Worlds That Weren't

“Just that I’m glad to have met you. Met you both,” he said. “In India, it’s customary to give gifts to friends on their wedding. I understand that’s in order?”

He called, and Ranjit Singh came up with a long rosewood chest strapped with brass and opened it. A double-barreled hunting rifle lay within.

Robre nodded, grinning as he took the weapon and broke the action open with competent hands; he’d received the single-shot weapon as pay from Banerjii, but this new treasure was pure delight. Sonjuh smiled at last, as well.

“Well,” King went on, “for the bride, I could have given a cradle…or a spinning wheel…” The smile on the girl’s face was turning to a frown. “But since it looks like you’ll be having other work to do first-”

Another case-this held a lighter weapon, the cavalry-carbine version of the Martini-Metford rifle. She mumbled thanks, blushing a little, then laughed out loud as King solemnly presented Slasher with a meaty ham-bone; the dog looked up at his mistress for permission, then graciously accepted it.

The Imperial and the clansman shook hands, hands equally callused by rein and rope, sword-hilt and tomahawk.

“Good-bye, and good luck in your war,” King went on. “I hope you exterminate the brutes.”

“So do I, Jefe,” Robre said. “But I doubt it. They’re a mighty lot of ’em, the swamps are big, ’n’ they can fight. Fight even harder in their home-runs, I suppose.”

“In the end, you’ll beat them,” King said. “You’re more civilized, and the civilized always win in the end, barring something like the Fall.”

Robre looked around at the gunboat, frowning slightly at a thought. “Could be you’re right,” he said. “Time will tell.”

The slight frown was still on his face when he stood on the bank and watched the smooth passage of the Queen-Empress Victoria II downstream. Then he turned to the girl beside him and met her smile with his own.

WHY THEN, THERE

Alternate history has many uses. One of them is to revive literary worlds that time has rendered otherwise inaccessible to us. Writers like Edgar Rice Burroughs or A.A. Merritt could, with some small degree of initial plausibility, litter the remoter sections of the world with lost races and lost cities; their models, writing a generation earlier, had a broader canvas to work with, as exploration wasn’t nearly so complete.

By the 1930s, Burroughs was taking his heroes to other planets and to a putative world within the hollow core of ours, and the last lost races were tribes in the interior of New Guinea. Even Mars and Venus were taken from us a little later, their six-armed green men, canals, and dinosaurs replaced with a boring snowball of rust and a sulphuric-acid hell…although alternatives to that are another story, one which I hope to tell someday.

Likewise, the supply of exploits available to a dashing young cavalry officer became sadly limited after 1914. Being machine-gunned at the Somme just isn’t up to the standards of the sort of exploit conveyed by Kipling, Henty, or (in nonfiction) the young Winston Churchill, who participated in one of the last quasi-successful charges by British lancers in 1898, against the Mahdists at Omdurman. Dervish fanatics tend to use plastique these days, rather than swords. Pirates are rather ho-hum Third World extortionists and sneak thieves, rather than characters like Henry Morgan-who was sent home in chains and ended up as governor of Jamaica, after a private audience with Charles II!

In short, by the second decade of the last century the gorgeous, multicolored, infinite-possibility world that opened up with the great voyages of discovery of the sixteenth century was coming to an end. So was the fictional penumbra that accompanied, mirrored, and even inspired it-for the Spanish conquistadors were themselves quite consciously emulating the feats of literary heroes, of the knights of the Chanson du Roland or the fantastic adventures of Amadis of Gaul.

From a literary point of view, this was a terrible misfortune. It’s often forgotten in these degenerate times how close to the world of the pulp adventurers the real world could be in those days.

Allan Quatermain, of H. Rider Haggard’s She and King Solomon’s Mines, was based fairly closely (fantasy elements like immortal princesses aside) on the exploits of Frederick Selous, explorer and frontiersman.

What writer could come up unaided with a character like Richard Francis Burton, the devilish, swashbuckling swordsman-adventurer who fought wild Somalis saber-to-spear, once escaped certain death on an African safari when he ran six miles with a spear through his face, snuck into at least two “forbidden” cities (Mecca and Medina) in native disguise, and translated the Thousand and One Nights to boot, after writing a firsthand account of the red-light district of Karachi?