“Cut that out,” Amanda said sternly. “I told you I’d take care of it, and I will. Just remember, the acting you did there will make you a better bargainer from now on.”
Her brother nodded. “Yeah, that’s true. But you can pay too high a price for some things, you know what I mean?”
“Oh, yes.” Amanda nodded. “I’ll deal with it. You don’t have to worry about it any more.” She went out to the kitchen. Instead of a broom, she found a mop. That would do well enough. She pushed the fur jacket ahead of her on the floor, as if she were herding along an animal that didn’t want to cooperate. The poor martens whose furs went into the jacket hadn’t wanted to cooperate. They hadn’t had a choice.
There was a chest that held mostly rags. Amanda opened it. She needed two or three tries to pick up the jacket with the end of the mop handle. It was heavier than she’d thought. She could have just stooped and gathered it in her hands, but that never occurred to her. She didn’t want to touch it any more than Jeremy had. At last, she managed to get it into the chest. Down came the lid—thud! For good measure, Amanda closed the latch.
She nodded, pleased with herself. The jacket was gone. It might as well never have existed. Out of sight, out of mind, she thought. She shouldered the mop as if it were a legionary’s matchlock musket and marched back to the courtyard. “There,” she said.
Her brother let out a long sigh, almost an old man’s sigh. “Good. Thanks again. I owe you one.” He laughed. “I don’t know where I can find one that big to pay you back with, though.”
“Don’t worry about it,” Amanda answered. “This is what family is for.”
“I knew it was for something,” Jeremy said. Amanda stuck out her tongue at him. Almost forgotten by both of them, the siege of Polisso ground on.
Twelve
Jeremy and Amanda both ate meat. Jeremy had never wondered why that didn’t bother him when wearing fur did. If he had wondered, he would have said people needed protein, but they could keep warm without killing animals. And that would have been true, but it wouldn’t have been the whole truth, though he might not have realized it wouldn’t. The whole truth was that he was as much a part of his culture as the people of Agrippan Rome were of theirs. He noticed their quirks. His own were water to a fish.
Since he ate meat, he had to buy it in the market square. With Polisso besieged, there wasn’t much to buy: pork every now and then, from people who kept pigs, and what the sellers claimed to be rabbit. Jeremy didn’t buy any of that. His bet was that it would meow if you sliced it.
When he brought back pork, Amanda cooked it till it was gray. Back in the home timeline, people didn’t worry about trichinosis any more. Here, the danger was as real as a kick in the teeth. All sorts of things you didn’t need to worry about in the home timeline could make you sick here.
Even when he’d stopped buying very often, he kept going back to the market square. Women gossiped at the fountains. The square was for men. One drizzly morning, he heard a rumor he’d been hoping for: someone said the Roman Emperor, or at least an imperial army, was on its way north to fight the Lietuvans.
“How do you know it’s true?” he asked the man who’d passed the news to him—one of the people who were selling what had to be roof rabbit.
“Well, my brother-in-law told me, and he’s pretty sharp,” the fellow answered.
That did not strike Jeremy as recommendation enough. “How does he know?” he asked. “Who told him?”
“You think my brother-in-law would make something up?” The man with the mystery meat sounded indignant. Jeremy only shrugged, as if to say, How should I know? The other man thought it over. Then he shrugged, too. “Well, maybe he would.”
“Terrific,” Jeremy said.
“You want to buy some rabbit?” the man asked him. “If you’ve got any prunes or anything like that, you can make a nice, tasty sauce for it.”
“No, thanks,” Jeremy answered. “If I had mice, I’d get some of it from you. They’d all run away.”
“Funny,” the local said. “Ha, ha, ha, ha. There. You hear me laughing?”
“No,” Jeremy told him. “I didn’t hear me joking, either.” The local sent him a gesture that meant something nasty. The one Jeremy gave back meant something just as nasty. They parted on terms of perfect mutual loathing.
Jeremy headed back to the house without any meat. On his way there, though, he heard two men who looked like blacksmiths talking about the army coming up from the south. That left him scratching his head.
He told Amanda about them. “What do you think?” he asked. “Were they listening to the other guy’s brother-in-law?”
“Who knows?” she answered. “We’ll just have to wait and see, that’s all. Maybe everybody’s saying, ‘Yes, there’s an army coming,’ because we’re all sick of being cooped up here. But maybe there really is an army. We won’t know till it starts shooting at the Lietuvans. If it ever does.”
“Schrödinger’s army,” Jeremy said, thinking of cats. Amanda made a face at him. He made one right back. She was his sister, after all. He couldn’t let her get away with something like that. But he hadn’t been joking with her, either. If you couldn’t tell whether an army was real till it showed up—or didn’t show up—how much good did it do you?
The only thing an army that might be real did was to pump up hope. That could help for a little while, maybe. But if more time went by and the army didn’t show up, wouldn’t hope sink lower than it would have if it hadn’t been lifted in the first place?
He wondered if the city prefect or the garrison commander had got worried about morale in Polisso. Even if the rumors about an approaching Roman army weren’t true, they might think it was in their interest to start them. Or people who were in danger of losing hope on their own might have started the rumors, to make themselves feel better. Or…
Jeremy gave up. He couldn’t tell. He just didn’t know, and he didn’t have any real evidence one way or the other. Sooner or later, he’d find out. Till then…
Till then, I’ll worry. That’s what I’ll do, he thought.
Amanda set her palm on the proper spot in the basement wall. The concealed door slid aside and let her into the chamber the locals weren’t supposed to discover. The electric lights in there came on. Seeing them made tears sting her eyes. Some small part of the tears came because the lights were bright after the gloom of the basement. But most of them sprang from the lights’ being electric. They were things from the home timeline. Every time she came down here, not being able to go back there ate at her more.
It’s home, she thought as the door silently slid shut behind her. How can anybody blame me because I want to go home, because I don’t want to stay here? People from Polisso would find Los Angeles endlessly marvelous, endlessly exciting. But they might well want to come back to the timeline of Agrippan Rome once they’d seen what there was to see. And Los Angeles was a richer place where you could do more things—do more kinds of things—than you could in Polisso. If it wasn’t home, even that wouldn’t matter. When it was…
The lights weren’t all that reminded her of home. The sheet-metal cabinets, the table with the plywood top, the blue plastic chair with the slotted back—they were ordinary things, but they were things from her world. In the home timeline, you didn’t have to be somebody important to sit in a chair with a back instead of on a stool. That wasn’t a big difference between the two worlds, but it was a difference. Differences gnawed at her spirit like acid now.
And the computer. The difference there was what the PowerBook could—or rather, couldn’t—do now. It was supposed to connect her to the home timeline, to the world that knew how to move between worlds, how to talk between worlds. It was supposed to, but it didn’t. It was like a friend who’d let her down. It was a friend who’d let her down.
Amanda had to make herself walk to the blue plastic chair. She had to make herself pull it out, had to make herself sit down in it. And it took everything she had in her
to make herself look at the laptop’s monitor. Her brother said the same thing. She and Jeremy had been disappointed so many times.
Is anybody there?
Three little words. She’d heard that I love you was supposed to hit you like that when the right person said those three little words. These three? Nobody talked about these three. But I love you, even when she heard it from the right person, was going to have to do some pretty fancy work to top them.
She blinked. Is anybody there? stayed on the screen. She wasn’t imagining it. If King Kuzmickas had taken Polisso without getting one single soldier scratched, he might have let out a whoop with one tenth the joy of the one that burst from Amanda’s lips. She sprang out of the chair. She jumped up and down. She did the wildest, whirlingest dance the world had ever seen.
And then she did something a lot harder than that. Instead of answering right away, she turned her back on the beautiful monitor. She left the secret basement. The door closed behind her again, shutting her out. She went upstairs to primitive, smelly, besieged Polisso.
Jeremy was watering the herbs in the herb garden. A few spices, like pepper and cinnamon, were expensive, imported luxuries here. As for the rest, the ordinary ones like basil and thyme, you grew your own if you wanted them. Otherwise you did without.
“There’s something I think you ought to see,” Amanda said.
She tried to sound calm, to hold the excitement out of her voice. She tried, but it didn’t work. Jeremy’s head came up as if he were a wolf scenting meat. “Is it—?” He stopped, as if he didn’t want to go on for fear of hearing no.
But Amanda said, “Yes!”
Her brother whooped even louder than she had. He was out in the open, not in a soundproof basement. He didn’t care at all, and neither did Amanda. Somebody next door exclaimed in surprise. They didn’t care about that, either. Jeremy set down the water jug. It was a wonder he hadn’t dropped it and smashed it. He grabbed Amanda’s hands. They did sort of a two-person version of the crazy dance she’d done by herself down below.
They were both laughing and panting when they finally stopped. “What does it say?” Jeremy demanded. “Tell me what it says!”
“Come see for yourself,” Amanda told him. But then, as they both hurried to the stairs, she added, “It’s just asking if we’re here. I haven’t even answered it yet.”
“Well, we’d better!” Jeremy said.
“You bet.” Fear filled Amanda as she set her palm on the patch of wall where it was supposed to go. The door slid aside, opening the secret part of the basement. She and Jeremy hurried in. They both ran to the PowerBook on the table. Her fear grew. Would the message still show on the screen? Had she imagined she saw it because she wanted to see it so badly?
Is anybody there?
The words were real. Seeing them there again, seeing Jeremy see them, made Amanda as happy as she had been when she saw them the first time. She would have been glad to go back to the temple to make one more thanks-offering. Those three words made her more grateful than anything else she’d ever known.
“Wow,” Jeremy said, his eyes wide and shining. Amanda nodded. Jeremy shook his head, as if fighting to believe it. Amanda understood that, all right. Her brother started to say something, then stopped and shook his head again. He turned to her and almost bowed. “You found it. You do the talking.”
“Okay.” With that, she switched from neoLatin to English. “Answer.” That was an oral command the computer recognized. She paused to think for a moment, then just spoke simply: “This is Amanda. Jeremy and I are both here. We’re all right, but the Lietuvans have Polisso under siege. What went wrong back there?”
That summed up what the home timeline needed to know, and what she and Jeremy most wanted to find out. She had another frightened moment when she sent the message. Would the laptop tell her it couldn’t go through, the way the machine had so many times before?
It didn’t. From everything she could tell, the message went crosstime just the way it was supposed to. Softly, she clapped her hands. Beside her, Jeremy said, “Yeah.”
Then they had to wait. That hadn’t occurred to her. Back in Porolissum in the home timeline, wouldn’t somebody be watching the monitor every single minute? She’d thought somebody would. Maybe she was wrong.
Five minutes went by. Ten. Fifteen. She wanted to kick something. She also wanted to scream. Had the message made it back to the home timeline?
And then the screen showed new words. Even before she read them, she and Jeremy both cheered again. Why not? They weren’t cut off any more. Only now, as the isolation ended, did Amanda realize how bad it had been.
She leaned forward to get a better look at the monitor. This is Dad, the new message began. She grinned at Jeremy, who was grinning back. Gladder than I can tell you that you’re okay. We’re starting to get things sorted out here, too.
“What happened?” Amanda asked again.
This time, the answer came back right away. Terrorists. Nationalist terrorists, Dad said. They bombed a lot of crosstime sites here in Romania, all on the same day. It was a nice piece of work, if you like that kind of thing.
“Terrific,” Jeremy said.
“Hush,” Amanda told him. “There’s more.”
And there was. Their father went on, That would have been bad enough by itself, but they also planted tailored viruses at some of the blast sites. Guess what? Both of the ones that connect to Polisso in Agrippan Rome got lucky. They’ve finally managed to decontaminate enough to set up computers here, but I’m wearing a spacesuit to talk to you guys.
“Urk,” Jeremy said. This time, Amanda didn’t hush him. She felt like going urk herself. Making real viruses these days was almost as easy as making computer viruses had been at the start of the twenty-first century. And real viruses could do as much damage in the real world as computer viruses had in the virtual world. They could, if you were ruthless enough to turn them loose. Nagorno-Karabakh and a big chunk of Azerbaijan next door were still uninhabitable. Armenians blamed Azerbaijanis; Azerbaijanis blamed Armenians. No one was ever likely to know who’d really used that Ebola variant. It was so hot, it had probably killed off whoever started it. That was poetic justice of a sort.
Fighting tailored viruses was dangerous enough in the home timeline. If one of them got loose in an alternate like Agrippan Rome, it might take out a third of the population or more. Natural epidemics had done that in the past. Unnatural epidemics…Amanda didn’t even want to think about it.
“How’s Mom?” Jeremy asked.
She’s fine. She sends her love, Dad answered. Amanda breathed a sudden sigh of relief. If Mom’s appendix had waited a little longer to act up, she would have got stuck here. That could have been very bad. Amanda couldn’t think of anything much worse, in fact.
She asked, “How long before you’re able to come and get us?”
Crosstime Traffic and the Ministry for the Environment here both have to decide it’s safe, Dad said. A week or two, probably. But you said there was a war going on there?
“That’s right,” Amanda said. She and Jeremy took turns telling what had happened since they got cut off. “We’ve had to sell for money instead of wheat and barley,” she put in at one point. “We didn’t have any place to put the produce, and then we didn’t want the locals calling us hoarders.”
Don’t worry about that, Dad said. No one will complain that you went against the grain.
For a second, Amanda just accepted that. She opened her mouth to start to answer it. Then she saw the revolted look on her brother’s face. She read the message again. She made a horrible face, too. “Well, that’s Dad for sure,” she said.
“You better believe it,” Jeremy said. “Nobody else in the world makes puns that bad.” From revolted, his expression suddenly went crafty. “Except maybe me.” He spoke to the PowerBook: “Answer. Wheat like to tell you to clean up that last message. We could barley understand it. It seemed pretty corny. Send.”
“Ow!�
�� Amanda exclaimed. “Where’s something I can hit you with?” Jeremy looked proud of himself, which wasn’t what she’d had in mind.
There was a pause at the other end. Amanda hoped Dad wasn’t running out and throwing up. That could be awkward in an antivirus spacesuit. At last, he answered, Your sense of humor is as rye as I remember. He must have typed that in instead of dictating it. If he’d spoken into the computer, it would have written wry, which was right, and not rye, which was wrong, to say nothing of ghastly. For good measure, he added, But I don’t want to be on the oats with you.
“That’s rice,” Amanda said. Jeremy groaned, not quite in praise. It wasn’t the best comeback, but they were running out of grains.
Dad got back to business. Just hang on till we finish decontaminating here, he said. That’s all you need to do now. Like I told you, it won’t be too long.
“As long as the Lietuvans don’t get into Polisso again, we’ll be fine,” Jeremy said. Amanda thought he’d put in one word too many, but it was too late to stop him.
Sure as houses, Dad wrote back, Again?
“They got some men in at night,” Amanda said. “Not too many, though, and Polisso is crawling with Roman soldiers. We had to pay the prefect a sort of a bribe to keep from having any quartered on us. They drove the Lietuvans out again.”
Are you all right? Is the house all right?
“We’re fine,” Jeremy said quickly. “And the house is okay. A couple of cannonballs hit the roof and smashed some tiles, but that’s it.”
He didn’t say anything about the broken-down front door. It was just about as good as new, so Amanda could understand that. And he didn’t say anything about the Lietuvan soldier who’d stumbled when the table broke under him. He didn’t say anything about stabbing the Lietuvan, either. Amanda supposed she could also understand that. Jeremy didn’t want to think about it, and it was all over with anyhow, and it would only worry Dad. We’re fine was an awful lot simpler—and it was the truth.
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