Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Read online

  This was the moment for a little Neanderthal regression. Through a whirling haze he managed to reach out, grab one of those attenuated arms, twist it with all his not insignficant strength. That spun his opponent around, one hundred eighty degrees. Everard jerked the arm higher. Higher. He heard a gasp of pain. He would break the arm off at the shoulder, if he needed to. The terrorist, however agonized, twisted ferociously, writhed halfway around, managed to reach back with his free hand and poke two long bony fingers in the general direction of Everard’s eyes. Everard, with one hand busy with the arm-twisting and the other one reaching for his stunner, bit hard at the jabbing fingertips. The man howled.

  Without relinquishing his grip, he knelt, pulling his prisoner down with him, and pressed the stunner hard against the man’s ribs. Ten thousand years of evolution would not have relocated the site of the human heart. One bolt would stun; three, if necessary, would kill. Everard was prepared for either necessity.

  “Start walking,” he said, in Temporal. “Do you understand Temporal? You don’t want to say? Well, start walking anyway.” He pushed the arm up a little higher and tapped the stunner’s snout, not gently, against the man’s rib-cage a couple of times. Another gasp. Stunners, blasters, time machines—they all had their place, but the proper twisting of an arm in its socket remained effective in its own way, Everard thought, at any point in space and time. And there was no call for being gentle. His enemy here was utterly ruthless, someone who was capable of calmly turning the whole time-line upside down for some blasphemous purpose of his own.

  Whatever the terrorist had hit him with continued to set up agonizing throbbings at every point of contact. But Everard moved forward, pushing his captive before him, giving the arm a little reminder from time to time. Were Founders coming out to gape at this astonishing scene? Everard didn’t try to see. He concentrated entirely on the figure in front of him. Through the courtyard, out the main gate, into the barren open rocky nothingness beyond. His scooter was waiting.

  “Now, then—” he said, and put his stunner to the man’s side. “I should just take you up and dump you in the sea to be a snack for the trilobites, like the barbarian I am. Wouldn’t change history in the slightest, that, and they might enjoy the meal. But no. I’m going to be civilized. Civilized people don’t dump their prisoners in the drink.” He pressed the stunner’s stud and felt the terrorist collapse against him. “A little nap, now—and then a visit to marvelous golden Prague for you.”

  It was a glorious spring day in Paris, and the sky was blue, and the air was like champagne. He and Wanda had arranged to meet at noon on the corner of the boulevard by the Metro station, just past the little cobbled plaza back of the ancient gray bulk of the Eglise St. Germain-des-Pres. Would she be there? Would the Metro station be there, for that matter, and the church, and the boulevard, and everything else that Paris of the 1920s should have? So far as they knew, the Patrol rescue team had set everything to rights again, but there was that damned phrase, so far as they knew.

  Well, he would find out soon enough now.

  Boulevard. Check.

  Cobblestoned plaza. Check.

  Metro station. Check.

  Church. Check. Check. Check.

  Wanda.

  She stood with her back to him, but there was no mistaking her, even with the gleaming blonde hair cut in a fashionable 1920s bob, even with the silly flapper dress, even with, insofar as he could see from this side of her, her lovely breasts bound in that idiotic 1920s way so that she would look more like the boy that Nature had absolutely never intended her to be. Yes, Wanda. Check and double-check. Everard felt almost ready to weep with joy. But Nature had never intended him to be much of a weeper, either.

  He came up behind her and cleared his throat ostentatiously.

  “Mademoiselle Tamberley?”

  She jumped, a little. Then she turned, and her smile was like the sun breaking through the primordial clouds of the sky above Alpha Point.

  “Oh! Manse! You surprised me!” She was in his arms in a moment, pressing tight. Here in Paris, in 1925 or in any other era, nobody was going to be troubled by the sight of lovers embracing on the street. Then she stepped back. “Oh, Manse,” she said. “You look so tired!”

  “Do I? Well, I’ve been working hard lately, I suppose. But our holiday begins right here and now.” He pointed toward the café across the street. “What about a little champagne to begin with, mademoiselle?”

  The author is grateful to Sandra Miesel for her assistance in planning this story. She is not, of course, responsible for any deviations from Poul Anderson’s Time Patrol concept that it may contain.

  AFTERWORD:

  THE SKALD OF SCIENCE FICTION

  We were friends for more than forty years, though not really close friends as I understand that term. It was more of an amiable collegial relationship for much of that time. In my days as an editor of anthologies we worked together on many projects easily and well, and for three decades we lived in neighboring communities, and saw each other frequently, but there wasn’t much of the intimate sharing of hopes and fears that I think of as friendship. When we met at parties, which was fairly often, we usually gravitated toward each other and exchanged pleasant tales of foreign travel, or discussed the various malfeasances of various publishers and agents, or got into pleasant dispute over some fine point of history or politics. (We didn’t disagree much about politics.) Of real personal intimacy, though, there was very little between us. Others I know reported the same phenomenon; and yet when Poul did take someone into that kind of close friendship—Gordy Dickson, say, or Jack Vance, or Ted Cogswell—it was a deep and close friendship indeed. A matter of chemistry, I guess.

  I’ll never forget my initial encounter with his work, that grim little story of a dark post-atomic future, “Tomorrow’s Children,” which appeared the year I was twelve. It was Poul’s second published story, written when he was just nineteen himself. (His first, a two-page squib, appeared in Astounding in 1944, before his eighteenth birthday.)

  And then, in the 1950s and 1960s, came the torrent of irresistibly readable stories and novels that brought him a houseful of Hugos and Nebulas and put him on the road to SFWA’s Grand Master award: Brain Wave, Three Hearts and Three Lions, the classic novella “Call Me Joe,” The High Crusade, and the lighthearted Hoka tales that he wrote with his dear friend Gordon R. Dickson, on and on for decades thereafter, “The Queen of Air and Darkness,” “Goat Song,” “Hunter’s Moon,” the Dominic Flandry stories, the Nicholas van Rijn stories—shelf after glorious shelf of wonderful tales, often with a touch of Nordic poetry about them, a bit of skaldic virtuosity. His Time Patrol stories were among my special favorites, and indeed in 1968, I wrote a whole novel, Up the Line, as a kind of playful riff on the concepts he explored in them.

  For all his great accomplishments over a long and marvelously prolific career, Poul was a modest man, who never claimed to be anything more than a popular entertainer. (His legion of readers knew better.) His prime concern as a storyteller was, as it should be, storytelling: he knew how to snare a reader and how to hold him in that snare, and with skaldic cunning he called upon details of sight, sound, smell, and taste to make every paragraph a vivid one. But there have been plenty of tellers of tales whose work ultimately rings hollow, however lively it seems on first acquaintance. What Poul was really doing as a writer was dealing with the great moral themes of existence within the framework of society: values, purpose, the meaning of life itself. Who am I? his characters asked, not in so many words but through their deeds. How shall I live my life? What are my obligations to myself and my fellow beings? Where does personal freedom end and the bond that creates a society begin? Big questions, all of them, with which great writers have been wrestling since the time of Homer and the author of the Gilgamesh epic before that; and Poul did not shy away from them, even as he pretended to be telling swift-pace tales of the spacelanes.

  In person he often tended to be quiet and eve
n shy, the antithesis of today’s science-fictional self-promoters, although he knew how to look after himself pretty well in his dealings with the publishing world. But in the right setting Poul was anything but quiet, anything but shy. At any convention party, for example, you could usually find him in the center of a fascinated group of listeners, holding forth with great animation and much flailing of arms (he was an energetic gesturer) on the conversational topic of the moment, be it slavery in ancient Rome, the cultural significance of the Lascaux cave paintings, the physics of time travel, the techniques of brewing beer in Belgium, or the customs regulations of the Byzantine Empire. The sound of his voice was unmistakable—a high-pitched, herkyjerk baritone—and so was the flow of unpretentious erudition that would come from him whenever talk veered toward any of his innumerable areas of profound expertise.

  His voice, as a writer, was as distinctive as was his way of speaking. One would have had to be style-deaf indeed to fail to recognize a Poul Anderson story after hearing only a paragraph or two of it. The powerful use of imagery and sensory detail, above all the dark rhythms that had come down to him out of the Viking literature of long ago, were all unmistakable. He was indeed our Nordic bard, the skald of science fiction. And if there’s a Valhalla for science fiction writers, Poul is up there right now, putting down Odin’s finest mead with the best of them.

  —Robert Silverberg

  LATECOMERS

  by David Brin

  David Brin entered the science fiction field in the late 1970s, and has been one of the most prominent SF writers in the business ever since, winning three Hugo Awards and one Nebula Award for his work. Brin is best-known for his Uplift series, which started in 1979 with Sundiver, and subsequently has continued in Startide Rising, which won both a Hugo and a Nebula in 1983, The Uplift War, which won a Hugo in 1987, and then on through Brightness Reef, Infinity’s Shore, and Heaven’s Reach. There’s also a guide to the Uplift universe, Contacting Aliens: An Illustrated Guide to David Brin’s Uplift Universe, by Brin and Kevin Lenagh. He won another Hugo Award in 1985 for his short story “The Crystal Spheres,” and won the John W. Campbell Memorial Award in 1986 for his novel The Postman, which was later made into a big-budget film staring Kevin Costner. Brin’s other novels include Kil’n People, Kil’n Time, The Practice Effect, Earth, Glory Season, and, with Gregory Benford, Heart of the Comet. His short work has been collected in The River of Time, Otherness, and Tomorrow Happens. He edited the anthology Project Solar Sail with Arthur C. Clarke and has published several non-fiction books such as The Transparent Society, Through Stranger Eyes, and King Kong is Back!: An Unauthorized Look at One Humongous Ape. His most recent book is a novel Existence.

  Here Brin takes us to an enigmatic ruin in deep space, and gives us front-row seats for a desperate battle over a secret that could change everything that we think we know about ourselves.

  Tor always felt a sneaking sympathy for despised underdogs. Like grave robbers—an under-appreciated profession, not unrelated to journalism. Both involved bringing what was hidden to light.

  Often, without consent of the hiders.

  Those olden-time thieves who pillaged kingly tombs were recyclers who put wealth back into circulation. Gold and silver had better uses, like stimulating commerce—or robot brains—than lying buried in some musty vault. Or take archaeologists, unveiling the work of ancient artisans—craftsmen who were far more admirable examples of humanity than the monarchs who employed them to decorate lavish burial chambers.

  Tor hadn’t come to the asteroid belt in search of precious metals or museum specimens. But I’m still part of that grand tradition, she thought while gazing from the control room of the survey ship, Warren Kimbel.

  Down below lay a pit that ran almost the full length of a three-kilometer rock. And in that pit a dozen explorer-drones scurried about, at her command, poking and prying at the remains of prehistoric baby starships. Extracting the brain and drive units for shipment in-system, there to be studied by human civilization.

  Rest in pieces. You never got to launch across the heavens. But maybe you’ll teach us how to leave the cradle.

  For two years, Tor had been in the Belt, helping peel back layers of a puzzle going back a million centuries. Lately, that meant uncovering strange alien works. But never before had she beheld such devastation.

  Below Tor’s vantage point, the hulking asteroid lay nearly black against a starry band of Milky Way. Collisions had dented, cracked, and cratered the rock along its long axis, some time after it broke from a parent body, when the solar system was no more than a billion years old. When Tor and her partner first approached, five days ago, it seemed a fairly typical carbonaceous planetoid, like millions of others drifting out here in the Belt. But this changed as the Warren Kimbel orbited to the other side of the nameless hunk of stone and frozen gases, where the sun’s vacuum brilliance cast long, stark shadows across jagged, twisted remnants of a catastrophe that wracked this place way back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth.

  “Gavin!” she called over her shoulder. “Come down here and see this!”

  Her partner floated through the overhead hatch, flipping in mid-air. His bare feet contacted the magnetized floor with a faint click.

  “What is it? More murdered babies to dissect? Or a clue to who their killers were?”

  Tor gestured to the viewing port. Her partner moved closer and stared. Highlights reflected from Gavin’s glossy features as watched the drones’ searchlights sweep the shattered scene below.

  “Yep,” he nodded at last. “Dead babies again. Povlov Exploration and Salvage ought to make a good price off each little corpse.”

  Tor frowned. Commercial exploitation was a small part of their reason for being here, but it helped pay the bills. “Don’t be morbid. Those are unfinished interstellar probes, destroyed ages ago, before they could be launched. We have no idea whether they were sapient machines like you, or just tools, like this ship. You of all people should know better than to go around anthropomorphizing alien artifacts.”

  Gavin’s grimace was an android’s equivalent of a sardonic shrug. “If I use ‘morbid’ imagery, whose fault is it?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I mean you organic humans faced a choice, back when you saw that ‘artificial’ intelligence was going to take off and someday leave the biological kind behind. You could have wrecked the machines, but that would ruin progress.”

  She refrained from mentioning how close that came to happening, when the Renunciation Movement crested, less than a generation ago—a movement that still captivated a strong, ever-sniping minority.

  “Or you could have deep-programmed us with ‘fundamental Laws of Robotics,’” Gavin sniffed. “And had slaves far smarter than their masters. But what did you organics finally decide to do?”

  Tor knew it was no use sparring with Gavin, when he got in a mood. She concentrated on piloting the Warren Kimbel closer to the long cavity where drones shone beams across acres of twisted metal.

  “What was your solution to the problem of smart machines?” Gavin persisted. “You chose to raise us as your children. Call us people. Citizens. You taught us to be just like you, and even gave some of us humaniform bodies!”

  Tor’s last partner—a nice old ’bot and a good chess partner—had warned her, when he trans-retired, not to hire an adolescent Class-AAA android fresh out of AI-college. “They could be as difficult as any human adolescent,” he warned.

  The worst part? Gavin was right. The decision, to raise Class AAAs as human children, was still controversial. Not everyone agreed it was a “solution” to one of the Great Pitfalls, or just a way to conceal the inevitable. For, despite genetic and cyborg improvements to the human animal, machines still seemed fated to surpass biological men and women. And how many species of organic intelligent life survived that crisis?

  Gavin shook his head in dramatic, superior sadness, exactly like a too-smart adolescent who properly deserved to be strangled. “Ca
n you really object when I, a man-built, manlike android, anthropo-morphize? We only do as we’ve been taught, mistress.” His bow was eloquently sarcastic. Especially since he was the only person aboard who could bend at the waist.

  Following a fiery cruise-zep accident, twenty years before, all of Tor’s organic parts were confined to a cylindrical canister, barely a meter long and half a meter wide, containing her brain and vital organs. One reason she seemed ideal as a deep-space explorer. With prosthetic-mechanical arms, legs and grippers, she looked more “robotic” than her partner did, by far.

  To Gavin’s snide remark, she had no response. Indeed, it was easy to wonder if humanity had made the right choice, when it came to dealing with AI.

  But isn’t that true of all our decisions, across the last two-dozen years? Haven’t we time and again selected the path that seems less traveled? The one that looks less likely? For the simple reason that, maybe, our chances of surviving the odds would have to come from doing something no one else has tried?

  Below, across the face of the ravaged asteroid, stretched acres of great-strutted scaffolding—twisted and curled in ruin. Tangled and half-buried within the toppled derricks lay silent ranks of shattered, unfinished starships, razed perhaps a hundred million years ago.

  Tor felt sure that her silicon eyes and Gavin’s germanium ones were the first to look upon this scene, since some awful force plunged through, wreaking all this havoc.

  The ancient destroyers had to be long gone. Nobody had yet found a star machine even close to active. Still, she took no chances, making certain the weapons console stayed vigilant. That sophisticated, semi-sentient unit searched, but found no energy sources, no movement amid the ruined, unfinished mechanisms below. Instruments showed nothing but cold rock and metal, long dead.