all our blacks are good topmen

Unfortunately, the wind blew out of the northeast for a month after they left without shifting even a point on the compass, and at the end of that month the Armada was no closer to England than Iberia itself. Not only that, but the hard-pressed coopers of Portugal had made many of the Armada’s casks of green wood, and when the ship’s cooks opened them the meat was rotten and the water stank. So they trailed into the port of Corunna, where several hundred soldiers and sailors swam to the shores of Spain and were never seen again. A few hundred more had already died of disease, so from his sickbed on the flagship Don Alonso Perez de Guzman el Bueno, seventh Duke of Medina Sidonia and Admiral of the Armada, interrupted the composition of his daily complaint to Philip the Second, and instructed his soldiers to go out into the countryside and collect peasants to help man the ships.

One squad of these soldiers stopped at a Franciscan monastery on the outskirts of Corunna, to impress all the boys who lived there and helped the monks, waiting to join the order themselves. Although they did not like it the monks could not object to the proposal, and off the boys went to join the fleet.

Among these boys, who were each taken to a different ship, was Manuel Carlos Agadir Tetuan. He was seventeen years old; he had been born in Morocco, the son of West Africans who had been captured and enslaved by Arabs. In his short life he had already lived in the Moroccan coastal town of Tetuan, in Gibraltar, the Balearics, Sicily, and Lisbon. He had worked in fields and cleaned stables, he had helped make rope and later cloth, and he had served food in inns. After his mother died of the pox and his father drowned, he had begged in the streets and alleys of Corunna, the last port his father had sailed out of, until in his fifteenth year a Franciscan had tripped over him sleeping in an alley, inquired after him, and taken him to the refuge of the monastery.

Manuel was still weeping when the soldiers took him aboard La Lavia, a Levantine galleon of nearly a thousand tons. The sailing master of the ship, one Laeghr, took him in charge and led him below decks. Laeghr was an Irishman, who had left his country principally to practice his trade, but also out of hatred of the English who ruled Ireland. He was a huge man with a torso like a boar’s, and arms as thick as the yardarms of the ship. When he saw Manuel’s distress he showed that he was not without kindness; clapping a callused hand to the back of Manuel’s neck he said, in accented but fluent Spanish, “Stop your snivelling, boy, we’re off to conquer the damned English, and when we do your fathers at the monastery will make you their abbot. And before that happens a dozen English girls will fall at your feet and ask for the touch of those black hands, no doubt. Come on, stop it. I’ll show you your berth first, and wait till we’re at sea to show you your station. I’m going to put you in the main top, all our blacks are good topmen.”

I never did like Jeremy Blasingame

How often have I searched for snippets before that one, from the long years of my coming to consciousness? How did I first discover the world beyond my body, beyond my searching hands? It was one of my greatest intellectual feats—perhaps the greatest—and yet it is lost to me.

So I read, and learn how other blind infants have accomplished the task. My own life, known to me through words—the world become a text—this happens to me all the time. It is what T.D. Cutsforth called entering the world of “verbal unreality,” and it is part of the fate of the curious blind person.

I never did like Jeremy Blasingame. He was a colleague for a few years, and his office was six doors down from mine. It seemed to me that he was one of those people who are fundamentally uncomfortable around the blind; and it’s always the blind person’s job to put these people at their ease, which gets to be a pain in the ass. (In fact, I usually ignore the problem.) Jeremy always watched me closely (you can tell this by voice), and it was clear that he found it hard to believe that I was one of the co-editors of Topological Geometry, a journal he submitted to occasionally. But he was a good mathematician and a fair topologist, and we published most of his submissions, so that he and I remained superficially friendly.

Still, he was always probing, always picking my brains. At this time I was working hard on the geometry of n-dimensional manifolds, and some of the latest results from CERN and SLAC and the big new cyclotron on Oahu were fitting into the work in an interesting way: It appeared that certain subatomic particles were moving as if in a multidimensional manifold, and I had Sullivan and Wu and some of the other physicists from these places asking me questions. With them I was happy to talk, but with Jeremy I couldn’t see the point. Certain speculations I once made in conversation with him later showed up in one of his papers, and it just seemed to me that he was looking for help without actually saying so.

And there was the matter of his image. In the sun I perceived him as a shifting, flecked brightness. It’s unusual I can see people at all, and as I couldn’t really account for this (was it vision, or something else?) it made me uncomfortable.

But no doubt in retrospect I have somewhat exaggerated this uneasiness.

The first event of my life that I recall that has any emotion attached to it (the earlier ones being mere snips of tape that could have come from anyone’s life, given how much feeling is associated with them) comes from my eighth year, and has to do, emblematically enough, with math. I was adding columns with my Braille punch, and, excited at my new power, I took the bumpy sheet of figures to show my father. He puzzled over it for a while. “Hmm,” he said. “Here, you have to make very sure that the columns are in straight, vertical rows.” His long fingers guided mine down a column. “Twenty-two is off to the left, feel that? You have to keep them all straight.”

All four of them jumped

His hand fell away in the sand. The wood touched by his finger was changing, becoming a bright green spot in the surrounding silver. A thin green sprig bulged from the spot, and grew up toward the sun; leaves unfolded from this sprout as it thickened, and beneath Manuel’s fascinated gaze a bud appeared and burst open: a white rose, gleaming wetly in the white morning light.

He had managed to stand, and cover himself with kelp, and walk a full quarter of a mile inland, when he came upon people. Three of them to be exact, two men and a woman. Wilder looking people Manuel couldn’t imagine: the men had beards that had never been cut, and arms like Laeghr’s. The woman looked exactly like his miniature portrait of Saint Anna, until she got closer and he saw that she was dirty and her teeth were broken and her skin was brindled like a dog’s belly. He had never seen such freckling before, and he stared at it, and her, every bit as much as she and her companions stared at him. He was afraid of them.

“Hide me from the English, please,” he said. At the word English the men frowned and cocked their heads. They jabbered at him in a tongue he did not know. “Help me,” he said. “I don’t know what you’re saying. Help me.” He tried Spanish and Portuguese and Sicilian and Arabic. The men were looking angry. He tried Latin, and they stepped back. “I believe in God the Father Almighty, Maker of Heaven and Earth, and in all things visible and invisible.” He laughed, a bit hysterically. “Especially invisible.” He grabbed his medallion and showed them the cross. They studied him, clearly at a loss.

“Tor conaloc an dhia,” he said without thinking. All four of them jumped. Then the two men moved to his sides to hold him steady. They chattered at him, waving their free arms. The woman smiled, and Manuel saw that she was young. He said the syllables again, and they chattered at him some more. “Thank you, Laeghr,” he said. “Thank you, Anna. Anna,” he said to the girl, and reached for her. She squealed and stepped back. He said the phrase again. The men lifted him, for he could no longer walk, and carried him across the heather.

With some hard flaps he was off

Laeghr smiled and turned around, and Manuel saw then that he had wings, wings with feathers intensely white in the black murk of the air. He clasped Manuel’s arm. “You know all that I know.” With some hard flaps he was off, tumbling east swiftly in the black air, like a gull.

With the help of Saint Anna the third mate had actually found a break in the cliffs, a quite considerable bay. Other ships of the Armada had found it as well, and they were already breaking up on a wide beach as La Lavia limped nearer shore. The keel grounded and immediately things began breaking. Soupy waves crashed over the canted midships, and Manuel leaped up the ladder to the forecastle, which was now under a tangle of rigging from the broken foremast. The mainmast went over the side, and the lee flank of the ship splintered like a match tub and flooded, right before their eyes. Among the floating timbers Manuel saw one that held a black cannonball embedded in it, undoubtedly the very one that Saint Anna had deflected from its course toward him. Reminded that she had saved his life before, Manuel grew calmer and waited for her to appear. The beach was only a few shiplengths away, scarcely visible in the thick air; like most of the men, Manuel could not swim, and he was searching with some urgency for a sight of Saint Anna when Friar Lucien appeared at his side, in his black robes. Over the shriek of the dark wind Lucien shouted, “If we hold on to a plank we’ll float ashore.”

“You go ahead,” Manuel shouted back. “I’m waiting for Saint Anna.” The friar shrugged. The wind caught his robes and Manuel saw that Lucien was attempting to save the ship’s liturgical gold, which was in the form of chains that were now wrapped around the friar’s middle. Lucien made his way to the rail and jumped over it, onto a spar that a wave was carrying away from the ship. He missed his hold on the rounded spar, however, and sank instantly.

The forecastle was now awash, and soon the foaming breakers would tear it loose from the keel. Most of the men had already left the wreck, trusting to one bit of flotsam or other. But Manuel still waited. Just as he was beginning to worry he saw the blessed grandmother of God, standing among figures on the beach that he perceived but dimly, gesturing to him. She walked out onto the white water, and he understood. “We are the Christ, of course! I will walk to shore as He once did.” He tested the surface with one shoe; it seemed a little, well, infirm, but surely it would serve—it would be like the floor of their now-demolished chapel, a sheet of water covering one of God’s good solids. So Manuel walked out onto the next wave that passed at the level of the forecastle, and plunged deep into the brine.

While Lucien read this

While Lucien read this, the soldier moved slowly about the chamber. First he set on the top of the box a plate of sliced biscuit; the bread was hard, as it became after months at sea, and someone had taken the trouble to cut slices, and then polish them into wafers so thin that they were translucent, and the color of honey. Occasional wormholes gave them the look of old coins, that had been beaten flat and holed for use as jewelry.

Next the soldier brought forth from behind the box an empty glass bottle with its top cut off so that it was a sort of bowl. Taking a flask in his other hand, he filled the bowl to the midway point with La Lavia’s awful wine. Putting the flask down, he circled the group while the friar finished reading. Every man there had cuts on his hands that more or less continuously leaked blood, and each man pulled a cut open over the bottle held to him, allowing a drop to splash in, until the wine was so dark that to Manuel, aware of the blue light, it was a deep violet.

The soldier replaced the bottle beside the plate of wafers on the box. Friar Lucien finished his reading, looked at the box, and recited one final sentence: “O lamps of fire! Make bright the deep caverns of sense; with strange brightness give heat and light together to your beloved, that we may be one with you.” Taking the plate in hand, he circled the chamber, putting a wafer in the mouths of the men. “The body of Christ, given for you. The body of Christ, given for you.”

Manuel snapped the wafer of biscuit between his teeth and chewed it. At last he understood what they were doing. This was a communion for the dead: a service for Laeghr, a service for all of them, for they were all doomed. Beyond the damp curved wall of their chamber was the deep sea, pressing against the timbers, pressing in on them. Eventually they would all be swallowed, and would sink down to become food for the fishes, after which their bones would decorate the floor of the ocean, where God seldom visited. Manuel could scarcely get the chewed biscuit past the lump in his throat. When Friar Lucien lifted the half bottle and put it to his lips, saying first, “The blood of Christ, shed for you,” Manuel stopped him. He took the bottle from the friar’s hand. The soldier stepped forward, but Lucien waved him away. Then the friar kneeled before Manuel and crossed himself, but backwards as Greeks did, left to right rather than the proper way. Manuel said, “You are the blood of Christ,” and held the half bottle to Lucien’s lips, tilting it so he could drink.

Manuel got up and followed him

Around noon Laeghr regained consciousness. Manuel, who had not left his side, held his hand, but Laeghr frowned and pulled it away.

“Listen,” Laeghr said with difficulty. His soul was no more than a blue cap covering his tangled salt-and-pepper hair. “I’m going to teach you some words that may be useful to you later.” Slowly he said, “Tor conaloc an dhia,” and Manuel repeated it. “Say it again.” Manuel repeated the syllables over and over, like a Latin prayer. Laeghr nodded. “Tor conaloc an naom dhia. Good. Remember the words always.” After that he stared at the deckbeams above, and would answer none of Manuel’s questions. Emotions played over his face like shadows, one after another. Finally he took his gaze from the infinite and looked at Manuel. “Touch me, boy.”

Manuel touched his forehead, and with a sardonic smile Laeghr closed his eyes: his blue crown of flame flickered up through the deck above and disappeared.

They buried him that evening, in a smoky, hellish brown sunset. Friar Lucien said the shortened Mass, mumbling in a voice that no one could hear, and Manuel pressed the back of his medallion against the cold flesh of Laeghr’s arm, until the impression of the cross remained. Then they tossed him overboard. Manuel watched with a serenity that surprised him. Just weeks ago he had shouted with rage and pain as his companions had been torn apart; now he watched with a peace he did not understand as the man who had taught him and protected him sank into the iron water and disappeared.

A couple of nights after that Manuel sat apart from his remaining berthmates, who slept in one pile like a litter of kittens. He watched the blue flames wandering over the exhausted flesh, watched without reason or feeling. He was tired.

Friar Lucien looked in the narrow doorway and hissed. “Manuel! Are you there?”

“I’m here.”

“Come with me.”

Manuel got up and followed him. “Where are we going?”

Friar Lucien shook his head. “It’s time.” Everything else he said was in Greek. He had a little candle lantern with three sides shuttered, and by its illumination they made their way to the hatch that led to the lower decks.

Manuel’s berth, though it was below the gun deck, was not on the lowest deck of the ship. La Lavia was very much bigger than that. Below the berth deck were three more decks that had no ports, as they were beneath the waterline. Here in perpetual gloom were stored the barrels of water and biscuit, the cannonballs and rope and other supplies. They passed by the powder room, where the armorer wore felt slippers so that a spark from his boots might not blow up the ship. They found a hatchway that held a ladder leading to an even lower deck. At each level the passages became narrower, and they were forced to stoop. Manuel was astounded when they descended yet again, for he would have imagined them already on the keel, or in some strange chamber suspended beneath it; but Lucien knew better. Down they went, through a labyrinth of dank black wooden passageways. Manuel was long lost, and held Lucien’s arm for fear of being separated from him, and becoming hopelessly trapped in the bowels of the ship. Finally they came to a door that made their narrow hallway a dead end. Lucien rapped on the door and hissed something, and the door opened, letting out enough light to dazzle Manuel.

Laeghr thumped his cane on the deck

A night or two later—Manuel himself was not sure, as the passage of time had become for him something plastic and elusive and, more than anything else, meaningless—the Armada anchored at Calais Roads, just off the Flemish coast. For the first time since they had left Corunna La Lavia lay still, and listening at night Manuel realized how much the constant chorus of wooden squeaks and groans was the voice of the crew, and not of the ship. He drank his ration of wine and water quickly, and walked the length of the lower deck, talking with the wounded and helping when he could to remove splinters. Many of the men wanted him to touch them, for his safe passage through some of the worst scenes of carnage had not gone unnoticed. He touched them, and when they wanted, said a prayer. Afterwards he went up on deck. There was a fair breeze from the southwest, and the ship rocked ever so gently on the tide. For the first time in a week the air was not suffused red: Manuel could see stars, and distant bonfires on the Flemish shore, like stars that had fallen and now burnt out their life on the land.

Laeghr was limping up and down amidships, detouring from his usual path to avoid a bit of shattered decking.

“Are you hurt, Laeghr?” Manuel inquired.

For answer Laeghr growled. Manuel walked beside him. After a bit Laeghr stopped and said, “They’re saying you’re a holy man now because you were running all over the deck these last few days, acting like the shot we were taking was hail and never getting hit for it. But I say you’re just too foolish to know any better. Fools dance where angels would hide. It’s part of the curse laid on us. Those who learn the rules and play things right end up getting hurt—sometimes from doing just the things that will protect them the most. While the blind fools who wander right into the thick of things are never touched.”

Manuel watched Laeghr’s stride. “Your foot?”

Laeghr shrugged. “I don’t know what will happen to it.”

Under a lantern Manuel stopped and looked Laeghr in the eye. “Saint Anna appeared and plucked a cannonball that was heading for me right out of the sky. She saved my life for a purpose.”

“No.” Laeghr thumped his cane on the deck. “Your fever has made you mad, boy.”

So the Moroccans

As the voyage progressed, Manuel’s berthmates became more intimate. Farther north the Moroccans suffered terribly from the cold. They came belowdecks after a watch with their dark skins completely goose-pimpled, like little fields of stubble after a harvest. Their lips and fingernails were blue, and they shivered an hour before falling asleep, teeth chattering like the castanets in a fiesta band. Not only that, but the swells of the Atlantic were getting bigger, and the men, since they were forced to wear every scrap of clothing they owned, rolled in their wooden berths unpadded and unprotected. So the Moroccans, and then everyone in the lower foredeck, slept three to a berth, taking turns in the middle, huddling together like spoons. Crowded together like that the pitching of the ship could press them against the beams, but it couldn’t roll them around. Manuel’s willingness to join these bundlings, and to lie against the beams, made him well-liked. Everyone agreed he made a good cushion.

Perhaps it was because of his hands that he fell ill. Though his spirit had been reconciled to the crusade north, his flesh was slower. Hauling on the coarse hemp ropes every day had ripped the skin from his palms, and salt, splinters, belaying pins and the odd boot had all left their marks as well, so that after the first week he had wrapped his hands in strips of cloth torn from the bottom of his shirt. When he became feverish, his hands pulsed painfully at every nudge from his heart, and he assumed that the fever had entered him through the wounds in his palms.

Then his stomach rebelled, and he could keep nothing down. The sight of biscuits or soup revolted him; his fever worsened, and he became parched and weak; he spent a lot of time in the head, wracked by dysentery. “You’ve been poisoned by the biscuits,” Juan told him. “Just like I was in the Indies. That’s what comes of boxing fresh biscuits. They might as well have put fresh dough in those barrels.”

Manuel’s berthmates told Laeghr of his condition, and Laeghr had him moved to the hospital, which was at the stern of the ship on a lower deck, in a wide room that the sick shared with the rudder post, a large smoothed tree trunk thrusting through floor and ceiling. All of the other men were gravely ill. Manuel was miserable as they laid him down on his pallet, wretched with nausea and in great fear of the hospital, which smelled of putrefaction. The man on the pallet next to him was insensible, and rolled with the sway of the ship. Three candle lanterns lit the low chamber and filled it with shadows. One of the Dominican friars, a Friar Lucien, gave him hot water and wiped his face. They talked for a while, and the friar heard Manuel’s confession, which only a proper priest should have done. Neither of them cared. The priests on board avoided the hospital, and tended to serve only the officers and the soldiers. Friar Lucien was known to be willing to minister to the sailors, and he was popular among them.

He smiled and laid the doll on his desk

Sherlock Holmes was still in a bright mood on the following morning, eating a hearty breakfast and sitting down afterwards to draft a long telegram. After it was dispatched he rose with a satisfied expression and took up the parcel which he had brought home from his shopping expedition on the previous day.

As he unwrapped it at the table I saw that it contained a doll which exactly matched the description given to us by Emily Royston. "You have found it!" I exclaimed. "Surely that is Emily's doll?"

He shook his head. "I have found poor Beatrice's twin," he said, "after visiting six West End shops yesterday afternoon. Now it is necessary to put her into the same state as her kid­napped sister."

He took the doll firmly by the torso and slid his fingers into the bright curls. Grasping the toy's head he turned it forcibly, so that it came away in his hand. He peered into the neck aperture for a moment, then replaced the head firmly.

"What on earth are you doing?" I asked.

"I am making sure," he said, "that this simulated Beatrice has been treated as Miss Grayling treated the original when she con­cealed the telegram inside the doll."

"It occurs to me," I said, "that the rigmarole with the doll was rather unnecessary. Why could she not simply have passed the document to Florez?"

"Because," he said, "she had a narrow escape from justice in the Cullington affair. The last person in England she would want to be seen with is Maximilian Florez."

I pointed to the doll. "But when she calls-if she calls-she will know that this is not the original doll," I protested.

"Perhaps so, Watson. Perhaps so." He smiled and laid the doll on his desk, covering it with some loose papers.

Though Sherlock Holmes could be a whirlwind of energy when in hot pursuit or a brooding storm of impatience when he had nothing to occupy his intellect, he had the patience of a cat by a mousehole when he was awaiting the outcome of one of his strata­gems. He passed that day in conversation and in playing light airs upon his violin as though he had no serious thought in his mind, while I considered the questions that still teemed in my mind and did not ask them because I knew he would answer me either ellipti­cally or not at all.

I do not know what it is that she has stolen

Mycroft cast his eyes upwards and considered. "Corinthia Grayling?" he mused, then after a moment, "Yes! As it happens I do."

"What do you know of her?" demanded Holmes.

"Pretty young thing," said Mycroft. "Formidably intelli­gent. I had occasion to interview her a couple of years ago, when she was with Arthur Cullington's family. You will recall, of course, that there was that unpleasant affair of the draft treaty that vanished from Cullington's study and I spoke to her then. Nothing came of it. We never traced the thief and poor Cullington was finished. I suppose it was after her time with the Cullington twins that she went on to Royston's little girl. Struck me as a very able young woman, I must say."

"Oh, she is," said Holmes. "She is. Tell me, Mycroft, was she ever under suspicion in the Cullington affair?"

"Poor Arthur's entire household was under suspicion. There was no doubt that the document had vanished from his safe. Of course we had to consider the governess, but we could find noth ing against her. The whole trouble was that we found nothing against anyone, but somebody in that house must have known something about it."

"Then having got away with it on that occasion, she has done it again," declared Holmes.

Mycroft looked at him with an expression of puzzlement.

"Are you implying that Corinthia Grayling was the thief in the Cullington affair?"

"It seems extremely likely" said Holmes. "And she has now repeated the trick. She has robbed Fortescue Royston of what is, no doubt, some equally important document."

Mycroft's look of puzzlement slowly changed to one of hor­ror. "Great Heavens!" he exclaimed. "You don't mean that she has the telegram?"

"I do not know what it is that she has stolen," said my friend, "but I am certain that it will be of importance. What is the telegram that you mentioned?"

The elder Holmes seemed to be embarrassed by his emo­tional outburst. He drew a snuffbox from his coat pocket and took a large pinch, flourishing a bright silk handkerchief as he did so. When he had done he put handkerchief and snuffbox back in his pocket and slumped into an armchair, his face a grim mask. If it was possible he seemed to have gone even paler.

Eventually Holmes stood up

Faced with the proferred gift, Emily abandoned her weeping, swallowed her sobs in one huge gulp, and reached out for the lolli­pop. In a moment it was firmly planted in her mouth, and though the tears still coursed down her cheeks she was, at last, silent.

Holmes straightened and tipped his hat again. "Permit me to introduce myself," he said. "I am Sherlock Holmes, consulting detective. Perhaps I can be of assistance."

"Mr. Holmes!" exclaimed the governess, and I could see that she started at the name. "I am Corinthia Grayling, governess to Emily here, who is the daughter of Mr. Fortescue Royston. It is extremely good of you to assist, but I'm sure that Emily's doll does not warrant taking up your time."

"Not at all," said Holmes. "It would be a cruel world in which a consulting detective might not apply his skills to the mys­tery of a little girl's stolen doll."

He squatted to speak to Emily. "Tell me, my dear," he said, was it some ragamuffin child who stole your doll?"

Still sucking vigorously at the lollipop, Emily shook her head firmly. At last she took the sweetmeat from her mouth and said, "No, sir. It was a big man with a silk hat like yours."

I almost felt the thrill I knew Holmes was experiencing at this odd revelation, for I was well aware how much unusual factors of everyday occurrences appealed to my friend.

"A big man in a silk hat," repeated my friend. "And what did he look like, Emily?"

She raised a hand. "He was ever so tall and he had a long coat and a silk hat and a big long moustache." She wrestled with the last word but managed it in the end.

"Emily!" exclaimed Miss Grayling. "She can exaggerate terri­bly sometimes, Mr. Holmes. It was probably some street ruffian."

"No it wasn't," declared Emily. "It was a big man with a moustache and he went that way," and she pointed in the direction we had been heading.

"And do you remember what colour his mous­tache was?" asked Holmes.

"It was brown," said the little girl promptly. Pointing at me, she said, "It was bigger than his mous­tache and brown, but sort of reddish and thick and floppy. I was waiting outside the shop like Miss Gray­ling told me and he came along and said could he look at my nice new dolly, and I let him look and he snatched it and ran away" The recollection brought fresh weeping.

"Emily," said Holmes, "I promise you that I will do my very best to find the man with the brown moustache and recover your doll. What is her name?"

"She's called Beatrice and she can move her head," said the child, and with a little prompting from Holmes she recited a detailed de­scription of the toy.

Eventually Holmes stood up. He smiled at Miss Grayling and said, "If I am to recover Emily's dolly I must be about my business, Miss Grayling. Here is my card. If you will call on me at four o'clock to­morrow, I have no doubt that I shall have news for you."

I thought Einstein was more important

None of this produces the slightest change in the world of 1980. Bewildered, now, he revisits 1775 and shoots Washington again, while the earlier version of himself, there on the same errand, looks on in annoyance. Then he heads for the early 1940s, where Enrico Fermi is working on the atomic bomb that Hassel knows had been invented forty years before by Madame Curie, and shoots him too. Nothing he does has any impact on the shape of the future. And then he encounters a fellow time-traveler, this one a professor of mechanics from Yale, who also has been roving through time unsuccessfully trying to change the course of events.

"I got Columbus," says Hassel.

"I got Marco Polo."

"I got Napoleon."

"I thought Einstein was more important."

"Mohammed didn't change things much -- I expected more from him."

"I know. I got him too."

Indeed, they had both assassinated Mohammed, nineteen months apart.

Hassel says, "But how could you have killed him after I killed him?"

"We both killed him."

"That's impossible. And the Yale man replies, "

My boy, time is entirely subjective. It's a private matter -- a personal experience. There is no such thing as objective time, just as there is no such thing as objective love, or an objective soul." They both had roved up and down the time-stream, making radical changes in history -- but only in their own subjective sense of history. Everybody else's history went right on, unaltered.

The Bester story is good sardonic fun, and I have read it many times with much enjoyment. But it doesn't, I think, stand up to serious logical analysis. I prefer to believe that if you change the past you irrevocably change all of time to come -- unless, of course, some other time-traveler
revokes the irrevocable by looping back in time to catch you in the act and cancel out your history-changing deed....

With all that established

Rome therefore remains pagan and strong, though it does, as it did in real history, split into two realms, each with its own Emperor -- a new Greek-speaking one with its capital in Constantinople, and the old western one with its capital in Rome. At times in my book, as in the real reality, the relationship between the two Empires is friendly and close; at other times they look upon each other with a barely veiled hostility, and sometimes the hostility is not veiled at all. But in our world the western empire will fall beneath the onslaught of the barbarian hordes late in the fifth century; in the world of my novel it goes on and on and on, century after century.

With all that established, I faced one of the most difficult tasks in writing an alternative-history novel: how to let the reader know where the point of divergence from real history occurs, without simply addressing the reader directly and straightforwardly spelling the thing out. I solved this with a little prologue, set in the Roman year 1203 -- our year 450 -- in which two elderly historians, meeting by chance in the library, engage in a pleasant conversation in which one of them wonders what course history might have taken if that obscure Egyptian tribe, the Hebrews, had succeeded in getting out of Egypt and spreading their subversive cult's beliefs through the Empire. His colleague is unimpressed. "'Well,' said Aufidius, suppressing a yawn, 'all that is sheer fantasy, you know. None of it happened, after all.'"

And off I go into the first long section of the book. It takes place in 1282 -- our year 529, by which time in our world the Empire of the West had already fallen -- and is intended to depict life in the city of Rome itself with the western realm very much a going concern. That chapter is followed by one, set about eighty years later, in which a Roman who has been sent into exile in the torrid and unpleasant land of Arabia discovers a potential threat to the safety of the Empire, an intensely charismatic prophet named Mahmud who is preaching a monotheistic religion with an extremely powerful appeal. Mahmud is planning to spread his creed to all neighboring lands, and my Roman shrewdly takes steps to have the man done away with before he can cause serious trouble.

in greatly altered form

During the course of my own career I've made use of altered history again and again to provide the impetus for a story. In "Translation Error," back in 1959, I had an emissary from another world take steps to avert World War I so that the second World War, which would lead to the development of atomic weapons, would also not take place. My novel of 1967, The Gate of Worlds, proposed that the Black Death of 1348 had killed so many Europeans that the Ottoman Turks had been able to conquer the whole continent, leaving the New World to develop independently under Aztec and Inca ruler and Africa as a continent of black-ruled kingdoms. And in "Trips," a short story from 1975, I packed a dozen or more alternative worlds into a single
work less than thirty pages long, in which my protagonist drifts from one reality to another: in one section, Genghis Khan has created a worldwide Mongol empire, in another, President Roosevelt's retirement in 1940 has led to American neutrality and a German victory in World War II, and in another, John F. Kennedy was never assassinated. Finally my wanderer returns to what he takes to be the real world, his own world, our world, from which he had originally departed -- only to discover that he hasn't reached home after all, for this world, too, similar as it is to the one from which he first set out, is also an alternative reality, in which another version of himself is living in the house he takes to be his own. And in a story called "Needle in a Timestack" (1983) I devised a 21st-century society in which time machines are as ubiquitous as cell phones and people are constantly scrambling other people's lives by making changes in their pasts.

My most elaborate venture into alternative reality, though, is the novel Roma Eterna (2003), which portrays, in ten sections spanning fifteen hundred years, a world in which the Roman Empire never fell apart, and is still -- in greatly altered form -- ruling the world in the twentieth century. The best way I know to show you how such visions of alternative reality are created is to describe, step by step, the process by which I constructed that book. What was the key factor, I asked myself, in the collapse of Imperial Rome? Isolate that factor, remove it from history, and, at least for the purposes of my story, Rome would withstand all challenge and survive through the ages.

I had been reading, just then, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, the classic work of the eighteenth-century historian Edward Gibbon. It was Gibbon's thesis that the rise of Christianity, adopted as the official state religion by the fourth-century Roman Emperor Constantine, set in motion the forces that caused the crumbling of Roman power. There were other factors as well, of course -- the encroachment of barbarian tribes on the Roman borders, for example, and Rome's catastrophic decision to enlist barbarian troops in its own armies -- but Gibbon saw Christianity as a poisonous creed, preoccupied with sterile theological debate and focused on hypothetical rewards in a future existence in a supernatural world at the expense of a practical concentration on the problems of life in the here and now, and he felt that its spread had dealt the Empire its death-blow. "I have described the triumph of barbarism and religion," he said toward the end of his immense book, a famous sentence succinctly encapsulating his analysis of the Empire's decay.

Even when we look at science fiction

Then there are the novels that are spun entirely, or almost entirely, out of the writer's imagination: Thomas Mann's Confessions of Felix Krull, say, or William Faulkner's Sanctuary, or Franz Kafka's The Trial, or Graham Greene's The Power and the Glory. These are books about invented people and situations, in no way autobiographical except, perhaps, in the most
far-fetched metaphorical sense. Mann was never a slippery rogue of a con man; Faulkner was never a sinister gangster given to creepy sexual practices; Kafka was never suddenly placed under arrest and put on trial before a tribunal of unknown makeup and jurisdiction; Greene was never an
alcoholic Mexican priest. Like all writers, they drew on certain aspects of themselves, however transformed, distorted, inverted, to create these characters and situations. But those characters are very different from the writers who invented them, and what the writers are providing in their
books is depictions of realities that never existed, alternative realities that we find convincing and plausible because of the skill of their inventors.

What makes these books convincing is that the invented aspect of reality, the fictional dimension (Felix Krull's roguery, Faulkner's gangster's creepiness) is embedded in as careful a representation of existing reality, the actual quotidian world, as the writer could create. Note that I say a representation of reality. The desk in front of me as I write this has very solid reality. It's big and bulky, and when I slap it with my hand it responds with a loud noise, and its middle drawer contains real postage stamps, paper clips, and staples. I could write long paragraphs about my
desk, its shape, its color, the scars that time has inflicted on it, but no matter how eloquent those paragraphs were, they wouldn't constitute a desk. They'd just be clumps of words describing a desk. If I were to paint the most cunning depiction of my desk that was possible to paint, a dazzling trompe-l'oeil simulation, it would still be only a thing of two dimensions made out of pigment and canvas, useless for holding paper clips. Similarly, a map of California isn't California. A photo of Marilyn Monroe isn't Marilyn Monroe. Novelists try to construct, out of words alone, convincing imitations of the world about them, against which they set their invented
characters and let them move through the invented situations of their plots. The novel itself isn't the world about the novelist; it's a verbal recreation of it, what the semanticists used to call a first-order abstraction. Putting imaginary characters and imaginary plot situations into it jumps us up into a second level of abstraction, the alternative reality that all fiction, however grittily realistic it pretends to be, is delivering.

Even when we look at science fiction -- and we should, about this time, because science fiction is the subject on which I'm best qualified to discourse -- we find ourselves, usually, only one further level of abstraction up from the "realistic" novel, even though science fiction is commonly thought to be fiction about worlds that don't exist.

Milo sighed silently

Milo disliked Major Jay Jarvis from first laying eyes upon him. The man was
short, skinny and pasty-white, save for his petulant, liver-colored lips, a
multitude of facial pimples and muddy-brown eyes. He was of early middle years,
balding and had chewed his nails to the quick, and his class-A uniform hung on
his bony figure like a sack. His hands never stayed still for an instant, always
playing with one of the profusion of stiletto-sharp pencils, a cold pipe which
had strewn ashes from end to end of the GI desk, a stack of manuals and
pamphlets, a higher stack of assorted papers and personnel files, the knot of
his tie or the soggy handkerchief with which he dabbed at a dripping beak of a
nose.

When Milo had been coldly ushered into the office by the armed second lieutenant
and buck sergeant who had escorted him here from B Company, the door had been
closed梐nd locked梑ehind him, leaving him to salute and report to this strange
officer.

The major looked up at him, but would not look him in the eyes. "Sprechen Sie
DeutschP" he demanded in an atrocious accent.

"]a, Herr Major. Ich spreche Deutsch," he replied aloud, adding, to himself,
"And one hell of a lot better than you do, you sourpussed bastard."

"You speak it well, too," said the officer grudgingly. "As well as a native, I'd
say. Moray, you're being considered for a commission, but we need to know more
about you, more than this"梙e flicked a personnel file

104

nooen fiaujris

with the nailless fingers of one soft hand?so-called 201 file of yours gives
us. Where did you learn your German, Moray?"

Milo sighed silently. Here it starts again after all this time. "Sir, I don't
know how or when or where I learned any of the languages I speak. I have been an
amnesiac since the mid-thirties. My very earliest memory is of waking up in a
hospital in Chicago, having been found clubbed down and robbed in an alley."

You can send for the

At Pat's suggestion, Milo packed only his razor and a few toiletries, a few
days' worth of underwear and socks, a couple of shirts and a few books. As an
afterthought, the old soldier suggested adding the fine, strong padlock from off
the moneybox chain, saying that such would be useful for the securing of issue
lockers in the barracks. Milo threw in a wad of handkerchiefs, then closed and
locked the thick briefcase which was the sole piece of luggage of any
description he owned.

It was while he was packing that Rosaleen bore up the stairs to his room a
picnic basket packed well-nigh to bursting with food "for your journey, love."

Reopening the briefcase, he managed to make room for but three of the thick
sandwiches. But then Rosaleen took over, emptied the case and repacked it so
competently that she was able to add two more sandwiches, a slab of

cheese and a half-dozen hard-boiled eggs, a small jar of pickles and a brace of
red apples.

"Do you have a pocket knife?" inquired Pat. When Milo shook his head, the old
man dug deep into his pants pocket and brought out an old, worn, but razor-edged
Barlow. "A soldier needs him a good knife, Milo; I don't, I can't even see good
enough to whittle no more. Mrs. O'Shea, she'll be damn glad I give it to you,
she's plumb sick and tired of fixin' up my cut fingers as it is.

"I'll pack up the resta your clothes and things, Milo, and put them in a old
cedar chest is up in the attic with some mothballs, too. You can send for them
whenever you wants them, see."

"No, Pat, thank you, but no," Milo told him. "Sell them for whatever you can, or
give them away. One thing, though. Rosaleen, can you find me a legal-sized
envelope and a sheet of blank paper?"

After a long pause

Finally, he went to PatO'Shea. The old soldier showed his teeth in a grimace
that was as close as he could any longer come to a real smile. Then he sobered
and said bluntly, "Milo, time was when I felt just like you do, but I knows
different, now; indeed I do. If I hadn't had my Maggie when I come home like I
am from the war, God alone knows what would've become of me. And a man never
knows whatall is going to happen to him, Milo, peace or war, day or night, one
minute to the next, so I say when you got the chance to get hitched up to a
good, strong woman like that, even if looks ain't her best suit, do it afore she
changes her mind. Marry her, Miio."

After a long pause, he added, "But if you really are dead set against the
institution of marriage in gen'rul and you want to get somewheres where she
can't come after you and fetch you back to the altar, let me know and I'll have
you enlisted in the Army and on a train out of Illinois in two shakes of a
lamb's tail."

Chapter III

On the 12th of August, Maggie O'Shea received a telegram the receipt of which
was to change the course of Milo's life for good and all. Taking both of her
daughters out of nursing school, she and they hurriedly packed and entrained for
Boston, Massachusetts, and the bedside of her last living relative, a deathly
ill aunt. Pat O'Shea, who studiously avoided any public appearance at which he
could not hide his hideously disfigured face, stayed behind.

Irunn had been badgering Milo for weeks concerning just exactly when he would
accompany her to Wisconsin to meet her family梐nd, he was certain, while there,
be maneuvered into asking for her hand ... or at least give the appearance of
having so done. He had been elusive and vague at best, blaming heavy commitments
in his work, which was no lie, the recent volume of Western and Central European
periodicals having so increased that he now lacked the time at the library to
get very much of his history and current-events reading done, spending whole
days from opening to closing of the facility translating and writing out the
articles in American English. With the swollen volume and a limited budget, the
per-word rate had had to be halved, but still Milo was assured of a very good,
well-stuffed envelope each week.