Futures Past

by Gardner Dozois

  Over the rattling of gunfire Rice could hear the whine of VTOL jets bringing in the evacuees from the US and Africa. Roman centurions, wrapped in mesh body armor and carrying shoulder-launched rockets, herded Realtime personnel into the tunnels that led to the portal.

  Mozart was in the crowd, waving enthusiastically to Rice. "We're pulling out, man! Fantastic, huh? Back to Realtime!"

  Rice looked at the clustered towers of pumps, coolers, and catalytic cracking units. "It's a goddamned shame," he said. "All that work, shot to hell:'

  "We were losing too many people, man. Forget it. There's plenty of eighteenth centuries."

  The guards, sniping at the crowds outside, suddenly leaped aside as Rice's hovercar burst through the ages. Half a dozen Masonic fanatics still clung to the doors and pounded on the windscreen. Jebe's Mongols yanked the invaders free and axed them while a Roman flamethrower unit gushed fire across the gates.

  Marie Antoinette leaped out of the hovercar. Jebe grabbed for her, but her sleeve came off in his hand. She spotted Mozart and ran for him, Jebe only a few steps behind.

  "Wolf, you bastard!" she shouted. "You leave me behind! What about your promises, you merde, you pig-dog!"

  Mozart whipped off his mirrorshades. He turned to Rice. "Who is this woman?"

  "The Green Card, Wolf! You say I sell Rice to the Masonistas, you get me the card!" She stopped for breath and Jebe caught her by one arm. When she whirled on him; he cracked her across the jaw, and she dropped to the tarmac.

  The Mongol focused his smoldering eyes on Mozart. "Was you, eh? You, the traitor?" With the speed of a striking cobra he pulled his machine pistol and jammed the muzzle against Mozart's nose. "I put my gun on rock and roll, there nothing left of you but ears, man"

  A single shot echoed across the courtyard. Jebe's head rocked back, and he fell in a heap.

  Rice spun to his right. Parker, the DJ, stood in the doorway of an equipment shed. He held a Walther PPK. "Take it easy, Rice," Parker said, walking toward him. "He's just a grunt, expendable."

  "You killed him!"

  "So what?" Parker said, throwing one arm around Mozart's frail shoulders. "This here's my boy! I transmitted a couple of his new tunes up the line a month ago. You know what? The kid's number five on the Billboard charts! Number five!" Parker shoved the gun into his belt. "With a bullet!"

  "You gave him the Green Card, Parker?"

  "No," Mozart said. "It was Sutherland."

  "What did you do to her?"

  "Nothing! I swear to you, man! Well, maybe I kind of lived up to what she wanted to see. A broken man, you know, his music stolen from him, his very soul?" Mozart rolled his eyes upward. "She gave me the Green Card, but that still wasn't enough. She couldn't handle the guilt. You know the rest."

  "And when she got caught, you were afraid we wouldn't pull out. So you decided to drag me into it! You got Toinette to turn me over to the Masons. That was your doing!"

  As if hearing her name, Toinette moaned softly from the tarmac. Rice didn't care about the bruises, the dirt, the rips in her leopard-skin jeans. She was still the most gorgeous creature he'd ever seen.

  Mozart shrugged. "I was a Freemason once. Look, man, they're very uncool. I mean, all I did was drop a few hints, and look what happened." He waved casually at the carnage all around them. "I knew you'd get away from them somehow"

  "You can't just use people like that!"

  "Bullshit, Rice! You do it all the time! I needed this seige so Realtime would haul us out! For Christ's sake, I can't wait fifteen years to go up the line. History says I'm going to be dead in fifteen years! I don't want to die in this dump! I want that car and that recording studio!"

  "Forget it, pal," Rice said. "When they hear back in Real-time how you screwed things up here—"

  Parker laughed. "Shove off, Rice. We're talking Top of the Pops, here. Not some penny-ante refinery:' He took Mozart's arm protectively. "Listen, Wolf baby, let's get into those tunnels. I got some papers for you to sign as soon as we hit the future."

  The sun had set, but muzzle-loading cannon lit the night, pumping shells into the city. For a moment Rice stood stunned as cannonbails clanged harmlessly off the storage tanks. Then, finally, he shook his head. Salzburg's time had run out.

  Hoisting Toinette over one shoulder, he ran toward the safety of the tunnels.

  Under Siege

  George R. R. Martin

  Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, George R. R. Martin made his first sale in 1971, and soon established himself as one of the most popular SF writers of the '70s. He quickly became a mainstay of the Ben Bova Analog with stories such as "With Morning Comes Mistf all," "And Seven Times Never Kill Man," "The Second Kind of Loneliness," "The Storms of Windhaven" (in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle, and later expanded by them into the novel Windhaven), "Override," and others, although he also sold to Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, Orbit, and other markets. One of his Analog stories, the striking novella A Song for Lya," won him his first Hugo Award in 1974.

  By the end of the '70s, he had reached the height of his influence as a science fiction writer, and was producing his best work in that category with stories such as the famous "Sand-kings," his best-known story, which won both the Nebula and the Hugo in 1980 (he'd later win another Nebula in 1985 for his story "Portraits of His Children"), "The Way of Cross and Dragon," which also won a Hugo Award in 1980 (making Martin the first author ever to receive two Hugo Awards for fiction in the same year), "Bitterblooms," "The Stone City," "Starlady," and others. These stories would be collected in Sandkings, one of the strongest collections of the period. By now, he had mostly moved away from Analog, although he would have a long sequence of stories about the droll interstellar adventures of Havalend Tuf (later collected in Tuf Voyaging) running throughout the '80s in the Stanley Schmidt Analog, as well as a few strong individual pieces such as the novella "Nightflyers"—most of his major work of the late '70s and early '80s, though, would appear in Omni. The late '70s and '80s also saw the publication of his memorable novel Dying of the Light, his only solo SF novel, while his stories were collected in A Song for Lya, Sandkings, Songs of Stars and Shadows, Songs the Dead Men Sing, Nightflyers, and Portraits of His Children. By the beginning of the '80s, he'd moved away from science fiction and into the horror genre, publishing the big horror novel Fevre Dream, and winning the Bram Stoker Award for his horror story "The Pear-Shaped Man" and the World Fantasy Award for his werewolf novella "The Skin Trade." By the end of that decade, though, the crash of the horror market and the commercial failure of his ambitious horror novel Armageddon Rag had driven him out of the print world and to a successful career in television instead, where for more than a decade he worked as story editor or producer on such shows as new Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast.

  After years away, Martin made a triumphant return to the print world in 1996 with the publication of the immensely successful fantasy novel A Game of Thrones, the start of his Song of Ice and Fire sequence. A free-standing novella taken from that work, "Blood of the Dragon," won Martin another Hugo Award in 1997. Two further books in the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, have made it one of the most popular, acclaimed, and best-selling series in all of modern fantasy. His most recent book are a massive retrospective collection spanning the entire spectrum of his career, GRRM: A Retrospective, and a new volume in the "Song of Ice and Fire" series, A Feast for Crows.

  In the intense and compassionate story that follows, in which an attempt is made to alter the past by a society that has run out of future, he suggests that what really matters in such an attempt is not so much what you do, but howyou do it.. .

  ON THE HIGH ramparts of Vargon, Colonel Bengt Anttonen stood alone and watched phantasms race across the ice.

  The world was snow and wind and bitter, burning cold. The winter sea had frozen hard around Helsinki, and in its icy grip it held the six island citadels of the great fortress called Sveaborg. The wind was a knife drawn from a s
heath of ice. It cut through Anttonen's uniform, chafed at his cheeks, brought tears to his eyes and froze them as they trickled down his face. The wind howled around the towering, gray granite walls, forced its way through doors and cracks and gun emplacements, insinuated itself everywhere. Out upon the frozen sea, it snapped and shrieked at the Russian artillery and sent puffs of snow from the drifts running and swirling over the ice like strange white beasts, ghostly animals all asparkle, wearing first one shape and then another, changing constantly as they ran.

  They were creatures as malleable as Anttonen's thoughts. He wondered what form they would take next and where they were running to so swiftly, these misty children of snow and wind. Perhaps they could be taught to attack the Russians. He smiled, savoring the fancy of the snow beasts unleashed upon the enemy. It was a strange, wild thought. Colonel Bengt Anttonen had never been an imaginative man before, but of late his mind had often been taken by such whimsies.

  Anttonen turned his face into the wind again, welcoming the chill, the numbing cold. He wanted it to cool his fury, to cut into the heart of him and freeze the passions that seethed there. He wanted to be numb. The cold had turned even the turbulent sea into still and silent ice; now let it conquer the turbulence within Bengt Anttonen. He opened his mouth, exhaled a long plume of breath that rose from his reddened cheeks like steam, inhaled a draft of frigid air that went down like liquid oxygen.

  But panic came in the wake of that thought. Again, it was happening again. What was liquid oxygen? Cold, he knew somehow; colder than the ice; colder than this wind. Liquid oxygen was bitter and white, and it steamed and flowed. He knew it, knew it as certainly as he knew his own name.

  But how?

  Anttonen turned from the ramparts. He walked with long, swift strides, his hand touching the hilt of his sword as if it could provide some protection against the demons that had invaded his mind. The other officers were right; he was going mad, surely. He had proved it this afternoon at the staff meeting.

  The meeting had gone very badly, as they all had of late. As always, Anttonen had raised his voice against the others, hopelessly, stupidly. He was right, he knew that. Yet he knew also he could not convince them and that each word further undermined his status, further damaged his career.

  Jägerhorn had brought it on once again. Colonel F. A. Jägerhorn was everything that Anttonen was not: dark and handsome, polished and politic, an aristocrat with an aristocrat's control. Jägerhorn had important connections, Jägerhorn had influential relatives, Jägerhorn had the confidence of Vice Admiral Carl Olof Cronstedt, commandant of Sveaborg. At the meeting, Jägerhorn had produced a sheaf of reports.

  "The reports are wrong," Anttonen had insisted. "The Russians do not outnumber us. They have barely forty guns, sir. Sveaborg mounts ten times that number."

  Cronstedt seemed shocked by Anttonen's tone, his certainty, his insistence. Jägerhorn simply smiled. "Might I ask how you come by this intelligence, Colonel Anttonen?" he asked.

  That was the question Bengt Anttonen could never answer. "I know," he said.

  Jägerhorn rattled the papers in his hand. "My own intelligence comes from Lieutenant Klick, who is in Helsinki and has direct access to reliable reports of enemy plans, movements, and numbers."

  He looked to Vice Admiral Cronstedt. "I submit, sir, that this information is a good deal more reliable than Colonel Anttonen's mysterious certainties. According to Klick, the Russians outnumber us already, and General Suchtelen will soon be receiving sufficient reinforcements to enable him to launch a major assault. Furthermore, they have a formidable amount of artillery on hand. Certainly more than the forty pieces that Colonel Anttonen would have us believe is the extent of their armament."

  Cronstedt was nodding, agreeing. Even then Anttonen could not be silent. "Sir," he insisted, "Klick's reports must be discounted. The man cannot be trusted. Either he is in the pay of the enemy or they are deluding him."

  Cronstedt frowned. "That is a grave charge, Colonel."

  "He is a fool and a damned Anjala traitor!"

  Jägerhorn bristled at that, and Cronstedt and a number of junior officers looked plainly aghast. "Colonel," the commandant said, "it is well known that Colonel Jígerhorn has relatives in the Anjala League. Your comments are offensive. Our situation here is perilous enough without my officers fighting among themselves over petty political differences. You will offer an apology at once"

  Given no choice, Anttonen had tendered an awkward apology. Jhgerhorn accepted with a patronizing nod.

  Cronstedt went back to the papers. "Very persuasive," he said, "and very alarming. It is as I have feared. We have come to a hard place." Plainly his mind was made up. It was futile to argue further. It was at times like this that Bengt Anttonen most wondered what madness had possessed him. He would go to staff meetings determined to be circumspect and politic, and no sooner would he be seated than a strange arrogance would seize him. He argued long past the point of wisdom; he denied obvious facts, confirmed in written reports from reliable sources; he spoke out of turn and made enemies on every side.

  "No, sir," he said. "I beg of you, disregard Klick's intelligence. Sveaborg is vital to the spring counteroffensive. We have nothing to fear if we can hold out until the ice melts. Once the sea lanes are open, Sweden will send help."

  Vice Admiral Cronstedt's face was drawn and weary, an old man's face. "How many times must we go over this? I grow tired of your argumentative attitude, and I am quite aware of Sveaborg's importance to the spring offensive. The facts are plain. Our defenses are flawed, and the ice makes our walls accessible from all sides. Sweden's armies are being routed—"

  "We know that only from the newspapers the Russians allow us, sir," Anttonen blurted out. "French and Russian papers. Such news is unrealiable."

  Cronstedt's patience was exhausted. "Quiet!" he said, slapping the table with an open palm. "I have had enough of your intransigence, Colonel Anttonen. I respect your patriotic fervor, but not your judgment. In the future, when I require your opinion, I shall ask for it. Is that clear?"

  "Yes, sir," Anttonen had said.

  Jägerhornsmiled. "If I may proceed?"

  The rebuke had been as smarting as the cold winter wind. It was no wonder Anttonen had felt driven to the cold solitude Hof the battlements afterward.

  By the time he returned to his quarters, Bengt Anttonen's mood was bleak and confused. Darkness was falling, he knew. Over the frozen sea, over Sveaborg, over Sweden and Finland. And over America, he thought. Yet the afterthought left him sick and dizzy. He sat heavily on his cot, cradling his head in his hands. America, America, what madness was that, what possible difference could the struggle between Sweden and Russia make to that infant nation so far away?

  Rising, he lit a lamp, as if light would drive the troubling thoughts away, and splashed some stale water on his face from the basin atop the modest dresser. Behind the basin was the mirror he used for shaving, slightly warped and dulled by corrosion but serviceable. As he dried his big, bony hands, he found himself staring at his own face, the features at once so familiar and so oddly, frighteningly strange. He had unruly, graying hair; dark-gray eyes; a narrow, straight nose; slightly sunken cheeks; a square chin. He was too thin, almost gaunt. It was a stubborn, common, plain face. The face he had worn all his life. Long ago, Bengt Anttonen had grown resigned to the way he looked. Until recently, he scarcely gave his appearance any thought. Yet now he stared at himself, unblinking, and felt a disturbing fascination welling up inside him, a sense of satisfaction, a pleasure in the cast of his image that was alien and troubling. Such vanity was sick, unmanly, another sign of madness. Anttonen wrenched his gaze from the mirror. He lay himself down with a will.

  For long moments he could not sleep. Fancies and visions danced against his closed eyelids, sights as fantastic as the phantom animals fashioned by the wind: flags he did not recognize, walls of polished metal, great storms of fire, men and women as hideous as demons asleep in beds of burning liqui
d. And then, suddenly, the thoughts were gone, peeled off like a layer of burned skin. Bengt Anttonen sighed uneasily and turned in his sleep … .

  … BEFORE THE AWARENESS is always the pain, and the pain comes first, the only reality in a still, quiet, empty world beyond sensation. For a second, an hour I do not know where I am, and I am afraid. And then the knowledge comes to me; returning, I am returning, in the return is always pain. I do not want to return, but I must, must. I want the sweet, clean purity of ice and snow, the bracing touch of the winter wind, the healthy lines of Bengt's face. But it fades, fades though I scream and clutch for it, crying, wailing. It fades, fades, and then is gone.

  I sense motion, a stirring all around me as the immersion fluid ebbs away. My face is exposed first. I suck in air through my wide nostrils, spit the tubes out of my bleeding mouth. When the fluid falls below my ears, I hear a gurgling, a greedy sucking sound. The vampire machines feed on the juices of my womb, the black blood of my second life. The cold touch of air on my skin pains me. I try not to scream, manage to hold the noise down to a whimper.

  Above, the top of my tank is coated by a thin, ebony film that has clung to the polished metal. I can see my reflection. I'm a stirring sight, nostril hairs aquiver on my noseless face, my right cheek bulging with a swollen, greenish tumor. Such a handsome devil. I smile, showing a triple row of rotten teeth, fresh new incisors pushing up among them like sharpened stakes in a field of yellow toadstools. I wait for release. The tank is too damned small, a coffin. I am buried alive, and the fear is a palpable weight upon me. They do not like me. What if they just leave me in here to suffocate and die? "Out!" I whisper, but no one hears.

  Finally the lid lifts, and the orderlies are there. Rafael and Slim. Big, strapping fellows, blurred white colossi with flags sewn above the pockets of their uniforms. I cannot focus on their faces. My eyes are not so good at the best of times and especially bad just after a return. I know the dark one is Rafe, though, and it is he who reaches down and unhooks the IV tubes and the telemetry while Slim gives me my injection. Ahhh. The hurt fades. I force my hands to grasp the tank's sides. The metal feels strange; the motion is clumsy, deliberate; my body, slow to respond. "What took you so long?" I ask.