Short Stories Read online

  “Good question. If there are no more questions, class dismissed,” says the man who played Rosencrantz.

  “Proof is left to the student. That’s what the old geometry books said, right?” adds the fellow who played Guildenstern. Maybe the responses mean something to them. Or maybe they truly are as witstruck by the strange fate that has entrapped them as were the characters they portrayed.

  “We were in London,” the young woman says. “And then we were in . . . London.” She says the same name twice. By the way she says it, the second London—this London—may lie beyond the sphere of the fixed stars, or whatever is farther away than that, from the one she knows.

  “When will you return thither?” Shakespeare asks.

  The players eye one another. Now they all shrug together. “We don’t know,” says the graybeard who played Claudius. On the stage, he effortlessly ordered Guildenstern and Rosencrantz about. Now he is as much out of his depth as they feigned being.

  Which leads Shakespeare to his next question, as inexorably as Hamlet’s disappearance led Guildenstern to open the fatal letter: “Will you return thither?”

  They look at one another again. They also look at Shakespeare—as if they hate him. And if they do, who can blame them? Are some questions not better left unfaced? “We don’t know,” the graybeard says once more, in a voice like ashes.

  “If we don’t know what happened to us, how are we supposed to know what’s going to happen to us?” The player who performed as Rosencrantz might have lifted his line from the play. He might have, but he hasn’t.

  “How will you live whilst here?” Shakespeare comes out with another natural question.

  “We’re actors.” Yes, that is the man who played the spokesman. And yes, that is a line from the play. But, Shakespeare realizes, it is also an answer. The man continues, “We’ve got stuff we can do. We won’t starve—any more than actors always starve, I mean.”

  “Ah, sadness! woe! that it should be so in your strange London, even as it is here,” Shakespeare says.

  “Listen, man, if there are actors in heaven—fat chance, yeah, but like I say, if—they’re starving there, too. Bet your sweet ass they are.” The player who was Guildenstern speaks with complete assurance.

  Still so many things to wonder at! Shakespeare scarce knows—knows not—where to begin. The best he can do is, “What is it like in, in your London?”

  Yet again, the players look at one another. This time, Shakespeare understands their glances at a glance. Let them tell him, and tell him true, and he will grasp even less than they do of his city.

  But then the woman who was Gertrude speaks for the first time. And she too beyond doubt is a woman, not so young and fresh as the company’s Ophelia, but no crone, either. She has teeth marvelously clean and white. Everyone in the company seems to.

  “It is full of noises,” she says softly.

  Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight, and hurt not.

  Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

  Will hum about mine ears; and sometimes voices,

  That, if I then had wak’d after long sleep,

  Will make me sleep again.

  “Holy crap, Jessica! What a showoff!” the spokesman says.

  “Teacher’s pet!” the player who was Guildenstern puts in.

  Shakespeare takes no notice of them, but bows to her. He has more of an answer than he thought he would get. And . . . “Those are not the worst of verses. Whose, if I may make bold to ask?”

  Coming up to him, she takes his hands in hers. “Why, they are yours, Master Shakespeare.”

  With regret, he shakes his head. “Never sprang they from my pen.”

  She leans forward to kiss him gently on the cheek. They are very much of a height. Her breath is sweet—how not, with those perfect teeth? “Never yet,” she whispers, and slips away.

  And that, at last, is altogether too much for Shakespeare’s ravished senses. He flees the tiring room, stumbling in his haste to get away. “Cast you forth, did they?” Ned says, rough sympathy in his voice. Shakespeare gives back not a word. Will he write those lines because Gertrude—no, Jessica—gave him them? Would he have written them had he never set eyes on her? Will he not write them now because she gave them, and in the giving somehow spoiled them?

  Questions. Always questions. Answers? How do I know? We haven’t got there yet. Christ, how he pities Rosencrantz and Guildenstern!

  * * *

  Can he stay away from the Rose? That question he answers on the morrow: he cannot, and scarcely tries. The lure of the lost company from that other London is too great. Can nails resist a lodestone? Not even if their ship falls to pieces because they fly from it.

  When he comes up, the signboard says they are giving something new. He nods to himself. Any company will offer a variety of its wares.

  He sets a penny in the moneytaker’s palm and goes in with the groundlings. A fresh curiosity kindles. Who is this Godot, and why is someone waiting for him?

  Copyright © 2009 Harry Turtledove

  Vilcabamba

  Harry Turtledove

  illustration by Jason Chan

  The President of the United States looked out of an Oval Office window at Grand Junction, Colorado. The Oval Office was square, but the President’s workplace kept its traditional name. Harris Moffatt III sighed and bent to his paperwork again. Even in Grand Junction, that never disappeared.

  Washington, D.C., remained the de jure capital of the United States. Harris Moffatt III had never been there. Neither had his father, President Harris Moffatt II. His grandfather, President Harris Moffatt I, got out of Washington one jump ahead of the Krolp. That the USA was still any kind of going concern came from his ever-so-narrow escape.

  Harris Moffatt III was also Prime Minister of Canada, or of that small and mountainous chunk of Canada the Krolp didn’t control. The two countries had amalgamated early on, the better to resist the invading aliens. That, of course, was before they realized how far out of their weight they were fighting.

  When the enormous ships were first detected, between Mars’ orbit and Earth’s, every nation radioed messages of welcome and greeting. The Krolp ignored them all. The enormous ships landed. There were still videos--Harris Moffatt III had them on his computer--of human delegations greeting the aliens with bouquets and bands playing joyful music. At last! Contact with another intelligent race! Proof we weren’t alone in the universe!

  “Better if we were,” the President muttered. When the Krolp came out, they came out shooting. Some of those fifty-year-old videos broke off quite abruptly. And “shooting” was the understatement of the millennium. Their weapons made ours seem like kids’ slingshots against machine guns.

  Seeing how the Krolp wanted things to go, half a dozen militaries launched H-bomb-tipped missiles at the great ships. They couldn’t live through that, could they? As a matter of fact, they could. Most of the missiles got shot down. Most of the ones that did land on target didn’t go off. And the handful that did harmed the Krolpish ships not a bit and the rampaging, plundering aliens running around loose very little.

  They weren’t invulnerable. Humans could kill them. Unless somebody got amazingly lucky, the usual cost was about two armored divisions and all their matériel for one Krolp. Back in the old days, the United States was the richest country in the world. All the pre-Krolp books said so. Not even it could spend men and equipment on that scale.

  Back before the Krolp came, a fellow named Clarke had written, Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know about that. What the Krolp did wasn’t magic. The best scientists in the USA--the best ones left alive, anyhow--had been studying captured or stolen Krolpish gadgets for half a century now. Their conclusion was that the aliens manipulated gravity and the strong and weak forces as thoroughly as humans exploited electromagnetism.

  Humans could use Krolpish devices and weapons. They could even use them against the inva
ders, for as long as they kept working. What humans couldn’t do was make more such devices themselves. The machines weren’t there. Neither was the theory. And neither was the engineering to turn theory into practice.

  And so Harris Moffatt III ruled an attenuated state between the Rockies and the Wasatch Range. He understood too well that he ruled here not least because the Krolp hadn’t yet taken the trouble to overrun this rump USA (and Canada).

  From everything he’d heard, the United States still was the richest country in the world. The richest human-ruled country, anyhow. And if that wasn’t a telling measure of mankind’s futility in the face of the aliens, Harris Moffatt III was damned if he could figure out what would be.

  • • •

  His appointments secretary stuck his head into the Oval Office. “Excuse me, Mr. President, but Grelch wants to see you.”

  “Tell him I’ll be with him in a few minutes, Jack,” Moffatt said. “I really do need to study this appropriations bill.” Calling the economy in the independent USA rotten would have praised it too much. So would calling it hand-to-mouth. Robbing Peter to pay Paul came closest, except Paul mostly got an IOU instead.

  Jack Pagliarone turned to pass the news on to Grelch--but Grelch didn’t wait to hear it. The Krolp shoved past the appointments secretary and into the office. “I see you, Moffatt,” he said--loudly--in his own language.

  “I see you, Grelch,” Harris Moffatt III answered--resignedly--also in Krolpish. There was a lot of Grelch to see. He was big as a horse: bigger, because he was a tiger-striped centauroid with a head like a vampire jack-o’-lantern. He had sharp, jagged jaw edges--they weren’t exactly teeth, but they might as well have been--and enormous eyes that glowed like a cat’s. He smelled more like Limburger cheese than anything else.

  “I have some things to tell you, Moffatt,” he declared. No titles of respect: the Krolp had them for one another, but rarely wasted them on humans.

  “I listen,” the President said, more resignedly yet, wondering what Grelch would want this time. He was bound to want something, and he’d make trouble if he didn’t get whatever it was.

  Not for the first time, Harris Moffatt III wondered what Grelch had done to be forced to flee to Grand Junction. A dozen or so alien renegades lived here. Humans had learned a lot from them, and from their predecessors. But they were deadly dangerous. They were Krolp, and had Krolpish defenses and Krolpish weapons. And they were almost all of them sons of bitches even by Krolpish standards. No alien who hadn’t done something awful to his own kind would have to stoop so low as to live with humans.

  “I need snarfar, Moffatt. You’ve got to get me snarfar,” Grelch said.

  “I can do that, Grelch.” The President tried to hide his relief. Some Krolp chewed snarfar. It gave them a buzz, the way nicotine or maybe cocaine did for humans. Harris Moffatt III didn’t know the details; snarfar poisoned people. He did know the aliens turned mean--well, meaner--when they couldn’t get the stuff.

  But he could get it. They grew it in the flatlands of the Midwest--what had formerly been wheat and corn country. He still had connections in the lands his grandfather once governed. People and things informally slid over the border all the time. He’d arranged to bring in snarfar before. He’d known he would have to do it again, for one Krolp or another, before too long.

  “You better do that, Moffatt. By the stars, you better,” Grelch snarled. He turned--which, with that four-legged carcass, needed some room--and stomped out of the Oval Office. The ripe reek that came off his hide lingered in the air.

  The President sighed. “That’s always so much fun.”

  “Yes, sir,” Jack Pagliarone said sympathetically. Even a renegade Krolp, an alien who’d put himself beyond the pale of his own kind, was convinced down to the bottom of whatever he used for a soul that he was better than any mere human ever born. All the evidence of fifty years of conquest and occupation said he had a point, too.

  “If we didn’t need to pick their brains . . .” Harris Moffatt III sighed again. Humanity needed nothing more.

  “By the stars, Mr. President, if the first big uprising had worked--” Jack sadly shook his head.

  Back when Harris Moffatt III was a boy, Americans, Russians, and Chinese all rebelled against the centauroids at once. They rocked the Krolp, no doubt about it. They killed forty or fifty of them, some with stolen arms, others with poison. But close didn’t count. The Krolp crushed mankind again, more thoroughly this time.

  Jack had spoken English with the President. Humans in the free USA mostly did. Even humans in Krolp-occupied America did when they talked among themselves. But the appointments secretary said By the stars anyhow.

  Well, Harris Moffatt III sometimes said By the stars himself. More and more humans these days believed what the Krolp believed and tried to imitate the conquerors any way they could. Weren’t the Krolp stronger? Didn’t that prove they were wiser, too? Plenty of people thought so.

  The President had when he was younger. Like his father before him, like Harris Moffatt IV now, he’d spent several years in St. Louis, the center from which the Krolp ruled most of the USA. He’d gone to what was called, with unusual politeness, a finishing school. In point of fact, he’d been a hostage for his father’s good behavior, as his older son was hostage now for his.

  He’d learned Krolpish--learned it more thoroughly, that is, because he’d already started lessons in Grand Junction. He’d learned the Krolp creed, too. He’d kept company with the pampered sons and daughters of the men and women who helped the centauroids run the occupied USA. Some of them were descendants of people who’d served in the American government with Harris Moffatt I. They were all much more Krolpified than he was. They thought him a hick from the sticks, and weren’t shy about telling him so.

  By the time he finished finishing school, he was much more Krolpified himself than he had been when he got there. He was so much more Krolpified, in fact, that he didn’t want to go back to the independent United States. His own people had come to look like hicks to him.

  He hoped he’d got over that. He hoped Harris Moffatt IV would get over it when the kid came home. You had to hope. If you didn’t hope, you’d give up. And where would free humans be then?

  Come to that, where were free humans now? In places like Grand Junction, Colorado, that was where. Happy day!

  • • •

  One of the men with whom the President had gone to finishing school was the grandson of an important official in the DEA. No one in the United States these days, free or occupied, worried about enforcing human drug laws. No one had time for that kind of nonsense. But Ommat--he even had a Krolpish name--knew how to get his hands on snarfar, and how to slip it discreetly over the border. Grelch got his chew. He didn’t bother Harris Moffatt III for a while.

  As far as Moffatt was concerned, that was all to the good. He had other things to worry about. The Krolp in St. Louis announced that they were going to send an embassy to Grand Junction. Not that they wanted to send one, but that they were going to. Asking permission of humans wasn’t a Krolpish habit.

  The U.S. Army still had a few tanks that ran. It had plenty of machine guns. And it had several dozen Krolpish weapons, which cut through a tank’s armor as if it weren’t there. As soon as one of those weapons hit it, it wasn’t.

  Several suits of Krolpish body armor had fallen into American hands, too. The only trouble was, humans had no way to adapt those to their own shape. Nothing people knew how to do would cut or weld the transparent stuff. The tools . . . The science . . . The engineering . . .

  Harris Moffatt III received the envoy and his retinue with a mixture of human and Krolpish ceremonial. The Stars and Stripes and the Maple Leaf flew behind him. He wore a polyester suit and tie and shirt from the days before the invaders came. Bugs and moths ignored polyester. They sure didn’t ignore wool or linen, the independent USA’s usual fabrics.

  A star shone over the President’s left shoulder. That sort of display was st
andard among the Krolp. With them, as far as human observers and savants could tell, it was a real star, even if a tiny one. And it hung in the air with no means of support at all, visible or otherwise. The Krolp routinely did things that drove human physicists to drink.

  Humans . . . imitated and improvised. This star was made from LEDs surrounding a battery pack. It hung from invisibly fine wires. It wasn’t as good as one of the originals, but it showed Harris Moffatt III claimed sovereign status. (Its weakness might say he didn’t deserve it, but he refused to dwell on that.)

  A star followed the Krolp envoy, too. His name, Moffatt had been given to understand, was Prilk. His star was brighter than the human-made simulacrum, but did not float so high. He was a representative, not a sovereign.

  Prilk’s overlord wasn’t the Krolpish governor of North America. He was the ruler of the Krolp, back on their home planet. He wasn’t exactly a king or a president or an ayatollah. Not being a Krolp, Harris Moffatt III didn’t understand exactly what he was. He was the boss: Moffatt understood that much. Krolp here could petition him. So could humans. Letters took months to reach the homeworld. Decisions took . . . as long as they took. Answers took more months to come back. Once in a blue moon, those answers made things better for people, not worse. It wasn’t likely, but it did happen.

  Prilk’s guards kept a wary eye on the American soldiers carrying Krolpish hand weapons. Those were dangerous to them and to the envoy, unlike almost any merely human arms. Reading Krolpish body language and expressions was a guessing game for people. Harris Moffatt III’s guess was that the centauroids thought humans had no business getting their hands on real weapons. Well, too bad.