epikt was five floors below them, but he had run an extension of himself up to this little penthouse lounge. All it took was a cable, no more than a yard in diameter, and a functional head set on the end of it.

  And what a head he chose! It was a sea-serpent head, a dragon head, five feet long and copied from an old carnival float. Epikt had also given himself human speech of a sort, a blend of Irish and Jewish and Dutch comedian patter from ancient vaudeville. Epikt was a comic to his last para-DNA relay when he rested his huge, boggle-eyed, crested head on the table there and smoked the biggest stogies ever born.

  But he was serious about this project.

  "We have perfect test conditions," the machine Epikt said as though calling them to order. "We set out basic texts, and we take careful note of the world as it is. If the world changes, then the texts should change here before our eyes. For our test pilot, we have taken that portion of our own middle-sized city that can be viewed from this fine vantage point. If the world in its past-present continuity is changed by our meddling, then the face of our city will also change instantly as we watch it.

  "We have assembled here the finest minds and judgments in the world: eight humans and one Ktistec machine, myself. Remember that there are nine of us. It might be important."

  The nine finest minds were: Epiktistes, the transcendent machine who put the "K" in Ktistec; Gregory Smirnov, the large-souled director of the Institute; Valery Mok, an incandescent lady scientist: her over-shadowed and over-intelligent husband Charles Cogsworth; the humorless and inerrant Glasser; Aloysius Shiplap, the seminal genius; Willy McGilly, a man of unusual parts (the seeing third finger on his left hand he had picked up on one of the planets of Kapteyn's Star) and no false modesty; Audifax O'Hanlon; and Diogenes Pontifex. The latter two men were not members of the Institute (on account of the Minimal Decency Rule), but when the finest minds in the world are assembled, these two cannot very well be left out.

  "We are going to tamper with one small detail in past history and note its effect," Gregory said. "This has never been done before openly. We go back to an era that has been called "A patch of light in the vast gloom,' the time of Charlemagne. We consider why that light went out and did not kindle others. The world lost four hundred years by that flame expiring when the tinder was apparently ready for it. We go back to that false dawn of Europe and consider where it failed. The year was 778, and the region was Spain. Charlemagne had entered alliance with Marsilies, the Arab king of Saragossa, against the Caliph Abd ar-Rahmen of Cordova. Charlemagne took such towns as Pamplona, Huesca and Gerona and cleared the way to Marsilies in Saragossa. The Caliph accepted the situation. Saragossa should be independent, a city open to both Moslems and Christians. The northern marches to the border of France should be permitted their Christianity, and there would be peace for everybody.

  "This Marsilies had long treated Christians as equals in Saragossa, and now there would be an open road from Islam into the Frankish Empire. Marsilies gave Charlemagne thirty-three scholars (Moslem, Jewish and Christian) and some Spanish mules to seal the bargain. And there could have been a cross-fertilization of cultures.

  "But the road was closed at Roncevalles where the rearguard of Charlemagne was ambushed and destroyed on its way back to France. The ambushers were more Basque than Moslems, but Charlemagne locked the door at the Pyrenees and swore that he would not let even a bird fly over that border thereafter. He kept the road closed, as did his son and his grandsons. But when he sealed off the Moslem world, he also sealed off his own culture.

  "In his latter years he tried a revival of civilization with a ragtag of Irish half-scholars, Greek vagabonds and Roman copyists who almost remembered an older Rome. These weren't enough to revive civilization, and yet Charlemagne came close with them. Had the Islam door remained open, a real revival of learning might have taken place then rather than four hundred years later. We are going to arrange that the ambush at Roncevalles did not happen and that the door between the two civilizations was not closed. Then we will see what happens to us."

  "Intrusion like a burglar bent," said Epikt.

  "Who's a burglar?" Glasser demanded.

  "I am:' Epikt said. "We all are. It's from an old verse. I forget the author; I have it filed in my main mind downstairs if you're interested."

  "We set out a basic text of Hilarius," Gregory continued. "We note it carefully, and we must remember it the way it is. Very soon, that may be the way it was. I believe that the words will change on the very page of this book as we watch them. Just as soon as we have done what we intend to do."

  The basic text marked in the open book read:

  The traitor, Gano, playing a multiplex game, with money from the Cordova Caliph, hired Basque Christians (dressed as Saragossan Mozarabs) to ambush the rearguard of the Frankish force. To do this it was necessary that Gano keep in contact with the Basques and at the same time delay the rear-guard of the Franks. Gano, however, served both as guide and scout for the Franks. The ambush was effected. Charlemagne lost his Spanish mules. And.he locked the door against the Moslem world.

  That was the text by Hilarius.

  "When we, as it were, push the button (give the nod to Epiktistes), this will be changed:' Gregory said. Epikt, by a complex of devices that he has assembled, will send an Avatar (partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction), and something will have happened to the traitor Gano along about sundown one night on the road to Roncevalles."

  "I hope the Avatar isn't expensive," Willy McGilly said.

  "When I was a boy we got by with a dart whittled out of slippery elm wood"

  "This is no place for humor," Glasser protested. "Who did you, as a boy, ever kill in time, Willy?"

  "Lots of them. King Wu of the Manchu, Pope Adrian VII, President Hardy of our own country, King Marcel of Auvergne, the philosopher Gabriel Toeplitz. It's a good thing we got them. They were a bad lot."

  "But I never heard of any of them, Willy," Glasser insisted. "Of course not. We killed them when they were kids." "Enough of your fooling, Willy," Gregory cut it off. "Willy's not fooling," the machine Epikt said. "Where do you think I got the idea?"

  "Regard the world," Aloysius said softly. "We see our own middle-sized town with half a dozen towers of pastel-colored brick. We will watch it as it grows or shrinks. It will change if the world changes."

  "There's two shows in town I haven't seen," Valery said. "Don't let them take them away! After all, there are only three shows in town"

  "We regard the Beautiful Arts as set out in the reviews here, which we have also taken as basic texts," Audifax O'Hanlon said. "You can say what you want to, but the arts have never been in meaner shape. Painting is of three schools only, all of them bad. Sculpture is the heaps-of-rusted-metal school and the obscene tinker-toy effects. The only popular art, graffiti on mingitorio walls, has become unimaginative, stylized and ugly.

  "The only thinkers to be thought of are the dead Teilhard de Chardin and the stillborn Sartre, Zielinski, Aichinger. Oh well, if you're going to laugh there's no use going on"

  "All of us here are experts on something," Cogsworth said. "Most of us are experts on everything. We know the world as it is. Let us do what we are going to do and then look at the world."

  "Push the button, Epikt!" Gregory Smirnov ordered.

  From his depths, Epiktistes the Ktistec machine sent out an Avatar, partly of mechanical and partly of ghostly construction. Along about sundown on the road from Pamplona to Roncevalles, on August 14 of the year 778, the traitor Gano was taken up from the road and hanged on a carob tree, the only one in those groves of oak and beech. And all things thereafter were changed.

  "DID IT WORK, Epikt? Is it done?" Louis Lobachevski demanded. "I can't see a change in anything.
"

  "The Avatar is back and reports his mission accomplished," Epikt stated. "I can't see any change in anything either."

  "Let's look at the evidence," Gregory said.

  The thirteen of them, the ten humans and the Ktistec, Chresmoeidec and Proaisthematic machines, turned to the evidence with mounting disappointment.

  "There is not one word changed in the Hilarius text," Gregory grumbled, and indeed the basic text still read:

  The king Marsilies of Saragossa, playing a multiplex game, took money from the Caliph of Cordova for persuading Charlemagne to abandon the conquest of Spain (which Charlemagne had never considered and couldn't have effected), took money from Charlemagne in recompense for the cities of the Northern marches being returned to Christian rule (though Marsilies himself had never ruled them); and took money from everyone as toll on the new trade passing through his city. Marsilies gave up nothing but thirty-three scholars, the same number of mules and a few wagonloads of book-manuscripts from the old Hellenistic libraries. But a road over the mountains was opened between the two worlds; and also a sector of the Mediterranean coast became open to both. A limited opening was made between the two worlds, and a limited reanimation of civilization was affected in each.

  "No, there is not one word of the text changed," Gregory grumbled. "History followed its same course. How did our experiment fail? We tried, by a device that seems a little cloudy now, to shorten the gestation period for the new birth. It would not be shortened"

  "The town is in no way changed," said Aloysius Shiplap. "It is still a fine large town with two dozen imposing towers of varicolored limestone and midland marble. It is a vital metropolis, and we all love it, but it is now as it was before."

  "There are still two dozen good shows in town that I haven't seen," Valery said happily as she examined the billings. "I was afraid that something might have happened to them."