Read Online Other Earths by Jay Lake, edited by Nick Gevers - Free Book Online Page B

although no one around him seems to know it. This pale, vacuous replica has a head full of worms, insecurity, and pure, naked, selfish need. He rules a country called the United States, squandering its resources, compromising its ability to function with greed and corruption.
    When the aide comes up and whispers in his ear to tell him that terrorists have flown two planes into buildings in New York City, there’s blood behind his eyes, as well as a deafening silence, and a sudden leap from people falling from the burning buildings to endless war in the Middle East, bodies broken in blood and bullets and bombs. The future torques into secret trials, torture, rape, and hundreds of thousands of civilians dead, two million people displaced, a country bankrupted and defenseless, ruled ultimately by martial law and generals.
    He sits there for seven minutes because he really has no idea what to do.

    . . . and his fate is to exist in a reality where towers do not explode in September, where Islamic fundamentalists are the least of his worries.
    There is only one present, only one future now, and he’s back in it, driving it. Seven minutes have elapsed, with a graveyard in his head. Seven minutes, and he’s gradually aware that in that span he’s read the goat story twice and then sat there for thirty seconds, silent.
    Now he smiles, says a few reassuring words, just as his aide has decided to come up and rescue him from the yawning chasm. He’s living in a place where they’ll never find him, those children, where there’s a torrent of blood, and a sky dark with planes and helicopters, and men blown to bits by the roadside. Cities burn, and the screaming of the living is as loud as the screaming of the dying.
    He rises from his chair, and his aide claps, encouraging the students to clap, and they do, bewildered by this man about whom reporters will say later, “He doesn’t seem quite all there.”
    An endless line of presidents rises from the chair with him, the weight almost too much. He can see each clearly in his head. He can see what they’re doing and who they’re doing it to.
    Saying his goodbyes is like learning how to walk again, while a nightmare plays out in the background. He knows as they lead him down the corridor that he’ll have to learn to live with it, like and unlike a man learning to live with a missing limb: a multitude of phantom limbs that do not belong, that he cannot control, but are always there. And he’ll never be able to explain it to anyone. He’ll be as alone and yet as haunted as a person can be. The wall between him and his wife will be more unbearable than ever.
    He thinks of Peter’s pale, wrinkled, yearning face, and he knows two things: He’s going to make them release the man, put him on a plane somewhere beyond his country’s influence, and then he’s going to have them destroy the machine and end the adept project. Beyond that, he knows nothing and everything.
    Then he’s back in the wretched, glorious sunlight of a real, an ordinary day, and so are all of his reflections and shadows. Mimicking him. Forever.

THE UNBLINKING EYE
    Stephen Baxter
     
     
    U nder an empty night sky, the Inca ship stood proud before the old Roman bridge of Londres.
    Jenny and Alphonse, both sixteen years old, pressed their way through grimy mobs of Londres. As night closed in, they had slipped away from the dreary ceremonial rehearsals at Saint Paul’s. They couldn’t resist escaping to mingle with the excited Festival crowds.
    And, of course, they had been drawn here, to the Viracocha , the most spectacular sight of all.
    Beside the Inca ship’s dazzling lines, even the domes, spires and pylons of the Festival, erected to mark the anniversary of the Frankish Conquest in this year of Our Lord Christus Ra 1966, looked shabby indeed. Her towering hull was made entirely of metal, clinkered in some seamless way that gave it flexibility, and the sails were llama wool, colored as brilliantly as the