“I’ll send a slave with the money,” the banker’s wife said. Her father-in-law had once been a slave. That didn’t keep her from owning them. Amanda wondered why not. One of the harder things about living in Agrippan Rome was that there were so many questions she couldn’t ask. One of these days—one of these years—scholars would look at history and literature and law and custom here and figure out some answers to questions like those. But Amanda wanted to know now.
The trouble with finding the alternates and visiting so many of them was that there were always more questions than answers. There probably always would be. There sure were now. Too many alternates, not enough people exploring them. The last time anything this important happened in the home timeline, Columbus discovered the New World. The alternates were far, far bigger than North and South America, and they’d been known for less than a lifetime. No wonder there were still so many things to learn. The wonder was that people from the home timeline had found out as much as they had.
Then Livia Plurabella said, “I’ve heard you people don’t keep slaves. Can that be true?” She wasn’t shy about indulging her curiosity.
“Yes, it’s true,” Amanda said. That was no secret.
“Really?” The local woman’s eyes, their edges outlined with powdered antimony, went wide. “By the gods, dear, how do you ever get anything done without other people to do it for you?”
“We do it ourselves,” Amanda answered. She didn’t mention that they had gadgets here no locals could see. Aside from the wrongs of slavery—and its being illegal for people from the home timeline to have anything to do with—having the gadgets made it impossible for the traders to have slaves, too. Too many questions they would have to answer.
Amanda laughed at herself. There’d been answers she wanted to get. But there were also answers she couldn’t give.
She’d certainly puzzled Livia Plurabella. “How do you manage that?” the banker’s wife asked. “When do you sleep? When do you bathe?”
“We just do what needs doing, as best we can.” Amanda thought she could ask one of her questions now: “How do you own people who are just like you?”
“They aren’t people just like me. They’re slaves,” Livia Plurabella said, completely missing Amanda’s point. This had to be the first time anyone had ever questioned slavery in the matron’s hearing. She hesitated. She was polite, too, in her own way. Then she asked, “You’re Christian, aren’t you, dear?”
“Yes,” Amanda said. “Imperial Christian.”
“I know Christians have some…some different ideas.” Yes, Livia Plurabella was working very hard to be polite. She went on. “Do Christians have some sort of…interesting notion that slavery is bad? I never heard they—you—did.”
“No, they—uh, we—don’t,” Amanda answered. That was true for all kinds of Christians in Agrippan Rome. It had also been true for Christians in the Roman Empire of Amanda’s world. The New Testament didn’t say one thing about putting an end to slavery. People hadn’t really started opposing it till the rise of democracy in England and America and France suggested that all men should be equal under the law—and till machines started doing work instead of slaves. Even then, America had needed a war to get rid of slavery.
But Amanda had only perplexed Livia Plurabella more. “What have you got against it, then?” she asked.
“We just don’t think it’s right for anyone to be able to buy and sell someone else,” Amanda said. “And it’s always worse for women—everybody knows that. If the Lietuvans took Polisso, would you want them selling and buying you?”
Such things did happen after cities fell. Livia Plurabella turned pale. She leaned towards Amanda and set a manicured hand—a hand probably manicured by a slave—on her forearm. “Is there going to be a war?” she whispered, as if she didn’t dare say it out loud. “Is there? What have you heard?”
She’d missed the point again, or most of it. But war was no small thing, either. “I haven’t heard anything new,” Amanda said. “All I know is, everybody’s worried about it.”
Some of the matron’s color came back. “Gods be praised,” she said in a voice more like her own. “A sack is the worst thing in the world. Pray to your own funny God that you never have to find out how bad a sack can be.” She got to her feet. “I will send the slave with the money. No, you don’t need to show me out, dear. I know the way.” Off she went, the hem of her long wool tunic sweeping around her ankles.
Amanda wanted to know how she knew about sacks. She also wanted to ask her more questions about slavery now that she had the chance. But Livia Plurabella had done all the talking she intended to do. She opened the front door, then closed it behind her. Amanda sighed. The chance was gone.
Jeremy was tossing a ball back and forth in the street with a boy named Fabio Lentulo and nicknamed Barbato—the guy with the beard. Fabio was Jeremy’s age, more or less. He was a skinny little fellow, a head shorter than Jeremy. He’d been apprenticed to the silversmith whose shop stood a few doors down from Jeremy’s house. Jeremy had got to know him the summer before. Even then, Fabio had had this thick, curly, luxuriant beard on cheeks and chin and upper lip. Jeremy didn’t know if his own beard would be that heavy when he was thirty—or ever.
Playing catch in the street here was an adventure. They had to do it over and through traffic, which paid no attention to them. The ball was leather, and stuffed with feathers. It wasn’t especially round. It would have made a crummy baseball. For throwing back and forth, though, it was all right.
Jeremy dodged a creaking oxcart. He lofted the ball over the sacks of beans or barley piled high in the back of the cart. Fabio jumped to catch it. When he came down, he almost got trampled by a horse with big clay jars of wine tied to its back. The man leading the horse called him several different kinds of idiot. Fabio gave back better than he got. Grinning, he sent Jeremy running after the ball with a high lob.
His foot splashed down in a smelly puddle the instant he made the catch. The dirty water—he hoped it was water, anyway—splattered him and three or four people around him. They all told him just what they thought. Since he was as disgusted as they were, he couldn’t even yell back.
He flung the ball right at Fabio’s nose, as hard as he could. It wouldn’t have hurt much had it hit. But it didn’t. The apprentice snatched it out of the air. He grinned. His teeth were white, but crooked. “Got you!” he said, and threw the ball back.
This time, Jeremy caught it without disaster. So Fabio thought landing him in trouble was fun, did he? “Why aren’t you at work?” Jeremy shouted.
“My boss is down sick, so he didn’t open up,” Fabio answered. “Why aren’t you?”
“I will be pretty soon, if you don’t get me killed first,” Jeremy said, and Fabio Lentulo’s grin got bigger. Jeremy threw the ball high in the air. Fabio had to look up to follow its flight. That meant he couldn’t watch where he was going. He caught it—and staggered back into one of the four big men carrying a sedan chair. Jolted out of step, the man swore and boxed Fabio’s ear. The woman sitting in the sedan chair screeched at the apprentice. Now Jeremy was the one who grinned. “Two can play at that game!” he called.
From then on, it was who could land whom in a worse pickle. How they didn’t get killed or badly hurt, Jeremy never understood. That they didn’t lose the ball might have been an even bigger marvel.
And then everything, even the ball game, came to a stop. A herald went through the streets shouting, “All who are not Roman citizens or legal residents have two days to vacate Polisso! By order of the most illustrious city prefect Sesto Capurnio, and the most noble and valiant garrison commander Annio Basso, all who are not Roman citizens or legal residents have two days to vacate Polisso! After that, they may be arrested. Their property may be seized. They may be sold as slaves. Hear ye! Hear ye! All who are not…” He started over again, as loud as he could.
“That doesn’t sound good,” Jeremy said.
“Sounds like a war,
all right,” Fabio Lentulo agreed. “Don’t want any stinking Lietuvans around to open the gates at night or something.”
“Why would they want to do that?” Jeremy asked.
The silversmith’s apprentice looked at him as if he’d just lost his mind. “Because they’re Lietuvans,” Fabio said with exaggerated patience. “They’d rather have their stupid King rule here than the Emperor, gods bless him. They’d rather have everybody bow down to their stupid gods, too—Perkunas and all the others nobody ever heard of. What do you want to bet they’re throwing Romans out of their ugly old towns, too?”
What Jeremy would have bet was that Fabio had never been more then ten kilometers outside of Polisso in his life. He had no way of knowing whether the towns in the Kingdom of Lietuva were ugly. For that matter, he had no way of knowing whether King Kuzmickas was stupid, either. But he believed those things, because he lived in the Roman Empire. If he’d lived in Lietuva, he would have thought the Emperor was stupid and Roman towns were ugly and Roman gods were stupid. Nationalism wasn’t as strong in this world as it was in the home timeline, but it existed.
Fabio Lentulo suddenly looked like a ferret that had spotted a mouse. “I know where some of those lousy Lietuvans live,” he said. “They won’t be able to take all their stuff with them—not if they’ve only got two days to pack. The plundering ought to be juicy.”
“No, thanks,” Jeremy said. “Leave me out.”
“Why not?” Now Fabio really couldn’t believe what he was hearing. “Who knows what all they’ll have to leave behind?” But Jeremy shook his head. The apprentice stared. “You are weird. What’s wrong with plundering a bunch of rotten foreigners?”
“I don’t care that they’re foreigners,” Jeremy answered. “They’re merchants. So am I. I wouldn’t want anybody plundering me if I had to get out of town.”
“Is that the Golden Rule thing Christians go on and on about?” Fabio asked.
“Well—yes,” Jeremy said, surprised the local had heard of it.
Fabio Lentulo might have heard of it, but he wasn’t much impressed. With a scornful wave, he said, “Bunch of crap, if you ask me. You do your friends all the good you can and your enemies all the harm you can, and that’s how you come out on top.”
The ancient Greeks and Romans had believed the same thing. Plenty of people in Jeremy’s world still did, but they mostly pretended they didn’t. In Agrippan Rome, Christianity hadn’t changed morals as much as it had back home. People here were more openly for themselves than they were in the home timeline.
Maybe that explains why they don’t worry about owning slaves, Jeremy thought. If somebody was a slave, didn’t he have it coming to him? Jeremy liked the idea—for about half a minute. Then he remembered all the men who’d owned slaves in the South before the Civil War…and who’d called themselves good Christians. He sighed. Things weren’t so simple as they looked at first.
He saw things like that more and more often as he got older. He’d begun to suspect that no small part of growing up was seeing that more and more things weren’t so simple as they looked at first. Trouble was, he liked being sure. Watching certainties disappear under the magnifying glass was a jolt every time.
You could, of course, pretend things were as simple as you’d believed when you were a kid. You could—if you didn’t mind living a lie. Or maybe if you just refused to look facts in the face. Some people did. Lots of people did, in fact. Jeremy wondered how.
Then he had to make a quick grab to keep the ball from hitting him in the eye. Fabio Lentulo screeched laughter. “I thought you’d gone to sleep there,” he said. “If you had, I was going to slit your belt pouch.”
Jeremy threw the ball back. “To the crows with you,” he said, an insult the locals often used. “Good to your friends and bad to your enemies, you said? Am I your enemy, if you want to steal from me?”
“My enemy? Nah.” The silversmith’s apprentice shook his head. “But you sure were acting like a dopey friend there.” He heaved the ball high in the air.
After a run that involved dodging two women and almost tripping over a dog, Jeremy caught it at his belt buckle. Willie Mays had invented that kind of catch a century and a half before his time. He’d seen old video. He wasn’t so smooth as Willie Mays, but he was plenty smooth enough to impress Fabio Lentulo. “Let me try that!” the apprentice called.
Jeremy flung it high. Fabio staggered—he almost tripped over that dog, too—and tried his own basket catch. The ball thudded to the cobbles at his feet. Jeremy jeered. Fabio Lentulo came back with something just as nasty. They both laughed. The game went on.
Every day, Amanda would go into the secret part of the basement, hoping to see a message on the PowerBook’s screen. Every day, she would be disappointed. Every day, she would try to send her own message. Every day, the computer would tell her she couldn’t. And every day, she would go back up to the main level wishing none of this were happening.
Wishes like that were worth their weight in gold. Amanda knew as much. Knowing didn’t keep her from making them. Every day no message came, every day she and Jeremy remained cut off in Polisso, was an argument no message would ever come, an argument they’d stay cut off forever. She thought about Livia Plurabella. If she was stuck here, would she turn into someone like that in another twenty-five years? Wondering what you would be like when you grew up was scary enough when you were doing it in your own world. When you might be stranded forever in a place where you didn’t want to live…
Then again, stranded forever might be stretching things. The Lietuvan traders still left in Polisso got out of town the day after the city prefect and the garrison commander finally issued the order expelling them. Some of their wagons rattled past the house where Amanda and Jeremy were staying.
Amanda peered out through one of the handful of narrow windows that opened on the street. Traffic in Polisso was as insane as usual. That meant the Lietuvans couldn’t get out of town in a hurry, no matter how much they wanted to. It also gave the locals the chance to pay them a not so fond farewell.
“Get out!” “Never come back!” “Gods-cursed blond barbarians!” Those were a few of the nicer good-byes people yelled. The rest…Amanda had heard some vile things at Canoga Park High. What the people of Polisso called the departing Lietuvans would have made the toughest kid there turn green.
They didn’t just call them names, either. They threw things. They had nastier things to throw than they would have in Los Angeles. Squishy vegetables and balls of manure were bad enough. But the stench of rotten eggs seemed ten times worse. Amanda couldn’t get away from it, either. The windows had no glass. Closing the shutters didn’t do a dollar’s worth of good.
The worst of it was, the Lietuvans had to take the abuse. If they’d tried to hit back, they wouldn’t have got out of Polisso alive. If they’d tried to hit back, the people in the street wouldn’t have thrown dung and rotten eggs. They would have thrown rocks and jars instead. They probably would have mobbed the foreigners, too. And so, stone-faced, the Lietuvans pushed on toward the gate. They tried to keep the flying garbage from spooking their horses and mules and oxen too badly. They also tried to duck so they didn’t get too filthy.
Some of the Lietuvans had been in Polisso a long time, long enough to have brought their wives down from their own country. The fair-haired women, tall by the standards of this world, left the town with their men. The locals spattered them with filth, too. Some of the things they called them made the names they gave the Lietuvan men sound friendly by comparison.
At last, after what seemed much too long, the hubbub moved closer to the gate. Amanda retreated to the courtyard, but the stink of hydrogen sulfide lingered there, too. Jeremy walked into the courtyard a minute or so later. He looked grim. He must have been watching the Lietuvans leave from another window.
“Nice people,” he said. He didn’t mean the Lietuvans. He meant the locals who had harried them on their way.
Amanda nodded. “Real
ly.”
“We wouldn’t do anything like that,” Jeremy said.
“Oh, I don’t know.” Amanda remembered her U.S. History class again. “Look what happened to the Japanese-Americans during the Second World War.”
“So?” Her brother didn’t buy the argument. “That was a hundred fifty years ago. Are you saying we’d keep slaves because they kept slaves in the South before the Civil War?”
“Well…maybe not,” Amanda admitted. “But the Second World War was a lot closer to now than the Civil War was. People acted more like us.”
“A little, maybe, but not a whole lot,” Jeremy said. “It was still a long time ago. They didn’t have any computers. They only had one telephone for every seven people in the country. You ask me, that’s backward.”
He’d just finished a high-school U.S. History course. Now that he reminded her of it, Amanda remembered running into that statistic, too. But she never would have thought of it on her own. She asked, “How do you come up with that stuff?”
She’d asked him questions like that before, so he knew what she meant. He’d never been able to give her a good answer, though. He couldn’t now, either. He said, “I don’t know. I just do,” which told her nothing whatsoever. But then he said, “How do you know what people are feeling? I can’t do that, or not very well.”
“No?” Amanda said in surprise—surprise that vanished when she thought it over and realized Jeremy was right. He didn’t just see how people worked. He always had to work it through inside his mind. Sometimes he didn’t come up with the right answers even then. Maybe that was the other side of the coin to being able to remember how many telephones the United States had during World War II. Given a choice, Amanda knew which one she would rather be able to do.
But people didn’t get choices like that. They were what they were, and had to make the most of it. Some remembered better and thought straighter than others. Some felt more clearly than others. A lucky handful, maybe, could do all those things well. Whatever you were good at, though, you needed to make the most of it. If you did, things wouldn’t turn out too bad most of the time.
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