Free Stories 2016

by Baen Books

  “Perhaps, as an up-timer, you underestimate the powerful effects that this literature is having, across Europe and beyond. Except in countries where it has been banned, for the insidious, underlying assumption of science fiction, that change is a permanent fact of life! And that any child, of no matter what mean background, can become an agent of change. No, Herr Flannery. You are still potent. Your ‘hands’ now guide minds upward, gently pushing them to ponder how things might be different than they are!”

  “Well, that can be dangerous in these times. There are many out there, in both low and high places, who consider science fiction to be heretical, blasphemous, and radically revolutionary.”

  “Making you popular with the Committees of Correspondence, of course.”

  John shrugged. “A connection we don’t publicly encourage. We get more than enough death threats. And, only last month, a crude pipe bomb. Fortunately, we discovered it in time. Still, I try to open all the packages myself since, as you can see, I have little left to lose.”

  He lifted both prosthetics into the light.

  “Ah, but we shall soon put a stop to that!” commented a youthful voice from behind John. He turned to see Hercule Savinien casting a lanky shadow through the doorway. The sixteen-year-old editorial apprentice had survived Charles de La Porte’s futile infantry advance at the Battle of Ahrensbök, with only a severe limp, thanks to twentieth-century field medicine. He now flourished a poignard dagger of considerable heft.

  “An elegant blade like this may be obsolete for matters of honor,” the young man said, in thickly accented English. “But it still can suffice as a letter-opener!”

  John frowned, pretending more anger than he felt.

  “Hercule, go stick that prodigious proboscis of yours into someone else’s business. Unless you have some good reason to be bothering us?”

  The boy’s eyes flashed briefly with a mix of warning and fierce intelligence . . . but that heat swiftly lapsed into a tolerant grin.

  “Jason and Jean-Baptiste have galleys for the next issue ready, when monsieur l’editeur will deign to look them over.”

  “Hm. And I assume you already have?”

  “But of course.” A gallic shrug. “The usual mix of TwenCen reprints and hack melodramas from my fellow primitives of this benighted era, who could not emulate Delaney or Verne, if their very lives depended on a soupcon of creative verve. If you had any real taste, you might look closer to home. Possibly in-house, for—”

  “Your time will come. That is, if you drop some of your own preening pretentiousness. If you focus. Learn patience and craft, as the deacon here has done.” John gestured toward his guest. “Now get out!”

  Hercule Savinien’s grin only widened as he delivered a flourished bow that would have served in any royal court—though conveying a shameless touch of wry sarcasm—and departed. John stared after the apprentice for an instant, then shook his head. Turning back to the visitor, he carefully used the artificial gripper of his right-hand prosthetic to shift, then pluck up the next page of the manuscript, having to clear his throat, before he spoke.

  “Now, where were we? Ah, yes. What is . . . what’s so cool about this story of yours—unlike so much of the ‘sci-fi’ we get submitted here—is that you’ve taken a speculative premise based upon our own shocking and strangely transformed world, extrapolating it into a plausible thought experiment of your very own.

  “This notion, for example, that the Ring of Fire wasn’t a simple swap of two land-plugs, one of them shifting backward to become powerful and destiny-changing, while the other one, shifted forward to the year 2000, would be inherently harmless, pathetically unimportant . . . I never realized how smug that image was. How self-important and based on unwarranted assumptions.

  “In other words, how very American!” John laughed ruefully. “But you point out that it may not have been a swap, at all! It could instead be a chain. A sequence, shuttling a series of spheres of space-time ever-backward, one following the other, like—”

  He shook his head, unable to come up with a metaphor. The visitor nodded, though with some reticence.

  “At the Grantville high school, I never fail to attend Demonstration Tuesday. They once showed us a laser, whose magical medium is capped, at both ends, by inward facing mirrors. At the time, I was struck that perhaps the Ring of Fire was like such a device, only with destiny as the active medium . . . ”

  “Whoa. What a way-cool idea!” John reached for his pencil with the special grip-end.

  “Only then, later the same night, it came to me in a dream . . . a dream that was so much more than . . . ”

  The author paused, staring into space, then shook himself in order to resume. “Well, it came to me that perhaps there might be mirror after mirror, after mirror. . . .”

  His voice trailed off again, as John scribbled.

  “Huh. Of course the implicit paradoxes abound. We’ve assumed that either Grantville’s arrival changed the former timeline, erasing and replacing the one we came from, or else it started a new, branching timestream that leaves the original one in place. The new one that received Grantville will gain advantages and get many boosts and head starts as a result, but also some losses. Either way, Grantville is making a huge difference.

  “In contrast, Milda Village would have very little impact, arriving in the year 2000—at most a few hundred confused villagers and traders, farmers and soldiers with antique weapons and antiquated technologies . . .

  “On the other hand, if Milda instead bounced further back in time, say another thousand years—”

  “More like fifteen centuries.”

  “Yeah, in your story, more than fifteen hundred years . . . then it implies branching after branching of multiple timelines! Each one offering a technological boost to more-primitive ancestors . . . no offense?”

  “None taken, Herr Flannery.”

  “In fact, why stop there? If you squint, you can envision another story about—”

  John felt a tingle in his spine. A sense, soft but familiar, that he had just missed something important. He lifted his head from the notepad sketch that he had begun, depicting a trellis of possible histories. Now he looked, yet again at the author.

  At his very distant facial expression.

  John played back the conversation a bit. Then he twisted his hand-hook to put the pencil down.

  “Tell me about your dream,” he said.

  * * *

  Kurt had been pleased, day before yesterday, to find a market fair in this part of Thuringia. His troopers murmured happily as the small landsknecht company rode into Milda, escorting three cargo wagons and two carriages of merchant dignitaries. Perhaps, this close to Jena, the locals felt some normality, especially with a university town between them and the fighting.

  It was a small fair—three or four tents where locals compared garden produce and bragged over samples of their winter piecework, while tapping barrels of home brew and betting on wrestling matches—plus a “theater” consisting of a painted backdrop behind a rickety stage, for pantomimes and palmers, preaching repentance while lacing songs and bawdy jokes amid stern morality plays.

  The illusion was brave, but threadbare, and it lasted only till a breathless rider came racing though, panting news of Magdeburg.

  At least thirty thousand dead and the whole city burned to the ground, with detachments of Tilly’s killers now spreading even this way.

  Half of the merchants wanted to turn around. The rest urged hurrying on to Jena. Their argument had raged on for hours, while a troupe of dispirited jugglers tried to herd everyone back to the little fairground for the midday highlight—a march of the local militia, with burnished pikes and laughably archaic matchlock muskets. Kurt’s frantic employers made the local inn so depressing that his Landsknechte took their beers outside, perching on a fence to heckle as pot-bellied volunteers high stepped, trying to look martially impressive in review.

  Well there’s no laughing at them anymore, he n
ow thought, watching by firelight as two of the farmer-soldiers got stitched by a pair of midwives. Beyond the circle of light, barely in view, were two more forms, shrouded and still—a tanner’s apprentice and the miller’s youngest son—who had been less lucky during the brief, nasty battle.

  It’s my fault, of course, he thought. If only I’d ordered my cavalry to use their pistols sooner. But who knew so many bandits would be terrified by a little gunfire?

  At least none of his Landsknechte had been killed or injured. They now mingled freely with the militia men, who had fought a pitched battle with unexpected bravery. Still, the mercenary guardsmen were in a foul mood. The robbers had nothing of value to pillage, beyond short swords of questionable value, and most of the refugees had scattered in all directions, leaving only a couple of dozen to be collared and prodded uphill, past the Hell Mouth ring, all the way back to Milda, for questioning by Father Braun.

  And our special guests, he added, peering past the coals at a cluster of people seated along the edge of the pantomime stage, where all the assembled Germans could see them. Two middle-aged men, three women and four children—all of them apparently of the same family—dressed better than the average refugee . . . plus an elderly fellow with gnarled hands and piercing eyes, to whom everyone deferred, as if he were an abbot or bishop.

  Hours ago, during the bandit attack, both of the younger men and one woman had tried valiantly to rally other émigrés and prepare a defense—it would have been futile, of course, but at least they tried—when the robbers’ attention had been drawn away by a phalanx of approaching Milda pikemen.

  The foe never saw Kurt’s cavalry till it was too late.

  Unlike the involuntary ones, who huddled under the half-tent behind them, this family had required no urging to ascend toward Milda, eagerly and gratefully following the pikemen while helping the wounded. Without displaying any dread, they had crossed the Hell Mouth boundary, staring at the transplanted disk of Germany as afternoon waned and Kurt rode about swiftly, inspecting the perimeter, setting things in order for nightfall.

  Now, the family sat, cross-legged but erect, apparently more curious than fearful. When offered food, they spurned all meats and sniffed at the boiled potatoes, till the youngest woman smiled—an expression like sunlight—then nodded gratefully and placed a bowl before the old man, who murmured a few words of blessing, then began to eat with slow care. Gently urging the frightened ones, she got first children and then other adults to join in.

  A noblewoman of some kind, Kurt realized. Or at least a natural leader, as well as something of a beauty . . . if you ignored a deep scar that ran from her left ear down to the line of her jaw. At one point, her gaze briefly locked with Kurt’s—as it had after the battle—measuring, as if she were the one here with real power. Then she went back to watching intently—whispering now and then into the old fellow’s ear—as Father Braun reported, at tedious length, what he had learned.

  “ . . . and so, after this extensive philological comparison, I finally concluded that they speak Aramaic, a tongue quite similar to Hebrew, and hence confirming that most of the denizens of this region appear to be Jews, plus some Samaritans, Syrians . . . ”

  The rest of the cleric’s recitation was drowned out by a mutter of consternation from those seated on makeshift benches and crowding in from all sides—a motley assortment of Milda residents, travelers, soldiers, teamsters, palmers, and shabby entertainers, almost all of those who were trapped here when the Hell Mouth snapped around Milda. Far too many to congregate within the small village inn.

  Kurt frowned at the reaction. Not all of the murmurs were actively hateful. He figured most were only shocked to learn that a despised minority now apparently surrounded them, in great numbers. And at least some of these Jews were armed.

  During his travels, Kurt had learned how most prejudices were as useful as a hymnal in a privy. Anyway, we don’t have time for this. He stepped into the light, clearing his throat. Those nearby swiftly took the hint—from a nobleman and commander of their little army—to settle down. Certainly, the village headman and masters, seated on a front row bench, seemed happy to defer.

  “What about our other guests?” Kurt pointed to a trio of grimy men who were clearly soldiers, staring fixedly at the coals, with bound wrists. Though clean-shaven—unlike most of the local males—they appeared to be in shock. As Kurt had felt earlier, when he inspected their confiscated weapons . . . short, gladius-style swords and skirted leather armor, of a type that looked so familiar.

  “I was unable to gather much from those three,” Braun said. “They were found wandering just outside the Hell Mouth, having apparently taken the brunt of it, near what seems to have been the outermost wall of some fortification.”

  Kurt had examined the wall in question, just before nightfall. Most of the stronghold must have been sliced away by the Hell Mouth, vanishing completely when Milda’s plug of Thuringia displaced whatever had been here, before.

  I wonder where that plug of land wound up, with its garrison of armed men. Perhaps they are now back where we came from?

  If so, they would stand little chance against Tilly’s raiders. From what he could tell, these locals had never heard of gunpowder.

  “Well, never mind them. What else did you learn from the refugees?”

  Braun nodded. “My smattering of Hebrew might not have sufficed. Certainly I doubted the testimony of my ears . . . until this young woman made my task much easier by speaking to me, at last, in rather good Latin.”

  The beauty with the scar. Kurt stepped forward and switched from German.

  “Est quod verum? Tu loqueris? You speak Latin? Why did you not say so before?”

  She whispered in the old man’s ear. He nodded permission, and she met Kurt’s gaze with confident serenity.

  “Et non petisti,” she replied to his question. You did not ask.

  Kurt’s initial flare at her impertinence quickly tempered. Courage was acceptable coin, and he liked women who made eye-contact. So he nodded, with the faintest upturn at one corner of his mouth . . . then turned and motioned for the priest to continue.

  Braun sighed, as if he dreaded coming to this part.

  “With her help, I questioned every person about the name of this region, into which we find ourselves plunged. They all replied with great assurance and consistency.”

  “It’s hell!” screamed one high-pitched voice, possibly a hysterical man.

  The Jesuit shook his head.

  “Nay, it is Judea.”

  Kurt nodded. He had already suspected as much, from the terrain, foliage, and much else. Around him, Catholics told their rosaries while other voices spoke in hushed tones of the Holy Land.

  “Then it’s worse than hell,” cried the same pessimist. “Tomorrow we’ll face a thousand Turks!”

  Father Braun raised a hand.

  “That might have been true, had a mere shift in location been the only aspect of what happened to us, today. Only there is more, far more shocking than that.

  “It appears, my dear children, that—by some great wonder achievable only by divine will—we have also been transported through time.”

  This brought on silence so deep that only the crackling logs spoke. Indeed, it seemed that most of the villagers and travelers and soldiers merely blinked, assuming that the priest had shifted to some non-germanic tongue.

  Kurt stepped closer to the firelight. Someone had to look and sound confident at this point, though his own calm was more a matter of numbness than noblesse. Anyway, he already had guessed the answer to his next question.

  “What is the date then, Father?”

  “Ahem. Well. There are discrepancies of calendar to take into account. It’s difficult to narrow down precisely. That is . . . ”

  “Priest—” Kurt gave him the full-on baron-look.

  The Jesuit threw his shoulders back, as if defying fate even to utter it aloud. In so doing, he revealed a build that must have once—in a form
er life—been that of a soldier.

  “The date is seventy, or seventy-one, or two or three, or perhaps seventy-four years . . . after the birth of our lord. We stand above the valley where he dwelled as a child, within sight of the sea where he preached and fished for souls.”

  Kurt nodded, accepting the finality of a diagnosis, already known.

  “And the poor people who we see, shambling along these roads in despair? What calamity do they flee?”

  He was envisioning Magdeburg, only much, much worse.

  Father Braun met his eyes.

  “It is as you suppose, Baron von Wolfschild. They are escaping the wrath of the Roman emperor-to-be, Titus, who has, of late, burned the holy Temple itself. And the city of Jerusalem.”

  * * *

  Jason was having none of it.

  “Come on, Johnny. It’s a great story! The fellow clearly studied Piper and de Camp, in all those Analog zines he read. He’s a natural. Anyway, weren’t we looking hard for some down-timers with talent?”

  Before John could answer, Sister Maria Celeste emitted a curt cough. She had been adjusting the pads on Jason’s wheelchair, which kept bunching up, he fidgeted so.

  “And what am I, signore? Chopped kidney? I have submitted to you several fine fantasies aeronatical dei mondi qui sopra, based upon discoveries made by my father. Yet, all you have seen fit to publish of my work are a few short poems. While you endlessly encourage those two rascals to believe they hold promise, as writers!”

  She nodded toward the front door of the Literary Home for Wounded Veterans . . . where a pair of figures dressed in black tried to seem innocuous, failing to conceal daggers at their hips. A nightly charade. Caught in the act, thirteen-year-old Jean-Baptiste murmured—“We’re just goin’ out for a—for some air, messieurs.”

  The older boy, Hercule Savinien, simply grinned, as if daring anyone to make something of their evening ritual. Again, the flourished bow.

  “Macht die Tür zu!” one of the other vets shouted, unnecessarily, as the lads slammed the door behind them.

  “Traps and snares and trip-wires.” The nun shook her head. “Romantic dolts! They should be working for Spy Magazine, and not Galaxy.” She turned her attentions to John, helping him to remove his prosthetics.