Short Stories

  BLACK TULIP

  Harry Turtledove

  Harry Turtledove who has taught ancient and medieval history at Cat State Fullerton, Cal State LA., and UCLA, and has a Ph.D. in Byzantine history has been called the standard-bearer for alternate history, and that's certainly true; his amazing novels, including The Guns of the South (American Civil War), The Great War: American Front (World War I), and the Worldwar tetralogy (World War II) have transformed, with their bravura storytelling and sheer joy in detail, our understanding of the term. His short stories are as richly realized as his novels; when Harry first described what he was going to do with Black Tulip, I knew that I was in for a ride as good as his novels.

  Sergei's father was a druggist in Tambov, maybe four hundred kilometers south and east of Moscow. Filling prescriptions looked pretty good to Sergei. You didn't have to work too hard. You didn't have to think too hard. You could get your hands on medicines from the West, medicines that really worked, not just the Soviet crap. And you could rake in plenty on the left from your customers, because they wanted the stuff that really worked, too. So pharmacy school, then a soft job till pension time. Sergei had it all figured out. First, though, his hitch in the Red Army. He was a sunny kid when he got drafted, always looking on the bright side of things. He didn't think they could possibly ship his ass to Afghanistan. Even after they did, he didn't think they could possibly ship him to Bamian Province. Life is full of surprises, even maybe especially for a sunny kid from a provincial town where nothing much ever happens.

  Abdul Satar Ahmedi's father was a druggist, too, in Bulola, a village of no particular name or fame not far east of the town of Bamian. Satar had also planned to follow in his father's footsteps, mostly because that was what a good son did. Sometimes the drugs his father dispensed helped the patient. Sometimes they didn't. Either way, it was the will of God, the Compassionate, the Merciful. Satar was twenty he thought he was twenty, though he might have been nineteen or twenty-one when the godless Russians poured into his country. They seized the bigger towns and pushed out along the roads from one to another. Bamian was one of the places where their tanks and personnel carriers and helicopters came to roost. One of the roads they wanted ran through Bulola. On the day the first truck convoy full of infidel soldiers rumbled through the village, Satar's father dug up an ancient but carefully greased Enfield rifle. He thrust it at the younger man, saying, My grandfather fought the British infidels with this piece. Take it and do to the atheists what they did to the soldiers of the Queen. Yes, Father, Satar said, as a good son should. Before long, he carried a Kalashnikov in place of the ancient Enfield. Before long, he marched with the men of Sayid Jaglan, who had been a major in the Kabul puppet regime before choosing to fight for God and freedom instead. Being a druggist's son, he served as a medic. He was too ignorant to make a good medic, but he knew more than most, so he had to try. He wished he knew more still; he'd had to watch men die because he didn't know enough. The will of God, yes, of course, but accepting it came hard.

  The dragon? The dragon had lived in the valley for time out of mind before Islam came to Afghanistan. Most of those centuries, it had slept, as dragons do. But when it woke oh, when it woke . . .

  Sergei looked out over the Afghan countryside and shook his head in slow wonder. He'd been raised in country as flat as if it were ironed. The Bulola perimeter wasn't anything like that. The valley in which this miserable village sat was high enough to make his heart pound when he moved quickly. And the mountains went up from there, dun and gray and red and jagged and here and there streaked with snow. When he remarked on how different the landscape looked, his squadmates in the trench laughed at him. Screw the scenery, Vladimir said. Fucking Intourist didn't bring you here. Keep your eye peeled for dukhi. You may not see them, but sure as shit they see you. Ghosts, Sergei repeated, and shook his head again. We shouldn't have started calling them that. Why not? Vladimir was a few months older than he, and endlessly cynical. You usually don't see 'em till it's too damn late. But they're real. They're alive, Sergei protested. They're trying to make us into ghosts. A noise. None of them knew what had made it. The instant they heard it, their AK's all lifted a few centimeters. Then they identified the distant, growing rumble in the air for what it was. Bumblebee, Fyodor said. He had the best ears of any of them, and he liked to hear himself talk. But he was right. Sergei spotted the speck in the sky. I like having helicopter gunships around, he said. They make me think my life-insurance policy's paid up. Not even Vladimir argued with that. The Mi-24 roared past overhead, red stars bright against camouflage paint. Then, like a dog coming to point, it stopped and hovered. It didn't look like a bumblebee to Sergei. It put him in mind of a polliwog, like the ones he'd see in the creeks outside of Tambov in the springtime. Come to think of it, they were camouflage-colored, too, to keep fish and birds from eating them. But the gunship had a sting any bee would have envied. It let loose .with the rocket pods it carried under its stubby wings, and with the four-barrel Gatling in its nose. Even from a couple of kilometers away, the noise was terrific. So was the fireworks display. The Soviet soldiers whooped and cheered. Explosions pocked the mountainside. Fire and smoke leaped upward. Deadly as a shark, ponderous as a whale, the Mi-24 heeled in the air and went on its way. Some bandits there, with a little luck, Sergei said. Pilot must've spotted something juicy. Or thought he did, Vladimir answered. Liable just to be mountain-goat tartare now. Watch the villagers, Fyodor said. They'll let us know if that bumblebee really stung anything. You're smart, Sergei said admiringly. If I was fucking smart, would I fucking be here? Fyodor returned, and his squadmates laughed. He added, I've been here too fucking long, that's all. I know all kinds of things I never wanted to find out. Sergei turned and looked back over his shoulder. The men in the village were staring at the shattered mountainside and muttering among themselves in their incomprehensible language. In their turbans and robes some white, some mud brown they looked oddly alike to him. They all had long hawk faces and wore beards. Some of the beards were black, some gray, a very few white. That was his chief clue they'd been stamped from the mold at different times. Women? Sergei shook his head. He'd never seen a woman's face here. Bulola wasn't the sort of village where women shed their veils in conformance to the revolutionary sentiments of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan. It was the sort of place when women thought letting you see a nose was as bad as letting you see a pussy. Places like this, girls who went to coed schools got murdered when they came home. It hadn't happened right here he didn't think Bulola had ever had coed schools but it had happened in the countryside. He gauged the mutters. He couldn't understand them, but he could make guesses from the tone. I think we hit 'em a pretty good lick, he said. Vladimir nodded. I think you're right. Another ten billion more, and we've won the fucking war. Or maybe twenty billion. Who the fuck knows?

  Satar huddled in a little hole he'd scraped in the dirt behind a big reddish boulder. He made himself as small as he could, to give the flying bullets and chunks of shrapnel the least chance of tearing his tender flesh. If it is God's will, it is God's will, he thought. But if it wasn't God's will, he didn't want to make things any easier for the infidels than he had to. Under him, the ground quivered as if in pain as another salvo of Soviet rockets slammed home. Satar hated helicopter gunships with a fierce and bitter passion. He had nothing but contempt for the Afghan soldiers who fought on the side of the atheists. Some Russian ground soldiers were stupid as sheep, and as helpless outside their tanks and personnel carriers as a turtle outside its shell. Others were very good, as good as any mujahideen. You never could tell. Sometimes you got a nasty surprise instead of giving one. But helicopters . . . What he hated most about helicopters was that he couldn't hit back. They hung in the air an
d dealt out death, and all you could do if they spotted you was take it. Oh, every once in a while the mujahideen got lucky with a heavy machine gun or an RPG-7 and knocked down one of Shaitan's machines, but only once in a while. Satar had heard the Americans were going to start sending Stinger antiaircraft missiles up to the mujahideen from Pakistan. The Americans were infidels, too, of course, but they hated the Russians. The enemy of my enemy... In world politics as in tribal feuds, the enemy of one's enemy was a handy fellow to know. And the Stinger was supposed to be very good. At the moment, though, Satar and his band were getting stung, not stinging. The gunship seemed to have all the ammunition in the world. Hadn't it been hovering above them for hours, hurling hellfire down on their heads? Another explosion, and somebody not far away started screaming. Satar cursed the Soviets and his comrade, for that meant he couldn't huddle in the shelter of the boulder anymore. Grabbing his sad little medicine kit, he scrambled toward the wounded mujahid. The man clutched his leg and moaned. Blood darkened the wool of his robe. Easy, Abdul Rahim, easy, Satar said. I have morphine, to take away the pain.

  Quickly, then, in the name of God, Abdul Rahim got out between moans. It is broken; I am sure of it. Cursing softly, Satar fumbled in the kit for a syringe. What did a druggist's son know of setting broken bones? Satar knew far more than he had; experience made a harsh teacher, but a good one. He looked around for sticks to use as splints and cursed again. Where on a bare stone mountainside would he find such sticks? He was just taking the cover from the needle when a wet slapping sound came from Abdul Rahim. The mujahid's cries suddenly stopped. When Satar turned back toward him, he knew what he would find, and he did. One of the bullets from the gunship's Gatling had struck home. Abdul Rahim's eyes still stared up at the sky, but they were forever blind now. A martyr who falls in the holy war against the infidel is sure of Paradise, Satar thought. He grabbed the dead man's Kalashnikov and his banana clips before scuttling back into shelter. At last, after what seemed like forever, the helicopter gunship roared away. Satar waited for the order that would send the mujahideen roaring down on the Shuravi the Soviets in his home village. But Sayid Jaglan's captain called, We have taken too much hurt. We will fall back now and strike them another time. Satar cursed again, but in his belly, in his stones, he knew the captain was wise. The Russians down there would surely be alert and waiting. My father, I will return, Satar thought as he turned away from Bulola. And when I do, the village will be freed.

  The dragon dreamt. Even that was out of the ordinary; in its agelong sleep, it was rarely aware or alert enough to dream. It saw, or thought it saw, men with swords, men with spears. One of them, from out of the west, was a little blond fellow in a gilded corselet and crested helm. The dragon made as if to call out to him, for in him it recognized its match: like knows like. But the little man did not answer the call as one coming in friendship should. Instead, he drew his sword and plunged it into the dragon's flank. It hurt much more than anything in a dream had any business doing. The dragon shifted restlessly. After a while, the pain eased, but the dragon's sleep wasn't so deep as it had been. It dreamt no more, not then, but dreams lay not so far above the surface of that slumber.

  Under Sergei's feet, the ground quivered. A pebble leaped out of the side of the entrenchment and bounced off his boot. What was that? he said. The stinking dukhi set off a charge somewhere? His sergeant laughed, showing steel teeth. Krikor was an Armenian. With his long face and big nose and black hair and eyes, he looked more like the dukhi himself than like a Russian. That wasn't the ghosts, he said. That was an earthquake. Just a little one, thank God. An earthquake? That hadn't even crossed Sergei's mind. He, too laughed nervously. Don't have those in Tambov you'd better believe it. They do down in the Caucasus, Sergeant Krikor said. Big ones are real bastards, too. Yerevan'll get hit one of these days. Half of it'll fall down, too mark my words. All the builders cheat like maniacs, the fuckers. Too much sand in the concrete, not enough steel rebar. Easier to pocket the difference, you know? He made as if to count bills and put them in his wallet. It's like that everywhere, Sergei said. 'I serve the Soviet Union!' He put a sardonic spin on the phrase that had probably meant something in the days when his grandfather was young. Sergeant Krikor's heavy eyebrows came down and together in a frown. Yeah, but who gives a shit in Tambov? So buildings fall apart faster than they ought to. So what? But if an earthquake hits a big one, I mean they don't just fall apart. They fall down. I guess. Sergei wasn't about to argue with the sergeant. Krikor was a conscript like him, but a conscript near the end of his term, not near the beginning. That, even more than his rank, made the Armenian one of the top dogs. Changing the subject, Sergei said, We hit the bandits pretty hard earlier today. He tried to forget Vladimir's comment. Ten billion times more? Twenty billion? Bozhemoi! Krikor frowned again, in a subtly different way. Listen, kid, do you still believe all the internationalist crap they fed you before they shipped your worthless ass here to Afghan? He gave the country its universal name among the soldiers of the Red Army. Well . . . no, Sergei said. They went on and on about the revolutionary unity of the People's Democratic Party of Afghanistan and the friendship to the Soviet Union of the Afghan people and everybody who's been here more than twenty minutes knows the PDPA's got more factions than it has members, and they all hate each other's guts, and all the Afghans hate Russians. Good. You're not an idiot not quite an idiot, I mean. Sergeant Krikor murmured something in a language that wasn't Russian: Shuravi! Shuravi! Marg, marg, marg! For a moment, Sergei thought that was Armenian. Then he realized he'd heard it here in Afghanistan a couple-three times. What's it mean? he asked. 'Soviets! Soviets! Death, death, death!' Krikor translated with somber relish. He waited for Sergei to take that in, then went on, So I really don't give a shit about how hard we hit the ghosts, you know what I mean? All I want to do is get my time in and get back to the world in one piece, all right? Long as I don't fly home in a black tulip, that's all I care about. Makes sense to me, Sergei agreed quickly. He didn't want to fly out of Kabul in one of the planes that carried corpses back to the USSR, either. Okay, kid. Krikor thumped him on the shoulder, hard enough to stagger him. Keep your head down, keep your eyes open, and help your buddies. Odds are, we'll both get through. The ground shook again, but not so hard this time.

  Allahu akbar! The long, drawn-out chant of the muezzin pulled Satar awake. He yawned and stretched on the ground in the courtyard of a mud house a Russian bomb had shattered. Ten or twelve other mujahideen lay there with him. One by one, they got to their feet and am-bled over to a basin of water, where they washed their hands and faces, their feet and their privates. Satar gasped as he splashed his cheeks with the water. It was bitterly cold. A pink glow in the east said sunrise was coming soon. God is great! the muezzin repeated. He stood on the roof of another ruined house and called out to the faithful: I bear witness, there is no God but God! I bear witness, Muhammad is the prophet of God! Come quick to prayer! Come quick to success! Prayer is better than sleep! God is great! There is no God but the one true God! The fighters spread blankets on the dirt of the courtyard. This was no mosque with a proper qibla, but they knew in which direction Mecca lay- They bent, shoulder to shoulder, and went through morning prayers together. After praying, Satar ate unleavened bread and drank tea thick with sugar and fragrant with mint. He had never been a fat man; he'd grown thinner since joining the mujahideen. The godless infidels and their puppets held the richest parts of the countryside. But villagers were generous in sharing what they had and some of what was grown and made in occupied parts of the country reached the fighters in the holy war through one irregular channel or another. A couple of boys of about six strutted by, both of them carrying crude wooden toy Kalashnikovs. One dived behind some rubble. The other stalked him as carefully as if their assault rifles were real. When the time came for them to take up such weapons, they would be ready. Another boy, perhaps thirteen, had a real Kalashnikov on his back. He'd been playing with toy firearms when the Russians invaded A
fghanistan. Now he was old enough to fight for God on his own. Boys like that were useful, especially as scouts the Shuravi weren't always so wary of them as they were with grown men. Something glinted in the early-morning sun: a boy of perhaps eight carried what looked like a plastic pen even more proudly than the other children bore their Kalashnikovs, pretend and real. Assault rifles were commonplace, pens something out of the ordinary, something special. Hey, sonny, Satar called through lips all at once numb with fear. The boy looked at him. He nodded encouragingly. Yes, you that's right. Put your pen on the ground and walk away from it. What? Plainly, the youngster thought he was crazy. Why should I? If he'd had a rifle, Satar would have had to look to his life. I'll tell you why: because I think it's a Russian mine. If you fiddle with it, it will blow off your hand. The boy very visibly thought that over. Satar could read his mind. Is this mujahid trying to steal my wonderful toy? Maybe the worry on Satar's face got through to him, because he did set the pen in the dirt. But when he walked away, he kept looking back over his shoulder at it. With a sigh of relief, Satar murmured, Truly there is no God but God. Truly, someone behind him agreed. He turned. There stood Sayid Jaglan. The commander went on, That is a mine I am sure of it. Pens are bad. I was afraid he would take off the cap and detonate it. Pens are bad, but the ones that look like butterflies are worse. Any child, no matter how small, will play with those. And then be blown to pieces, Satar said bitterly. Oh, no, not to pieces. Sayid Jaglan shook his head. He was about forty, not very tall, his pointed beard just beginning to show frost. He had a scar on his forehead that stopped a centimeter or so above his right eye. They're made to maim, not to kill. The Russians calculate we have to work harder to care for the wounded than to bury the dead. Satar pondered that. A calculation straight from the heart of Shai-tan, he said at last. Yes, but sound doctrine even so. Sometimes the officer Sayid Jaglan had been showed through under the chieftain of mujahideen he was. You did well to persuade the boy to get rid of that one. Taking off the cap activates it? Satar asked. Sayid Jaglan nodded. Satar went over and picked up the pen and set it on top of a battered wall, out of reach of children. If he was afraid of doing it, he didn't show his fear, or even acknowledge it to himself. All he said was, We should be able to salvage the explosive from it. Yes. Sayid Jaglan nodded again. You were a little soft when you joined us, Satar who would have expected anything different from a druggist's son? You never followed the herds or tried to scratch a living from the fields. But you've done well. You have more wit than God gave most men, and your heart was always strong. Now your body matches your spirit's strength. Satar didn't show how much the compliment pleased him, either. That was not the Afghan way. Gruffly, he replied, If it is God's will, it will be accomplished. Yes. Sayid Jaglan looked down the valley, in the direction of Bulola. And I think it is God's will that we soon reclaim your home village from the atheist Shuravi. May it be so, Satar said. I have not sat beside my father for far too long.