That wasn't good at all-not even slightly. Something had gone wrong somewhere between here and the world where he'd been born.
He tried Michael one more time, and got the same error message. Really scared now, he left-fled-the basement. The secret door closed behind him.
Amanda was not someone who gave in to panic. She was someone who always tried to look on the bright side of things.
That was one reason her brother sometimes drove her crazy. Of course, Jeremy had woken her out of a sound sleep to tell her about the error message. She was not at her best yawning in the middle of the night.
She went down to the basement to try to send messages to the home timeline herself. When she found she couldn't, either, she went back to her bedroom. “It'll be fine in the morning,” she said.
“How do you know that?” Jeremy demanded.
“Because nothing's ever as awful when the sun comes out as it is at three in the morning, or whatever time it is now,” Amanda answered. Then she shut the door in his face.
The computer still wouldn't send messages when she got up in the morning. That wasn't good news. It was, in fact, very bad news. With the sun shining down brightly on the courtyard, though, it didn't seem so bad.
Before long, Amanda was too busy to worry about it anyway. She and her mother had had all they could do to keep the house in some kind of order and to keep everybody fed without help from servants or slaves. Now she had to do it without Mom around. It was more work than one human being could do.
She tried to get Jeremy to help. He didn't want to. That made her lose her temper. “You listen to me, Jeremy,” she snapped. “If you don't do what needs doing, I'll tell Dad when he gets back here. Then you'll catch it. And you know what else? You'll deserve it, too.”
He helped. He was surly about it. He helped less than he would have if he'd known what he was doing. Sometimes just having an extra pair of hands and an extra pair of eyes made a difference, though.
Breaking off from the housework to deal with customers every once in a while didn't help, either. The one good thing about that was that nobody asked them, Where are your mother and father? The locals probably thought they would get better deals from the younger people in the family. They were wrong, but it kept them from being too curious.
Two days passed. Three days. Four. Five. The computer kept giving the same error report whenever Amanda and Jeremy tried to send a message. No message from any of the other alternates or the home timeline came in.
And Dad didn't come back to Polisso.
At first, Amanda wondered whether that was because something had gone wrong with Mom. No way to know for sure, not when the message system was down. As one day followed another, though, she began to realize that probably wasn't the problem.
“I think something's wrong with the transposition chamber,” she said to Jeremy at supper the sixth night.
When she put it that way, it didn't sound so bad. If she'd said, I'm afraid we're stuck here forever, it would have seemed much worse. But it would have meant the same thing.
Her brother was sucking marrow out of a lamb shank. Amanda thought that took realism too far, but Jeremy really did like marrow. Air and marrow going through the center of the bone made a gross noise. He smacked his lips.
“You may be right,” he said, scratching his chin. He was growing the scraggly beginnings of a beard. Razors here, even the straight razors the traders sold, were nothing but long, slim knives. No neat blades in plastic safety housings. You could do yourself some serious damage if you weren't careful. From what he said, the beard itched coming in.
“Maybe we ought to go out to the chamber outside of town,” Amanda said.
“We can if you want to,” Jeremy said. “I don't think it'll do much good, though.”
“Why not?”
“Because if that one were working, Dad would have come through it by now, along with technicians to fix whatever's wrong with this one.”
“Oh.” Amanda winced. That made more sense than she wished it did. She tried to stay optimistic. “We ought to check anyway.”
“All right. I'll go tomorrow,” Jeremy said.
Amanda wished he didn't make sense there, too, but he did. Anyone on the road was much less likely to give a large young man trouble than a young woman. That was unfortunate, which didn't make it any less true. She said, “What could make both transposition chambers stop working at the same time?”
“I don't know,” her brother answered bleakly. “I've been chewing on that for three or four days now, and I haven't got any sure answers.”
Three or four days? That was a day or two longer than Amanda had been worrying. Jeremy hadn't let on how worried he was till now. Amanda said, “What are some of the things you've thought of?”
“Maybe there was an earthquake in the home timeline.” That could have been true. Quakes happened randomly across timelines. “Maybe the transposition operators are out on strike.” That was a joke; the chambers could go automatically 99.999 (and probably several more nines after that) percent of the time. Jeremy went on: “Maybe the operators are still filling out Agrippan Roman forms.“ That was a joke, too-sort of.
“What are we going to do if a chamber… doesn't show up for a while?” Amanda asked.
“The best we can,” her brother answered. “What else can we do?”
“Nothing,” she said unhappily.
“When people do come back for us, we'll be the richest pair in Polisso,” Jeremy said.
“That sounds good,” Amanda said. Her brother grinned at her. She knew he was trying to keep up her spirits along with his own, and liked him for it. After a second, she stuck a finger in the air-the sign she'd thought of something. “From now on, we'd better take money for everything we sell.”
“How come?” Jeremy asked. Then he looked foolish. “Oh.”
“Yeah,” Amanda said. “What would we do with all that grain if we couldn't ship it back to the home timeline? It'd start coming out of our ears.”
“Uh-huh.” Jeremy nodded. “Then when things do get straightened out again, that'll make things more complicated, because the locals will keep wanting to buy for cash. But we can worry about that later. Right now, we'll just do what we've got to do to keep going.”
Do what we've got to do to keep going. That made a lot of sense to Amanda. It was simple. It was practical. And it meant she didn't have to think about nasty possibilities. If the transposition chamber couldn't come back for a few weeks, that was one thing. If it couldn't come back for a few years, that was something else again. No matter how much energy the batteries stored, they'd run dry sooner or later. Then Amanda and Jeremy would be on even terms with the locals, and they'd stay that way till they got rescued.
And if for some reason the chamber couldn't come back at all…
Then we're stuck here, Amanda thought. The chill that ran through her was colder than winter at the South Pole. Polisso was a nice enough place to visit; plenty of alternates were worse. But to live here? To speak neoLatin the rest of her days and forget English? To have to forget that women were just as good as men and could do anything men could? To say goodbye to doctors and dentists and ice cream and deodorant and malls and Copernicus and the SPCA and everything she'd grown up with?
Jeremy said something under his breath. She thought it was Robinson Crusoe. She didn't want to ask him, for fear she was right. Why wouldn't he be thinking along with her, though? They would be even more isolated from their homes than Robinson Crusoe ever was. At least he'd stayed in his own world.
“We know Mom's all right. That's the important thing,” Jeremy said.
“Sure.” Amanda made herself sound perky. If her brother didn't want to think about getting stuck here, how could she blame him? She didn't want to think about it, either.
A literate soldier poised pen over papyrus. “Reason for leaving the city?” he asked.
“I'm just going out for a walk,” Jeremy answered. “It's a nice day. And I'm sick of smelling smoke and garbage in here.”
“Reason for leaving the city: constitutional.” The guard at the western gate wrote that down, then laughed. Jeremy realized the fellow wasn't much older than he was himself. When the local smiled, he looked like a kid. He said, “The city stink does get to you, doesn't it? But when you get out of it for a while, it's even worse when you come back.”
“I've noticed that, too,” Jeremy said.
“You'll be back by sunset?” the soldier asked. “There's another form if you stay out longer.”
“By sunset,” Jeremy promised.
“All right,” the guard said. “If you come in late, now, there's a fine for giving false information.”
“There would be,” Jeremy said. The guard laughed again. He thought Jeremy was kidding. Jeremy knew he wasn't. Life in Agrippan Rome broke down into a million separate boxes. If you stepped outside any of them, or if you stepped into one where you'd said you wouldn't go, you had to pay.
Even the law here worked like that. For two thousand years and more, lawmakers and lawyers had tried to take life apart and look at each possible deed. If you were accused of doing something wrong, they would fit it into a pigeonhole- stealing sheep worth between twenty and forty denari, for instance. Then they would decide whether you'd done it. If they decided you had, another pigeonhole told them exactly how to punish you. To Jeremy, that kind of precise control felt like a straitjacket. The locals took it for granted.
“Pass on,” the gate guard said, and Jeremy did.
A hawk wheeled overhead. There were rabbits in the fields. The hawks weren't the only ones to eat them. Sometimes the locals would hunt them with dogs and nets. Rabbit stew could be tasty. No matter what people in the home timeline said, it didn't taste like chicken.
Jeremy realized he hadn't been outside Polisso since coming here. The town couldn't have been even a kilometer square. He traveled several times that distance every day he went to high school. When you were on foot all the time, though, distance stretched dramatically.
A few tombstones poked up through the tall grass on either side of the road. Time had blurred the carvings on them. The locals didn't bury people inside the walls. That wasn't because they thought dead bodies left there might spread disease; they'd never heard of germs, and had no idea how disease spread. The only pollution they worried about was the religious kind.
As Jeremy reached the bend that put Polisso out of sight behind him, he stopped in the middle of the road. Except for the faintest ripple of the wind through the grass and a starling's distant, metallic call, silence was absolute. That kind of quiet was something he didn't get to know in Los Angeles. There was always a murmur of traffic noise there, of airplanes and helicopters overhead, and of the neighbors' TVs or radios or computers or stereos. There was also the sixty-cycle hum of electricity. You didn't constantly notice it, but it was around whenever you went indoors.
Not here. This was just… nothing. The starling fell silent. All Jeremy could hear was the blood rushing in his ears. He hardly ever realized it was there, but it seemed very loud now.
When he started walking again, each thump of his sandal on the paving stones might have come from a giant's heavy boots. He tried to go on tiptoe to be quieter. It didn't seem to do much good.
He concentrated so hard on being quiet, he almost walked past the cave that hid the transposition chamber. That would have been great. He looked ahead. He turned around and looked behind. No one coming either way. He left the road and went over to the mouth of the cave. He had to cast around a bit before he found the hidden trapdoor close by. Grunting with effort, he lifted it and went down the tunnel pathway that led back into the cave.
Almost everything inside the cave seemed the same as it had when his family got here. Only one thing was missing: the transposition chamber. He hadn't expected to find that there. It would have been nice, but he hadn't expected it.
He turned on the PowerBook sitting on a table in a niche farther back in the cave. The computer came to life right away. He sent a message to the Crosstime Traffic electronic monitor in the home timeline that checked this machine's output. He tried to send one, anyway.