A Time Odyssey Omnibus

by Arthur C Clarke - Stephen Baxter

  Alexander’s real-world career was spectacular enough. He was educated by Aristotle, and in military and diplomatic issues by his formidable father, Philip, who had made Macedon dominant in its region. But as Philip was preparing to invade Persia, he was assassinated under circumstances that remain mysterious. When Alexander came to power he was only twenty years old—but in a series of rapid campaigns, and a purge of irksome relatives, he consolidated his position in Macedonia and Greece.

  Then he turned to Persia. After six short years Alexander had overthrown an empire that had stood for two centuries.

  That should have been enough for any man—but not Alexander. Perhaps he wanted to imitate Achilles, or perhaps it was all an expression of rivalry with his dead father. Whatever the motive, Alexander launched his battle-hardened army toward India, crossed the Hindu Kush, and faced down the princelings of the Punjab. At last his exhausted troops rebelled, and even the god-king could go no farther. Alexander returned to Babylon—and there he died at the age of thirty-two. It may have been treachery, or malaria, or an excess of drink, or simply the accumulation of stress.

  In our timeline Alexander’s empire fell apart after his death—but not before he had spread Greek culture throughout the Middle East and central Asia. That was why, when the Romans came east, they found Greek-speakers. In fact Cleopatra, lover of Mark Anthony, was descended from Ptolemy, one of Alexander’s generals who took over Egypt after his king’s death. If not for Alexander’s gift of a common Greek vernacular, Jesus’ message could not have traveled out of Judea, and without the context of Christianity, Muhammad’s career would surely have been different. Thus Alexander’s legacy of Hellenism shaped Roman history, Christianity, and Islam, and ultimately led to the rediscovery of Greek culture during the Renaissance. The world we know is a product of Alexander’s conquests.

  Alexander made a huge impact on our history. But what if he had lived on? He might paradoxically have done more harm than good.

  This tantalizing notion was explored in a famous counterfactual essay in Some Problems of Greek History (OUP 1969) by Arnold Toynbee, who wondered if a united Eurasia under Alexander’s heirs might have made faster progress toward civilization and technology. His empire might certainly have endured and grown. Alexander understood the need to weld together the disparate people who now came under his rule. Expansion to the west, perhaps as far as Gibraltar, was quite possible, and he actually had plans for advancing eastward to the Black Sea.

  But not everybody agrees with Toynbee’s rosy assessment. It’s true that in Alexander’s time, order derived only from empires, outside whose borders were barbarians and chaos. But while he had an instinct for empire-building, Alexander was also a brutal and enthusiastic warmaker. Each new campaign had to be financed by plunder from the last. He committed atrocities—he destroyed Thebes and burned Persepolis—and in his campaigns he spent lives like matches. If Alexander had lived, would he have consolidated—or chosen to go on and on, as he had wanted to in India, and in the end drained his new conquests of wealth and vitality, much as he exhausted his native Macedon? And would his lasting empire really have been a good foundation for subsequent history?

  For good or ill, Alexander’s postponed. death would surely have had an impact around the world. This global impact is explored in two recent books by American authors. Steven Barnes in Lion’s Blood (Warner Books, 2002), suggests that a longer life for Alexander might have resulted in the world’s domination by Africa, not Europe—in which case, as history is written by the winners, Alexander would probably be remembered as black. This book is a role-reversal fable, about the keeping of white slaves in a black America; it is meaty, well thought-out, and remarkably brave: an example of alternate history at is best.

  In Conquistador (Roc, 2003), S. M. Stirling imagines Alexander living on to found a Greek-speaking Empire that persists for centuries, and shapes subsequent history. Rome is a footnote, north Europe irrelevant, the Jews assimilated by the Greeks, Christianity and Islam stillborn. As the Macedonians move east, Iranians and others are pushed into central Asia, in turn displacing the Han, the Turks, the Mongols, and many others; nothing like “our” China emerges. The world remains medieval, socially and technologically: to Stirling, an industrial revolution an unlikely accident, not to be repeated.

  But we view this fascinating history through the narrow prism of an alternate California. The Americas remain uncontacted, until a gateway opens up with our world in 1946, and an old soldier moves through to a virgin California and founds what he calls the Commonwealth of New Virginia. Stirling’s other California is a peculiarly American utopia. This is the frontier myth revived. But still, Stirling namechecks me on page 76!

  Like these two examples, most alternate history spins on Alexander’s story muse on what would have happened if Alexander had lived on. But in ancient times thirty-two wasn’t such a terribly young age to die, especially for a man who had worked, and played, so hard. What if Alexander had died younger? (See “Conquest Denied” by Josiah Ober in What If? Penguin Putnam, 1999.)

  Alexander actually came close to death early in his Persian campaign, on the river Granicus. If he had died then, leaving no heir, Ober suggests, Macedon would probably have disintegrated into feuding factions. Persia would have survived, while Athens would have come to dominate Greece. After an exhausting war between Carthage and Athens, Rome would have risen to power. In Persia, Rome would have found a mirror of itself: highly patriarchical, dominated by ritual, emphasis on duty and a veneration of ancestors. Perhaps the world would have settled into a bipolar form—a stable but stifling Roman-Persian duopoly—but without the Hellenistic tradition Alexander left behind, perhaps not to our liking.

  So. maybe it’s better that he didn’t die too old, or too young.

  Alexander is surely proof that one man can make a difference to history. But he is also an exemplar of the odd fact that many works of alternate history seem to find worlds which are worse than ours. Alexander didn’t die too early—or too late—but at just the right time to ensure his long-term legacy.

  Enjoy these other great books published by

  The Random House Publishing Group:

  BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE AND STEPHEN BAXTER

  Time’s Eye

  Sunstorm

  BY ARTHUR C. CLARKE

  Childhood’s End

  Rendezvous with Rama

  2010: Odyssey Two

  The Songs of Distant Earth

  2061: Odyssey Three

  3001: The Final Odyssey

  Hammer of God

  BY STEPHEN BAXTER

  Manifold: Time

  Manifold: Space

  Manifold: Origin

  Evolution

  Coalescent

  Exultant

  Copyright © 2005 by Arthur C. Clarke and Stephen Baxter

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Del Rey Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  Del Rey is a registered trademark and the Del Rey colophon is a trademark of Random House, Inc.

  ISBN 0-345-45252-X

  Printed in the United States of America

  Book design by Julie Schroeder

  PART 1

  A BALEFUL SUN

  1: RETURN

  Bisesa Dutt gasped, and staggered.

  She was standing. She didn’t know where she was.

  Music was playing.

  She stared at a wall, which showed the magnified image of an impossibly beautiful young man crooning into an old-fashioned microphone. Impossible, yes; he was a synth-star, a distillation of the inchoate longings of subteen girls. “My God, he looks like Alexander the Great.”

  Bisesa could barely take her eyes off the wall’s moving colors, its brightness. She had forgotten how drab and dun-colored Mir had been. But then, Mir had been another world altogether.

  Aristotle said, “Good morning, Bisesa. This is your regular alar
m call. Breakfast is waiting downstairs. The news headlines today are—”

  “Shut up.” Her voice was a dusty desert croak.

  “Of course.” The synthetic boy sang on softly.

  She glanced around. This was her bedroom, in her London apartment. It seemed small, cluttered. The bed was big, soft, not slept in.

  She walked to the window. Her military-issue boots were heavy on the carpet and left footprints of crimson dust. The sky was gray, on the cusp of sunrise, and the skyline of London was emerging from the flatness of silhouette.

  “Aristotle.”

  “Bisesa?”

  “What’s the date?”

  “Tuesday.”

  “The date.”

  “Ah. The ninth of June, 2037.”

  “I should be in Afghanistan.”

  Aristotle coughed. “I’ve grown used to your sudden changes of plans, Bisesa. I remember once—”

  “Mum?”

  The voice was small, sleepy. Bisesa turned.

  Myra was barefoot, her tummy stuck out, fist rubbing at one eye, hair tousled, a barely awake eight-year-old. She was wearing her favorite pajamas, the ones across which cartoon characters gamboled, even though they were now about two sizes too small for her. “You didn’t say you were coming home.”

  Something broke inside Bisesa. She reached out. “Oh, Myra—”

  Her daughter recoiled. “You smell funny.”

  Shocked, Bisesa glanced down at herself. In her jumpsuit, scuffed and torn and coated with sweat-soaked sand, she was as out of place in this twenty-first-century London flat as if she had been wearing a spacesuit.

  She forced a smile. “I guess I need a shower. Then we’ll have breakfast, and I’ll tell you all about it…”

  The light changed, subtly. She turned to the window.

  There was an Eye over the city, a silver sphere, floating like a barrage balloon. She couldn’t tell how far away it was, or how big. But she knew it was an instrument of the Firstborn, who had transported her to Mir, another world, and brought her home.

  And over the rooftops of London, a baleful sun was rising.

  2: THE PEAK OF ETERNAL LIGHT

  Mikhail Martynov had devoted his life to the study of Earth’s star. And from the first moment he saw the sun, at the beginning of that fateful day, he knew, deep in his bones, that something was wrong.

  “Good morning, Mikhail. The time on the Moon is two o’clock in the morning. Good morning, Mikhail. The time is two o’clock and fifteen seconds. Good morning…”

  “Thank you, Thales.” But he was already up and moving. As always he had woken to within a minute of his personal schedule, without need of Thales’s softly spoken electronic wake-up call, a schedule he kept independently of the Houston time to which the rest of the Moon was enslaved.

  Mikhail was a man of routine. And he would begin the day, as he began every day of his long solitary watches in this Space Weather Service Station, with a walk into the sunlight.

  He took a quick breakfast of fruit concentrate and water. He always drank the water pure, never polluted with coffee granules or tea leaves, for it was water from the Moon, the result of billions of years of slow cometary accretion and now mined and processed for his benefit by million-dollar robots; he believed it deserved to be savored.

  He clambered briskly into his EVA suit. Comfortable and easy to use, the suit was the result of six decades’ development from the clumsy armor worn by the Apollo astronauts. And it was smart, too; some said so smart it could go out Moonwalking by itself.

  But smart suit or not, Mikhail worked cautiously through a series of manual checks of the suit’s vital systems. He lived alone here at the Moon’s South Pole, save for the electronic omnipresence of Thales, and everybody knew that low gravity made you dumb—the “space stupids,” they called it. Mikhail was well aware of the importance of concentrating on the chores necessary to keep himself alive.

  Still, it was only minutes before he was locked tight into the warm enclosure of the suit. Through the slight distortion of his wedge-shaped visor he peered out at his small living quarters. He was a man equipped for interplanetary space, standing incongruously in a clutter of laundry and unwashed dishes.

  Then, with a grace born of long practice, he pushed his way out through the airlock, and then the small dustlock beyond, and emerged onto the surface of the Moon.

  Standing on the slope of a crater rim mountain, Mikhail was in shadow broken only by sparse artificial lighting. Above him stars crowded a silent sky. When he looked up—he had to lean back in his stiff suit—he could make out dazzling splashes of light high on the crater wall, places the low polar sunlight could reach. Solar-cell arrays and an antenna farm had been placed up there in the light, as well as the sun sensors that were the Station’s main purpose.

  This Space Weather Service Station, dug into the wall of a crater called Shackleton, was one of the Moon’s smaller habitats, just a few inflatable domes linked by low tunnels and heaped over by a layer of charcoal-gray Moon dust.

  Unprepossessing the hab itself may have been, but it was situated in one of the Moon’s more remarkable locations. Unlike the Earth, the Moon’s axis has no significant tilt; there are no lunar seasons. And at the Moon’s South Pole the sun never rises high in the sky. There the shadows are always long—and, in some places, permanent. Thus the pool of darkness in which Mikhail stood had been unbroken for billions of years, save by humans.

  Mikhail looked down the slope, beyond the low bulges of the Station domes. On Shackleton’s floor floodlights revealed a complex tangle of quarries and lumbering machines. Down there robots toiled over the real treasure of this place: water.

  When the Apollo astronauts had brought home their first dusty Moon rocks, the geologists had been dumbfounded that the samples contained not a trace of water, not even bound chemically into the mineral structures. It took some decades to unravel the truth. The Moon was no sister world of Earth but a daughter, created in the early days of the solar system when a collision with another infant world had smashed apart a proto-Earth. The debris that had eventually coalesced into the Moon had been superheated until it glowed blue-white, in the process driving off every trace of water. Later, comets had splashed on the Moon’s surface. Out of the billions of tonnes of water delivered by these lesser impacts, most had been lost immediately. But a trace, just a trace, had found its way to the permanently shadowed floors of the polar craters, a gift of water to the Moon as if in recompense for the circumstances of its birth.

  By Earth’s standards the Moon’s water was little enough—not much more than a respectably sized lake—but for human colonists it was a treasure beyond price, literally worth far more than its weight in gold. It was invaluable for the scientists too, as it bore a record of eons of cometary formation, and offered indirect clues to the formation of Earth’s oceans, which had also been bequeathed by cometary impacts.

  Mikhail’s interest in this place was not lunar ice, however, but solar fire.

  He turned away from the shadows and began to toil up the steepening slope of the rim mountain toward the light. The path was just a trail, beaten flat by human footprints. It was marked by streetlights, as everybody called them, small globe lamps hung from poles, so he could see what he was doing.

  The slope was steep, each step an effort even in the Moon’s gentle one-sixth gravity. His suit helped, with a subtle hum from exoskeletal servos and a high-pitched whir of the fans and pumps that labored to keep his faceplate clear of condensed sweat. He was soon breathing hard, and his muscles ached pleasantly: this walk was his daily constitutional.

  At last he reached the summit of the mountain and emerged into flat sunlight. A small collection of robot sensors huddled here, peering with unending electronic patience at the sun. But the light was too brilliant for Mikhail’s eyes, and his visor quickly opaqued.

  The view around him was still more dramatic, and complex. He was standing on the rim of Shackleton, itself a comparatively m
inor crater, but here at its western rim Shackleton intersected the circles of two other craters. The landscape was jumbled on a superhuman scale: even the craters’ far rims were hidden by the Moon’s horizon. But with long practice Mikhail had trained himself to make out the chains of mountains, slowly curving, that marked the perimeters of these overlapping scars. And all this was thrown into stark relief by the low light of the sun as it rolled endlessly around the horizon, the long shadows it cast turning like clock hands.

  The South Pole, shaped when the Moon was young by an immense impact that had bequeathed it the deepest crater in all the solar system, was the most contorted landscape on the Moon. A greater contrast to the flat basalt plain of Tranquillity where Armstrong and Aldrin had first landed, far to the north close to the Moon’s equator, would be hard to imagine.

  And this peak was a special place. Even here among the mountains of the Pole, most places knew some night, as the passing shadows of one crater wall or another blocked out the light. But the peak on which Mikhail stood was different. Geological chance had left it steeper and a little taller than its cousins to either side, and so no shadow ever reached its summit. While the Station, only footsteps away, was in perpetual darkness, this place was in permanent sunlight; it was the Peak of Eternal Light. There was nowhere like this on tipped-over Earth, and only a handful of locations like it on the Moon.

  There was no morning here, no true night; it was no wonder that Mikhail’s personal clock drifted away from the consensus of the rest of the Moon’s inhabitants. But it was a strange, still landscape that he had grown to love. And there was no better place in the Earth–Moon system to study the sun, which never set from this airless sky.

  But today, as he stood here, something troubled him.

  Of course he was alone; it was inconceivable that anybody could sneak up on the Station without a hundred automatic systems alerting him. The silent sentinels of the solar monitors showed no signs of disturbance or change, either—not that a cursory eyeball inspection of their casings, wrapped in thick meteorite shielding and Kevlar, would have told him anything. So what was troubling him? The stillness of the Moon was an uncomfortable place to be having such feelings, and Mikhail shivered, despite the comfortable warmth of his suit.