The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories by Ian Watson, Ian Whates Page B

but much less hopeful direction, and came down with a skid and a thud on dust and ash. I stumbled, flailing, and trod on a circle of glowing embers which I as quickly jumped out of, scattering more ash.
     
    “Oi!” someone shouted. It must have been his fire.
     
    “Sorry!” over my shoulder. Then I ran without looking back. Around me the early evening was lit only by scattered small fires, some of them behind the window-spaces of what buildings remained standing. Grass and weeds poked through the crazed tarmac under my feet. A few metres in front of me, a random leaf of grass or scrap of paper caught fire. I threw myself forward, hitting the ground with a pain I wouldn’t feel for minutes. I side-stepped into an adjacent probability, as one might roll on the ground, got up and ran on.
     
    The Improver base in this Edinburgh lies beneath where a multi-storey park had been, close to the unaltered Castle Rock. I reached the door - saw a red bead on the wall - flinched aside - keyed the code in the lock - dived through.
     
    I stood up in low fluorescent lighting, pale corridors. I suspected my pursuer would be after me. I rang the alarm. Two guards were ready for him when he slipped into our space from a probability where the car park’s floors hadn’t pancaked in the blast from Rosyth. His capture took only a moment: a hiss of gas, a thrown net, the laser pistol knocked from his fingers.
     
    The guards tied him in the net to a chair. I tried to interrogate him, before the effects of the gas wore off and he gathered his wits enough to sidestep.
     
    “Why are you after me?”
     
    His head jerked, his eyes rolled, his tongue lolled. “Isn’t it obvious? You were on a mission to undermine the GBR!”
     
    “What’s that to you?” I said. “To Conservers, that regime must be an abomination anyway - radical, revolutionary even - isn’t that everything you’re against?”
     
    “No, no.” He struggled to focus his eyes and control his drool. “It’s a rare marvel. A socialist state that works, that has survived the fall of Communism, because of the computerized planning developed at Strathclyde from the ideas of Kantorovich and Neurath. You have no idea, do you, where that might lead? Nor do we, but we want to find out.”
     
    “Well,” I said, “sorry about that, old boy, very interesting no doubt, but I’m fucked if my relatives will suffer in this Caledonian Cuba a second longer than they have to.”
     
    He inhaled snot. “Fuck you.”
     
    I could see I wouldn’t get much more out of him, so I whiled the minutes before he recovered enough to slip away by taunting him with what I’d done on the train. He looked at me with horror and loathing.
     
    “You introduced Darwin to that world?”
     
    “Who?” I said. “Wallace’s theory of natural selection - that’s what I outlined.”
     
    He thrashed in the net. “Whoever. You know what you may have done, if that young woman should be the one who convinces that world that evolution happened? Some day, perhaps many years hence, in some backwater of an Eastern empire, a young man - an Orthodox seminarian in Georgia, perhaps - will read her work, lose his faith, and go on to lead a bloody revolution - “
     
    “ - which will happen anyway, in one or other of these shit-holes,” I said. “We’re working on that problem.”
     
    “I wish you luck,” he said drily. He was coming to, now, almost ready to vanish before our eyes.
     
    “And what about this world?” I demanded. “This post-atomic horror? Would you have us leave it too?”
     
    “Yes,” he said. “To see what comes of it. Let it be.”
     
    And he went. The net slumped to the chair. I looked at the guards, shrugged.
     
    “C’est la vie ,” one of them said. “Come on, you need a coffee. And some bandages.”
     
    I followed them to the first-aid station, then to the canteen. As I sipped hot black coffee, I found myself gazing idly at the room’s walls, which were papered