One
When Jeremy Solters found a note from his mother in his lunchbox, he started to laugh. He couldn't help it. So many ways she might have got hold of him-e-mail to his handheld, e-mail to his desktop, voicemail to his phone, a tingle on the implant behind his ear. But what did she pick? The most primitive comm mode she could find, and the one most likely to go wrong. That was Mom, all right. Maybe she'd spent too much time out in the alternates. She forgot to use technology when she had it at her fingertips.
He unfolded the note and made sense of her scrawl. Stop at the store on the way home and pick up two kilos of apples, she wrote. Jeremy laughed again and reread the note to make sure he had it right. He supposed he should have been glad she hadn't talked about pounds and ounces. He never could remember which was bigger. And he supposed he should have been glad she'd remembered to write in English. He could have read neoLatin. But if she'd used Koine or Great Serbian or any of the Indic languages, she wouldn't have got her precious apples.
“What's that?” Michael Fujikawa asked, as Jeremy wadded up the piece of paper and tossed it in the direction of the trash can.
“Note from my mom, if you can believe it,” Jeremy told his friend. The crumpled note bounced off the front of the trash can. Jeremy sighed. He unfolded from his perch on a concrete bench, picked up the paper, and threw it out. He was tall and skinny, but he'd never made the Canoga Park High basketball team. This wasn't the first time he'd proved he couldn't shoot.
Michael only nodded. “Oh, yeah,” he said. He was short and kind of round. Most of Jeremy's friends were short and kind of round. He sometimes wondered if that meant anything. Before he could do more than start to wonder now, Michael went on, “My dad will do the same thing. When he comes home from an alternate, it's like he has trouble remembering he's at the end of the twenty-first century, not stuck in a fifteenth-century equivalent or whatever.”
“Maybe that's it,” Jeremy agreed. “I was thinking the same thing about Mom.”
The sun beat down on him. It was only May, but it was supposed to get up past thirty today. The Valley was like that. When real summer came, it could climb over forty for a week at a time.
Jeremy ate his sandwich and his yogurt and an orange from a Palestine that hadn't seen a century and a half of murder and war. That Palestine was a sleepy Turkish province where nothing much ever happened. The oranges and lemons were especially fine there. He didn't know whether that was better or worse than the Palestine in his own world. It sure was different, though.
Michael's lunch had a couple of golden plums of a sort Jeremy hadn't seen before. He pointed to the one his friend was eating. “Where'd that come from?” he asked.
“Safeway,” Michael said unhelpfully.
“Thanks a lot,” Jeremy told him. “Which world did it come from, I mean? It's not one of ours, is it?”
“I don't think so,” Michael said. “But I don't know which alternate it's from. All I know is, Dad brought it home when he did the shopping the other day. Half the time, the store labels don't tell anyhow.”
“They're supposed to,” Jeremy said. “The EPA gets on 'em if they don't.”
“Well, the EPA's pretty dumb if it bothers about these. They're good.” Michael ate all the flesh off the plum. He tossed the pit at the trash can. It went in. He was a good shot. He took the second plum out of its plastic bag. Jeremy hoped for a taste, but Michael ate it all. He liked his food, which was no doubt why he stayed round.
The lunch bell rang just after Michael finished the plum. He jumped up. “I have to go to my locker. I left my history paper in there, and Ms. Mouradian doesn't let you print new ones in class.”
Jeremy nodded sympathetically. “She's strict, all right. I've got mine.” He slung his notebook and his handheld under his arm and headed off for U.S. History. “See you there.” His grandfather told stories about lugging around a backpack full of ten or fifteen kilos' worth of books when he went to high school. It wasn't so much that Jeremy didn't believe him. He just thought old people remembered things as being much better or much worse than they really were, depending on what kind of message they wanted to get across.
Boys and girls hurried through the dark, narrow halls. Canoga Park High was almost 150 years old. Some of the buildings were newer, replacing ones knocked down in the earthquake of '27 or the bigger one of '74, but a lot of them went all the way back to the 1950s. As far as Jeremy could see, they hadn't known much about how to make schools back then.
Of course, compared to what people in the alternates had, this was heaven. But that wasn't how most kids looked at it. Jeremy didn't look at it like that most of the time himself. He compared Canoga Park High to new schools, fancy schools. Next to them, it didn't make the grade.
Michael Fujikawa slid-skidded, really-into his seat just ahead of the late bell. Ms. Mouradian sent him a fishy stare. That was all she could do, though. He had beaten the bell. She said, “Now that we're all here”-another fishy look for Michael-“we need to push. Only a couple of weeks left in the semester, and we still have a lot of ground to cover. First things first. Pass your homework papers to the front of the room.”
Jeremy pulled his paper from his notebook. He sent it forward. Looking relieved that he'd remembered his, Michael did the same. Ms. Mouradian snatched up the homework with impatience she couldn't hide. Jeremy almost laughed, but managed to hold it in. He'd never had a history class where they didn't cover the last part of the material at a mad gallop.
Ms. Mouradian said, “Yesterday we talked about how energy problems started showing up as early as the 1970s.” Jeremy's desktop came to life. It showed him a long line of incredibly old-fashioned-looking cars in front of a gas station just as far out-of-date. The history teacher went on, “Things only got worse as time went on. By the time we reached the 2040s, our oil reserves really did start running dry, the way people had said they would for years. Nobody knew what to do. Many feared that civilization would collapse from lack of energy, lack of transport, lack of food.”
The desktop showed skinny people plundering a truck outside a supermarket. Jeremy's grandfather talked about those days, too. Jeremy hadn't taken him too seriously till he found out on his own how bad things had been. The video on the desktop looked a lot better than the stuff from the 1970s. It had started out digital. It wasn't so grainy, and the color and sound were better. Jeremy felt more as if he were really there, not watching something from ancient history.
“What caused the change?” Ms. Mouradian asked. “Why don't we have troubles like those now?”
A dozen hands shot into the air at the same time. Jeremy's was one of them. Behind him, a girl said, “Why doesn't she ask easy ones like that all the time?”
Two or three people couldn't stand knowing and not saying. Before Ms. Mouradian could call on anybody, they shouted out the answer: “The alternates!”
She nodded. “That's right. The alternates. Without the work of Galbraith and Hester, the world would be a very different place.” When she suddenly smiled, she didn't look a whole lot older than the kids in her class. “And that's what the alternates are all about, isn't it? Look at your desktops, please.”
Jeremy did, even though he'd already seen this video a million times. There were Samaki Galbraith and Liz Hester announcing their discovery to a startled world. He was tall and black and dignified. She was a little redhead who bounced and squeaked, excited at what they'd found. Considering what it was, she'd earned the right, too.
Then the desktop cut away from the chronophysicists. It showed some of the worlds they'd found-worlds where things had gone differently from the way they'd happened here.
Jeremy had seen a lot of these videos, too. Here was footage from a world where the Vikings had settled North America. Here was one where successors of Alexander the Great ruled half a dozen empires that stretched from Spain to the borders of China. Here were gaudy pictures from a world where civilization in the Old World had got off to a later start than it had here, so the Native American cultures were the most advanced anywhere.
Here was a triumphal procession through the streets of Rome in a world where the Roman Empire hadn't fallen. Jeremy smiled when that one came up. His folks spent a lot of their time trading there. He and his sister went there, too. Sometimes the locals needed to see a whole family. It added realism.
And here, quickly, one after another, were worlds with breakpoints closer to here-and-now. Here were Spaniards with bayoneted flintlocks swaggering through a town on the border between their empire and Russia in a world where the Armada conquered England. Here was a race riot in a town that didn't look too different from the ones Jeremy knew, but where the Confederate flag flew. And here was one in a world where nobody had discovered atomic energy. The United States and the Soviet Union were fighting World War VI there right this minute.
The desktop went blank. Jeremy knew how many more alternates it might have shown: the one where the Chinese had discovered the Americas; the one where the United States was a contented part of a British Empire that covered three-quarters of the globe; the nasty one where the Germans had won World War I; the even nastier one where they'd won World War II; and on and on.
Ms. Mouradian said, “How did finding the alternates change things for us?” Again, a lot of hands went up. Again, Jeremy's was one of them. Nobody yelled out the answer this time, though. It wasn't so simple.
The teacher pointed at him. “Jeremy.”
“We aren't limited to the resources of one world any more,” he answered. “We can get food and raw materials and ideas from a lot of different places, a little from here, a little from there. We don't take enough from any alternate world to hurt it.” He'd known all that stuff long before he took this class. With his mom and dad both working for Crosstime Traffic, he had to.
Ms. Mouradian knew where his folks worked. Maybe that was why she'd picked him to answer. She nodded when he was done. “That's good,” she said. “And what are some of the problems we've had since we started traveling to the alternates?”
Jeremy raised his hand one more time. He didn't want Ms. Mouradian-or anybody else-to think he didn't know there were problems. She didn't call on him again, though. She picked Michael Fujikawa instead. His folks worked for Crosstime Traffic, too. He said, “Probably contamination is the worst one.”
“That's right,” the history teacher said. “Please look at your desktops again.” Jeremy looked down. He saw the video he thought he would. There were long lines of people waiting to get shots for Hruska's disease. An early explorer had brought it back from a world that was off-limits now. There were also pictures of the blank, idiotic stares on the faces of people who'd come down with the illness. Then the desktop showed some of the plant and animal diseases and parasites that had come back here from other alternates.
A girl named Elena Ramos raised her hand. When Ms. Mouradian called on her, she said, “The other big problem is keeping people in the alternates from knowing we're visiting them.”
“Oh, yes.” The teacher nodded again. “That is the other important one. Wherever we go where there's civilization, we have to keep the secret. That's why we always pretend to be part of the world where we trade. Some alternates are advanced enough that they might be able to use the technology if they got their hands on it. That could be very, very dangerous.” The desktop showed another clip from the world where the Nazis had won the Second World War. It wasn't pretty. Ms. Mouradian went on, “That rule is also why we drill for oil and do our mining on alternates where there are only hunters and gatherers, or else worlds without any people at all. On worlds like those, we don't have to hide.”
On the desktop, oil rigs stood like steel skeletons in the middle of a vast, golden desert. Antelope with enormous horns watched, wondering what the fuss was about. An oil worker in grimy coveralls walked up to one and stroked its nose. It stood there and let him. It had never learned to be afraid of men. In that alternate, there were no men to be afraid of.
The antelope disappeared from the desktop. Jeremy sighed, and he wasn't the only one. Ms. Mouradian said, “Now we're going to go over some of the Supreme Court decisions that center on crosstime travel.” Jeremy sighed again, on a different note. Again, he wasn't the only one.
Amanda Solters stood under the awning at Canoga Park High. She stayed out of the sun while she waited for the bus and for her brother to show up. She hoped Jeremy would get there before the bus did. His last class this year was on the far side of campus, so sometimes he cut things close.
While she waited, she checked her handheld to see what she had to do tonight. She made a face at the thought of algebra homework. That was old-fashioned, boring drill and practice. She had to understand what she was doing to get it right. It wasn't like a foreign language, where she could soak it up in a few sessions with the implant. She'd learned Spanish that way, and French, and neoLatin and classical Latin for trips out to the alternate with her parents and Jeremy.
Here he came, as usual half a head taller than most of the kids around him. He'd tried out for the basketball team the autumn before, but he hadn't even got onto the JVs. Being tall wasn't enough. You had to be able to run and shoot, too.
He spotted her and waved. Amanda was tall herself, for a girl-one meter, seventy-three centimeters. Her grandfather, who was old-fashioned as well as old, sometimes said she was five feet ten. That meant next to nothing to her, any more than pounds or quarts or degrees Fahrenheit did.
“We've got to stop at the store and get apples,” Amanda said importantly when her brother came up. He started to laugh. She scowled at him. “What's so funny?”
“Did Mom leave a note in your lunchbox, too?” he asked.
“She left me one, all right,” Amanda said. “You mean she gave 'em to both of us?”
Her brother nodded. “She sure did.”
“Why didn't she just carve the message on a rock and leave it here at the bus stop?” Amanda said. “Sometimes I think she's even more stuck in her ways than Grandpa is.”
“I wouldn't be surprised.” Jeremy pointed up the street. “Here comes the bus.”
It was old-fashioned, too. The school district couldn't afford anything newer and cleaner. It burned natural gas, which meant it spewed carbon dioxide into the air. Most vehicles, these days, were either electric or ran on fuel cells that gave off only clean water vapor. Global warming hadn't stopped, but it had slowed down.
They got on the bus. As soon as it was full, the driver pulled off the side street where she'd picked up her passengers and turned north onto Topanga Canyon Boulevard. The bus rattled almost enough to drown out the trills of telephones as friends on other buses and in cars started catching up with people here. Kids on the bus made calls, too. Back in the old days, Amanda's grandfather said, everybody could listen to everybody else talking. She had trouble imagining that. It sounded like an amazing nuisance. Throat mikes let people keep conversations private, the way they were supposed to be.
Jeremy's phone trilled as the bus rolled past the green of Lanark Park on one side of the street and the rival green of an old, old nursery on the other. His lips moved. His Adam's apple bounced up and down. All Amanda could hear was a faint mumbling with no real words. Like everybody else, she and Jeremy had learned to use throat mikes before they got out of elementary school.
She had to poke Jeremy when the bus stopped in front of the Safeway. “Apples!” she said. He nodded and got up. He kept right on talking while they got off the bus. Probably Michael, Amanda thought. He and her brother had been best friends since the second grade.
When she and Jeremy went into the store, he asked, “Did Mom's note to you say what kind of apples she wanted?”
“I wish!” Amanda exclaimed. “No-we're on our own.” You could have too many choices. Amanda saw that when she walked into the produce department. This was a big store, even for a Safeway. It tried to stock some of everything. As far as fruits and vegetables were concerned, it couldn't. It couldn't even come close. Still, as Amanda peeled a plastic bag off a roll, she looked at a couple of dozen different kinds of apples, all in neat bins.
She eyed red ones, golden ones, green ones, golden ones with reddish blushes, red ones streaked with gold, green ones streaked with gold. The sign above one bin said raised right here, so you know what goes into them! Other signs announced the alternates from which those apples had come.
Amanda pointed to a bin full of apples that were almost the same color as the navel oranges across the aisle from them. “What are these?”
“They're weird,” Jeremy said. He was suspicious of unfamiliar food.
Amanda wasn't. “Let's try them.” She picked out two nice ones and dropped them into the bag. Even though petroleum didn't get burned much any more, it still had a million uses. Making every kind of plastic under the sun was one of the most important.
As if to make up for the orange apples' strangeness, Jeremy chose two golden deliciouses from the raised right here bin. He pulled off a bag of his own. In went the apples. Even so, he pointed at the sign and said, “That's really lame. We're so mixed up with the alternates by now, who can tell what started out here and what didn't? And who cares, anyway?”
“Some people don't like anything new. Some people probably didn't like TV and telephones when they were first starting up,” Amanda said. She took an apple from a different bin.
Her brother grabbed another one, too. “I know, I know. They ought to look at what things are like in some of the alternates. That would teach them a lesson.”
“I doubt it,” Amanda said. “People like that don't learn lessons.”
“Don't I wish you were wrong.” Jeremy put another apple in his sack. “How much have we got?” They set both bags of apples on the tray of a produce scale, and added fruit till they had two kilos. Then they took the bags to the express checkout line.
The checker gave them a dirty look. “Why didn't you buy all the same kind?” he said.
“Because we like different kinds,” Amanda answered.
“But they all have different prices per kilo,” the checker grumbled. Jeremy probably would have got angry by himself. Amanda only smiled, which worked better. The checker muttered something, but he pulled out his handheld so he could see which kind cost what. He looked at the total on the register. “It comes to 557 dollars.”
“Here.” Amanda gave him five benjamins, a fifty-dollar piece, and a smaller ten-dollar coin. He ran the benjamins through a reader to make sure they were genuine, then put them and the coins in the register. He gave her back three little aluminum dollars. She stuck them in the hip pocket of her shorts.
Jeremy grabbed the apples. “Come on,” he said, looking at his watch. “There'll be a northbound bus in five minutes.”
They crossed the street and caught the bus. It wasn't a school bus, so they had to pay 125 dollars each for the ride.
From the stop where they got off, it was two blocks to their house. A squirrel was nibbling something under the mulberry tree in the front yard. Fafhrd watched it wistfully from a window. The big red tabby was an indoor cat. That kept him safe from cars and dogs and the occasional raccoon and coyote, to say nothing of fleas and other cats with bad tempers. He still knew what he was supposed to hunt, though. Every line of his body said, If I ever get the chance, that squirrel is dinner.
“Poor thing,” Amanda said as she walked up the brick path to the front door. She didn't mean it. Fafhrd was an indoor cat because the last one they'd had hadn't looked both ways before he crossed the street.
She opened the door. She and her brother hadn't even got out of the front hall when their mother called from the kitchen, “Did you remember the apples?”
“Yes, Mother,” Amanda said, and then, under her breath, “I knew she was going to do that.” Jeremy nodded. Raising her voice again, Amanda went on, “Why didn't you call when we were on the bus, to make sure?”
She'd intended that for sarcasm. Her mom took it literally. “Well, I was going to,” she said, “but your Aunt Beth called me just then, and I got to talking with her. I forgot what time it was till I saw you out front. I'm glad you remembered all by yourselves.” She'd never believe they weren't still four years old.
As they took the apples into the kitchen. Fafhrd rubbed against their ankles and tried to get them to trip over him. Amanda bent down and scratched behind his whiskers. He purred for fifteen seconds or so, then trotted away. Yes, she still adored him. That was all he'd needed to know.
“What kind did you get?” their mother asked when they plopped the apples on the kitchen table. Melissa Solters looked like an older, shorter version of Amanda. Jeremy got his lighter brown hair and eyes that were hazel instead of brown from their father.
“You didn't say you wanted any kind in particular, so we bought a bunch of different ones,” he said now.
“Don't be ridiculous,” Mom said. “Apples don't-”
“Grow in bunches.” Amanda waved a finger at her. “I knew you were going to do that.” Mom made silly jokes. Dad, on the other hand, made puns. Amanda had never decided which was worse.
“Haven't seen these funny-colored ones before,” Mom said, peering into the bag. “They must be from a newly opened alternate.”
“Orange you glad we got them?” Jeremy asked, deadpan. He took after Dad in more ways than looks. Amanda felt like taking after him, preferably with a baseball bat.
“How was school today?” Mom asked. Either she hadn't noticed what Jeremy had said or she was pretending she hadn't. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other. Amanda could never be sure which.
“Okay,” she answered. “I got an A-minus on my lit paper.”
“In my day-” Mom shook her head. “They've tightened up since my day. Most people got A's then. An A-minus meant you weren't doing so well.”
“What's the point of having grades if everybody gets the same thing?” Amanda asked.
“I don't know. I guess that's why they tightened up. It's not the first time they've had to do it, either,” Mom said. “Getting rid of grade inflation, they call it. The other kind of inflation, the kind with money, just goes on and on. When your grandfather was little, a dollar was worth almost as much as a benjamin is now.“
Amanda thought about bygone days when people got good grades without working hard. She thought about even more distant days, when dollars were real money instead of afterthoughts in small change. The only answer she could see was that she'd been born in the wrong time.
The last day of school was always a half-day. When the final bell rang at twenty past twelve, soft whoops-and a couple that weren't so soft-came from every corner of Jeremy's homeroom. “Have a great summer,” the teacher said. “See you in September.”
Out trooped the students. They were saying, “Have a great summer,” too, and, “See you senior year,” and, “See you online,” and all the other things Jeremy had said and heard ever since the first grade. Somebody from another class started singing,
“No more stylus, no more screen, No more teachers-they're obscene.”
Other boys and girls-mostly boys-joined in right away. People always did. Jeremy couldn't see why. Kids escaping school had probably sung that song since the days of the Pyramids.
Jeremy waved to Michael Fujikawa, who was coming out of a room a few doors down. When they were smaller, they'd got together almost every day during summer vacation. Not now. Now it was, “See you in September.” They both said it at the same time, and not just because they didn't live two houses apart any more.
“Good luck in your alternate,” Jeremy added.
“Same to you,” Michael said. His parents traded in an Asian-dominated alternate world, the same as Jeremy's did in Agrippan Rome. In the alternate where the Fujikawas worked, Chinese fleets had kept Europeans out of the Indian Ocean. Trade patterns and all later history were very different there. These days, Japanese warlords dominated China in that alternate, as German warlords had dominated the Roman Empire here. Michael went on, “It'll be good getting back. I'm starting to know people over there, too.”
Jeremy nodded. “So am I. But it's not the same. It can't be the same. Too many things we know, but we can't tell them.”
“Yeah.” Michael walked on for a few steps. Then he said, “Friends are one thing. I wonder what happens if you fall in love in an alternate.”
“People have,” Jeremy said. “They say people have, anyway. It's usually supposed to be a mess. I don't see how it can be anything else.” He didn't even want to think about that. Instead, he changed the subject: “I miss the days when we could fool around together all summer long.”
“Me, too. Text messages just aren't the same,” Michael said. “I wish there was bandwidth enough for video between alternates.”
“There is-if you're a gazillionaire,” Jeremy said. That disgusted him. If you were rich enough, you could get whatever you wanted. If you weren't, you had to put up with e-mail as primitive as it had been a hundred years earlier. Even still-photo attachments were iffy.
“We'll be glad to see each other when school starts, that's all,” Michael said.
“Sure.” Jeremy nodded again. “You be careful, you hear?” That wasn't idle advice. Michael was going to a violent place. What warlords there wanted, they reached out and took. People who didn't like it could easily end up dead.
“You, too,” Michael told him.
“Me? Don't worry about me. I'll be fine.” Jeremy laughed. “Hardly anything ever happens in Agrippan Rome. The Empire's more than two thousand years old there, and they've spent all that time making it more complicated. You have to fill out sixteen different forms before you can swat a fly, let alone catch a mouse.” He was exaggerating, but only a little.
“Be careful anyway,” Michael said. “If you're not careful, you get in trouble.” Jeremy's folks always said the same thing. He didn't mind it so much from his friend. Michael pointed. “There's your sister.” He waved. “Hi, Amanda.” When he and Jeremy were smaller, he'd done his best not to notice her. Now he was polite.
“Hi, Michael,” she said, and then started, “'No more stylus, no more screen-'”
“Not you, too!” Jeremy broke in.
“Why not?” Amanda said. “They sing the same kind of song in Polisso, where we're going.” She started a chant in neoLatin.
“In my alternate, too,” Michael said, and sang in the Japanese-Chinese pidgin merchants used there. That didn't mean anything to Jeremy, who'd never soaked up the language through his implant. Michael had taught him a few phrases, most of them dirty, but he didn't hear any of those. He'd done the same for his friend with neoLatin, which was an excellent language to swear in.
“Here comes our bus, Jeremy,” Amanda said. “Last time this year. I like that.”
“Everybody likes that,” Michael said.
Jeremy grabbed his hand before getting on the bus with Amanda. “We'll message back and forth all the time.”
“Sure,” Michael said. “See you. So long, Amanda.”
“So long,” Amanda said. As she and Jeremy climbed into the bus, she added, in a low voice, “I didn't used to think much of Michael, but he's okay.”
“He is the best of men,” Jeremy said in neoLatin. His sister poked him in the ribs.
She sat down with a girl she knew. Jeremy sat in the seat right behind her. Somebody in the back of the bus sang out, “'No more stylus, no more…'” Jeremy stuck his fingers in his ears. The guy who'd sat down beside him laughed.
People called good-byes as their friends got off the bus. They waved through the windows. The ones who'd left waved back and then headed home. Some would go out to the alternates for the summer. Some would work here. Some would just take it easy till September. Lucky, Jeremy thought.
Jeremy and Amanda got out at their stop. He hurried up the street toward their house. “What's the rush?” Amanda called.
“Don't you want to finish packing so we can leave?” Jeremy asked. He wished they could have left weeks ago. Amanda didn't need to think very long. She caught up with him in three long strides. They went on together.
Amanda's stomach didn't have time to do more than lurch on the suborbital hop to Romania. Then weight returned, the sky went from black to blue once more, and down they came, outside of Bucharest. “Now for customs,” Jack Solters said. “That'll take longer than getting here did.”
Amanda thought her father was exaggerating. He turned out not to be. They stood in line for an hour and a half before a man in a muddy brown uniform examined their passports with microscopic care. He took their thumbprints and retinal prints and compared them to the data in the passports. “Purpose of your visit?” he asked. He spoke with a thick accent. Romania wasn't a wealthy country. Not many people here had implants. The customs man had learned English the hard way, the old-fashioned way. It showed.
“We are in transit,” Dad answered. “We are doing business in an alternate.”
“Papers,” the customs man said.
“Right here.” Amanda's father handed him a thick sheaf of them. Some were in English, others in Romanian. The official called over another man in a fancier uniform. They put their heads together and talked in their own language. Amanda thought she recognized a word here and there. Romanian and the neoLatin she knew both sprang from classical Latin, though they'd gone in different directions.
Dad spoke up in fluent Romanian. He'd learned it through his implant. The man in the fancier uniform answered him. They went back and forth for a minute or two. The Romanian gestured. He and Dad stepped off to one side. They talked some more. Then they smiled and shook hands. After that, everything went smoothly. The junior customs man stamped the Solters' passports. No one searched their bags. They went on to the rental-car counter.
As they drove the little, natural gas-powered Fiat north and west up Highway E-68, Jeremy said, “What did you do, Dad? Slip him a couple of hundred benjamins?”
“Of course not,” their father answered. “That would be illegal.”
At the same time, Mom pointed to the dome light. Jeremy looked blank. Amanda got it right away. She grabbed her stylus and scribbled on the screen of her handheld. She showed it to Jeremy: the car's bugged, dummy.
He stared at the dome light. Amanda couldn't figure out why he would do that. For somebody who was smart-and Jeremy was, no doubt about it-he could act pretty foolish sometimes. A microphone right out there in the open where anybody could see it wouldn't make much of a bug.
“Oh,” Jeremy said-much later than he should have. “Sure.”
From Bucharest to Moigrad, the little town by the site of what was Polisso in the alternate and had been Porolissum in ancient days, was a little less than four hundred kilometers. The Fiat wheezed and chugged going over the Transylvanian Alps. They drove through Cluj, the only good-sized town between Bucharest and Moigrad, an hour before they finally got where they were going.
In this world, Porolissum was a ruin, a place where archaeologists dug. A hundred years earlier, they'd rebuilt one gate to look the way it had back in Roman days. Amanda supposed they'd been trying to lure tourists. They hadn't had much luck. If Moigrad wasn't the middle of nowhere, you could see it from there.
The reconstructed gate didn't look much like the one in Polisso. That had bothered Amanda when she saw first one and then the other. It didn't any more. In the alternate, Polisso had been a going concern for two millennia. People there must have repaired or rebuilt the gate half a dozen times.
With a sigh of relief, Dad parked in front of the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad. Two men in the white, grays, and black of urban camouflage came out of the building. They both carried assault rifles. “Are they guards or bandits?” Jeremy asked.
“Guards,” Dad said. In a low voice, he went on, “Romania's poor, and it's proud. Not everybody here likes multinationals.”
Amanda eyed the rifles. That sounds like an understatement, she thought. Her father rolled down his window. He spoke to the guards in Romanian. They smiled, but the smiles didn't reach their eyes. One of them said something. Dad handed him his passport. The guard studied it, nodded, and gave it back. He spoke again.
“Show him your passports, too,” Jack Solters said. Mom and Amanda and Jeremy got out the documents. They handed them to Dad, who gave them to the guard. He looked them over, then returned them. He nodded again. He and his partner stepped back and waved toward the office.
“Looks like we're okay,” Mom said. She opened the car door. As she got out and stretched, the second guard said something.
Dad translated: “Our luggage will have to go through the sniffer. He knows we are who we say we are, but they aren't making any exceptions.”
“I don't mind,” Amanda said. “Have they had trouble here?”
After some back-and-forth with the guards in Romanian, Dad shook his head. “He says they haven't, and they don't want any, either. They've got some hotheads, some big talkers, and they aren't taking any chances.”
“Don't people realize what a mess we'd be in without the alternates?” Amanda said.
“In a word,” Dad answered, “no.”
Two
Going from the home timeline to an alternate should have been dramatic. It should have been exciting. Jeremy had seen video of a Saturn rocket blasting off for the moon. This should have been something like that, all noise and flame. Why not? He and his family were traveling between worlds, too.
No drama here, though. They sat in the same kind of seats as they had for the suborbital hop from Los Angeles to Bucharest. They got even less leg room here than they'd had in the shuttlecraft. They couldn't see out. Jeremy had always wished you could see things change as you passed from one alternate to the next. Things didn't work out that way, though. When you traveled between alternates, you weren't properly in any of them till you stopped. That meant there was nothing to see, and no point to a window.
One by one, the family changed into clothes that wouldn't look out of place in Polisso. Tank tops and shorts wouldn't do. Sandals would, but not sandals of bright blue-and-red plastic.
Jeremy and his father put on knee-length woolen tunics. Jeremy's was undyed, his father's a dull blue. Both tunics had embroidery around the sleeves and the neck opening, Dad's more than Jeremy's. Jeremy's socks were also of wool, hand-knitted; his sandals were leather, with bronze buckles. His underwear came down to his knees. It was wool, too. It itched. A plain floppy felt hat finished his outfit. Dad's hat boasted a braided leather band and a bright pheasant feather sticking up from it.
Mom and Amanda wore tunics that fell all the way to their ankles. Amanda's was blue like Dad's. Mom's was saffron yellow, which showed the family had money. So did her shiny brass belt, the gold hoops in her ears, and her lace headdress. Amanda wore a brass belt, too, but not such a wide one. Her headdress was lower and flatter than Mom's. That meant she wasn't married.
A computer guided the transposition chamber. An operator sat in the chamber with the travelers. He didn't change, and looked like the odd man out. He had manual controls in case of emergency. Fortunately, emergencies were rare. Emergencies where the manual controls would do any good were even rarer. Jeremy chose not to dwell on that.
He tried to tell when the chamber reached the right alternate. He tried whenever he went crosstime, and he always failed. If he'd been waiting for the chamber, he would have seen it materialize. Inside it, he might as well not have left the home timeline.
The trip to the alternate seemed to take about forty-five minutes. When he got out and looked at the sun, though, it would be in the same place in the sky here as it had in the home line. Duration across timelines was a tricky business. Quantum physics seemed simple beside it.
Out of the blue-or so it felt to Jeremy-the operator said, “Okay, you're here.” Jeremy muttered to himself. Caught by surprise again.
He got up and stretched. The ceiling of the chamber was only a few centimeters above his head. Tall in his own timeline, he would seem taller in the alternate. The locals weren't as well nourished as people back home. I'd make the basketball team here, he thought. I'd play center, too.
Somebody had scribbled something on the wall by the door. He leaned closer to get a better look. THE ONE AND ONLY HOMEMADE TIME MACHINE, it said. He grinned. That hadn't been there the last time he came to Agrippan Rome. Odds were it wouldn't be there when the chamber came back for his family. The company usually made that kind of stuff disappear in a hurry.
“Here you go.” The operator opened the door, the way a steward would on a shuttlecraft. The air they'd brought with them from the home timeline mingled with what the locals breathed. That was cool and damp. The transposition chamber had materialized in a cave two or three kilometers from Polisso. The cave overlooked the road to the west. That road never had a whole lot of traffic. When video cameras in the cave showed it was clear in both directions, people could go down and head for town with the locals none the wiser.
Dad was the first one out the door. “Time to make the best deals we can,” he said in neoLatin. He used English as little as he could while they were in the alternate. So did everybody else. What people in Polisso didn't hear, they couldn't wonder about.
Jeremy and Amanda followed their father around to the cargo compartment. The first things Dad got out were two swords in leather sheaths. He gave Jeremy one and buckled the other one on himself. No one here traveled cross-country unarmed. Then he pulled out four packs full of trade goods. Everybody in the family got one of those.
“A good thing bandits don't know we're coming, or we'd really have things to worry about,” Mom said as she slung her pack on her back.
“Need more than swords to keep off bandits,” Dad agreed.
Jeremy put on his own pack. Like the others, it was full of wind-up pocket watches almost the size of a fist, mirrors in gilt-metal frames, straight razors, Swiss army knives, and other examples of what would have been thoroughly outdated technology in his world. Here, though, no one could match it. No one could come close. Traders from Crosstime Traffic got wonderful prices.
If they'd been limited to what they could carry on their backs, they would have lost a lot of business. But they weren't. Another transposition chamber brought more trade goods to a subbasement under the house they used in Polisso. People hardly ever traveled through that one. If strangers appeared in Polisso from nowhere, the locals would wonder how they got there. Walking in and out through the west gate was a different story. Anybody could understand that.
Dad was checking the monitors to make sure nobody could see the family when they came out of the cave. Jeremy went over to look at the screens, too. They showed grassy hillsides. Motion and an infrared blip drew Jeremy's eye. It was only a rabbit hopping along. He relaxed. The Roman military highway arrowed off toward the west, as scornful of the landscape it crossed as any American interstate.
“Looks good,” Jeremy said.
Dad nodded. “Yes, I think so, too.” He raised his voice a little. “Come here, Melissa. See anything you don't like?”
Mom took a long, careful look at the monitors. She shook her head. “No, everything looks fine.”
“Let's go, then,” Dad said.
The mouth of the cave wasn't wide enough to let anyone in or out. A camouflaged trapdoor nearby took care of that. Jeremy and Amanda hurried down the hillside to the highway. When Jeremy got to it, the soles of his sandals slapped against the paving stones. That road had been there for two thousand years. It wasn't heavily traveled, but still… How many others had walked it before him?
The breeze blew from out of the west. The grass on either side of the road rippled like seawater. A starling flew by overhead. It made metallic twittering noises. Jeremy didn't hate starlings here the way he did in California. They belonged here. They weren't imported pests.
“Cooler here than when we left,” Mom said. Jeremy nodded. She was right. It didn't mean much, though. Weather changed randomly from one timeline to another.
“Let's go,” Dad said. They started east toward Polisso, which lay not far past the curve of the next hill.
Amanda could see the walls of Polisso ahead when the wind shifted. She wrinkled her nose. Dad broke a rule: he dropped into English to say, “Ah, the sweet smell of successpool.” The pun wouldn't work in neoLatin.
“Funny,” Amanda said, meaning anything but.
Horse manure. Garbage-old, old garbage. Sewage. Wood smoke, thick enough to slice. People who hadn't bathed for a long time. Those were some of the notes in the symphony of stinks. The scary thing was, it could have been worse. People here knew about running water. There were public baths. But the pipes only went through the richer parts of town. The baths were cheap, but they weren't free. Not everybody could afford them.
After coughing, Amanda said, “Those who travel across time learn things about smells that those who stay home never imagine.” It sounded more impressive in neoLatin. It would have been true no matter what language she spoke.
“In a few days, you won't even notice,” Mom said. That was also true. Amanda wouldn't have believed it the first time she came to Polisso. She'd wanted to throw up. She hadn't, quite. Some people did when they first went crosstime. Living in cultures that knew little about sanitation and cared less took work.
Sandstone walls, lit by the sinking sun, seemed to turn to gold. The long black barrels of cannon stood on wheeled carriages atop the wall. More big guns poked out from the tall, narrow windows of siege towers that strengthened the fortifications. Some of those towers and parts of the wall were visibly newer than others. Polisso had stood siege before.
A wagon drawn by half a dozen horses came rattling and squealing out of the gate. The horses' iron-shod hooves and the iron tires on the wagon wheels banged and clanked against the paving stones of the highway. The horses strained against their harness. The wagon was full of sandstone blocks. Pulling it couldn't have been easy for the animals.
The driver was a swarthy little man with a big black mustache. He wore a tunic like Jeremy's, but shabbier and with less embroidery. “Gods look out for you,” he said, as Amanda and her family stepped off onto the grass by the side of the road to give the wagon plenty of room to go by.
“And for you as well,” Dad answered politely.
“Thanks, friend,” the driver said. His neoLatin had an accent a little different from what Amanda had learned through her implant. That guttural undertone said he came from the province of Dacia-probably from right here in Polisso. Amanda sounded as if she came from Italy, or perhaps Illyricum or southern Gallia.
With a leer for Amanda, or for Mom, or maybe for both of them, the local flicked the reins. Men here weren't shy when they liked somebody's looks. Amanda stuck her nose in the air. So did her mother. The driver just laughed. You couldn't discourage them that way. The Solters family walked on toward Polisso.
A gate guard yawned, showing two broken teeth. He and his comrades wore surcoats of dull red linen over light mail-shirts. They tucked baggy wool trousers into rawhide boots that rose almost to their knees. Their helmets had a projecting brim in front and a downsweeping flair in back to protect their necks.
They all wore swords on their hips. Some of them carried pikes twice as tall as they were. The rest shouldered heavy, clumsy-looking matchlock muskets. A lot of them had nasty scars. They'd seen action somewhere.
“God look out for you,” Dad called to the guards.
“Gods look out for you as well,” answered the guard with the broken teeth. He had a small plume of red feathers sticking up from his helmet. That meant he was a sergeant. It also meant he could read and write, which many of the other guards couldn't do. And it meant he was going to ask nine million questions and write down all the answers. Sure enough, he pulled out an enormous book with pages made from parchment, a reed pen, and a brass bottle of ink. “Your names?”
“I am Ioanno Soltero, called Acuto,” Dad answered.
Scratch, scratch, scratch, went the pen. “They call you clever, eh?” the sergeant said. “Should they?”
With a wry shrug, Dad answered, “If I were as clever as that, would I let people know I was clever?”
“Huh,” the sergeant said. “And the people with you?”
“My son, Ieremeo Soltero, called Alto,” Dad said. The sergeant nodded as he wrote that down. Jeremy was tall. Dad went on, “My wife, Melissa Soltera. My daughter, Amanda Soltera.” Women didn't have semiofficial nicknames tacked on after their family names.
“Occupation?” the sergeant asked.
“We are merchants,” Dad replied. “We work with Marco Petro, called Calvo, whom you will know. If you do not recognize us, some of your men will.”
Several guards nodded. One said, “I remember the Solteri from last year and the year before that. Don't you, Sarge?”
“Of course I do. You think I'm stupid?” the sergeant snapped. “But that doesn't matter. We've got to have the records.” He turned back to Dad. “Nature of your trade and merchandise?”
“Hour-reckoners, mirrors, knives with many attached tools, razors, and other such small things of great use, all at best prices.” Dad got in a quick sales pitch.
Scratch, scratch, scratch. The sergeant wrote it down without changing expression. He paused to reink the pen, then asked, “Declared value of your merchandise?”
“Nine hundred aurei,” Dan answered. Merchants bringing more than a thousand goldpieces' worth of goods into a town had to pay a special tax. Nobody admitted bringing in more, not if there was any way around it.
The sergeant grunted. He knew the rules at least as well as Dad. If he wanted to be difficult, he could search the Solters' packs. His broad-shouldered shrug made his mail-shirt clink. Merchants whose goods were worth more than a thousand aurei were rich enough to land a nosy sergeant in hot water. He seemed to decide snooping beyond what the law required was more trouble than it was worth. “Religion?” he asked. “Your greeting and your names make you Christians or Jews.”
“We're Imperial Christians,” Dad said. “We're peaceful people. We don't cause trouble.”
Another grunt. “Yeah, that's what they all say.” The sergeant wrote it down, though. “Now-your home province and birthplace?”
It went on and on. Agrippan Rome floated on a sea of parchment, papyrus, and, in recent years, paper. The Empire had been a going concern for more than two thousand years. Amanda wondered if anyone had ever thrown anything out in all that time. Somewhere in Polisso, were there records of travelers who'd come through this gate five hundred or a thousand or fifteen hundred years before? She wouldn't have been surprised. Had anybody looked at them since a bored guard took them down? That would have surprised her.
After what seemed like forever and was almost half an hour, the sergeant said, “All right. Everything seems in order. Entry tax for a grade-three town, a family of four, merchant class, is… Let me see.” He had to check a sheet of parchment nailed to the guardhouse wall. Once he had checked it, he did some figuring on his fingers. “Eighteen denari.”
Dad grumbled. Grumbling was good form. It said you weren't too rich to worry about money. Grumble a lot, though, and you risked annoying the guardsmen. “Here.” Dad handed over the small silver coins. They weren't all quite the same size or shape, but they all weighed the same. The Empire was careful about its coinage.
The sergeant counted the denari. Twice. Then he nodded. “You have paid the entry tax,” he said formally. “You do not have the seeming of Lietuvan spies. Enter, therefore, into the city of Polisso. May your dealings be profitable. You will report to the temple of the spirit of the Emperor for the required sacrifice. If not, your failure will be noted.” He sent Dad a hard look.
In this paperwork-mad society, not sacrificing would be noticed. But Dad only said, “We will. I told you, we're Imperial Christians.”
Christianity here had the same name as it did back home, but it wasn't the same thing. In this world, it never had become the most important faith in the Roman Empire. The Empire here hadn't gone through the troubles it had in Amanda's world. It had stayed strong and mostly prosperous. People hadn't worried so much about the next world. For most of them, this one had seemed enough. The new belief and the old ones had mingled much more here. Even the Christians who didn't call themselves Imperial were less strict about other gods than the ones in the home timeline.
Judaism here wasn't as different as Christianity, but it wasn't the same, either. Jews here didn't believe the Emperor was divine, the way most people did. But they did think of him as God's viceroy on earth. They would sacrifice to his good health and good fortune, but not to his spirit.
In this world, Muhammad had never been born. It was a different place, with a different history. Finding things in it the same as they were back home would have been the real shocker.
“Come on,” Jeremy said. “Let's get moving.”
“Why are you in such a hurry?” Mom asked. He didn't answer, but pushed on into Polisso. The rest of the family followed.
Once upon a time, the town had been a camp where a Roman legion stayed. It still kept the square layout and grid of main streets it had had then. In between those streets that joined at neat right angles, little lanes and alleys wandered every which way. Houses had their lower story of stone or brick, the upper floors of timber. Some of them had balconies that reached across the lanes toward balconies reaching from the other side. Amanda wondered how sunlight ever trickled down there. By the damp, nasty smell, it often didn't.
A triumphal arch sprouted in the middle of a square. Men on horseback, ox carts, and people on foot went past it or under it. They didn't look at it twice. Why should they? To them, it was just part of the landscape. Amanda pointed to the figure in relief above the keystone. 'There's Agrippa.“
Even after almost two thousand years of weathering, even with bird droppings streaking his face and his ceremonial armor, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa still looked tough. The sculptor showed him as a burly, muscular man with bushy eyebrows, a big nose, and a chin that stuck out. Here, as in Amanda's world, he'd been a lifelong friend and helper to Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. In both worlds, Augustus had married his daughter to Agrippa. He'd given Agrippa his ring during an illness, showing he wanted Agrippa to be his heir.
Augustus was always getting sick-and always getting better. Agrippa was the picture of health-till, in Amanda's world, he died in 12 B.C. He was only fifty-one. Augustus kept right on getting sick-and getting better-for another quarter of a century before he finally died, too.
In this world, Agrippa had stayed healthy. It made an enormous difference. Augustus tried to conquer Germania, the way his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, had conquered Gallia. When the Germans rebelled, in Amanda's world Augustus had had to send a bad general against them. Agrippa was already more than twenty years dead. The other general-his name was Varus-got three Roman legions massacred. The German revolt succeeded. In Amanda's world, the Roman frontier stopped at the Rhine till the Empire fell.
Things weren't the same in this world. Here, Augustus had had Agrippa to use against the Germans. Agrippa was old by then-he was the same age as Augustus-but he knew his business. He beat the Germans and killed their chief. Settlers from the Empire came in, as they had in Gallia. Germania became a Roman province. Here, it still was a Roman province.
And when Augustus finally died here, who succeeded him? Agrippa. “My hair is white, but I am still strong,” he said when he became Emperor. He proved it, too. He reigned for twelve years on his own, and he conquered Dacia-the land that had become Romania in Amanda's world. The Romans had conquered it in her world, too, but not for almost another hundred years. They'd never held it very firmly there. Here, it was still called Dacia, and it still belonged to Rome.
One man, Amanda thought, looking up at Agrippa. One man made all that difference. In her world, the German invasions helped bring down the Roman Empire. In this one, the people of Germania became Romanized. They came to speak and read and write Latin. Cities sprang up there, Roman cities. Some great Roman Emperors and some great scholars and writers-and a lot of good soldiers-here had had German blood. The same held true for Dacia, though not quite to the same degree.
With the lands and people it hadn't had in her world, the Roman Empire here never fell. It went on and on, staying itself and not changing much, the way China had in her world. It had known a couple of dynasties of nomad conquerors from off the steppe, but in time it had swallowed them up. They were like a drop of ink in a lake. They couldn't turn all that water black. There weren't enough of them.
Dad pointed to a sign. LUCERNARIUS, it said: lamp-seller. Sure enough, the little shop stocked lamps of pottery and polished brass. “There's a man trying to rise above his place here,” Dad remarked.
“How come?” Amanda said, and then, “Oh! The sign's in classical Latin.”
“You bet it is,” Dad said. “In neoLatin, it'd just be lucerno.“
The sounds of neoLatin had changed less from the old language than those of Italian or Spanish or French. But its grammar worked like theirs-and like English's, too, come to that. Word order told who did what in a sentence. Man bites dog meant something different from Dog bites man.
Classical Latin had another way of doing things. You could use almost any word order you wanted, because word endings were what counted. If a lamp-seller bit a dog, he was a lucernarius. If the dog bit him, he was a lucernarium. If you gave him a dog, you gave it to a lucernario. After that, it was his dog, canis lucernarii-or, if you preferred, lucernarii canis. And if you wanted to speak to him about it, you called out, Lucernarie! All nouns changed like that. Adjectives changed with them. Verbs had their own forms.
It made for a language more compact than English. Classical Latin didn't need a lot of the helping words English used. Its word endings did the job instead. If you didn't have an implant, classical Latin was probably harder to learn than English.
And classical Latin wasn't dead in Agrippan Rome. Far from it. People spoke neoLatin in their everyday business. But the men who mattered-the bureaucrats who kept the Empire going whether the ruler was a genius or a maniac or a murderer or all three at once-wrote in the classical language. So did scholars and historians and poets. They looked down their noses at neoLatin. Learning the old tongue, learning to be elegant in it, was a big part of what raised a man to the higher classes of society here.
Sometimes the upper crust even spoke classical Latin among themselves-usually when they didn't want ordinary people to know what they were talking about. In Amanda's world, the Catholic Church had used Latin the same way into the twentieth century.
“The lamp-seller won't get in trouble for writing his sign like that, will he?” Jeremy asked.
Dad shook his head. “It's not against the rules. Just-snooty. Maybe he sells to rich people. Maybe he wants poor people to think he sells to rich people, so he can get away with charging more.”
“Snob appeal,” Mom said.
Agrippan Rome had its share of real snobs, its share and then some. Aristocrats here carried on an old, old tradition, and boy, did they know it. They looked down their noses at anybody who wasn't one of them. In a way, that made Amanda want to laugh. For all his gold and all his slaves, even the richest aristocrat here didn't have a car or a phone or a computer or a refrigerator or air-conditioning or a doctor who knew much or any of a million other things she took for granted when she was home.
But people were people, in her timeline or any of the alternates. Knowledge changed. Customs changed. Human nature didn't. People still fell in love-and out of love, too. They still schemed to get rich. They squabbled among themselves. And they needed to feel their group was better than some other group. Maybe they had more money. Maybe they had blond hair. Maybe they spoke a particular language. Maybe they had the one right religion-or the one right kind of the one right religion. It was always something, though.
And they showed off. A woman stood in the middle of the street holding up a puppy. Her friends gathered to pet it. It snapped at one of them. She smacked it in the nose. It yipped. The woman who owned it smacked it, too. People here didn't worry about cruelty to animals. That was custom, not human nature. Too bad, Amanda thought.
She and her family went up the main street that led into Polisso from the west gate. At the third good-sized cross street, they turned left. All the houses and shops and other buildings had numbers on them. That let the vigili-the police-find any place in town in a hurry. It let the city prefect collect taxes more easily, too. The numbers didn't look just like the ones Amanda was used to, but they used the same system. What she thought of as Roman numerals were for display here, the same as they were in her world.
Dad turned right on the next big cross street. The important streets, like that one, were paved with cobblestones. You had to be careful when you walked, or you could turn an ankle. The lanes and alleys that branched off from the main streets weren't paved at all. They were dusty when it was dry and streams of stinking mud when it rained.
“Here we are-24 Victorious Emperor.” Dad looked pleased with himself for remembering the way. The house-an upper story of whitewashed wood above a lower one of whitewashed stone-showed little to the street. Only narrow windows with stout shutters and a door with heavy iron hinges interrupted the stonework. All the display would go on the inside, in the rooms and in the courtyard.
The door also had a heavy iron knocker. Before Dad could grab it, Jeremy did. He raised it and brought it down three times. Bang! Bang! Bang!
“Welcome, welcome, three times welcome!” Marco Petro, called Calvo, was a stout man with blue eyes and a big nose. His bald head gave him his nickname. In Jeremy's world, his name was Mark Stone. He clasped hands with Dad and Jeremy and blew kisses to Mom and Amanda. “Come in, come in, come in.” People here liked saying and doing things in threes. They thought it was lucky. That way why Jeremy had knocked three times.
“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Dad answered. Jeremy shot him a suspicious look. Marco Petro had sounded normal. He was just… talking. The way Dad said it, he might have been poking fun at the custom he was following.
Or, then again, he might not have. You never could tell with Dad.
By the way Marco Petro boomed laughter, he thought Dad was sending up local customs. He stood aside to let the Solters family come in, then closed the door behind them. It was close to ten centimeters thick, of solid oak. He set a stout iron bar in brackets to lock it.
Closing the door cut off most of the light in the entry hall. Jeremy blinked, trying to help his eyes adapt. Marco Petro laughed again, on a different note. Now he too sounded like somebody gently-or maybe not so gently-mocking the culture in which he'd been living. “Good to see you folks,” he said. He kept on using neoLatin, but in a way that suggested he would rather have spoken English. “Messages by thinking machine are fine, but real live people are better.”
Mom curtsied. “Thank you so much for the generous praise. Better than a thinking machine!” She couldn't come out and say computer. It wasn't just that the word didn't exist in neoLatin. The idea behind the word didn't exist, either.
Marco Petro bowed to her. “More sarcastic than a thinking machine, too. Take your packs off. Make yourselves at home. You will be at home for the next three months. Come out into the courtyard, why don't you? We'll get you something wet.“
Bees buzzed among the flowers in the courtyard garden. A fountain splashed gently. This house had running water. It was cold, and the germs in it would give you stomach trouble in nothing flat if you weren't immunized, but it ran. A statue of Agrippa's son and successor, the Emperor Lucius, stood not far from the fountain. It was a small recent copy of a famous piece in Rome. It wasn't all that well carved, but the gilding on the armor and the lifelike paint on the flesh and face helped hide flaws.
Jeremy thought painted statues were gaudy, to say nothing of tacky. But the ancient Greeks and Romans had always done that. In Jeremy's world, the custom had died out. It lived on here. When in Agrippan Rome, you did as the Romans did.
“Lucinda!” Marco Petro called as he hurried into the kitchen. “Bring out some wine, will you, dear? The Solteri are here.” He wouldn't serve the guests himself. He was the head of a family. That would have been beneath his dignity. He had his daughter do it instead.
In most households this wealthy, a servant or a slave would have brought the wine. But Crosstime Traffic rules prohibited owning or dealing in slaves. Even if they hadn't… Jeremy shook his head. He'd seen slavery here, and it sickened him. How could one person buy, sell, own another? The locals did, though, and it bothered them not a bit. Some-not all, but some-slaves seemed contented enough. That puzzled Jeremy, too.
Servants also weren't a good idea here. Along with the transposition chamber in the subbasement, this house had other gadgets and weapons from the home timeline. The locals thought the merchants who lived here were eccentric for doing their own housework. But there was no law against being eccentric.
Marco Petro came back out into the courtyard. His wife came out, too, from another door. Her name was Dawn. Here, she went by Aurora, which meant the same thing. “Welcome, welcome, three times welcome!” she called. “Marco, are you getting something for them?”
“Lucinda's taking care of it, dear,” Marco Petro answered.
He sounded like someone holding on tight to his patience. His wife nagged. Jeremy had seen that before. The merchant turned toward the kitchen. “How are you coming, Lucinda?” “Ill be right there, Father.”
Lucinda Petra came out carrying a big tray of hammered copper. On the tray were an earthenware jar of wine, seven hand-blown glass cups, a loaf of brown bread, and bowls of honey and olive oil for dipping. In this world, only Lietuvans and other barbarians ate butter.
Lucinda was Jeremy's age. She had blue eyes like her father. She didn't have a big nose, though, or, as far as he could see, anything else wrong with her. She was the main reason he'd hurried into Polisso. He never had got up the nerve to tell her how cute he thought she was.
Even without his saying anything, Amanda could tell what he was thinking. “Stop staring,” she whispered.
“Stifle it,” Jeremy answered sweetly.
After Lucinda set the tray on a table, she poured wine for everybody. Agrippan Rome thought of wine the way a lot of Europeans did in Jeremy's world. Babies here started drinking watered wine as soon as they stopped nursing. As children got older, they watered it less and less. It was probably safer than drinking the water.
In his own world, there were good reasons not to let kids drink wine. They had plenty of other things to drink: water and milk that wouldn't make them sick, fruit juices, soda. They could get behind the wheel of a car and kill themselves and other people. And they were just starting out in life. Who his age or Amanda's was ready to take a place in the grown-up world?
There wasn't much else to drink here. There were no cars.
People started working at twelve or thirteen-sometimes at eight or nine-and worked till they dropped. The line between children and adults blurred. It was a different world. One whiff of the ripe, ripe air told how different it was.
Marco Petro splashed a little wine on the paving stones of the courtyard. “To the spirit of the Emperor,” he murmured.
Everyone else imitated the ritual. The traders would have done it with their customers. They did it among themselves, too, to stay in practice. The paving stones showed plenty of stains, some old, some new, If they hadn't, the locals would have wondered why. The most obvious answer was that the people here didn't wish the Emperor well. That would have been dangerous.
“By what you've sent back home, business has been good here,” Dad remarked, dipping a chunk of the brown bread into olive oil.
“Not bad at all,” Marco Petro agreed. “Hour-reckoners and mirrors, especially. Everybody who's anybody wants to pull out an hour-reckoner and see what time it is. All the people with hour-reckoners want everybody else to see them seeing what time it is. They want to show off, you know. And if you've been looking at yourself in polished bronze, or not looking at yourself at all, a real mirror seems like a miracle.”
Lucinda smiled. “They do wonder why we'd rather have grain than gold.”
“They always have,” Jeremy said. Talking about trade with Lucinda was easier than talking about other things. “As long as they don't wonder where it goes, everything's fine.”
“We make sure of that,” Aurora Petra said. Jeremy nodded. Most of the grain went back to the home timeline through the transposition chamber in the subbasement. Some went out in wagons, though: enough to make it look as if more did. That grain didn't go any farther by road than the chamber outside of town. The locals saw it leave Polisso. That was what counted.
“It'll be funny, going back to Cincinnati after living here for a while,” Lucinda said. “Do without things for a while, and they don't seem real any more.”
“It's like jet lag, only more so,” Jeremy said.
“That's just what it's like,” Lucinda agreed. Jeremy felt proud. His sister made a face at him. He ignored her.
“I hope things stay quiet with Lietuva,” Mom said.
“The guard at the gate was talking about Lietuvan spies,” Amanda put in.
“They aren't keeping Lietuvan merchants out of the Empire, so it should be all right,” Marco Petro said. The kingdom to the north and east ruled what were Poland and Belarus and Ukraine and the Baltic countries and some of European Russia in Jeremy's world. Every generation or two, it fought a war with Rome. Neither side ever gained much, but they both kept trying. No, human nature didn't change much across timelines.
Three
“Safe trip! God go with you!” Amanda called as Marco Petro and Aurora and Lucinda Petra left the house and strode toward the west gate of Polisso. They would leave Agrippan Rome through the other transposition chamber. As long as they were seen to leave the town and weren't seen to go out of this alternate, everything was fine.
“Thank you. See you before too long,” Marco Petro answered. He had a sword on his belt and carried a bow. He wore a quiver of arrows on his back. A leather pouch on his hip hid a pistol. That was for real emergencies, though. They had pistols here-long, clumsy, single-shot pistols. His neat little automatic was something else altogether.
A couple of skinny little boys in ragged tunics watched the traders leave. No one else paid much attention. They looked like ordinary people. Why get excited?
The Petri tramped down the street. They walked carefully because of the cobblestones. Tripping and breaking an ankle just when they were leaving would have been awful. The surface would get better on the flat paving stones of the highway. Still, the Petri didn't have to go very far.
Next to Amanda, Jeremy blew Lucinda a kiss. Her back was turned, so she didn't see it. Amanda sighed. Jeremy was socially challenged. He even knew it, but knowing it and doing something about it were two different beasts.
Mom called, “Safe journey!” too. Marco Petro turned and waved. So did his wife. They rounded a corner. Marco Petro started singing a song. Amanda could pick it out for a little while. The the noise of Polisso swallowed it up.
“Just us now.” Dad sounded cheerful about it.
Amanda wasn't so sure she was cheerful. Maybe Dad hadn't intended to, but he'd reminded her how alone they were here. Jeremy seemed to have the same feeling. He went into the house without looking at anybody else.
A gray cat darted up the street. It gave Amanda and her parents a wary green glance and kept on running. Mom said, “Maybe I'll leave some scraps in front of the door and see if we can make friends.”
“Good luck,” Amanda said. Cats here were more like wild animals than pets. They lived in towns because towns were full of rats and mice. They didn't want much to do with people.
“It could happen.” Mom was a born optimist.
“Let's go in and set up,” Dad said. “It's late now, so we may not have any new business today. If we don't, we will tomorrow.”
They took a few watches and mirrors and razors and Swiss army knives and arranged them on a display stand in a room near the front door. Most of the trade goods went into a strong room by the kitchen. A lot of houses in Polisso had strong rooms. This one was special. Local thieves couldn't come close to winning against technology from the home timeline. Burglar alarms with infrared sensors meant traders were waiting for them even before they tried beating modern alloys and locks that read thumbprints.
“We'd better get supper started,” Mom told Amanda.
Amanda made a face, but she went off to the kitchen. Like most alternates, Agrippan Rome had rigid gender roles. At home, Dad and Jeremy did at least half the cooking. Not here, even though the work was a lot harder here.
Supper was barley porridge. It had mushrooms and onions and carrots chopped up in it. It also had bits of sausage. The sausage came from a local butcher shop. Amanda carefully didn't think of what all might have gone into it. Whatever it was made of, it didn't taste bad. It had a strong fennel flavor, like Italian sausage on a pizza, only more so. Since the rest of the porridge was bland, that perked it up.
Washing dishes was another pain. You couldn't get anything clean, not the way it would have been back home. Scrubbing a bowl with a rag in cold water without soap would have frustrated a saint. Going back to the home timeline for most of the year had let Amanda forget how tough things were here. The first evening reminded her in a hurry.
After the sun went down, the only lights in the main part of the house were olive-oil lamps and candles. The traders couldn't show anything different from what other people in Polisso had. Trouble was, those lamps and candles didn't give off a whole lot of light. Shadows lurked in corners. They reared when flames flickered. And, when a lamp ran dry or a candle burned out, they would swoop.
Amanda found herself yawning. You didn't get sleepy right after sundown back home. Electric lights held night at bay. Not these feeble lamps. Here, night was night, the time to lie quiet. Like somebody out of a fairy tale, Amanda carried a candle to bed. It gave just enough light so she didn't trip and break her neck, but not a dollar's worth more.
She yawned again when she got to the bedroom. The bed, she remembered, was all right. Leather lashings attached to the frame weren't as good as a box spring, but they weren't bad. The mattress was stuffed with wool. It got lumpy, but you could sleep on it. The blanket was wool, too. No one here knew about sheets. The pillow, now, the pillow was full of goose down. That would have cost a pile of benjamins back home.
Before Amanda went to sleep, she rubbed on insect repellent. It came in a little pottery jar, so it looked like a local medicine. Unlike local medicines, it really worked. Bedbugs and fleas and mosquitoes were bad enough. Lice… Amanda shuddered and slathered on more repellent. She'd found out the hard way why lousy meant what it did.
She blew out the candle. The darkness that had been hovering poured down on her. She could hardly tell the difference between having her eyes open and closed. She didn't keep them open very long anyway. Sleep hit her over the head like a rock.
Next thing she knew, the new day's first sunlight was trickling in through the shutters. That wasn't what woke her, though. The new day's first wagon was clattering past outside. A second one followed, and a third, and a fourth. Like a lot of towns in Agrippan Rome, Polisso had a law against wheeled traffic at night. That let people sleep. But as soon as it got light…
She'd slept in her tunic. On a hot night, she would have slept nude. Nude and regular clothes were the only choices you had here. Nobody'd thought of pajamas or nightgowns or anything of the sort.
For breakfast, Amanda ate leftover porridge from the night before. It had sat in the pot all night. Pease porridge in the pot, nine days old wasn't a nursery rhyme here. It was a way of life. No refrigerators in Agrippan Rome. No ice at all in summertime. (No ice cream, either. She sighed. Thinking of food could make her homesick like nothing else.)
No one had finished eating before somebody knocked on the door. Jeremy said something rude in English.
“Try that in neoLatin,” Dad said. The knock came again. It was louder and more insistent. He muttered a few words that might have been neoLatin-or might not, too. “People go to bed with the sun here. They wake up with the sun, and they're ready to do business.”
Bang! Bang! Bang! Whoever was out there sounded ready to break down the door.
Amanda rose from her stool. “I'll get it,” she said. “I'm almost done here.”
When she opened the door, the man outside was reaching for the knocker to pound some more. He dropped his hand. He also gave back a step in surprise. People in Polisso often did the first time they saw Amanda. She was five or six centimeters taller than this fellow, for instance.
“Bono diurno.” she said sweetly. “What can I do for you, sir?”
He didn't return her good day. Instead, still staring, he blurted, “You're not Marco Petro!” A moment later, he added, “You're not even part of his family,” which made a little more sense.
“No, sir,” she agreed, still polite. The man was olive-skinned, but he still turned red. Sometimes the best way to make someone feel foolish was to pretend not to notice how foolish he was. She went on, “The Petri have taken a load of grain out of Polisso. I'm Amanda Soltera. We Solteri are from the same firm. We'll be staying in town for a while.” She waited. When the man kept on standing there with his mouth hanging open, she prompted him by repeating, “What can I do for you, sir?”
Hearing it a second time seemed to make him notice her as a person, not just a phenomenon. He said, “I am here to do business. Let me see your father.” Then he paused and asked in a small voice, “Is he nine feet tall?”
The Roman foot was a little shorter than the one the USA had used till it went metric. Even so, nobody in the world was nine Roman feet tall. Amanda didn't like the rest of what the local had said, either. “You can do business with me, sir. What do you need? An hour-reckoner? A razor? A knife with many tools? One of the special mirrors we sell?”
“You… do business?” the man asked. In Polisso, women didn't, except those on their own or too poor not to. Amanda didn't fit either of those categories. He could see that much. Under his breath, he said, “Well, you are an Amazon in size- why not in manner?”
Amanda pretended not to hear that. If she didn't hear it, she didn't have to decide whether it was compliment or insult. She said, “Please come in,” and then, as he walked past her, “Whose man of affairs are you?”
He stopped and gave her a funny look. Not only was she a person, she was a person with a brain. “How do you know I am anyone's man of affairs?”
“By the way you dress. By the way you talk. If you were a merchant on your own, you would have a different way of speaking. If you were a noble, your tunic would have more embroidery.” It would be of finer wool, too, but Amanda didn't mention that.
“Well, girl, you are right,” the local said. He tried to get some of his own back with that faintly scornful girl and with the way he went on: “I am Lucio Claudio, called Fusco. I have the honor to serve the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio, called Magno-and he is great indeed.“
Amanda knew who Gaio Fulvio was. He had probably the largest estate of any noble who lived in Polisso. He'd dealt with Crosstime Traffic traders before, but never with the Solters family. “We are pleased to have the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio for a customer,” she said. “I ask you again, what would he like?”
“An hour-reckoner,” Lucio Claudio answered. “He has seen those that other men in the city have. They are more convenient than water clocks. He can carry one with him, and he does not have to keep a slave boy filling and emptying basins.”
“True,” Amanda said gravely. So it was. A lot of nobles in Polisso had figured out the same thing years before. Some still hadn't, though. If their grandfathers hadn't had watches, they didn't want them, either. Things changed slowly in Agrippan Rome. That made people want to think they didn't change at all. But things always changed, whether people wanted them to or not.
She led Gaio Fulvio's man to the room where the trade goods were on display. His eyes went from one big pocket watch to another. Before he spoke or pointed, she told herself she knew which one he'd choose. When he said, “That one,” she almost hugged herself with glee. She'd hit it right on the money.
He'd picked the biggest, gaudiest watch the merchants carried. To Amanda, it looked like a bright blue enamel turnip with gilding splashed here and there. The back had a gilded relief of Cupid shooting an arrow into Paris as he gazed at Helen of Troy. It couldn't have been more tasteless if it tried for a week.
But it was popular as could be in Polisso. People here liked things that were big and bright and overdecorated. They admired them. Two hundred years before Amanda's time, the Victorians in her world had been the same way.
She took the watch off the stand and wound it. It started to tick. Lucio Claudio heard the noise, too. He leaned forward. “You should wind it once a day,” Amanda told him. “This is how you set the hour. It is now near the end of the first hour of the day.” In Agrippan Rome, the first hour of the day began at sunrise, the first hour of the night began at sunset. Day and night always had twelve hours each. Daytime hours were longer in summer, nighttime in winter. Water clocks measuring steady bits of time had already begun to dent that idea. Mechanical clocks would probably kill it, the way they had in Amanda's world.
Lucio Claudio held out his hand. Amanda gave him the pocket watch. He held it up to his face to look at the dial (it had Roman numerals on it, which was as old-fashioned here as it would have been in the home timeline) and listen to the ticking. “There are gears and springs inside to make it work?” he asked.
“That's right,” Amanda said. The locals knew about such things. The ones in the watch were smaller and finer than any they could turn out for themselves, though.
“How is it that no one else can make such things?” Lucio Claudio inquired.
“That's our trade secret,” Amanda answered, not quite comfortably. “Everyone who makes or sells things has trade secrets. Others would steal if we didn't.” People stole in the home timeline. They stole in every alternate ever found. They were people, after all. They had an easier time here than some places. No one in Agrippan Rome had ever thought of patent laws.
“Only you,” the local said musingly. “How very lucky for you. I wonder if we should not ask for a report-an official report, mind you-on how you came to be so lucky.”
Alarm trickled through Amanda. Official reports were trouble. They meant the ponderous bureaucracy of Agrippan Rome had noticed the crosstime traders. Amanda supposed that was bound to happen sooner or later. She wished it hadn't happened while she was here. It would make life a lot more complicated.
Letting Lucio Claudio see that wouldn't help. “If the city prefect asks us for an official report, I'm sure we'll give him one,” Amanda said. “In the meantime, do you want to buy the hour-reckoner for the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio?”
Lucio Claudio's nickname meant dark. His scowl certainly lived up to it. Why? Had he hoped the threat of an official report would scare Amanda? (It did, even if she didn't show it.) He looked at the pocket watch again. “Yes, the most illustrious nobleman does want it,” he said. He wasn't nearly so good at hiding unhappiness as Amanda was. “What is your price?”
“You know you've chosen the finest hour-reckoner we have,” Amanda said. She vastly preferred a plain old five-benjamin wristwatch herself, but nobody'd asked her. “That one costs five hundred modii of wheat.” A modio-in classical Latin, a modius-was a little less than nine liters.
“That is too much,” Gaio Fulvio's man said. “The most illustrious nobleman will give you two hundred fifty modii.” Haggling was a way of life here. Offering half the opening price was a standard opening move-so standard, it was boring.
But Amanda shook her head. “I am sorry, sir. Our prices are firm. You will have heard that, I think.” Lucio Claudio scowled again, which meant he had heard it. He just hadn't believed it. Amanda added, “We have fixed prices for all our hour-reckoners. If the most illustrious Gaio Fulvio would like something cheaper-”
That did it. She'd hoped it would. The locals were vain. They showed off, and took pride in showing off. Lucio Claudio turned red. “No!” he snapped. “Nothing but the best, the finest, for the most illustrious nobleman. Your price is outrageous, but he will pay it.”
Yes, he would have tried to dicker more if he hadn't known about the fixed-price policy. Amanda hid a snicker, imagining how Gaio Fulvio would have lost face if he'd gone out in public with a cheap watch. She said, “I thank you, and I thank the most illustrious nobleman. I will write out a contract for the sale-”
“You write the classical tongue? You read it?” Lucio Claudio said.
“Oh, yes, sir,” Amanda answered. “Many merchants do. It helps us in our business.” Literacy wasn't all that unusual in Agrippan Rome. In a town like Polisso, perhaps a quarter of the men had their letters. More knew neoLatin than the old language, though.
“But you are a girl-a woman-a female,” Gaio Fulvio's man sputtered. Far fewer women could read and write, even in neoLatin. It was a sexist society, no doubt about it. And neoLatin wasn't valid for most business deals, which made life harder still.
Amanda enjoyed poking just because the society was so sexist. “I am a merchant,” she said proudly.
The pen, like most, was a reed with a hand-carved nib. Penknives really were pen knives here. Amanda neatly printed a standard sales contract. She gave it to Lucio Claudio to sign.
He read it over, looking for anything wrong. To his obvious disappointment, he found nothing. “Let me have the pen,” he said, and scrawled his name in the space she'd left for it.
“I hope the most illustrious nobleman gets good use from his hour-reckoner,” Amanda said, letting him down easy. Not too easy, though: “He can have it as soon as he pays.”
“Of course. Payment will come to you soon. I'm sure he will be pleased to carry the hour-reckoner.” Lucio Claudio got out of there in a hurry. Amanda closed the door behind him, then went back to finish her breakfast.
A skinny stray dog gnawed at something in a pile of garbage near Polisso's main square. It growled as Jeremy and his family walked by. When they didn't bother it, it lowered its head again. “Poor pup,” Amanda said.
She was right. By the standards of anybody from the home timeline, everybody here was poor. Jeremy knew all the things the locals didn't have. But they didn't know, and so it didn't bother them. Some of them thought they were rich. They tried to keep what they had, and to get more. The ones who didn't have so much wished for more, schemed for more. People, again.
In the square and in the roofed colonnades to either side, farmers and craftsmen and traders sold everything under the sun. Here a man hawked cups. Another man carried a tray of sweet rolls and shouted about how good they were. A craftsman displayed wooden buckets on a stand. A storyteller told a fable about the Emperor Agrippa and the beautiful Queen of China. Agrippa had never gone anywhere near China, but that didn't stop the storyteller. Every so often, someone would toss a coin into the bowl at his feet. A blank-faced peasant woman stood behind a big basket of onions she'd carried from her farm. Come evening, she'd go home with the ones she hadn't sold.
On the far side of the square stood the prefect's palace and the temple to the spirit of the Emperor. The clerks and secretaries and nobles who ran Polisso worked in the prefect's palace. Soldiers stood guard in front of it. Nobody was going to give the rulers any trouble. Just for a moment, Jeremy remembered the guards in front of the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad.
Dad pointed to the temple. “We'll make our offering. We'll get our certificate. Then nobody will worry about us any more.”
“That sounds good to me,” Jeremy said. They were in public, so he couldn't come out with what he really thought. He felt like a hypocrite, sacrificing to a spirit he didn't believe in. Dad insisted that hypocrisy greased the wheels between people. If you always said just what you thought, nobody could stand you, he'd say. And you'd hate everybody who did it to you. Jeremy wasn't convinced.
A big blond man in a linen shirt with billowing sleeves and baggy breeches tucked into boots held up some furs. “You want pelts?” he asked in accented neoLatin. That accent and his clothes showed he came from Lietuva. “Make fine fur jacket. Marten? Sable? Ermine?”
“No, thank you.” Jeremy tried not to look at the pelts as he walked by. He couldn't have been much more revolted if the Lietuvan had tried to sell him a slave. No one in the home timeline had worn furs for more than fifty years. The mere idea turned his stomach. True, furs were warm, and this alternate had no substitutes. But Jeremy couldn't get over his disgust-and he couldn't sell pelts in the home timeline anyway. He sneaked glances at his sister and his parents. They all had that same tight-lipped look. They were trying not to show what they thought, too, then.
Up the stairs of the temple they went. The guards nodded to them. “In the name of the gods, greetings,” one of the soldiers called.
“Greetings to you,” Dad replied. He didn't have to mention the gods. That wasn't the custom for what Agrippan Rome called Imperial Christians. He went on, “We've just come to Polisso. We need to make an offering to the Emperor's spirit.”
“Go ahead, then, and peace go with you,” the guard said.
Before they entered the temple itself, they paused in an anteroom called the narthex. Several clerks stood there behind lecterns. Only the very most important people here worked sitting down. Dad steered the family to a clerk who was talking to a woman and had no one else waiting in line. That did him less good than he'd thought it would. The woman had a complicated problem, and took what seemed like forever to get it settled.
“You pick the shortest line, you take the longest time,” Mom said. “It's just as true here as it is at home.”
“I know,” Dad said gloomily. “You wish some of the rules would change when you travel, but they don't.” The locals who might overhear him would think he meant traveling from town to town. His own family knew better.
At last, the woman flounced off. Jeremy didn't think she'd settled anything. She seemed to be giving up. The clerk spent the next couple of minutes making notes on her case-or, for all Jeremy knew, doodling. Only after he'd used that time showing how important he was, did he look up and ask, “And how may I be of assistance to you?”-in classical Latin.
Most newcomers wouldn't have understood him. They would have had to ask him to repeat himself in neoLatin. He would have done it-and looked down his pointy nose at them while he was doing it. But Dad answered in the classical language: “Having arrived at the famous city of Porolissum”- using the ancient name was especially snooty-“we should like to make a thanks-offering to the spirit of the Emperor.”
“Oh.” Upstaged, the clerk seemed to shrink a few centimeters. “All right. Give me your name and the day you came into town.” That was in neoLatin. Since he couldn't score points with the old language, he stopped using it. Dad also returned to the modern tongue. The clerk went off to a wooden box full of papers and parchments and papyri. He finally found the one he wanted. “Ioanno, called Acuto; Ieremeo, called Alto; Melissa; and Amanda. Yes, you are all here, and as described.” He didn't seem happy about that. Dad had proved more clever than he would have liked. “You are Imperial Christians?”
“That's right,” Dad said.
“Then you will offer incense, not a living sacrifice?” “Yes,” Dad said.
“Very well. That is permitted.” By the way the clerk sounded, he wished it weren't. But he didn't decide such things. He just did what the people set over him told him to do. After scribbling several notes on his forms, he said, “You do understand, though, that you will pay as large a fee for the incense as people who believe in the usual gods pay for a sacrificial animal?”
“Yes,” Dad said again, this time with resignation. Why wouldn't the government tolerate Imperial Christians? Jeremy thought. It makes money off them.
“The fee for four pinches of incense, then, is twelve denari,” the clerk said. Dad paid. As far as Jeremy was concerned, the rip-off was enough to incense anyone. The clerk wrote some more. He handed Dad a scrap of parchment.
“Here is your receipt. Keep it in your home in a safe place. It is proof that you have offered sacrifice.” He pulled four tiny earthenware bowls from a cabinet behind him and handed one to each member of the Solters family. The bowls held, literally, a pinch of waxy incense apiece. “You may proceed into the sacred precinct. Set the bowls on the altar, light the incense, and offer the customary prayer. Next!”
That last was aimed at the woman standing behind the crosstime travelers. The clerk reminded Jeremy of someone who worked for the Department of Motor Vehicles, not a man who had anything to do with holiness. But then, for most people here religion was as much something the government took care of as roads and public baths.
As he walked into the temple proper, he brought the bowl up to his nose so he could sniff. The incense smelled faintly- very faintly-spicy. It was, no doubt, as cheap and as mixed with other things as it could be and still burn.
Sunbeams slanting in through tall windows lit up the interior of the temple. Mosaics on the walls and statues in niches showed every god the Agrippan Romans recognized, from Aphrodite and Ares to Zalmoxis and Zeus. One small statue pictured Jesus as a beardless youth carrying a lamb on his back. That kind of portrait had gone out of favor in Jeremy's world, but not here. Here, for most people, Jesus was just one god among many. Mithras the Bull-slayer had a more impressive image.
One of the sunbeams fell on the bust of the Roman Emperor behind the altar. Honorio Prisco III was a middle-aged man with a big nose, jowls, and a bored expression. As far as Jeremy could tell, he wasn't a very good Emperor. He wasn't a very bad Emperor, either. He just sort of sat there.
The sunbeam also highlighted a line around his neck that looked unnatural. The lower neck and top part of the chest on the bust never changed. The head and upper neck did whenever a new Emperor took the throne. A peg and socket held the two parts of the bust together. A new Emperor? Take the old ruler's portrait off the peg, pop on the new. There you were, easy as pie, ready to be loyal.
Several pinches of incense already smoked on the altar. Off to one side, a priest in a white toga-only priests wore togas these days-wrung the neck of a dove for a man who wasn't a Christian of any sort.
Dad set his incense bowl on the altar. Jeremy and Amanda and Mom followed suit. Several lamps burned on the altar. By each one stood a bowl full of thin dry twigs. Each member of the family took a twig and lit it at a lamp. They used the burning twigs to light their incense, then stamped them out underfoot.
Four thin twists of gray smoke curled upward. Along with his parents and sister, Jeremy said the prayer required of Imperial Christians: “May God keep the Emperor safe and healthy. May his spirit always be the spirit of truth and justice. Amen.” They all bowed to the bust of Honorio Prisco III, then turned away from the altar.
That prayer didn't say the Emperor was divine. It did say that the people who made it cared about him and wished him well. It was hardly religious at all, not in the sense Jeremy would have used the word back home. It was more like pledging allegiance to the flag. It showed that the people who did it willingly took part in the customs of this country.
Not far from the altar, two ordinary-looking men stood talking in low voices. They weren't being rude. They were quietly making sure the prayers were made the way they were supposed to be. People who didn't like being watched couldn't have stood living in Agrippan Rome.
That was one of the traders' biggest problems here. The locals weren't just curious. They were snoopy. About everything. Jeremy glanced over at Amanda as the family left the temple. That fellow to whom she'd sold the blue-plate special-that was how he thought of the big blue pocket watches-had talked about making them submit one of the Empire's dreaded official reports about how they could turn out such things when nobody else here knew how. Dad would have to figure out a way around that.
Out in the market square, a herald was shouting, “Hear ye! Hear ye! The great and mighty Emperor of the Romans, Honorio Prisco III, has declared that the Roman Empire will keep the peace with the Kingdom of Lietuva for as long as King Kuzmickas chooses to keep it!”
“What's that supposed to mean?” Jeremy asked. “It doesn't sound like it means anything.” A lot of the proclamations the government put out didn't sound as if they meant anything.
But Dad said, “It means we're liable to have a war. Lietuva has wanted to take this province away from Rome for years. And if King Kuzmickas does decide to go to war, the Emperor is saying he'll get all the fight he wants.”
Border provinces like Dacia did sometimes change hands between Agrippan Rome and Lietuva. In the Middle East, Mesopotamia-Iraq in the home timeline-and Syria went back and forth between the Romans and Persians every so often. But the heartland of each great empire was too far from its neighbors to be conquered. The ruling dynasties might change, but the empires went on and on.
Oddly, gunpowder made that more true, not less. Hearing as much had puzzled Jeremy at first. But it made sense if you looked at it the right way. Cannons could knock down the strongest fortress or city wall. And cannons, here, were also very, very expensive. Only central governments pulling in taxes from huge tracts of land could afford to have a lot of them. That meant anybody who rebelled against the central government was likely to lose. He wouldn't be able to get his hands on enough cannons to fight back well.
There had been gunpowder empires in Jeremy's world, too. The Ottoman Turks, the Moguls in India, and the Manchus in China had all run states like that. In his world, though, Europe had had lots of countries, not one big, overarching empire. They'd competed, kicking technology and thought ahead and leading to the scientific and industrial revolutions.
Competition here was weaker. The dead hand of the past was stronger. This is how they did it in the good old days carried enormous weight in Agrippan Rome… and in Lietuva, and in Persia, and in the two gunpowder empires that split India between them in this alternate, and in China. The Japanese here were pirates who raided China's coast, the same as the Scandinavians did in Europe.
A beggar with a horrible sore on his face held out a skinny hand to Jeremy and whined, “Alms, gentle sir?”
Jeremy gave him a sestertio, a little copper coin. “That was a mistake,” Dad said with a sigh.
“How come?” Jeremy asked. “Look what happened to the poor man.”
“For one thing, that sore is probably a fake,” Dad said. “And if it's not a fake, he probably picks at it and rubs salt in it to keep it looking nasty. Beggars' tricks are as old as time. And for another… Well, you'll find out.”
And Jeremy did, in short order. He'd given one beggar money. All the other beggars in the market square hurried toward him. He might have been a magnet and they bits of iron. They showed off blind eyes, missing hands and feet, and sores even uglier than the first man's had been. None of them had bathed in weeks, if not years. Most of them called for coppers. Some, the bolder ones, screeched for silver.
“I can't give them all money,” Jeremy said in dismay.
“Which is why you shouldn't have given it to any of them,” Dad “said. ”Just keep walking. They'll get the message.“
Little by little, the beggars did. By ones and twos, they drifted back toward their places in the square. Some of them cursed Jeremy, as much for getting their hopes up as for not giving them any coins. Others didn't bother. They might as well have been merchants. If business in one place didn't suit them, they'd look somewhere else.
“Did they try to slit your belt pouch?” Dad asked.
After checking, Jeremy shook his head. “No.”
“You're lucky.”
“I am lucky,“ Jeremy said slowly. He didn't mean it the way his father did. ”I don't have to live the way they do.“ A day in Polisso taught more about human misery than a year in Los Angeles. ”Most of what's wrong with them, a doctor back home could fix in a hurry. I've always had plenty to eat, and a house with a heater that works.“
“Coming here can make you feel guilty about living the way we do at home,” Amanda said.
Jeremy nodded. That was what he'd been trying to say. His sister had done a better job of putting it into a few words.
“There's nothing wrong with the way we live,” Dad said. “Anybody who says poverty makes you noble has never been poor-really poor, the way these people are. But you were right. We are lucky that we don't have to live like this all the time.“
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. Even when they were in Polisso, they didn't live just like the locals. They had links back to the home timeline. If something went wrong, they could get help or leave. They had a swarm of immunizations. They couldn't come down with smallpox or measles or typhoid fever or cholera. Smallpox didn't even exist any more in the home timeline. They had antibiotics against tuberculosis and plague. The locals didn't-they had doctors who believed in the four humors and priests who prayed. One was about as much use as the other-as much, or as little.
A drunk lurched out of a tavern. He stared around with bleary, bloodshot eyes, then sat down next to the doorway. He wasn't going anywhere, not any time soon. Some things didn't change from one timeline to another. Jeremy's also had its share of drunks, and probably always would.
“Make way! Make way! In the name of the city prefect, make way!” bawled a man with a loud voice.
Up the street came a gang of slaves carrying firewood to heat the water in the public baths. They were skinny, sorry-looking men, all of them burdened till they could barely stagger along. They belonged to Polisso, not to any one person. That made their lives worse, not better. Because they didn't serve anyone in particular, no one in particular cared how they were treated. The overseer shouted out his warning again.
Neither Jeremy nor anybody else in his family said much the rest of the way back to the house. That gang of slaves reminded them again all how lucky they really were.
Four
The smith's name was Mallio Sertorio. He used his dirty thumbnail to pull one tool after another out of the Swiss army knife. Big blade, small blade, file, corkscrew, awl… When he found the little scissors, an almost comic look of surprise spread over his face.
“How do they do that?” he muttered, more to himself than to Amanda.
“I am only a trader,” she answered. “I do not have the secrets of the men who made these knives.”
“Of course you don't-you're only a girl,” Mallio Sertorio said. That wasn't what Amanda had said, and didn't endear him to her. He extracted a screwdriver blade. That puzzled him. Screws here were made by hand, and uncommon. But he poked at the blade with his thumb. “Fine workmanship. And very fine steel, too.”
“We sell only the best.” Amanda nodded.
“Oh, yes. Oh, yes.” The smith nodded, too. “I want to buy this one and take it apart, to see if I can learn the secrets these fellows know.” He pulled a tweezer out of its slot. “Isn't that clever?” he crooned.
“I'll be glad to sell it to you,” Amanda said. “What you do with it afterwards is your business.” She didn't think he would learn much. A couple of smiths in Polisso had already started selling imitation Swiss army knives. They were bigger and clumsier and held fewer tools.
“Do I have to pay grain?” Mallio Sertorio asked. “Grain is a nuisance. I'll give you silver. I'll even give you gold. You can buy grain yourself, or anything else you want.”
“Grain is what we want,” Amanda answered. Grain and other food from the alternates helped feed the crowded home timeline. Oil fed the petrochemical industry. The list went on and on.
“I have to have this,” Mallio Sertorio said. “Do you understand? I have to have it. I am not a young man. You, you have your whole life ahead of you, but I am not young.“ He scratched at his mustache. Like his hair, it was grizzled. ”I have spent thirty years learning my trade. I am good at it, as good as any man in Polisso, as good as any man in the whole province of Dacia.“
“I'm sure you are,” Amanda said softly. People in Agrippan Rome liked to swagger and brag. They often made themselves out to be richer or more clever or more skilled than they really were. This didn't sound like that. Mallio Sertorio was stating the facts as he saw them.
“Thirty years.” The smith set down the Swiss army knife. His hands-hands callused from work and scarred by cuts and burns-bunched into fists. “Thirty years, and I see this, and I also see I might as well be an apprentice in my first day at a smithy. How did they do this work?“
Machinery your culture won't invent for quite a while, if it ever does, Amanda thought. But she couldn't tell him that. Instead, she had to repeat, “I don't know.” She felt embarrassed, even a little ashamed. How was a man with nothing but hand tools supposed to match this mechanical near-perfection? And even if he did somehow do it once, how could he keep on doing it again and again?
Mallio Sertorio saw that, too. People in Agrippan Rome were ignorant, yes. They weren't stupid. He said, “You have dozens of these knives, don't you? Hundreds of them, even? But each one has to take months, maybe a year, to make. How?“
Amanda didn't say anything. She didn't see anything she could say. It probably wouldn't have mattered. Mallio Sertorio was talking to himself-to himself, and to the Swiss army knife. “How?” he said again. “Whatever the answer is, by the gods, I'll find it.” He picked up the knife and held it out to Amanda. “I will buy this. Write me up a fancy contract in old-fashioned Latin. You want grain? I'll get you grain. I must have this. I've got so much to learn.”
The smith had to make his mark on the contract. Amanda witnessed it. “You know how many modii of wheat?” she asked.
“Oh, yes,” he answered. “I know numbers. Words- especially in the old language-words I'm not so good with.”
At supper that evening-bread, cheese, and a stew of rabbit, onions, garlic, and parsnips-Amanda mentioned the smith's driving urge to know. Her mother nodded. She said, “That's one of the things we want here.”
“You bet,” Dad said. “That's why we sell them things that aren't impossibly far ahead of what they can make. There's a story about an African who saw an early airplane, but it didn't mean anything to him-it was magic. Then he saw a team of horses pulling a carriage. He laughed and clapped his hands and said, 'Why didn't I think of that?' It was beyond what his people knew how to do then, but not too far beyond. This culture has been stuck in a rut for a long time. Along with everything else we're doing, maybe we can help shake it loose.“
“Then what happens?” Amanda asked.
“With luck, things go forward here,” her father answered. “By themselves, gunpowder empires don't change very much or very fast. A poke here and a poke there, though, and who knows? In a few hundred years, this may be a different place.” He sounded as if he were sure he would come back here to see the changes.
To Amanda, a few hundred years didn't begin to seem real. She had enough trouble trying to figure out where she'd be and what she'd do when she got out of high school year after next. She wasn't going to worry about whether Agrippan Rome had its own industrial revolution a long, long way down the line.
One of the reasons Jeremy's folks brought him and Amanda to Agrippan Rome with them was so they'd look normal. Everyone here expected grownups to have children. Who else could take over the family business after they were gone? That meant he and his sister had to go out into Polisso and do the things kids their age did here. They had to be seen doing them, too. If they weren't out there being visible, what point to bringing them along?
The trouble with that was, Jeremy didn't like most of what the kids his age in Polisso did. A lot of those kids were already working hard at their trades. When they weren't working, they gambled with dice or knucklebones. They played sports different from the ones he knew, and they didn't seem to care if they maimed one another. Or they went to the amphitheater. Jeremy didn't have the stomach for that.
Here, the Roman Empire had never lost its taste for blood sports. People swarmed into the amphitheater to watch bears fight wolves. They gave condemned criminals to lions. Thousands cheered as what they called justice was done. And they set men against men. Gladiators who won their matches were heroes here, the way running backs and point guards were at home. Gladiators who didn't win were often dragged from the arena feet first.
People here said seeing bloodshed made for better soldiers. Of course, people here also said the sun went around the Earth. They said some men were slaves by nature. They said there were one-eyed men and men with their faces in the middle of their chests off in some distant corner of the world. They said the streets in China were paved with gold. (In China in this alternate, they said the streets in the Roman Empire were paved with jade. The Chinese were no less ignorant than anybody else.)
That Jeremy was a visitor in Polisso didn't make things any easier. People picked on him because he came from somewhere else. It could have been a farm more than ten kilometers from town as easily as Los Angeles in the home timeline. And Polisso had its street gangs, too.
Things could have been worse. By local standards, Jeremy was very large. That made some of the town's less charming inhabitants think twice. Unfortunately, they often hunted in packs.
As much as he could, he stayed out of the alleys and lanes that wound between the main streets. Anything could happen there. The bigger streets, on the other hand, were pretty well patrolled. Gangs mostly steered clear of men with muskets, armor, and short tempers.
Mostly, though, didn't mean always. And the vigili couldn't be everywhere at once. Three locals came up to Jeremy on the street just around the corner from where he was staying. They were his age or a little older: one of them had the fair beginnings of a beard. None of them would ever belong to the Polisso Chamber of Commerce. The one with the shaggy chin said, “You're not from here, are you?”
That was a loaded question. If he said yes, they'd call him a liar and jump on him. If he said no, they'd call him a stranger-and jump on him. Even if none of them came up much past his chin, one against three made bad odds. Sometimes people didn't come back from summer trading runs. He said, “No,” but then, before they could jump on him, “But I've got some new jokes from Carnuto.” The town to the west was a reasonable place to say he'd come from.
And the prospect of jokes was enough to make the punks pause. They could find people to beat up any old time. Jokes were something else, something special. In a world without the Web, TV, radio, movies, and recorded music, entertainment was where you found it. “All right, let's hear 'em,” said the gangbanger with the whiskers. The other two nodded, trying to look tough. Plainly, they followed his lead. He leaned forward and stuck out his jaw. He was better at being menacing than his pals. “They better be good.”
“They are.” Jeremy hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. The jokes came from a real Roman joke book called The Laughter-Lover. Dad had got it so the family could have jokes to tell that came from Rome, not from Los Angeles. Trouble was, by Los Angeles standards, they were some of the lamest jokes in the world. With luck, things were different here. Without luck…
“Go on, then,” Whiskers said.
“A halfwit wanted to see what he looked like when he was asleep, so he stood in front of the mirror with his eyes closed.”
Jeremy waited for the punks to commit literary criticism on his person. Instead, they grinned. They didn't laugh out loud, but they didn't start kicking him, either. The skinnier one of the pair behind Whiskers got up the nerve to speak for himself: “Tell us another one.”
“Sure.” Jeremy flogged his memory. “'That slave you sold me died yesterday,' a man told a halfwit. The halfwit said, 'By the gods, he never did anything like that when I owned him!'“
Whiskers did laugh this time, which seemed to be the cue for his pals to do the same. “Not bad,” he said. “Keep going.”
How many can I remember? Jeremy wondered. The ancient Roman joke book did seem better suited to Polisso than to Los Angeles. He brought out another one: “An astrologer cast a horoscope for a sick man and said, 'You'll live another twenty years.' The man said, 'Come back tomorrow, then, and I'll give you your fee.' 'But what happens if you die tonight?' the astrologer said.”
They needed a couple of seconds to get it. When they did, though, they howled scandalized laughter. Despite common sense, some people in Los Angeles believed in astrology. Here, people believed in astrology. They didn't know all the things about the way the universe worked that people in the home timeline did. Astrology let them think they knew more than they did.
“Not bad,” Whiskers said. “Not bad at all. I knew a guy like that. He said he knew everything there was to know, but he didn't even know his girl was seeing somebody else on the side. You got any others?”
“Sure.” Jeremy told as many jokes as he remembered. Some got laughs. Some were groaners-but if you told a lot of jokes, some would always be groaners. The three punks slapped him on the back. Whiskers reached out and affectionately messed up his hair. After that, they paid him the best compliment they could-they went off and left him alone.
From then on, he knew he wouldn't worry when he haggled with people in Polisso. How important was haggling over money or grain, really? He'd just won a dicker for his own skin.
Mom dug a big blob of bread dough out of an earthenware bowl. She slammed it down on the countertop and started to knead it. Half a meter away, Amanda was chopping cabbage. There was an odd sort of pleasure in making the family's food from scratch. If it was good, you deserved all the credit. (If it wasn't, you deserved all the blame. Amanda didn't like to think about that. If I make it, it will be good, she told herself.)
Pleasure or not, making food from scratch was much more work than cooking at home. No microwaves here. No computerized ovens that did everything but blow out the candles on a birthday cake. They had a wood-burning oven for baking, and the fireplace for soups and stews and for roasting. That was it.
Mom paused. “I'm going to bring in a stool,” she said. “I'm sick and tired of standing up.”
“It's all right with me.” Amanda hoped she didn't show how startled she was. Local women always worked standing up in the kitchen. Always. And Mom had always been a stickler for doing things the way people here did them. To see her changing her ways was a surprise.
Even after she got the stool, she didn't seem comfortable. She kept shifting her weight, leaning now this way, now that. Watching her made Amanda nervous.
Finally, when she couldn't stand it any more, she asked, “Are you all right, Mom?”
“I'm fine,” her mother said quickly. Too quickly? Her right hand rubbed her stomach and got bits of cabbage on her tunic. “I've had kind of a stomach ache the last couple of days, though.”
“Probably getting used to what Polisso calls food again,” Amanda said.
“I guess so,” Mom said, but then she contradicted herself: “It doesn't feel like that.” She shrugged then. “I don't know what else it could be.” She went back to kneading what would be a loaf. If the dough wasn't well kneaded, the bread would be dense and chewy.
“Antibiotics don't always get everything,” Amanda said. You could catch almost anything from food in Polisso. The only way to be perfectly safe would have been not to eat or drink. Unfortunately, that had drawbacks of its own.
“It doesn't feel like food poisoning,” her mother said. “Only an ache. It's not bad. Just-annoying.” She hardly ever complained. When she did, Amanda worried.
But there wasn't time for much worrying. There wasn't time for anything except chores from dawn till dusk: cooking and washing and cleaning and doing business. After the bread went into the oven, you couldn't walk away and forget about it till it was done. No thermostats here. Amanda had to watch the fire and feed wood into it at the right rate to keep it from getting too high or too low. Otherwise, the loaves would come out scorched or soggy. Either way, they wouldn't be worth eating. All the work that went into making them, starting with grinding grain into flour, would be wasted.
Mom used a flat wooden peel to slide the loaves out of the oven: the same tool a cook at a pizza place used in the home timeline. After the bread had cooled, Amanda ate a piece. She wished she could have said it was far better than anything she could get at home because she'd helped make it herself. She wished she could, but she couldn't. It was gritty. The quern that ground the grain was made of stone, and tiny bits of it got into the flour. The bread was also coarse-grained; the quern didn't grind as fine as modern milling machines. And, in spite of everything, it had stayed in the oven a couple of minutes too long. It was okay, but nothing to get excited about.
Her mother had some, too. Amanda watched to see if she had trouble eating. She didn't seem to, even if she also looked disappointed at how the bread turned out. Amanda asked, “How do you feel?”
“I'm all right,” Mom answered. “Like I said, a nuisance, that's all.”
“Have you told Dad?”
“Yes, I've told your father. He's the one who wouldn't tell me. He wouldn't want me to worry.” Mom rolled her eyes. “I don't want him to worry, either, but I want him to know what's going on.”
“What if it… really is something?” Amanda didn't want to say that. She didn't even want to think it. She knew something about loss. Two of her grandparents had died. But Mom and Dad were different. They were supposed to be there, no matter what; they were the rocks at the bottom of her world.
Part of Amanda knew her parents were people. She knew things could happen to people. The rest of her recoiled from that like a nervous horse shying from a rattler. Move the rocks at the bottom of the world and you made an earthquake.
Mom came over and gave her a hug. “The very worst that can happen is that I go back to the home timeline for a little while and get it fixed, whatever it is. Then I come back here again. Okay?“
“Okay.” Amanda hugged her back, hard. She was very, very glad for the transposition chamber down in the subbase-ment here, just in case. Doctors in Agrippan Rome not only didn't know anything, they didn't even suspect anything. The really scary part was, they were better than doctors other places in this world. Roman doctors got fat salaries teaching medicine in Lietuva and Persia.
That evening, Jeremy got into an argument with Mom over nothing in particular. He would do that every once in a while, mostly because he couldn't stand admitting he might be wrong. He was right most of the time. That made it harder for him to see he was wrong some of the time. It also made him a first-class pain in the neck.
And tonight, it made Amanda furious. “You leave Mom alone!” she yelled at him. “Don't you know anything?”
Nothing made Jeremy madder than even hinting that he was dumb. “I know what a miserable pest you are,” he said.
He would have gone on from there, too, but Dad held up a hand. “That will be enough of that,” he said. “That will be enough of that out of both of you, as a matter of fact. There are four of us here, and thousands of people in Polisso. If we can't count on each other, we may as well go home.”
It wasn't that he was wrong. He was right, and Amanda knew it. And he knew Mom wasn't feeling right, so he'd taken that into account. But so did Jeremy. And he kept steaming. He hadn't said all he wanted to, and he was itching to let out the rest. He pointed at Amanda. “She started it.”
“That's the oldest excuse in the world-in any world,”
Dad said. “She got the first word, you got the last word, and that's plenty. If it goes on from there, the only thing you'll both do is get angrier. What's the use? Answer me, please.”
Jeremy didn't. Maybe he wanted to. He probably did, in fact. But arguing with Dad was usually like playing chess against the computer at the high level. You could try it, and it would make good practice, and you'd even learn something, but you wouldn't win.
Mom sat quietly through the whole thing. She often did during squabbles. Dad enjoyed stamping on fires, and she didn't. But she seemed too quiet tonight.
Or maybe I'm imagining things, Amanda thought. She knew she sometimes borrowed trouble. She couldn't help it, any more than Jeremy could help being a know-it-all. But she feared this trouble didn't need borrowing. It was really here.
Most of the house the merchants from Crosstime Traffic used would have seemed ordinary to the people of Polisso. Most, but not all. That was why they had no servants. Servants would have seen things that couldn't be explained to anybody from this alternate. The basement and subbasement were cases in point.
Part of the basement wouldn't have seemed strange to the locals. A lot of houses here had storerooms under them. This one did, too, but its were different.
Jeremy took a lamp with him when he went down the wooden steps into the storeroom that held sacks of grain, baskets of onions, strings of garlic, and big clay jars full of olive oil and wine and the fermented fish sauce that went into every kind of cooking here the way soy sauce and salsa did back home. As usual, the lamp didn't defeat darkness. It did push back the hem of its black cloak. Jeremy could walk around without banging his head.
There was a smooth patch on the wall above one particular jar of wine. Jeremy let his hand rest on it for a moment. Software scanned his palmprint and fingerprints. A well-camouflaged door silently slid open. The camouflage was all the better down here, with only lamplight to see by.
As soon as Jeremy walked through the door, it closed behind him. Real lights, electric lights, came on in the ceiling. High-capacity batteries powered them-and everything else down here. The flickering flame of the lamp was suddenly next to invisible. Jeremy blew it out. He would light it again when he left the basement.
The wall behind the palm lock was reinforced concrete. So was the ceiling. The locals might be able to blow them open, but they wouldn't have an easy time of it. The subbase-ment where the transposition chamber came and went had another layer of shielding. But the most important shield was making sure nobody in Polisso suspected the house had a special basement, let alone a subbasement.
On a table sat a PowerBook. It was sleeping to save power. Jeremy touched a key to rouse the laptop. It was the house's link to the home timeline and all the alternates Crosstime Traffic visited. “Michael Fujikawa,” he said into the microphone, and then an eight-digit number that defined the alternate where his friend was spending the summer.
“Go ahead,” the computer told him.
“You around, Michael?” Jeremy asked. “It's me, Jeremy.” He didn't really expect that Michael would be there. North China, where his parents traded, was six hours ahead of Romania. Michael would probably be snoring in the wee small hours. “How's it with you? What you been up to? Give me a yell when you get a chance. 'Bye.”
The PowerBook turned Jeremy's spoken words into written ones. Text took up a lot less bandwidth to send than voice did. Jeremy knew he ought to go back up into the world of Agrippan Rome. Instead, he started a game. The computer, which was playing the aliens invading Earth, was knocking the snot out of him when the incoming-message bell rang.
“Quit. Don't save,” Jeremy said with relief. The twisted World War II vanished from the screen. He wouldn't lose tonight, anyway. A human player would have screamed at him for grabbing the excuse to bail out. The PowerBook didn't care.
Words formed on the monitor. Hey, Jeremy, Michael said. Good to hear from you. I was wondering when I would.
“We've been getting settled in,” Jeremy said. “You could have messaged me, too, you know. And what are you doing up so early?”
Sunrise ceremony today-yawn, Michael answered. We've been busy, same as you. It happens. How's business?
“Pretty good,” Jeremy said. “The locals are starting to wonder how come we can do things they can't, though. One of them gave my sister a hard time about it. They may start trying to snoop harder. That wouldn't be so good, not when traders have spent so much time making connections here.”
If you have to pull out, you have to pull out. Plenty of alternates, and they're all easy to get to. Crosstime will find one that's not too different, and you'll start over. Michael could be practical to the point of cynicism.
“I suppose so.” Jeremy knew Crosstime Traffic had had to abandon some alternates. Most of those had technology a lot higher than Agrippan Rome's, though. And that wasn't really what was on his mind, anyhow. After a pause, he said, “Other thing that's been going on here is, Mom doesn't feel good.”
What's wrong? The question came back at once. Michael had spent so much time at the Solters' house, Mom sometimes seemed to be almost as much his mother as Jeremy's.
“Some kind of stomach trouble,” Jeremy said.
Something she ate?
“Maybe. I hope so. That would be the easiest to fix and the least to worry about,” Jeremy answered. As he spoke, the dictation program on the PowerBook put his worries on the monitor, where he could see them as well as think them. He didn't like that. It made them seem more real. When he said, “The antibiotics she took didn't do much,” the words on the screen took on a frightening importance.
They also must have seemed important to Michael, who was reading them not just in another place but in another universe. That doesn't sound so good, he said. Do you think she'll have to go back to the home line to get it looked at?
“I don't know,” Jeremy said. On the monitor, that looked very bald and very helpless. “As long as she's all right, nothing else matters.”
Sure, Michael replied. Listen, tell her I hope she's feeling better. He wasn't somebody who talked for the sake of being polite. What he said, he meant. He went on: I wish I were close enough to do something. You let me know what's going on, you hear? You don't, you're in big trouble when I see you this fall.
“I will,” Jeremy said. “Thanks.” Michael wouldn't tell him anything like, If you need somebody to talk to, I'm here. Coming right out with something like that would only embarrass both of them. But there were ways to get the message across without saying the words.
Take care of yourself. I've got to go. The rising sun is calling me. Like Jeremy, Michael took part in rituals he didn't fully believe in. The locals believed in them, and that was what counted.
“You watch yourself, too.” Jeremy waited for an answer… and waited, and waited. Michael really had gone, then. Jeremy softly said something else-softly, but not quite softly enough. The words formed on the PowerBook's screen. He laughed. “Erase last six,” he said, and they disappeared.
He wanted to say something that would make the monitor burst into flames. But that wouldn't help, either, even if it might make him feel better for a little while. He didn't know what would help. He didn't know if anything would help.
He was seventeen. He took care of most things on his own. Some of them, his folks never found out about. Taking care of your own troubles-learning how to take care of your own troubles-was a big part of what growing up was about. But having Mom and Dad there as backups felt awfully good. And when the trouble was that something was wrong with one of them… He said some more things he had to tell the computer to erase.
A water jug on her hip, Amanda walked down the street to the public fountain a couple of blocks from her house. She didn't have to bring water back, not when it was piped into the place. But she or Mom went every few days anyway. Women didn't just fill up their jars and walk away. They stood around and chatted, the way men were more likely to do in the market square. Locals said I heard it by the fountain when they meant I heard it through the grapevine.
The last couple of times, Mom had sent Amanda to get water and listen to the chatter. Mom liked to go herself. That she stayed home gnawed at Amanda. Mom kept insisting everything was all right now. Trouble was, she didn't act as if everything were all right.
A girl about Amanda's own age came out of a house not far from the fountain. “Hello, Maria,” Amanda said. “How are you this morning?” She'd got to know the local the last time her family was in Polisso.
“I'm fine, thank you, Mistress Amanda,” Maria answered. She was short and skinny and dark. She had a delicately arched nose and front teeth that stuck out and spoiled her looks. In the home timeline, braces would have fixed that. Here, she was stuck with it. Her smile was sweet even so. “God bless you,” she told Amanda. She was a Christian, and not one of the Imperial sort. She clung tight to her beliefs, not least because she had little else to cling to. She was a slave.
“What do you know?” Amanda said uncomfortably. She had tried and failed to imagine what it would be like to own somebody, or to be owned. If the prosperous potter Maria belonged to ever ran short of cash, he could sell her as if she were a secondhand car. And he could visit indignities on her no car ever suffered. Under local law, every bit of that was legal, too.
“I know God loves me.” Maria did sound convinced of it. Maybe believing that helped keep her from fretting about her fate in this world. She went on, “And I know my master is worrying about the godless Lietuvans again.”
“Is he?” Amanda said. Maria nodded. The Lietuvans weren't really godless. But they did have their own gods. They didn't much like the traditional Roman deities. And they really didn't like the Christian God. In Lietuva, Christians still became martyrs. There weren't many of them there. The handful who did live in the kingdom lived secretly, and in fear. Even in Amanda's world, Lithuania had been the last European country to accept Christianity.
Maria said, “He thinks they will go to war with the Empire. There have been more Lietuvan merchants and traders in town than usual. He says they are all spies.”
The guard at the gate had talked about Lietuvan spies when Amanda and her family came into Polisso. Had he known something? Or had the city prefect or the garrison commander started worrying for no good reason? That could make everybody in town jumpy.
“Why doesn't your family have any servants, Amanda?” Maria asked. “You traders must be rich. You could afford them. Then you wouldn't have to do work like this.” She didn't say a slave's work-it wasn't, or wasn't always, anyhow-but she meant something like that.
“We like taking care of things for ourselves,” Amanda answered. It was an un-Roman attitude, but she couldn't explain the real reasons.
Maria looked puzzled. “But you don't mind doing this?” She sounded puzzled, too.
“It's just something that needs doing,” Amanda said. If it were something she had to do every day of her life, she probably wouldn't have felt that way about it. It wouldn't just have been work. It would have been drudgery. Most of the year, she didn't have to worry about it. Maria did.
Other women at the fountain were talking about the Lietuvans, too. Maybe that meant there was something to Maria's master's alarm. Maybe it just meant they'd all heard the same rumors. Either way, Amanda knew she'd have to tell her folks about it. They didn't want to get trapped in a war.
A lot of the chatter at the fountain, though, could have happened in front of the lockers at Canoga Park High. The women and girls talked about who was seeing whom. They talked about who was cheating on whom. They traded news on where the prices were good, and on who had the best stuff. A couple of them asked Amanda about the mirrors her family was selling.
“How do they give such good reflections?” a plump woman asked. “Nobody in town has ever seen anything like them.”
Amanda went into her song and dance about buying the mirrors from people who lived a long way away. The less she admitted knowing about them, the fewer really pointed questions she'd get.
“It's too bad you won't tell,” the plump woman said.
“Oh, leave her alone, Lavinia,” another woman said. “You mean to tell me your kin haven't got any trade secrets?”
“Well, of course we do,” Lavinia said. “But not everybody's so interested in ours.”
That made Amanda want to fill up her jar and get back to the house as fast as she could. But the women took turns, and cutting ahead would get her talked about much more-and much more nastily-than any trade secrets. She had to wait and smile and pretend she didn't know what Lavinia was talking about.
While she was waiting, though, Jeremy came up the street calling, “Amanda! Amanda, come home quick!”
Ice ran through her. “What's the matter?” she said, afraid she already knew the answer.
Her brother didn't come right out and say it, not in front of all the women. He did say, “Mom needs you,” in a way that could only mean one thing.
“I'm coming.” Amanda started away without a backwards glance.
Quietly, Maria called, “I'll pray for you,” after her. Amanda had told her Mom wasn't feeling well. The rest of the women would soon know the same thing.
Once Amanda got out of earshot of them, she asked, “What is it? How bad is it?”
“Dad thinks it's her appendix,” Jeremy answered. “All the pain is here now.” He rested his hand between his right hipbone and his belly button, then went on, “She'll have to go back and have it out. That's not something to take care of here. They're sending a chamber now, down in the subbasement. He'll go back with her, then come here again as soon as she's okay.”
Amanda nodded. “That's fine. We can manage by ourselves for a couple of days, or whatever it takes. I just want to make sure Mom's all right.”
Her mother didn't look all right, or anywhere close to it. By the dark circles under her eyes, the pain wasn't just in one place now. It was worse than it had been, maybe a lot worse. But she tried hard to stay cheerful. She kissed Amanda and said, “I'll be fine. If it is appendicitis, they won't have any trouble fixing it once I get back to the home timeline.”
Dad and Jeremy and Amanda all helped her down to the subbasement. The chamber appeared in the room fifteen minutes later. Dad and the operator eased Mom inside. Dad said, “I'll send a message as soon as we know for sure, and I'll be back as fast as I can.”
“Okay,” Amanda and Jeremy said together. The chamber door slid shut. A moment later, the chamber disappeared. Amanda looked at Jeremy. He was looking back at her. For a little while, they were on their own.
Five
Jeremy thought people were looking at him. He had to go out in Polisso and pretend everything was normal. Mom and Dad had been gone for only a few hours. Jeremy felt as if his shield against the world were gone, too. Responsibilities weighed a million kilos. If he made a bad mistake, he couldn't pass any part of it on to someone else. It was his.
And he worried about Mom. Appendicitis was something simple enough to fix on the home timeline. But all the same, even doctors said the only minor surgery was surgery you didn't have to have. If something went wrong… Or if it turned out not to be appendicitis, but something worse…
He wouldn't think about that. He told himself so, again and again. It was like trying not to think of a green-and-orange zebra. You could tell yourself you wouldn't. You could tell yourself all sorts of things. The thought kept returning just the same.
“Furs! I have fine furs!” a Lietuvan trader shouted. Jeremy kept on walking through the market square. He didn't want furs. He wanted to tell the Lietuvan what he thought of him for selling them. He couldn't. A real Agrippan Roman might not have bought fur, but he wouldn't have minded anyone selling it.
And the locals call the Lietuvans barbarians, Jeremy thought. They're more alike than they are different.
They had reason to be, of course. Rome and Lietuva had lived next door to each other for a thousand years. They'd fought wars against each other. They'd traded. Ideas had gone across their border along with trade goods. NeoLatin had words for things like amber and wax and slave that were borrowed from Lietuvan. Lietuvan had more words taken from classical Latin and neoLatin: a whole host of technical terms, as well as words like wine and wheel and ship.
Another Lietuvan in a fur jacket called, “Here! You are a young man! Buy yourself a slave girl! She's well trained. She'll do what you tell her.” He leered.
The girl he pointed at was blond and skinny and broad-faced, with high cheekbones. She couldn't have been more than twelve years old. Her threadbare tunic was filthy. She didn't look well trained. She looked scared to death.
“You want her?” the Lietuvan asked. “I'll give you a good price.”
“No.” Again, Jeremy kept on walking. Behind him, the Lietuvan said something in his own language. Whatever it was, it wasn't praise. Jeremy didn't care. He discovered he'd only thought being offered furs was disgusting. Now he found the real thing. If he gave the trader enough silver, the fellow would sell him the girl.
He couldn't. Dealing in slaves, even to set them free, was as illegal as could be for crosstime traders. Setting her free wouldn't do her much of a favor, anyhow. What was called freedom here was often only the freedom to starve. Keeping her was just as much out of the question. She would ask questions the traders couldn't answer, see things she wasn't supposed to see, and learn things the locals shouldn't know. Whatever happened to her would just have to happen.
“Good luck,” Jeremy whispered. She would need it. He hoped she got an easy master. There were some: quite a few, in fact. That wasn't really the problem with slavery. The problem with slavery was that there were masters, period.
“Plums! Peaches! Who'll buy my plums and peaches?” a peasant woman called. She wore a bright scarf wrapped around her head. Years of weathering had left her cheeks almost the same color as the plums in her basket. The peaches here were smaller and paler than the ones Jeremy knew from the home timeline. They didn't taste just the same, either. They weren't quite so sweet, but they had a spicy flavor he liked.
He haggled long enough to look normal, then took a small basket full of them back to the house. He'd brought the basket himself. Nobody here gave out shopping bags or anything like them.
Amanda opened the door as soon as he knocked. Smiles wreathed her face. “You've heard from Dad!” Jeremy exclaimed.
His sister nodded. “It was her appendix, and now it's out, and she's going to be fine.”
Some of the weight fell from Jeremy's shoulders. “That's… about the best news there is,” he said. “Did Dad say how long he'll stay back there?”
“A few days,” Amanda answered. “He can't be quite sure yet, 'cause he has to see how Mom's doing. But he said he'd get back here as soon as he could. And Mom shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks-but she'll have to wear a patch of false skin over the scar when she goes to the baths.”
“I hadn't thought of that,” Jeremy said, but it made sense when he did. Nobody here had a scar like that. Agrippan Rome knew no anesthetics. It had no antibiotics. It had never heard of sterile operating techniques. A wound in the belly meant sure death from infection.
“It doesn't matter,” Amanda said. “She's going to be okay. That does.”
“Yeah.” Jeremy nodded. Yes, some of the weight was off. Things would get back to normal pretty soon. Now he could concentrate on how much business he and Amanda did before Dad came back to Polisso.
And he could tell Michael Fujikawa the good news. He stayed up late to try and catch Michael getting up. When he went to the laptop in the hidden part of the basement, he found a message waiting for him. How's your mom doing?
“She went back to the home timeline,” he answered, as if his friend were standing there in front of him. The computer transcribed his words. “It was appendicitis. Dad was right about that. They took out her appendix. She'll be back in a couple of weeks. Dad says he'll be back in a few days-as soon as he's sure she's all right. She should be. The operation went fine.”
He waited. He didn't have to wait long. Michael must have been sitting at the laptop that connected them across the skein of alternates. That's terrific! he said. I'm sorry she had to have the operation, but now she'll be okay. So you and Amanda are by yourselves? How you doing?
“We're okay,” Jeremy said. “We can manage on our own for a little while, anyway. I want to see how much we can sell before Dad gets here again.”
There you go, Michael told him. Show him what you can do by
The message stopped there. Jeremy frowned, waiting for Michael to go on. But only the incomplete sentence stared at him. After half a minute or so, new words formed on the screen: TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED. NO CONTACT WITH HOME TIMELINE.
“What's that supposed to mean?” Jeremy asked. The message program was still running, so those words went up on the monitor, too. “You there, Michael?” That appeared, too. What didn't appear was an answer from Michael Fujikawa.
Muttering, Jeremy ordered the computer to send the message. He got the same error report as before: TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED. NO CONTACT WITH HOME TIMELINE.
“But I'm not even trying to send to the home timeline,” Jeremy protested. He really did swear when he saw those words go up on the screen. Then a chill ran through him. He wasn't trying to send to the home timeline, but everything went through it. He called up the address code for the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad. That was the home timeline's counterpart of this place. “Is everything all right there?” he asked, and told the laptop to send.