Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  They also brought out cups of a steaming milk, coffee, and cocoa mix that was surprisingly tasty; I realized, too, that a little coconut milk must be in there, probably as a sweetener. Since all of us had just been terrified out of our minds, the combination of comfortable chairs and hot milk promptly made us all drowsy.

  Porter, now that Chrys and I were there, probably felt perfectly safe. Even at eighteen, even with the terrible things that had happened in her past (she had seen her mother murdered by Closer agents), she still figured she was perfectly safe with two of her three big heroes there. (Chrys and Paula—I qualify as “good old Mark,” mainly in charge of spoiling her rotten. The third hero is Robbie.) For the rest of us it just made staying awake that much harder.

  But Paula is about as good a bodyguard as there is, and Chrys and I had been trained pretty well, so we didn’t nod off. Instead, we looked around and watched things.

  The furniture was in reds and blues; was that a clan color, national color, something the culture valued, or pure coincidence? It vaguely matched the clothing on the few people we had seen, but were they in uniform or did they just like those colors for their own clothing?

  There was space in here to seat twenty, which argued that this space was not particularly for us; ergo this airship had other missions at other times. ATN, for a special mission, might have built such a ship, but it would have built it for that one special purpose, and it would have been much too expensive to operate as a regular thing. So if these people were operating it regularly, they were somewhere far in advance of ATN—or say a thousand years beyond what we had in my timeline.

  We had seen nothing that resembled a flag, but besides the Roman look to the guards’ outfits, there were a lot of eagles around, and since the Romans hadn’t used flags and had had a major eagle fetish, I was pretty secure in identifying them as Roman. However, I hadn’t noticed any “SPQR” (“senatus populusque Romanus”—meaning “this was done by the Senate and the people of Rome”), which in our timeline the Romans put on everything from roads and bridges to monuments and outhouses.

  That could either mean they never got in the habit of using it, or that maybe the Senate was abolished. Or maybe their timeline was only partly descended from Rome. I could hear conversation in the distance, but not clearly enough to be sure of the language, and of course even that wouldn’t tell you much about their timeline.

  While I had been trying to hear, the airship had lifted off. The movement was fairly swift, but there was little sense of acceleration; one moment we were looking out at the land around us from an effective height of maybe twenty feet, the next we were rising into the sky. We turned to face the wind, and still there was no audible motor, propeller, turbine, or jet in the process; the ship just did what it did, no fuss or noise about it.

  Through the windows, we saw the sky ahead of us darken. A moment later it got gray, then dark, then sounds went away, and then any sense of being there; after an eternal while, light, then sound, then definition, and finally color came back. We had crossed over into another timeline. “Some budget they have here,” Chrys observed. “Rather than walk through a gate to us, they send a whole ship through and back? Either they have more energy than they need, or they don’t mind burning it, or both.”

  I nodded. The major reason that nobody has wiped out all the other timelines is that travel is very expensive, and the more you send through, the higher the cost goes. It was just about inconceivable that anyone would send anything this big through on what seemed to be purely a diplomatic mission—but there you had it, here we were.

  Which meant they were economically far in advance of ATN, and to judge from the way this airship performed, they were probably way out in front technologically as well.

  “How do you suppose this thing is working?” I asked Chrys. “It’s pretty clearly lighter than air whenever they want it to be, so it doesn’t work by filling a gasbag, like our blimps, and it doesn’t work by using vacuum gels like the ATN ones. How can they add or remove so much weight without making any sound?”

  “We rotate it into the collapsed dimensions,” Caius Xin Schwarz said, entering. “The ship is made of cells within cells; any cell can make the matter inside itself vanish, and restore it later, by causing it to rotate into one of the dimensions that didn’t expand when the universe was formed. We can get right up to the edge of the stratosphere using that technique.”

  I had once read something about the collapsed dimensions, I vaguely recalled, in an issue of Discover. Chrys is from a timeline some centuries in advance of mine, and she looked as blank as I did. Oh, well, we have a saying in the Crux Ops that once you’re fifty years in advance of your own time, everything is magic.

  “Can you tell us where, exactly, you’re taking us?” I asked.

  “To Rome, of course. You’ll be addressing the tribunes and the Senate.”

  “What about?” I knew enough Roman history from my years as an art historian to ask, “And I assume the consuls as well?”

  “Of course, all the ceremonial offices. And then there will be a festival, and—” He stopped and stared at me. “What on Earth do you mean, ‘what about’?”

  “I have no idea why anyone in this timeline would want me to speak to them,” I said. “I figured you’d be telling me what it was all about sooner or later.”

  He scratched his head. “You are Mark Strang? Native of Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States of America?”

  “Yep. And where I came from the North won the Civil War, World War I ended in November 1918, Elvis never entered politics, McGovern lost in 1972, and the Soviet Union broke up after a crisis in 1991.” Since he was obviously familiar with our family of timelines, giving him the major breakpoints would at least let him decide whether he had a guy from the wrong timeline.

  He shook his head—obviously that gesture went back a long way. “You’re the right one, but I will have to talk to my superiors before I can tell you anything else. And probably they will insist that I bring you to them before explaining anything. Something is seriously wrong here.” He got up and headed for the door.

  “Thanks for zapping the Closers anyway,” I said.

  He stopped and nodded. “We were surprised to find them there, but we thought it was a last-minute counterattack. But now that you mention it, it may be a clue to the whole problem.”

  He shot through the door like a rocket; I guess he was a bit nervous. “Well,” Paula said, “since it looks like we will have some time on our hands, I don’t suppose anyone here would mind telling me absolutely everything that’s going on, and then maybe following up by explaining why three people I thought I had known for years have this secret life I’ve never heard of that apparently involves flying saucers and armies from nowhere?”

  We were both grateful to have something to do other than worry; we started at the beginning, explaining about the war between ATN and the Closers, about how I had accidentally fallen into the middle of it in my home timeline, that the three years when I was supposedly working “undercover,” a few years before, had actually been the time when I had stowed away and entered a Closer timeline and conducted my own private war there. We told her about the dozens of cases, and she was even sharp enough to ask why we didn’t seem to have aged much. Finally she asked, “And you’ve never seen these guys before? They don’t look like anybody else?”

  “Well, they’re clearly Roman-descended,” I said, “and like most of the timelines based on Greece or Rome, they’ve pretty well intermarried everybody, at least if our friend Caius is any indicator. Roman first name, Chinese or Korean second, and something Germanic for the third … the ancient civilizations didn’t worry much about intermarriage. But as to which of the many Romes they hail from, we don’t know. We’ve only explored a bit over a million timelines, and there’s maybe a million in Closer territory we can’t get to—by ‘we’ I mean ATN, because Chrys and I have only been to about a dozen each, not counting short visits and some training camps and
things. But the best guess is that there are a few octillion timelines. Figure in any civilization that makes it all the way to modern industrial technology and so forth, there are going to be at least twenty or so turning points in their history. Figure most turning points could have gone several ways. It adds up in a hurry, once there are time travelers going back there to change things.”

  Paula shook her head, and said, “I will never, never say again that people don’t appreciate how many alternatives there are.”

  I laughed; if her sense of humor was intact, we hadn’t freaked her out too much. “Anyway, for some reason I’m apparently important to these people, and so are Chrys and Porter. And it looks like we were supposed to know what we did. I sure don’t, and if Chrys did, she’d have spoken up. And Porter knows about ATN, but this is the first time she’s been crosstime, so I don’t think she’ll have any idea either. No, we just have to wait and—”

  Once again, the door opened abruptly, and our unhostly host came in. “We’ve determined that a mistake was made, and that it wasn’t the fault of anyone on board this airship.”

  “Well, that’s a load off my mind,” I said.

  He ignored the sarcasm, and said, “Unfortunately, as I had guessed, the mistake is serious enough so that we are going to have to have you meet with the Chief Tribune first, and he will explain matters to you. So I’m afraid I will have to leave you still puzzled for a while; can I at least offer you refreshments or answer any other questions?”

  “Hmmm,” Chrysamen said, “I don’t suppose you’ve thought of this yet, but practically any question we can think of probably leads straight to things you aren’t allowed to talk about. If there’s time for us to have a meal, why don’t we do that? Afterward maybe we’ll have thought of something.”

  Another dead giveaway that you’ve stumbled into a Rome-derived timeline is the enormous variety of chopped, pickled fish that turns up on the table. They brought in about ten kinds, and a lot of flat hard bread, and we spent a while chewing and at least making sure that whatever happened next, we wouldn’t be hungry. I noticed, too, that all of us were practiced enough at the way things can get fraught so that we were all careful to visit the toilet before the ship landed.

  Then, finally, we were coming in over Rome. The first thing I noticed was that several of the landmarks I’d associated with the Romans weren’t there, but then if “consul” was a purely ceremonial job, there had never been an Empire—it sounded as if the Roman Republic might still be a going concern. We landed on a wide terrace on the side of a gigantic building, stepped onto the moving-sidewalk-that-moved-you-but-not-itself, and stepped off onto the middle of the terrace on a fine, warm afternoon.

  Caius Xin Schwarz walked out onto the terrace with us, saluted by sticking his arm straight out, and without a word went back inside. The ramp folded in behind him, and the ship rose into the sky.

  The man who came out to greet us was wearing a toga of a deep reddish purple; probably it didn’t mean he was emperor, but surely it meant he held considerable power. “Mr. Strang, I’m honored and a bit amazed to meet you,” he said. His English was just as flawless as Caius Xin Schwarz’s had been. “I am Marcus Annaeus Scipio, and I’m the Chief Tribune here. I believe we’ve found the nature of our error, and it’s really quite embarrassingly simple. We’d never made such an enormous crosstime leap before, and it had not occurred to us that you would be in the same place in the same small city, so far from where you live, on two occasions exactly twenty-four hours apart. We gave poor Schwarz orders to pick you up twenty-four hours earlier than he should have.”

  “‘So far crosstime,’” I echoed. “What year are we in?”

  “Oh, it was almost purely a crosstime trip. You would count it as somewhere just before your own year 2000, and we would count it as 2750 A.U.C.” So they were still measuring dates from the founding of Rome … yes, it looked like this was a world where the Roman Republic had managed to overrun the Earth without ever having an emperor. He smiled gently. “Believe it or not we thought we were just throwing a party for you, so we sent Captain Schwarz and his gunboat to bring you along.”

  “Uh, he’s not the most party-hearty type I’ve ever met.” To judge from the way the Chief Tribune snorted with laughter, it looked like the translation chips were doing everybody proud. “But what was the party about?”

  “The idea was an historical commemoration—to have one of the most important, perhaps from our viewpoint the most important, crosstime traveler of all time come and visit us on what is both a significant year since the founding of Rome, and a significant anniversary in time travel. We first developed our own crosstime equipment just fifteen hundred years ago—tomorrow is the anniversary of our first test.”

  Somehow or other they had managed to be two hundred years ahead of my timeline’s 1990s … and they had done it in the 400s A.D. They were seventeen hundred years in advance of my home timeline. No wonder I didn’t understand them at all.

  And he had said … just what had he said?

  “Er,” I asked. “This will sound very stupid, but I don’t think I’ve done whatever it was, that I did, that was so important to you people. I mean, I probably did it, or rather I will do it …” Time travel can be so confusing. “But I haven’t done it yet, in my chain of experience.”

  “So I gathered. Well, that’s easy enough to fix; we can send you back to do it, and indeed we shall. What we’re celebrating is the glorious day on which you saved the Roman Republic, Mr. Strang, by assassinating Gaius Julius Caesar.”

  6

  I don’t suppose my jaw could have dropped any farther, but while I was still thinking about it, Chief Tribune Scipio looked up over his head and said, “Yes?”

  He appeared to hear something from nowhere, and then said, “Yes, of course, that’s exactly what I wanted you to do. Show him in at once.”

  A door opened at the far end of the room, and General Malecela strode in. For a guy who had probably just been snagged as bizarrely as we had, he seemed pretty self-possessed.

  I even had the impression he managed to wink at us as he walked up to join our group.

  “I assume,” he said, “that I’m in the presence of President Brunreich and Chief Tribune Scipio, and you must be Mr. Strang’s personal associate—?”

  “Paula Renatsky. Who are you?” Paula was not going to let herself be thrown by the unexpected addition of another person, no matter how impressive and dignified-looking.

  He grinned. “Just so. I’m General Malecela, and within Crux Operations, I’m the boss, for Mister Strang and Friend-mother ja N’wook.” He turned to Scipio, and said, “Your Captain Schwarz is quite possibly the rudest officer I’ve ever encountered in my life.”

  Scipio nodded. “I would be surprised if you had found a ruder one. At any rate, were you given an adequate briefing on the matter?”

  “Believe me, I would not have stepped onto your airship if I had not had an adequate briefing.” It might have been a bit of humor if Malecela had bothered to smile, but he didn’t.

  “Well, then I suppose the time has come to settle on what ought to be done—and perhaps to demystify our companions, here.”

  “Fine by me,” Porter said. Paula quietly stepped on her foot.

  The biggest problem with time travel is also its greatest virtue; once you can move around in time, you often have all the time you want to get something done.

  When they thought they had grabbed me for a victory celebration, they had slipped only slightly; everything would work out fine, apparently, if they just made sure they returned me to Weimar, in my own timeline, twenty-four hours after I had left.

  That is, fine with everyone else. The “approaching group of timelines” that Citizen-teacher Zouck had been so excited about (and Thebenides so afraid of) seemed to be descended from this one right here. Time travel had grown so inexpensive with them, and remote sensing of timelines so accurate, that they were able to do what was only theoretically possible for
the Closers and ATN—whenever a major decision came along, they were able to try out all the possible consequences, creating a new timeline for each one, keeping them all in touch with each other, and then, if it had turned out badly for any of the timelines, correcting those so that no one had to live in a failed one.

  Moreover, they had been able to institute regular and reliable communications to reshape their own past; this meant that when they knew they would be taking on the Closers and showing up to aid ATN, they had relayed the information back thousands of years so that their ancestors could put some effort into getting ready, and take advantage of a longer technical lead time.

  This had given them such a tremendous boost over everyone else that even General Malecela simply shook his head and said he had spent his brief visit to their twenty-ninth-century (or by their figuring, thirty-sixth-century) entirely in awe of their technology; when he tried, later, to explain to us how amazing it was, we realized you had to be from a highly advanced civilization like ATN just to understand that this Roman timeline was doing things that ought to be impossible.

  They had been willing to share, too—apparently their first contacts had been with the timelines in which Porter had been president of the United States (hey, I always knew my ward had a lot of potential) just at the time when those timelines came under Closer attack. The Romans had sized up the situation, figured out who the bad guys were in zip time (small wonder, since they were already looking for the Closers), and beaten the living daylights out of the Closers, tracking them from timeline to timeline too fast for them to even warn each other of what was happening until it was too late.