Debt of Ages

by Steve White

  “Wait a minute!” Sarnac sifted through his new-old memories. “Tylar, didn’t you tell me that Sidonius died at age forty-eight? Wouldn’t that come to 480 or so?”

  “Ah, but that was in our reality, in which he endured appalling hardships withstanding several Visigothic sieges of Clermont, only to be sold out by the Western Empire for which he had held the Auvergne—one of that empires final sellouts before its richly merited demise. And afterwards he was imprisoned for years by the Visigoths. It’s scarcely surprising that he lost his will to live. In the alternate timeline there were no sieges, no imprisonment, and no heartbreak at witnessing the death of the empire in which he’d believed.”

  “I’m glad somebody had a better life in my history,” Andreas said bitterly. Then he remembered himself and gave the former High King an apprehensive look. But Artorius took it with his usual affability.

  “Actually, quite a lot of people did. My counterpart forestalled the Dark Ages, which was certainly a good thing in the short run. Of course, after witnessing enough history one grows skeptical of good things in the short run.”

  “Didn’t somebody once say, ‘In the long run, we’re all dead’?” Sarnac couldn’t resist putting in.

  “John Maynard Keynes,” Artorius replied unhesitatingly. “Author of an economic theory which infallibly bankrupted any nation that embraced it and led directly to the fall of the West little more than a century after his time. You’ll forgive me if I view his aphorisms with a degree of irreverence. But, to continue, the alternate Sidonius was only better off until 491, when he was killed by an aristocratic clique with its own ideas about who should succeed to the purple. Killing the Pope hadn’t been part of their plans; he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with his brother-in-law the heir.”

  “Brother-in-law?”

  “Yes. You’ll recall that I was childless,” Artorius continued evenly. “So to secure the succession, the Restorer revived the custom of the Antonine emperors and adopted an heir. He chose Ecdicius, one of his top cavalry generals.”

  “Anybody I know?” Sarnac asked, reviewing his memories.

  “No. I never met him, myself, although I knew of him as the brother of Sidonius’ wife Papianilla. They were the children of Avitus, who had been Augustus of the West from 455 to 457. After my… departure, he formed a small private unit of cavalry, financed by the income of his own estates, to resist the Visigoths. His aggressive, hit-and-run operations were the reason it took King Euric five years to conquer the Auvergne. On one occasion, he lifted one of the sieges of Clermont with only eighteen men!”

  “Sounds like quite a guy,” Sarnac remarked, summoning up from his own land’s history the image of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

  “Indeed,” Tylar nodded. “He was a swashbuckler born long before his time—a proto-Musketeer. By sheer gallantry, he held back the night for a little while. But he could not halt it. In the end, he escaped into the land of the Burgundians and entered their service. His struggle had been hopeless from the first.”

  “I like him more and more,” Sarnac said. “Blame it on my background. Where I come from, we’ve always been suckers for lost causes.”

  “Yes, his was a lost cause—in our reality. In the alternate timeline… well, imagine what the man who fought the Visigoths to a standstill for five years with no resources except his own private ones could have accomplished on the winning side, with the full support of a triumphantly resurgent empire!”

  Sarnac thought about it. Tylar observed his expression and nodded. ‘The alternate Ecdicius led his band of cavalry to join the alternate Artorius in time to help smash the Visigoths before the walls of Bourges.”

  “All right!” Sarnac exclaimed, carried away. Tiraena rolled her eyes heavenward.

  “In the subsequent campaigns he became the Restorer’s right-hand man,” Tylar continued. “His military prestige plus his connections—son of an Augustus and brother-in-law of the Pope—made him the logical choice as the adopted heir. The fact that he wasn’t a Briton also helped; the Restorer needed to broaden his base of support. And then in 491, with the Restorer on his deathbed, Ecdicius was assassinated.”

  Sarnacs face fell. Tylar continued relentlessly. “This is the point at which it is possible, using minimal overt force, to effect a change in the alternate history’s course. We will save Ecdicius and Sidonius from death.”

  “Wait a minute, Tylar,” Sarnac said hesitantly. “Don’t get me wrong; from everything you’ve told me about Ecdicius, I’d like nothing better than to save his life. But how is this going to fundamentally change the course of the alternate history? I mean, if Ecdicius survives he’ll just succeed to the throne of the reunified Roman Empire you want to torpedo!”

  “Oh, my! I see I haven’t made matters altogether clear.” Tylar seemed to gather his forces. “You see, my dear fellow, we’re going to have to lay a bit of groundwork first, to assure that Ecdicius, after having been saved, will be more than willing to act as our instrument to set in motion the changes we want.”

  “Just what changes do we want?” Tiraena wanted to know.

  “Consider: in our reality, the Roman Empire split into Eastern and Western halves, and subsequently the Western part devolved further into the competing nation-states in which the scientific and industrial revolutions could occur. In the alternate history, the Restorer aborted this process by reuniting East and West. Well, we’re going to make sure the process resumes. Ecdicius is going to lead the West into secession!”

  Chapter Five

  The transtemporal vehicle traced its cold, dark orbit through regions where Sol was just another zero-magnitude star. Its remoteness, as much as the stealth technology of Tylar’s people, had concealed it from the sensors that kept watch on the borderlands of one of the Pan-Human Leagues two capital systems.

  They gazed at it in silence, standing on the immaterial force-field floor of what Sarnac had decided to think of as the observation deck of Tylar’s ship. The spherical chamber had, at the touch of the time travelers thoughts, seemed to vanish. Their eyes told them that they stood, impossibly, in empty space, silhouetted against the star-fields. But from some unidentifiable source came enough light to see each other and the mammoth construct they were approaching.

  “We decided it would be most straightforward to equip it with a time-distortion drive—not a very efficient one, but it only had to travel from Alpha Centauri to Sol,” Tylar explained. ‘Then we brought it back from the twenty-ninth century to the twenty-third when we came to fetch you.”

  “Gee,” Sarnac attempted lightness. “A temportal just for little old me!”

  “Scarcely,” Tylar said deflatingly. “We already had one at Sol at this particular time—a rather crucial time, given the discovery of a second Korvaash successor-state, though not to be compared with fifteen years ago. So we decided to use it. Can’t just go anywhen, you know!”

  “So that’s why you picked me up fifteen of my years later, and not right after our last acquaintance when I was still young and full of beans. I’d wondered about that.”

  “Also,” Tiraena spoke up from the semidarkness, “it explains why you moved this monstrosity to Sol instead of just leaving it at Alpha Centauri, which in our time is just a newly established colony that doubtless doesn’t rate a temportal.”

  “Precisely,” Tylar affirmed. “Temportals are quite expensive—even for us. Having to emplace one in 485 A.D. expressly for this operation was bad enough.”

  “485 A.D… ?” Sarnac began on an interrogatory note. But Tylar hurried on in his patented question-deflecting way.

  “We then equipped this vehicle with our power sources so it can operate with a lower probability of failure— Andreas was very lucky to survive the transition to our reality! Fortunately, we didn’t have to rebuild it to carry a larger payload, since this ship is actually smaller than the one-man craft that was to have carried Andreas to the inner system of Alpha Centauri A. Still, it’s been through a fe
w changes.

  “I can tell.” Sarnac couldn’t take his eyes off the huge artifact toward which they seemed to be magically gliding through open space. The original structure was like a colossal junk-sculpture representing pathologically overcomplex technology. But the Baroque massiveness was here and there overlaid by the jarringly contrasting additions of Tylars people, which like all their machines didn’t look like machines, having been grown in nanotechnological embryos. As Sarnac watched, one of them reconfigured, its unfamiliar metal writhing as it shape-shifted to perform the next stage of the preparations for departure.

  “I hardly recognize it.” Andreas sounded lost.

  Then they seemed to swoop around it and begin their approach, entering a kind of open latticework funnel that reminded Sarnac of the front end of a twentieth-century artists conception of a Bussard ramscoop—one of the many concepts that unanticipated discoveries had left behind in realms of the hypothetical and the irrelevant. The massiveness of that delicate-seeming framework became apparent as they settled into its enclosure, which easily held the ship that, despite the evidence of their eyes, surrounded them.

  “And now,” Tylar said briskly, “we can proceed to the temportal.”

  There was no sensation of motion. But the stars precessed around them, and ahead Sarnac could see that which he had uncomprehendingly glimpsed fifteen years earlier: a torus of space-distorting force, visible only by the wavering and twinkling of the stars beyond it. It began to grow as the transtemporal vehicle that held their ship in this clenched magnetohydrodynamic hand accelerated toward it under the reactionless drive he kept meaning to ask Tylar to explain.

  “Must be a tight fit,” he remarked, gesturing aft at the stupendous mass of the construct that bore them.

  “Not really,” Tylar assured him. “You’d be surprised at the temportals diameter.”

  In fact, the barely perceptible circle was enclosing more and more of the sky as they neared it. They were moving slowly compared to the Korvaash battlecruiser aboard which Sarnac had previously made such an approach, and he had time to brace himself for what he knew was coming.

  It was as bad as he remembered—like the disorientation that accompanied a displacement transition, only worse. The sensation of wrongness was somehow only heightened by the fact that the sky was still the familiar one of Sol, not the new one that greeted one who emerged from a displacement point into a different stellar system.

  But not quite the same sky. A before-and-after photographic comparison would have shown the slight changes wrought by eighteen centuries of random stellar motion. And as he regained his mental equilibrium his eyes swung toward Canis Major. Yes, its brightest star was even brighter than it was supposed to be… and it was red, not blue-white. What Sarnacs epoch knew as Sirius B had not yet collapsed into the white dwarf stage, bequeathing some of its mass to its companion. Far outshining the future Sirius A, it was still the red giant that the ancient astronomers had observed. And he knew that at this moment, far sunward, lay an Earth whose people still believed the sun and planets and stars revolved around it. An Earth where the Western Roman Empire had met its overdue end nine years earlier and Europe was a swirling barbaric chaos within which the future gestated—at least in this, his own familiar reality.

  As though reading his thoughts, Tylar harrumphed. ‘The next step is the transition to the point in the alternate timeline congruent to this one. Robert and Tiraena, I should warn you to expect the same phenomena we just experienced, only in intensified form.”

  “Oh, shit!” Sarnac breathed.

  “You have almost a minute to prepare yourselves,” the time traveler assured them. “It takes that long for our power sources to charge the capacitors that make up most of this vehicles mass, making possible the truly titanic power surge required.”

  “It took us days,” came Andreas’ faint voice. No one else commented. The silence stretched. Sarnac’s left hand felt the pressure of Tiraenas grip. He returned it.

  “It is time,” Tylar stated. And within Sarnacs head, Creation went mad.

  When he could think again, he found himself crouched on the immaterial floor, staring at the stars light-years beneath him. They were unchanged. And Sirius was still as ruddy as when he had last glanced at it. But there was no room for doubt that something had happened.

  ” Intensified form’ my left one,” he muttered as he got to his feet, noting with sour satisfaction that Tylar was recovering his composure with as much difficulty as the rest of them—except Andreas, who was seemingly unaffected.

  “Andreas, didn’t you feel that?”

  “Oh, I know what you just experienced. It affected me when I entered your reality. But no, this time there was nothing.”

  “You see,” Tylar explained, back in form, “Andreas is returning to the place in which he belongs. The psychic sensation of outraged reality only seems to affect someone making a transition to a timeline other than his own.”

  “So we won’t feel it on our return?” Tiraena asked.

  “No, you won’t. By the same token, you’ll find that a transposition via temportal back to your own twenty-third century—which you’ve never done in a state of consciousness—will be less unpleasant than one to an era foreign to you. And no, we don’t understand the ‘why’ of it.”

  “To hell with the ‘why’ of it,” Sarnac grunted, “as long as we’ve got some light at the end of the tunnel.” He turned to Tiraena. “What did you feel?”

  “It’s hard’ to describe.” She shook her head slowly. “Sometimes, at the moment you wake up from a deep sleep it’s as though you’re looking at yourself from the outside. You remember your name, and the face in the mirror, but for the barest instant you wonder: Who is this person?’ Well, this was like that… but for the universe.”

  The last aftershocks ceased reverberating around Sarnacs skull, and he noted that they were no longer surrounded by the vast metal basket Instead, the Brobdingnagian mass of hybrid technology that had brought them to this reality was falling away astern. The starry firmament seemed to rotate around them as their ship realigned itself. Then the bright yellow-white star that was the alternate Sol lay dead ahead.

  “Now,” Tylar announced briskly, “we can proceed to Earth.”

  There was, as always, no sense of motion. But the transtemporal vehicle seemed to recede from them with impossible rapidity, vanishing from sight before Sarnac could even try to calculate their velocity. The tiny flame of Sol began to grow perceptibly brighter.

  “We should be entering Earth orbit in a few hours,” Tylar explained. “We may as well stop wasting time by talking of the ‘alternate Earth’ and the alternate this and the alternate that. As for the alternate Artorius, I suggest we adopt Artorius’ suggestion and refer to him as ‘the Restorer.’ At any rate, we have time for—”

  “For listening to you answer a few questions,” Sarnac cut in. “For openers, why have we come to the year 485 A.D.? You’ve been saying all along that 491 is the first year when the course of this timelines history can be changed.”

  “Ah, but we want it to stay changed. And for that, it will be necessary for us to lay a bit of groundwork, as I mentioned before.”

  “Groundwork?” Tiraena queried suspiciously. “Yes, I remember you saying something about assuring that this Ecdicius would be inclined to do what you want him to do…”

  “Yes: break up the Empire by setting up a separate Western Empire. But there must be more behind the breakup than one man’s understandable annoyance at being almost assassinated. Ecdicius will merely provide the leadership for a movement with a genuine East-West incompatibility behind it.”

  “What ‘incompatibility’ is that?”

  “In our own history, what sundered the two halves of the Empire irrevocably was the schism between their two forms of Christianity. This suggests our obvious avenue of approach.”

  “Uh, hold on, Tylar,” Sarnac said hesitantly. “I’m no history buff, but I do know that the religious
wars in European history were pretty damned nasty. Is that what we’re going to be starting here?”

  “Oh, we won’t be starting it, my dear fellow. It started before the timelines branched off, at the moment the Empire took the road of intolerantly exclusive monotheism. Andreas’ history doesn’t include the Thirty Years’ War, but you can be sure that it holds comparable horrors.”

  “He’s right,” the young transtemporal explorer admitted. “Instead of wars between sovereign nations espousing different religions—Tylar told me about those—we’ve had repeated, bloody suppressions of embryonic heresies. Whole ethnic groups were exterminated because they had been ‘infected with error.’ Doctrinal unity has always been seen as a pillar of Imperial unity, and no challenge to it has ever been tolerated.”

  Tiraena shook her head. “I still have trouble imagining this kind of thing, in either version. I never heard much about it as a child—I suppose it was something my Terran ancestors weren’t proud of in their heritage. And while the history of Raehan has its share of stupidities and brutalities, the Raehaniv have never been inclined to slaughter each other over their various religions.”

  “The religious atmosphere on Raehan has always been more like that of eastern Asia,” Tylar explained. “It was once said that a Chinese gentleman was a Confucian in public and a Taoist in private. But after he died, he expected to enter a Buddhist afterlife. And he was always careful to sacrifice to Animist deities. All, be it noted, with complete sincerity. This seems odd to a Westerner—but no odder than formulations like Thou shalt have no other gods before Me’ or There is no god but Allah’ seem to a Chinese… or a Raehaniv.”