Futures Past
Table of Contents
Preface
Aristotle and the Gun
Sitka
The Only Game in Town 1
2
3
4
5
6
7
Playing the Game
Killing the Morrow
Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne
The Game of Blood and Dust
Calling Your Name
What Rough Beast
O Brave Old World!
Radiant Doors
The Hotel at Harlan's landing
Mozart in Mirrorshades
Under Siege
FUTURES PAST
Edited by
Gardner Dozois & Jack Dann
This is a work of fiction. All the characters and events portrayed in this book are fictional, and any resemblance to real people or incidents is purely coincidental.
eISBN: 978-1-62579-145-0
Copyright © 2013 by Gardner Dozois and Jack Dann
First printing: July 2006
Cover art by: Ron Miller
All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form.
Electronic version by Baen Books
http://www.baenbooks.com
Edited by Jack Dann & Gardner Dozois
UNICORNS!
MAGICATS!
BESTIARY!
MERMAIDS!
SORCERERS!
DEMONS!
DOGTALES!
SEASERPENTS!
DINOSAURS!
LITTLE PEOPLE!
MAGICATS II
UNICORNS II
DRAGONS!
INVADERS!
HORSES!
ANGELS!
HACKERS
TIMEGATES
CLONES
IMMORTALS
NANOTECH
FUTURE WAR
GENOMETRY
SPACE SOLDIERS
FUTURE SPORTS
BEYOND FLESH
FUTURE CRIMES
A.I.S
ROBOTS
FUTURES PAST
Acknowledgment is made for permission to reprint the following material:
"Aristotle and the Gun:" by L. Sprague de Camp. Copyright 1956 by Street & Smith Publications, Inc. Originally appeared in Astounding Science Fiction, February 1956. Reprinted by permission of the author's Estate.
"Sitka," by William Sanders. Copyright © 2004 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, April/May 2004. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Only Game in Town:' by Poul Anderson. Copyright 1960 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, January 1960. Reprinted by permission of the author's Estate.
"Playing the Game," by Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois. Copyright © 1981 by TZ Publications, Inc. First published in The Twilight Zone Magazine, February 1982. Reprinted by permission of the authors.
"Killing the Morrow," by Robert Reed. Copyright © 1996 by Robert Reed. First published in Starlight I (Tor), edited by Patrick Nielsen Hayden. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne," by R. A. Lafferty. Copyright © 1967 by Galaxy Publishing Corp. First published in Galaxy, February 1969. Reprinted by permission of the author's Estate.
"The Game of Blood and Dust," by Roger Zelazny. Copyright 0 1975 by UPD Publishing Corporation. First published in Galaxy, April 1975. Reprinted by permission of the author's Estate.
"Calling Your Name," by Howard Waldrop. Copyright 0 2003 by Howard Waldrop. First published in Stars: Original Stories Based on the Songs of Janis Ian (DAW), edited by Janis Ian and Mike Resnick. Reprinted by permission of the author. "Calling Your Name:' words and music by Janis Ian, copyright © Tao Songs Two. All rights reserved. Used by permission.
"What Rough Beast," by Damon Knight. Copyright ©1958 by Mercury Press, Inc. First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, February 1959. Reprinted by permission of the author's Estate.
"O Brave Old World!," by Avram Davidson. Copyright © 1975 by Avram Davidson. First published in Beyond Time (Pocket Books), edited by Sandra Ley. Reprinted by permission of the author's Estate.
"Radiant Doors," by Michael Swanwick. Copyright © 1998 by Dell Magazines. First published in Asimov's Science Fiction, September 1998. Reprinted by permission of the author.
"The Hotel at Harlan's Landing:' by Kage Baker. Copyright © 2002 by Kage Baker. First published in Black Projects, White Knights (Golden Gryphon). Reprinted by permission of the author and the author's agent, Linn Prentis.
"Mozart in Mirrorshades," by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. Copyright © 1985 by Bruce Sterling and Lewis Shiner. First published in Omni, September 1985. Reprinted in Mirrorshades (Arbor House), edited by Bruce Sterling. Reprinted by permission of the authors.
"Under Siege," by George R. R. Martin. Copyright ©1985 by George R. R. Martin. First published in Omni, October 1985. Reprinted by permission of the author.
Tomorrow is another world …
In Poul Anderson's "The Only Game in Town," an organization that tries to stop people from warping the past shows that it not only knows how to enforce the rules, it knows how to break them, too …
In "Playing the Game," Jack Dann and Gardner Dozois demonstrate that not only is it impossible to go home again, it may be impossible to even find it …
Damon Knight's poignant, bittersweet "What Rough Beast" shows one man can make a difference, in more ways than you thought possible …
R. A. Lafferty's "Thus We Frustrate Charlemagne" is a sharp, funny cautionary tale about altering the past—and how sometimes it's better to leave well enough alone …
And Howard Waldrop's "Calling Your Name" is a wry, compassionate look at how the little things in life count so much, they can change everything—including the world itself …
Preface
EVERY MOMENT OF every day, a thousand possible futures die unborn around us, a thousand corners not turned, a thousand roads not taken. We've all wondered, What would have happened if we'd gotten to that party late and so never met the person whom, in this universe, later became our spouse? What if we hadn't driven down that particular street at just the right time to collide with another car going across an intersection? What if we had managed to get to the airport in time to make that flight, the one that crashed?
And what's true of our own personal lives is true of history as well, of course: a thousand corners not turned, a thousand roads not taken. The fate of nations depends on the outcome of battles, which, as Shakespeare has shown us, can depend on whether or not a horse throws a horseshoe, or, in one memorable example from the American Civil War, whether or not a staff officer decided to have a cigar after dinner. What has become increasingly evident, over the past few decades, as we've learned about Chaos Theory and the Butterfly Effect (that busy, frenetically flailing insect that causes hurricanes in the Gulf by flapping its wings in Peru) and the Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions, is how small a change is needed to alter everything. How completely the entire structure of history could change once you tamper with one small brick in the foundation upon which everything else is built—the difference in one course of bricks altering the shape of the next, which alters the next, and so on; a cascade of changes building upon changes, until the structure you get is radically different than the one you would have ended up with, if that first brick hadn't been changed.
In the pages of the anthology that follow, sixteen of science fiction's most expert dreamers will show you what happens when people (often people with only the very best of intentions) deliberately set out to change the world by going back and turning one of those unturned corners, t
aking one of those roads not taken … actively changing things, so that the Mongols discover the New World instead of the Europeans, or the American Revolution never happens, or ruthless industrialists take over eighteenth-century Salzburg and set up refineries and cracking towers in the town square … exploring what would happen if you woke up one day to find yourself in a different life from the one you remember, or lost among the billion worlds of probability, unable to find your way home … if you had to meddle, with sabotage and murder, to provoke World War I, or if refugees from the future returned to destroy your past and replace it with another … or if someone from another time took over your body in order to kill someone … or if you were forced to hide from ruthless immortals who were implacably chasing you through every second of recorded history … or if the most casual touch of your hand changed everything in the world around you, whether you wanted it to or not …
Changing worlds. Worlds where the stuff of history is so mutable that it melts and reforms like wax under heat and pressure, and the universe you wake up in might not be the one in which you went to sleep—or the one in which you'll wake tomorrow.
Enjoy!
Aristotle and the Gun
L Sprague de Camp
The late L. Sprague de Camp was a seminal figure, one whose career spanned almost the entire development of modern fantasy and SE. Much of the luster of the "Golden Age" of Astounding during the late '30s and the '40s is due to the presence in those pages of de Camp, along with his great contemporaries Robert A. Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and A. E. Van Vogt. At the same time, for Astounding's sister fantasy magazine, Unknown, he helped to create a whole new modern style of fantasy writing—funny, whimsical, and irreverent, including such classics as "The Wheels of If," "The Gnarly Man," "Nothing in the Rules," "The Hardwood Pile," and (written in collaboration with Fletcher Pratt), the famous "Harold Shea" stories, which would later be collected as The Complete Enchanter. In science fiction, he was the author of Lest Darkness Fall, in my opinion one of the three or four best Alternate Worlds novels ever written, as well as the at-the-time highly controversial novel Rogue Queen, and a body of expertly crafted short fiction such as "Judgment Day," "Divide and Rule," and "A Gun for Dinosaur."
"Aristotle and the Gun," published in 1956, would prove to be de Camp's last science fiction short story for more than a decade. After this, he would devote his energies to turning out a long sequence of critically-acclaimed historical novels (including The Bronze God of Rhodes and An Elephant for Aristotle, two of my favorite historical novels) and, like Isaac Asimov (and at about the same time), a number of nonfiction books on scientific and technical topics. He would not return to writing fantasy and SF. to any significant degree until the mid-1970s, and, although his presence enriched several other fields, it was sorely missed in ours. Still, if de Camp had to stop writing science fiction for a time, this was a good story to go out with—de Camp at the height of his powers, writing in his usual vivid, erudite, and slyly witty way about some of the subjects—and the historical personages—that interested him the most, and demonstrating how worlds can irrevocably change whether you want them to or not.
De Camp's other books include The Glory That Was, The Search for Zei, The Tower of Zanid, The Great Fetish, The Honorable Barbarian, and, with Fletcher Pratt, The Land of Unreason. His short fiction has been collected in The Best of L. Sprague de Camp, A Gun for Dinosaur, and The Purple Pterodactyls. His most recent books are the posthumous collections Aristotle and the Gun and Other Stories, and Years in the Making: The Time-Travel Stories of L. Sprague de Camp, and the novel omnibus The Complete Enchanter.
From: Sherman Weaver, Librarian
The Palace
Paumanok, Sewanhaki
Sachimate of Lenape
Flower Moon 3, 3097
To: Messire Markos Koukidas
Consulate of the Balkan Commonwealth
Kataapa, Muskhogian Federation
My dear Consul:
You have no doubt heard of our glorious victory at Ptaksit, when our noble Sachim destroyed the armored chivalry of the Mengwe by the brilliant use of pikemen and archery. (I suggested it to him years ago, but never mind.) Sagoyewatha and most of his Senecas fell, and the Oneidas broke before our countercharge. The envoys from the Grand Council of the Long House arrive tomorrow for a peace-pauwau. The roads to the South are open again, so I send you my long-promised account of the events that brought me from my own world into this one.
If you could have stayed longer on your last visit, I think I could have made the matter clear, despite the language difficulty and my hardness of hearing. But perhaps, if I give you a simple narrative, in the order in which things happened to me, truth will transpire.
Know, then, that I was born into a world that looks like this one on the map, but is very different as regards human affairs. I tried to tell you of some of the triumphs of our natural philosophers, of our machines and discoveries. No doubt you thought me a first-class liar, though you were too polite to say so.
Nonetheless, my tale is true, though for reasons that will appear I cannot prove it. I was one of those natural philosophers. I commanded a group of younger philosophers, engaged in a task called a project, at a center of learning named Brookhaven, on the south shore of Sewanhaki twenty parasangs east of Paumanok. Paumanok itself was known as Brooklyn, and formed part of an even larger city called New York.
My project had to do with the study of space-time. (Never mind what that means but read on.) At this center we had learned to get vast amounts of power from sea water by what we called a fusion process. By this process we could concentrate so much power in a small space that we could warp the entity called space-time and cause things to travel in time as our other machines traveled in space.
When our calculations showed that we could theoretically hurl an object back in time, we began to build a machine for testing this hypothesis. First we built a small pilot model. In this we sent small objects back in time for short periods.
We began with inanimate objects. Then we found that a rabbit or rat could also be projected without harm. The time-translation would not be permanent; rather, it acted like one of these rubber balls the Hesperians play games with. The object would stay in the desired time for a period determined by the power used to project it and its own mass, and would then return spontaneously to the time and place from which it started.
We had reported our progress regularly, but my chief had other matters on his mind and did not read our reports for many months. When he got a report saying that we were completing a machine to hurl human beings back in time, however, he awoke to what was going on, read our previous reports, and called me in.
"Sherm," he said, "I've been discussing this project with Washington, and I'm afraid they take a dim view of it."
"Why?" said I, astonished.
"Two reasons. For one thing, they think you've gone off the reservation. They're much more interested in the Antarctic Reclamation Project and want to concentrate all our appropriations and brain power on it.
"For another, they're frankly scared of this time machine of yours. Suppose you went back, say, to the time of Alexander the Great and shot Alexander before he got started? That would change all later history, and we'd go out like candles."
"Ridiculous," I said.
"What, what would happen?"
"Our equations are not conclusive, but there are several possibilities. As you will see if you read Report No. 9, it depends on whether space-time has a positive or negative curvature. If positive, any disturbance in the past tends to be ironed out in subsequent history, so that things become more and more nearly identical with what they would have been anyway. If negative, then events will diverge more and more from their original pattern with time.
"Now, as I showed in this report, the chances are overwhelmingly in favor of a positive curvature. However, we intend to take every precaution and make our first tests for short periods, with a minimum—"
"
That's enough," said my superior, holding up a hand. "It's very interesting, but the decision has already been made" "What do you mean?"
"I mean Project A-257 is to be closed down and a final report written at once. The machines are to be dismantled, and the group will be put to work on another project"
"What?" I shouted. "But you can't stop us just when we're on the verge—"
"I'm sorry, Sherm, but I can. That's what the ABC decided at yesterday's meeting. It hasn't been officially announced, but they gave me positive orders to kill the project as soon as I got back here."
"Of all the lousy, arbitrary, benighted—"
"I know how you feel, but I have no choice."
I lost my temper and defied him, threatening to go ahead with the project anyway. It was ridiculous, because he could easily dismiss me for insubordination. However, I knew he valued my ability and counted on his wanting to keep me for that reason. But he was clever enough to have his cake and eat it.
"If that's how you feel:' he said, "the section is abolished here and now. Your group will be broken up and assigned to other projects. You'll be kept on at your present rating with the title of consultant. Then when you're willing to talk sense, perhaps we can find you a suitable job."