Harry Turtledove - Gunpowder Empire

One

When Jeremy Solters found a note from his mother in his lunchbox, he started to laugh. He couldn't help it. So many ways she might have got hold of him-e-mail to his handheld, e-mail to his desktop, voicemail to his phone, a tingle on the implant behind his ear. But what did she pick? The most primitive comm mode she could find, and the one most likely to go wrong. That was Mom, all right. Maybe she'd spent too much time out in the alternates. She forgot to use technology when she had it at her fingertips.

He unfolded the note and made sense of her scrawl. Stop at the store on the way home and pick up two kilos of apples, she wrote. Jeremy laughed again and reread the note to make sure he had it right. He supposed he should have been glad she hadn't talked about pounds and ounces. He never could remember which was bigger. And he supposed he should have been glad she'd remembered to write in English. He could have read neoLatin. But if she'd used Koine or Great Serbian or any of the Indic languages, she wouldn't have got her precious apples.

“What's that?” Michael Fujikawa asked, as Jeremy wadded up the piece of paper and tossed it in the direction of the trash can.

“Note from my mom, if you can believe it,” Jeremy told his friend. The crumpled note bounced off the front of the trash can. Jeremy sighed. He unfolded from his perch on a concrete bench, picked up the paper, and threw it out. He was tall and skinny, but he'd never made the Canoga Park High basketball team. This wasn't the first time he'd proved he couldn't shoot.

Michael only nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He was short and kind of round. Most of Jeremy's friends were short and kind of round. He sometimes wondered if that meant anything. Before he could do more than start to wonder now, Michael went on, “My dad will do the same thing. When he comes home from an alternate, it's like he has trouble remembering he's at the end of the twenty-first century, not stuck in a fifteenth-century equivalent or whatever.”

“Maybe that's it,” Jeremy agreed. “I was thinking the same thing about Mom.”

The sun beat down on him. It was only May, but it was supposed to get up past thirty today. The Valley was like that. When real summer came, it could climb over forty for a week at a time.

Jeremy ate his sandwich and his yogurt and an orange from a Palestine that hadn't seen a century and a half of murder and war. That Palestine was a sleepy Turkish province where nothing much ever happened. The oranges and lemons were especially fine there. He didn't know whether that was better or worse than the Palestine in his own world. It sure was different, though.

Michael's lunch had a couple of golden plums of a sort Jeremy hadn't seen before. He pointed to the one his friend was eating. “Where'd that come from?” he asked.

“Safeway,” Michael said unhelpfully.

“Thanks a lot,” Jeremy told him. “Which world did it come from, I mean? It's not one of ours, is it?”

“I don't think so,” Michael said. “But I don't know which alternate it's from. All I know is, Dad brought it home when he did the shopping the other day. Half the time, the store labels don't tell anyhow.”

“They're supposed to,” Jeremy said. “The EPA gets on 'em if they don't.”

“Well, the EPA's pretty dumb if it bothers about these. They're good.” Michael ate all the flesh off the plum. He tossed the pit at the trash can. It went in. He was a good shot. He took the second plum out of its plastic bag. Jeremy hoped for a taste, but Michael ate it all. He liked his food, which was no doubt why he stayed round.

The lunch bell rang just after Michael finished the plum. He jumped up. “I have to go to my locker. I left my history paper in there, and Ms. Mouradian doesn't let you print new ones in class.”

Jeremy nodded sympathetically. “She's strict, all right. I've got mine.” He slung his notebook and his handheld under his arm and headed off for U.S. History. “See you there.” His grandfather told stories about lugging around a backpack full of ten or fifteen kilos' worth of books when he went to high school. It wasn't so much that Jeremy didn't believe him. He just thought old people remembered things as being much better or much worse than they really were, depending on what kind of message they wanted to get across.

Boys and girls hurried through the dark, narrow halls. Canoga Park High was almost 150 years old. Some of the buildings were newer, replacing ones knocked down in the earthquake of '27 or the bigger one of '74, but a lot of them went all the way back to the 1950s. As far as Jeremy could see, they hadn't known much about how to make schools back then.

Of course, compared to what people in the alternates had, this was heaven. But that wasn't how most kids looked at it. Jeremy didn't look at it like that most of the time himself. He compared Canoga Park High to new schools, fancy schools. Next to them, it didn't make the grade.

Michael Fujikawa slid-skidded, really-into his seat just ahead of the late bell. Ms. Mouradian sent him a fishy stare. That was all she could do, though. He had beaten the bell. She said, “Now that we're all here”-another fishy look for Michael-“we need to push. Only a couple of weeks left in the semester, and we still have a lot of ground to cover. First things first. Pass your homework papers to the front of the room.”

Jeremy pulled his paper from his notebook. He sent it forward. Looking relieved that he'd remembered his, Michael did the same. Ms. Mouradian snatched up the homework with impatience she couldn't hide. Jeremy almost laughed, but managed to hold it in. He'd never had a history class where they didn't cover the last part of the material at a mad gallop.

Ms. Mouradian said, “Yesterday we talked about how energy problems started showing up as early as the 1970s.” Jeremy's desktop came to life. It showed him a long line of incredibly old-fashioned-looking cars in front of a gas station just as far out-of-date. The history teacher went on, “Things only got worse as time went on. By the time we reached the 2040s, our oil reserves really did start running dry, the way people had said they would for years. Nobody knew what to do. Many feared that civilization would collapse from lack of energy, lack of transport, lack of food.”

The desktop showed skinny people plundering a truck outside a supermarket. Jeremy's grandfather talked about those days, too. Jeremy hadn't taken him too seriously till he found out on his own how bad things had been. The video on the desktop looked a lot better than the stuff from the 1970s. It had started out digital. It wasn't so grainy, and the color and sound were better. Jeremy felt more as if he were really there, not watching something from ancient history.

“What caused the change?” Ms. Mouradian asked. “Why don't we have troubles like those now?”

A dozen hands shot into the air at the same time. Jeremy's was one of them. Behind him, a girl said, “Why doesn't she ask easy ones like that all the time?”

Two or three people couldn't stand knowing and not saying. Before Ms. Mouradian could call on anybody, they shouted out the answer: “The alternates!”

She nodded. “That's right. The alternates. Without the work of Galbraith and Hester, the world would be a very different place.” When she suddenly smiled, she didn't look a whole lot older than the kids in her class. “And that's what the alternates are all about, isn't it? Look at your desktops, please.”

Jeremy did, even though he'd already seen this video a million times. There were Samaki Galbraith and Liz Hester announcing their discovery to a startled world. He was tall and black and dignified. She was a little redhead who bounced and squeaked, excited at what they'd found. Considering what it was, she'd earned the right, too.