Alternate Empires

by Gregory Benford

  That first Olympian was not at all pretty, but it was definitely alien. When the next string turned out very similar to the first, it was Sam who saw at once that it was simply a slightly rotated view of the same being. The Olympians took forty-one pictures to give us the complete likeness of that first one in the round…

  Then they began sending pictures of the others.

  It had never occurred to anyone, not even Sam, that we would be dealing not with one super race, but with at least twenty-two of them. There were that many separate forms of alien beings, and each one uglier and more strange than the one before.

  That was one of the reasons the priests didn’t like calling them Olympians. We’re pretty ecumenical about our gods, but none of them looked anything like any of those, and some of the older priests never stopped muttering about blasphemy.

  Halfway through the third course of our lunch and the second flask of wine, Sam broke off his description of the latest communique from the Olympians—they’d been acknowledging receipt of our transmissions about Earthly history—to lift his head and grin at me.

  “Got it,” he said.

  I turned and blinked at him. Actually, I hadn’t been paying a lot of attention to his monologue because I had been keeping my eye on the pretty Kievan waitress. She had attracted my attention because—well, I mean, after attracting my attention because of her extremely well developed figure and the sparsity of clothing to conceal it—because she was wearing a gold citizen’s amulet around her neck. She wasn’t a slave. That made her more intriguing. I can’t ever get really interested in slave women, because it isn’t sporting, but I had got quite interested in this woman.

  “Are you listening to me?” Sam demanded testily.

  “Of course I am. What have you got?”

  “I’ve got the answer to your problem.” He beamed. “Not just a sci-rom novel plot. A whole new kind of sci-rom! Why don’t you write a book about what it will be like if the Olympians don’t come?”

  I love the way half of Sam’s brain works at questions while the other half is doing something completely different, but I can’t always follow what comes out of it. “I don’t see what you mean. If I write about the Olympians not coming, isn’t that just as bad as if I write about them doing it?”

  “No, no,” he snapped. “Listen to what I say! Leave the Olympians out entirely. Just write about a future that might happen, but won’t.”

  The waitress was hovering over us, picking up used plates. I was conscious of her listening as I responded with dignity, “Sam, that’s not my style. My sci-roms may not sell as well as yours do, but I’ve got just as much integrity. I never write anything that I don’t believe is at least possible.”

  “Julie, get your mind off your gonads”—so he hadn’t missed the attention I was giving the girl—“and use that pitifully tiny brain of yours. I’m talking about something that could be possible, in some alternative future, if you see what I mean.”

  I didn’t see at all. “What’s an alternative future?”

  “It’s a future that might happen, but won’t,” he explained. “Like if the Olympians don’t come to see us.”

  I shook my head, puzzled. “But we already know they’re coming,” I pointed out.

  “But suppose they weren’t! Suppose they hadn’t contacted us years ago.”

  “But they did,” I said, trying to straighten out his thinking on the subject. He only sighed.

  “I see I’m not getting through to you,” he said, pulling his robe around him and getting to his feet. “Get on with your waitress. I’ve got some messages to send. I’ll see you on the ship.”

  Well, for one reason or another I didn’t get anywhere with the Kievan waitress. She said she was married, happily and monogamously. Well, I couldn’t see why any lawful, free husband would have his wife out working at a job like that, but I was surprised she didn’t show more interest in one of my lineage—

  I’d better explain about that.

  You see, my family has a claim to fame. Genealogists say that we are descended from the line of Julius Caesar himself.

  I mention that claim myself, sometimes, though usually only when I’ve been drinking—I suppose it is one of the reasons that Lidia, always a snob, took up with me in the first place. It isn’t a serious matter. After all, Julius Caesar died more than two thousand years ago. There have been sixty or seventy generations since then, not to mention the fact that, although Ancestor Julius certainly left a lot of children behind him, none of them happened to be born to a woman he happened to be married to. I don’t even look very Roman. There must have been a Northman or two in the line, because I’m tall and fair-haired, which no respectable Roman ever was.

  Still, even if I’m not exactly the lawful heir to the divine Julius, I at least come of a pretty ancient and distinguished line. You would have thought a mere waitress would have taken that into account before turning me down.

  She hadn’t, though. When I woke up the next morning—alone—Sam was gone from the inn, although the skipship for Alexandria wasn’t due to sail until late evening.

  I didn’t see him all day. I didn’t look for him very hard, because I woke up feeling a little ashamed of myself. Why should a grown man, a celebrated author of more than forty best-selling (well, reasonably well selling) sci-roms, depend on somebody else for his ideas?

  So I turned my baggage over to the servant, checked out of the inn, and took the underground to the Library of Rome.

  Rome isn’t only the imperial capital of the world, it’s the scientific capital, too. The big old telescopes out on the hills aren’t much use anymore, because the lights from the city spoil their night viewing, and anyway the big optical telescopes are all out in space now. Still, they were where Galileus detected the first extrasolar planet and Tychus made his famous spectrographs of the last great supernova in our own galaxy, only a couple of dozen years after the first spaceflight. The scientific tradition survives. Rome is still the headquarters of the Collegium of Sciences.

  That’s why the Library of Rome is so great for someone like me. They have direct access to the the Collegium data base, and you don’t even have to pay transmission tolls. I signed myself in, laid out my tablets and stylus on the desk they assigned me, and began calling up files.

  Somewhere there had to be an idea for a science-adventure romance no one had written yet…

  Somewhere there no doubt was, but I couldn’t find it. Usually you can get a lot of help from a smart research librarian, but it seemed they’d put on a lot of new people in the Library of Rome—Iberians, mostly; reduced to slave status because they’d taken part in last year’s Lusitanian uprising. There were so many Iberians on the market for a while that they depressed the price. I would have bought some as a speculation, knowing that the price would go up—after all, there aren’t that many uprisings and the demand for slaves never stops. But I was temporarily short of capital, and besides you have to feed them. If the ones at the Library of Rome were a fair sample, they were no bargains anyway.

  I gave up. The weather had improved enough to make a stroll around town attractive, and so I wandered toward the Ostia monorail.

  Rome was busy, as always. There was a bullfight going on in the Coliseum and racing at the Circus Maximus. Tourist buses were jamming the narrow streets. A long religious procession was circling the Pantheon, but I didn’t get close enough to see which particular gods were being honored today. I don’t like crowds. Especially Roman crowds, because there are even more foreigners in Rome than in London, Africs and Hinds, Hans and Northmen—every race on the face of the Earth sends its tourists to visit the Imperial City. And Rome obliges with spectacles. I paused at one of them, for the changing of the guard at the Golden House. Of course, the Caesar and his wife were nowhere to be seen—off on one of their endless ceremonial tours of the dominions, no doubt, or at least opening a new supermarket somewhere. But the Algonkian family standing in front of me were thrilled as the honor Legions marc
hed and countermarched their standards around the palace. I remembered enough Cherokee to ask the Algonkians where they were from, but the languages aren’t really very close and the man’s Cherokee was even worse than mine. We just smiled at each other.

  As soon as the Legions were out of the way I headed for the train.

  I knew in the back of my mind that I should have been worrying about my financial position. The clock was running on my thirty days of grace. I didn’t, though. I was buoyed up by a feeling of confidence. Confidence in my good friend Flavius Samuelus, who, I knew, no matter what he was doing with most of his brain, was still cogitating an idea for me with some part of it.

  It did not occur to me that even Sam had limitations. Or that something so much more important than my own problems was taking up his attention that he didn’t have much left for me.

  I didn’t see Sam come onto the skip-ship, and I didn’t see him in our compartment. Even when the ship’s fans began to rumble and we slid down the ways into the Tyrrhenian Sea he wasn’t there. I dozed off, beginning to worry that he might have missed the boat; but late that night, already asleep, I half woke, just long enough to hear him stumbling in. “I’ve been on the bridge,” he said when I muttered something. “Go back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”

  When I woke, I thought it might have been a dream, because he was up and gone before me. But his bed had been slept in, however briefly, and the cabin steward reassured me when he brought my morning wine. Yes, Citizen Flavius Samuelus was certainly on the hover. He was in the captain’s own quarters, as a matter of fact, although what he was doing there the steward could not say.

  I spent the morning relaxing on the deck of the hover, soaking in the sun. The ship wasn’t exactly a hover anymore. We had transited the Sicilian Straits during the night and now, out in the open Mediterranean, the captain had lowered the stilts, pulled up the hover skirts, and extended the screws. We were hydrofoiling across the sea at easily a hundred miles an hour. It was a smooth, relaxing ride; the vanes that supported us were twenty feet under the surface of the water, and so there was no wave action to bounce us around.

  Lying on my back and squinting up at the warm southern sky, I could see a three-winged airliner rise up from the horizon behind us and gradually overtake us, to disappear ahead of our bows. The plane wasn’t going much faster than we were—and we had all the comfort, while they were paying twice as much for passage.

  I opened my eyes all the way when I caught a glimpse of someone standing beside me. In fact, I sat up quickly, because it was Sam. He looked as though he hadn’t had much sleep, and he was holding a floppy sun hat with one hand against the wind of our passage. “Where’ve you been?” I asked.

  “Haven’t you been watching the news?” he asked. I shook my head. “The transmissions from the Olympians have stopped,” he told me.

  I opened my eyes really wide at that, because it was an unpleasant surprise. Still, Sam didn’t seem that upset. Displeased, yes. Maybe even a little concerned, but not as shaken up as I was prepared to feel. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “It could be just interference from the sun. It’s in Sagittarius now, so it’s pretty much between us and them. There’s been trouble with static for a couple of days now.”

  I ventured, “So the transmissions will start up again pretty soon?”

  He shrugged and waved to the deck steward for one of those hot decoctions Judaeans like. When he spoke it was on a different topic. “I don’t think I made you understand what I meant yesterday,” he said. “Let me see if I can explain what I meant by an alternate world. You remember your history? How Fornius Vello conquered the Mayans and Romanized the Western Continents six or seven hundred years ago? Well, suppose he hadn’t.”

  “But he did, Sam.”

  “I know he did,” Sam said patiently. “I’m saying suppose. Suppose the Legions had been defeated at the Battle of Tehultapec.”

  I laughed. I was sure he was joking. “The Legions? Defeated? But the Legions have never been defeated.”

  “That’s not true,” Sam said in reproof. He hates it when people don’t get their facts straight. “Remember Varus.”

  “Oh, hells, Sam, that was ancient history! When was it, two thousand years ago? In the time of Augustus Caesar? And it was only a temporary defeat, anyway. The Emperor Drusus got the eagles back.” And got all of Gaul for the Empire, too. That was one of the first big trans-Alpine conquests. The Gauls are about as Roman as you can get these days, especially when it comes to drinking wine.

  He shook his head. “Suppose Fornius Vello had had a temporary defeat, then.”

  I tried to follow his argument, but it wasn’t easy. “What difference would that have made? Sooner or later the Legions would have conquered. They always have, you know.”

  “That’s true,” he said reasonably, “but if that particular conquest hadn’t happened then, the whole course of history would have been different. We wouldn’t have had the great westward migrations to fill up those empty continents. The Hans and the Hinds wouldn’t have been surrounded on both sides, so they might still be independent nations. It would have been a different world. Do you see what I’m driving at? That’s what I mean by an alternate world—one that might have happened, but didn’t.”

  I tried to be polite to him. “Sam,” I said, “you’ve just described the difference between a sci-rom and a fantasy. I don’t do fantasy. Besides,” I went on, not wanting to hurt his feelings, “I don’t see how different things would have been, really. I can’t believe the world would be changed enough to build a sci-rom plot on.”

  He gazed blankly at me for a moment, then turned and looked out to sea. Then, without transition, he said, “There’s one funny thing. The Martian colonies aren’t getting a transmission, either. And they aren’t occluded by the sun.”

  I frowned. “What does that mean, Sam?”

  He shook his head. “I wish I knew,” he said.

  Chapter 3

  In Old Alexandria

  The Pharos was bright in the sunset light as we came into the port of Alexandria. We were on hover again, at slow speeds, and the chop at the breakwater bumped us around. But once we got to the inner harbor the water was calm.

  Sam had spent the afternoon back in the captain’s quarters, keeping in contact with the Collegium of Sciences, but he showed up as we moored. He saw me gazing toward the rental desk on the dock but shook his head. “Don’t bother with a rental, Julie,” he ordered. “Let my niece’s servants take your baggage. We’re staying with her.”

  That was good news. Inn rooms in Alexandria are almost as pricey as Rome’s. I thanked him, but he didn’t even listen. He turned our bags over to a porter from his niece’s domicile, a little Arabian who was a lot stronger than he looked, and disappeared toward the Hall of the Egyptian Senate-Inferior, where the conference was going to be held.

  I hailed a three-wheeler and gave the driver the address of Sam’s niece.

  No matter what the Egyptians think, Alexandria is a dirty little town. The Choctaws have a bigger capital, and the Kievans have a cleaner one. Also Alexandria’s famous library is a joke. After my (one would like to believe) ancestor Julius Caesar let it burn to the ground, the Egyptians did build it up again. But it is so old-fashioned that there’s nothing in it but books.

  The home of Sam’s niece was in a particularly run-down section of that run-down town, only a few streets from the harborside. You could hear-the noise of the cargo winches from the docks, but you couldn’t hear them very well because of the noise of the streets themselves, thick with goods vans and drivers cursing each other as they jockeyed around the narrow corners. The house itself was bigger than I had expected. But, at least from the outside, that was all you could say for it. It was faced with cheap Egyptian stucco rather than marble, and right next door to it was a slave-rental barracks.

  At least, I reminded myself, it was free. I kicked at the door and shouted for the butler.

  It wasn’t t
he butler who opened it for me. It was Sam’s niece herself, and she was a nice surprise. She was almost as tall as I was and just as fair. Besides, she was young and very good-looking. “You must be Julius,” she said. “I am Rachel, niece of Citizen Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus, and I welcome you to my home.”

  I kissed her hand. It’s a Kievan custom that I like, especially with pretty girls I don’t yet know well, but hope to. “You don’t look Judaean,” I told her.

  “You don’t look like a sci-rom hack,” she replied. Her voice was less chilling than her words, but not much. “Uncle Sam isn’t here, and I’m afraid I’ve got work I must do. Basilius will show you to your rooms and offer you some refreshment.”

  I usually make a better first impression on young women. I usually work at it more carefully, but she had taken me by surprise. I had more or less expected that Sam’s niece would look more or less like Sam, except probably for the baldness and the wrinkled face. I could not have been more wrong.

  I had been wrong about the house, too. It was a big one. There had to be well over a dozen rooms, not counting servants’ quarters, and the atrium was covered with one of those partly reflecting films that keep the worst of the heat out.

  The famous Egyptian sun was directly overhead when Basilius, Rachel’s butler, showed me my rooms. They were pleasingly bright and airy, but Basilius suggested I might enjoy being outside. He was right. He brought me wine and fruits in the atrium, a pleasant bench by a fountain. Through the film the sun looked only pale and pleasant instead of deadly hot. The fruit was fresh, too—pineapples from Lebanon, oranges from Judaea, apples that must have come all the way from somewhere in Gaul. The only thing wrong that I could see was that Rachel herself stayed in her rooms, so I didn’t have a chance to try to put myself in a better light with her.

  She had left instructions for my comfort, though. Basilius clapped his hands and another servant appeared, bearing stylus and tablets in case I should decide to work. I was surprised to see that both Basilius and the other one were Africs; they don’t usually get into political trouble, or trouble with the aediles of any kind, so not many of them are slaves.