Asimov's SF, October-November 2008

by Dell Magazine Authors

  But what am I supposed to do? I'd asked her.

  Keep telling people the truth. What else can you do?

  What else? I looked up on the big screen at the missile in the seabed, at the Chinese script snaking along its side.

  “Maybe it won't kill the Gulf Stream,” I said.

  Ngunu nodded. “Yes, but maybe it will. Some people say it might work. And if it does, Agrebi, and Saluz, and Mkeze, and other scientists, they all say the rains will come back.”

  “And everyone in Europe will freeze to death.”

  “They can come to Africa. For a fee. Help fix the mess they made.”

  I nodded. How could I criticize? “But ... what if it doesn't work?” I sat down at a coffee table, dizziness worsening.

  Ngunu shrugged. “What can we do but try?”

  “So you don't mind being the same as Follesdal?” I tensed, asking that question, but my instinct had led there. Ngunu's eyes narrowed as he searched carefully for a way to say yes without equating his own brutal calculations to his enemy's.

  “Talk to me,” I said after a moment, not wanting whatever well-crafted excuse he would formulate. “Maybe there's another way. One that doesn't require so much more dhuluma.”

  Ngunu looked at Lokondo, fear on his face, and in his eyes I could see the other faces staring at him: everyone he'd ever loved, everyone he'd ever known. Children who would have played on the shores of Lake Niassa, and grown up to farm fish in those waters, who'd become soldiers instead. Old men who should have been sitting around, drinking Tusker lagers and telling big stories, but had thirsted to death by the roadside instead. His mother, tears on her dry cheeks. The dry bed of Lake Niassa. The gunfire, the dust storms. His father's blind eyes. All his dead brothers’ whispering voices.

  “Just talk to me,” I said. “Please. We have footage of Follesdal admitting fault. There are new laws up on the books now, ecological harm regulations, corporate liability. I think we can force A.C.T. to rehabilitate Lake Niassa, to restimulate the monsoons. Maybe we've already won.”

  And there he stood, gun in his hand, looking at me with those eyes. The same eyes I'd photographed in that clinic so many years before. Afraid. Angry. Tired.

  He exhaled slowly. “What good can talking do?” he said. But he sat down at the table in front of me.

  I smiled with relief—I almost laughed for joy, thanking Laura silently—and checked my cameras.

  To this day, I don't know what happened then, except somehow, I knew exactly what to say next.

  Copyright (c) 2008 Gord Sellar

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  * * *

  Novelette: THE ENGLISH MUTINY

  by Ian R. MacLeod

  After a break from writing short fiction for a few years, Ian R. MacLeod has recently produced several shorter works. His novella “The Hob Carpet” appeared in this past June's Asimov's, and he has another piece due out in the steampunk anthology Extraordinary Engines. Ian lives in the river town of Bewdley in England, and tells us that he's currently working on a couple of new novels. The author says the main idea for his latest story's alternate history premise comes from William Dalrymple's book, White Mughals, which he thoroughly recommends. Ian maintains a personal website at www.ianrmacleod.com.

  I was there. I was fucking there.

  I know that's what they say, all of us English anyway, and half the rest of the Empire besides. The fact that people think they can make that claim—tell anyone who'll listen to them how they survived the atrocities and sieges—is supposed to be evidence enough. But I was. I was there. Right at the beginning, and way, way earlier than that. I knew Private Sepoy Second Class Johnny Sponson of the Devonshires long before that name meant anything. More than knew the guy, the bastard, the sadhu holy monster, the saint—whatever you want to call him. I loved him. I hated him. He saved my fucking life.

  Me? I was just a soldier, a squaddie, another sepoy of the Mughal Empire. I really didn't count. Davey Whittings, Sir, Sahib, and where do you want that latrine dug? Always was—just like my dad and his dad before him. All took the Resident's rupee and gave their blood. No real sense of what we were, other than targets for enemy cannon. Stand up and salute or drop down and die. Nobody much cared what the difference was, either, least of all us.

  But Johnny Sponson was different. Johnny came out of nowhere with stories you wouldn't believe and a way of talking that sounded like he was forever taking the piss. In a way, he was. In a way, he was shitting us all with his tall good looks and his la di da. But he was also deadly earnest.

  This was at the start of the Scottish campaign. One of them anyway—rebellious bastards that the Scots are, I know there's been a lot. Never really saw that much of Johnny at first as we marched north through England. But I knew there was this new guy with us who liked the look of his reflection and the sound of his voice. Could hear him sometimes as I lay trying to get some sleep. Holding forth.

  But no—no ... Already, I'm getting this wrong. The way I'm describing Johnny Sponson, someone like him would never have got as far as being torn apart by Scottish guns. He'd have copped it long before in a parade ground misfire with some sepoy—oops, sorry Sarge, silly me—leaning the wrong way on his musket. Or maybe a garrote in the night. Anything, really, just to shut the loudmouthed fucker up. But with Johnny, there was always something extra—a tale beyond the tale he was spinning or some new scam to make the half-blood NCOs look like even bigger cunts than they already were. Even then, even before the revolt, mutiny, freedom war, whatever you want to call it, Johnny simply didn't give the tiniest fuck about all the usual military bullshit. He was an original. He was a one-off.

  Johnny might have been just a private, a sepoy, lowest of the low, but he'd grown up as Lord-in-waiting on one of the last English estates. Learned to read and fight and fence and dance and talk there, and do all the other things he could do so much better than the rest of us combined. Even I was listening to Johnny's stories by the time we crossed Hadrian's Wall. We all were. And the place he was describing that he'd come from didn't sound much like the England I knew. There were no factories or hovels or beggars. I pictured it as a world of magic—like so-called Mother India or heaven, but somehow different and better still. The landscapes were softer, the skies less huge. I saw green lawns and cozy rooms filled with golden warmth, and the whole thing felt real to me the way things only can when you're marching toward battle and your back aches and your feet hurt. It was a fine place, was Johnny's estate, and all of it was taken from him because some Indian vakil lawyer came up with a scrap of ancient paper that disproved the Sponson family title.

  The way Johnny told his story, it span on like those northern roads we had to march. He used words we'd never heard. Words like right and liberty and nation. Words like reversion, which was how the Mughal Empire had swallowed up so much of England when the country was rightly ours. Bankrupted, disinherited, thrown out on the streets, Johnny had had no choice but to sign up for the Resident's rupee like the rest of us. And so here he was, marching north behind the elephants with the rest of us Devonshires to fight the savage bloody Scots.

  Never seen such mountains before. Never felt such cold. The Scottish peasants, they live in slum hovels that would make a sorry dump like York or Bristol seem lovely as Hyderabad. They reek of burned dung. The women came to our camps at night, offering to let us fuck them for half a loaf of bread. They'd let you do it, as well, before they slipped a dagger into your ribs and scarpered off with the bread. Can't even remember how I got hit exactly. We were on this high, wind-bitten road. Elephants pulling the ordnance ahead. Then a whoosh. Then absolute silence, and I was staring at a pool of my own steaming guts. It seemed easy, just to lie there on the frozen road. I mean, what the hell difference did it make? Private Davey Whittings, second class. Snap your heels, stand up straight lad, salute the flag of Empire and pay good attention to the cleanliness of your gun. Death or glory, just like my dad always used to say before beating me for some
thing I hadn't done.

  But the voice I heard was Private Johnny Sponson's, not my dad's at all. My dad's been dead these last fifteen years, and I hope the bastard didn't give the vultures too much bellyache. But I was raving about him—and how my dear mum had then done the decent thing and walked into a furnace—as Johnny pushed my insides back where they belonged, then lifted me up and tied me to what was left of a wagon. Then, seeing as all the elephants were dead and the bullocks were all shot to mincemeat, he started to haul me himself back along that windy road for ... I really don't know how many days, how many miles.

  At the end of it, there was this military hospital. I already knew all about military fucking hospitals. If you wanted to live, you avoided such places like the plague. If you wanted to die, it was far better to die on a battlefield. Without Johnny Sponson there, I wouldn't have stood a chance. The whole place was freezing. Wet tents in a lake of mud. Got me through, though, Johnny did. Found me enough blankets to stop me freezing solid. Changed the dressings on my wound, nagged the nurses to give me some of the half-decent food they otherwise saved for themselves. Bastard saved my fucking life. So in a way I was the first of Johnny Sponson's famous miracles, least as far as I know. But Christ wasn't there, and neither was Mohammed or Shakti. Johnny wasn't some ghost or saint or angel like the way you'd hear some people talk. It was just him, and he was just being Johnny, and filling my head with his Johnny Sponson stories. Which was more than enough.

  Told me how half the platoon had got killed or injured in that Scottish bombardment. Told me how he'd fluked his way around the cannonfire in the same way he'd fluked his way around most things. Then he'd seen me lying there with half of me insides out and decided I could do with some help. Suppose he could have saved someone else—someone with a far better chance of living than I ever had. Why me? All the time I knew him, I never thought to ask.

  Johnny told me many things. How, for example, little England had once been a power to be reckoned with in the world. How this guy called William Hawkins had once sailed all the way around the Horn of Africa to India back in the days when the Mughal Empire didn't even cover all of India let alone Europe, and no one had even dreamed of the Egyptian Canal. How Hawkins arrived in pomp at the court of Jehangir. How, the way things had been back then, he'd been an emissary from equal kingdoms. No, more than that, because Hawkins had sailed from England to India, and not the other way around. After that, there'd been trade, of course. Spices and silks, mainly, from India—with English wool and the sort of cheap gewgaws we were already getting so good at manufacturing in return. The stuff became hugely fashionable, so Johnny assured me, which always helps.

  So there we were, the English and the Mughals, equal partners, and safely half a world away from each other, and between us lay the Portuguese, who were traveling and trading as well. Then something changed. I was still half in and out of my fever, but I remember Johnny shaking his head. Like, for just this once, he didn't know the answer. Something, he kept saying, as if he couldn't figure what. Of course, these were difficult times, the sort the priests will still tell you about—when it snowed in England one sunless August and the starving ate the dead, and the Mughals expanded across India looking for food and supplies—looking for allies, as well. They could have turned to England, I suppose. That was what Johnny said, anyway. But the Mughals turned to Portugal instead. A great armada was formed, and we English were defeated, and the Mughal Empire expanded all that way to the northerly fringes of Europe. I know, I know—I remember Johnny clapping his hands and laughing and shaking his head. Bloody ridiculous—England and India united by an Empire, which has since pushed south and west across France and Spain and Prussia, and east from India across all the lands of Araby. Half the world taken as if in some fit of forgetfulness, and who the hell knows why...

  So I recovered in that hospital with a scar on my belly and a strange new way of looking at things. Sometimes, it sounded to me as if Johnny was just talking to himself. In a way, I think he was. Practicing what he wanted to say in those famous speeches that came not long after. He certainly had a way of talking, did Johnny. So much of the truth's lost now, but Johnny really was an educated man. He'd say the words of writers written years ago in English, of all languages—instead of proper Persian or Hindi or Arabic—as if they were fresh as baked bread.

  There was this Shakes-something, and I thought at first Johnny meant an Arab prince. I can even remember some. If it is a sin to covert honor, then I am the most offending soul. That was one of them. Learned from his tutors, who taught him about the old ways of England in that fine estate before the Mughals took it away from him like the greedy bloodsucking bastards they are. Not that Johnny would put it so bluntly, but I learned that from him as well—how it wasn't as simple as the Indians being in charge and us English being the servants, the sepoys, the ones who worked the mines and choked on our own blood to keep their palaces warm.

  Death. Guns. Spit and blood and polish. How to use a bayonet in the daylight of battle and a garrote in the dark. That was all I knew before Johnny Sponson came along. I was never that much of a drinker, or a chancer, or a gambler of any kind. Don't stand out—that was the only thing I'd ever learned from my dear departed dad, bastard that he was. I spent most of what little spare time I had, and even littler spare thought, on wandering around whatever place I happened to be billeted. Liked to look up at the buildings and over the bridges and stand outside the temples, just studying the scene. Watch the sadhu beggars with their ash-smeared bodies, their thin ribs and twisted and amputated limbs. I was fascinated by the things they did, the way they adorned and painted what was left of themselves, affixed it with hooks and nails and bamboo pins. But what struck me most was the contrast—the beauty of their aspiration to be one with God, and the ugliness of what you actually saw. And the ways they smiled and rocked and moaned and screamed—was that pain, or was it ecstasy? I never really understood.

  Those of us Devonshires considered alive enough to be worth saving were put on board this ship which was to take us to our next posting in London. The winter weather was kind to us on that journey south. The cold winds pushed us easily and the sea was smooth, and the sailors were good at turning a blind eye in the way that sailors generally are. We sepoys lay out there on the deck underneath the stars with the sconces burning, and we talked and we danced and we drank. And Johnny, being Johnny, talked and drank and danced most of all.

  You remember what that time before the mutiny was like—you remember the rumors? The plans to extend the term of service for us sepoys from fifteen to twenty years? That, and the forced conversion to Islam? Not that we cared much about any kind of religion, but the business of circumcision—that got us as angry as you'd expect. It just needed something ... I remember Johnny saying exactly that as I leaned with him looking out at the ship's white backwash and the wheeling gulls—how the Indians would be nothing without us English, how the whole of their Empire would collapse if someone finally pulled out just one tiniest bit like a house of cards...

  There was a lot of other stuff as well. Hopes and plans. What we'd do come the day. And Johnny seemed at the center of it, to me at least. But where all those rumors came from, whether they were his or someone else's or arose in several different places all at once, I really couldn't tell. But that whole idea that England was waiting for Johnny Sponson—like the people knew him already, or had invented him like something magical in their hour of need ... I can't tell you that that was true. But there are many kinds of lies—that's one thing that being around Johnny Sponson taught me. And maybe the lie that there were whole regiments of sepoys just waiting for the appearance of something that had the size and shape and sheer fucking balls of Johnny Sponson ... Well, maybe that's the closest lie there is to the truth.

  So we ended up down in London, and were billeted in Whitehall barracks, and the air was already full of trouble even before that spring began. Everywhere now, there was talk. So much of it that even the officers—wh
o mostly couldn't speak a word of English to save their lives, as many of them would soon come to regret—caught on. The restrictions, the rules, the regimental bullshit, got ever stupider—and that was saying a lot. The whole wretched city was under curfew, but Johnny and I still got out over the barracks walls. There used to be these bars in London then, down by Charing Cross—the sort where women and men could dance with each other, and you could buy a proper drink. Illegal dives, of course. The sweat dripped down the walls, and there was worse on the floor. But that wasn't the point. The point was just to be there—your head filled up with pipe smoke and cheering and music loud enough to make your ears ring.

  And afterwards when the booze and the dancing and maybe a few of the girls had finally worn everyone out, Johnny and I and the rest of us sepoys would stagger back through London's curfew darkness. I remember the last time we got out was the night before the Muharram parade when the mutiny began, and how Johnny danced the way even he had never danced before. Tabletops and bar-tops and crashed-over benches held no obstacle—there was already a wildness in his eyes. As if he already knew. And perhaps he did. After all, he was Johnny Sponson.

  Johnny and I rolled arm in arm late that night along the ghats beside the Thames. And still he talked. He was saying how the Moslem Mughals were so nice and accommodating to the Hindus, and how the Hindus took everything they could in return. Something about an officer class and a merchant class, and the two getting on with each other nicely, the deal being that every other religion got treated like dogshit as a result. Like the Jews, for example. Or the Romanies. Even the Catholic Portuguese, who'd had centuries to regret helping conquer England for the Mughals. Or us Protestant Christians here in England—although anyone rich enough to afford it turns to Mecca or buys themselves into a caste. Why, Johnny, he could take me along this river, right within these city walls, and show me what was once supposed to have been a great new cathedral—a place called Saint Paul's. A half-built ruin, it was, even though it was started before the Mughals invaded more than two hundred years ago.