Common Words: Passion Before Reason

Even though I've been reading it since the late 1990s, and even though I came out of university with a degree perfectly suited to it, I've not made many forays into actually writing alternate history. Generally speaking, I've tuned myself more toward the future; it takes effort to futz with the dial until you're pointed at a might-have-been, and there's an entirely different kind of research required to make it plausible. "Passion Before Reason" is my first attempt at writing a pure alternate history - my perpetually-in-draft novel Our Watchword Evermore may be set in one, but it's a rather different beast. Work on this, such as it is, was completed in late January of 2010.

I will not tell you the specific point of divergence here - I'm pretty sure it comes up somewhere in the story, though. It's been a while since I read it.

*****
"Passion Before Reason"
by Andrew Barton
*****

Montreal, Quebec
1982

"DEATH TO CANADA," the graffiti said, blood-red and English in the center of the intersection. It was the devil's own luck, Genevieve Lalonde thought while leaning on the handlebars, that the fool who'd written it hadn't been run down. Montreal drivers didn't err cautiously, not when they heard gunshots behind every whisper.

She wouldn't mention any of it in her next letter home. Papa was already tottering on the edge of a heart attack, every day convinced today would be the day the FLQ would leap from the shadows and take his precious daughter away. If she could only see Quebec through the lenses of cameras that gleefully recorded every spilled drop of blood, she'd have been worried too. As it was, one of the nukes Chairman Chernenko had trained on the city would dig her grave before any terrorist.

It was a cool day with grey skies and the distant scent of rain, and Genevieve had hardly worked up a sweat as she guided the bicycle into the churchyard. Not even the FLQ would dare smash its sanctity. There were still ten minutes before she was to begin today's lesson, so she slipped into one of the pews and prayed for peace in Quebec, Northern Ireland, Beirut, and all the other trouble spots of the world.

She met Father Johnson in the vestibule, tall and solid and with hair like mist. His very English name concealed a fiery Quebecois heart, and with Papa and Mama so far away it was comforting to know a strong father was close by, blood or no. She suspected that if the FLQ ever did try to shatter his church's sanctity, he'd tear the fools apart and the soldiers' laws be damned.

"If I didn't know better, I'd think you and that bicycle were together from the beginning," he said. He looked from side to side and lowered his voice. "Please, think about what I said. At least in a vehicle you have some protection. I don't know if the children could take it if you left one day and never came back. Those terrorists... every day they're getting more brazen. At this rate they won't care a whit about God's law, let alone man's."

"I appreciate your concern, Father," Genevieve said. "You don't have to worry. It's going to be cold soon. I just don't like the idea of coming here every day in armor. Some of them, they'd take it as a challenge."

"This church hasn't lost a member that way in three years, and I don't intend to reset that clock any time soon," Father Johnson said. He placed his hand, hard and worn and with marbled knuckles, on her shoulder. "We're all thankful to have you here. Just don't be in too much of a hurry to see heaven."

She went downstairs and waited for the children to arrive, children who should've been in schools shuttered since before they were born. All Genevieve had was a blackboard, a box of chalk, a few books and her wits. They came in ones and twos, handed into her care after mothers' kisses, and for four hours she could forget the troubles outside as she led them through mathematics, French, English, and geography. When she gathered the world maps at the end, plenty of the children had filled Quebec with pale blue.

Maybe the graffiti fool would be right, after all.

The weather hadn't improved when she mounted her bicycle and started down the road for home. Few were brave enough to raise Canada's flag in Montreal. Quebec flags flew from nearly every house she passed, loyalty badges worn by decent people who only wanted to shut their windows against the storm. Perhaps tomorrow, at least, would be pleasant and sunny.

The traffic light switched to red as she approached, and dutifully Genevieve swallowed her momentum. A long white van with grimy side panels lumbered to a stop beside her. A nod at the driver to get his attention, all the better to remind him not to run her down, and a scan left and right along the perpendicular road. Father Johnson's concerns aside, it would be a smooth ride home so long as she could beat the rain.

The thunder came first, in one swift crack.

#

"We left for a reason," her mother had said. "If you go there, you'll only come back dead."

Genevieve's head still ached, both from motherly advice and whatever her captors had knocked her out with, but at least it was a reminder that she still lived. If if was the FLQ that had her, if she'd managed to stumble into their sights, it wouldn't be for much longer. They'd killed six captives when Prime Minister Wagner first called down martial law, and Quebec's rivers had been bloody ever since.

Yet, she'd woken up on a cot with her clothes still on. So maybe not the worst cell of the FLQ, at least. Whoever they were, they'd left her in a windowless basement with bare concrete walls lit by a naked lightbulb with a pull string like a chain of miniature pearls. They hadn't answered after she first pounded on the single door, maybe ten minutes or maybe five hours ago.

It opened with a creak that froze her through sheer novelty. A man and a woman entered, both in the plain, rumpled vests and canvas pants that were a Montrealer's best way to blend into the crowd, their eyes hidden beneath knit masks. Neither of them carried any guns that she could see, and if she understood the typical Felquiste, they always wanted their captives to see their guns.

"Do you know why you're here?" the woman asked in joual, the fast-flowing French of working-class Montreal. Genevieve had spent enough time on the island to follow it, but Papa would have taken a ruler to her backside if she ever dared speak it at home.

"Because you carried me here," Genevieve said with a shrug. Her own accent wouldn't set off any alarm bells; half the families back in Kapuskasing still had Quebec mud on their boots. "If you're going to kill me in the name of liberty, get on with it. I don't have the patience for a long stew."

"Nobody is dying today," the woman said. "We're not barbarians or murderers, we're patriots. People who care about the nation and its future, like you should. You can call me Yvette. We've got a lot to talk about."

"I don't think I have anything to say," Genevieve said.

"You must have left your tongue back in church, then," Yvette said. It shouldn't have rattled Genevieve but it did, the hissing simplicity of the other woman's words. She was no Felquiste spouting communist dogma, but at least then she'd have known what to expect. "You've been busy poisoning the well. Quebec will be free one day, you know, no matter how many traitors like you are out there putting termites in the foundation."

"Hardly patriotic of you to throw out accusations of treason like fireworks on la Fête nationale," Genevieve said.

"Accuracy is not a sin," Yvette said. "You've been busy. Busy undermining our future. Busy teaching English to Quebec's children." She spat it, as if it was worse than any curse in a chalice's or tabernacle's name. "That is your sin."

At first it was all Genevieve could do to keep from laughing in Yvette's face. The twenty-five minutes or so she helped her students practice English, sandwiched between subject matter that came straight from Quebec City, was enough to make her a traitor in their eyes? It was ridiculous... yet, so was the Catholic-Protestant split that was tearing Northern Ireland apart. There were people who would rather abandon a languge than change their religion. To the FLQ and the other "liberation" movements that had sprung up in the secular spring of the Quiet Revolution, the French language was Quebec's religion, and there she was spreading seeds of doubt.

"What are you going to do to me?" she asked. Pressing them on their language hang-up wouldn't improve her situation. If they thought of her as reasonable, maybe she'd find an opportunity to escape.

"We're still working on that," Yvette said. "Like I said, we're not going to kill you. Not even the government would be that kind. Just remember that we're patriots. We care about where loyalties should be."

Yvette and her muscle left without another word, and the thunk of the lock dropping into place echoed through Genevieve's concrete prison.

#

They would be looking for her soon, spreading a net across the island's alleys and laneways, Father Johnson if no one else. Maybe they'd even find her before she was nothing but a skeleton. FLQ or no, she would put more faith in the words of fallen angels than people who cloaked evil deeds in the Fleurdelisé. She'd tried shouting, screaming for help, but no one was listening. There were no windows and her captors never came to the door, except to bring her cloudy water and flavorless food.

Though the cot they'd left her was soft enough, she slept fitfully, no more than a few minutes here and there. It felt like she'd been tossing and turning for a day and a night when she opened her eyes and found her basement as dark as a moonless sky. There were no shafts of light, no electronics with unblinking red eyes, nothing but absence all around.

She pulled the thin sheet close. Things scuttled and skittered in the darkness. She'd read about bugs that could flay a person into naked bone in a matter of minutes. All of them lived far from Montreal, but that was no salve to her exhausted mind. For hours, for ages they clattered through the inky dark and clambered on her skin. Every itch was a marauding insect, a black-armored beast with piercing mandibles that crawled on her like she was a mound of dirt, insensate and inconsequential. Biting. Burrowing.

Finally she could take it no longer. She stumbled through her basement prison, dancing drunkenly across a cold and unfamiliar floor, until she found the door and slammed on it with both hands, screaming for absolution. It was some time before they answered her.

"So," Yvette said once the lightbulb had been replaced, "do you still want to know what we want from you?"

Genevieve nodded. Her throat was still raw. Yvette smirked and handed her a pen and paper.

"It's an oath," Yvette said before Genevieve had a chance to read it. "A sacred pledge that you will not and will never again teach the English language here in Quebec. Sign it, and you're free to go. Just remember that we have eyes in many places. We saw what you were doing once, remember."

She might have signed a loyalty pledge to the Free Republic of Quebec if it had got her out of the basement. No matter how much of a cream puff her brothers might call her once they learned the facts, at least she'd be alive and free to set them straight. The document was as Yvette had said, and Genevieve signed with three careful words, masked by cursive but perfectly legible. She was careful to accentuate the "G" at the beginning and an "L" toward the end, and though it was only eight letters, Genevieve had no trouble stretching them out. The patriot woman looked at the finished flourishes like it was a four-year-old's art project.

"It's enough," she said, ignorant or uncaring. Most likely the former. "We'll remember your face."

She was blindfolded and led to a vehicle that bounced and rumbled and made senseless turns again and again, no doubt to keep her from retracing the route. After a while the motor stopped and she was shoved out and down onto hard, wet ground.

"There's one thing you must remember," Yvette said. "Don't try the patience of patriots."

Genevieve waited until the vehicle's engine had faded into nothing until she slipped off the blindfold. It was a night almost as dark as her cell had been, with only a handful of streetlights and a few scattered constellations shining down on a city under siege. Of course they wouldn't have waited until daytime. Maybe some street straggler would do the job they'd been been unwilling to do, and they wouldn't have to worry about whether she'd keep her word. She shivered and walked and missed her bicycle.

"Canadian Army! Down on the ground and freeze!"

Four patrolling soldiers, their flag patches flashing like rubies in the dimness, drowned her in harsh, white light. She fell spreadeagled to the ground, cold enough to freeze her if they took their time, and waited for them to haul her away. There was no question that it was well past curfew. At least the room they'd take her to would have a window on the world.

#

"The children will understand," Father Johnson said. "No one will blame you for leaving."

Genevieve looked out the window and watched the city stream by, endless cowering tenements where there was no hope of a better future, just one long, shambling instant that stretched into eternity. Iron clouds hung low over the island and made every raindrop taste of rust and blood.

"I can't betray them any more than I did myself," Genevieve said, in English. It tasted sweet after her captivity, like an oasis after a spell in the desert. "They didn't have to do anything. That must've been what they were counting on. They just left me there until I started torturing myself."

"There's no need for that in this world," Father Johnson said. "It'll be a shame to see you go, that's God's own truth. Considering what those terrorist bastards told you about keeping an eye out, I don't even know if I could replace you."

Genevieve thought of the children again. Without them Montreal would never escape the long and choking now that the FLQ and Yvette's patriots had locked it in. It would be the twenty-first century by the time they were her age, but if the terrorists had their way it would be a century of pain and strife and broken promises of tomorrow. She could run, yes, go home to peaceful Ontario and a life far from the struggles of Quebec, and maybe some bright young leader would solve the problems that had chewed up so many others. Even then she would still see it happen, would still watch every drop of blood spilled and every hope dashed, and like tormenting ghosts they would be with her until the end.

A radio chanteuse sang of the Titanic. Survivors had lived with their guilt then, too, but absolution on its deck was hardly a substitute for life. Women and children went first into the lifeboats, but there were times when the women as well had to stay behind.

"Then don't," Genevieve said. "Don't replace me. I'll stay."

Father Johnson jerked the car to the side of the road and stared deep into the wells of her eyes, as if deciding whether he would be performing an exorcism today.

"You've seen it yourself, this is no place of peace and amity," Father Johnson said. "You still have a life ahead of you. You still have a _chance_ of peace. We've made more than enough martyrs here. Be reasonable, Genevieve, and go home. We'd all rather miss you than mourn for you."

"Reasonable people don't kidnap other people off the street in broad daylight," she said. "Reasonable people don't try to hold back an avalanche. Reasonable people don't let themselves get tortured by bugs that aren't there. Maybe I'm not a reasonable person, Father. Maybe you don't need reasonable people."

"Reasonable people," Father Johnson said. He shifted in his seat and looked straight ahead for a few moments. The traffic was so light he could have stopped the car in the middle of the street without inconveniencing a soul. After a while he wordlessly started the engine and turned back into the lane. "If not for reasonable people, we'd never have got where we are."

"If it was up to reasonable people, we'd have never started," Genevieve said. "I think I've been reasonable enough. I can't betray the kids. First they want me to stop teaching English. What if they think history's being painted in an unfavorable light? What if they decide your sermons are too federal? What if they say, to hell with God and Caesar?"

"There's no call for that kind of language, miss," Father Johnson said. He ran a hand across his head and sighed, the sort of sigh Atlas would make when he thought about the weight and inescapability of his responsibility. "Genevieve, please, think carefully. This is a dangerous situation you're stepping in."

"It's the right thing to do."

"I suppose it is." Father Johnson sighed, long and low. He could see the truth as well as she could. Folding to demands only encouraged more demands. Not bombs, not bullets, not martial law, nothing but outright defiance could defeat terrorists who cloaked themselves in patriotism. "I'll line up a bed for you. If you're going to do this, I'm not going to make it easy for them to snatch you off the street again."

"Thank you, Father," Genevieve said. She recognized her surroundings now; the church wasn't very far away. "I suppose we've got work to do. If I'm going to betray anyone, better it's someone who doesn't deserve loyalty."

#

They came the next night, when Montreal was as dark as a blackguard's heart. Genevieve had let the children out at the regular time, after lessons that included a study of false friends between French and English, words that sounded like they'd be related but weren't at all, like magazine and magasin. That would be sort of store that terrorists went to when they needed more ammunition. Perhaps it was where Yvette and her boys had stopped off before they made their presence known.

"I thought we had an arrangement," Yvette said, descending the stairs with two big men as bodyguards and carrying a polished pistol in one hand. Firearms were easier to find in Montreal than confessionals, no matter how tightly the military and police tried to cork the island up, and they'd have just as much luck reassembling the bottle that had made Pierre Trudeau the shortest-serving Prime Minister in Canadian history. "Is this all that your word means to you?"

"Yvette. I thought you and your boys weren't barbarians or murderers," Genevieve said.

"It's only a prop until it goes off," Yvette said, stroking the barrel with her leather-gloved hand. "Please, don't make it go off. You've already made things complicated enough. I suppose it can't be helped when traitors betray their nation."

Yvette gave a sharp nod, and her guards each took firm grip of Genevieve's arms before she could run. The struggles she offered weren't worth much; the men were big enough to touch thumb and forefinger around her elbow.

"You're betraying the future," Genevieve said. "This isn't going to end with you on top! The Brits have been in Northern Ireland for six hundred years and they're not leaving any time soon, Beirut's going to burn to the ground before anyone raises the white flag. I'm trying to build bridges, and you keep burning them down! You'd be better off just locking all the children in your basement! Tabarnak! Why don't you lock the whole province in your basement?"

"We are the future!" Yvette shouted. "I know who you really are, Genevieve Lalonde of Ontario! You must think it's some kind of fun, coming back here to gawk at us like animals! To make sure we know how stupid we were to stay, to try and fight for ourselves! We are the future!"

"You're wrong," Genevieve said. The men had started to squeeze, but the pain only made her feel strong and free. "You're so wrong, now."

There was a crash as the storage room door flew open and Father Johnson charged out with a plank of wood in his hands. He'd been crouching there for hours, waiting for the terrorists to make their move, and had no doubt made a quick call to the military authorities as soon as Genevieve had identified them. He swung the wood like a baseball bat and sent Yvette's gun clattering across the floor. They both dove after it, but Father Johnson scooped it up first.

"This is God's house," he spat. "Be humble, or in the name of the Lord your blood will paint my walls."

"It's still two against one," rumbled the man who held Genevieve's left arm. "Seems to me men like you take vows against gambling. So how's about we take what we came for and leave you be, all nice and properly?"

They had her arms but not her legs, and months of bicycling across Montreal had made her muscles taut as the cables that held up the Frontenac Bridge. While they were both distracted trying to stare down Father Johnson and the barrel of Yvette's gun, she struck the right-arm goon in the crotch with a quick, steel kick. While he recoiled and grunted in pain, she gave the same gift to his friend, and dashed to Father Johnson's side. He hollered for help, and in moments half a dozen burly parishoners stormed down the stairs to surround the terrorists.

"Do you want to hear my sacred pledge now, Yvette?" Genevieve asked. "I pledge that I will never let you do to anyone else what you did to me, that I won't stand by while you try to poison our well. Do you think they'd thank you for this? Did you expect a child today to grow up and say 'thank you for making me live in terror and loneliness?' Do you expect them to be thankful that you and your kind want Quebec to be a self-absorbed backwater? Why don't you lock the whole province in the basement and throw away the key?"

"At least I'm fighting for what Quebec was meant to be!" Yvette shouted. "Strong and independent, proud and free. If it was up to people like you, they'd have all been speaking English at the funeral for the last Quebecois."

"Maybe it would've turned out better for you," Genevieve said. "When you get the chance, you should dig out that 'loyalty oath' you put in front of me and let an Anglo take a look. I believe you'll find it's signed, 'Go to Hell.' People have always been terrified of what they don't understand. I'm sure you'll have plenty of opportunity to learn before your trial."

The police arrived a few minutes later, and Father Johnson was more than relieved to hand them Yvette's still-cold gun. The terrorists spat curses as they were hustled out and away, but she'd heard worse. Never from children, though. Every day she saw in their eyes the hope of a new generation.

"Vive le Quebec," Genevieve whispered. She climbed the stairs and left the light on behind her.

*****

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Previously on Common Words

• #14: Alpha Pavonis
  
• #13: No Regrets
  
• #12: Pattern Recognition
  
• #11: A Scene from the West
  
• #10: The Ossuary
  
• #9: Tranquility's Prologue
  
• #8: Corona
  
• #7: The Tragic Myth
  
• #6: The Platinum Desolation
  
• #5: The Worlds Machine
  
• #4: Tranquil Fragments
  
• #3: The Software Market on Rainier
  
• #2: Sixty-Ton Payload
  
• #1: To the Gallows

Electing Alternatives

Once the decision has been made, once history has been written, there's always the temptation to sit back and wonder - "what if?" It's the age-old premise that only relatively recently led to the growth of the alternate history genre. What if things had gone differently? What if Stephen Harper had been shut out of his majority for a third time running on Monday night? It's a question that, I think, many of us will be asking between now and October 19, 2015. Elections are rich in potential points of divergence - like little else in a democracy, they provide opportunities for a country to back up, go forward, or veer off into an entirely new direction, to nullify a whole set of possibilities while opening even more.

It will be some time before the question of whether Harper's majority could have been avoided can be answered. It's been less than a week - we don't have the information. Beyond that, though, one problem with speculating about it - for that matter, speculating about the possibilities of divergence with any given election, is that most can't be reduced to one choice. It's an area where alternate historians can run into problems if they're not careful. It's one thing to say that history went on a different track because one man noticed a pack of cigars in a clearing; it's something else entirely to say that the future unfolded in a different way because the other guy was voted in.

Outside of Saanich—Gulf Islands, generally not the choice of a new generation.

It's the problem of inertia. Looking back on it, the most believable choice I can come up with to deny Harper a majority in this election is to prevent the election entirely: that is, for the other parties in Parliament to not, for whatever reason, find the Conservative government in contempt over the F-35 issue. After that, it ultimately came down to fifteen million individual choices, and aside from places like Etobicoke Centre or Montmagny—L'Islet—Kamouraska—Rivière-du-Loup - ridings where recounts are underway after the winners squeaked in with twenty-vote and five-vote margins, respectively - it didn't really matter which choice any particular elector made. Unlike battles, it's not nearly as common for national elections to be so close and so hard-fought that it could easily have gone the other way. The parties and opinion-massagers can push their views and move their message, but in the end they're only trying to push something heavy and fast onto a slightly new course: like installing a mass driver on an asteroid to push it into a new orbit that does not lead to an impact with Earth.

I don't write much alternate history, but it seems to me that people who do would do well to consider the plausibility of mucking around with elections. When you've got it coming down to so many individual choices, all of them made for different reasons with different information, one of the most plausible source for major change is something delivered from outside - say, a terrorist attack during an election campaign. Aside from that, once the campaign has begun it's rare for things to change drastically; I'm certain that the out-of-nowhere NDP surge in Quebec will be studied and picked over by political scientists for decades to come.

Now that the votes have been counted, we're back to where we were before - where individual choices can make big differences.

I promise I'll stop talking about politics soon

Sliding Behind the Curtain

Living in Metro Vancouver, I've been told, has that aspect of always looking behind the curtain. So many movies and television shows are filmed here that even if you don't stumble into an open-air shot, like Underworld 4 on Granville last week or the one they Brooklynized Front Street for over the weekend, all you need is a bit of attention to let the walls of suspended-disbelief come crashing down. The first time this happened to me, I didn't even live in New Westminster yet - I saw The A-Team in the theatre while I was on vacation, and even that handful of days was enough for me to pick out "Frankfurt" as just being downtown Vancouver. I don't think there's a Fairmont Pacific Rim in Germany.

This is one of the things that makes it even more distracting - when the camera includes blunt evidence that the city it's actually in is not the city it wants you to think it's in. Like how on an episode of Castle a few weeks ago, when a foot chase on a busy street in Manhattan inexplicably had a Los Angeles Metro Local bus in the background - noticeable because they're painted a rather distinctive orange color that tends to capture the eye. Sure, I didn't notice a lot of this while I lived in Ontario... but for that fraction of the audience familiar with the filming zones, which now includes me, the ride has got considerably bumpier. You're telling me that this is unfamiliar place X, but the evidence you've prevented demonstrates that it's actually familiar place Y.

This might be one of the scourges of the motion picture industry if more people than me actually cared. Thinking about it, though, there are some circumstances where this sort of thing is actually worthwhile - and far from being an interruption, could actually shore up the foundation. I'm thinking specifically, since I've been going back through the first two seasons on DVD recently, of Sliders.

Sliders, probably the single most mainstream appearance of the alternate history concept on the North American airwaves. Every week the four Sliders found themselves on a parallel Earth in a parallel San Francisco, but thanks to tax incentives most of those San Franciscos were in fact Vancouver with San Francisco establishing shots between scenes. When I first started rewatching the episodes after moving here, I thought the new familiarity might be distracting - but it's not!

It actually subtly advances the whole concept of the alternate history.

In a world where corporate hired guns are literally that: San Francisco, Texas. Vancouver's just on the other side of the street, though.

What I always disliked about Sliders was a reflection of the necessities of the medium: its alternate histories always seemed too artificial. You have a world where Texas not only remained independent but absorbed what would have become the Western United States, and yet Lyndon Johnson and George Bush not only still existed but still became Presidents (of Texas, that is). You have a world where J. Edgar Hoover became President and buried the Constitution, but the Internet nevertheless exists. You have a world where dinosaurs survived to the present day, and yet you still have humans. No concept of the butterfly effect at all. It's a far more simplified setup, wherein pretty much everything that isn't explicitly and directly affected by the departure from familiar history is unchanged.

It's in the filming that they get around this, even if they weren't trying to. Having never been to San Francisco, I can't say whether Vancouver looks anything like it - but what I do know is that Vancouver can't ever look exactly like it. The San Franciscos that the Sliders visit contain sights that you'd never find if you went to our San Francisco - and why should you? These are worlds with decades, centuries, or millennia of different history, that in some cases developed along entirely different (and entirely CRAZY) paths! While it's most likely that a sufficiently alternate San Francisco would resemble neither San Francisco nor Vancouver, using Vancouver can take advantage of that blunt evidence - that this is not the city they're telling you it is.

Even though pretty much every San Francisco they visit still has the Transamerica Pyramid on the skyline.

A Mote of Alternate History to Consider

An idea: the nations of the world in Ralph Centennius' The Dominion in 1983 are completely devoid of nuclear technologies not because radioactivity wasn't discovered until thirteen years after it was written, but because the aliens of Mars and Jupiter - because in the late nineteenth century, you were practically crazy if you didn't believe there was life on Mars - are maintaining nuclear dampers in Earth orbit.

An Alternate View: Seattle, British Columbia

On I-90 westbound just short of Vantage, Washington, there's an exit that leads to a parking lot and a "WATCH FOR RATTLESNAKES" sign. The terrain's typical for that area of central Washington state, a lot of raw rock speckled with hardy plants that look like they're waiting for a cowboy to come riding past in a cloud of dust. The wind is cool while the air is warm - at least it was when I was there - and the chitters of distant critters and the rumbling of the vehicles passing by on the nearby freeway are swallowed in the open vastness.

Also, the Columbia River is there. It's huge - one of the largest rivers west of the Rockies, and of those I've seen in person, only the St. Lawrence and Mississippi compare. This river was sought after by explorers for decades, and was one of the keys to European settlement of the Pacific Northwest. Significant diplomatic conflict between the United Kingdom and an expansionist United States pivoted around the river and its watershed in the mid-19th century. In the end the border was settled straight along the 49th parallel, and geographical oddities like Point Roberts just had to deal.

Still, while passing through Seattle, I couldn't help but think that it would be great to be able to go there without needing a passport. There are three ways I can think of to go about this. First is, of course, fixing the restrictions: up until a couple of years ago, a driver's licence or birth certificate was more than enough for a Canadian to wend across the border, no huhu. The second, a bit less practical, is to dust off the owner's manual for your time machine and hop back to 1992 for some score swingin' on the flippity-flop. The third is mostly academic, but is interesting in its own right - go back and manipulate history so that Seattle, or at least the ground on which it's built, was always part of Canada.

This is something I thought about on the way back to Vancouver, and particularly in the forty-minute lineup to clear Customs at Surrey.

The Columbia River - now just imagine a huge Canadian flag on the far shore.

I'm not going to be indulging in a fully-realized alternate history here - those are of wizard complexity considering the degree of factors which must be taken into account; could be a job well-suited for a sapient computer, perhaps. The biggest bugbear - how - isn't one I'm going to get into, though it's not because I'm short of possibilities. Perhaps the American government becomes willing to grant concessions in the Pacific Northwest from British arm-twisting of the Mexicans in California; perhaps Captain Vancouver recognizes the Columbia River for what it is on that day in 1792, in which case the United States loses the "finder's keepers" argument and the river ends up with some other name entirely. Could be that something really unlikely happens too.

Sure, I know it's not exactly the likeliest possibility - the United States in the nineteenth century was rather hungry for territory, and didn't part with it lightly - there are absolutely aspects of our own history that are low-probability; perhaps smart folk back when would've put their money on the Confederation of North America and not the United States of America. Ultimately that part of Washington state north and west of the Columbia could easily be folded into Canada, or whatever unified British North America calls itself; Portland becomes a border town and Spokane might end up part of Idaho.

The question I tossed around was this - how does the development play out? Will alternate Vancouver - which I'll mark with an asterisk - become Canada's Pacific metropolis, or would *Seattle? Or both? I did some looking into this, and came up with the "Seattle, British Columbia" thread by David Tenner on soc.history.what-if, which looked into this same issue back in 2007. It's not surprising; there's scarcely a mote of potential alternate history that SHWI hasn't chewed on over the last fifteen years. But the discussion within did wake me up to a factor I hadn't considered.

I already knew that the railway was important. Vancouver is what it is because it's the western terminus of the Canadian Pacific Railway; had the original plans come to fruition, the tracks would have stopped in New Westminster and the developmental patterns in Metro Vancouver would've been considerably different. I hadn't thought about the issue of the mountain passes, though - and from what I've read, the Canadian railway planners weren't exactly spoiled for choice, as the really ideal mountain passes seem to require running rails through what would be American territory even with Canada on the Columbia. From my admittedly limited comprehension of the issue, it seems plausible that *Vancouver - or *New Westminster, for that matter - would be the western terminus and the center of development.

That doesn't mean it'd all work the same way, though. Look at a terrain map of Metro Vancouver on Google Maps - there's a triangle of territory from Vancouver to Chilliwack and Bellingham, Washington that's relatively open land surrounded by mountains, restricted only by a line on a map. The lack of a national border would spur *Vancouver's development even further, by removing the only major artificial barrier to development. Possibly the situation would result in something along the Golden Horseshoe model, with *Vancouver and *Seattle the anchors on either side of a more-or-less continuous urban zone. Think of *Surrey as a western reflection of Mississauga, and *Seattle occupying roughly the same position as Hamilton does in Ontario's Golden Horseshoe.

Might be an interesting place to set a story, once the holes in the theory - and I'm sure there are many - could be identified and filled in. Would have to come up with names, though. At the least I have reasons to doubt that "Seattle" would come up in the alternate - which is unfortunate, since it's a good name.

For All Nails #301

Before I was a science fiction writer, I was a follower of alternate history - a subgenre of speculative fiction placed in settings where the actual flow of history took a different course than it did in our textbooks. Sliders, the worldhoppingest of Nineties Adventure Shows, introduced me to the concept, and the Internet exposed me to a world of it - sites such as Kedamono's Alternate History Travel Guides and many others that have since been lost, but the core of it was the Usenet newsgroup soc.history.what-if. Timelines such as President Chester A. Arthur's For All Time, a supremely dystopian unfolding of the Cold War, took my interest, and projects like For All Nails sealed it.

For All Nails is a collaborative extension of the richly detailed alternate history set out by Robert Sobel in 1973's For Want of a Nail, where a British victory at the Battle of Saratoga in 1777 led to the end of the American Revolution and a vastly altered North America, one dominated by the British-influenced Confederation of North America and its great rival, the United States of Mexico. Sobel's summation of the history left off in the early 1970s. In late 2001, Noel Maurer started the project where Sobel left off, and intended to take it to the 21st century. It eventually attracted more than a dozen contributors, including Randy McDonald of A Bit More Detail, and by the time I stumbled into the project in 2003, more than two hundred and fifty posts had been made.

Shortly thereafter, it seems, the project lost steam barely having made it to the 1980s. I wrote a few posts focusing on Quebec - in this alternate history, a semi-independent associate of the Confederation of North America - and left one unfinished. I began work on it on October 5, 2004, but it lay fallow until late September 2009, when I returned to it and completed it. The most recent post, FAN #300, was made on July 26, 2005.

Five years is a long time. I'm not sure what kind of a reaction it would get on soc.history.what-if. Still, I can't abide something going unseen - so, for better or for worse, it'll at least be live here.

#

For All Nails #301: An Independent Quebec Within a United CNA

"The greatest failure of the Bastien government was that, in seeking to please everyone, it succeeded in pleasing no one. While Sir Geoffrey Gold, eager to salvage something out of the CNA's Executive Revision debacle[1], was quick to approve Quebec's petition for its own Viceroy, there were many in Quebec who were unsatisfied with the arrangement. In requesting and welcoming Sir Albert Hardy as Viceroy, Bastien reminded Quebec of ties to Britain that many would prefer to have forgotten."

- From _It Began With A Whisper: A History of the Quebec Crisis_ by Michael Deschamps. Dorchester: Upcountry Press, 1997.

*****

Dorchester House
Quebec City, Associated Confederation of Quebec
16 June 1977

One could be forgiven for thinking that the residence of the Honourable Sir Albert Hardy, Viceroy of Quebec, had seen better days. Sir Albert himself certainly thought so. The place had been built while Queen Victoria was in power, and aside from a rather hasty renovation that had characterized the first fortnight of his occupancy in Dorchester House, he didn't imagine it had been well kept up since then. In one of his more contemplative moods, he'd realized that it was eminently logical. After all, from what better place could he watch over the slum of a continent than a dilapidated mansion?

A year of living in his "temporary lodgings" had hardened his spirits. His official residence, the Palais du Québec - he had preferred "Viceregal Palace," but had been overruled - was little more than a wooden frame in undeveloped parkland. The most hopeful estimates didn't anticipate it would be ready for another five years, at least. The contractors called it a regrettable necessity in light of the Viceroy's august office. The Viceroy himself called it shiftlessness. With a hundred years of internal sovereignty behind them, and North America at their doorstep, Sir Albert wondered how they could have fallen so far.

Of course, that wasn't to say that recent events had proved the Johnnies down south to be much better. The people of Quebec knew where their true loyalties ought to lie, even if North America had forgotten.

A hard rap at the door put paid to those thoughts. Sir Albert put down the memorandum he'd tried to read five times and of which he'd retained not one line and signalled his watchman to let the scandalmonger in. Luther Macpherson, a stout, competent Scot who'd proven his grit on blood-soaked French fields, entered with a notebook-clutching, fire-eyed young lady in a knee-length skirt and knitted blouse in all the colors of Quebec's damnable flag. All that London had done for them, and not even a hint of the Union Jack that had made it all possible.

"Your Excellency," she said, offering an obviously-practiced curtsey. "It's a privilege to meet you. I'm Eve Devlin, of the Frontenac[2] _Intrepid_."

"Madame," Sir Albert said as he rose from his chair. He clasped her hand for a moment and found it nearly as hot as coal fresh from the furnace. "I hope you'll understand that this interview must be brief by necessity. Would that you were the only demand on my time."

"Brevity is my job, Excellency," Devlin said. Young and shapely, she was, the sort of woman for whom those scandalous Mexican costumes were made, and most likely a calculated maneuver by her editor. He'd hardly be the first man to have a few wrong words slip out. "May I be seated?"

Sir Albert motioned to a rickety, uneven chair, the only other one in the room. Few visitors had the inclination to prolong meetings after a few moments balancing on it. With luck, she'd ask the sort of questions that would allow him to trot the same old answers out for a ride around the stables.

Did he see further friction between London and Burgoyne? No, he said, Britain has always been ready for North America to choose its own path. Will he be active in pursuing greater cooperation between Quebec and Britain? Of course, he said, and he'd taken a primary role in the continued cooperative development of hydroelectric stations at Gallivan Falls.[3] Devlin asked sharp questions, and he thought it a shame they'd only appear in some upcountry rag of a newspaper.

"What's your opinion on Quebec's decision to retain its ties to the United Kingdom separately from the CNA?"

"I'd call it a recognition of historical connexions, and one that remains most welcome in London," Sir Albert said. "My presence as Viceroy of Quebec is a recognition of the role the United Kingdom played in ensuring Quebec's continuity as a distinct culture on this continent. Without British aid, you would have been helpless against Fanchon and his heirs, and hopeless to maintain its unique identity without being subsumed into the greater whole of North America."

"You might have some people disagree with you on that, Excellency," Devlin said. "I don't believe there's a nation on this Earth as stubborn as the Quebecois. Nevertheless, I--"

"I'm sorry, madame, but I'll have to stop you there," Sir Albert said, raising one hand. "I've given you twenty minutes now, and I think I've been more than generous. I'm certain you've collected enough material today for an entire series of articles. For myself, as I said, important matters of state do not wait, not even in the company of beautiful women."

Devlin blushed. "I'm thankful for your time, Excellency. It was a privilege and an honour."

Sir Albert thanked her and let Macpherson lead her out. He returned to the memoranda, and the files, and the requests for services and signatures that piled his desk, and kept his back to the wall. He couldn't help but think she'd find some way to pound his words into a knife.

*********

From the Frontenac _Intrepid_, Page A1
20 June 1977

QUEBEC "HELPLESS AND HOPELESS" WITHOUT BRITAIN: VICEROY

*********

[1] See FAN #253.

[2] OTL Toronto, Ontario. Given the differing patterns of settlement in eastern Canada due to the lack of United Empire Loyalists, among other changes, Frontenac is a far smaller and lower-profile city than Toronto was even in 1977, when the Anglophone exodus from Montreal had only just begun.

[3] OTL Churchill Falls, Labrador. They weren't discovered until after the POD in any event, and had a succession of names before being renamed after Winston in 1965. Here they're named after Ezra Gallivan, who is still fondly looked upon in Quebec for his role in the 1889 plebiscite. Owing to Quebec's access to Niagara Falls and multiple dammable Ontario rivers in the FaNTL, as well as more limited historic industrialization, there was less motivation to tap the falls' potential as early as in OTL.

The Fulcrum That Walked Like A Man

There's an old theory that the tides of history ebb and flow from the influence of Great Men. This theory, popular in the 19th century but today unwelcome in the halls of academe, is based upon the degree to which the actions of singular influential "historical heroes" determine how events played out. Going by it, the American Revolution was won by the skill and fortitude of George Washington rather than the logistical and strategic challenges which the American environment posed to a military accustomed to Old World combat. I can see, in some respects, why its fall from grace took place. Individual actors are not the only ingredient in the grand scope of history, and in many cases it doesn't make an incredible difference who's running the show.

This is one of the most critical considerations for any aspiring author of alternate history.

On the battlefields of the First World War, say, individual generals can be seen as caught up in the current of history and the dominating philosophy of the times, which reduced soldiers to so many pawns thrown away for little or no gain.

And yet, even then, there were individuals that nudged things the other way. Witness Sir Arthur Currie, commander of the Canadian Corps in 1917 and architect of the Battle of Vimy Ridge. If someone like Field Marshal Haig was in charge instead, I find it distinctly implausible that a more traditional British general would have taken the steps that won Vimy Ridge for Canada.

GURPS Infinite Worlds is probably one of the most dedicated sourcebooks on alternate history we'll get for a while, and it includes three lenses for game masters building their own parallel worlds. The first is that of the Great Man, as above. The second is the Great Moment, which gives the most weight to greater social forces - the example it provides is that if Adolf Hitler had died in a 1917 gas attack, say, the postwar situation of Germany was such that "Julius Streicher or Joseph Goebbels or some unknown street fighter might have become dictator and launched World War II and the Final Solution." The third is the Great Motherland theory, which draws a great deal of inspiration from Jared Diamond's Guns, Germs, and Steel, where history is based primarily on geographic factors and environmental adaptation.

Nevertheless, the Great Motherland theory is a blunt instrument if there ever was one, and is best suited for exploring the Grand Sweep of history; any closer, and it's like using a telescope for reading glasses. Bear in mind that a world in which western Eurasian civilization is dominant would, under this theory, describe our world and one in which Nazi Germany rules Europe equally well.

In my own opinion, all three lenses work, but at different resolutions of history. Right now, I'm working on an alternate history short where Pierre Trudeau was killed in 1968, jumping off the point of divergence I looked at in "To the Gallows" in January, and the question of how one man's absence would alter history is weighing heavily on my mind.

It wouldn't destroy Canada. Neither would it make it a utopia. Countries are bigger than individuals, even when those individuals lead them, and from a distance a Trudeau-less Canada in 2009 would likely be broadly similar to our 2009 in terms of population, wealth, industries and so on.

Getting closer, though, Trudeau shaped Canadian society to an extent that few others have, before or since. It was Trudeau that pushed through official, nationwide bilingualism and the National Energy Program - two moves that other Prime Ministers in his place might not have done. The culture of an Alberta that never asked for those Eastern bastards to freeze in the dark would, again, be broadly similar to our Alberta - it would take something on the order of global thermonuclear war to keep people from exploiting the tar sands - but would likely be noticeably different.

Furthermore, there's the issue of Quebec. There's no telling how a different Prime Minister in 1970 would have dealt with the October Crisis. The world is a fundamentally chaotic system, and from time to time individuals do have a long enough lever to move the world.

You may notice I used a lot of words like "possibly" and "likely" and so on in this post. For that, I only have recourse to S.M. Stirling, who quite rightly observed at a recent Worldcon panel that "alternate history is the ultimate non-falsifiable hypothesis."

The Arrow of Avalon

They say that in an hour of great need, King Arthur will return from blessed Avalon to save Britain and its people. Messiahs run deep in human belief, back to deepest antiquity, because there really is something primal about the desire for a grand, glorious, elevated leader to show us the light and save us from ourselves. It is the bedrock of myths and religions around the world, repeated again and again in the interest of building a bright future.

Mythologies can unify nations just as much as any great leader or historic charter. J.R.R. Tolkien created a mythology out of whole cloth in The Lord of the Rings, and as Google comes up with 4,080 hits as of this writing for "English-Quenya dictionary," it can hardly be argued that he missed the mark. I've seen it mentioned in a few places - though I can't find corroborating links at the moment, so take this with a grain of salt if you'd prefer - that one of Tolkien's goals was to create a uniquely British mythology through his literature.

Canada is a young country, and has a very limited national mythology - Mounties, lumberjacks, voyageurs, blackflies and log drivers are pretty much all we've got. It may be that this is a significant factor in the ongoing "Canadian identity" debate, and I see it as a definite relic of our colonial past. For the longest time Canada didn't need any identity of its own; hell, Canadian citizenship didn't even exist until 1947. It's only very recently in our history that the United Kingdom's coattails stopped being good enough.

It's possible for myths to be made. Every day there's a chance for a new messiah to be born. There's nothing in the rules that says a messiah has to be a person, though.

The Avro Canada CF-105 Arrow is one of those enduring what-ifs in modern Canadian history, a perfect component of what Michael Moore's Canadian Bacon called our "serious inferiority complex." A product of the 1950s need to do the Soviets one better, it was to have been one of the finest interceptors in the air and break records that the best aircraft today would struggle to meet. The prototypes flew, the project weathered governmental caprice, and it was poised to enter service and history - only for the program to be cancelled in 1959. It wasn't just cancelled, though, but practically annihilated. Today, the severed nose section of the last Arrow stands in the Canada Aviation Museum, and aside from a few fragments, it represents the only known remains of the five aircraft that were built.

Yet, for fifty years now there's been a whispered legend going around, once championed by the late June Callwood, that "one got away." The 1996 CBC docudrama The Arrow embraced the legend wholeheartedly, and ended with the last Arrow taking to the skies for an unknown destination. There it would sit, in secrecy and silence, perhaps until it was needed again...

It wasn't until more than ten years later that it struck me how similar this concept was to the myth of King Arthur. Instead of a person asleep on blessed Avalon or under Glastonbury Tor, we have the Last Arrow in a lonely hangar or hidden away in a farmer's barn. A triumph of science, technology and engineering, hidden from the small minds that would tear it down until it could one day return to the world and inspire a new generation to look toward the future.

Sounds like a hell of a national myth to me. Might make a good story. Hmm...

Scrawl the Myriad Ways

"What follows is a brief history of events since the Hellstorm, concentrating on the differences between this world and the path that history might have taken had the Hellstorm not occured. This world is a 'close parallel' of Earth; any event that isn't mentioned (e.g., the Korean War, the assassination of Martin Luther King) is assumed to have occured as in our world, perhaps with minor changes."
- David L. Pulver, GURPS Technomancer

You wouldn't want to imagine what's been lost, and gained, throughout history for want of a horseshoe nail. Lucky breaks like the Battle of Midway, where the US divebombers happened upon the Japanese fleet when it was at its most vulnerable, or the fickleness of nature, such as the Kamikaze of 1281 or the Protestant Wind of 1688, have influenced the course of history in ways subtle and gross. The present is built on an extremely brittle foundation, so much so that if the past was not fixed, nothing would be safe. We're all subject to the howling winds of happenstance, even though we've become so used to them that many of us can't even recognize them at all.

Alternate history is the act of tacking against the wind, of realizing the degree to which we've all built our houses on the sand. As I've said before, history is at the root of all the problems and prospects of the present day, to a degree that's easily unrecognized or glossed over.

Veteran sf author Larry Niven has said that he doesn't like writing parallel-universe stories, because in his opinion, in a "world" where everything happens, no particular event matters, and nor does the effort or sweat expended over bringing any one success to fruition. My own problem with parallel-universe stories, and with the genre of alternate history as a whole, tends more toward failures of creativity and invention. If something happened one way in actual history, the opinion in a great deal of published AH seems to be that there's no reason it shouldn't happen exactly the same way in an alternate history, even if the point of divergence between our history and the alternate history predates it by decades.

This is particularly common with historical characters; there are plenty of alternate history books that include historical figures in their cast who were born long after the point of divergence. Adolf Hitler shows up as an aide to a German general in Harry Turtledove's Timeline-191 series, even though the specific point of divergence - the security of Special Order 191 - took place twenty-seven years before he was born. To compound this attitude, Turtledove's The Two Georges not only includes Richard Nixon as a Los Angeles steam car salesman but makes Martin Luther King the Governor-General of the North American Union in a history that diverged from ours in the 18th century.

What's the problem? Only that acts of cross-historical pollination such as these greatly compromise willing suspension of disbelief. To suggest that mass movements and guiding philosophies are inevitable is one thing, and on the macro level is defensible - Jared Diamond's thesis that Eurasia was likely to achieve world dominance due to the nature of its geography is a sound one, even if there's no reason the precise shape of its dominance would have remained the same given a divergence far enough back in history.

But to introduce historical figures into an alternate twentieth century that is alternate because the American Revolution or the American Civil War went another way speaks of two things. The first is arrogance - "Martin Luther King Jr. was so important that he would have found a way to have been born even had the Roman Empire never fallen" - and the second is, to put it bluntly, laziness. Works of fiction are already filled with characters who did not exist. To me, using historical characters in a setting where they have no justification for existing doesn't provide verisimilitude, doesn't underscore the connection between that timeline and this one - no! What it does is jerk me out of the narrative and remind me that it's nothing but a work of fiction conjured out of a keyboard in California.

Even Robert Sobel, who with 1973's For Want of a Nail laid the foundation for alternate history to climb to new heights in the 1990s and 2000s, didn't entirely escape this, though the world he created is head and shoulders above all others in this regard. Familiar historical characters are mostly limited to the years immediately following the 1777 point of divergence, and then only because they were already active at the time. Subsequent to that, the only significant actual historical characters who appear in this 441-page alternate history textbook are Abraham Lincoln - himself a subversion of the trend, who is just an ordinary lawyer and is not even mentioned in the index - along with Sergei Witte, who in our history was Prime Minister of the Russian Empire and in Sobel's overthrew it, and Thomas Edison, who in both histories was a renowned inventor.

What really gets me is that, while the presence of Lincoln, Witte, and Edison are really historical in-jokes, their presence is like installing screen doors in a submarine: they don't improve the way the narrative works, and their very presence diminishes its ability to do what it's supposed to do, to be believed.

There's no reason an alternate history writer couldn't, and shouldn't, use historical characters born before the point of divergence and examine how changed history has changed them from what we know, or create her or his own figures of power and glory to fill the vacancies created when our renowned forebears were never born. Of course, the alternative would be - gasp - people actually learning about a previously unfamiliar aspect of history, and we can't have that, can we?