Alexanders empire survived his death on several other parallel Earths.

On Iskander1 (Q4, current year 1260), Alexander lived another 20 years and passed the crown
on to his son Alexander IV. The TL4 Third Macedonian Empire rules from Kashmir to
Venice under a decadent Buddhist Turkish dynasty; its main rivals are the Novgorodi
city-states of the Baltic, a militant Hindu kingdom in Bengal, and Franco-Saxon Gaul.
On Iskander-3 (Q7, current year 653), Alexander turned west after conquering Persia
and crushed Rome underfoot; the TL3 Macedonian Empire (following the
evangelistic Mouametic version of Christianity) is preparing holy crusades against
the Manichean rebels in Carthage and the schismatic Nestorian Gupta Empire in
India.
On lskander-4 (Q6, current year 55 A.D.), although Alexander still died in Babylon,
Antigonos preserved the empires unity at the Battle of Ipsus in 301 B.C. Rome has
been penned up west of the Adriatic and broken into squabbling provinces. The
world is TL2.
On lskander-5 (Q3, current year 1505), Alexanders empire lasted long enough to
produce Hellenistic successor states in Gaul, Spain, and Britain capable of fighting
off the Germans, who invaded the Near East instead, eventually sending the Huns
and Turks east into India and China. The Celtic-Hellenistic kingdoms of the North
Atlantic coasts are TL(4+1); the German- Persian kingdoms from Armenia to the
Ganges, and the welter of warring Chinese states, are TL3.
On Mandeville (Infinite Worlds, p. 136), Alexanders conquests somehow matched
the medieval Alexander Romance legends, including his descent to the sea floor in a
diving bell, his griffin-drawn chariot, his courtship by the queen of the Amazons, and
the wall of brass he built across the north to keep the giants out.
Siva-1 (Q5, current year 2004) certainly is; beginning in the fourth century B.C., a
sect of psionic gurus known as the Sons of the Tirthankaras began spreading a
powerful meme (or possibly a global mind control gestalt) of total peace and
nonviolence. No war has happened anywhere on Siva-1 since the discovery of
America in 605 A.D. The Buddhist Maurya empire of Asoka survived until 453 A.D. in
Siva-2 (Q6, current year 1753), sending missionaries from Ireland to Japan and
bringing knowledge back to India. The stronger Buddhist presence in China and
Europe fragments them culturally; the TL5 Buddhist states in India (especially the
Maharaj of Vanarasi) and Japan continue to expand and dominate Europe, Australia,
and the Americas.
Another pacifist United India, this one the sole surviving power after a 1944-1945
nuclear WWII, dominates Siva-3 (Q6, current year 1981). In exchange for Indian
rebuilding help, surviving communities must embrace nonviolence.
On Siva-4 (Q4, current year 1866), a larger Jewish population exiled from Egypt by
the Emperor Hadrian formed colonies in India, which eventually connected the

Mogul Empire sufficiently to developments in Europe that it was able to adapt steam
technology and play Britain, Holland, and France off against each other. The Moguls
conquered the European trading posts during the Napoleonic Wars and have a TL5
economy several times the size of Britains.
On Siva-6 (Q4, current year 1599), Julian the Apostate survived as Roman Emperor
in 363 A.D. and conquered Persia, driving the Christians east to India and Central
Asia. The Christian Turks waged holy war against the Mithraist empires of the west
and the Confucian and Hindu states of the east, bringing block printing south with
them in the 11th century. Their Indian sultanates sponsored printing presses,
accidentally triggering a scientific revolution during debates with Hindu
astronomers. Along with Christianity, the Black Death (redirected by Turkish
southward trade) swept away much of the aristocratic and caste structures in India,
clearing the path for full industrial takeoff. India is the center of the TL8 world, but
on the verge of tearing itself apart in religious warfare.
Taft-2 (Q4, current year 1968): On this low-mana worldline, Taft won the nomination
in 1940 and kept America out of WWII. Britain fought Germany to a standstill by
1942; Germany and Russia made a separate peace in 1944; the Wehrmacht
overthrew Himmler in 1949 after his attempt to summon Wotan backfired. The
British Commonwealth and the Europa-Verein compete in space for global
leadership: swinging London and mod Berlin compete to be the sorcerous
capital of the world.
Taft-3 (Q6, 1997): As noted on p. B528, Taft-3 suffered a cataclysmic solar storm in
1908, followed by a steady increase in a peculiar sterilizing radiation, which
contributed to the panic of the Depression, and hence to Tafts election in 1940. The
second World War, waged with millions fewer young men, ended in Russian and
German collapse. The last primate baby was born in 1965; TL7 civilization falls apart
outside a few increasingly geriatric neo-feudal dictatorships.
Taft-4 (Q7, 2035): Following a decade-long wave of global UFO panics, Taft-4
underwent a sudden pole shift in 1918, burying Europe (and the South Pacific) under
miles of ice. TL(6+3) Alaska and Antarctica are temperate colonies of China and
Brazil, respectively, competing with India and the African League for global
dominance. The original China and California are tropical, monster-infested jungles;
the eastern U.S. is a paranoid, racist TL7 military dictatorship. Bizarrely, the polar
radiation count in some wavelengths matches that of Taft-3, hence the realitys
association with the other Taft worlds. (Robert A. Taft was the second of the four
emergency presidents during the aftermath of the pole shift, before the generals
took over openly in 1963.)
Taft-5 (Q7, 1972): There is probably no connection between Tafts election in 1952
(he died of cancer less than a year into his term) and the 1961 discovery (or entry)
of an immense, seemingly dead, artificial spacecraft in orbit around Saturn. The U.S.

and Soviets are competing to reach the ship first, driving aerospace, at least, to
TL(7+2); Infinity and Centrum are also trying to crash-build parachronic spacecraft
that can reach the object while remaining stealthy enough to keep the Secret from
two very suspicious, alert superpowers.
Taft-6 (Q5, 1956): Here, by contrast, nothing untoward seems to have happened,
not even to President and Mrs. Taft. (In this worldline, she never suffered her
debilitating stroke, and he hasnt got his cancer.) Instead, Taft is still in his second
term as president, having pushed through major civil rights and anti-discrimination
legislation, demobilized the national security state (except the Navy and a nuclear
deterrent), and rolled back federal expansion and regulation in the economy. Infinity
has agents roaming America and the world checking every monster and UFO
sighting and since this low-mana parallel has quite a few normal-mana patches,
theres a lot of them. But the Patrol has found no brewing cataclysms, and nobody
seems to practice magic openly, which means that the Cabal may already have
taken over here. Or it means something else . . .
Dixie-2 (Q3, current year 1966) and Dixie-3 (Q6, current year 1937) both diverge at
Gettysburg. In Dixie-2 the CSA dominates the Caribbean and the United States is an
appendage of French and Japanese bankers. In Dixie-3 both the CSA and the U.S.
are poor, corrupt satellites of European powers. Both realities are high TL6.
In Dixie-4 (Q4, current year 1954), the Civil War occurred in 1844, the West is still
Mexican, and the United States and CSA are allied against the Mexican and German
Empires. Britain is neutral; the world is TL6.
Dixie-5 (Q6, current year 1943) diverged with Earlys Raid in 1864 and turned into a
long British quagmire in America that left the CSA an impoverished British puppet
and the United States a fanatical garrison state between British Canada and the
Confederacy. The U.S. military is TL8; the rest of the world is TL7 or lower, including
the Unions TL6 Soviet allies.
Dixie-6 (Q6, current year 1910) diverged at First Manassas when the CSA pushed on
and took Washington; Texas and California have both declared themselves
independent, and all four nations are rivals for the Indian West.
The Chinese chronicles nearly the only ones surviving on this Quantum 6 parallel
call the first wars after the Second American Revolution the Springtime Wars. The
railroad strikes of 1876 destroyed the corrupt Grant administration and ushered in a
workers collective in Chicago; with the Barbary Coup and the Christmas March on
Wall Street, the United Socialist States of America stretched from sea to shining sea.
A lengthy campaign against the recalcitrant South ended just like the last one, with
the stronger North winning through total war; the remaining capitalists and
reactionaries fled to Canada and Australia. Americas example once more fired the
workers of Europe; Germany, France, Italy, and Russia all went Communist in the
next 20 years. Only reactionary Britain and Japan held out, spreading the virus of

capitalism to Sun-Yat Sens Chinese Republic.The Summer Wars of the 1950s

brought down the British and Japanese monarchies, but the victorious powers
quarreled over the spoils and failed to extirpate Chinas booming economy, which
as always relied very little on overseas trade. By the late 20th century, the stresses
of socialist economics had badly damaged the environment. Just as the Homeline
Soviet Union poisoned whole river basins and lakes, in Lenin- 2 the entire industrial
world (except, oddly, China) began to choke on its own filth. The Communist powers
blamed the Chinese capitalists, of course, and declared the Autumn War in 2000 as
a crusade to end capitalism and defeat pollution. In fact, the Bolsheviks in Russia,
the DKAP in Mitteleuropa, and the Christian Communist Congressional Party in the
USSA fought each other almost as much as they fought the Chinese. The nuclear
exchanges didnt do nearly as much damage as did the total ecological collapse.
The Gulf Stream shut down and shifted global weather patterns. Catastrophic
warming melted the ice caps and flooded the coastlines; mega-storms tore through
the desertified continental interiors; mass extinctions wrecked the few surviving
farms and forests.
Most of the few million poisoned, dying survivors in the current year 2021 are at TL3
at best. The Chinese remnants along the drowned coastlines and interior districts
are at TL4/7 thanks to (barely) surviving industrial technology; China was probably
at TL8 by the Autumn War, with desperate experiments perhaps reaching TL10. At
least one Chinese Orion drive(nuclear-explosion propelled) ship lifted off in 1999 for
an unknown destination; others may have escaped during the war. A few Chinese
received experimental genetic grafts, hopefully allowing them to survive ecological
disaster. Although Miracle Workers and the Patrol are trying to repair Lenin-2, the
chances look grim; talented locals such as Xing La (p. B322) receive priority for
outtime recruiting, to save a few people before the inevitable choking doom as the
last of the plankton die off.
On Lenin-3 (Q6, current year 2004), Mussolini stayed Communist and his
government supported the
Catalan workers, who were the anti-Soviet, anti-Fascist third force in Spain during
the 1936-1939 War.
Mexicos Cardnas brought his own socialist government into Mussolinis antiMoscow Socialist Axis in
1938, and Mussolinis Axis stayed neutral during the inter-fascist struggle of World
War II. The U.S.-U.K. alliance took an increasingly technocratic stance after the war,
and launched a series of huge government Manhattan Initiatives. Government
scientists intended projects like the Moon shots, the fuel-cell car (caused by concern
over Irans socialist government joining the Axis in 1953), the Concord stratojet, and
so forth to maintain the Wests lead, even after the Soviet collapse in the 1960s.
This uneven development path leaves Lenin-3 TL6 in some areas (like personal

electronics and agriculture), TL7-8 in most things, and TL9 in highprofile gadgets
like moon colonies, fuel cells, and supersonic aircraft.
On Lenin-4 (Q6, current year 2027), a more severe Western recession in the 1970s
forced perestroika a decade early, with the United States in a position of weakness.
The U.S. and USSR agreed to cooperate industrially and economically to dominate
the Earth and space. They are challenged by a nonaligned movement centered in
Brasilia, the United Peoples of Earth, and by a newly formed aerospace
megacorporation, Terradyne, Inc.
The Patrol carelessly uses the Lenin prefix to note other worlds with important
variances from Homeline socialist history. On Lenin-5 (Q5, current year 1965),
Bukharin, not Stalin, took over the Soviet Union in 1924. Bukharin did not purge the
Red Army, which easily threw back Operation Barbarossa in 1941, causing a
Wehrmacht coup against Hitler that aborted the War. General Zhukov took over
after Bukharins death in 1956, denouncing him and revealing the gulags to the
West. Zhukov is pursuing full rapprochement with the U.S. against Maos China;
fascist Germany remains neutral.
On Lenin-6 (Q3, current year 1922), Bakunin won the dispute over Marx at the 1872
First International, and socialist anarchism remains the progressive wave of the
future among the intelligentsia. Kropotkins Bakuninite soviets overthrew the czars
in 1918; the resulting collectives are fighting a desperate, unorganized war against
British and Japanese invaders, who are allied with Marxist death squads directed by
Lenin, Trotsky, and Dzerzhinsky.
On Reich-1 (Q4, current year 1952), Germany forced an unequal peace on Britain
after destroying the
BEF at Dunkirk, and went on to defeat the Soviet Union while the United States
ignored Europe and crushed Japan. Neither has yet developed nuclear weapons,
although both have active research programs. After Hitler died in 1949, Himmler
purged the Party and took sole power. He began the next war by occupying Britain,
despite the warnings of his admirals that Germany was not yet ready to challenge
the Americans. Sure enough, the United States is currently blockading the entire
Atlantic coast of Europe, American jets proving equal to the best the Luftwaffe can
field. Battles against the Wehrmacht in India and Siberia have been less successful,
but America is slowly assembling a gigantic invasion force in Iceland, and as yet the
Germans have no idea of its intended target.
On Reich-3 (Q5, current year 1970), Japan struck Russian Vladivostok rather than
Pearl Harbor in 1941. The isolationist United States stayed out of war and never
fully funded nuclear research. Japan and Germany divided Eurasia, isolating the
United States still further. Most of South America is German-aligned (though
Ecuador and Venezuela are Japanese clients, and Brazil is ostentatiously neutral).
Only Canada and Mexico remain closely allied with the United States (Canada, with

a large voting base of U.K. refugees and their children, is in fact far more committed
to resisting the Axis powers than the U.S.) But the United States still wields
influence in the Caribbean that Germany covets, and its continued possession of
Hawaii strikes Japan as an affront. While conflict between the two Axis empires is
rising along their common borders, they have thus far determined to table those
issues until the last of the Anglo-Saxon powers can be properly humbled.
On Reich-4 (Q4, current year 1988) the Wehrmacht broke Leningrads defenses in
1941. By
1945 only Germany and Japan succeeded in developing nuclear weapons, which
they used to cement their victory. Heavy investments in anti-aircraft defenses by
the United States were negated by the German ballistic missiles, whose first nuclear
strike destroyed industrial centers and troop formations alike. American resistance
was brave, but ultimately futile. The Japanese provided the bulk of the occupation
troops from their empire, and the Axis powers split North America between them.
Without a common enemy, the two superstates, each convinced of the supremacy
of their ruling race, soon turned on one another. In 1979, dispute over Persian Gulf
oil rapidly escalated, and triggered a German first strike that decapitated the
Japanese Empire and destroyed enough of its nuclear capability to leave Germany
as a functioning state. But the de facto ruler of the world, after heavy losses, is
finding it difficult to find the personnel to administer its new territories. (And, on
viewing the devastation, the Germans are likewise finding it difficult to summon the
wherewithal to bother, Nazi doctrines regarding lebensraum and the racial destiny
to rule notwithstanding.) Reich-5 (Q3, current year 2010) is covered
Zone Green (p. 51).
On Britannica-1 (Q5, current year 2001), the American colonies splintered after
independence to become a zone of proxy wars between the European powers.
Undistracted and eventually economically predominant in America, the British
Empire defeated Napoleon (1792-1809), Russia (1854-1856), Germany twice (19101914 and 1936-1940), and the Soviet Union (1958-1963). The Bolshevist War ended
with TL7 Britain holding a near-complete monopoly on space travel and a new Pax
Britannica unfolding before it; now TL8.
The TL(5+2) Empire of Britannica-2 (Q6, current year 1936) diverges in 1824, with
the death of John Quincy Adams. Prime Minister Canning easily outmaneuvered
President Henry Clay, and the British obtained a full claim to Oregon, which they
expanded into California in 1846 to secure their Nicaraguan Canal. (The canal was
very useful in the 1862 intervention that separated the American Confederacy as a
British puppet.) The Raj extends from Thibet to Persia, British capital dominates the
factories of the Germanies through Hanover and Holland, and a British railway runs
from the Cape to Cairo. Infinity is unsure how much of this is due to Centrum
manipulation; the timeline has been part of Zone Green for over a decade. More

worrisome are the hints that the Empire has developed time travel, which if true
would explain the unbroken run of British luck since 1824.
On TL6 Britannica-4 (Q5, current year 1901), Washington was able to bring up
enough troops to capture British supply depots in New Jersey and besiege New York
in 1777. France jumped in and stripped Britain of its tropical colonies; George III
went mad and the Prince Regent formed a government led by Fox and his Whig
cronies. England industrialized and radicalized as France ossified; by the 1860s, it
was democratic and overwhelmingly prosperous. Its freelance anti-imperials
intervened in the American Civil War against slavery, intrigued with the sepoys who
overthrew French India, and ran guns to rebels against Franco-Russian-dominated
China. Prime Minister Rhodes and President Roosevelt have suggested a democratic
English-Speaking Union with the Canadian and Australian Republics almost
certainly a Centrum plot in some fashion, but hard to oppose for Infinity without
aiding Continental despotism.
Other Britannicas diverge more strongly still: Britannica-5 is a steampunk reality
absorbed into Zone Green a decade ago.
Britannica-6 (Q6, current year 1887) diverged with the survival of the Princess
Charlotte in 1817 to become Queen Charlotte in 1830 and spawn a vast new royal
family, all of whom continuously intrigue against each other, exile each other to
remote colonial fortresses, and sponsor senseless, grandiose TL(5+2) engineering
projects such as the Channel Bridge, the Ice Dreadnought, and the Electrical Terror,
while betting immense sums on dromedaries or racing aerostats.
On Britannica-7 (Q4, local year 1141) Boadicea threw off Roman rule in 60 A.D. and
established a matriarchal Celtic tribal union, Brittia, that spread into Ireland and
Scotland over the next centuries. An Irish cultural-technical upsurge in the sixth
through eighth centuries extended Brittia across the North Atlantic and its influence
deep into Europe; it has alternated holy wars and very profitable intellectual
exchange (reaching TL4) with the Saracen Caliphate in Rome for the last 200 years.
A dinosaur-killer meteorite struck Lucifer-1 (Q7, current year 1991) in 1888,
obliterating human life everywhere except New Zealand. Continued volcanism in the
Northern Hemisphere has rendered almost the entire atmosphere nearly
unbreathable; the New Zealand survivors are reduced to TL2 savagery.
On Lucifer-2 (Q3, current year 1492) the Canterbury Event (a meteorite swarm
striking the Moon in 1178) missed the Moon and plowed across the Eastern
Hemisphere, wiping out urban civilization and ushering in a new Ice Age. The
dominant civilizations are the Aymara Empire along the Brazilian coast and a
Muskogean confederation in the Ohio Valley, both TL2.
In Lucifer-3 (Q5, current year 2004), radiation from a nearby supernova or gammaray burster sterilized the surface of Earth in 1979. Homeliners are systematically

looting the ruins of its TL7 human civilization for surviving art treasures and refined
raw materials.
Lucifer-4 (Q3, current year 64,403,225 B.C.) is a late-Cretaceous parallel where the
iridium meteorite has just fallen in the Yucatan (p. 84).
On the normal-mana world Lucifer-6 (Q3, current year 747 B.C.) an eccentric comet
entered an Earth-grazing orbit around 2350 B.C., causing catastrophic weather
shifts every 400 years. Babylonian and Egyptian wizards plan to invade and conquer
the comet when it comes back around next year.
Infinity knows of several other parallels where history diverged to vault Muslim
powers into predominant roles. Caliph is the only one more advanced than
Homeline, although Jihad-2 (Q5, current year 1429), in which Constantinople fell to
the Arabs in 676 and Europe followed, is well into a TL5 industrial revolution.
In Jihad-1 (Q5, current year 1881), where the Arabs defeated the Franks at Tours in
732, Muslim Faranjistan is still stagnating with the rest of the world at TL4.
In Ottoman-1 (Q6, current year 1766), the Turks took Vienna in 1529 and marched
to Rome and the Rhine; the Anglo-Spanish alliance is gingerly pressing back into the
fragmented taifa states of France and Germany; TL4.
The Turkish empire in Ottoman-2 (Q6, current year 1766) extends over a huge part
of Asia, Russia, and India as the Ottomans turned east to swallow Tamerlanes
empire upon his death. The Europeans they neglected are moving into TL5,
however.
Ottoman-3 (Q4, current year 1640) also diverges with Tamerlane, who conquered
China in the 1390s and forcibly converted it to Islam. With Tamerlane occupied in
the East, the Ottomans took Constantinople in 1405 and swallowed Europe to the
Elbe. Both TL4 Muslim empires (and the remainder of Muscovy) are wracked with
revolts and famine from Germany to Manchuria.
In Ottoman-4 (Q7, current year 1871), Mehmet the Conqueror survived long enough
to complete his invasion of Italy in 1481, aborting the Renaissance. The TL6
Ottomans control the Mediterranean and Caribbean both, and are racing the Moguls
to African colonies.
Andalus (Q4, current year 1930), in which the Muslims of Spain threw back the
Reconquista and went on to discover America in 1484, achieving TL6 in rivalry with
Japan, Saxony, and Russia.
Ismail (Q4, current year 1594) in which the Safavids defeated the Ottomans in 1512
and built a millenarian TL4 Shiite empire stretching from India to Algiers.

Khedive (Q6, current year 1941) in which Mehmet Alis modernization program in
Egypt achieved industrial takeoff in the 1860s, allowing Egypt to absorb most of
northern Africa and the Middle East and become a TL7 great power holding the
balance between Britain, Germany, and Russia.