The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  A civil servant, an inspector of some kind. Denys felt the sinking one feels on running into one’s tutor in a wine bar: the evening not well begun. “They may well be crowded for dinner,” he said.

  “I have reserved a quiet table,” said the smiling man, lifting his glass to Denys.

  The grub was, in fact, superior. Sir Geoffrey Davenant was an able teller of tales, and he had many to tell. He was, apparently, no such dull thing as an inspector for the Colonial Office, though just what office he did fill Denys couldn’t determine. He seemed to have been “attached to” or “had dealings with” or “gone about for” half the establishments of the Empire. He embodied, it seemed to Denys, the entire strange adventure about which Denys had been thinking when Sir Geoffrey had first spoken to him.

  “So,” Sir Geoffrey said, filling their glasses from a bottle of South African claret—no harm in being patriotic, he’d said, for one bottle—”so, after some months of stumbling about Central Asia and making myself useful one way or another, I was to make my way back to Sadiya. I crossed the Tibetan frontier disguised as a monk—”

  “A monk?”

  “Yes. Having lost all my gear in Manchuria, I could do the poverty part quite well. I had a roll of rupees, the films, and a compass hidden inside my prayer wheel. Mine didn’t whiz around then with the same sanctity as the other fellows’, but no matter. After adventures too ordinary to describe—avalanches and so on—I managed to reach the monastery at Rangbok, on the old road up to Everest. Rather near collapse. I was recovering a bit and thinking how to proceed when there was a runner with a telegram. From my superior at Ch’eng-tu. WARN DAVENANT MASSACRE SADIYA, it said. The Old Man then was famously closemouthed. But this was particularly unhelpful, as it did not say who had massacred whom—or why.” He lifted the silver cover of a dish, and found it empty.

  “This must have been a good long time ago,” Denys said.

  “Oh, yes,” Davenant said, raising his ice-blue eyes to Denys. “A good long time ago. That was an excellent curry. Nearly as good as at Veeraswamy’s, in London—which is, strangely, the best in the world. Shall we have coffee?”

  Over this, and brandy and cigars, Sir Geoffrey’s stories modulated into reflections. Pleasant as his company was, Denys couldn’t overcome a sensation that everything Sir Geoffrey said to him was rehearsed, laid on for his entertainment, or perhaps his enlightenment, and yet with no clue in it as to why he had thus been singled out.

  “It amuses me,” Sir Geoffrey said, “how constant it is in human nature to think that things might have gone on differently from the way they did. In a man’s own life, first of all: how he might have taken this or that very different route, except for this or that accident, this or that slight push—if he’d only known then, and so on. And then in history as well, we ruminate endlessly, if, what if, if only … The world seems always somehow malleable to our minds, or to our imaginations anyway.”

  “Strange you should say so,” Denys said. “I was thinking, just before you spoke to me, about how very solid the world seems to me, how very—real. And—if you don’t mind my thrusting it into your thoughts—you never did tell me how it is you come to know my name; or why it is you thought good to invite me to that excellent dinner.”

  “My dear boy,” Davenant said, holding up his cigar as though to defend his innocence.

  “I can’t think it was a chance.”

  “My dear boy,” Davenant said in a different tone, “if anything is, that was not. I will explain all. You were on that train of thought. If you will have patience while it trundles by.”

  Denys said nothing further. He sipped his coffee, feeling a dew of sweat on his forehead.

  “History,” said Sir Geoffrey. “Yes. Of course the possible worlds we make don’t compare to the real one we inhabit—not nearly so well furnished, or tricked out with details. And yet still somehow better. More satisfying. Perhaps the novelist is only a special case of a universal desire to reshape, to ‘take this sorry scheme of things entire,’ smash it into bits, and ‘remold it nearer to the heart’s desire’—as old Khayyám says. The egoist is continually doing it with his own life. To dream of doing it with history is no more useful a game, I suppose, but as a game, it shows more sport. There are rules. You can be more objective, if that’s an appropriate word.” He seemed to grow pensive for a moment. He looked at the end of his cigar. It had gone out, but he didn’t relight it.

  “Take this Empire,” he went on, drawing himself up somewhat to say it. “One doesn’t want to be mawkish, but one has served it. Extended it a bit, made it more secure; done one’s bit. You and I. Nothing more natural, then, if we have worked for its extension in the future, to imagine its extension in the past. We can put our finger on the occasional bungle, the missed chance, the wrong man in the wrong place, and so on, and we think: if I had only been there, seen to it that the news went through, got the guns there in time, forced the issue at a certain moment—well. But as long as one is dreaming, why stop? A favorite instance of mine is the American civil war. We came very close, you know, to entering that war on the Confederacy’s side.”

  “Did we.”

  “I think we did. Suppose we had. Suppose we had at first dabbled—sent arms—ignored Northern protests—then got deeper in; suppose the North declared war on us. It seems to me a near certainty that if we had entered the war fully, the South would have won. And I think a British presence would have mitigated the slaughter. There was a point, you know, late in that war, when a new draft call in the North was met with terrible riots. In New York several Negroes were hanged, just to show how little their cause was felt.”

  Denys had partly lost the thread of this story, unable to imagine himself in it. He thought of the Americans he had met on the train. “Is that so,” he said.

  “Once having divided the States into two nations, and having helped the South to win, we would have been in place, you see. The fate of the West had not yet been decided. With the North much diminished in power—well, I imagine that by now we—the Empire—would have recouped much of what we lost in 1780.”

  Denys contemplated this. “Rather stirring,” he said mildly. “Rather cold-blooded, too. Wouldn’t it have meant condoning slavery? To say nothing of the lives lost. British, I mean.”

  “Condoning slavery—for a time. I’ve no doubt the South could have been bullied out of it. Without, perhaps, the awful results that accompanied the Northerners doing it. The eternal resentment. The backlash. The near genocide of the last hundred years. And, in my vision, there would have been a net savings in red men.” He smiled. “Whatever might be said against it, the British Empire does not wipe out populations wholesale, as the Americans did in their West. I often wonder if that sin isn’t what makes the Americans so gloomy now, so introverted.”

  Denys nodded. He believed implicitly that his Empire did not wipe out populations wholesale. “Of course,” he said, “there’s no telling what exactly would have been the result. If we’d interfered as you say.”

  “No,” Sir Geoffrey said. “No doubt whatever result it did have would have to be reshaped as well. And the results of that reshaping reshaped, too, the whole thing subtly guided all along its way toward the result desired—after all, if we can imagine how we might want to alter the past we do inherit, so we can imagine that any past might well be liable to the same imagining; that stupidities, blunders, shortsightedness, would occur in any past we might initiate. Oh, yes, it would all have to be reshaped, with each reshaping.…”

  “The possibilities are endless,” Denys said, laughing. “I’m afraid the game’s beyond me. I say let the North win—since in any case we can’t do the smallest thing about it.”

  “No,” Davenant said, grown sad again, or reflective; he seemed to feel what Denys said deeply. “No, we can’t. It’s just—just too long ago.” With great gravity he relit his cigar. Denys, at the oddness of this response, seeing Sir Geoffrey’s eyes veiled, thought: Perhaps he’s mad. He said, joi
ning the game, “Suppose, though. Suppose Cecil Rhodes hadn’t died young, as he did.…”

  Davenant’s eyes caught cold fire again, and his cigar paused in midair. “Hm?” he said with interest.

  “I only meant,” Denys said, “that your remark about the British not wiping out peoples wholesale was perhaps not tested. If Rhodes had lived to build his empire—hadn’t he already named it Rhodesia?—I imagine he would have dealt fairly harshly with the natives.”

  “Very harshly,” said Sir Geoffrey.

  “Well,” Denys said, “I suppose I mean that it’s not always evil effects that we inherit from these past accidents.”

  “Not at all,” said Sir Geoffrey. Denys looked away from his regard, which had grown, without losing a certain cool humor, intense. “Do you know, by the way, that remark of George Santayana—the American philosopher—about the British Empire, about young men like yourself? ‘Never,’ he said, ‘never since the Athenians has the world been ruled by such sweet, just, boyish masters.’”

  Denys, absurdly, felt himself flush with embarrassment.

  “I don’t ramble,” Sir Geoffrey said. “My trains of thought carry odd goods, but all headed the same way. I want to tell you something, about that historical circumstance, the one you’ve touched on, whose effects we inherit. Evil or good I will leave you to decide.

  “Cecil Rhodes died prematurely, as you say. But not before he had amassed a very great fortune, and laid firm claims to the ground where that fortune would grow far greater. And also not before he had made a will disposing of that fortune.”

  “I’ve heard stories,” Denys said.

  “The stories you have heard are true. Cecil Rhodes, at his death, left his entire fortune, and its increase, to found and continue a secret society which should, by whatever means possible, preserve and extend the British Empire. His entire fortune.”

  “I have never believed it,” Denys said, momentarily feeling untethered, like a balloon: afloat.

  “For good reason,” Davenant said. “If such a society as I describe were brought into being, its very first task would be to disguise, cast doubt upon, and quite bury its origins. Don’t you think that’s so? In any case it’s true what I say: the society was founded; is secret; continues to exist; is responsible, in some large degree at least, for the Empire we now know, in this year of grace 1956, IV Elizabeth II, the Empire on which the sun does not set.”

  The veranda where the two men sat was nearly deserted now; the night was loud with tropical noises that Denys had come to think of as silence, but the human noise of the town had nearly ceased.

  “You can’t know that,” Denys said. “If you knew it, if you were privy to it, then you wouldn’t say it. Not to me.” He almost added: Therefore you’re not in possession of any secret, only a madman’s certainty.

  “I am privy to it,” Davenant said. “I am myself a member. The reason I reveal the secret to you—and you see, here we are, come to you and my odd knowledge of you, at last, as I promised—the reason I reveal it to you is because I wish to ask you to join it. To accept from me an offer of membership.”

  Denys said nothing. A dark waiter in white crept close, and was waved away by Sir Geoffrey.

  “You are quite properly silent,” Sir Geoffrey said. “Either I am mad, you think, in which case there is nothing to say; or what I am telling you is true, which likewise leaves you nothing to say. Quite proper. In your place I would be silent also. In your place I was. In any case I have no intention of pressing you for an answer now. I happen to know, by a roundabout sort of means that if I explained to you would certainly convince you I was mad, that you will seriously consider what I’ve said to you. Later. On your long ride to Cairo: there will be time to think. In London. I ask nothing from you now. Only…”

  He reached into his waistcoat pocket. Denys watched, fascinated: would he draw out some sign of power, a royal charter, some awesome seal? No: it was a small metal plate, with a strip of brown ribbon affixed to it, like a bit of recording tape. He turned it in his hands thoughtfully. “The difficulty, you see, is that in order to alter history and bring it closer to the heart’s desire, it would be necessary to stand outside it altogether. Like Archimedes, who said that if he had a lever long enough, and a place to stand, he could move the world.”

  He passed the metal plate to Denys, who took it reluctantly.

  “A place to stand, you see,” Sir Geoffrey said. “A place to stand. I would like you to keep that plate about you, and not misplace it. It’s in the nature of a key, though it mayn’t look it; and it will let you into a very good London club, though it mayn’t look it either, where I would like you to call on me. If, even out of simple curiosity, you would like to hear more of us.” He extinguished his cigar. “I am going to describe the rather complicated way in which that key is to be used—I really do apologize for the hugger-mugger, but you will come to understand—and then I am going to bid you good evening. Your train is an early one? I thought so. My own departs at midnight. I possess a veritable Bradshaw’s of the world’s railroads in this skull. Well. No more. I will just sign this—oh, don’t thank me. Dear boy: don’t thank me.”

  When he was gone, Denys sat a long time with his cold cigar in his hand and the night around him. The amounts of wine and brandy he had been given seemed to have evaporated from him into the humid air, leaving him feeling cool, clear, and unreal. When at last he rose to go, he inserted the flimsy plate into his waistcoat pocket; and before he went to bed, to lie a long time awake, he changed it to the waistcoat pocket of the pale suit he would wear next morning.

  As Sir Geoffrey suggested he would, he thought on his ride north of all that he had been told, trying to reassemble it in some more reasonable, more everyday fashion: as all day long beside the train the sempiternal Nile—camels, nomads, women washing in the barge canals, the thin line of palms screening the white desert beyond—slipped past. At evening, when at length he lowered the shade of his compartment window on the poignant blue sky pierced with stars, he thought suddenly: But how could he have known he would find me there, at the bar of the Grand, on that night of this year, at that hour of the evening, just as though we had some long-standing agreement to meet there?

  If anything is chance, Davenant had said, that was not.

  At the airfield at Ismailia there was a surprise: his flight home on the R101, which his father had booked months ago as a special treat for Denys, was to be that grand old airship’s last scheduled flight. The oldest airship in the British fleet, commissioned in the year Denys was born, was to be—mothballed? Drydocked? Deflated? Denys wondered just what one did with a decommissioned airship larger than Westminster Cathedral.

  Before dawn it was drawn from its great hangar by a crowd of white-clothed fellahin pulling at its ropes—descendants, Denys thought, of those who had pulled ropes at the Pyramids three thousand years ago, employed now on an object almost as big but lighter than air. It isn’t because it is so intensely romantic that great airships must always arrive or depart at dawn or at evening, but only that then the air is cool and most likely to be still: and yet intensely romantic it remains. Denys, standing at the broad, canted windows, watched the ground recede—magically, for there was no sound of engines, no jolt to indicate liftoff, only the waving, cheering fellahin growing smaller. The band on the tarmac played “Land of Hope and Glory.” Almost invisible to watchers on the ground—because of its heat-reflective silver dome—the immense ovoid turned delicately in the wind as it arose.

  “Well, it’s the end of an era,” a red-faced man in a checked suit said to Denys. “In ten years they’ll all be gone, these big airships. The propeller chaps will have taken over; and the jet aeroplane, too, I shouldn’t wonder.”

  “I should be sorry to see that,” Denys said. “I’ve loved airships since I was a boy.”

  “Well, they’re just that little bit slower,” the red-faced man said sadly. “It’s all hurry-up, nowadays. Faster, faster. And for what? I put it to
you: for what?”

  Now with further gentle pushes of its Rolls-Royce engines, the R101 altered its attitude again; passengers at the lounge windows pointed out the Suez Canal, and the ships passing; Lake Mareotis; Alexandria, like a mirage; British North Africa, as far to the left as one cared to point; and the white-fringed sea. Champagne was being called for, traditional despite the hour, and the red-faced man pressed a glass on Denys.

  “The end of an era,” he said again, raising his flute of champagne solemnly.

  And then the cloudscape beyond the windows shifted, and all Africa had slipped into the south, or into the imaginary, for they had already begun to seem the same thing to Denys. He turned from the windows and decided—the effort to decide it seemed not so great here aloft, amid the potted palms and the wicker, with this pale champagne—that the conversation he had had down in the flat lands far away must have been imaginary as well.

  III: THE TALE OF THE PRESIDENT PRO TEM

  The universe proceeds out of what it has been and into what it will be, inexorably, unstoppably, at the rate of one second per second, one year per year, forever. At right angles to its forward progress lie the past and the future. The future, that is to say, does not lie “ahead” of the present in the stream of time, but at a right angle to it: the future of any present moment can be projected as far as you like outward from it, infinitely in fact, but when the universe has proceeded further, and a new present moment has succeeded this one, the future of this one retreats with it into the what-has-been, forever outdated. It is similar but more complicated with the past.

  Now within the great process or procession that the universe makes, there can be no question of “movement,” either “forward” or “back.” The very idea is contradictory. Any conceivable movement is into the orthogonal futures and pasts that fluoresce from the universe as it is; and from those orthogonal futures and pasts into others, and others, and still others, never returning, always moving at right angles to the stream of time. To the traveler, therefore, who does not ever return from the futures or pasts into which he has gone, it must appear that the times he inhabits grow progressively more remote from the stream of time that generated them, the stream that has since moved on and left his futures behind. Indeed, the longer he remains in the future, the farther off the traveler gets from the moment in actuality whence he started, and the less like actuality the universe he stands in seems to him to be.