Read Online The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories by Ian Watson, Ian Whates - Free Book Online
Authors: Ian Watson, Ian Whates
Tags: Fiction, General, Fantasy, Alternative histories (Fiction); English, Fantasy Fiction; American, Alternative History, Fantasy Fiction; English, Alternative histories (Fiction), Alternative histories (Fiction); American
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with old newspaper and magazine pages, saved from ruins. A particularly striking front page of the Daily Mirror, from May 1968, showed four longhaired young people in white T-shirts with a big black cross, which in a colour picture would have been red. The caption identified the youths as Andreas Baader, Ulrike Meinhof, Bernadette Devlin and Danny Cohn-Bendit. They stood on a platform in front of a huge crowd, the wind blowing in their hair, AK-47s in their uplifted hands, and behind them the skyline of Istanbul. The city in whose streets they would, a few hours later, fall to a hail of machine-gun bullets - along with a shocking proportion of the youthful crowd.
What good could come, I thought, of probability as crazy as this? One in which Pope Paul VI had responded to the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 by claiming Palestine again for the Church, and urged the youth of Europe on a crusade to win it back? A crusade that had ended with an assault on Istanbul, a city too stubborn to let the human tide through? And where the massacre had sparked an international incident that had escalated to an all-out thermonuclear exchange?
While worlds like that - and worse - exist, I remain an Improver.
* * * *
I caught up with Mary Ann Dykes a few weeks later, on another of my jaunts to the Republic. I’d made my dead-letter drops for the dissidents, I had a spare few hours, and I sought her out. I found her working in a women’s refugee centre, giving, as she put it, something back for the help she’d been given. Her hair was trimmed, her skirt short, her cheeks pink, her habits unladylike. I spoke to her outside, as she took a cigarette break on the street. She’d applied for a place at Glasgow, to study zoology.
“I can take you back,” I told her. “Back to your own world, where the knowledge you’ve picked up can make you famous, and rich.”
She sucked hard on her cigarette and looked at me as if I were crazy. She waved a hand at the street, all ruts and litter and Party posters flapping in the breeze and GB’s face and Straw’s surveillance cameras everywhere.
“Why?” she demanded. “I like it here.”
There’s pleasing some people, that’s the trouble.
<>
* * * *
The Wandering Christian
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
“I’m dying,” said the madman next to him.
“So,” Absalom grunted, feeling the arrowhead shift against his ribs, “there’s a lot of that about.”
“No,” said the madman, eyes like candle flames, “I’m really dying.”
Absalom coughed, bringing up blood. The arrow had dimpled one of his lungs, and he was slowly drowning, he supposed, his blood filling up his lungs. He knew more about doctoring than the barber-surgeons who occasionally came round to see what they could do for the wounded. As a soldier, he was more than familiar with the many ways a man could die.
He tried to remember whether he had seen the madman before, up on the walls of Rome, maybe defending one of the gates. Now, he was bearded and scrawny, his hands pressed on the yellow rag he held to his liver, trying to keep his insides in. His armour and weapons were long gone, passed on to a healthier defender.
“It’s the end of time,” he said. “What date is it?”
“The second day of Tammuz.”
“No,” the madman coughed, “the year? I’ve forgotten.”
Absalom knew his One True Testament. “It’s 4759,” he said. “4759 years since the creation of the world. It’s not the end of time at all. The Messiah has not come.”
The madman grimaced, painfully. Absalom realized he really was mad. Twenty-two years of soldiering, and he would die a forgotten hero with only a lunatic for company.
“Even if Rome falls, it will not be the end of time. The Chosen People will endure.”
The madman began to choke, and Absalom thought he was about to pass away, but his coughs changed,
What good could come, I thought, of probability as crazy as this? One in which Pope Paul VI had responded to the Israeli victory in the Six-Day War of 1967 by claiming Palestine again for the Church, and urged the youth of Europe on a crusade to win it back? A crusade that had ended with an assault on Istanbul, a city too stubborn to let the human tide through? And where the massacre had sparked an international incident that had escalated to an all-out thermonuclear exchange?
While worlds like that - and worse - exist, I remain an Improver.
* * * *
I caught up with Mary Ann Dykes a few weeks later, on another of my jaunts to the Republic. I’d made my dead-letter drops for the dissidents, I had a spare few hours, and I sought her out. I found her working in a women’s refugee centre, giving, as she put it, something back for the help she’d been given. Her hair was trimmed, her skirt short, her cheeks pink, her habits unladylike. I spoke to her outside, as she took a cigarette break on the street. She’d applied for a place at Glasgow, to study zoology.
“I can take you back,” I told her. “Back to your own world, where the knowledge you’ve picked up can make you famous, and rich.”
She sucked hard on her cigarette and looked at me as if I were crazy. She waved a hand at the street, all ruts and litter and Party posters flapping in the breeze and GB’s face and Straw’s surveillance cameras everywhere.
“Why?” she demanded. “I like it here.”
There’s pleasing some people, that’s the trouble.
<
* * * *
The Wandering Christian
Eugene Byrne & Kim Newman
“I’m dying,” said the madman next to him.
“So,” Absalom grunted, feeling the arrowhead shift against his ribs, “there’s a lot of that about.”
“No,” said the madman, eyes like candle flames, “I’m really dying.”
Absalom coughed, bringing up blood. The arrow had dimpled one of his lungs, and he was slowly drowning, he supposed, his blood filling up his lungs. He knew more about doctoring than the barber-surgeons who occasionally came round to see what they could do for the wounded. As a soldier, he was more than familiar with the many ways a man could die.
He tried to remember whether he had seen the madman before, up on the walls of Rome, maybe defending one of the gates. Now, he was bearded and scrawny, his hands pressed on the yellow rag he held to his liver, trying to keep his insides in. His armour and weapons were long gone, passed on to a healthier defender.
“It’s the end of time,” he said. “What date is it?”
“The second day of Tammuz.”
“No,” the madman coughed, “the year? I’ve forgotten.”
Absalom knew his One True Testament. “It’s 4759,” he said. “4759 years since the creation of the world. It’s not the end of time at all. The Messiah has not come.”
The madman grimaced, painfully. Absalom realized he really was mad. Twenty-two years of soldiering, and he would die a forgotten hero with only a lunatic for company.
“Even if Rome falls, it will not be the end of time. The Chosen People will endure.”
The madman began to choke, and Absalom thought he was about to pass away, but his coughs changed,
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