Multiverse: Exploring the Worlds of Poul Anderson Read online

  “It was! I’ll remember it forever!” Alianna said.

  “As will I.” Alianora hesitated. Then, remembering, she asked, “Might I . . . wear the white tunic once more, for just this morning?”

  Alianna set a palm soft with understanding on her arm. “Of course, Mother. Of course.”

  AFTERWORD:

  For me to talk about Poul Anderson is like a young guitarist talking about Hendrix or Keith Richards—he’s one of the main guys from whom I learned my licks. What makes a story, how to tell a story, which words to choose to tell it as well as you can . . . What I know, I know in no small measure because so much of what Poul did rubbed off on me. I started reading him long before I started (and then soon stopped) shaving, and have been doing it ever since, always with enjoyment and always with profit. That we would become colleagues and, toward the end of his life, friends, shows me I’ve done a few things right in my life, anyhow. And that he and Karen would come to my house for dinner . . . Well, if you’d told that to my not-yet-shaving self, he would’ve said, “No way!” But yes. There may be something to this growing-up business after all.

  —Harry Turtledove

  A SLIP IN TIME

  by S. M. Stirling

  Considered by many to be the natural heir to Harry Turtledove’s title of King of the Alternate History novel, fast-rising science fiction star S. M. Stirling is the bestselling author of the Island in the Sea of Time series (Island in the Sea of Time, Against the Tide of Years, On the Ocean of Eternity), in which Nantucket comes unstuck in time and is cast back to the year 1250; and the Draka series (including Marching Through Georgia, Under the Yoke, The Stone Dogs, and Drakon, plus an anthology of Draka stories by other hands edited by Stirling, Drakas!), in which Tories fleeing the American Revolution set up a militant society in South Africa and eventually end up conquering most of the Earth. He’s also produced the Dies the Fire series (Dies the Fire, The Protector’s War, A Meeting at Corvallis), plus the five-volume Fifth Millennium series, and the seven-volume General series (with David Drake), as well as stand-alone novels such as Conquistador, The Peshawar Lancers, and The Sky People. Stirling has also written novels in collaboration with Raymond E. Feist, Jerry Pournelle, Holly Lisle, Shirley Meier, Karen Wehrstein, and Star Trek actor James Doohan, and contributed to the Babylon 5, T2, Brainship, War World, and Man-Kzin War series. His short fiction has been collected in Ice, Iron and Gold. Stirling’s newest series include the Change works, consisting of The Sunrise Lands, The Scourge of God, The Sword of the Lady, and The High King of Montival, and the Lords of Creation series, consisting of The Sky People and In the Courts of the Crimson Kings. His most recent books are the first two volumes in the new Shadowspawn series, A Taint in the Blood and The Council of Shadows, and a new volume in the Change series, The Tears of the Sun. Born in France and raised in Europe, Africa, and Canada, he now lives with his family in Santa Fe, New Mexico.

  Poul Anderson’s stories of the Time Patrol were among the most popular and longest-running of his series, with almost a dozen Time Patrol stories and novels being published from 1955 to within a few years of his death. In most of them, Time Patrolman Manse Everard and his compatriots ride off to keep unscrupulous time-travelers from destroying the proper timeline by changing historic events in the past. In the suspenseful story by S. M. Stirling that follows, though, we encounter a situation so grim that Manse Everard himself might end up needing a spot of rescuing.

  Prologue: Sarajevo, Bosnia

  Austro-Hungarian Empire

  June 28th, 1914 AD

  The short, skinny young man was sweating as he touched the pistol. Part of it was fear, part a savage joy. Only moments now until he drew it and struck his blow for the South Slav cause.

  Mehmedbašić had lost his courage at the last instant, Čabrinović’s bomb had failed, then the cars had swept by so fast, so fast that there was nothing he could do. It had been as bad as the day the guerillas had rejected him as too small, too weak, to serve Serbia in the struggle against the Turks. But now the cars were here again, and stopped before him. The beefy Austrian in the light-blue uniform and plumed hat with his Czech whore by his side . . .

  The hand about to draw the pistol fell to his side. A vast peace filled him, and he swayed, smiling, as if to the music of the angels his mother had believed in. Uniformed guards bustled about, the stalled engine coughed, backfired, and growled to life. The cars swept away as the crowd waved and cheered.

  Gavrilo Princip slumped quietly to the ground.

  There was a good deal of celebration that day, in honor of the Archduke’s visit; it was nearly an hour before someone noticed that he had quietly stopped breathing. The Belgian automatic pistol had vanished from his pocket with his meager cash and the picture of his mother long before official notice was taken.

  An appendix to the police report on the attempted assassination mentioned him as a possible member of the Black Hand, but the heir to the Royal and Imperial throne never bothered to read it.

  I:

  Venus

  2332 AD

  “Mach’ ma uns auf nach Wien!” Wanda Everard said gaily. “Off to Vienna! Music, sinful pastries, architecture, nineteen twenty-six!”

  She spoke in German and with a trace of the slurred lilting Viennese dialect you’d expect from a woman of that city’s upper middle classes. One of the perks of membership in the Time Patrol was a system which could teach you a language in an hour or so.

  “You look good as a flapper,” Manse grinned.

  She did, with a comely blond handsomeness that was wholly of her native late-twentieth-century California but would not be at all outré in Jazz Age Vienna. The skirt a thumb’s- width above the knee and bobbed hair and cloche hat were one reason that they were taking their vacation in that decade, being a lot more comfortable than the corsets and long skirts that would be de rigueur in the halcyon days of the Belle Epoque. His own rather stiff collar and tie were probably more confining, but he’d fit in just as well, looking like exactly what he was: a Midwestern farmboy of German descent who’d grown into a big battered thirtyish man with a roadmap of experience on his face. Their covers would be as American tourists, whose dollars would be welcome in a capital still not recovered from the fall of the empire it had ruled.

  “See you for dinner, Manse,” Piet Van Sarawak said, grinning. “Deirdre says the rijsttafel is coming along nicely. She’s finally learned you can’t scold a robot. Enjoy your week. Damn, but time travel helps with scheduling!”

  Manse’s friend was an Unattached Time Patrol agent as well, but he’d been born in this time and place, the terraformed Venus of the twenty-fourth century; he was slim and dark and dressed in a sarong.

  Behind him, the open fretwork of the house walls showed a long stretch of lawn and garden, then slopes planted in vines down to the borders of a canal. The air was full of the scents of flowers and rock and an almost-eucalyptus tang that was not quite like anything on earth, and a rainbow of passing birds sang the intricate melodies men had designed them for. His wife Deirdre was pushing a three-year-old boy in a swing that hung from the branches of a great tree, her rust-red hair flying in the warm breeze as she laughed at the crowing child.

  Good, Manse thought. I was right to avoid Piet and her for a couple of years of their own duration-sense. She’s had time to heal . . . not just from losing her world, but from learning that now it never existed at all.

  Their own ten-month Monica was in a playpen not far from the trunk, with the van Sarawak family manaq—a bioengineered hybrid of cat, dog, and chimp genes designed as a companion-nurse—curled up watchfully nearby. Manse felt a little bemused at the sight; as an Unattached agent of the Time Patrol he’d never really expected to be a father. He found he liked it.

  “Yum!” Wanda said. “I’ bring dann de Sachatoatn von Demel mit.”

  Piet laughed and replied in English: “I didn’t have that hypno, Wanda. What the hell did that mean?”

  “I’ll bring back so
me sachertorte from the Hofzuckerbäckerei Demel,” Wanda said. “It’s supposed to be legendary.”

  Manse smiled a little. Wanda was a Specialist, and in glacial ecologies at that; she’d had a lot less exposure to travel through human history than he had and it was fresher for her. Sometimes that made him feel like a bit of a cradle robber, but it also gave him some of the first excitement back. They mounted the timecycle, a smooth shape of not-quite-metal that resembled a wheel-less motorcycle as much as anything. He touched the control panel.

  II:

  Vienna

  Austro-Hungarian Empire

  June 1st, 1926 AD

  “What the hell?” Manse said.

  He felt Wanda’s arms stiffen around his waist, and the little sonic stunner flew into his hand. The cycle was set for emergence in a warehouse owned by a Patrol front-organization, bought quietly in a half-abandoned suburb in the hungry year of nineteen-nineteen. There should have been someone to meet them.

  Instead the timecycle thumped down on the stone pavement of a new-looking square, with buildings that were Art Deco-neoclassical-something-else-entirely all around it. People were streaming across the pedestrian parts, and the circular roadway was thick with automobiles and a few horse-drawn landaus. The air smelled of coal-smoke and exhausts and a little of dung. Not far away a flatbed truck carried a huge, clumsy-looking movie camera on a heavy tripod, grinding away with its lens pointed to the sky.

  The screams and scrambling rush to get away from the machine that had appeared in their midst started immediately. The alarm spread a little more slowly than it might have, because everyone else was looking up. Involuntarily, Manse did the same. A dirigible was floating by about a thousand yards above his head, the rasp of the engines mounted in pods along its sides throbbing through the air. It was huge; his trained eye estimated the length as at least nine hundred feet and the maximum diameter at around two hundred, bigger than the Hindenburg. Fraktur-Gothic letters bore the name Graf Zeppelin, and the colors of Imperial Germany, black and white and red with the crowned eagle across it.

  This is eight years after the end of World War One! his mind gibbered, even as his left hand dove for the emergency-departure switch.

  And froze, for a single fatal second; a cold sweat broke out on his face and flanks. It was set to return them to the point of departure—and if what his subconscious had grasped was true, that would have put them both into a sulfuric-acid hell hot enough to boil lead, what Venus would have been if the world-shapers of the First Scientific Renaissance had never turned it into a second Earth.

  A man in a uniform that included a tall shako-style leather hat ran towards him, blowing a whistle and fumbling at his waist for a pistol. Manse’s snapped off a short silent pulse from the stunner. The cop went sprawling, bonelessly limp as the vibration-beam short-circuited his cortex; he’d wake up in fifteen minutes with a headache and some bruises. You could use it with a clear conscience. He shot again and again, at anyone who seemed to be coming towards them, while his left hand fumbled at the controls to change the setting to something on earth. Other uniforms were pressing through the crowd, gray cloth and rifles, the military. No need to be subtle, just get them up and out—

  Crack.

  The bullet ripped the stunner out of his right hand, taking skin with it. A few yards away a soldier in a pike-gray uniform blinked in surprise as he started to pull at the bolt of his Mannlicher rifle.

  “Nein, ihr Cretins! Ich hab’ g’sagt: lebendig festnehmen!” a voice screamed in nasal schönbrunner Deutsch, upper-class Austrian German. “No, you imbeciles, take him alive!”

  Something hit him with stunning force and he toppled to land on the pavement; he’d been clouted in the back of the head with the butt-end of a rifle. Blinking, his vision contracting to a dimming tunnel, he saw Wanda stiff-arm a man away and slam her hand down on the control panel. The cycle vanished, instantly elsewhere in time and space. Behind it he could see the filming team, still cranking their camera, but now it was pointed straight at him.

  The world went away.

  III:

  Elsewhere/When

  Wanda Everard hovered ten thousand feet in the air and two centuries future-ward. Vienna sprawled beneath her, the neo-Baroque splendors of the Ringstrasse familiar, but enigmatic low-slung buildings stretching out beyond. A boomerang-shaped flying . . . something . . . curved silently towards her and she slapped the controls again.

  Two centuries more, and a frantic sweep of her hand as a bubble of iridescent force started to close around the machine like time-lapse photography.

  A jump, and she was over Vienna’s ancestor, Roman Vindobona, in about the year the Emperor Marcus Aurelius died there. The Danube glittered a cold blue-gray beneath her, and she shivered; beyond it the wild Marcomanni laired in wolf-haunted forests. Legionnaires might see a glimmer, if they looked skyward at precisely the right angle.

  Part of that quivering was shock. She turned up the protective field and the heater, and ate an energy-bar from the emergency supplies. That and systematic deep-breathing brought calmness back swiftly, buried rage and grief; besides Patrol training at the Academy she’d been in danger before, from animals and from men.

  I’ve even been in something like this situation before, she thought mordantly. Then it was San Francisco that wasn’t the way it should have been.

  No more than a handful of Agents in the vast, labyrinthine organization that guarded a million years of history from homo erectus to the post-human Danellians had seen an alteration, an actual divergence in the time-stream. She was one; Manse Everard was another. Now she’d seen two, and equaled his record. Nobody had seen more than that. It was an honor she could have done without, and horror clawed at the edge of vision like things scuttling in the corners of her eyes.

  “I will not think about Monica,” she told herself.

  Monica who now would never have existed, future-ward of that Vienna.

  She could call the Patrol here; the standing-wave beacons were registering on the timecycle’s control screens when she queried them.

  Everything pastward of the moment of change would still exist. There were agents in every milieu, clandestine headquarters in cities, bases on the moon, spaceships inconspicuously orbiting, the Academy in the Oligocene, places like the resort in the Old Stone Age Pyrenees where she’d gone on her first long date with Manse. Tourists and traders and scientists . . . There was virtually no year since the emergence of the human race when the Patrol wasn’t more-or-less active, and there were researchers farther back than that.

  “Every step you take, I’ll be watching you,” she murmured, from the lyrics of a golden oldie she remembered from her childhood. “I never understood why anyone considered that a romantic song.”

  But I’m not a police type, she thought, as her hand halted on its way to call for help. I’m a scientist, a Specialist and not even a Specialist in a period of history; I study ancient ecologies and the only humans I deal with are Pleistocene primitives. I’ll be cut out of the loop, stashed somewhere safe—last time Manse had me involved only because he was in charge of the rescue project. They may decide that it’s too risky to go after him, they may write him off. Monica needs her father too! Manse will be furious, but to be furious, he’ll have to be rescued.

  Decision firmed, and she shoved emotion aside with an effort like hauling herself up a rock-face; the Patrol had its regulations, but you could get around them . . . if your insubordination worked. Then you were a hero. If it didn’t . . . you were the goat.

  “I’ll be a dead goat if I can’t pull it off,” she told the bright spring morning of 180 AD. “Or never have existed. No need to worry about the exile planet!”

  Which is full of Neldorian bandits and Exaltationists and similar low-lifes.

  Patrol Court was the least of her problems. Other agents would be heading futurward “now”, for a value of “now” that only the Temporal language could express, across the wave-front of actuating upheav
al. They’d see the altered future; some of them would flit straight back downtime. They’d gather, assess the situation, and then they’d act. They might or might not spare crucial effort and personnel on rescuing those stranded here. Their first duty was to the timestream that led to the Danellians, after all. You didn’t age in the Patrol and you never got sick, but you were most assuredly expendable.

  She examined her mount. About four-tenths charge on the cells, which used a principle she didn’t even begin to understand and which made nuclear fusion look like a water-clock. Hopping interplanetary distances as well as through time had drained them a bit, but they would be ample as long as she didn’t go off-planet again. Her hand touched the controls, summoning menus, then tapped the actuator. This time she was over Vienna again, and in nineteen twenty-six once more, but at fifteen thousand feet and near sundown of the same day.

  The city of the Habsburg emperors spread out below, the river gray, a haze of industrial smog merely giving it a blur. The machine detected a surprising amount of air traffic for this year, but most of it was well below her. Her optics cut through the gritty air, and the machine’s memory showed . . .

  About an eighty-six percent correspondence between what Vienna should have been and what’s below me now. Most of that difference is additional buildings on greenfield sites, and some redevelopment closer in.

  This city was bigger than it should have been. She’d uploaded information as part of her preparation for the week-long vacation they’d planned, before flitting back to Venus and Monica and returning on home to the Bay Area of the 1990s after dinner. Vienna had plunged from over two million people and rising in 1914 to about one and a half million after the end of the war, when it went from the capital of an Empire larger than France to an absurdly overdeveloped head on a minor Alpine republic’s Heidiesque yodeling-and-goat-milk body. It had stayed around that number for the rest of the twentieth century and most of the twenty-first.