“Makes sense, sir.”
“Good. Now, act like you’re strenuously objecting, so I can overrule you.”
“Damn it, sir!” Olson shouted. “It’s a damn fool idea, letting this primitive fuckhead onto our ship! How was that!”
“Stick to slave-driving, Olson,” Jason snapped. “You’re not going to win any awards with acting like that.” He turned to Aziz. “Vero, post laborem, tu intrabis. Post laborem.” He gestured to the piles of stuff, then to the carts, and then to the direction of Damascus. “Post omnia.”
“Postea,” said Aziz, nodding.
Jason held out his hand, and the two shook hands. “God,” he said to Olson with a weak smile, “I hope we’re agreeing on the same thing.”
*****
It took nearly two hours to get the carts unloaded, with Jason, Olson and Creed pitching in. Other crew members and colonists continued to carry goods to Freedom while Creed and the other two sentries kept watch. They had seen no sign of bandits since the three were waylaid, but they were undoubtedly being watched. Fortunately, the gold and silver had already been transferred to the warehouse, which was under constant guard.
The carts were loaded with copper wire, various hunks of steel (mostly pieces of disassembled machinery), and piles of spare clothing, and then the caravan started back to Damascus, with Aziz reluctantly leading the way. The three spacemen accompanied him.
It was past noon by the time the third shipment was unloaded, and the animals and humans were exhausted. Resisting the urge to take a shower and a nap aboard Freedom, Jason returned again with Creed and Olson to Aziz’s house, where they spent the afternoon trying to sleep on mats in the stifling heat. Jason was anxious to continue with moving the cargo, but the animals needed to be rested and watered, and working in hot desert sun in the middle of the afternoon was a recipe for heat stroke. So he lay on his mat between Olson and Creed, staring at the cracked stucco of the ceiling, blinking away sweat while Aziz and Istir snored a few steps away. He had just dozed off when Aziz roused him. “Yeh-son. Oportet nos laborare.”
Groaning, Jason got to his feet. They ate a dish of lukewarm couscous together and then Azis and the three spacemen made their way back to the warehouse. Aziz aroused the slaves and drivers, who had been napping on the cool floor of the warehouse, and work commenced. The warehouse was now half-empty; one corner was piled high with copper wire, scraps of steel and synthetic fiber clothing. There was a tense moment when a Roman officer leading a group of stationarii stopped Aziz in the street to inquire about the unusual amount of goods being moved out of the warehouse, but he was distracted by a local baker (who had been handsomely bribed by Aziz) claiming to have accidentally baked far more bread than he could sell. The officer gave Aziz a stern warning not to block the street, and then his men spent an hour filling themselves with freshly baked bread before staggering away down the street, moaning contentedly and patting their bellies.
It was almost sundown by the time the carts were once again loaded, and Jason breathed a sigh of relief as the caravan exited the city to head out across the desert. They met neither bandits nor Roman soldiers on the way to the staging area, and they unloaded the cargo without incident. Freedom was now visible only as a dark outline against the near-black desert sky, and the natives—with the exception of Aziz—seemed to have largely lost interest in it. Aziz kept stopping to glance over at the ship, as if to confirm it was still there. “Post labores,” Jason would remind him, and Aziz sighed and went back to work.
They returned to the warehouse some time in the middle of the night, Jason and the other two spacemen popping stimulant pills to keep going. After the last of the goods was loaded into the carts, a few of them remained empty. Aziz once again led the caravan outside of town, this time taking a different route. They stopped at Uncle Ibrahim’s estate to load the empty carts with cages full of young chickens, as well as crates containing dozens of kittens and puppies: Ibrahim’s young grandchildren had spent several days scouring the city for stray animals. There was a hive of honeybees in one crate, and another crate—which seemed to be packed full of soil—was said to contain earthworms. The spacemen weren’t sure how much Ibrahim understood of their mission, but he seemed to think earthworms would be helpful. The caravan set out across the desert once more, with dozens of sheep, goats, and semi-tame dogs tailing it.
Ibrahim asked Aziz a question in Aramaic as they were leaving, to which Aziz responded with a chuckle. Jason raised an eyebrow at Aziz, who explained, “Qui quaerit, si nomen tuum non est certus sum Noach.”
Jason smiled. “Ego non sum Noach. Ego sum Jason, sicut nauta Argonis.”
Aziz’s eyes lit up, as if realizing the connection for the first time. “Yeh-son!” he exclaimed. “Not Yeh-son. Yeh-son!”
Jason nodded. Aziz seemed to think he was saying two different names, but they sounded identical to Jason.
“Cupidis terga aurea?” said Aziz. When Jason shrugged, Aziz pointed to a large sheep behind them.
“Yes, it’s a very nice sheep,” Jason said. “I’m not sure it’s going to contribute much to our long-term survival, though.” The big sheep would take up too much space relative to its value and would most likely have to be killed for food within a few weeks.
Aziz shook his head. He went to the sheep and ran his hand along its coat. “Vellus. Aurum.”
“Oh,” said Jason, suddenly getting the joke. “Yes, I’m looking for the golden fleece.”
Aziz said something to Ibrahim, who shrugged. “Fabulam nescit,” Aziz explained.
“It’s okay,” Jason said. “Most people in the twenty-third century don’t know the story either. Can we get going? Nunc nos abimus?”
“Bene, bene,” said Aziz. He bade goodbye to his uncle and they set off again across the desert.
The animals slowed their travel even further, and Olson suggested they might be better off without the sheep, which walked slowly and tended to wander off the road.
“You can’t, sir!” Creed exclaimed, coming up behind them, with something large and woolly hanging over his shoulders.
Jason did a double-take at the young man. “Creed, is that a lamb on your shoulders?”
“Yes, sir,” said Creed. “The dogs kept nipping at her, and she looked like she was about to bolt.”
“How much does that thing weigh?” Olson asked.
“Not that much,” Creed said. “She’s mostly fleece. Feel it.” He scratched the lamb under her chin, and she let out a contented baa.
“Get away from me,” Olson said. “That thing smells like damp wool.”
“Are you really going to carry that lamb all the way to the staging area?” Jason asked.
“Is that all right, sir? Her name is Genny. It’s short for Geneva.”
Jason shrugged. “It’s your back.” With his scruffy beard, Creed looked like an old paining he had seen of Jesus carrying a lamb on his shoulders.
“I guess we’re not ditching the sheep,” said Olson.
“Doesn’t look like it,” said Jason. “You’re a natural shepherd, Creed.”
“Do you think so, sir? We didn’t have many animals on Clovis, where I grew up. I always thought it would be nice to have animals around. I could help care for them aboard Freedom.”
Jason suppressed a laugh. Creed was so serious most of the time that sometimes Jason forgot how young he was. Around the animals, he was just like a little kid. “We’ll see, Creed.”
*****
It was mid-morning when they finally reached the staging area. The crew and colonists had been working all night, and most of the goods had already been loaded onto the ship. Rather than have the animals carry the last load directly onto the ship as they had planned, Jason decided to continue with the staging process. The cargo would have to be stowed by hand anyway, and some of the holds were getting a little crowded for a pair of oxen drawing a cart to maneuver in. Additionally, with the sheep, goats, dogs, cats and chickens, the area near the holds was already begi
nning to sound and smell like a zoo. Aziz seemed disappointed; he’d hoped to catch a look at the inside of the ship while they were loading the cargo. “Post laborem,” Jason reminded him again.
By noon, all the cargo had been unloaded from the carts, and Aziz gave the exhausted drivers (who had been helping move cargo along with the slaves) permission to take the equally exhausted animals back to the city. Nineteen of the slaves remained to help carry the cargo onto Freedom; one man had succumbed to heat stroke and died. His body was loaded onto one of the carts to be brought back to the city for burial.
Aziz seemed mildly disappointed with the ship’s holds. Yes, the lights were remarkable and the air conditioning was amazing, but surely there was more to the wondrous ship than this?
“What do you think, Schwartz?” Jason asked the weapons officer, who was coordinating the stowing of some crates.
“I don’t see the harm in it, sir,” said Schwartz. “The man kept his word and did a hell of a job getting all this stuff on such short notice.” Aziz looked from Schwartz to Jason, as if he’d understood the gist of what she’d said.
“All right,” Jason said. “Give him a quick tour of levels four and five. Don’t let him out of your sight, and don’t let him touch anything. Keep explanations to a minimum.”
“I know about three hundred words of Latin, sir. If he picks up any twenty-third century ideas, it’s not going to be from me.”
*****
Mika Schwartz returned with Aziz just as the slaves were depositing the last of the cargo into the holds, to be stowed by a crew member or colonist.
“Bene reddere eos,” said Jason to Aziz, motioning toward the exhausted men. He couldn’t do anything about slavery in the second century, but he could at least make sure that Aziz compensated the men fairly.
“Bene,” said Aziz distractedly. He was clearly still trying to process all the wonders he had seen on the ship. “Iam amplius dies tres quam mercedem dedit.”
“Bene,” replied Jason. “Gratias tibi.”
Aziz nodded. “Te gratissimum.”
The slaves, having completed their work, left the ship and began to trudge back toward the city. Their awe of the spaceship had given way to the need to get back to the city before the peak of the afternoon heat.
“Vos quoque consurgite,” said Jason, pointing to the departing slaves.
“Animalia!” exclaimed Aziz. “Animalia non video!”
“What’s he saying?” Schwartz asked.
“He’s stalling,” Jason said. “I think he wants to see where we’re keeping the animals.”
“No harm in it,” said Schwartz. “As long as he doesn’t mind risking heat stroke on the way back. It’s going to be damned hot in a couple of hours.”
“Bandits are a bigger problem,” Jason said. He turned to Aziz. “Periculosum iter facire solum.”
Aziz brushed off the warning. “Tardi sunt. Consequar.”
Jason shook his head. “Nihil,” he said. “We’ve kept our bargain. It’s time for you to go. Tempus abire tibi.”
“Quid est?” Aziz gasped in awe. A few paces away, Olson was examining a stack of crates and tapping numbers into a handheld calculator.
“Damn it, Olson,” Jason grumbled. But it was too late: Aziz had darted to Olson’s side. “Quid est?” he asked again, looking over Olson’s shoulder.
“It’s all right, Captain,” Olson said. “I don’t think he’s going to figure out how to build a pocket calculator.”
“That’s not the point, Olson. If you—”
“Captain!” cried Nichols from the door to the hold. “One of the dogs has gotten loose in the hold where we’ve got the chickens! It’s a massacre, sir!”
“Hell, Nichols. Can’t you get Endo or Gutierrez to help you?”
“Endo is corralling sheep and Gutierrez is dealing with the bees, sir.”
“All right, all right. Schwartz and I are coming. Olson, get rid of our merchant friend. Now.”
“Aye, sir,” said Olson, but as Jason and Schwartz left, he was still talking to Aziz.
*****
Aziz ibn Batnaya walked across the desert ground in a daze, barely aware of the blinding sun overhead pounding him with its heat. He had seen countless wonders today, but the most astounding of all had been the last, which the man called Olson had explained to him. The device was miraculous, to be sure: the calculator was like a tiny abacus, except that it moved the beads for you. But that wasn’t the truly wondrous thing. What was making Aziz’s head spin was the way the device used figures to represent numbers. The figures themselves seemed to be arbitrary; they resembled the figures he’d seen used by Indian merchants. Like the Hindis, the spacemen used a symbol to represent the idea of nothing—in the case of the calculator, a simple empty circle, which Olson called “zero.”
But the calculator did something else with the zero, something remarkable. Olson’s explanations, in fractured Latin, were incomprehensible to Aziz, but as the strange figures danced across the little screen, inspiration struck him like a thunderbolt. The calculator, he realized, used the zero as a placeholder, to indicate multiplication by a factor of ten. 70, then, was ten times as much as 7. With such a system, you could represent any number from zero to infinity. It was so simple, so obvious, and yet entirely new in the way that every revolutionary idea was. The fortune Aziz had acquired from the spacemen would change his life, certainly, but this—this would change everything! With his newfound wealth, Aziz would start his own trading house, and he would fill it with accountants trained in the use of the zero. He had no doubt that within ten years, he would be the wealthiest man in all the Levant. The other trading houses would steal his idea eventually, but that was all right: they would all know his name. In fact, there was no reason the zero had to be called that. It could be called the Aziz! His name would be known throughout the Roman Empire and beyond!
So enraptured was Aziz by the idea of the zero and his impending fortune and fame that he did not realize how far he had fallen behind the group of slaves heading back to the city. Nor did he hear the bandits as they crept up behind him, clubs in hand. They had been watching the caravan in frustration, waiting in vain for an opportunity to attack, but there had been too many men. It didn’t matter to them that Aziz had no money or treasure on him; at this point they would kill him simply out of spite.
Aziz heard a footstep and he turned and let out a cry just as they fell upon them, but there was no one to help him. And so Aziz ibn Batnaya was killed for nothing.
Chapter Forty-four
Freedom launched just before evening of her seventh day on Earth. She would go straight up until she reached the stratosphere and then turn east, with the intention of orbiting until they found a suitable landing site in sub-Saharan Africa. There they would find colonists to continue their mission and hopefully supplement their food supply.
She had barely leveled off, though, when the strain on the reactor began to show. “We’re showing stress fractures in four of the eight reaction chambers,” said the voice of Kyra Gleeson over the bridge speakers. “I may be able to repair them, but we need to set down now. The longer we wait, the worse it’s going to get.”
“You can’t repair it in orbit?” asked Jason.
“The problem is,” said Gleeson, “we’ve got a lot of heat to vent.”
“Damn it,” muttered Jason. He’d thought they were in the clear once they reached orbit, but in space, the accumulated heat of the reactor had nowhere to go. They needed to get back into the atmosphere, and fast.
“All right. Mr. Olson, find us somewhere to land.”
“Somewhere cold, if possible,” said Gleeson. “We need to lose some heat.”
“Do you want now or do you want cold?” Olson asked irritably. “There’s nothing but desert for hundreds of klicks in any direction.”
“What about the Mediterranean?” Jason asked.
“That could work,” Gleeson said. “The water is probably pretty warm, but it will conduct he
at better than the air.”
“You want me to set down in the Mediterranean Sea?” Olson asked incredulously.
“Any reason we can’t?” asked Jason.
“We’ll have no anchor and no propulsion. We’ll just float on the surface, at the mercy of the tides. And there’s a lot of boats out there. Somebody will see us go down and they’ll sail out to investigate. Not exactly low-profile.”
“We may not have a choice,” Jason said.
“What if we flood the empty holds?” Gleeson said. “With the loss of ballast, we’ll sink like a rock. The water should be colder down at the bottom anyway.”
Olson shook his head. “So now we’re landing on the bottom of the Mediterranean?”
“Freedom’s hull is rated to withstand a hundred atmospheres,” Jason said. “How deep is the Mediterranean?”
“Looks like 5,000 meters at its deepest, sir,” said Gleeson, who had apparently anticipated the question. “That’s about five hundred atmospheres. But most of it’s more like 1,500 meters. If we land within a few klicks of shore, we should be okay.”
“How much is ‘a few’?” asked Olson.
There was a pause. Then Gleeson said, “The bathymetric map I have says it drops off pretty quickly on the eastern edge. We’ll have a bigger margin of error if we go a little farther south, near the Nile delta.”
“That’s almost two hundred klicks from our current position,” said Olson. “I can get you there, but it’s going to take a good twenty minutes.”
“I can’t guarantee we have twenty minutes,” said Gleeson. “The reactor could blow any minute.”
“How quickly can you get us down if we make a beeline for the water?” Jason asked.
“Less than ten minutes. We’re practically over the shore now; we can get there as fast as we can safely descend.”
“Your call, Gleeson,” said Jason. “We risk a reactor meltdown or we risk imploding on the sea floor.”
The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic Page 29
