The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

1. The Trafalgar Gate

I bought a kilo of oranges in Soho — Covent Garden would have none at this time of year — and walked down Whitcomb Street and around the corner on Pall Mall to the Square. The Gate faced me, a concrete henge straddling the entrance to Duncannon Street. There wasn’t much of a queue, just a line four abreast filling the pavement along the front of the National Gallery and St Martin’s in the Fields. I passed the two hours it took me to get to the front reading the latest Amis fils in paperback. I turned the last page and chucked the Penguin to a hurrying, threadbare art student seconds before I’d have had to relinquish the book to the security bin.

“Papers, please.”

I resisted the temptation to monkey the guard’s cockney. String bag slung on the thumb, rope of my duffel bag clutched in the fingers of one hand, I passed the documents over with the other, for a frowning moment of scrutiny. Then the guard waved me on to the Customs table. Wanded, searched, duffel bag contents spread out and thrust back in any old how. Passport scanned and stamped. One orange taken “for random inspection”. I’ve paid worse tolls. As long as the stack of Marie Therese thalers and the small change in my boot-heels made it through, I was good to go anywhere.

I walked under the arch and into Scotland.

They don’t like you to call it Scotland, of course. Officially, East London is the capital of the GBR (which — the tired joke notwithstanding — doesn’t actually stand for “Gordon Brown’s Republic” but is the full name of the state, derived from the standard ISO abbreviation for “Great Britain” and accepted as its legal designation at the exhausted end of the 1978 UN Security Council session that imposed the settlement, ending the bloody civil war that followed the Colonels’ Coup of ‘73). But it’s mostly Scottish accents you hear on the streets, along with Asian and African and Islingtonian — the few thousand white working-class Londoners who stayed in the East are in high demand as faces and voices for the regime: actors, diplomats, border guards. North Britain (another name they don’t like) speaks to the world in a cockney accent.

I walked up Duncannon Street, avoiding eye contact with anyone in a plastic fake-leather jacket. The bank is still called the Royal Bank and the currency is still called the pound. Come to think of it, the Party is still called Labour. Zigzagging the Strand and Kingsway, I was 100 metres from Holborn when I noticed I was being followed. Usual stuff — corner of the eye, shop-window reflection, tail still there after I’d dashed across the four lanes (GBR traffic’s mercifully two-stroke, and sparse) and walked on. Worse, when I checked again in a parked wing-mirror the guy vanished in plain sight. (In my plain sight, that is. No one else noticed.)

Another sidewinder, then. One who knew I was on to him. Shit. Jack Straw’s boys (and girls) I could dodge with my eyes shut. This was different.

There’s a procedure for everything. For this situation, SOP is to take a long step sideways — chances are, the sidewinder who’s spotted you spotting him has just hopped into an adjacent probability (like, one where you took a different route) and is sprinting ahead to hop back further up the road (following his SOP, natch). But he’d know that, so if he knew I was a sidewinder… but I had no evidence of that, yet. Either way, the trick was to take a bigger or a smaller jump than he’d expect, but one that would still keep me on track to catch an Edinburgh train at King’s Cross.

I turned sharp left onto High Holborn and walked briskly towards the border. Long before I’d reached Princes Circus, I was the only person on the street. There isn’t a wall between East and 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 destinations. An express at twelve of the clock, platform three. I bought a newspaper and a packed lunch, and took my seat. The train — French-fangled, electric — glided out as all the church-bells of London pealed noon, flashed through the villages north of London — Camden, Islington, Newington — at an accelerating clip that reached 150 miles an hour as we passed Barnet. Too fast to read the sign, but I knew the town. There’s always, for me, a frisson at Barnet — it’s where the last battle of the Second Restoration was fought, when the Bonny Prince and his men routed the Hornsey militia and found London defenceless before them.

The endless fields of England rolled by, the spring ploughing well under way, sometimes with one man behind a horse, sometimes with a great modern contraption from the Massey manufactories, drawn by a phalanx of Clydesdales. I leaned on the table, munched bread and cheese and sipped stout, and worried idly about my soft spot for this probability. How does one weigh the absence of total war and totalitarian revolution, against the continuance of Caliph and Romanoff and Manchu, and Voltaire at Ferney broken on the wheel?

I was in the non-smoking carriage, with the ladies, which didn’t bother me at all. My clothes, while unfashionable, raised no more than a momentary eyebrow. A bum-freezer here is a pea-jacket there, and Levi makes denim jeans across a surprising range of probabilities.

Across the table — not Pullman, but the idea is obvious enough — sat a young lady, bowed over a thick book. Black brows knitted under her bonnet, lips moving as she read, her thin face pallid, her gown frayed at the cuffs. She glanced up as I turned a rustling page of The Times, and I smiled politely and looked back at the science page. Antarctic continent found — Spanish claim disputed. The young woman sighed. I looked up again.

“A heroine in jeopardy, milady?” I asked.

She shot me an indignant glance.

“I am not reading a novel,” she said. “I study zoology.”

“Ah,” I said. “Your pardon. An admirable pursuit.”

“But it is so hard!” she cried. “All those lists!”

“The Latin names,” I murmured, nodding sagely, “of the great Linnaeus? They can indeed be a trial — “

She shook her head. “It is not that. So many disconnected facts to commit to memory!” Then she frowned. “I cannot place your accent, sir.”

“New Scotland,” I said, with a self-deprecating smile. “Hence the barbaric twang.”

She took this bold-faced lie without demur. I told another.

“My name,” I said, “is Steve Jones.”

“And mine,” she said, “is Mary Ann Dykes.”

“At your service, miss.”

“Thank you. Delighted to make your acquaintance.”

I gave my occupation, disingenuously, as commercial traveller in oranges. She gave hers as confidential servant.

“And why, if I may make so bold, are you studying zoology?”

“I am an orphan, sir,” she said. “I say this not to elicit sympathy, but to explain. I go to seek a post as a governess, in the Scottish capital. The mistress of the house has ambitions for her sons to be physicians, and I have been told that comparative anatomy is — but no!” She smiled suddenly. “That is true, but merely my excuse. The subject intrigues me.”

“As I said, an admirable pursuit.”

“But most taxing. Before my father passed away, he taught me the rudiments of mathematics, and of Newton. Would that zoology had its Newton!”

“I know little of that science,” I mused aloud, “but I have sometimes thought that, just as our poor will multiply to the limits of their wages, or of the poor-rates, the entire brute creation must perforce indulge in an even more wanton and thoughtless reproduction of their kind…”

Mary Ann didn’t blush. This history had no Victoria. She frowned.

“Yes?” she said. “Your drift, sir?”

“Yet as we see,” I went on, “the world is not over-run with” — I glanced out of the window — “rabbits, let us say, or nettles. All that are born do not survive, and those who do must, on average, have some perhaps slight advantage which — so to speak — selects them for survival over their less fit brethren. If we dare to imagine this process repeated, generation after generation, over many ages and revolutions of the Earth. but I fear I am rushing too far, in too speculative a direction.”

“No!” she said. She clutched my wrist, then withdrew her too-hasty hand. This time, she did blush. “Please, do go on.”

I did. By the time we reached the southern shore of the Firth of Forth, her textbook was covered with delighted scribbles linking facts at last, and her face with astonished smiles and happy frowns at the results.

I was about to part with her, at the station — which is called simply Edinburgh Central, Walter Scott in this world having remained an advocate at the Bar — smug in my Improving zeal, when she caught my elbow.

“Mr Jones,” she said, “may I presume upon our acquaintance to ask you to escort me to my destination? It is in the West Port, and — “ She looked away.

“And the Grassmarket is notorious for footpads, and you cannot afford a cab? Don’t worry, Miss Dykes. I can’t afford one either. Let us walk together.”

I carried her luggage. It was pathetically light.

“Mr Jones,” she enquired anxiously as we emerged from the rear of the station on to Market Street and caught our first stagnant whiff of the Nor Loch, “I see you carry no weapon.”

“I need none,” I assured her. “I am an adept in the martial arts of the East.”

She laughed. “Ancient arts are no match for a good pistol, sir, but I still trust in your protection.”

Across the Royal Mile, down St Mary’s Street into the Cowgate, then along beneath the North Bridge and Charles IV Bridge towards the Grassmarket. High, dank walls like cliff-faces dripped. Opium dens wafted their dark allure. Gypsy fiddles enlivened the air around hostelries. Homeward cars and velocipedes splashed through the noxious puddles. After the Cowgate, the Grassmarket was respectability itself, even with its tinker stalls, beggar families, skulking footpads, stilt-walking clowns, and carousing students of medicine, divinity and law. The flag of the Three Kingdoms, aflutter in the evening breeze, could be glimpsed over the Castle which, like its Rock, straddles history sturdy and aloof with only its flags changing, above the Grassmarket’s seething pool of probabilities.

Out of that seething pool stepped my pursuer. Two metres in front of us, and no one in between. If I hadn’t recognized his face, the levelled thing in his hand would have identified him surely enough. In this world, it might have seemed no more than a glittering toy, but Mary Ann divined its sinister import in an instant. Or perhaps she just reacted to my start. She clutched my upper arm with both hands. From the point of view of one about to draw on the martial arts of the East, this was not a welcome move, however pleasing it might have been under other circumstances.

After a split second of bafflement, I realized that my pursuer must have stayed in the GBR, guessed — or been leaked — my destination and blithely taken the faster train of that more advanced world, then sidestepped to this world of Tairlidhe’s victory to await me. How he’d found out that this was the world to which I’d fled to evade him, I didn’t care to guess. Infiltration and defection are permanent possibilities, across all probabilities.

I had no choice. I sidestepped, back to the GBR. I may have hoped my pursuer wouldn’t expect that, but in all honesty it was a reflex.

I had never before sidestepped with someone holding on to me. I was almost as surprised as Mary Ann to find us still together, in a different Grassmarket.

“What is this?” she cried, gazing around bewildered at the suddenly airier, cleaner, brighter and even noisier space of the plaza. She let go off me, and took a swift pace or two back and looked at me with suspicion and dread. “What arts of the East have you used, Mr Jones? Sorcery? Illusion?”

“Not these, I fear,” I said. “This is real. It is a different reality than that to which you are accustomed — one in which history took a different turn, centuries ago.”

She seemed to grasp the concept at once.

“Are there many such?”

“An infinite number,” I told her.

“But how marvellous! And yet how obvious, that the Creator’s infinity should be reflected in His creations!”

“That’s one way of looking at it,” I allowed.

Mary Ann looked around again, more calmly now, though I could see her quivering.

“I see this is a history in which the Covenanters’ memory is honoured,” she said. She pointed to one of a trio of statues. “I recognize that visage, of Richard Cameron. But who are the others?”

“They will mean nothing to you,” I said.

“I want to see them, all the same.”

She was intrigued by the pedestrian crossing, and impressed by the vehicles, tinny and two-stroke though they were. I nudged her to stop her staring at women with bare heads and short skirts. We stopped beneath the statues.

The stern man in the homburg, with upraised, didactic, forefinger:

“John Maclean,” she read from the plinth. “A preacher, was he?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. “And in his manner of public speech, by all accounts.”

The man in the short coat, with glasses and pipe — and, Scotland being Scotland in all manifestations, with a traffic cone on his head:

“And ‘Harold Wilson, martyr of British democracy’?” She recoiled almost, frowning. “A democrat? A radical?”

“Not precisely,” I said, looking around distractedly. “It would take too long to explain. That man who confronted us — he may catch up at any moment. I must go.”

“What about me, Mr Jones?” Mary Ann said.

“I’m sorry,” I said, still looking about. “I can’t take you with me. It’s far too dangerous. You’ll be safe here for now.” My gaze alighted on a tall concrete building, from which hung a banner with a jowly, frowning, face and the letters “GB”. I pointed.

“Remove your bonnet,” I said. “It’s not customary here. Your dress will pass. Go to that building, ask for the Women’s Institute, and say that you have just arrived from London, penniless. Say nothing of where you really come from, lest you be consigned to a lunatic asylum. You will be made welcome, and given employment. Learn what you can in this world, and as soon as possible I’ll take you back to yours.”

“But — “

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw my pursuer emerge from the pub called The Last Drop, and peer around.

“Goodbye, Miss Dykes,” I said.

I handed her the oranges — they were for here, after all, where they were scarce — and sidestepped as far as I’d ever dared in a single jump.

4. Storm Constantinople!

And fell briefly into a world of Latin buzz and blazing neon, of fairy lights suspended on nothing above a grassy park, on which robe-clad dark-skinned people strolled beneath a Rock with no Castle, and with an evening sky alight with the artificial constellations of celestial cities in orbit overhead. I sprinted across the sward, towards where the King’s Stables Road wouldn’t be. I’d never been in this probability, but I recognized it by report: this is the one where Spartacus won, slavery fell, capitalism rose, and the Romans reached the Moon in about 500 (Not) AD and Alpha Centauri a century or two later.

I leaped a stream that in most other worlds had long since been a sewer, sidestepped in mid-air, in a familiar but much less hopeful direction, and came down with a skid and a thud on dust and ash. I stumbled, flailing, and trod on a circle of glowing embers which I as quickly jumped out of, scattering more ash.

“Oi!” someone shouted. It must have been his fire.

“Sorry!” over my shoulder. Then I ran without looking back. Around me the early evening was lit only by scattered small fires, some of them behind the window-spaces of what buildings remained standing. Grass and weeds poked through the crazed tarmac under my feet. A few metres in front of me, a random leaf of grass or scrap of paper caught fire. I threw myself forward, hitting the ground with a pain I wouldn’t feel for minutes. I sidestepped into an adjacent probability, as one might roll on the ground, got up and ran on.

The Improver base in this Edinburgh lies beneath where a multi-storey park had been, close to the unaltered Castle Rock. I reached the door — saw a red bead on the wall — flinched aside — keyed the code in the lock — dived through.

I stood up in low fluorescent lighting, pale corridors. I suspected my pursuer would be after me. I rang the alarm. Two guards were ready for him when he slipped into our space from a probability where the car park’s floors hadn’t pancaked in the blast from Rosyth. His capture took only a moment: a hiss of gas, a thrown net, the laser pistol knocked from his fingers.

The guards tied him in the net to a chair. I tried to interrogate him, before the effects of the gas wore off and he gathered his wits enough to sidestep.

“Why are you after me?”

His head jerked, his eyes rolled, his tongue lolled. “Isn’t it obvious? You were on a mission to undermine the GBR!”

“What’s that to you?” I said. “To Conservers, that regime must be an abomination anyway — radical, revolutionary even — isn’t that everything you’re against?”

“No, no.” He struggled to focus his eyes and control his drool. “It’s a rare marvel. A socialist state that works, that has survived the fall of Communism, because of the computerized planning developed at Strathclyde from the ideas of Kantorovich and Neurath. You have no idea, do you, where that might lead? Nor do we, but we want to find out.”

“Well,” I said, “sorry about that, old boy, very interesting no doubt, but I’m fucked if my relatives will suffer in this Caledonian Cuba a second longer than they have to.”

He inhaled snot. “Fuck you.”

I could see I wouldn’t get much more out of him, so I whiled the minutes before he recovered enough to slip away by taunting him with what I’d done on the train. He looked at me with horror and loathing.

“You introduced Darwin to that world?”

“Who?” I said. “Wallace’s theory of natural selection — that’s what I outlined.”

He thrashed in the net. “Whoever. You know what you may have done, if that young woman should be the one who convinces that world that evolution happened? Some day, perhaps many years hence, in some backwater of an Eastern empire, a young man — an Orthodox seminarian in Georgia, perhaps — will read her work, lose his faith, and go on to lead a bloody revolution — “

“ — which will happen anyway, in one or other of these shit-holes,” I said. “We’re working on that problem.”

“I wish you luck,” he said drily. He was coming to, now, almost ready to vanish before our eyes.

“And what about this world?” I demanded. “This post-atomic horror? Would you have us leave it too?”

“Yes,” he said. “To see what comes of it. Let it be.”

And he went. The net slumped to the chair. I looked at the guards, shrugged.

“C’est la vie,” one of them said. “Come on, you need a coffee. And some bandages.”

I followed them to the first-aid station, then to the canteen. As I sipped hot black coffee, I found myself gazing idly at the room’s walls, which were papered 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.