“Am I in danger?”
“No, Colonel Kalinski. The immunization programs the ISF gave you over the years leave you fully protected.”
“And Yuri was surely treated too.”
“By the ISF medics before he was left on Per Ardua, yes.”
She thought quickly. “Could you manufacture a vaccine? You could start from samples of our blood . . .”
The ColU hesitated. “It is not impossible. With the help of the medicus, perhaps, the assembly of a cultivation lab from local equipment . . . it might take time, but it could be done.”
“In time to save a lot of lives?”
“Yes, Colonel Kalinski.”
Titus put his big hand over the slate, gently compelling her to lower it. He said tensely, “You speak to your oracle through your talking glass. It perturbs me that my commanders seem willing to accept you and your miracles without explanation. I would not permit it, were I the centurion—”
“But you are not, Titus Valerius,” Michael said gently.
“No. I am not. But I believe I understood what you have plotted with the oracle.”
“‘Plotted’ doesn’t seem the right word—”
“You intend to damp down the plague, to preserve the lives of slaves who would otherwise die.”
“That’s the idea. What’s wrong with that?”
Titus fumed. “It will break the ship’s budget, and bring us all to starvation long before we cross the orbits of Constantius, Vespasian and Augustus, that’s what!”
Stef frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Michael said gently, “I fear you do not, Stef. You are not used to thinking like a slave-owner. I have mixed with the Brikanti, for example, who use slaves much less sparingly—indeed, mostly for trade with the Empire. But you are a star traveler. You must know that a ship like this has a fixed budget of consumables—water and food and air.”
“Of course.”
“Then you must see that to the centurion—or specifically the optio who manages such things—the slave labor aboard is just another asset, to be used according to a plan. In the first year we have so many slaves, who will eat this much food, who will get this amount of work done—of whom this number will die of various causes, and in the second year we will have a diminished number of slaves, reduced by the deaths, augmented by births, of course, but most of those will be exposed. And that diminished number is in the plan, as is the food they eat, the work they will do, the further deaths during the year—”
“And so it goes on,” said Stef.
“So it goes on,” Titus said grimly. “And as long as there’s one slave left at the end of the journey to wipe the centurion’s arse, the job will be done.”
“We expect disease, you see,” Michael said. “We factor it into the numbers. And if by some miracle you and Collius the oracle were to prevent those deaths—”
“I told you,” Titus said. “We’ll all be chewing the hull plates before we’re halfway home. Why, I remember once on campaign—”
“It won’t be as bad as that,” Michael said. “You do dramatize, Titus. There would be culls; the numbers would be managed one way or another. But it would be severely destabilizing, and not welcome to the command hierarchy.”
“And the alternative,” Stef said slowly, “is to let them all die. Down in that pit.”
“We have no choice,” the ColU murmured from the slate.
“No,” Stef growled. “No! I don’t know why the hell I was brought to this world, but I’m damn sure it wasn’t to stand by and watch hundreds of men, women, children, die a preventable death.” She said desperately to Michael, “What if we could cut a deal?”
Titus snorted.
But Michael frowned, evidently intrigued. “What kind of deal?”
“The ship couldn’t feed all these people, if they stayed alive. Very well. Let them live, and we’ll find ways to feed them. The ColU, Collius, is a pretty resourceful oracle. You saw that already. Why, Titus, it showed you how to make soil down at the colonia, did it not?”
“It did. What are you suggesting?”
“Let me take the ColU through this ship’s systems. With you, Michael, and the remiges.”
The ColU said, “Colonel Kalinski, I would not advise—”
She buried the slate in her tunic so the ColU could not be heard. “We’ll find a way to upgrade. Does that translate? We’ll improve the output of the farms. My God, it can’t be so hard; it’s probably no better than medieval down there. We’ll improve the water filtration and reclamation. Show you how to clean up the air better.”
Michael was frowning, unsure. “You mean you could make the Malleus better able to support a larger population of crew. And that way you would have us spare the slaves.”
“That’s the idea.”
He shook his head. “Romans are suspicious of innovation, Stef.”
“Well, they can’t be that suspicious, or they wouldn’t have put their money into Brikanti starships like this, would they? And that centurion of yours strikes me as an imaginative man.” She was stretching the truth there, but at least Quintus hadn’t gone running and screaming when two strangers and a robot from an alternate history had come wandering through his brand new Hatch. “Suppose the Malleus Jesu were to return, not just with its mission at Romulus completed, but new and improved—a prototype for a new wave of starships to come? What if he were able to present that to his own commanders? Romans might not like innovation. What about opportunity, staring them in the face?”
Titus and Michael looked at her, and at each other.
“We must talk this over,” Michael said. “Before the optio first of all.”
“I agree,” said Titus.
Michael waggled a finger at her. “And don’t start meddling before you’ve got specific approval from the centurion—and the trierarchus, come to that. Or we’ll all be for the Brikanti long jump.”
Which, Stef had already gathered, meant being thrown out of an airlock.
Titus growled, “But first let’s do what we came for and find your slave boy, Stef Kalinski, if he’s still alive.” He leered at her. “And what then? Will you come with me down into the pen, and confront these dying maggots you insist on saving?”
She couldn’t meet his gaze.
15
AD 2215; AUC 2968
When Ari Guthfrithson walked into her classroom, Penny Kalinski was trying to teach the children of ancient Britons and Vikings about the contingency of history.
She looked down at her notes on the desk before her, silently cursing the need to read her own handwritten scrawl in this world without computers, cursing the inadequacy of her antique pair of reading glasses to cope with the slow drift of her eyesight. Two years after arriving here, aged seventy-one, there were still some things she couldn’t get used to. And she tried not to let the druidh put her off her stride.
But now Ari settled into a place at the back of the class beside Marie Golvin, once a bridge crew member on board the ISF ship Tatania, and now a teacher here at Penny’s Academy. Marie was a figure from Penny’s old past, constantly reassuring.
“The Mongols, then,” Penny said. She checked her notes. “It is the late twentieth century.” The thirteenth in Penny’s history. The Brikanti, like the Romans, used the old Julian calendar, applying crude leap-year corrections as the centuries passed—and, like the Romans, the Brikanti counted their years since the founding of Rome. It had taken some effort for the newcomers to match their own Gregorian-calendar dates to those in use here. “The Mongols, under their rapacious but visionary khans, have exploded from the steppe and have rampaged into the eastern provinces of the Empire, tearing through Pannonia and Noricum and even Rhaetia. They besiege and destroy town after town. They are exterminating Romans. And, who knows? If they cannot be stopped, they may turn on Italia, even reach Rome it
self. The legacy of centuries of civilization would be lost, the statues smashed, the books burned, the churches plundered. Perhaps Rome and the Empire could never rise again, even if the Mongol horde could someday be driven out.
“And to the east it is no better. An equally ferocious horde, under generals of equal genius, is tearing its way into the soft belly of the Xin dominion. They don’t seek territory, these are not empire builders like the Caesars; they seek nothing but booty, and land to pasture their horses, and women and girls to bear their children.”
Her pupils were no older than twelve years old, and their eyes widened at that last detail. But Brikanti was not a prissy culture. And nor had it been much of a stretch for Penny, a woman, to be effectively running this Academy; women had freedom and power here compared to many other cultures—even those less barbaric than the Mongols.
“There was a moment, then, on the cusp of the twenty-first century, when the future of civilization itself, the very idea of it, was under threat. The European plains might now be inhabited by nothing but the horses of illiterate herdsmen, grazing grass growing in the rubble of ruined cities . . .”
Even as she spoke, concentrating on each still-unfamiliar Brikanti word, she was aware of the grandeur of the setting.
Her two dozen students, all children of the wealthy Eboraki merchants who were able to afford the fees she charged, sat in neat rows under the looming conical roof of this schoolhouse. Brand new, and commissioned with the help of Ari himself for the purpose of her Academy—which she had dedicated to Saint Jonbar, who she claimed to Ari was a powerful figure in her own lost version of Christianity—it actually had the feel of great age. It was a roundhouse, like a relic of the European Iron Age of her own history. But the long trunks of the frame, gathered into a stout cone over her head, had been brought across the Atlantic from Canada, which in this history was a province of the Brikanti federation—an expensive import, but for many centuries no trees in Pritanike had been allowed to grow so tall before being cut down for use. The trunks had been set up on a base of concrete, and brilliant fluorescent strip lights were suspended from the apex of the house: to Penny it was a strange mixture of ancient and modern technologies.
In this setting, two years after her arrival aboard the Ukelwydd, she had established her Academy, whose principal purposes were to teach math and science—especially her own subject, physics, which was far in advance of anything known here. But she had insisted to Ari that she include classes like this, on wider aspects of culture. She said the goal was to educate herself in this new course of history. Ari had bought it; he had come from a wide-ranging educational background himself.
But she suspected that Ari believed she had a deeper agenda. After all, two years on, Ari was still one of only a handful of Brikanti to know that she came from a different historical background—and, she thought, one of even fewer who actually believed the reality of it all. But, suspicious as he was, he had allowed her to go ahead with these side projects. Penny wondered if Beth Eden Jones had had something to do with that—maybe she’d used a little pillow talk. And she was, after all, carrying Ari’s baby . . .
And here he was now, sitting at the back of her class like some school inspector, a half-smile playing on his lips as she lectured these children about the possibility of counterfactuals. Well, he was right to be suspicious. Of course she had an agenda. Of course she was playing a long game. Saint Jonbar, indeed!
She focused on her students, on the Mongols.
“So everything hung in the balance. All history might have been changed. But that did not happen. Does anybody know—”
There were some shout-outs, but a forest of hands was raised more politely, as she’d patiently taught them. This was a warrior culture after all; they did have Vikings in their ancestry. At the beginning, Marie had said she was lucky the students didn’t try to attract her attention by throwing axes at her head.
She picked out a student at random. “Yes, Freydis?”
The girl stood up. “The great Roman Emperor Constantius XI sent an embassy to the Xin empress, and persuaded her to join forces and attack the Mongols.” She sat down just as sharply.
“Yes. That’s essentially right. Except that it was actually the other way around . . .” That history-changing bit of statecraft, an alliance between bitter rivals that had probably saved two empires, had been initiated by strategic geniuses in the Xin court. But Roman historians, propagandists all, had from that moment given the credit to Constantius. The Brikanti, for all their stated rivalry with Rome, were in some ways in awe of the mighty Empire that had once come so close to destroying them, and had allowed their own view of history to be dazzled by such lies.
“But the point is that because the two rulers were able to put aside their own suspicion and ambition, the Mongols were defeated. Without that, everything would have been different. That’s what I want you to take away from this lesson today . . . Yes, Freydis.”
The girl stood again. “Maybe it’s like when Queen Kartimandia told the Caesar to attack Germania and not Pritanike. If she hadn’t done that . . .”
Her face shone with the excitement of discovery, of finding a new idea, a whole new way of thinking. Penny was no natural teacher, and at seventy-one years old she was finding the daily classroom routine a grind. But at such moments, when a spark was lit in a young imagination, she could see why people would teach.
But Freydis’s contribution hadn’t gone down well with her classmates; there was laughter and catcalls. “Yes, Freydis, and you’d be speaking Latin now!”
“So would you,” Freydis snapped back.
“All right, all right.” Penny stood, holding up her hands. “That’s enough for now. Time to break for lunch—”
The room turned into a near riot as the students grabbed their stuff and jumped up from their benches. Marie Golvin yelled with parade-ground lungs, “Back here in one hour for relativistic navigation!”
Ari Guthfrithson, with quiet dignity, let the tide of youngsters wash past him. Then, when the room was empty, he walked toward Penny, clapping his hands. “Skillfully done. And all delivered in correct Brikanti, halting and with an exotic accent as it is. I do continue to wonder why, you know, you pepper their brains with such ideas, the fragility of history. It wasn’t the stated purpose of the Academy, after all.”
Before Penny had to answer, Marie Golvin, who had been collecting up scrolls and paper scraps from around the room, joined them. “Will you have lunch with us, druidh? Nothing exciting, I’m afraid.”
“I’d be honored. And that was a neat deflection, by the way, Lieutenant Golvin.” It had taken him some time to memorize the term for Golvin’s ISF rank. “Well, shall we walk?”
16
The Academy of Saint Jonbar had been established on the edge of Eboraki, away from the crowded ancient core of the city, in what Penny might have called an outer suburb. The refectory where they would eat, though attached to the Academy, was a short walk out of the campus and toward town.
The main schoolhouse was one of a cluster of such buildings, all brand new roundhouses, which included a gymnasium, a library, an arts center, a small clinic, a workshop for pottery, metalwork and other crafts, and a Christian chapel. The buildings were arranged in neat rows, like the city itself aligned not north-south but on a northeast to southwest axis, the direction of the solstice sunrise and sunset, following Brikanti tradition. There was a grassy playing field, and a kind of parade ground where some of the students, cadets in the armed forces of the Brikanti, could practice marching, and wage mock battles with swords and even blank-loaded firearms. But all this was set in an oak grove, one of a number studded around the city, the tree a symbol of ancient druidh wisdom.
Penny and Marie had together designed this complex, with advice from Ari and other locals, and all paid for by money Ari had managed to extract from Navy contingency funds—the military-college aspect
had been part of the price they’d had to pay for that. To Penny, even now, it looked like a museum piece, like a reconstruction of some Iron Age village rather than a brand-new, living, breathing facility for young people.
Of course those few students who went on to become full druidh wouldn’t be so young when they finished. Ari, for instance, had gone through a few years of general education, including history, geography and philosophy, followed by twenty years of specialist study in law, politics, and mathematics and astronomy. Nowadays this was a literate culture, but Ari had told Penny that the old preliteracy tradition of memory training, the recall of long passages, was still used to develop the mind. Mathematics was particularly strong here. Penny herself had supervised classes of young children learning to reproduce the outlines of mistletoe seeds using the arcs of circles, carefully drawn with compasses and pens. It was easy to see, given such beginnings, how the Brikanti grew up to be such fine astronomers and interstellar navigators: from the geometry of a mistletoe seed to the trajectory of a starship.
The principal town of Eboraki was evidently a more ancient community than the Roman-planted towns in Gaul and Germania, and the older traditions of Celtic architecture and town planning lingered on, not obliterated by later Roman developments as in Penny’s timeline. A grid pattern of roads of gravel and crushed rock separated houses of wattle and daub with thatched roofs, all surrounded by a monumental wall, outside which lay cemeteries and funeral pyres. The higher ground in the center of the city—in Penny’s world dominated by a cathedral that had stood on the site of a demolished principia, headquarters of a Roman legion—did bear the remains of a two-thousand-year-old fort, but here it had been a Brikanti-built bastion, a relic of the days when continental invasions had been feared and experienced. This Britain, for better or worse, had never been severed from its own past by a Roman sword.
Studying this new history with her students, Penny had come to understand how much harm the Brikanti and their continental cousins, who Penny had grown up knowing as the Celts, had suffered at the hands of the Romans. Once the Celtic nations had prospered across Europe from Britain to the Danube, but the Romans’ empire-building expansion had driven them back. Though Britain, in this history, had remained independent of Rome, elsewhere the Celts had been crushed. When Caesar had invaded Gaul—a prosperous, settled and literate country of a population of eight million—he had slaughtered one million and enslaved another million. One detail particularly remembered by Brikanti historians was that Caesar had severed the hands of rebels, so they could not gather their harvest. This history was not well-known in Penny’s timeline. Here, it had never been forgotten.
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