“But even if that explosion explains one thing, doesn’t it also leave a lot of loose ends? Thousands of people must have seen that blast. Wouldn’t something like that make it into the historic record?”
“I don’t know. Not many people in the second century could write, and whatever written accounts there might have been probably wouldn’t have survived. Also….”
“What?”
“I was thinking about what you told me earlier, about seeing Simon killing his uncle, just like in the story you heard.”
“It’s in the Talmud,” Schwartz said. “Somebody observed the event and wrote it down.”
“Right, but they wrote it down because of how it fit into the bigger story of Simon bar Kochba’s rebellion against the Roman Empire. Maybe that’s what history is. Just a bunch of stories. Sometimes events get twisted to fit the story. And events that don’t fit into the story get left out altogether.”
“A Roman legion getting miraculously wiped out by fire from heaven doesn’t fit into the story?”
“Very few people even knew the legion was here. And they arrived after Jewish defeat is already certain. Why would God strike down a single legion but let the others crush Judaea?”
“What about radiation?”
“Relatively little radiation from a proton reactor explosion, and it was over water, so the currents would have carried it away. There would be no evidence of the explosion after a few years. Hell, Hiroshima was rebuilt within a few decades.”
“So an entire Roman legion just disappears, and somehow nobody wrote down what happened to them.”
“Exactly,” said Olson. “Well, not the whole legion.” He looked again at Gaius, who had regained some of his color and began fighting anew against his restraints.
“Do you think he has any idea what happened to the rest of his legion?” Schwartz asked.
“I doubt it,” Olson said. “You couldn’t see much on the screen but a big cloud over the beach.”
“Probably best not to tell him then.”
“Agreed.”
Olson undid his own restraints and got to his feet. Between Freedom’s acceleration and Earth’s pull on them, they were back to normal gravity. He went to Gaius, who glared at him with rage and awe.
“I let you go,” the one called Olson said. “You no fight, or Schwartz….” He indicated the woman standing behind him, who held one of those marvelous steel knives the foreigners used. Olson dragged his thumb across his neck.
Gaius nodded. “I will not resist,” he said. For now. They had taken his weapons and armor and stowed them somewhere.
Olson undid the straps on his arms and legs and then motioned for him to stand. Gaius did so. Olson towered over Gaius. All the foreigners he’d seen were tall, and Olson was built like a bear besides. No, Gaius would not resist until he understood more and the foreigners had relaxed their guard.
Olson pointed to one of the screens, which showed a swirl of blue and white that slowly receded from view. Each screen, Gaius had come to understand, was like a window that somehow held a viewpoint from somewhere else on the ship, either inside it or out. He assumed this was done with a complex system of mirrors, but it was strange that he had seen no evidence of such a system on his way into this room.
“World,” said Olson.
Gaius had been watching this screen in particular; unless it lied, the vessel he was on was now somewhere far above the Earth. This must be what it’s like for the gods looking down on people, he thought. “We are going to heaven?”
“Yes,” said Olson. “We fly through the sky.”
Gaius nodded. The Latin words for heaven and sky were almost the same, but clearly Olson meant to say they were traveling through the sky to somewhere else, not flying to heaven. “Where do you come from?”
“Another star. Far away.”
“Where are we going?”
“I do not know,” said Olson. “Somewhere very, very far away.” Olson pointed to another screen, which looked in on the garden room that Gaius had barely glimpsed before fainting from the poison the foreigners had pumped into the air. “Your men,” Olson said. The soldiers lay scattered on the ground near the door; the Jewish women and a few of the foreigners lay closer to the fountain near the center of the room.
“Dead?” Gaius asked.
Olson shook his head. “Sleep. Come.”
Olson led Gaius to the door of the wondrous room with all the screens, and the woman, Schwartz, followed, still brandishing her knife. The door slid open, seemingly of its own accord, and Gaius suppressed his amazement. Clearly the foreigners were used to such marvels, and he had no desire to play the role of the awed native. He’d led five thousand men through the heaths and hills of England, provoking fear and awe in the uncivilized tribesmen of that land, wresting order from chaos. He was not about to submit to subjugation at the hands of these people merely because they possessed tools and machines of sorts he had not seen.
He was led down a corridor to a door, which slid open to reveal a small room. They went inside, and Gaius felt a strange sensation in his gut as the room began to fall. Panic subsided as he realized the two foreigners remained placid—they had been expecting this. The room, he realized, was a sort of car used to travel vertically through the sky ship. He had almost acclimated to the falling sensation when the room slowed to a halt. The door opened, revealing the garden. Olson stepped out, and Gaius followed. Schwartz walked just behind him.
Not waiting for permission, Gaius ran across the grass toward his fallen men. He stopped before the closest one and knelt next to him, listening for his breath. After a few seconds, he was satisfied the man was still alive. He glanced back at Olson, who was walking toward him. Gaius saw worry in the big man’s face, and Gaius realized Olson hadn’t been completely certain the poison wasn’t fatal.
Gaius went to another man, and then a third, and a fourth. All were alive, although sleeping so deeply that Gaius couldn’t wake them either by shouting or shaking them. He stood and turned to Olson.
“They will recover from the poison?”
“Not poison,” said Olson. “We… take air.” He gestured toward the women. “All sleep.”
“Why?” Gaius asked.
“We leave. Stop fight,” said Olson, clearly struggling with the limits of his Latin.
“Why?” Gaius asked again. He gestured widely around him. “Why do you do all this?”
Olson sighed deeply. “Our people die. Bad enemy. War. We run away. We need more people. Women. Men. We need you.”
Gaius looked around him at the people dozing in the grass. There were, he realized now, almost exactly the same number of men and women. Of these, very few were dressed as the foreigners were. The mission of the foreigners suddenly became clear to him. They had come to Earth because their own people were too few to ensure their survival. But Olson spoke of an enemy. Did the foreigners really expect to raise a new generation of warriors by breeding Roman soldiers with Jewish whores? What reason would the offspring of this unholy union have for continuing this war? More likely, they would rebel against the foreigners themselves. Surely the foreigners had to know that.
“Who is your enemy?” he asked.
Olson seemed to be expecting the question. “We show you,” he said.
*****
An hour later, Gaius understood. The woman named Schwartz had shown him pictures of the beings they called Cho-ta’an, and of the destruction those demons had caused. She sat across a table from him in a small room as he held a portable screen showing battles fought with awesome weapons across strange landscapes, and battles fought in the sky between ships like Freedom. Some of the pictures moved, as if these scenes were unfolding in the present, but he understood from Schwartz’s comments that the screens could depict events that occurred days or even years in the past. Many of the pictures seemed to show other worlds, but some, Schwartz told him, were of Earth. It was no Earth that he recognized, though. She showed him cities full of buildings g
rander than anything in Rome, and then those same cities after the Cho-ta’an had attacked. If such cities existed, then the Roman Empire itself was, at best, a second-rate power. How was it possible that he, Gaius Aemelius Numisius, who had seen more of the world than almost anyone, knew nothing of such cities, nor of the war that had destroyed them? Was the great Roman Empire beneath the notice of the Cho-ta’an? The idea was mind-boggling. Schwartz seemed to recognize his shock and confusion, but her explanations made no sense to him. She spoke of time as if it were a stream, and he recalled the writings of Heraclitus, who taught that the world was in a state of constant flux.
At last, as he watched the destruction of some unknown world at the hands of the Cho-ta’an, he understood: just as these moving pictures showed something that occurred years ago as if it were happening now, another set of pictures might show events on Earth in Gaius’s time. To the soldiers on the screen, it must feel as though the battle is happening now, but in fact it ended many years ago. Perhaps the same is true of the war with the Jews. It seems to me as if it is happening now, but in reality perhaps it ended some time ago. What a strange idea. It reminded him of Plato’s cave, in which all that we experienced was just shadows on a wall. Had he lived his entire life as figure on these screens, never suspecting there was another world outside? Maybe Plato had been taken aboard a sky ship too. If so, he had been allowed to return to write about it.
“We will go back to Earth?” he asked.
“No,” said Schwartz. “We go to another world, very far away.”
We shall see about that, thought Gaius. He’d been plotting since they’d removed his restraints to find a way to make them turn the ship around. Would Rome still be there when they arrived? He would find out.
“The war is over?”
“The war against the Jews, yes.”
“What of the Empire?”
“The Roman Empire falls.”
“The Cho-ta’an?”
“No. Other humans. Barbarians.”
“When?”
Schwartz frowned the way she did when her knowledge of Latin wasn’t adequate to explain a concept. She tapped a button to clear the screen, and then dragged her finger across it, producing a line. Below the line, she wrote TEMPUS. Then she made several perpendicular ticks along the line, labeling them Julius Caesar, Rebellionis de Judaea and Cadunt de Roma. She looked to Gaius, who nodded. Then, far to the right, she made another tick and labeled it Cho-ta’an Impetum. She looked at him again, but this time he shook his head. “No,” he said. “What of this?” He dragged his finger along the section between Rebellionis de Judaea and Cho-ta’an Impetum. If the line was meant to show the passage of time, and the finger’s width between Julius Caesar and the Jewish revolt was meant to signify the hundred or so years between Caesar’s death and the second Jewish revolt, then the duration between the Jewish revolt and the war with the Cho-ta’an was something like two thousand years! Unless Gaius had slept for twenty centuries in the ship’s garden, that was impossible.
And yet… if he accepted that the people on the screen lived in the past even though they felt as if they were in the present, then they could just as well be two thousand years in the past as two years. Applying this principle to himself, why could his own experiences not be two thousand years in the past? Still his mind rebelled against the idea. If his life before coming aboard Freedom was in the distant past, then what happened to the years in between? For that matter, how could he know that he was currently in the present and not in another layer of the past? Were other people, in the distant future, watching him through this very screen? The thought enraged him, and he hurled the screen against the wall behind Schwartz. It clattered to the floor.
Schwartz got calmly to her feet and turned to pick up the device. Gaius lunged over the table toward her—and was hurled headfirst into the wall. He managed to throw his hands up before he struck, softening the impact. He crumpled to the floor, dazed. By the feet of Mercury, she was quick! She’d tricked him, feigning distraction to get him to attack, and then used his own momentum against him.
Schwartz bent over, picked up the device, and stepped back. “The door is locked,” she said. “I cannot open it. Olson will not unlock it for you. He will take the air. You understand?”
“I understand,” he grunted. She wanted him to know that even if he could get his hands on her, taking her hostage would do him no good. Olson wouldn’t open the door, and they would just suck the air out of the room as they’d done before.
“Good,” she said. She motioned for him to take his seat.
His dignity bruised but otherwise unhurt, Gaius got to his feet. He walked to the chair and sat down.
Schwartz put the screen in front of him again. The display hadn’t changed. She drew another line, just to the right of Cho-ta’an Impetum and labeled it Tempore Anomalia. Then she drew a line that curved from this point back to Rebellionis de Judaea. She labeled this line Freedom. This was, he had learned, how the foreigners spelled the name of their ship. She sat back, waiting for him to react.
He stared at the screen, unable to make sense of it. Was Schwartz trying to tell him that Freedom had traveled from the future to the past, like a boat rowing upstream? It seemed absurd, but perhaps that was how Schwartz had known he was going to attack, and how she had countered him so quickly. She knew his future!
No, he couldn’t accept it. Better to think that he had slept for two thousand years. As hard as that was to believe, at least it didn’t require time to flow backwards. But if he’d somehow lost two thousand years, then what of his legion back on Earth? Were they all dead? Had Rome really fallen? That, too, seemed preposterous.
He put the matter out of his mind. He needed to deal with reality, not philosophical ideas. The reality was that he was trapped aboard a metal ship that flew through the sky, along with some two hundred of his men—men who were just as confused as he was.
“I must see my men,” he said.
Schwartz nodded, taking the screen away. “Very soon,” she said.
Chapter Sixty
“How did it go?” Olson asked as Schwartz entered the bridge.
“You weren’t watching?”
“I knew you had it under control.”
“That’s reassuring. Gaius is, well, disoriented. He’s pragmatic at heart, though. I think he’ll come around.”
“Meaning what, exactly?”
“Meaning he’ll realize he’s stuck here, so he might as well make the best of it.”
“You don’t think he’ll organize a mutiny or a hostage situation?”
“Oh, I’d count on it. When he realizes we’re looking at a voyage of several hundred years, he’ll do whatever he can to get us to turn around. And he’ll have every single colonist on his side.”
“You think so?”
“Definitely. You and I know that history can’t be changed. They don’t. Even the refugees are going to start getting pretty homesick in a few weeks. ‘And all the children of Israel complained against Moses and Aaron, and the whole congregation said to them, ‘If only we had died in the land of Egypt!’’”
“The grass is always greener. I always thought I wanted to helm a starship, and now I’d give anything to have the Captain back. He always knew what to do.”
“He was a man of action, I’ll give him that much.”
“You think this was a mistake? Bringing all these people aboard Freedom?”
“I don’t know. I suppose it could still turn out okay.”
“What exactly did you mean when you said Gaius would come around?”
“I just meant he’s not going to do anything crazy. He won’t try another ill-thought-out attack. He’ll take charge of the colonists and institute some kind of law and order. But once he’s got them under his thumb, we need to watch out.”
“What can we do about it? The crew is outnumbered fifty to one, and we’re out of ammo. How are we going to keep control over four hundred colonists?”
�
��We aren’t,” Schwartz said.
“I’m going to need you to elaborate.”
“Suppose Gaius threatens to kill all the refugees unless we turn around. What do we do?”
“Nothing?”
“Exactly. No response. No negotiation.”
“Then he starts killing hostages. We still do nothing?”
“Nothing at all. He’ll get the idea after a few hostages. We’re not going to turn around. We’re not going to negotiate. We’re not going to give him anything at all. Sure, he could keep killing hostages, but why? It’s not going to get him anywhere with us, and it’s not going to win him any friends among the refugees. Let Gaius do what he wants. If he really goes nuts and starts murdering colonists left and right, we can suck out their air again and drag him out of there, but I don’t think it will be necessary.”
“You’re talking about holding those people prisoner.”
“They are prisoners, Olson. So are we. What I’m talking about is maintaining an absolute firewall between colonists and crew, so there’s no chance of the colonists compromising our mission. The doors separating the crew areas from the colonists are six-centimeter-thick carbon steel. You know how long it would take to break through those with nothing but hand tools? We could get halfway across the galaxy before they get to us.”
“They’ve got the materials to make bombs.”
“To blast through six centimeters of steel? They’re not going to be able to do that with a barrel of black powder. Besides, if they ever do develop the means to get through those doors, we just suck their oxygen out and go in with space suits to confiscate any contraband and throw the ringleaders in solitary for a few weeks.”
“You sound like you’ve thought this through.”
“I worked a stint as prison guard on Tarchon before I joined the IDL.”
“Is it feasible to keep the two populations completely segregated? We need to get Gleeson in on this conversation. Gleeson, are you there?”
Kyra Gleeson’s voice came over the comm a moment later: “I’m here, Captain.”
The Legacy of the Iron Dragon: An Alternate History Viking Epic Page 39
