Insistence of Vision

by David Brin

  I made myself take a deep breath. “I . . . had some rough times as a kid, sure, but that doesn’t mean—”

  The blonde’s hand slid higher up my thigh, threatening to drive away all rational thought.

  “Let us persuade you.”

  “Huh? Of what?”

  “Of our purpose. Our resolve to make your decision obvious.”

  “Yes,” the redhead added, leaning closer. “We are here to give you everything that you presently want. To fulfill your fantasies, such as they are.”

  “And you figure I want more than a good exec job and a wife and home?”

  “We know you. Better than you know yourself, Alec,” Red said with a slow, sly smile.

  Struggling for some sense of control, I stretched, pretending nonchalance, knowing that I’m fooling no one.

  “You ladies have got quite a line, I got to hand it to you.”

  “You do not believe us,” the redhead said. “Of course, it is a fantastic tale.”

  “It’s original, I’ll give you that.”

  Blonde is all business. She leaned back, giving me a good long look at her perfectly proportioned body. “For now, let us see about collecting those samples you offered.”

  5.

  The rebels groveled very well. Heads smacked on marble, moans of supplication echoed, they even trotted forward some women to offer—probably their poor frightened wives. I yawned.

  My Western Frontier Advisor whispered, urging me to put them all on spikes. “As an example to others!” he finished.

  “Have you watched an impalement?” I answered. I had made that mistake the first time I went along with this joker. They put the pointed shaft up the victim’s bum and it takes the victim a full day to work down on it. I would still wake up in a sweat, years later, remembering their screams.

  “Sire, for the good of the Kingdom—”

  “Clemency is granted!” I said loudly. “One year at hard labor, helping to build the Great Library in Alec-Sandria, then back home on probation—and I better not hear of any more raided caravans! This rebellion stuff has got to stop. Get a life!”

  Okay, not eloquent. But the expressions on their faces—and their wives’—made me feel like Abraham Lincoln. Sheesh, these ancient guys are easily pleased.

  Not that I was always Mr. Nice Guy. Especially at the beginning, building a ragtag band of followers, then eventually taking over and ejecting the old Pharaoh. Had to show I was the kind of ruthless cutthroat that my growing army expected. Those first years were hungry, danger-packed, and tense, even with some modern tricks from the twenty-first century. And yet . . . it’s funny how finally taking power didn’t turn out to be as voluptuously satisfying as I thought it would be.

  Who would have expected that I’m nowhere near the bully that I used to think I was?

  The cries of gratitude from the rebels hardly faded away before the chief herald cried out. “Lo, the Priestess of Isis arrives!”

  Damn! I had meant to slip away—

  She came in at full swagger. And though she bowed low before me and uttered all the proper phrases, anyone could tell that she’s my equal here.

  Some may even suspect the truth.

  The gold bracelets were striking, the ivory headdress and ebony belt gave her authority, and the figure . . . well nobody else in 1400 B.C. has anything like it.

  But she was all business. How did I ever think she was so alluring, back in Mulligan’s?

  “Lord of All the Lands, I approach you with supplications.”

  Which meant work to do. With a sigh I sat back on my throne and answered in English.

  “The usual?”

  “I bring laws for you to proclaim. Matters that we discussed at our last monthly meeting. Regulations for fair trade in the Sinai. A better plan for Nile boats. Establishment of county and provincial fairs, for the open exchange of improvements. The apprenticeship and scholarship program for bright sons and daughters of the peasant class.”

  Yeah, yeah. Half of the ideas were mine. I’m not a complete puppet. Still, I winced when I saw a crimson scroll under her belt. The weekly quota of heirs for me to sire.

  Dammit, I bet she was planning an increase! What am I, a machine?

  “Look, what’s the rush?” I mumbled. “We’ve already accomplished—”

  “A great deal, proving that our estimates of your abilities were correct. You should trust—”

  “Trust!” I laughed, without joy. “You tricked me! All of this, in order to—”

  “In order to help guide society quickly toward a more advanced state, so that in three and a half millennia it will be capable of defeating a dire enemy from the stars.”

  None of the guards, deputies and ass-kissers around the throne room understood us, of course. They assumed we were talking in the Language of the Gods.

  “Do remember the Enemy, O great Pharaoh.”

  I shivered. They had showed me a foe, all right—made me experience them in full. Not classic aliens or terrifying robo-devils, nothing you’d expect at all. They came from a world where smart mammals like us were herded. Not like cows, but more subtly. Symbiotic, they had mastered how to tap our deepest fears, using them against us. They ruled by immersing us in them. Imagine a chilly analytical engine, impersonally merciless as it uses you, only far worse to look at and impossible to look away from—because it’s always there, slimy, inside.

  The blonde and the redhead made me experience that. They showed me how humanity was losing.

  But on this new timeline, we’ll have an extra 3,000 years to get ready. Time enough, maybe, if we bypass the cruel stupidities and waste of the Assyrian and Roman and Ch’ing empires and all the dark ages between. If feudalism gets replaced by opportunity and science a whole lot earlier. Especially—they say—if that future has plenty of people with my traits. Traits that did me little good in my old life, but ones that would breed true, making great leaders in the future. Leaders not stunted the way I am—only good for simple tasks, like bullying primitives by the marshy borders of the Nile.

  “One of your descendants invented the time beam,” they had told me that night – it seemed like ages ago – as if I was supposed to be proud. “She knew this attempt would be our only chance.”

  “Well then, why not take her back in time? Or pick my son to be Pharaoh? He carries the same miracle genes, right? He’s better and wiser than me, too, ain’t that right? Anyway, if I leave, won’t they vanish?”

  “It is hard to explain the subtleties of temporal dynamics,” the redhead had said. “All of your children made large contributions to our future. That timeline must continue to stand like a trellis for the new one to grow alongside. And it will continue to stand, even after you are removed.”

  I think of myself as flexible-minded, but this made my head hurt. You can’t do time travel without a painful paradox, and the two savants in front of me were accommodating.

  “But still . . . why me? Because that time beam had a … fringe… that appeared both in my era and here? I mean now?”

  “That’s part of it. Also, we must borrow the least important element. One whose suite of actions—personal choices and conscious involvement—can be spared, and yet someone capable of exercising fierce power in a primitive era, then growing into the job. All of those reasons pointed to you.”

  The least important element. Brutally frank, those gals were, once they knew they had me. Their futuristic personality analyzer told them I’d be fine leading a nation of millions, though in my real world I never made it beyond middle management. I could satisfy harems, but not one modern wife.

  Go figure.

  6.

  It really came home to me later that day, in the privacy of my seraglio.

  Did you ever work in an ice cream shop? First week you gorge. Second week you peck a little. Third week . . . well, I was getting that third week feeling again, real bad.

  A voluptuous lady of the Levant, soft like pillows. A stately and dignified Nubian, like
warm ebony. A leering, silky submissive of the West and a skilled contortionist from the Far East. All of them were volunteers, of course, never coerced. That moralist, Isis, made sure of their enthusiasm before any came to me. (What did she do with the others? I wondered.)

  I had done the research every other man only dreams about, and learned a daunting truth: there is only a finite range of women, as there is of men. Probably Casanova learned the same lesson. Who would’ve figured the polygynous drive for variety turns out to be satiable, even in a rutting fool like me?

  Eventually, it palls.

  And then, dammit, you start dreaming every night of someone who actually loved you, who chose you, as an equal, despite knowing all your faults.

  I tried to shake off the mood. It would be unseemly for Pharaoh not to watch the Parade of Lovelies, then show that he still has what it takes to govern. Sighing, I proceeded to do my best.

  Later, the Priestess of Isis arrived for another consultation, this time accompanied by her redheaded companion, now the Priestess of Karnak, proudly bringing the latest crop of infants to show off. Each one a gift for the ages, or so that pair of eugenic time warriors crooned.

  And yet, once again I wondered. They’d told me that a chain beginning in the year 2015 would not be long enough to create a new civilization with sufficient power by 2200. But three thousand years might suffice. We were growing a parallel timeline, a vine climbing alongside the world I had known. One that would be strong enough to battle a terrible foe. Too much High Concept for me, I’m afraid. But one nagging doubt kept bothering me—

  I have only their word for it that I joined the right side in their war.

  Looking at my latest offspring, one baby after another whom I would barely know, I found myself wishing with a pang that I hadn’t missed so many of Bobby’s Little League games. That I had gone to see Rachel win the science fair.

  Who knew they’d turn out to be geniuses?

  And who cared about that? I just missed them.

  Oh, the blonde and redheaded time agents played me right. They offered power, which I enjoyed at first— till I got responsible. They knew it would happen. . . .

  “Hey,” I barked at both of them as they packed up their latest harvest of healthy, cooing princesses and princelings to depart. “I’m here running the Kingdom all day, begetting heirs all night, and meanwhile—what are you two doing in those temples of yours?”

  The Priestess of Isis interrupted her inspection of a young heir. Her eyes became slits.

  “We are organizing the women, Alec. Mind your own business.”

  I sighed as they left, ruminating yet again on my fate. And especially on one awful irony.

  Somewhere deep down, way back in my former life, I always expected to be punished. For my faults. For my failings.

  Now, despite pleasures that would have stunned Hefner, I couldn’t escape feeling that way again. Exiled and condemned. Wishing… though I knew it was hopeless… for clemency.

  A pardon.

  For some way to go home.

  “I could have done better,” I muttered. “If only they left me alone. Really. I would have changed.”

  The pall lingered over me like a familiar cloud…

  . . . till a nearby Grecian-primitive beauty gave me a slow, suggestive smile.

  Ah, well. One endures.

  Story Notes

  The preceding story was created with my longtime collaborator Gregory Benford. Together, we wrote the deep-space novel Heart of the Comet. Of course, any collaboration results in a different “voice.”

  Science fiction features more collaborations than any other genre. I believe one reason is that – for all our notorious authorial egos – we really do care above all about story.

  Story towers above all other considerations. If teamwork can make it succeed, then ego gives way to teamwork!

  Next comes a light-hearted piece – another collaboration with Greg – in which we channel one of the greatest, early masters of our art, putting him in a “mash-up” with another maestro of newborn science fiction.

  Paris Conquers All

  ᚖ

  by Jules Verne

  (As told to David Brin & Gregory Benford)

  I commence this account with a prosaic stroll at eventide – a saunter down the avenues of la Ville Lumière, during which the ordinary swiftly gave way to the extraordinary. I was in Paris to consult with my publisher, as well as to visit old companions and partake of the exquisite cuisine, which my provincial home in Amiens cannot boast. Though I am now a gentleman of advanced age, nearing my 70th year, I am still quite able to favor the savories, and it remains a treat to survey the lovely demoiselles as they exhibit the latest fashions on the boulevards, enticing smitten young men and breaking their hearts at the same time.

  I had come to town that day believing – as did most others – that there still remained weeks, or days at least, before the alien terror ravaging southern France finally reached the valley of the Seine. Isle de France would be defended at all costs, we were assured. So it came to pass that, tricked by this false complaisance, I was in the capital the very afternoon that the crisis struck.

  Paris! It still shone as the most splendid exemplar of our progressive age – all the more so in that troubled hour, as tense anxiety seemed only to add to the city’s loveliness – shimmering at night with both gas and electric lights, and humming by day with new electric trams, whose marvelous wires crisscrossed above the avenues like gossamer heralds of a new era.

  I had begun here long ago as a young attorney, having followed into my father’s profession. Yet that same head of our family had also accepted my urge to strike out on a literary road, in the theater and later down expansive voyages of prose.

  “Drink your fill of Paris, my son!” the good man said, seeing me off from the Nantes railway station. “Devour these wondrous times. Your senses are keen. Share your insights. The world will change because of it.”

  Without such help and support, would I ever have found within myself the will, the daring, to explore the many pathways of the future, with all their wonders and perils? Ever since the Martian invasion began, I had found myself reflecting on an extraordinary life filled with such good fortune, especially now that all human luck seemed about to be revoked. With terror looming from the south and west, would it all soon come to nought? All that I had achieved? Everything humanity had accomplished, after so many centuries climbing upward from ignorance?

  It was in such an uncharacteristically dour mood that I strolled in the company of M. Beauchamp, a gentleman scientist, that pale afternoon less than an hour before I had my first contact with the horrible Martian machines. Naturally, I had been following the eyewitness accounts which first told of plunging fireballs, striking the Earth with violence that sent gouts of soil and rock spitting upward, like miniature versions of the outburst at Krakatau. These impacts had soon proved to be far more than mere meteoritic phenomena, since there soon emerged, like insects from a subterranean lair, three-legged beings bearing incredible malevolence toward the life of this planet. Riding gigantic tripod mechanisms, these unwelcome guests rapidly set forth with one sole purpose in mind – destructive conquest!

  The ensuing carnage, the raking fire, the sweeping flames – none of these horrors had yet reached the fair country above the river Loire... not yet. But reports all-too vividly told of villages trampled, farmlands seared black, and hordes of refugees cut down as they fled.

  Invasion. The word called to mind vivid pain all too easily remembered. We of northern France knew the pain just twenty-eight years back, when Sedan fell and this sweet land trembled under an attacker’s boot. Several Paris quarters still bear scars where Prussian firing squads tore moonlike craters out of plaster walls, mingling there the ochre life blood of communards, royalists and bourgeois alike.

  Now Paris trembled before advancing powers so malign that, in contrast, those Prussians of 1870 were like beloved cousins, welcome to town for a p
icnic!

  All of this I pondered while taking leave, with Beauchamp, of the Ecole Militaire, the national military academy, where a briefing had just been given to assembled dignitaries, such as ourselves. From the stone portico we gazed toward the Seine, past the encampment of the Seventeenth Corps of Volunteers, their tents arrayed across trampled grass and smashed flowerbeds of the ironically-named Champs de Mars. The meadow of the god of war.

  Towering over this scene of intense (and ultimately futile) martial activity stood the tower of M. Eiffel, built for the recent exhibition – that marvelously fashioned testimonial to metal and ingenuity... and also target of so much vitriol.

  “The public’s regard for it may improve with time,” I ventured, observing that Beauchamp’s gaze lay fixed on the same magnificent spire.

  My companion snorted with derision at the curving steel flanks. “An eyesore, of no enduring value,” he countered, and for some time we distracted ourselves from more somber thoughts by arguing the relative merits of Eiffel’s work, while turning east to walk toward the Sorbonne. Of late, experiments in the transmission of radio-tension waves had wrought unexpected pragmatic benefits, using the great tower as an antenna. I wagered Beauchamp there would be other advantages, in time.

  Alas, even this topic proved no lasting diversion from thoughts of danger to the south. Fresh in our minds were reports from the wine districts. The latest outrage – that the home of Vouvray was now smashed, trampled and burning. This was my favorite of all the crisp, light vintages – better, even, than a fresh Sancerre. Somehow, that loss seemed to strike home more vividly than dry casualty counts, already climbing to the millions.

  “There must be a method!” I proclaimed, as we approached the domed brilliance of Les Invalides. “There has to be a scientific approach to destroying the invaders.”

  “The military is surely doing its best,” Beauchamp said.