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And how does the brave new world he never really lived to see look to Lincoln? What does he think and feel about it? That's liable to be the crux of your story. He's watched laissez-faire capitalism take hold in the USA (and, don't forget, in the CSA) after the war. What does he think about it? He wrote some sharp things about the relationships between capital and slave labor. What would the relationships between capital and wage-slave labor look like to him? Has he ever heard of Karl Marx? What does he think about him, if he has?

I've offered answers to some of these questions in my novel,
How Few Remain
. The ones I proposed there certainly aren't the only ones possible. To me, alternate history is always more a game of questions than of answers, anyhow. The questions you come up with show what concerns you in the real world, even more than your answers will.

Real historians still play this game, too. Now they call it “counterfactuals.” In my admittedly biased opinion, counterfactuals are much less interesting than alternate-history stories and novels. Why? Simple. Counterfactuals are illustrations of broad historical forces. Stories and novels are illustrations of character. People fascinate me; I have to confess that broad historical forces don't. You need both for any reasonably serious approach to the world's workings, but more people care more about people—a clumsy sentence, but true, and important to a writer.

Changing wars is an easy way to generate alternate histories. It's far from the only way. Altered history can spring from changed diseases. What would the world look like today if the Black Death had killed off ninety percent of Europe's population in the fourteenth century rather than “only” a third? What would it look like if HIV had spread out of Africa three hundred years before it really did?

You can play with geography, whether Earth's or the Solar System's. If the lump of rock in the next orbit out from the Sun had been big enough to hold a reasonable atmosphere, our Viking probe might have got a humongous surprise when it touched down there. Or—who knows?—their probe might have discovered us instead. If the Mediterranean Sea had never refilled after evaporating when the gap between Gibraltar and Africa closed up five million years ago, what might that part of the world look like now? If glaciations and migration patterns had worked out differently, the Americas might have been settled by
Homo erectus
, not
Homo sapiens
. How would Europeans have treated subhumans when they found them here? (This notion, and my book called
A Different Flesh
, spring from a speculation by the late Stephen Jay Gould. Inspired by exactly the same speculation, Roger MacBride Allen wrote the fine
Orphan of Creation
at about the same time. Each of us was fascinated to see how the other used very similar research materials—and we've been friends ever since, not least because of the coincidence.)

If gold hadn't been discovered on Cherokee lands in the late 1820s, the Trail of Tears might never have happened, treaties between the USA and Native American tribes might have been more respected, and things might not have turned out quite so bad for our original immigrants. Might—you can't be sure.

And if that fender-bender hadn't made you an hour late for your job interview, you wouldn't have drowned your sorrows at the place next door to that office … and now, twenty years later, you wouldn't be married to your spouse. This is alternate history on what you might call the microhistorical level. Everyone has such stories. In a lifetime, you accumulate piles of them. It's so easy to imagine your life being different if you'd made another choice back then. And if it could happen to you, couldn't it happen to your country? Your world? Maybe Livy was pondering
his
long-ago fender-bender when he set pen to papyrus to talk about Alexander and the Romans.

I've mentioned researching a-h stories a few times. How do you go about that? If you want to capture the look and feel—and, most important, the language and attitudes—of a bygone time, use primary sources as much as you can. Primary sources are written by the people you're researching. A collection of Lincoln's speeches and writings is a primary source. A modern biography of him isn't—it's a secondary source. The advantage to using primary sources is that, with them, you are the only person standing between your source and your reader. Secondary sources add another layer of distancing, which isn't what you want. (Just in case you're wondering, it also isn't hard to find reprinted or plain used 1880s travel guides that will tell you more than you ever wanted to know about contemporary Chicago—what it was like before you went and changed it, at any rate.)

On this same principle, do as many things related to your novel yourself as you can, too. Nothing tells you more about what riding in an airship feels like than talking your way aboard the Goodyear blimp. You may not own an AK-47 yourself, but I wouldn't be surprised if you know someone who does. If you need to write about field-stripping one, watching where your friend has trouble will tell you where your characters may, too. If you set a novel in Hawaii, you should go there if you can possibly afford to; seeing the place first hand will tell you more about weather and smells and such than you can get from a zillion­ books. (The same is no doubt true of Buffalo, but the temptations are fewer there.) And remember, for a working writer such travel is deductible­. Save those receipts!

If you're working on something contentious, you will often find out that one side says one thing, the other side says something else, and if you didn't know better you'd be positive they were talking about two different incidents. How do you decide who's telling the truth and who's lying? How do you decide if anyone's telling the truth? You do it the same way you do when two of your children are squabbling over the last cookie: you weigh the available evidence, you make up your mind, and you take your best shot. Sometimes, when your kids are going at it hammer and tongs, you feel like smacking both of them, though I hope you don't. Sometimes you feel like smacking your sources, too. Most of the time, you can't, which is bound to be a good thing.

To sum up, you need to make up your mind about what your change is and what it means to things that follow upon it, and you probably need to do a not-too-obtrusive job of establishing it in the front end of your story. (You can do this too well. I had a story bounced by an editor who couldn't tell where the real history left off and the a-h began. I had, honest, made this Perfectly Clear—to me, anyhow. Not to him/her. The story eventually sold elsewhere, so I don't think the beam was entirely in my own eye.)

And, most important, you need to have your changes matter to the people in your piece, whether those people are real ones in new circumstances or figments of your imagination. If you don't do that, you may have yourself a cool counterfactual, but you won't have a story. People, what they do, what happens to them, and why, are what make stories. One reason alternate histories are hard to do well is that your need to do the background stuff can make you look away from the people in the foreground. Especially at the shorter lengths, you just don't have room to do that, so try not to.

The rewards are the flip side of the difficulties. A good alternate history can make your readers look at the ordinary, mundane world in a whole new way. The urgent desire to blow somebody's mind is a very Sixties thing, you say? Okay, I plead guilty to that. But in closing, I will note that a good friend of mine once said writing a-h was the most fun you could have with your clothes on. I don't know for sure that she was right, but I don't know for sure that she was wrong, either. Your next assignment, should you choose to accept it, is to find out for yourself.

DRANG VON OSTEN

This story was written just as the Soviet Union was coming to pieces in the late summer of 1991. Yes, it's one where I was working from the headlines. It's a story that starts out looking like one thing and ends up—I hope—looking like something else. Science fiction isn't and isn't supposed to be prophecy, but I have to say that, more than twenty years after I did this piece, it looks at least as probable as it did when it was new. Maybe more so, or maybe, again, I'm judging from current headlines. Eventually, we'll all find out.

B
uckets of rain poured down from the autumn sky. They turned the endless Russian plain into an endless swamp. The thick, gluey mud tried to suck the boots off
Gefreiter
Jürgen Sack's feet at every weary westward step he took.

The clouds and the deluge shut down visibility, too. The lance-corporal­ never knew the ground-attack plane was near until it screamed past just over his head, almost close enough for him to reach out and touch the big red star painted on the side of the fuselage. He threw himself face-down into the muck. A few of his comrades had the presence of mind to fire at the aircraft, but to no effect.

Half a kilometer west of Sack, the plane vomited cannon fire and rockets into the Germans retreating across the Trubezh. He swiped a filthy sleeve across his equally filthy face. “God help us,” he groaned. “We'll never make it back to Kiev alive.”

Beside him in the mud lay a staff sergeant who'd been at the front since the push east began in '41.
Wachtmeister
Gustav Pfeil said, “If you think the Reds are going to get you, they probably will. Me, I figure I'm still alive and they haven't got me yet.” He pushed himself to his feet. “Come on. The sooner we cross the Trubezh, the safer we're liable to be.”

Sack stumbled after him. You had to stay with your comrades, no matter what. Get cut off and dreadful things were likely to happen. Like too many other German soldiers, he'd seen what the Reds sometimes did to men they caught. Some of the roadside corpses had their noses cut off, others their ears. Others had their pants pulled down and were missing other things.

The lance-corporal lifted his face against the rain, letting it wash some of the dirt away from his eyes. Here and there, through the downpour, he saw other hunched figures tramping west.

A squeal in the sky, different from any aircraft noise. “Rockets!” he screamed, his voice going high and shrill as a girl's. He dove for the mud again, in an instant redestroying a couple of minutes' approach to cleanliness.

He was near the rear edge of the salvo of forty truck-mounted artillery rockets; no doubt they were all intended to slam down on the Germans struggling to cross the rain-swollen Trubezh. The noise and the blast were quite dreadful enough where he lay. He felt as if he'd been lifted and then slammed back to earth by a giant's hand. Fragments of rocket casing screeched past his head. They could have gutted him like a carp.

More rockets rained down on the crumbling German position east of the river. The enemy must have lined up a whole battery of launcher trucks axle to axle, Sack thought with the small part of his mind not terrified altogether out of rationality. To either side of him, wounded men's screams sounded tiny and lost amidst the shrieks and explosions of the incoming rockets.

Just when he was certain his company's hellish fix could not grow worse, shells began landing along with the rockets. Mud and dying grass fountained up into the weeping sky, then splashed down on men and on pieces of what had been men.

Then German artillery west of the Trubezh—the last defensive positions in front of the Dnieper and Kiev—opened up in counterbattery fire. The eastbound shells sounded different from incoming ordnance; instead of growing louder and shriller, their track across the sky deepened and got fainter as they dopplered away. But any response to the barrage under which he suffered was lovely music to Jürgen Sack.

The enemy fire slackened: maybe the counterbattery work had smashed the rocket launcher trucks. Sack didn't care about wherefores; the only thing that mattered to him was that, for the moment, the heavens were raining only water, not steel and brass and high explosive.

“Up!” he yelled, scrambling to his feet. “Up and get moving!”

At the same time,
Wachtmeister
Pfeil was shouting, “Come on, you lice! Head for the river! We have a chance to hold them there.”

Between them, the two noncoms bullied almost all the huddled, terrified Germans into motion. A few did not move because they'd never move again. One or two more, still alive and unhurt, refused to get up even when Sack kicked them with his muddy boots. They'd taken all they could; even capture by the enemy, with its prospects of Siberia at the best, horrid death at the worst, could not stir them from their fatal apathy. Sack hurried on. Delaying to force the laggards up would only have meant dying with them.

A ragged German rear guard—men in flooded foxholes, three or four mechanized infantry combat vehicles, a couple of panzers—held a line on a low rise a couple of hundred meters this side of the Trubezh. A grimy lieutenant, his helmet knocked askew on his head, squelched toward Sack. The lance-corporal gulped, fearing he was about to be ordered to help hold that unholdable line. But the lieutenant just waved him toward the river. “Go on, go on. Get as many across as you can, while we keep the
verdammte
Asiatics off your backs.”

Sack nodded and stumbled on. But when he started to come down from the rise toward the Trubezh, his feet for a moment refused to carry him forward. The ground-attack plane had caught German rafts in the water. Wreckage drifted downstream. So did dead men, and their fragments. Sack had read of battles where streams flowed red with blood. Till that moment, he'd thought it a novelist's conceit. No more.

Living soldiers still struggle in the Trubezh, too; a couple of rafts and barges that hadn't been hit wallowed up onto the western bank. Men in camouflage cloth and field-gray mottled and filthy enough to serve as camouflage cloth scrambled off, glad to put any water barrier, however small and flimsy, between themselves and the uncountable Asiatic horde swarming out of the east.

The boats started back toward the eastern bank of the Trubezh. Sack dispassionately admired their crews, just as he admired the worn lieutenant in charge of that doomed rear-guard line. He admitted to himself that he lacked the courage required to stick his head deliberately into the tiger's mouth and leave it there while the fanged jaws closed.

Boots splashing at the marge of the river,
Wachtmeister
Pfeil positioned himself where one of the barges looked likeliest to ground. Sack stood at his left shoulder, as if he were a feudal retainer. But chivalry in the east was dead, dead. This war had room only for ugliness.

An old soldier, Pfeil knew all the tricks. As soon as the barge got close, he splashed out into the Trubezh and helped drag it to shore. As if by magic, that entitled him to a place on board. His big, rough hands pulled Sack in after him.

Germans swarmed on until the rough water of the Trubezh was bare centimeters from the gunwale. Even as the sergeant at the engine threw it into reverse and backed the clumsy vessel away from the river­bank, more men reached out beseechingly, though they had to know they'd swamp it if they managed to get aboard.

The cannon of one of the panzers posted on the eastern rise roared. A moment later, a couple of MG-3 machine guns opened up. With their rapid cyclic rate, they sounded like giants ripping enormous sheets of canvas. However many bullets they spat, though, there always seemed to be more short, stocky men who wore the red star on their fur caps.

Some of the Germans by the riverside turned and ran back toward the rearguard line to help buy their comrades time. Others threw down weapons, stripped off clothes and boots, and plunged naked into the chilly Trubezh: drowning looked to them a better risk than waiting for another boat where they were. They swam almost as fast as Sack's overloaded barge made headway across the river.

The lance-corporal became aware of an unfamiliar feeling. “Great God, I'm almost warm!” he bawled into Pfeil's ear.

“I shouldn't wonder,” the senior noncom answered. “We're packed together tight as steers in a cattle car.” Pfeil managed a worn grin. “I just hope we're headed away from the slaughterhouse.”

Sack tried to laugh, but after what he'd been through the past few months—and especially the past few days—he couldn't force himself to find it funny. Hardly more than a year before, German motorized patrols were operating east of the Volga and pushing toward Astrakhan over a steppe that seemed empty of foes. Now the Volga line was long forgotten. If the army couldn't hold the Reds along the Dnieper … if they couldn't do that, where would they stop them?

Deciding such questions was not a lance-corporal's concern. Sack watched the western bank of the Trubezh ever so slowly draw nearer. How long could crossing a couple of hundred meters of water take?

Too long—the barge was still wallowing toward the far shore when he heard another fighter-bomber screaming in on an attack run. Cannon shells whipped the river to creamy foam; underwing rockets lanced down on tongues of flame. Sack's scream was lost in those of his comrades.

One instant he was huddled in the barge, the next flying through the air, and the one after that floundering in the cold, muddy Trubezh. He must have swallowed a liter of it before he clawed his way to the surface and sucked in a lungful of desperately needed air. Then his boots touched bottom. He realized he was just a few meters from shore.

He splashed up onto the western bank and threw himself down at full length, more dead than alive. Or so he thought, till a roar in the sky warned that the enemy plane was coming back for another pass. He scrambled on hands and knees toward a shell hole that might offer some small protection.

He rolled in on top of another man who'd beaten him to it. “I might have known it would be you,
Wachtmeister
.”

Pfeil grunted. “You can get hurt around here if you're not careful.”

Both men buried their heads in the wet dirt, waiting for another dose of guns and rockets. But it didn't come. The Red fighter-bomber sheered off and streaked away eastward, two
Luftwaffe
fighters hot on its trail. Moments later, a blast louder than shellfire said one enemy aircraft, at any rate, would never harass German ground troops again.

Sack and Pfeil both shouted like men possessed. They pounded each other on the shoulders, clasped hands. “The air force
is
good for something!” the lance-corporal yelled, in the tone of an atheist suddenly coming to Jesus.

“Every once in a while,” Pfeil allowed. “Haven't seen much of those bastards the past few weeks, though.” Sack nodded. Too many hundreds of kilometers of front, too few planes spread too thin.

The two battered soldiers used the momentary respite to get away from the riverbank. Sack spotted an abandoned farmhouse, half its roof caved in, that looked like an ideal spot to curl up and rest for a while before getting back to the war. When he pointed it out to Pfeil, the staff sergeant grinned. He hurried past his junior to take the lead in exploring the retreat.

He and Sack both entered with rifles at the ready, in case partisans were lurking inside. And indeed, the farmhouse was occupied—but by German soldiers in too-clean uniforms with the metal gorgets of the military police round their necks. “What unit, gentlemen?” one of them asked with a nasty smile.

“First platoon, third company, second regiment, Forty-First
Panzergrenadiers
,” Sack and Pfeil answered in the same breath.

“Where's the rest of it?” the military policeman demanded.

“Back in the hospital, dead on the field, drowned in the f— in the Trubezh,” Pfeil said. “Oh, I expect some of our comrades are still alive, but we got separated. It happens in battle.” His tone implied, as strongly as he dared, that his questioner had never seen real combat.

If the military policeman noticed the sarcasm, he didn't show it. One of his companions might have, for he said, “At least they have all their gear, Horst. Some of those fellows have been coming back without a stitch on them.”

“As if the quartermasters didn't have enough problems,” Horst snorted. Sack wanted to pump him full of bullets—here he was in his dog collar, with a safe post back of the line, making the lives of fighting men miserable. But Horst went on, “You're right, Willi, we have worse things to worry about. You two—there's a road, of sorts, about a hundred meters west of here. A kilometer and a half, maybe two, down that road are more
panzergrenadiers
. Attach yourself to their
Kampfgruppe
for the time being.”

“Yes sir,” Sack and Pfeil said, again together. They got out of the farmhouse in a hurry; the military police had almost certainly taken possession of it knowing it would attract tired soldiers.

The road, like too many Russian roads, was nothing more than a muddy track. Pfeil swore at the military police as he tramped along. Sack echoed him for a while—like any real soldier, he had only scorn for the dog-collar boys—but then fell silent. He didn't like what he'd heard back at the farmhouse. A
Kampfgruppe
was like papier-mâché: bits and pieces of defunct units squashed together in the hope they'd hold. Also like papier-mâché, battle groups fell apart when handled roughly.

Somebody in a foxhole shouted, “Halt!”

Sack and Pfeil obediently halted. “We're friends,” Sack called. He stood still to let the sentry see his uniform.

“Stay,” the sentry said. They stayed—he had the drop on them.

He didn't get out of the hole to check them himself, but called to someone else. The other soldier approached from the side, careful not to get between the foxhole and the two Germans. He too kept his assault rifle at the ready as he carefully examined Sack and Pfeil. But when he spoke to them, what came out of his mouth was gibberish, not German.