Gunpowder Empire

by Harry Turtledove

  “Maybe we ought to go out to the chamber outside of town,” Amanda said.

  “We can if you want to,” Jeremy said. “I don’t think it’ll do much good, though.”

  “Why not?”

  “Because if that one were working, Dad would have come through it by now, along with technicians to fix whatever’s wrong with this one.”

  “Oh.” Amanda winced. That made more sense than she wished it did. She tried to stay optimistic. “We ought to check anyway.”

  “All right. I’ll go tomorrow,” Jeremy said.

  Amanda wished he didn’t make sense there, too, but he did. Anyone on the road was much less likely to give a large young man trouble than a young woman. That was unfortunate, which didn’t make it any less true. She said, “What could make both transposition chambers stop working at the same time?”

  “I don’t know,” her brother answered bleakly. “I’ve been chewing on that for three or four days now, and I haven’t got any sure answers.”

  Three or four days? That was a day or two longer than Amanda had been worrying. Jeremy hadn’t let on how worried he was till now. Amanda said, “What are some of the things you’ve thought of?”

  “Maybe there was an earthquake in the home timeline.” That could have been true. Quakes happened randomly across timelines. “Maybe the transposition operators are out on strike.” That was a joke; the chambers could go automatically 99.999 (and probably several more nines after that) percent of the time. Jeremy went on: “Maybe the operators are still filling out Agrippan Roman forms.” That was a joke, too—sort of.

  “What are we going to do if a chamber…doesn’t show up for a while?” Amanda asked.

  “The best we can,” her brother answered. “What else can we do?”

  “Nothing,” she said unhappily.

  “When people do come back for us, we’ll be the richest pair in Polisso,” Jeremy said.

  “That sounds good,” Amanda said. Her brother grinned at her. She knew he was trying to keep up her spirits along with his own, and liked him for it. After a second, she stuck a finger in the air—the sign she’d thought of something. “From now on, we’d better take money for everything we sell.”

  “How come?” Jeremy asked. Then he looked foolish. “Oh.”

  “Yeah,” Amanda said. “What would we do with all that grain if we couldn’t ship it back to the home timeline? It’d start coming out of our ears.”

  “Uh-huh.” Jeremy nodded. “Then when things do get straightened out again, that’ll make things more complicated, because the locals will keep wanting to buy for cash. But we can worry about that later. Right now, we’ll just do what we’ve got to do to keep going.”

  Do what we’ve got to do to keep going. That made a lot of sense to Amanda. It was simple. It was practical. And it meant she didn’t have to think about nasty possibilities. If the transposition chamber couldn’t come back for a few weeks, that was one thing. If it couldn’t come back for a few years, that was something else again. No matter how much energy the batteries stored, they’d run dry sooner or later. Then Amanda and Jeremy would be on even terms with the locals, and they’d stay that way till they got rescued.

  And if for some reason the chamber couldn’t come back at all…

  Then we’re stuck here, Amanda thought. The chill that ran through her was colder than winter at the South Pole. Polisso was a nice enough place to visit; plenty of alternates were worse. But to live here? To speak neoLatin the rest of her days and forget English? To have to forget that women were just as good as men and could do anything men could? To say goodbye to doctors and dentists and ice cream and deodorant and malls and Copernicus and the SPCA and everything she’d grown up with?

  Jeremy said something under his breath. She thought it was Robinson Crusoe. She didn’t want to ask him, for fear she was right. Why wouldn’t he be thinking along with her, though? They would be even more isolated from their homes than Robinson Crusoe ever was. At least he’d stayed in his own world.

  “We know Mom’s all right. That’s the important thing,” Jeremy said.

  “Sure.” Amanda made herself sound perky. If her brother didn’t want to think about getting stuck here, how could she blame him? She didn’t want to think about it, either.

  A literate soldier poised pen over papyrus. “Reason for leaving the city?” he asked.

  “I’m just going out for a walk,” Jeremy answered. “It’s a nice day. And I’m sick of smelling smoke and garbage in here.”

  “Reason for leaving the city: constitutional.” The guard at the western gate wrote that down, then laughed. Jeremy realized the fellow wasn’t much older than he was himself. When the local smiled, he looked like a kid. He said, “The city stink does get to you, doesn’t it? But when you get out of it for a while, it’s even worse when you come back.”

  “I’ve noticed that, too,” Jeremy said.

  “You’ll be back by sunset?” the soldier asked. “There’s another form if you stay out longer.”

  “By sunset,” Jeremy promised.

  “All right,” the guard said. “If you come in late, now, there’s a fine for giving false information.”

  “There would be,” Jeremy said. The guard laughed again. He thought Jeremy was kidding. Jeremy knew he wasn’t. Life in Agrippan Rome broke down into a million separate boxes. If you stepped outside any of them, or if you stepped into one where you’d said you wouldn’t go, you had to pay.

  Even the law here worked like that. For two thousand years and more, lawmakers and lawyers had tried to take life apart and look at each possible deed. If you were accused of doing something wrong, they would fit it into a pigeonhole—stealing sheep worth between twenty and forty denari, for instance. Then they would decide whether you’d done it. If they decided you had, another pigeonhole told them exactly how to punish you. To Jeremy, that kind of precise control felt like a straitjacket. The locals took it for granted.

  “Pass on,” the gate guard said, and Jeremy did.

  A hawk wheeled overhead. There were rabbits in the fields. The hawks weren’t the only ones to eat them. Sometimes the locals would hunt them with dogs and nets. Rabbit stew could be tasty. No matter what people in the home timeline said, it didn’t taste like chicken.

  Jeremy realized he hadn’t been outside Polisso since coming here. The town couldn’t have been even a kilometer square. He traveled several times that distance every day he went to high school. When you were on foot all the time, though, distance stretched dramatically.

  A few tombstones poked up through the tall grass on either side of the road. Time had blurred the carvings on them. The locals didn’t bury people inside the walls. That wasn’t because they thought dead bodies left there might spread disease; they’d never heard of germs, and had no idea how disease spread. The only pollution they worried about was the religious kind.

  As Jeremy reached the bend that put Polisso out of sight behind him, he stopped in the middle of the road. Except for the faintest ripple of the wind through the grass and a starling’s distant, metallic call, silence was absolute. That kind of quiet was something he didn’t get to know in Los Angeles. There was always a murmur of traffic noise there, of airplanes and helicopters overhead, and of the neighbors’ TVs or radios or computers or stereos. There was also the sixty-cycle hum of electricity. You didn’t constantly notice it, but it was around whenever you went indoors.

  Not here. This was just…nothing. The starling fell silent. All Jeremy could hear was the blood rushing in his ears. He hardly ever realized it was there, but it seemed very loud now.

  When he started walking again, each thump of his sandal on the paving stones might have come from a giant’s heavy boots. He tried to go on tiptoe to be quieter. It didn’t seem to do much good.

  He concentrated so hard on being quiet, he almost walked past the cave that hid the transposition chamber. That would have been great. He looked ahead. He turned around and looked behind. No one coming either way
. He left the road and went over to the mouth of the cave. He had to cast around a bit before he found the hidden trapdoor close by. Grunting with effort, he lifted it and went down the tunnel pathway that led back into the cave.

  Almost everything inside the cave seemed the same as it had when his family got here. Only one thing was missing: the transposition chamber. He hadn’t expected to find that there. It would have been nice, but he hadn’t expected it.

  He turned on the PowerBook sitting on a table in a niche farther back in the cave. The computer came to life right away. He sent a message to the Crosstime Traffic electronic monitor in the home timeline that checked this machine’s output. He tried to send one, anyway.

  TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED. NO CONTACT WITH HOME TIMELINE.

  Jeremy said several choice things, in neoLatin and in English. Again, he wasn’t really surprised, but he was disappointed. Whatever had gone wrong had gone wrong here as well as at the chamber inside Polisso. He’d feared that was true. As he’d told Amanda, Dad—or somebody—would have come out of a chamber here and fixed the problem with the one under the house if it weren’t.

  After running out of curses, Jeremy said one thing more: “Well, I tried.” Now he and Amanda knew help wasn’t right around the corner. They’d already been pretty sure of that. Finding out they were right was news they needed, not news they wanted. For the time being—however long the time being turned out to be—they were on their own.

  He thought about growing old and dying in Polisso. Then he thought about not growing old but dying in Polisso. There was a lot more wear and tear here than back in Los Angeles. There were a lot fewer ways to fix anything that went wrong, too.

  Filled with such gloomy thoughts, he went to the monitors to make sure he could safely leave. He got a surprise then, and not a pleasant one. An army was coming up the highway toward Polisso.

  It was a Roman army. The standard-bearers carried gilded eagles above the letters SPQR. Those stood for Senatus populusque Romanus: “the Senate and people of Rome” in classical Latin. The Senate, these days, was a powerless rich men’s club. The people had no voice in politics, and hadn’t for two thousand years. The slogan lived on.

  Some cavalrymen were heavily armored lancers. Others were archers, with quivers full of arrows on their backs. The big, clumsy matchlock pistols they had here weren’t practical for horsemen. Behind the cavalry squadrons marched troop after troop of foot soldiers. Some men carried tall pikes. Others shouldered matchlock muskets. They laughed and joked and sang as they tramped along.

  Their being here said they were liable to see action before long. The government wouldn’t reinforce Polisso if it didn’t think trouble likely. That kind of trouble could come from only one place: Lietuva.

  Jeremy remembered the gate guard who’d asked if he and his family were Lietuvan spies. The soldier had been kidding, but he’d been kidding on the square. Were some of the Lietuvan traders in town real spies? Jeremy would have been surprised if someone in Polisso weren’t looking into that right now. He wouldn’t have wanted to be a Lietuvan trader here. No one in this world had ever heard of laws against illegal search and seizure.

  The army’s baggage train followed the foot soldiers. Cannon rattled along on wheeled carriages. Wagons carried food and gunpowder and lead for bullets and stone or iron cannonballs. Other wagons held surgeons and their supplies, clerks to keep track of pay records and such, and farriers and blacksmiths and veterinarians to care for the horses.

  Those cannon made Jeremy especially thoughtful. Polisso already had a lot of artillery. The central government wouldn’t move more in unless it really worried about an attack.

  Normally, Jeremy and his family wouldn’t have had to fear a war. If it got bad, they could hop into a transposition chamber and leave it behind. But, at least for now, he and Amanda were stuck here. That made him take things more seriously than he would have otherwise.

  He was also stuck here—in this cave—till the army marched past and went into Polisso. He couldn’t come out while soldiers might spot him. They would wonder what he’d been doing there. Spying on them? The way things were, that would have to occur to them. They would ask questions. They wouldn’t be polite about it—or gentle, either.

  Up till then, he’d never worried about how long an army took to pass any particular place. While he was waiting, it seemed like forever. In fact, it was several hours. He kept looking down at his wrist to find out just how long. That would have worked better if he’d worn a wristwatch. In Agrippan Rome, he couldn’t. Even the big mechanical pocket watches Crosstime Traffic traders sold here were way ahead of the state of the art.

  At last, the coast was clear. Jeremy scooted out of the cave and made it to the road before anybody coming from Polisso spotted him. He sauntered toward the city as if he had not a care in the world. Pretending to be carefree took more acting than anything else he’d done since coming to this alternate.

  Pretending to be carefree also proved the wrong role. Travelers in Polisso hadn’t been allowed to leave while the army was going in. A gray-haired merchant leading a train of mules was the first man who came up to Jeremy. The merchant stared at him and said, “Boy, don’t you know there’s a gods-cursed army just ahead of you?”

  Jeremy couldn’t very well claim he didn’t know. The horses and oxen of the cavalry and baggage train had left unmistakable hints an army was on the move. So he smiled and shrugged and nodded.

  The merchant’s eyes got bigger yet. “Well, then, don’t you know you’re an idiot?”

  If he’d smiled and shrugged and nodded again, the older man would have been sure he was one. Instead, he asked, “What are you talking about?”

  “What am I talking about? What am I talking about?” The merchant seemed convinced he was an idiot anyway. “The gods must watch over fools like you, even if you are a big, strong fool. Don’t you think those soldiers would have grabbed you and put you in a helmet if they’d spotted you?”

  “Gurk,” Jeremy said. The man with the mule train seemed to think that was the first sensible thing to come out of his mouth. He got his mules going again and left Jeremy standing in the middle of the road. After a couple of minutes, Jeremy walked on to Polisso.

  Other travelers coming out of the city sent him strange looks. They too must have wondered what he was doing ambling along in the army’s wake. None of them asked him any questions, though. They just went on about their own business.

  When he got back to Polisso, the gate guard who’d let him out of the city checked him back in. He too said, “You’re lucky the soldiers didn’t see you.” After a moment, he took off his helmet and scratched his head. “How come they didn’t?”

  “I’d gone off the road when they came. I was trying to knock over rabbits with rocks,” Jeremy answered. He spread his hands. “No luck.”

  “I wouldn’t think so.” The gate guard laughed at the idea. “You’d need a cursed lot of it to hit one.” Then he laughed again. “And when you saw the soldiers, I’ll bet you bloody well made sure they didn’t see you.”

  “Well—yes.” Jeremy had been inside the cave. Of course they hadn’t seen him. But he could agree without actually lying. The guard clapped him on the back and waved him into Polisso. He didn’t have good news for Amanda: no sign of the transposition chamber and no contact with the home timeline. But he was happy just the same. The good news was, he would be able to tell her the bad news in person. He hadn’t been pulled into the army.

  What would happen if there really was a war? He did his best not to think about that.

  In the Declaration of Independence, Thomas Jefferson complained that the King of England quartered his soldiers on the American colonists. Amanda remembered that from the U.S. History class she’d taken two years before. It hadn’t meant anything to her then except one more fact she had to know for a test. People in the United States hadn’t had soldiers quartered on them for a long, long time.

  But she wasn’t in the United State
s any more. Some of her neighbors had soldiers living in their houses and eating their food. She and Jeremy were lucky it hadn’t happened to them.

  “I wonder why they didn’t try to give us any soldiers,” she said at breakfast, two days after the army came to Polisso.

  “They like what we sell, and they don’t want to make us so angry we’ll go away and won’t come back,” Jeremy answered, spooning up barley mush. “That’s the only thing I can think of.”

  “What do we do if they say, ‘Here, take these four’?” Amanda asked.

  “I’m going to give the city prefect a couple of thousand denari,” Jeremy said. “Why not? Silver’s not much more than play money for us. I’ll tell him to use it to buy food for the reinforcements. We’ll do that instead of letting them in here.”

  “Can you be smooth enough to get away with it?” Amanda asked.

  Her older brother shrugged. “I can—because I have to. Dad would probably do a better job of it, but he’s not here. That leaves me.”

  “I’m not a potted plant, you know,” Amanda said.

  “No, but you’re a girl,” Jeremy answered. “As far as the locals are concerned, you might as well be a potted plant.”

  That stung, especially because it was true. Amanda’s chin went up. “So what?”

  Jeremy held up a hand. “Look, I know it’s no big thing. Everybody you’ve skinned on a deal here knows it’s no big thing. But if you go try to talk to the city prefect, what will he and his flunkies see? A girl. Guys like that are like principals—they can’t see past the end of their noses.”

  The principal at Canoga Park High was a woman. That didn’t spoil Jeremy’s point: Ms. Williams definitely couldn’t see past the end of her nose. Amanda sighed. “All right,” she said. “No, not all right, because it isn’t. But I can see why you’ve got to be the one who goes. Macho!” She spat that out as if it were the dirtiest word ever invented. Right then, she felt it was.