PARADOX EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV User Manual
WHAT IF?
THE ANTHOLOGY OF
ALTERNATE HISTORY
by
Harry Turtledove and Others
Pressname: Paradox Books
Copyright © 2014 Paradox Interactive AB
All rights reserved
Authors: Harry Turtledove, Janice Gable Bashman,
Lee Battersby, Luke Bean, Raymond Benson, Felix
Cook, Aidan Darnell Hailes, Jordan Ellinger, James
Erwin, Anders Fager, David Parish-Whittaker, Rod
Rees, Aaron Rosenberg
Editor: Tomas Härenstam
Cover Art: Ola Larsson
ISBN: 978-91-87687-50-1
www.paradoxplaza.com/books
CONTENTS
Introduction – Troy Goodfellow ................................... 1
Company – Luke Bean .................................................... 4
The More it Changes – Harry Turtledove ................. 24
A Single Shot – Rod Rees ............................................ 43
The Buonapartes – Anders Fager ............................... 64
Let No Man Put Asunder – Aaron Rosenberg ......... 84
Roaring Girl – David Parish-Whittaker ................... 106
Defeat of the Invincible – Janice Gable Bashman . 132
Rising Sun – James Erwin .......................................... 153
Écureuils – Aidan Darnell Hailes .............................. 171
English Achilles – Jordan Ellinger ............................ 185
The Great Work – Felix Cook................................... 206
To Be Or Not To Be – Raymond Benson .............. 227
The Emperor Of Moscow – Lee Battersby ............. 249
Afterword ..................................................................... 268
Other Titles by Paradox Books ................................. 269
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
There is an ongoing debate in academic history
about the value of what they call “counterfactual”
history—the idea that we can learn about how we got
where we are by asking ourselves how things might
have changed if the past took a different road. The
plague doesn’t get to Byzantium. The Germans do
get across the Marne. China doesn’t stop the treasure
fleets. These puzzles ask us to examine what we
mean when say that an historical event was “caused”
by one factor or another.
Academic debate aside, alternate histories undoubtedly provide as much entertainment as they do illumination. Whether it’s a question of seeing how far a
writer can push the “want of a horseshoe nail” or
simply imagining how all of our lives would be different in a world where, say, Hitler stuck to art school, the
possibilities generated by an infinite range of stories
can tickle the imagination.
This is not to say that writing a good alternate history is easy. You must have an interesting starting
point, you must have plausible connections between
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
events, and you must have an intuitive understanding
of the motivations of men and women, great and small.
Paradox grand strategy games are where history
starts going off the rails the moment you press PLAY,
and, for as long as we’ve made these games, fans have
entertained us with After Action Reports (AARs); descriptions of their experiences in the game, sometimes
with decisions up for community vote. An AAR can be
either a straight summary of what happened on screen
or a deeper meditation on what it is like to live in this
new, computer-generated world, sometimes told from
the perspective of a leader or citizen in this newly generated past. Both approaches have their advocates, but
both are best done with a strong eye to how the past is
always a foreign country.
This anthology is a celebration of the story-telling
power of our games, especially Europa Universalis, a series that launched Paradox Development Studio (and
Paradox Interactive). Strategy games like ours make for
good stories because there are never two experiences
that are remotely identical to each other. Thuringia replaces Austria as the ruler of Central Europe in one
game, in another France bulldozes through the Holy
Roman Empire, and in a third Vienna pulls it all together to rebuild the empire of Charlemagne.
Now imagine an alternate timeline where there is no
Europa Universalis; a dark timeline where an experimental title did not find a global audience willing to
embrace the uncertainties of history and the challenges
of the greatest of men and women. There are still
games, of course, and even strategy games. But they are
likely both less grounded in our common love for our
history and less celebratory of the wonderful improvisational nature of gamers.
2
INTRODUCTION
Enough sadness. We bring you stories—tales of
great deeds, small heroisms and how everything could
have been different.
Troy Goodfellow
Assistant Developer
Paradox Interactive
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
COMPANY
By Luke Bean
I first met Duckie Wooler when I was sixteen. He had
come to Mecklenburg to start a war, and I figured I
could get a pack or two of cigarettes out of it. The idea
of being invaded didn’t worry me much. War, as far as
my town was concerned, was the natural state of affairs. Indeed, it was the idea that the invaders might
bring peace that troubled the locals. So when this
strange American showed up waving around a camera
and talking of an age of peace to come, he found nothing but closed doors and pursed mouths. I took pity on
this lonely man, and I do not think it is an exaggeration
to say we saved each other’s lives. Today, of course,
Silas “Duckie” Wooler is the New York Journal’s fabled international correspondent, the man who built
the case for the Pacification of Germany. And though
my name, Erich Kalb, is little remembered, I too am
famous: I am the subject of Mr. Wooler’s most iconic
photograph, “The Boy and the Banner.”
4
COMPANY – LUKE BEAN
In 1950, Mr. Wooler asked me to write a short foreword for the 20th anniversary edition of Duckie in Ger-
many. (It is a fascinating work of journalism, and I strongly
encourage you to read it.) I found it difficult to bottle my
feelings on the topic. The story of my travels as Duckie’s
translator meant little to me without the context of how
I had arrived at that point in my life. Soon my short foreword had exploded into a hundred pages of anecdotes,
arguments, and explanations. “If you want to make me
look like an idiot,” Duckie eventually told me, “You can
do it in your own damn book.”
With all respect to Mr. Wooler, I believe there is an
error at the heart of his reporting on Germany. My world
was not divided into predatory mercenaries and innocent
victims. The companies maintained their grip on Germany by making everyone an accomplice to their crimes.
At some point, we had all housed them, fed them, traded
with them, fought for them. Everyone knew their local
company men, and counted family and friends among
them. When a boy turned thirteen, Mecklenburg’s largest
company, the Duke’s Rifles, would come to their door.
“Fight with us,” the sergeant would say, “You’ll come
home rich or you’ll come home in a box, but either way
you’ll be a man.” They wouldn’t actually waste effort car-
rying your coffin home, but you understood. Duckie
once asked me why people didn’t turn on the companies.
The question made me laugh. Who was there to turn? We
were the companies, every last one of us.
1. The Balloon
One of my earliest memories is of a hot air balloon. I
was in town with my mother when it appeared in the
distance. She lifted me onto her shoulders to see. We
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
walked around like that, Mother going about her business and me craning my neck to always keep an eye on
the distant balloon, as if it was waiting for a chance to
slip away. When the balloon came closer, Mother took
me off her shoulders and told me not to look at it anymore, but I looked anyway, and she didn’t stop me.
Three men dangled from nooses tied to the basket.
Mother needn’t have worried about me. I thought they
were just taking a ride.
I still don’t understand this. It’s clear the hangman
wanted everyone to see his handiwork. If it could be
read as a threat, that I could accept. “This is what hap-
pens if you resist conscription!” “These men collaborated with Wehrwolves.” Cause and effect. But if the
balloon knew who hung those men, or who they were,
or what they did, then it wasn’t telling. Maybe someone
just wanted death to remain familiar to us, so we would
not recoil from its touch.
2. The Lübeck Watch
I grew up near Grevesmühlen, on the very edge of
company lands. To the east was Hansestadt Wismar, to
the west Hansestadt Lübeck. The Hanseatic Cities
were an object of fear and fascination for me, lands of
unimaginable debauchery. It was held as unimpeachable fact at my school that the merchant princes of the
Hansa considered the flesh of children a fine delicacy,
and nearly everyone had a friend whose cousin had
been sold to Lübeck to be devoured. But alongside the
lurid stories, there was the recognition that these
strangers were somehow like us. People from Russia or
England or the United Kingdoms seemed unimaginably alien, but our wayward brothers talked like us and
6
COMPANY – LUKE BEAN
traded with us. They sung foreign tunes in our native
tongue. This combination of strangeness and familiarity excited me. Lübeck was a wicked and dangerous
place, and I wanted desperately to see it, to slouch between cinemas and cabarets and strangers’ bedrooms
through streets foggy with cigar smoke.
But nobody was allowed into the Hanseatic Cities.
The Rifles didn’t want us getting seduced by their decadent ways. Thinking too much about the outside
world was discouraged. We were told history had
ended with Wallenstein, and outside Germany nothing
of interest had happened ever again. When the Duke’s
Rifles raided beyond Germany, they would target rich
Dutch cities, weak Polish towns—some companies
braver and more foolish than the Rifles even crossed
west into the United Kingdoms before the wall went
up—but the Hanseatic Cities were untouchable. They
bought the companies’ plunder, processed our poppies, and made the money flow. We were expected to
hate and fear them, but not to live without them.
There was a lieutenant in the Rifles, Erich Gersten,
who spent time with my mother. She often had men
over; it kept her in good standing with the Rifles. Most
of them ignored me, but Erich was kind to me, and I
think Mother loved him a little bit for it. He acted like
it was terribly significant that we had the same first
name. “We Erichs have to stick together,” he would
tell me. “Listen to your mother and fight bravely for
your company and you’ll do our name proud.” Some-
times I liked to imagine he was my father, and I was
named after him, but my mother said that wasn’t true.
Erich was more pretty than handsome, and could
have almost been mistaken for a woman without his
sleek red beard. He often tried to keep his face from
7
EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
smiling, but it always found a way. I’d seen Mother get
angry with him for laughing when she banged her head
on a doorframe, things like that—he wasn’t a sadist, he
just couldn’t help but find things funny. Erich loved
boasting about his adventures, and I loved listening to
him. He was proud to be a member of the Rifles. This
gentle, happy man was surely responsible for more
deaths than he could remember, but that was just part
of the job. When he paced back and forth making up
stories about daring raids and desperate escapes, I
didn’t doubt for a moment that I was going to be a
company man with the Rifles, and I was going to follow him into battle.
One of Erich’s most sacred duties was the Lübeck
Watch. Once a year he would gather together a band of
fifteen trusted men from all over Mecklenburg. They
would meet in the Hart’s Head Tavern and speak in whispers just loud enough to make sure everyone knew they
had secret business. When night fell, they would buy everyone a round of drinks, swear them to secrecy, and
march off towards Lübeck. They would return the next
day, nodding grimly to each other. I could only imagine
they were infiltrating Lübeck to some unknown (but pre-
sumably exciting) end. I couldn’t get Erich to tell me anything about the Lübeck Watch. “I was making sure
Lübeck’s still there,” he said blandly. “It is.”
When I was thirteen I was short for my age, with a
young face. If I couldn’t look like a man, I was deter-
mined to at least act like one, which to my mind mostly
involved fighting over imagined insults. The Rifles
weren’t shy about wasting boys my age as cannon fodder, but I was regarded as officer material. I was just
annoyed that it meant they would not take me with
them into combat. So when Erich Gersten came to my
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COMPANY – LUKE BEAN
door in full uniform and announced that he was enlisting me for the Lübeck Watch, I was giddy. I expected
Mother to set her jaw and growl her disapproval, but
she nodded calmly.
Erich gave me a uniform. I didn’t care that the
sleeves covered my hands. I trailed his band of men,
trying to match their gait and catch their jokes. I
couldn’t do either very well, so I ended up spending
most of the journey to Lübeck petting the pack mule.
We left the road before reaching the city and stopped
in a grove of trees. The sloping fortifications in the distance marked the end of company lands.
Erich’s men began unpacking the mule’s bags. They
contained folding wooden chairs. Everyone took one,
and we marched out of the trees, straight towards the
walls of Lübeck. I had no idea what was going on, but
I followed along. We unfolded our chairs and sat them
in a line at the base of the wall. One of the men opened
his backpack and spilled a small pile of rocks on the
ground. Another passed around bottled beer.
Guards started pooling at the top of the fortifications. They were armed, but seemed more curious than
hostile. Erich picked up a stone and flung it up at the
guards. It fell short, scuttling down the wall into the
trench at the bottom. The guards laughed. Some peeled
away to go back to patrols, but others stayed to watch.
Erich handed me a stone and grinned. I flung it as hard
as I could. And so fifteen company men and I sat and
spent hours drinking and flinging stones at the walls of
Lübeck. The guards shouted insults down and we
shouted insults back. Soon my hand was sore and my
elbow numb. I loved it.
It was about an hour before someone managed to
actually hit one of the guards, but the stone struck him
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
square in the face, splitting the guard’s lip and drawing
an audible yelp of pain. We all hooted and cheered and
lifted the soldier who made the throw into the air like
he’d just taken the city singlehandedly. The crack of rifle fire interrupted our celebration, and one of the folding chairs was split open by a bullet. I wanted to run,
but Erich stopped me. “They’re aiming around us.
Those cowards know what will happen to them if they
provoke the Rifles.” Sometimes the men would wander
off to find more stones, or spend a few minutes swapping jokes and stories, but always they returned to
throwing stones, until late until the night.
We had picked the area clear of stones. Some of the
soldiers had gone to sleep or passed out drunk. I
helped Erich start a campfire. Erich looked away from
the wall and into the fire and was quiet. He smiled to
himself, and for a moment the man who told me adventure stories was replaced with the man who looted
cities for a living. “It’s all well to play at war with them.
But we’re going to do it one of these days. I know people have been saying that for years, but we’re really going to do it. I’m going to reach down those fat bastards’
throats and pull the food right out of their bellies. I’m
going to get myself a Bernardi Autocycle, and I’m going to get your mother a radio.”
That was in 1925. The next summer was the Sack
of Lübeck, and Erich Gersten got his wish.
3. The Brown Banner
The Brown Banner was a tradition handed down to the
Duke’s Rifles from the Sixty Years’ War. When the Rifles wanted to punish someone, they would peel a strip
of skin off of them, tan it into leather, and sew it onto
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COMPANY – LUKE BEAN
the Banner. Stealing from the Rifles might lose you a
square of skin the size of your hand; betray them and
they’d take every inch of skin. You could tell exactly
how each square of skin was forfeited, because the offender’s name and a short description of their crimes
were etched into every patch. When old Banners grew
too heavy to carry they were retired to the Great Barracks in Schwerin, where they hung from every rafter
like sagging folds on an old woman’s bones.
This is one of Erich Gersten’s stories, most of
which were pure fantasy, but something about the way
he told this one made me believe it. The Duke’s Rifles
were skinning a man for the Banner. He’d murdered
his wife, and if you wanted to murder someone in
Mecklenburg, you’d damn well better belong to the Rifles. When Erich took him from his cage and led him
to the Tannery he was quiet, almost bored-looking.
They laid him on the table and he went limp. The moment the knife touched his back he giggled. As it sliced
his flesh he started laughing. It wasn’t that he didn’t
feel the pain; he was crying and clenching his fists so
tight his fingernails broke skin. But the more the flaying hurt, the more he laughed, cackling so loud it
started to frighten Erich’s men. Erich gagged him, and
that stopped the noise, but they could still see his face
contorted in laughter. In the end they killed him to
make him stop. They took the rest of his skin, but they
didn’t add it to the Banner. The cut was too sloppy—
from the laughing, and from Erich’s hands trembling.
4. History
Schooling was sparse in Grevesmühlen, and ended at a
young age, but my school made sure we took pride in
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
the parts of our history they were willing to tell us
about. I assume my readers have been raised on the
Western history of Germany: three hundred years of
anarchy and bloodshed. Here is the version I was
taught.
The age of the companies began with the Sixty
Years’ War. Sometimes books called it the Fifty Years’
War, or the Ninety Years’ War, or basically any number
they felt like. It was confusing because the war hadn’t
really remembered to end properly. I suppose one day
nobody showed up to battle, and then it was over.
Every town had its own local heroes from the Sixty
Years’ War, lords or generals or mercenaries who had
taken the town under their wing. Grevesmühlen’s patron savior was none other than the Father of our
Country himself, Albrecht von Wallenstein. Some
called him the First Captain, or the Great Liberator, or
the King Who Broke His Crown. He’d held a hundred
titles from Admiral to Emperor, but he was the Duke
of Mecklenburg, so to us he was the Good Duke. He
led the first companies to war for the Emperor to drive
out the foreigners. But as Wallenstein grew strong, the
Emperor came to fear him, until he tried to have Wallenstein killed. Wallenstein evaded the assassins, and
when the companies saw how the Emperor betrayed
his most loyal servant, they proclaimed Wallenstein the
only man they’d ever kneel to again. Even the companies that fought for the foreigners were impressed by
his promises of land, wealth, and freedom. He deposed
the tyrannical Emperor and drove off the wicked foreigners, and from that day all the people of Germany
grew strong and free. The Duke’s Rifles were directly
descended from Wallenstein’s armies. Plenty of companies could make the same claim, but Grevesmühlen
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COMPANY – LUKE BEAN
had few enough things to be proud of, so we took
whatever we could get.
Among company men, the reverence for Wallenstein was genuine. He had liberated us from the tyranny
of the state. Only in Germany was a man free to do as
he pleased. If you and your brothers were strong
enough, you could take what you wanted. And if you
were weak, well, Germany had no patience for weakness—as it should be. You could pay a company if you
wanted protection, and if you didn’t, it was your loss.
Everyone wanted protection. Once in a while you’d
hear rumors of a town that had the audacity to try to
elect a mayor and govern themselves. This kind of Statist corruption inevitably met swift justice.
Change came slow to Germany. Old companies grew
strong, upstart companies toppled them, and the Duke’s
Muskets started using rifles, but the German way of life
changed little over the centuries between the Sixty Years’
War and my birth. This was by design. The Maxim War
was a typical example of how the companies reacted to
change. In 1889 the Redshanks Company returned from
a contract in Swedish West Africa with ten Maxim machine guns. Within a month, a coalition of twenty-eight
companies had formed to oppose the Redshanks, and by
the end of the year the Redshanks Company had been
wiped out, their company towns sacked, and their Maxim
guns smashed to pieces. There was no point, the captains
all agreed, in turning war into slaughter. One did not need
machine guns to prey on the weak.
But progress whittled away at Germany. Not five
years after the Maxim War, a gunsmith with the Württemberg Knights invented the Daimler Automated Rifle. Unlike the Redshanks, the Knights were willing to
share. The Daim-Aut could be finicky, and if it broke
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
you might not be able to find the parts to fix it, but it
was a treasured status symbol and a viciously effective
weapon. During the Sack of Lübeck a platoon of Quartered Men with Daim-Auts held off a Swedish landing
force outnumbering them eight to one.
As long as the companies spent all their energy on
raiding and backbiting, they were regarded as a benign
tumor, more harm to operate on than to tolerate. Napoleon had tried to excise the tumor, and look how
that turned out for him! But the Sack of Lübeck
changed everything. Too many companies had cooperated to make it possible, their new automatic weaponry was too powerful, and it was a violation of the
implicit accord between the companies and the Hansa.
But worst of all, nobody had seen the Sack of Lübeck
coming. The companies were no longer predictable.
The West began building the case for surgery.
5. The Wehrwolf
When I was eleven, I came in from the poppy fields
one night and found my mother talking with a man.
This man was different from most of the company
men who buzzed around my mother—filthy and unshaven, but with a preacher’s voice and urgent eyes.
Mother told me to go upstairs, but the man said no, I
should hear this. He spoke to us of a land of freedom
to the south, where a woman did not have to give her
body to the companies, where a boy would only be
called to war to defend his home, not to burn someone
else’s. He didn’t spell it out, but I knew enough to figure out that he was a Wehrwolf.
We ate with him, and then Mother sat with him for
hours, nodding and letting him talk. I had a thousand
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COMPANY – LUKE BEAN
questions, but Mother grabbed my arm, telling me to
close my mouth and open my ears for once. Eventually
she sent me to bed. She came upstairs with me, and
told me to stay in my room until she came for me in
the morning, and to never breathe a word of what happened that night to anyone.
In the morning, the Rifles came to our house. They
thanked my mother and added the man’s skin to the
Brown Banner.
The present German government would have you
believe the Wehrwolves were virtuous liberators. Don’t
believe a word of it. They were no better than the companies. They looted towns, raped women, and conscripted boys just the same; they just did it with Justice’s name on their lips, as if one more blasphemy
could turn their sins to virtue. Whichever Wehrwolf
band sent that man to Grevesmühlen was looking to
expand their turf, not set us free. But even if he was
lying, that man was the first person to tell me about a
world without companies. The second was Duckie.
6. My Hand
The air itself seemed to vibrate with excitement before
a raid departed. We wanted the wealth. We wanted the
food. We wanted the victory. Every indignity the Rifles
ever inflicted on Mecklenburg was forgiven in the
weeks before and after a raid. I practiced my aim until
my trigger finger blistered, popped, and blistered again.
I going to see Lübeck, and I was going to bring back
whatever I could carry. It took hours of staring at the
ceiling before I fell asleep.
I woke to unbearable pain. I tried pushing myself
out of bed, but my right arm collapsed under me. I
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
dragged my right hand onto my chest to look. It was a
bulging, purple mess of swelled meat and jumbled
bones. A brief glimpse of my mother standing at the
door with a hammer was all I needed to understand
what had happened.
I screamed every foul word I knew until I ran out
of words and then I screamed incoherent gibberish and
then my tongue gave up and I just screamed. By the
time I’d worked up the strength to stand, Mother was
long gone. I raced into town without even pausing to
tend to my hand. I don’t know what I intended to do.
Would I have reported my mother? I’m not sure. But
by the time I got to Grevesmühlen the Rifles had already left for Lübeck. It didn’t matter. I’d never be able
to fire a rifle, let alone be one.
Mother had never spoken ill of the companies, or
argued when I talked about joining them. She was loyal
to the Rifles and they were loyal to her. But I thought
I understood. I thought my mother didn’t want me to
grow up, that she was scared to let her son risk his life,
that she wanted me to be a coward so I could be her
boy forever. We didn’t talk about it properly until years
later, when she joined me in Philadelphia. It wasn’t that
she was scared of me dying. She was scared of me dying
for a company. Quietly but fervently, she hated them
with every fiber of her being.
7. The Radio
Two days after the Rifles set out for Lübeck, a small
group of recruits rode back into town, and with them
was every horse the Rifles had brought. I was with the
crowd waiting for our company to return. Word rushed
through the crowd that these were the only survivors,
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COMPANY – LUKE BEAN
then in the very next breath, the story changed. The
men were on their way, they just didn’t need to ride
their horses home.
The Duke’s Rifles drove into town four hours later,
and every last one of them at the wheel of a Bernardi
Autocycle. Most of them kept on driving to Schwerin,
but our local Rifles were heroes like never before. Everyone wanted to drive an autocycle, or ride in one, or
at least just honk the horn. By the time people started
creeping home to sleep, three cycles were stuck in
ditches, one had crashed through the wall of a house,
and nearly half of them were out of fuel. Throughout
the night and into the next morning, Rifles trickled in
on foot from the road to Schwerin, having also crashed
their cycles or run out of gas. The men had brought
back several barrels of petrol, but it quickly became
clear that it wasn’t enough to keep the cycles fuelled
for long, and within a year or so the last of them had
run dry. They remained chained up outside houses as
rusting monuments, testifying that the men who lived
here’d had their way with the Queen of the Hansa.
Erich got Mother her radio. He pulled up at our
house the morning after the Rifles returned with this
huge cabinet radio taking up the driver’s seat and him
leaning out the side, barely keeping control of the autocycle. Just a week before I’d have laughed my head
off. Mother still hadn’t come home after breaking my
hand, and I wasn’t able to help him carry it, so he had
to nudge the radio into our house inch by inch. Erich
was disappointed that Mother wasn’t home to greet
him, and probably a little worried. He said what a
shame it was about my hand, but he didn’t ask for an
explanation, and we never really talked about the Rifles
anymore after that.
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
My mother came home the next day. We didn’t talk,
but she found the radio, and she read the note Erich
had left, and they seemed to cheer her up a little. With
my broken hand, I couldn’t train to join the Rifles anymore, and it was weeks before I could work the poppy
fields. The radio became the new center of my life. At
first, every broadcast was about Lübeck. It amused me
to hear Rostock and Hamburg lamenting our victory.
When the Swedes tried and failed to relieve Lübeck
from the companies that had stayed to pick it clean, the
radio wept and I cheered. At night I stayed quiet to see
if I could hear gunfire, but it was too far away.
After a few days some of the pleasure went out of
the constant coverage of Lübeck. Grevesmühlen was
raided only rarely, and not as harshly as a town without
company protection would have been, but even so
Lübeck’s plight was not impossible for me to relate to.
Sometimes they would broadcast lists of survivors who
had been separated from their loved ones, and I turned
off the radio for that. But eventually the mournful tributes to Lübeck waned, and my love affair with radio
began in earnest.
I became a hermit and a man of the world at the
same time. I listened to American jazz and English
marches and Hansa cabaret and strange atonal Russian
music and just about anything else they’d put on the
air. Mother took up some of the slack in the poppy
fields, partly in penance for my hand and partly on a
condition: I was to learn English. The Hanseatic Cities
had a significant population of refugees who had fled
England when the Leveller Party took power, enough
to have English-language radio stations. They played
detective stories and Westerns brought over from the
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COMPANY – LUKE BEAN
US, and even before I understood what they were saying I understood the sound of a gruff man and a sultry
woman and a gunshot. This was my life for two years:
hunched over a radio, listening to a world I’d never
known.
As young love often does, my relationship with the
radio came to an end. The radio was hidden in a storage
cellar. It was a treasured item, and it was better not to
attract attention to it. This worked for a time, but Erich
could not be kept from boasting about how he’d
brought his woman a radio. Eventually, the Rifles were
contracted to go off and fight in some foreign war (I’d
stopped keeping track) and Grevesmühlen was raided.
The Stranger’s Band was led by a man named Heinrich Robledo. He was not born to the life of a company
man. He had chosen it. He was from the United Kingdoms—his real name was Enrique—and had fought
with the Spanish separatists for a long time. They got
tired of fighting before he did, so he came to Germany
so he could keep fighting forever. The captain of the
Rifles had offended him somehow, and we suffered the
consequences.
Robledo came to our door himself with a small
group of men. He’d heard we had a radio. My mother
had made sure to be far away by the time the Stranger’s
Band arrived, but I had remained behind to help them
find anything they needed. It was best not to let raiders
look for things on their own, because if they couldn’t
find them they got frustrated, and that could put them
in a destructive mood.
I led Robledo to the cellar. He took one look at the
radio and spat. “It’s too big. Why’s it so big?” he said,
as if I’d somehow enlarged it to spite him. I said I didn’t
know. His men tied a rope around it and hauled it out
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
of the cellar. It banged against the wall as it rose,
knocking off a chip of its sleek casing with each strike.
And then Robledo didn’t know what to do with it.
He’d imagined a newer, smaller model of radio. His
wagons were with the main force, looting Schwerin.
His men could lift it, but couldn’t carry it far. They tried
tying it to a horse and the horse collapsed. They
dragged the radio out in front of our house. Robledo
smashed it to pieces with his rifle butt so that if he
couldn’t have it, at least we couldn’t either. By the time
the Quartered Men arrived to reinforce Grevesmühlen,
Heinrich Robledo was long gone.
8. Duckie
The wreckage of the radio was still outside my house
when Duckie Wooler arrived in Grevesmühlen. It had
been there for nearly a month, but neither Mother nor
myself had the heart to get rid of it. He was taking a
photograph of the broken radio, and I accidentally
stepped into the back of the shot. He made an “out of
the way” gesture, and I told him to fuck off, and he
said “What?” in English, and I told him to fuck off in
English, and he offered to hire me as a translator, and
I told him to fuck off again, and off he fucked.
Duckie lingered in town, and quickly became a local
laughingstock. He had not yet grown fat, but already
he gave the impression of one destined for fatness.
People tolerated his pictures at first, then let him take
pictures if he paid them in cigarettes. He was sometimes flanked by two blank-faced men that everyone
assumed, probably correctly, were Hansa agents. It was
thanks to these men, whose names I’ve forgotten, that
I came to work for Duckie. I happened to be in the
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COMPANY – LUKE BEAN
Hart’s Head on an errand, and I overheard him introducing them as the Duck’s Rifles. The pun didn’t work
in German, but I couldn’t help but bark a quick laugh.
He noticed.
As I left the tavern, I found Duckie matching my
stride. He explained his situation to me. Grevesmühlen
had sucked Duckie in like mud. He had spent all his
money bribing his way past the Hanseatic border, and
now he had an escort but no translator and no way of
getting around. He said he needed someone to provide
a local touch. But more than that, I think he needed
someone to care. He thought his photographs could
set us free from the companies. He was starting to realize that we were our own prisoners. He needed just
one person to ask to be free.
Duckie walked me all the way home. He gave
speeches about liberty, and when those made my eyes
glaze over he told horror stories he’d heard about the
companies, and when that didn’t move me he gave me
a box of cigarettes and promised me two whole cartons. Something about him reminded me of the Wehrwolf. Not just the things he said, but the way he talked,
even the way he carried himself. Maybe that’s why I
told him I’d think about it, as a way of apologizing. I
don’t know. He didn’t want to let me go before I’d
agreed to help him, but I insisted I was going to sleep.
He scrunched up his face like a wounded dog and said
“Don’t you want to do something about all this?”
I manipulated the question in my head as I lay in
bed. “Don’t you want to do something about all this?”
It shocked me that I’d never considered the question.
I dreamt of the men hanging from the balloon, and
throwing rocks at the walls of Lübeck, and laughing at
Erich’s jokes so hard I cried, and that man laughing as
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
they peeled his skin off, and the joy that ran through
the town after a successful raid, and my beloved radio,
and the look on the Wehrwolf’s face as they dragged
him away, and in the morning, I knew my answer.
***
IN ACTUAL HISTORY
Albrecht von Wallenstein was the commander of the
Habsburg armies in the Thirty Years’ War. His forces
were largely made up of mercenaries, who were supported by looting the countryside. Though a highly capable general, Wallenstein was erratic, ambitious, and
untrustworthy, traits that eventually lead to his assassination on the orders of his own Emperor. Company
imagines a world in which the 1634 attempt on Wallenstein’s life fails, and his conspirators depose Emperor Ferdinand II.
The Thirty Years’ War—known to the characters of
Company as the Sixty Years’ War—was devastating to
Germany in real life, but the Holy Roman Empire survived as a patchwork of states rather than devolving
into a no-man’s-land ruled by mercenary companies.
The Holy Roman Empire helped defeat France in the
War of Spanish Succession and Spain in the War of the
Quadruple Alliance, averting the Franco-Spanish union known in Company as the United Kingdoms. In real
life, of course, the United Kingdom refers to the union
of the English and Scottish thrones, which here has
been divided by a powerful France’s support of the Jacobite Rebellions.
The 1910 book Der Wehrwolf, about peasants defending their town from raiders in the Thirty Years’
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War, inspired a very different guerrilla organization in
real life: the Nazis’ Wehrwolf commando force. And
Gottlieb Daimler, inventor of the Daimler Automated
Rifle, abandoned gunsmithing at 18 to focus on mechanical engineering. Instead of the first assault rifles,
he would go on to create the first modern cars. Cars
are replaced in Company by the more rudimentary auto-
cycle, a motorized tricycle descended from the designs
of Enrico Bernardi.
ABOUT LUKE BEAN
Luke Bean is an aspiring screenwriter and a recent
graduate from New York University’s Tisch School of
the Arts, where he majored in Film & Television and
History. He currently works at the Gilder Lehrman Institute of American History. Luke Bean is one of the
three winners of the Paradox Short Story Contest 2014.
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
THE MORE IT CHANGES
By Harry Turtledove
Yitzkhak the cobbler loosened the vise and checked to
see whether the glue had set between the half-dozen
thicknesses of leather. Finding it had, he let out a small
grunt of satisfaction. On the topmost layer, he drew an
outline of the rears on the pair of boots that needed reheeling. The knife he reached for was sharp but sturdy.
Sturdy it had to be, to cut through that much leather.
He bore down with the knife, using all the strength
in his right arm. If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right
hand forget her cunning. The verse from Psalm CXXXVII
was seldom far from the Jew’s thoughts.
He muttered to himself as he cut. Too many people
had forgotten too many things over the course of too
many years. To Yitzkhak, it seemed as though more
people had forgotten more things lately. That might
have been because his rusty beard had more white in it
than he cared to remember. Or, on the other hand, it
might not. The way things were these days, you never
could tell. And no one ever seemed to forget trouble.
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THE MORE IT CHANGES – HARRY TURTLEDOVE
After cutting the new boot heels, he used brass nails
to fix them in place. Iron nails would have been
cheaper, and would have served just as well…till
Chaim the butcher walked in mud or splashed through
a puddle. After that, they would have started to rust.
Do it right the first time was one of the rules Yitzkhak’s
father had beaten into him. The habit was too deeply
ingrained now for him to lose it, or even to remember
he’d once had to acquire it.
Warm, sweet summer air and light came through
the open door and the narrow window of the cobbler’s
shop. So did the exciting, almost intoxicating gabble of
trade. Monday was market day in Kolomija—the
town’s name could be spelled at least half a dozen different ways in at least three different alphabets. The
same was true for Yitzkhak’s own name. This was a
debatable part of the world in all kinds of ways.
It was summer, yes. Just what the date was was as
debatable as the spelling of Kolomija. By the calendar
the Catholics used, it was August 24, 1772. To the Orthodox, it was August 13 of the same year. In the Jews’
system, which reckoned from the creation of the
world, it was the twenty-fifth of Av in the year 5532.
The Ottoman Empire lay not far to the south—just on
the other side of the Carpathians. To Muslims, it was
the twenty-fourth of Jumaada al-awal, 1186. And, by
the new reckoning that threatened to swallow all the
others, it was the twenty-fifth day of the eleventh
month in the year 95.
Even the frontiers in these parts rippled and shifted
like a river. Until a few months before, the Jews of Kolomija had paid taxes to a nobleman who mostly didn’t
send them to the King of Poland. Now, though, Kolomija—and that nobleman—owed allegiance to the
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EUROPA UNIVERSALIS IV: ANTHOLOGY OF ALTERNATE HISTORY
Emperor of Austria. If the nobleman held out on Joseph, Yitzkhak suspected he would regret it.
The cobbler looked at the boots he’d just fixed. He
looked under the counter. He had to patch a torn upper for Shmuel the rope-maker. That could keep,
though. Shmuel was down in Jablonow, fifteen miles
to the south, tending his sick mother. Unless the poor
woman took a turn for the worse and died (God forbid,
Yitzkhak thought), he wouldn’t come home for a week
or two.
Yitzkhak didn’t have anything he needed to do right
this minute. It was gloomy and stuffy inside the
cramped shop. It smelled of leather and sweat and glue.
Under that, it smelled musty.
Outside, the sun shone. Outside, the market square
would be packed. Kolomija had a fine market day. It
wouldn’t just be peasants bringing in chickens and
white radishes and peas from the countryside. Merchants came call the way from Czernowitz, sometimes
all the way from Rowne, to buy and sell and trade.
Rowne was on the other side of the border now, but
nobody yet had fussed about it.
He closed and latched the shutter, stepped outside,
and put a big iron padlock on the front door. The lock
was ancient and rusty. A half-witted child could pick it
or force it. So far, no burglar had figured that out. With
luck, none would till Yitzkhak got back. “Alevai oma-
nyn,” he murmured as he started for the market square.
His own well-made boots kicked up dust at every
step. It was hot outside. The broad brim of his foxtrimmed black hat kept the sun off his face, but sweat
sprang out on his forehead.
He wasn’t the only man who might have been working but was heading for the market instead. He called
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