Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Page 23

  She was astonished she had spoken so boldly, but the Queen simply gave a small wave of her hand. “You cannot give them what they need, Wanderfoot. You cannot even help them find it. Not in your world of decay and disintegration. Your failure is already written in the books of your history. Your race is doomed. The Fey are the future as they have been the past.”

  Barbro straightened and faced her squarely. “Please let me have them,” she said. “They belong with me.”

  The Queen regarded her, tall and regal and distant, her eyes depthless pools of far-seeing and secrets untold. “You will sleep with us tonight and on the morrow I will decide.”

  Then she was gone, faded back into the night. Ayoch was beside her at once. “Your bed is here, mother love,” he said, gesturing vaguely.

  She glanced back to where she had seen Jimmy and Barraboo, but they were gone. She felt a sudden, intense weariness steal over her. She could not seem to help herself; she had to sleep.

  “Lead me,” she told the pooka, and so he did.

  When she woke again, Jimmy was sitting next to her. He had a worn and world-weary look, but there was intensity in his blue eyes that suggested the strength of his resolve. She could tell at once that he had decided on his course of action. She sat up quickly. “Will you come away with me?” she asked.

  He shook his head. “I will remain here. I came to find a new life. I need to leave behind the old one. It stole so much away from me I cannot go back to it. Here, I have a chance to find peace and contentment of the sort I knew as a child.”

  “It is not real,” she insisted.

  “It is real enough for me, and more real than the life I was living. I do not believe in that world anymore. I hope I can come to believe in this one.”

  “And Barraboo? Will you keep here with you or give her to me?”

  She had missed seeing the bundle lying by his side. He reached down and picked up the baby and handed it to her. “Give her what you think she needs and if that fails, bring her back to me. I will be waiting.”

  She was in tears as she took the baby and held it to her. Its dark little face peeked out at her with eyes that at once seemed both young and innocent and old and wise. “Oh, Jimmy,” she whispered.

  He leaned over and kissed her cheek. “Think of me now and then, Mother. Remember how happy I am.”

  He led her down to where a wagon hitched to a reindeer and driven by an old man barely taller than her waist and wrinkled with age waited. Jimmy helped her climb aboard, taking care to wrap her and Barraboo in a blanket. He smiled a knowing smile at the driver, who gave back a small nod, and then the little man clucked at the reindeer and lightly touched one flank with the switch and the wagon and its occupants rumbled off into the haze.

  Morgarel the wraith waited until they were gone too far for the woman to look back and see him changing back and then walked over to Ayoch. The pooka was staring off into the distant, watching after Wanderfoot and her new baby with sharp, far-seeing eyes.

  “Hoah,” the pooka said softly. “How long do you give her?”

  “Before she comes again? I have no sense of that. Years, I hope. The changeling needs time to adapt and learn.”

  “Which she will do. She is clever, that one. And how clever our Mistress, too.” He looked behind the wraith. “And what of them?”

  Jimmy Cullen sat rocking Barraboo as he fed her milk from a goatskin and sang softly to her. Other creatures hovered at the edges of shadows that didn’t quite reach to where father and daughter shared a life and watched intently.

  “He will live awhile longer and then pass. She will become one of us. The Queen ordains.”

  “Mother Sky sees our future thusly. We will be them and so make them us, and in the end ours shall be the way.” Ayoch cocked his head and hopped once in a sort of minor celebration. “Cockatoo!” he crowed.

  The cry echoed over Cloudmoor and into the future.

  AFTERWORD:

  I began reading science fiction and fantasy in middle school—right about 1956—although there was little enough of the latter being written at that time and most of the kids I knew were reading the former. It was the beginning of the age of space travel and Sputnik and travels to the moon, and that was what every kid I knew was reading about. I shouldn’t say “kids” but rather “boys” because very few girls I knew had found their way to that sort of fiction yet.

  Anyway, among those writers whose works I read and admired—while still in my burgeoning wannabe-professiona-writer mode—was Poul Anderson. In those days, I wasn’t reading or particularly interested in fantasy. I was strictly a science fiction kid, with peripheral leanings towards adventure stories (Boy’s Life and the like), so my favorite stories by Poul tended to fall along those lines.

  But I remember one that didn’t. I read “The Queen of Air and Darkness” right after it came out in one of the science fiction magazines, and I was captivated by it. When I was asked to contribute to this anthology, it was the first story I thought of. It always felt to me as if there were more to the story, as if the telling of it wasn’t finished. What happened afterwards to the Queen and the Old Folks of Cloudmoor and Carheddin? Was that really the end of them when Sherrinford took back Jimmy Cullen? Could they really have been so easily dispatched?

  I felt a certain trepidation in trying to make those determinations for Poul. “The Queen of Air and Darkness” had won both the Hugo and Nebula and has enthralled Poul Anderson readers for decades. Who was I to mess with an icon and his art? But my marching orders were clear—I was to take something from Poul’s astounding body of work and build on it. I have tried to do that here.

  I met Poul Anderson once, years ago now, at a family gathering at Astrid and Greg’s home. I can no longer remember the occasion. He was quiet and unassuming and had about him the grandfatherly look I see in myself these days when I look in the mirror. I said hello and told him how much I admired his work. I have no idea if he knew who I was or what I did. He didn’t say, and I didn’t ask. It didn’t matter. What mattered was how it made me feel. Writers form links in an endless chain, one influencing another in a crucial, necessary rite of interaction and succession, ultimately so we may be inspired and our craft may evolve.

  Poul Anderson was one who did that for me.

  In spades.

  —Terry Brooks

  CHRISTMAS IN GONDWANALAND

  by Robert Silverberg

  Robert Silverberg is one of the most famous SF writers of modern times, with dozens of novels, anthologies, and collections to his credit. As both writer and editor (he was editor of the original anthology series New Dimensions, perhaps the most acclaimed anthology series of its era), Silverberg was one of the most influential figures of the Post New Wave era of the ’70s, and continues to be at the forefront of the field to this very day, having won a total of five Nebula Awards and four Hugo Awards, plus SFWA’s prestigious Grand Master Award.

  His novels include the acclaimed Dying Inside, Lord Valentine’s Castle, The Book of Skulls, Downward to the Earth, Tower of Glass, Son of Man, Nightwings, The World Inside, Born With The Dead, Shadrach In The Furnace, Thorns, Up the Line, The Man in the Maze, Tom O’ Bedlam, Star of Gypsies, At Winter’s End, The Face of the Waters, Kingdoms of the Wall, Hot Sky at Morning, The Alien Years, Lord Prestimion, Mountains of Majipoor; two novel-length expansions of famous Isaac Asimov stories, Nightfall and The Ugly Little Boy; The Long Way Home, and the mosaic novel, Roma Eterna. Recently published were a reprint of an early novel, The Planet Killers; a novel omnibus, The Chalice of Death; and a mystery novel, Blood on the Mink. His collections include Unfamiliar Territory, Capricorn Games, Majipoor Chronicles, The Best of Robert Silverberg, At The Conglomeroid Cocktail Party, Beyond the Safe Zone, six massive retrospective collections—To Be Continued: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 1; To the Dark Star: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 2; Something Wild is Loose: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 3; Trips: The Collec
ted Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 4; The Palace at Midnight: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 5; Multiples: The Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 6; We Are For the Dark: the Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 7; Hot Times in Magma City: the Collected Stories of Robert Silverberg, Volume 8—as well as collections Phases of the Moon: Stories from Six Decades, and two collections of early work, In the Beginning and Hunt the Space-Witch!. His reprint anthologies are far too numerous to list here, but include The Science Fiction Hall of Fame, Volume One and the distinguished Alpha series, among dozens of others. He lives with his wife, writer Karen Haber, in Oakland, California.

  Here’s another fast-moving Time Patrol story in which Manse Everard faces his most desperate challenge—keeping the Time Patrol itself from never having existed in the first place.

  “You want me to go where?” Manse Everard asked, astounded. He was not a man who astounded easily, not after all he had seen and done, the multitude of places and times he had visited.

  “Gondwanaland,” said Daniel Ben-Eytan again.

  Everard stared. “Right. That’s what I thought you said. But there isn’t any history to protect in Gondwanaland, except for the Founding Convocation itself, I suppose. There’s hardly even any pre-history. Therefore the Patrol has no work to do there, unless somebody has it in mind to launch an attack on the whole fabric of the time-line from start to—”

  “Exactly,” Ben-Eytan said. “The whole fabric of the time-line is what’s in jeopardy.”

  It was much too lovely a spring day in Paris to be hearing stuff like this, Everard thought. He had been there two days, now, laying the groundwork for what was going to be one of the great furloughs of his life—a couple of weeks in the glorious 1920s Paris of Hemingway and Fitzgerald, Picasso and Gertrude Stein, Josephine Baker and James Joyce. He had found himself a pleasant room in a lovely little hotel in the rue Jacob and had spent the two days strolling along the banks of the nearby Seine, checking out restaurants, peering admiringly at Notre Dame upstream and the Eiffel Tower down the other way, and reconnoitering all the famous Left Bank literary landmarks, the Dome and the Coupole and the Brasserie Lipp and the Deux Magots. Now he was sitting at one of the streetfront tables of the Café de Flore on the Boulevard Saint-Germain, enjoying a mid-afternoon Pernod and watching the passing parade. The day was warm and mild, the sky a perfect blue, the air like champagne. Wanda Tamberley would be joining him here tomorrow, and the anticipatory thought of her slender blonde loveliness filled him with delight. Despite the gap of nearly forty years in their ages—and in the Patrol, how could you ever keep track of how old you really were, what with the constant skipping back and forth in time and the Danellian longevity treatments on top of that?—he had never known a woman who excited him as much as Wanda did, and that was saying quite a lot.

  And then, out of the blue in the most literal way, materializing out of that champagne air, Daniel Ben-Eytan had descended upon him to tell him to forget about Paris, to forget about his holiday with Wanda, to forget about everything cheerful and pleasant and delightful, and get himself back in time some X or Y hundred million years to save the world from chaos.

  Everard peered sourly at the stocky, swarthy little twenty-eighth-century Israeli. “You know, you could just as easily have dropped in on me at the end of my vacation instead of the beginning, Daniel. We would still be able to manage whatever it is that needs to be managed back there in the Cambrian. Showing up when you did is very goddamned linear-minded of you.”

  “Yes, I suppose it is,” said Ben-Eytan complacently. He was like that. “But this is when I arrived, didn’t I? They told me to get to work. And here I am. I’m mixed up in this thing, too. Also Spallanzani, Nakamura, Gonzalez. You know who I mean, yes? Yes. Of course you do. They’re already waiting at the headquarters that’s been set up. I wasn’t joking when I said the time-line’s in jeopardy. For Christ’s sake, Manse, buy me a drink, will you?”

  “Very well. For Christ’s sake, if not for yours, you irritating bastard.” Everard signalled to a waiter. Just then a big, handsome kid with a little dark mustache, a youngster who might easily have been Hemingway, walked by down the street, no more than ten feet from where Everard and Eytan were sitting. He was accompanied by a smaller, fair-haired young man who quite probably was Scott Fitzgerald, and they were very deep in what looked like an exceedingly serious discussion. The Paris of the lost generation, yes! Everything right here within reach. Everard could gladly have throttled Ben-Eytan. Everard was something like sixty years old, or so he believed, and had been in the Patrol some thirty biochronological years, and he felt he was entitled to a little down-time.

  This trip was supposed to have been something special. His annoyance at having it interrupted like this had nothing to do with dereliction of duty. No matter when he took off from his current location in time on this new job, he’d arrive in the remote past at the proper point. But the Israeli, annoyingly, had tracked him down right here and now. To tell them that he must go—where? And to do what?

  “Gondwanaland’s a big place, and it covers a lot of time. Which region, which area?”

  “Alpha Point,” said Ben-Eytan.

  Everard gasped. “The Founding Convocation!”

  “Indeed. What else?” They had been speaking in English, but suddenly the Israeli switched to Temporal, the synthetic language used by the Patrol, which could handle the grammatical niceties of time travel much more rationally. “A terrorist group out of A.D. 9999 or thereabouts—we aren’t really sure of their point of origin, but it’s somewhere early in the period of the Chorite Heresiarchy—has/will/had gone back to the start and wiped out the entire Founding Convocation. The Patrol’s extinct. It has been/will be snuffed out right at the source. Decapitated. Its best people removed at one stroke. Not only is it gone, it never existed.”

  Suddenly Lost Generation Paris and all its delights, and the impending additional delight of Wanda’s arrival there, lost all appeal. The world turned colorless and two-dimensional, and Manse Everard sat numb, stunned, disbelieving what he had just heard. For a long moment he was unable to speak.

  The waiter arrived with Ben-Eytan’s drink, absinthe on the rocks. As usual, Ben-Eytan had gone Everard one better, one-upping his Pernod with the stronger drink.

  “Santé,” he said cheerfully, tilting his glass toward Everard.

  “All right, already. Tell me,” Everard said.

  “I can show you. We can hover over the camp—we don’t want to get too close; the toxic cloud may still be potent—and you can see for yourself. Everybody dead. All the organizers, Saltonstall, Schmidt, Kipminu, Greyl, Gan-Sekkant, every big name you can think of, gone with the trilobites, every last one of them, right on the second day of the Convocation.”

  “The Danellians, too?”

  “No, not them, so far as we can tell. They got themselves out ahead of the attack, or maybe they arranged not to show up in the first place. They always know how to look after themselves.”

  “Naturally.”

  “But everyone else who was there—gone. And the Patrol with them.”

  Everard felt the Boulevard Saint-Germain heaving and swirling around him. This was dizzying news indeed. Incomprehensible, in fact.

  Slowly he said, “If the Patrol’s gone, if it’s all been unhappened, then what are we doing here in Paris? Would Paris still exist, minus the Patrol? We ourselves shouldn’t still exist. Wouldn’t the elimination of the Patrol eliminate every single intervention that the Patrol has carried out since it was organized? Which would include everything along the time-line that led to my existence, and yours. Shouldn’t the history of the world be screwed up fifty thousand different ways?”

  His own intervention to keep Carthage from destroying Rome, for example. His interference with the Mongol conquest of North America in the thirteenth-century. His rescue of Tom Nomura’s girlfriend back in the early Pliocene, just as the Mediterranean was getting born. Dozens, sco
res, hundreds of other missions—all negated? And he was just one of who knew how many Patrolmen who wandered the corridors of time seeing to it that the multitudes of malevolent time-travelers who delighted in meddling with the stream of history were prevented from doing the harm that they so eagerly yearned to do. If there never had been any Patrol, if all that harm had/would have taken place after all, the stream of history became a nightmarish cataract of chaotic contradictions, forever mutable, completely at the indifferent mercy of anyone who could lay his hands on a timecycle.

  His head was spinning.

  Ben-Eytan said, “The time-line is fluid, Manse. But also very resilient. You know that. Come on, man. By now you should live by Aleph-sub-Aleph logic with every breath you take.”

  “Even so—”

  “We exist and we don’t exist. You know that. Everything’s conditional, until the unhappening of the Convocation is permanently unhappened. And it will be. The time-line isn’t screwed up because you—and I, and Nakamura, and Gonzalez, and Spallanzani—are going to/have already fixed it. The Danellians know that, because they know everything, and so they know that we are the team that will/has done the job, and therefore they have chosen us to go back and repair things. So be it. And here I am. Here be we. Q.E.D.”

  The good old deterministic loop, Everard thought. It will be done because it has been done because it must be done. He felt even dizzier. This was not the first time that Everard had been caught up in the paradoxical circularities of a universe in which two-way travel through time was freely and easily possible. He had long before given up trying to account for the higher mysteries of it, though he still could not resist the temptation to pick and gnaw at some of the stranger aspects.