“So far so good,” I said. “We had a Bonaparte, too. But his empire didn’t last long. He abdicated and was sent off to Elba in 1814—”
“Yes—but he escaped, returned to France, and led his armies to glorious victory!”
I was shaking my head. “He was free for a hundred days, until the British defeated him at Waterloo. He was sent to St. Helena and died a few years later.”
Olivia stared at me. “How strange… how eerie, and how strange. The Emperor Napoleon ruled in splendor at Paris for twenty-three years after his great victory at Brussels, and died in 1837 at Nice. He was succeeded by his son, Louis—”
“The Duke of Reichstadt?”
“No; the Duke died in his youth, of consumption. Louis was a boy of sixteen, the son of Emperor and the Princess of Denmark.”
“And his Empire still exists,” I mused.
“After the abdication of the English tyrant George, the British Isles were permitted to enter the Empire as a special ward of the Emperor. After the unification of Europe, enlightenment was brought to the Asians and Africans. Today, they are semiautonomous provinces, administered from Paris, but with their own local Houses of Deputies empowered to deal with internal matters. As for New France—or Louisiana—this talk of rebellion will soon die down. A royal commission has been sent to look into the complaints against the Viceroy.”
“I think we’ve got the C. H. date pretty well pinned down,” I said. “Eighteen-fourteen. And it looks as though there’s been no significant scientific or technological progress since.”
This prompted questions which I answered at length. Olivia was an intelligent and well-educated woman. She was enthralled by my picture of a world without the giant shadow of Bonaparte falling across it.
The morning had developed into the drowsy warmth of noon by the time I finished. Olivia offered me lunch and I accepted. While she busied herself at the wood-burning stove, I sat by the window, sipping a stone mug of brown beer, looking out at this curious, anachronistic landscape of tilled fields, a black-topped road along which a horse pulled a rubber-tired carriage, the white and red dots of farmhouses across the valley. There was an air of peace and plenty that made my oddly distant recollection of the threat to the Imperium seem, as Olivia said, like a half-forgotten story, read long ago—like something in the book lying on the table. I picked up the fat, red leather-bound volume, glanced at the title:
THE SORCERESS OF OZ, by Lyman F. Baum.
“That’s funny,” I said.
Olivia glanced over at the book in my hands, smiled almost shyly.
“Strange reading matter for a witch, you think? But on these fancies my own dreams sometimes love to dwell, Brion. As I told you, this one narrow world seems not enough—”
“It’s not that, Olivia. We’ve pretty well established that our C. H. date is early in the nineteenth century. Baum wasn’t born until about 1855 or so—nearly half a century later. But here he is…”
I flipped the book open, noted the publisher—Wiley & Cotton, New York, New Orleans, and Paris—and the date: 1896.
“You know this book, in your own strange world?” Olivia asked.
I shook my head. “In my world he never wrote this one…” I was admiring the frontispiece by W. W. Denslow, showing a Glinda-like figure facing a group of gnomes. The next page had an elaborate initial “I” at the top, followed by the words: “ ‘…summoned you here,’ said Sorana the Sorceress, ‘to tell you…’ ”
“It was my favorite book as a child,” Olivia said. “But if you know it not, how then do you recognize the author’s name?”
“He wrote others. THE WIZARD OF OZ was the first book I ever read all the way through.”
“The Wizard of Oz? Not The Sorceress? How enchanting it would be to read it!”
“Is this the only one he wrote?”
“Sadly, yes. He died the following year—1897.”
“Eighteen ninety-seven; that could mean…” I trailed off. The fog that had been hanging over my mind for days since I had awakened here was rapidly dissipating in the brisk wind of a sudden realization: Dzok and his friends had relocated me, complete with phony memories to replace the ones they’d tried to erase, in a world-line as close as possible to my own. They’d been clever, thorough, and humane. But not quite as clever as they thought, a bit less thorough in their research than they should have been—and altogether too humane.
I remembered the photogram the councillors had shown me—and the glowing point, unknown to Imperial Net cartographers, which represented a fourth, undiscovered world lying within the Blight. I had thought at the time that it was an error, along with the other, greater error that had omitted—the Zero-zero line of the Imperium.
But it had been no mistake. B-I Four existed—a world with a Common History date far more recent than the 15th century—the C. H. date of the closest lines beyond the Blight.
And I was there—or here—in a world where, in 1897 at least one man known in my own world had existed. And if one, why not another—or two others: Maxoni and Cocini, inventors of the M-C drive.
“Could mean what, Brion?” Olivia’s voice jarred me back to the present.
“Nothing. Just a thought.” I put the book down. “I suppose it’s only natural that even fifty years after a major divergence, not everything would have been affected. Some of the same people would be born…”
“Brion,” Olivia looked at me across the room. “I won’t ask you to trust me, but let me help you.”
“Help me with what?” I tried to recapture the casual expression I’d been wearing up until a moment before, but I could feel it freezing on my face like a mud pack.
“You have made a plan; I sense it. Alone, you cannot succeed. There is too much that is strange to you here, too many pitfalls to betray you. Let me lend you what help I can.”
“Why should you want to help me—if I were planning something?”
She looked at me for a minute without answering, her dark eyes wide in her pale, classic face.
“I’ve spent my life in search for a key to some other world… some dreamworld of my mind. Somehow, you seem to be a link, Brion. Even if I can never go there, it would please me to know I’d helped someone to reach the unattainable shore.”
“They’re all worlds, just like this one, Olivia. Some better, some worse—some much, much worse. They’re all made up of people and earth and buildings, the same old natural laws, the same old human nature. You can’t find your dreamworld by packing up and moving on; you’ve got to build it where you are.”
“And yet—I see the ignorance, the corruption, the social and moral decay, the lies, the cheats, the treachery of those who hold the trust of the innocent—”
“Sure—and until we’ve evolved a human society to match our human intelligence, those things will exist. But give us time, Olivia—we’ve only been experimenting with culture for a few thousand years. A few thousand more will make a lot of difference.”
She laughed. “You speak as though an age were but a moment.”
“Compared with the time it took us to evolve from an amoeba to an ape—or even from the first Homo sapiens to the first tilled field—it is a moment. But don’t give up your dreams. They’re the force that carries us on toward whatever our ultimate goal is.”
“Then let me lend that dream concrete reality. Let me help you, Brion. The story they told me—that you had fallen ill from overwork as an official of the Colonial Office, that you were here for a rest cure—’tis as thin as a Parisian nightdress! And, Brion…” She lowered her voice. “You are watched.”
“Watched? By whom—a little man with a beard and dark glasses?”