The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories by Ian Watson, Ian Whates Read Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Ian Watson, Ian Whates
West London - they’ve learned that much - but planning blight, student hostels and regular patrols fill the function almost as well. From a sidewinder’s angle, though, the good thing about the band of run-down property east of Charing Cross Road is that it’s a debatable land, a place where the probabilities are manifold, and therefore a prime locale for long sideways steps.
I clambered over concrete rubble, waded through fireweed, crunched broken panes, and stood still and did that thing in my head.
* * * *
2. That thing in my head
You do it too.
Those times when you know you left the front-door keys on the kitchen table, not beside the phone, and there’s no one else around who could have moved them? Big secret: it wasn’t the little people messing with your head. That street entrance or shop front you’ve never noticed before, though you must have driven past it a hundred times? Shock revelation: you’re not living The Truman Show , and nobody’s shifting the scenery.
You’re, shifting, in the scenery: sideslipping between entire universes whose only difference may be where you left the keys last night, or how a town plan turned out thirty years ago, or a planning permission last month, or . . .
You’re doing it all the time, unconsciously. Sidewinders do it consciously. Don’t ask me how, or how many of us there are. You don’t want to know. Most of us, by a sort of natural selection, end up in the probability where they’re happy, or at least content. A small minority are intrinsically malcontent, or seduced by the possibilities, or both.
Some of that minority get recruited. You don’t want to know about that, either. Let’s just say there are two sides. Well, there are an infinity of sides, but they collapse, on inspection, to two: the Improvers, and the Conservers.
The Improvers want to put “wrong” histories “back on track”; the Conservers want all possible histories to unfold unhindered. This conflict has, I’m told, been going on for some time. I suspect it’s waged from great shining bastions of widely separated probability where civilization is vastly more advanced than it is anywhere we can reach, each of them perhaps far outside the human branch of history altogether. The best-laid plans of Miocene men, or of the wily descendants of dinosaurs on an Earth the asteroid missed . . .
That’s the sort of question we sidewinders argue amongst ourselves. For you, for now - all you need to know is, I’m an Improver.
And right now I was on the run from a Conserver.
* * * *
3. Tairlidhe is my darlin’, the young chevalier
I stepped out of the bank doorway I found myself in, nodded to the footman, and caught a tram. Tall buildings, fat with sandstone and gross with gilt, filled the view from the top-deck window. The streets buzzed with electric velocipedes and reeked with ethanol-fuelled cars. The pavements were more crowded than those of the world I’d come from, and the crowds whiter. Here and there a Mahometan, a Hindoo or a Jew walked, distinct in their costume and dignity. Blacks and Chinese were more common and less noticeable, porters and street-merchants for the most part. Slavery was abolished in 1836, after the Virginia Insurrection made it too expensive; the Opium Wars were never fought.
Discreetly, I unscrewed a boot-heel and thumb-nailed out a 1997 shilling with the head of Charles X. The conductor grumbled, but gave me a fistful of nickel in change that weighed down my jacket pocket as I jumped off. King’s Cross is in the same place, with the same name - it’s one of those sites that’s a converse to the debatable lands: a place implacable, straddling probabilities like railway lines. The statue in the front is of Luipoldt II.
I plunged to the ticket office through the foetid cloud of pomade and pipe-smoke and bought a single to Edinburgh. Display-boards clattered with flip-plates of digits and
I clambered over concrete rubble, waded through fireweed, crunched broken panes, and stood still and did that thing in my head.
* * * *
2. That thing in my head
You do it too.
Those times when you know you left the front-door keys on the kitchen table, not beside the phone, and there’s no one else around who could have moved them? Big secret: it wasn’t the little people messing with your head. That street entrance or shop front you’ve never noticed before, though you must have driven past it a hundred times? Shock revelation: you’re not living The Truman Show , and nobody’s shifting the scenery.
You’re, shifting, in the scenery: sideslipping between entire universes whose only difference may be where you left the keys last night, or how a town plan turned out thirty years ago, or a planning permission last month, or . . .
You’re doing it all the time, unconsciously. Sidewinders do it consciously. Don’t ask me how, or how many of us there are. You don’t want to know. Most of us, by a sort of natural selection, end up in the probability where they’re happy, or at least content. A small minority are intrinsically malcontent, or seduced by the possibilities, or both.
Some of that minority get recruited. You don’t want to know about that, either. Let’s just say there are two sides. Well, there are an infinity of sides, but they collapse, on inspection, to two: the Improvers, and the Conservers.
The Improvers want to put “wrong” histories “back on track”; the Conservers want all possible histories to unfold unhindered. This conflict has, I’m told, been going on for some time. I suspect it’s waged from great shining bastions of widely separated probability where civilization is vastly more advanced than it is anywhere we can reach, each of them perhaps far outside the human branch of history altogether. The best-laid plans of Miocene men, or of the wily descendants of dinosaurs on an Earth the asteroid missed . . .
That’s the sort of question we sidewinders argue amongst ourselves. For you, for now - all you need to know is, I’m an Improver.
And right now I was on the run from a Conserver.
* * * *
3. Tairlidhe is my darlin’, the young chevalier
I stepped out of the bank doorway I found myself in, nodded to the footman, and caught a tram. Tall buildings, fat with sandstone and gross with gilt, filled the view from the top-deck window. The streets buzzed with electric velocipedes and reeked with ethanol-fuelled cars. The pavements were more crowded than those of the world I’d come from, and the crowds whiter. Here and there a Mahometan, a Hindoo or a Jew walked, distinct in their costume and dignity. Blacks and Chinese were more common and less noticeable, porters and street-merchants for the most part. Slavery was abolished in 1836, after the Virginia Insurrection made it too expensive; the Opium Wars were never fought.
Discreetly, I unscrewed a boot-heel and thumb-nailed out a 1997 shilling with the head of Charles X. The conductor grumbled, but gave me a fistful of nickel in change that weighed down my jacket pocket as I jumped off. King’s Cross is in the same place, with the same name - it’s one of those sites that’s a converse to the debatable lands: a place implacable, straddling probabilities like railway lines. The statue in the front is of Luipoldt II.
I plunged to the ticket office through the foetid cloud of pomade and pipe-smoke and bought a single to Edinburgh. Display-boards clattered with flip-plates of digits and
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