Alternate Wars

by Gregory Benford

  “The mathematics identified you as the best hostage, Your Grace.”

  “The best? Best for what, my Lord? If you had taken Henry himself, then he could not have issued the Act of Supremacy. His supposed death would have served the purpose as well as mine.”

  “Yes. But for Henry the Eighth to disappear from history while his heir is but a month old … we did not know if that might not have started a civil war in itself. Between the factions supporting Elizabeth and those for Queen Katherine, who was still alive.”

  “What did your mathematical learning tell you?”

  “That it probably would not,” Brill said.

  “And yet choosing me instead of Henry left him free to behead yet another wife, as you yourself have told me, my cousin Catherine Howard!”

  Brill shifted on his chair “That is true, Your Grace.”

  “Then why not Henry instead of me?”

  “I’m afraid Your Grace does not have sufficient grasp of the science of probabilities for me to explain, Your Grace.”

  Anne was silent. Finally she said, “I think that the probability is that you would find it easier to deal with a deposed woman than with Henry of England, whom no man can withstand in either a passion or a temper.”

  Brill did not answer. The visual rolled—ten seconds, fifteen—and he did not answer.

  “Mr. Premier,” Brill said in a choked voice, “Mr. Premier—”

  “You will have time to address these issues soon, Mr. Director,” Krenya said. “Mistress Boleyn, this third charge—sexual abuse…”

  The term had not existed in the sixteenth century, thought Lambert. Yet Anne understood it. She said, “I was frightened, my Lord, by the strangeness of this place. I was afraid for my life. I didn’t know then that a woman may refuse those in power, may—”

  “That is why sexual contact with hostages is universally forbidden,” Krenya said. “Tell us what you think happened.”

  Not what did happen—what you think happened. Lambert took heart.

  Anne said, “Master Culhane bade me meet him at a place … it is a small alcove beside a short flight of stairs near the kitchens…. He bade me meet him there at night. Frightened, I went.”

  “Visuals,” Krenya said in a tight voice.

  The virtual square reappeared. Anne, in the same white nightdress in which she had been taken hostage, crept from her chamber, along the corridor, her body heat registering in infrared. Down the stairs, around to the kitchens, into the cubbyhole formed by the flight of steps, themselves oddly angled as if they had been added, or altered, after the main structure was built, after the monitoring system installed…. Anne dropped to her knees and crept forward beside the isolated stairs. And disappeared.

  Lambert gasped. A time hostage was under constant surveillance. That was a basic condition of their permit; there was no way the Boleyn bitch could escape constant monitoring. But she had.

  “Master Culhane was already there,” Anne said in a dull voice. “He … he used me ill there.”

  The room was awash with sound. Krenya said over it, “Mistress Boleyn—there is no visual evidence that Master Culhane was there. He has sworn he was not. Can you offer any proof that he met you there? Anything at all?”

  “Yes. Two arguments, my Lord. First: How would I know there were not spying devices in but this one hidden alcove? I did not design this castle; it is not mine.”

  Krenya’s face showed nothing. “And the other argument?”

  “I am pregnant with Master Culhane’s child.”

  Pandemonium. Krenya rapped for order. When it was finally restored, he said to Brill, “Did you know of this?”

  “No, I … it was a hostage’s right by the Accord to refuse intrusive medical treatment.… She has been healthy.”

  “Mistress Boleyn, you will be examined by a doctor immediately.”

  She nodded assent. Watching her, Lambert knew it was true. Anne Boleyn was pregnant, and had defeated herself thereby. But she did not know it yet.

  Lambert fingered the knowledge, seeing it as a tangible thing, cold as steel.

  “How do we know,” Krenya said, “that you were not pregnant before you were taken hostage?”

  “It was but a month after my daughter Elizabeth’s birth, and I had the white-leg. Ask one of your experts if a woman would bed a man then. Ask a woman expert in the women of my time. Ask Lady Mary Lambert.”

  Heads in the room turned. Ask whom? Krenya said, “Ask whom?” An aide leaned toward him and whispered something. He said, “We will have her put on the witness list.”

  Anne said, “I carry Michael Culhane’s child. I, who could not carry a prince for the king.”

  Krenya said, almost powerlessly, “That last has nothing to do with this investigation, Mistress Boleyn.”

  She only looked at him.

  They called Brill to testify, and he threw up clouds of probability equations that did nothing to clarify the choice of Anne over Henry as holy hostage. Was the woman right? Had there been a staff meeting to choose between the candidates identified by the Rahvoli applications, and had someone said of two very close candidates, “We should think about the effect on the Institute as well as on history…”? Had someone been developing a master theory based on a percentage of women influencing history? Had someone had an infatuation with the period, and chosen by that what should be altered? Lambert would never know. She was an intern.

  Had been an intern.

  Culhane was called. He denied seducing Anne Boleyn. The songs on the lute, the descriptions of her brother’s death, the bastardization of Elizabeth—all done to convince her that what she had been saved from was worse than where she had been saved to. Culhane felt so much that he made a poor witness, stumbling over his words, protesting too much.

  Lambert was called. As neutrally as possible she said, “Yes, Mr. Premier, historical accounts show that Queen Anne was taken with white-leg after Elizabeth’s birth. It is a childbed illness. The legs swell up and ache painfully. It can last from a few weeks to months. We don’t know how long it lasted—would have lasted—for Mistress Boleyn.”

  “And would a woman with this disease be inclined to sexual activity?” ”

  “‘Inclined’—no.”

  “Thank you, Researcher Lambert.”

  Lambert returned to her seat. The committee next looked at visuals, hours of visuals—Culhane, flushed and tender, making a fool of himself with Anne. Anne with the little Tsarevitch, an exile trying to comfort a child torn from his mother. Helen of Troy, mad and pathetic. Brill, telling newsgrids around the solar system that the time rescue program, savior of countless lives, was run strictly in conformance with the All-World Accord of 2154. And all the time, through all the visuals, Lambert waited for what was known to everyone in that room except Anne Boleyn: She could not pull off in this century what she might have in Henry’s. The paternity of a child could be genotyped in the womb.

  Who? Mark Smeaton, after all? Another miscarriage from Henry, precipitately gotten and unrecorded by history? Thomas Wyatt, her most faithful cousin and cavalier?

  After the committee had satisfied itself that it had heard enough, everyone but Forum delegates was dismissed. Anne, Lambert saw, was led away by a doctor. Lambert smiled to herself. It was already over. The Boleyn bitch was defeated.

  The All-World Forum investigative committee deliberated for less than a day. Then it issued a statement: The child carried by holy hostage Anne Boleyn had not been sired by Researcher Michael Culhane. Its genotypes matched no one’s at the Institute for Time Research. The Institute, however, was guilty of two counts of hostage mistreatment. The Institute’s charter as an independent, tax-exempt organization was revoked. Toshio Brill was released from his position, as were Project Head Michael Culhane and intern Mary Lambert. The Institute stewardship was reassigned to the Church of the Holy Hostage under the direct care of Her Holiness the high priest.

  Lambert slipped through the outside door to the walled garden. It w
as dusk. On a seat at the far end a figure sat, skirts spread wide, a darker shape against the dark wall. As Lambert approached, Anne looked up without surprise.

  “Culhane’s gone. I leave tomorrow. Neither of us will ever work in time research again.”

  Anne went on gazing upward. Those great dark eyes, that slim neck, so vulnerable…. Lambert clasped her hands together hard.

  “Why?” Lambert said. “Why do it all again? Last time use a king to bring down the power of the church, this time use a church to—before, at least you gained a crown. Why do it here, when you gain nothing?”

  “You could have taken Henry. He deserved it; I did not.”

  “But we didn’t take Henry!” Lambert shouted. “So why?”

  Anne did not answer. She put out one hand to point behind her. Her sleeve fell away, and Lambert saw clearly the small sixth finger that had marked her as a witch. A tech came running across the half-lit garden. “Researcher Lambert—”

  “What is it?”

  “They want you inside. Everybody. The queen—the other one, Helen—she’s killed herself.”

  The garden blurred, straightened. “How?”

  “Stabbed with a silver sewing scissors hidden in her tunic. It was so quick, the researchers saw it on the monitor but couldn’t get there in time.”

  “Tell them I’m coming.”

  Lambert looked at Anne Boleyn. “You did this.”

  Anne laughed. This lady, wrote the Tower constable, bath much joy in death. Anne said, “Lady Mary—every birth is a sentence of death. Your age has forgotten that.”

  “Helen didn’t need to die yet. And the Time Research Institute didn’t need to be dismantled—it will be dismantled. Completely. But somewhere, sometime, you will be punished for this. I’ll see to that!”

  “Punished, Lady Mary? And mayhap beheaded?”

  Lambert looked at Anne: the magnificent black eyes, the sixth finger, the slim neck. Lambert said slowly, “You want your own death. As you had it before.”

  “What else did you leave me?” Anne Boleyn said. “Except the power to live the life that is mine?”

  “You will never get it. We don’t kill here!”

  Anne smiled. “Then how will you ‘punish’ me—‘sometime, somehow’?”

  Lambert didn’t answer. She walked back across the walled garden, toward the looming walls gray in the dusk, toward the chamber where lay the other dead queen.

  TUNDRA MOSS

  F.M. Busby

  Until the Alaska Communication System sent him here to live in a Quonset hut on Amchitka Island, PFC Buster Morgan hadn’t known weather that was all sideways. Nor slogged through mud over his ankles while gusting wind dried the surface and blew dust in his eyes.

  Tonight it was blowing sixty, maybe sixty-five. Over seventy made it hard to walk; you had to lean into it. And it could shift in no time, slap you flat in the mud.

  When God made the Aleutians he couldn’t have been sober.

  Squinting against cold, slashing rain, Buster kept his dim light on one edge of the boardwalk. Losing track of that edge could put you in deep mud. He had the walks’ layout down pat; just by flashlight, he couldn’t have told where he was.

  The boardwalks, connecting huts throughout the area, were planks laid crosswise over paired phone poles. Long as you didn’t get blown off, you could get anywhere you wanted.

  Where Buster wanted was the mess hall, for a snack before graveyard shift and a sandwich to take along. The cooks were good about leaving stuff out special for the hootowl crew.

  He’d had a good day’s sleep. At shift’s end that morning, after breakfast the sun showed. So he and Scooter in crypto and Silent Yokum the shift chief and teletype operator Chmielevski—Shemmy, who missed women even more than most—hiked down the moss-cushioned ravine to the Bering shore. Under the bluff lay no real beach; jagged rocks cluttered the narrow strip of sand.

  This stretch was so bad that the cable ship had landed the Adak and Attu teletype cables at the next cove west, below a bowl-shaped valley. Buster had been there with Sergeant Thorne, to open the steel-covered cable hut and unseal the terminal boxes for the quarterly landline tests.

  Learning that chore was why Buster was brought along. And to carry some of the bulkier gear.

  Today the four walked only to the creek mouth at the near cove. Shemmy said he hoped there’d be a sea otter again, floating with food laid out on its chest, eating each piece from its front paws. Then rolling over and over, fast, to wash off.

  Or the time one spooked a seabird bobbing offshore. It shot up from the water, missing by maybe a foot as the bird fled, then lay and rolled. Just for fun, the otter did that.

  No such fun this day. Scooter pointed to a whale spout, but nothing else was happening. Buster turned to the dirt bluff. With the wind strong behind him he ran straight at it, then on up, sixty degrees or better, the wind holding him.

  Almost at the top he remembered you can’t trust the wind! He doubled forward, grabbed tundra grass and clambered, hands and feet both. He’d barely topped the bluff when it went dead calm.

  “It all depends, George,” the president said. “If Stalin allows us the refueling bases, we can go ahead with the northern prong of the offensive. If he doesn’t…” Roosevelt shrugged.

  “Yes, sir.” General Marshall knew the problem. Doolittle’s one-way raid, striking four cities although Tokyo got all the news play, had been worth it in morale. But for a real campaign, men and planes were too valuable to be used only once. And from the Aleutians, bombers couldn’t reach Japan and return. Without the use of Siberian bases, no northern offensive could succeed.

  FDR hadn’t chosen to run the war this way. Along with Churchill, he had wanted a Europe First policy. But a mild stroke kept him from delivering his “day of infamy” speech in person. Public and congressional pressure, then, insisted that the country’s major effort go toward avenging Pearl Harbor.

  It wasn’t only Stalin, Marshall thought, who kept the president worried. MacArthur’s obsession with the Philippines made him hard to manage. The man was a strategic genius; his concept of island-hopping, bypassing strong-points, left major southern Pacific Jap forces dying on the vine. But he would keep pushing for a premature Philippine assault, Damn it.

  Roosevelt sighed; the general looked at him more closely. Always tired these days; perhaps that was why he catered too much, in the general’s opinion, to “Uncle Joe.”

  Marshall didn’t trust the Old Bolshevik. But for an effective Aleutian thrust, Stalin’s cooperation was vital.

  From the headland, the hootowl shift quartet trudged back up toward the ACS area, staying clear of the central sag in the ravine’s deep moss cover. Thin spots weren’t always obvious; you could fall through. Up nearer the ridge, Scooter led the way with bouncing steps off springy humps of moss. “Beautyrest…”

  Coming slantwise against the wind, the Navy PBY was over them before they heard it. Barely a hundred feet up, the big flying boat was drifting sideways more than not. Eerie.

  Wind or no wind, the four reached the messhall in time to have lunch, then went to their Quonset—filled with ten men’s clutter, and like every hut in the area, smelling of stove oil. Graveyard did take it out of you; Buster folded early and didn’t get up for dinner. What woke him, not long before time to relieve Thorne on duty, was somebody screeching on the radio.

  It was the Late Mystery. Buster remembered one about an armed maniac stalking the island with a killer wolf. Late at night Weevil Hawkins had believed it, holed up in the messhall with his carbine, and damn near shot Buster Morgan at the door.

  Tonight’s sounded good, but Buster had to go. He pulled up his parka hood, went through the little storm porch and stepped outside. To struggle a hundred yards through sideways rain.

  On the messhall porch he stomped mud off his feet. Here on The Rock all windows were covered; there’d been no Jap planes over for several months, but still you kept blackout. So until he opened the inner doo
r, Buster couldn’t know who was inside.

  Nobody was. Weevil had been rotated Stateside, anyway.

  If you want to stay out of drafts, stay out of Russia.

  Sure thing, thought M/Sgt. Hardeman, but that’s where they sent me. The embassy building in Moskva was old; heating wasn’t its strong point. Especially in this anteroom, where he sat with half a pot of chilling coffee, waiting for word from Ambassador Harriman and wishing he’d never heard of the U.S. Diplomatic Corps.

  The trouble was, they heard of him first. So here he sat, he and his crypto clearance, in Moskva. Drinking vodka off-duty instead of bourbon, and each day sweating against a Dear John letter from Eloise, whom he hadn’t married for her patience.

  The coffee wasn’t fit to drink. Hardeman propped his chin on one hand and closed his eyes. The ambassador’s secretary didn’t catch him asleep, though; the man’s shoes squeaked.

  “Here.” The paper Hardeman was handed carried several lines of number groups. “Send this to CINCCOM, for the president, via SHAEF for Eisenhower’s records. On each leg, return copy will be required for validation. Repeat transmission until good copy is confirmed; sender will then authorize further relay.”

  “Yes, sir.” The sheet was marked Operational Priority and Send In Clear. Looking at the string of six-digit numbers, Hardeman grinned. Book code: each number group denoted a page, line, and word within the line. Since no one but originator and recipient knew which book, anyone else would play bloody hell trying to decode the apparently simple cipher. Including Ike.

  Well, that was Franklin Roosevelt for you.

  Hardeman took the message down to Comcenter. This time of night the radioteletype to Britain was fairly solid. But it still took one rerun to confirm correct copy.

  Being alone in the messhall always felt strange. Buster fast-fried a slice of meat and made a couple of potato patties; while they sizzled he fixed a sandwich for later. After eating and washing up, he filled his canteen. This building, with a shower and washroom on the far end, had the only running water in the ACS area. It came from a tundra lake; one washing turned white cloth khaki. And to keep the big water bugs out of your mouth, you drank from the canteen with your teeth closed.