Other Earths Part 1

Other Earths.

by Nick Gevers & Jay Lake.

INTRODUCTION.

Nick Gevers and Jay Lake.

In a sense, all fiction is alternate history. Did Odysseus rule in Ithaca? Where is Jack Aubrey in the recorded naval annals of the Napoleonic period? Did Rabbit Angstrom really play high school basketball? These characters are people that never were-that is what makes them part of fiction, after all.

Works that meet a relatively formal definition of alternate history have been with us since at least the nineteenth century. Aside from occasional fascinating literary sallies by the likes of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Benjamin Disraeli, most early counterfactual fictions were jingoistic wish-fulfillments or utopian whimsies, followed somewhat later by academic gedankenexperimenten gedankenexperimenten. With the evolution of modern science fiction, alternate history came along for the ride, enriching the genre with visions of altered actualities to complement those of distant planets and turbulent futures.

Today alternate history is in its own right a major subgenre of speculative fiction. There are superstars such as Harry Turtledove and Eric Flint, more experimental efforts from Esther Friesner, Kim Stanley Robinson, and Christopher Priest, and continued incursions from literature by way of writers such as Peter Ackroyd and Philip Roth. Alternate history even has its own award, the Sidewise, named in honor of the seminal Murray Leinster short story "Sidewise in Time." The award is administered by the estimable Steven H. Silver, whose dedication to the form is legendary.

Alternate history is alive and well and living on bookshelves worldwide. So why this anthology? Because, rightly or wrongly, alternate history has come to form a ghetto of its own within speculative fiction. A very large portion of the alternate history canon is concerned with militaria, fiction about soldiers and the wars they fight. This is as if an entire symphony orchestra were represented only by the bra.s.s section; however grand, the bra.s.s quickly becomes monotonous playing on its own.

We solicited work from among the best writers in the field. Some are masters of the genre, with the sort of deep thought and brilliant voice that makes a book such as this eminently rewarding. Others are newer players becoming well known for their achievements in urban fantasy, new weird, and all the other movements and subgenres of the past decade or two.

We felt that the form would benefit from being challenged by these sharply innovative voices. These are writers who can produce fascinating work in striking out across the countries of the mind where Lincoln was just a country lawyer, Ralph Vaughan Williams was only a soldier, and Bugsy Siegel was a Knight Templar. Even better, they can take us to places where the s.h.i.+ft of history was something else entirely-a faery queen on England's throne, stars missing from the summer sky, an endless spiral of time along the sh.o.r.es of the Mekong. In short, this book is intended to be a showcase of what can be done by some of the most brilliant minds writing today, many working in a form not normally their own.

Like a microcosm of speculative fiction, alternate history's name is legion, for it is many, with a mult.i.tude of potentials. This collection brings new names and new ideas to this old and honorable field. With luck, it will bring new readers as well.

THIS PEACEABLE LAND; OR, THE UNBEARABLE VISION OF HARRIET BEECHER STOWE.

Robert Charles Wilson

"It's worth your life to go up there," the tavernkeeper's wife said. "What do you want to go up there for, anyway?"

"The property is for sale," I said.

"Property!" The landlady of the roadside tavern nearly spat out the word. "There's nothing up there but sand hills and saggy old sheds. That, and a family of crazy colored people. Someone claims they sold you that? You ought to check with the bank, Mister, see about getting your money back."

She smiled at her own joke, showing tobacco-stained teeth. In this part of the country there were spittoons in every taproom and Bull Durham advertis.e.m.e.nts on every wall. It was 1895. It was August. It was hot, and we were in the South.

I was only posing as an investor. I had no money in all the baggage I was carrying-very little, anyhow. I had photographic equipment instead.

"You go up those hills," the tavernkeeper's wife said more soberly, "you carry a gun, and you keep it handy. I mean that."

I had no gun.

I wasn't worried about what I might find up in the pine barrens.

I was worried about what I would tell my daughter.

I paid the lady for the meal she had served me and for a second meal she had put up in a neat small box. I asked her whether a room was available for the night. There was. We discussed the arrangements and came to an agreement. Then I went out to where Percy was waiting in the carriage.

"You'll have to sleep outside," I said. "But I got this for you." I gave him the wrapped dinner. "And the landlady says she'll bring you a box breakfast in the morning, as long as there's n.o.body around to see her."

Percy nodded. None of this came as a surprise to him. He knew where he was, and who he was, and what was expected of him. "And then," he said, "we'll drive up to the place, weather permitting."

To Percy it was always "the place"-each place we found.

Storm clouds had dallied along this river valley all the hot day, but no rain had come. If it came tonight, and if it was torrential, the dirt roads would quickly become useless creeks of mud. We would be stuck here for days.

And Percy would get wet, sleeping in the carriage as he did. But he preferred the carriage to the stable where our horses were put up. The carriage was covered with rubberized cloth, and there was a big sheet of mosquito netting he stretched over the open places during the night. But a truly stiff rain was bound to get in the cracks and make him miserable.

Percy Camber was an educated black man. He wrote columns and articles for the Tocsin Tocsin, a Negro paper published out of Windsor, Canada. Three years ago a Boston press had put out a book he'd written, though he admitted the sales had been slight.

I wondered what the landlady would say if I told her Percy was a book writer. Most likely she would have denied the possibility of an educated black man. Except perhaps as a circus act, like that Barnum horse that counts to ten with its hoof.

"Make sure your gear is ready first thing," Percy said, keeping his voice low although there was n.o.body else about-this was a poor tavern on a poor road in an undeveloped county. "And don't drink too much tonight, Tom, if you can help it."

"That's sound advice," I agreed, by way of not pledging an answer. "Oh, and the keeper's wife tells me we ought to carry a gun. Wild men up there, she says."

"I don't go armed."

"Nor do I."

"Then I guess we'll be prey for the wild men," said Percy, smiling.

The room where I spent the night was not fancy, which made me feel better about leaving my employer to sleep out-of-doors. It was debatable which of us was better off. The carriage seat where Percy curled up was not infested with fleas, as was the mattress on which I lay. Percy customarily slept on a folded jacket, while my pillow was a sugar sack stuffed with corn huskings, which rattled beneath my ear as if the beetles inside were putting on a musical show.

I slept a little, woke up, scratched myself, lit the lamp, took a drink.

I will not drink, I told myself as I poured the liquor. I will not drink "to excess." I will not become drunk. I will only calm the noise in my head.

My companion in this campaign was a bottle of rye whiskey. Mister Whiskey Bottle, unfortunately, was only half full and not up to the task a.s.signed him. I drank but kept on thinking unwelcome thoughts, while the night simmered and creaked with insect noises.

"Why do you have to go away for so long?" Elsebeth asked me.

In this incarnation she wore a white dress. It looked like her christening dress. She was thirteen years old.

"Taking pictures," I told her. "Same as always."

"Why can't you take pictures at the portrait studio?"

"These are different pictures, Elsie. The kind you have to travel for."

Her flawless young face took on an accusatory cast. "Mama says you're stirring up old trouble. She says you're poking into things n.o.body wants to hear about any more, much less see photographs of."

"She may be right. But I'm being paid money, and money buys pretty dresses, among other good things."

"Why make such trouble, though? Why do you want to make people feel bad?"

Elsie was a phantom. I blinked her away. These were questions she had not yet actually posed, though our last conversation, before I left Detroit, had come uncomfortably close. But they were questions I would sooner or later have to answer.

I slept very little, despite the drink. I woke up before dawn.

I inventoried my photographic equipment by lamplight, just to make sure everything was ready.

It had not rained during the night. I settled up with the landlady and removed my baggage from the room. Percy had already hitched the horses to the carriage. The sky was drab under high cloud, the sun a spot of light like a candle flame burning through a linen handkerchief.

The landlady's husband was nowhere to be seen. He had gone down to Crib Lake for supplies, she said, as she packed up two box lunches, cold cuts of beef with pickles and bread, which I had requested of her. She had two adult sons living with her, one of whom I had met in the stables, and she felt safe enough, she told me, even with her husband absent. "But we're a long way from anywhere," she added, "and the traffic along this road has been light ever since-well, ever since the Lodge closed down. I wasn't kidding about those sand hills, Mister. Be careful up there."

"We mean to be back by nightfall," I said.

My daughter Elsebeth had met Percy Camber just once, when he came to the house in Detroit to discuss his plans with me. Elsie had been meticulously polite to him. Percy had offered her his hand, and she, wide-eyed, had taken it. "You're very neatly dressed," she had said.

She was not used to well-dressed black men. The only blacks Elsebeth had seen were the day laborers who gathered on the wharves. Detroit housed a small community of Negroes who had come north with the decline of slavery, before Congress pa.s.sed the Labor Protection Act. They did "the jobs white men won't do," for wages to which white men would not submit.

"You're very prettily dressed yourself," Percy Camber said, ignoring the unintended insult.

Maggie, my wife, had simply refused to see him.

"I'm not some radical old Congregationalist," she told me, "eager to socialize with every tawny Moor who comes down the pike. That's your side of the family, Tom, not mine."

True enough. Maggie's people were Episcopalians who had prospered in Michigan since before it was a state-st.u.r.dy, reliable folks. They ran a string of warehouses that catered to the lake trade. My father was a disappointed Whig who had spent a single term in the Ma.s.sachusetts legislature pursuing the chimera of Free Education before he died at an early age, and my mother's bookshelves still groaned under the weight of faded tomes on the subjects of Enlightened Marriage and Women's Suffrage. I came from a genteel family of radical tendencies and modest means. I was never sure Maggie's people understood that poverty and gentility could truly coexist.

"Maggie's indisposed today," I had told Percy, who may or may not have believed me, and then we had settled down to the business of planning our three-month tour of the South, according to the map he had made.

"There ought to be photographs," Percy said, "before it's all gone."

We traveled several miles from the tavern, sweating in the airless heat of the morning, following directions Percy had deduced from bills-of-transfer, railway records, and old advertis.e.m.e.nts placed in the Richmond and Atlanta papers.

The locality to which we were headed had been called Pilga.s.si Acres. It had been chartered as a business by two brothers, Marcus and Benjamin Pilga.s.si of South Carolina, in 1879, and it had operated for five years before the Ritter Inquiry shut it down.

There were no existing photographs of Pilga.s.si Acres, or any of the inst.i.tutions like it, unless the Ritter Inquiry had commissioned them. And the Final Report of the Ritter Inquiry had been sealed from the public by consent of Congress, not to be reopened until some time in the twentieth century.

Percy Camber intended to shed some light into that officially ordained darkness.

He sat with me on the driver's board of the carriage as I coaxed the team over the rutted and runneled trail. This had once been a wider road, much used, but it had been bypa.s.sed by a Federal turnpike in 1887. Since then nature and the seasons had mauled it, so the ride was tedious and slow. We subdued the boredom by swapping stories: Percy of his home in Canada, me of my time in the army.

Percy "talked white." That was the verdict Elsebeth had pa.s.sed after meeting him. It was a condescending thing to say, excusable only from the lips of a child, but I knew what she meant. Percy was two generations out of slavery. If I closed my eyes and listened to his voice, I could imagine that I had been hired by some soft-spoken Harvard graduate. He was articulate, even for a newspaper man. And we had learned, over the course of this lengthy expedition, to make allowances for our differences. We had some common ground. We were both the offspring of radical parents, for example. The "madness of the fifties" had touched us both, in different ways.

"You suppose we'll find anything substantial at the end of this road?" Percy asked.

"The landlady mentioned some old sheds."

"Sheds would be acceptable," Percy said, his weariness showing. "It's been a long haul for you, Tom. And not much substantial work. Maybe this time?"

"Maybe."

"Doc.u.ments, oral accounts, that's all useful, but a photograph-just one, just to show that something remains-well, that would be important."

"I'll photograph any old shed you like, Percy, if it pleases you." Though on this trip I had seen more open fields-long since burned over and regrown-than anything worthy of being immortalized. Places edited from history. Absences constructed as carefully as architecture. I had no reason to think Pilga.s.si Acres would be different.

Percy seldom spoke out loud about the deeper purpose of his quest or the book he was currently writing. Fair enough, I thought; it was a sensitive subject. Like the way I don't talk much about Cuba, though I had served a year and a half there under Lee. The spot is too tender to touch.

These hills were low and covered with stunted pines and other rude vegetation. The road soon grew even more rough, but we began to encounter evidence of a prior human presence. A few fenceposts. Sc.r.a.ps of rusted barbwire. The traces of an old narrow-gauge railbed. Then we pa.s.sed under a wooden sign suspended between two lodgepoles on which the words PILGa.s.sI ACRES PILGa.s.sI ACRES in an ornate script were still legible, though the seasons had bleached the letters to ghosts. in an ornate script were still legible, though the seasons had bleached the letters to ghosts.

There was also the remains of a wire fence, tangled over with brambles.

"Stop here," Percy said.

"Might be more ahead," I suggested.

"This is already more than we've seen elsewhere. I want a picture of that sign."

"I can't guarantee it'll be legible," I said, given the way the sun was striking it, and the faint color of the letters, pale as chalk on the white wood.

"Well, try," Percy said shortly.

So I set up my equipment and did that. For the first time in a long while, I felt as though I was earning my keep.

The first book Percy had written was called Every Measure Short of War Every Measure Short of War, and it was a history of Abolitionism from the Negro point of view.

The one he was writing now was to be called Where Are the Three Million? Where Are the Three Million?

I made a dozen or so exposures and put my gear back in the carriage. Percy took the reins this time and urged the horses farther up the trail. Scrub gra.s.s and runt pines closed in on both sides of us, and I found myself watching the undergrowth for motion. The landlady's warning had come back to haunt me.

But the woods were empty. An old stray dog paced us for a few minutes, then fell behind.

My mother had once corresponded with Mrs. Harriet Beecher Stowe, who was a well-known abolitionist at one time, though the name is now mostly forgotten. Percy had contacted my parents in order to obtain copies of that correspondence, which he had quoted in an article for the Tocsin Tocsin.

My mother, of course, was flattered, and she continued her correspondence with Percy on an occasional basis. In one of his replies Percy happened to remark that he was looking for a reliable photographer to hire for the new project he had in mind. My mother, of course, sent him to me. Perhaps she thought she was doing me a favor.