The Year’s Best Science Fiction: Seventh Annual Collection

by Gardner Dozois

  (“Only that isn’t what he said,” Davenant was fond of telling. “That’s what he was, understandably, reported to have said, and what the Queen and the nurses convinced themselves they heard. But he was a bit dazed there at the end, poor good old man. What he said was not ‘How is the Empire,’ but ‘What’s at the Empire,’ a popular cinema. I happened,” he always added gravely, “to have been with him.”)

  The first question had been how far “forward” the Otherhood should press; those members who thought the whole scheme insane, as Platt did, voted for next Wednesday, and bring back the Derby winners please. Deng Fashen was not certain the thrust could be entirely calculated: the imaginary futures of imaginary pasts were not, he thought, likely to be under the control of even the most penetrating orthogonal engineering. Sometime in the first decades of the next century was at length agreed upon, a time just beyond the voyager’s own mortal span—for the house rule seemed, no one could say quite why, to apply in both directions—and for as brief a stay as was consistent with learning what was up.

  The second question—who was to be the voyager—the President pro tem had answered by fiat, assuming an executive privilege he just at that moment claimed to exist, and cutting off further debate. (Why exactly did he insist? I’m not certain why, except that it was not out of a sense of adventure, or of fun or curiosity: whatever of those qualities he may once have had had been much worn away in his rise to the Presidency pro tem of the Otherhood. A sense of duty may have been part of it. It may have been to forestall the others, out of a funny sort of premonition. Duty, and premonition: of what, though? Of what?)

  “It’ll be quite different from any of our imaginings, you know,” Davenant said, who for some reason had not vigorously contested the President’s decision. “The future of all possible pasts. I envy you, I do. I should rather like to see it for myself.”

  Quite different from any of our imaginings: very well. The President pro tem had braced himself for strangeness. What he had not expected was familiarity. Familiarity—cozy as an old shoe—was certainly different from his imaginings.

  And yet what was it he was familiar with? He had stepped out of his club in London and found himself to be, not in the empty corridors of the Orient Aid Society that he knew well, but in private quarters of some kind that he had never seen before. It reminded him, piercingly, of a place he did know, but what place he could not have said: some don’s rich but musty rooms, some wealthy and learned bachelor’s digs. How had it come to be?

  And how had it come to be lit by gas?

  One of the pleasant side effects (most of the members thought it pleasant) of the Otherhood’s endless efforts in the world had been a general retardation in the rate of material progress: so much of that progress had been, on the one hand, the product of the disastrous wars that it was the Otherhood’s chief study to prevent, and on the other hand, American. The British Empire moved more slowly, a great beast without predators, and naturally conservative; it clung to proven techniques and could impose them on the rest of the world by its weight. The telephone, the motor car, the flying boat, the wireless, all were slow to take root in the Empire that the Otherhood shaped. And yet surely, the President pro tem thought, electricity was in general use in London in 1893, before which date no member could alter the course of things. And gas lamps lit this place.

  Pondering this, the President pro tem had entered the somber and apparently little-used dining room and seen the draconic standing in the little butler’s pantry: silent as a statue (asleep, the President pro tem would later deduce, with lidless eyes only seeming to be open); a polishing-cloth in his claw, and the silver before him; his heavy jaws partly open, and his weight balanced on the thick stub of tail. He wore a baize apron and black sleeve garters to protect his clothes.

  Quite different from our imaginings: and yet no conceivable amount of tinkering with the twentieth century, just beyond which the President pro tem theoretically stood, could have brought forth this butler, in wing collar and green apron, the soft gaslight ashine on his bald brown head.

  So someone had broken the rules. Someone had dared to regress beyond 1893 and meddle in the farther past. That was not, in itself, impossible; Caspar Last had done it on his first and only excursion. It had only been thought impossible for the Otherhood to do it, because it would have taken them “back” before the Otherhood’s putative existence, and therefore before the Otherhood could have wrested the techniques of such travel from Last’s jealous grip, a power they acquired by already having it—that was what the President pro tem had firmly believed.

  But it was not, apparently, so. Somewhen in that stretch of years that fell between his entrance into the telephone box of the Club and his exit from it into this familiar and impossible world, someone—many someones, or someone many times—had gone “back” far before Rhodes’s death: had gone back far enough to initiate this house, this city, these races who were not men.

  A million years? It couldn’t have been less. It didn’t seem possible it could be less.

  And who, then? Deng Fa-shen, the delicate, brilliant Chinaman, who had thoughts and purposes he kept to himself; the only one of them who might have been able to overcome the theoretical limits? Or Platt, who was never satisfied with what was possible within what he called “the damned parameters”?

  Or Davenant. Davenant, who was forever quoting Khayyám: Ah, Love, couldst thou and I with Him conspire To take this sorry scheme of things entire; Would we not smash it into pieces, then Remold it nearer to the heart’s desire …

  “There is,” said the Magus behind him, “one other you have not thought of.”

  The President pro tem let fall the drape and turned from the window. The Magus stood in the doorway, a great ledger in his arms. His eyes did not meet the President pro tem’s, and yet seemed to regard him anyway, like the blind eyes of a statue.

  One other … Yes, the President pro tem saw, there was one other who might have done this. One other, not so good at the work perhaps as others, as Davenant for example, but who nonetheless would have been, or would come to have been, in a position to take such steps. The President pro tem would not have credited himself with the skill, or the nerve, or the dreadnought power. But how else to account for the familiarity, the bottomless suitability to him of this world he had never before seen?

  “Between the time of your people’s decision to plumb our world,” said the Magus, “and the time of your standing here within it, you must yourself have brought it into being. I see no likelier explanation.”

  The President pro tem stood still with wonder at the efforts he was apparently to prove capable of making. A million years at least: a million years. How had he known where to begin? Where had he found, would he find, the time?

  “Shall I ring,” the Magus said, “or will you let yourself out?”

  * * *

  Deng Fa-shen had always said it, and anyone who traveled in them knew it to be so: the imaginary futures and imaginary pasts of orthogony are imaginary only in the sense that imaginary numbers (which they very much resemble) are imaginary. To a man walking within one, it alone is real, no matter how strange; it is all the others, standing at angles to it, which exist only in imagination. Nightlong the President pro tem walked the city, with a measured and unhurried step, but with a constant tremor winding round his rib cage, waiting for what would become of him, and observing the world he had made.

  Of course it could not continue to exist. It should not ever have come into existence in the first place; his own sin (if it had been his) had summoned it out of nonbeing, and his repentance must expunge it. The Magus who had taken his confession (which the President pro tem had been unable to withhold from him) had drawn that conclusion: it must be put out, like a light. And yet how deeply the President pro tem wanted it to last forever; how deeply he believed it ought to last forever.

  The numinous and inhuman angels, about whom nothing could be said, beings with no ascertainable business am
ong the lesser races and yet beings without whom, the President pro tem was sure, this world could not go on functioning. They lived (endless?) lives unimaginable to men, and perhaps to Magi, too, who yet sought continually for knowledge of them: Magi, highest of the hominids, gentle and wise yet inflexible of purpose, living in simplicity and solitude (Were there females? Where? Doing what?) and yet from their shabby studies influencing, perhaps directing, the lives of mere men. The men, such as himself, clever and busy, with their inventions and their politics and their affairs. The lesser hominids, strong, sweet-natured, comic, like placid trolls. The draconics.

  It was not simply a world inhabited by intelligent races of different kinds: it was a harder thing to grasp than that. The lives of the races constituted different universes of meaning, different constructions of reality; it was as though four or five different novels, novels of different kinds by different and differently limited writers, were to become interpenetrated and conflated: inside a gigantic Russian thing a stark and violent policier, and inside that something Dickensian, full of plot, humors, and eccentricity. Such an interlacing of mutually exclusive universes might be comical, like a sketch in Punch; it might be tragic, too. And it might be neither: it might simply be what is, the given against which all airy imaginings must finally be measured: reality.

  Near dawn the President pro tem stood leaning on a parapet of worked stone that overlooked a streetcar roundabout. A car had just ended its journey there, and the conductor and the motorman descended, squat hominids in greatcoats and peaked caps. With their long strong arms they began to swing the car around for its return journey. The President pro tem gazed down at this commonplace sight; his nose seemed to know the smell of that car’s interior, his bottom to know the feel of its polished seats. But he knew also that yesterday there had not been streetcars in this city. Today they had been here for decades.

  No, it was no good, the President pro tem knew: the fabric of this world he had made—if it had been he—was fatally weakened with irreality. It was a botched job: as though he were that god of the Gnostics who made the material world, a minor god unversed in putting time together with space. He had not worked well. And how could he have supposed it would be otherwise? What had got into him, that he had dared?

  “No,” said the angel who stood beside him. “You should not think that it was you.”

  “If not me,” said the President pro tem, “then who?”

  “Come,” said the angel. She (I shall say “she”) slipped a small cool hand within his hand. “Let’s go over the tracks, and into the trees beyond that gate.”

  A hard and painful stone had formed in the throat of the President pro tem. The angel beside him led him like a daughter, like the daughter of old blind Oedipus. Within the precincts of the park—which apparently had its entrance or its entrances where the angels needed them to be—he was led down an avenue of yew and dim towers of poplar toward the piled and sounding waters of a fountain. They sat together on the fountain’s marble lip.

  “The Magus told me,” the President pro tem began, “that you can feel the alterations that we make, back then. Is that true?”

  “It’s like the snap of a whip infinitely long,” the angel said. “The whole length of time snapped and laid out differently: not only the length of time backward to the time of the change, but the length of the future forward. We felt ourselves come into being, oldest of the Old Races (though the last your changes brought into existence); we saw in that moment the aeons of our past, and we guessed our future, too.”

  The President pro tem took out his pocket-handkerchief and pressed it to his face. He must weep, yet no tears came.

  “We love this world—this only world—just as you do,” she said. “We love it, and we cannot bear to feel it sicken and fail. Better that it not have been that it die.”

  “I shall do all I can,” said the President pro tem. “I shall find who has done this—I suppose I know who it was, if it wasn’t me—and dissuade him. Teach him, teach him what I’ve learned, make him see…”

  “You don’t yet understand,” the angel said with careful kindness but at the same time glancing at her wristwatch. “There is no one to tell. There is no one who went beyond the rules.”

  “There must have been,” said the President pro tem. “You, your time, it just isn’t far along from ours, from mine! To make this world, this city, these races…”

  “Not far along in time,” said the angel, “but many times removed. You know it to be so: whenever you, your Otherhood, set out across the timelines, your passage generated random variation in the worlds you arrived in. Perhaps you didn’t understand how those variations accumulate, here at the sum end of your journeyings.”

  “But the changes were so minute!” said the President pro tem. “Deng Fashen explained it. A molecule here and there, no more; the position of a distant star; some trivial thing, the name of a flower or a village. Too few, too small even to notice.”

  “They increase exponentially with every alteration—and your Otherhood has been busy since you last presided over them. Through the days random changes accumulate, tiny errors silting up like the blown sand that fills the streets of a desert city, that buries it at last.”

  “But why these changes?” asked the President pro tem desperately. “It can’t have been chance that a world like this was the sun of those histories, it can’t be. A world like this…”

  “Chance, perhaps. Or it may be that as time grows softer the world grows more malleable by wishes. There is no reason to believe this, yet that is what we believe. You—all of you—could not have known that you were bringing this world into being; and yet this is the world you wanted.”

  She reached out to let the tossed foam of the fountain fall into her hand. The President pro tem thought of the bridge over the Zambezi, far away; the tossed foam of the Falls. It was true: this is what they had striven for: a world of perfect hierarchies, of no change forever. God, how they must have longed for it! The loneliness of continual change—no outback, no bundas so lonely. He had heard how men can be unsettled for days, for weeks, who have lived through earthquakes and felt the earth to be uncertain: what of his Fellows, who had felt time and space picked apart, never to be rewoven that way again, and not once but a hundred times? What of himself?

  “I shall tell you what I see at the end of all your wishings,” said the angel softly. “At the far end of the last changed world, after there is nothing left that can change. There is then only a forest, growing in the sea. I say ‘forest’ and I say ‘sea,’ though whether they are of the kind I know, or some other sort of thing, I cannot say. The sea is still and the forest is thick; it grows upward from the black bottom, and its topmost branches reach into the sunlight, which penetrates a little into the warm upper waters. That’s all. There is nothing else anywhere forever. Your wishes have come true: the Empire is quiet. There is not, nor will there be, change anymore; never will one thing be confused again with another, higher for lower, better for lesser, master for servant. Perpetual Peace.”

  The President pro tem was weeping now, painful sobs drawn up from an interior he had long kept shut and bolted. Tears ran down his cheeks, into the corners of his mouth, under his hard collar. He knew what he must do, but not how to do it.

  “The Otherhood cannot be dissuaded from this,” the angel said, putting a hand on the wrist of the President pro tem. “For all of it, including our sitting here now, all of it—and the forest in the sea—is implicit in the very creation of the Otherhood itself.”

  “But then…”

  “Then the Otherhood must be uncreated.”

  “I can’t do that.”

  “You must.”

  “No, no, I can’t.” He had withdrawn from her pellucid gaze, horrified. “I mean it isn’t because … If it must be done, it must be. But not by me.”

  “Why?”

  “It would be against the rules given me. I don’t know what the result would be. I can’t imagine.
I don’t want to imagine.”

  “Rules?”

  “The Otherhood came into being,” said the President pro tem, “when a British adventurer, Cecil Rhodes, was shot and killed by a young man called Denys Winterset.”

  “Then you must return and stop that killing.”

  “But you don’t see!” said the President pro tem in great distress. “The rules given the Otherhood forbid a Fellow from returning to a time and place that he formerly altered by his presence…”

  “And…”

  “And I am myself that same Denys Winterset.”

  The angel regarded the President pro tem—the Honorable Denys Winterset, fourteenth President pro tem of the Otherhood—and her translucent face registered a sweet surprise, as though the learning of something she had not known gave her pleasure. She laughed, and her laughter was not different from the plashing of the fountain by which they sat. She laughed and laughed, as the old man in his black coat and hat sat silent beside her, bewildered and afraid.

  VI: THE BOY DAVID OF HYDE PARK CORNER

  There are days when I seem genuinely to remember, and days when I do not remember at all: days when I remember only that sometimes I remember. There are days on which I think I recognize another like myself: someone walking smartly along the Strand or Bond Street, holding the Times under one arm and walking a furled umbrella with the other—a sort of military bearing, mustaches white (older than when I seem to have known him, but then so am I, of course), and cheeks permanently tanned by some faraway sun. I do not catch his eye, nor he mine, though I am tempted to stop him, to ask him … Later on I wonder—if I can remember to wonder—whether he, too, is making a chronicle, in his evenings, writing up the story: a story that can be told in any direction, starting from anywhen, leading on to a forest in the sea.