Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  A lot worse could happen, of course, and easily might, but this was the first time she was really aware that it could.

  As usual, I felt like an idiot in the situation, and wondered what I would do without Chrysamen.

  After a while Porter stopped crying, dried her eyes, and tried to apologize for upsetting everyone. We all told her not to worry about it, and by then we figured we were all tired enough to sleep.

  Caesar’s courtesy even extended far enough to supply us with three beds, smaller ones for Porter and Paula and a big one for Chrys and me. The room was warm and comfortable—one of those Roman inventions that should never have gone out of use was central heating—and pitch-dark with the blinds pulled. Paula snores now and then, and Porter occasionally mumbles in her sleep; after a few minutes there was enough snoring and mumbling so that I figured they were both out.

  Chrysamen is hard to tell about; she’s so silent and wastes so little energy in her movement, like the superb natural athlete she is, that when there’s nothing that needs doing she simply doesn’t move. Thus in the dark you can’t really tell if she’s asleep or lying awake.

  I certainly knew that I was lying awake. I couldn’t quite figure it out. I had shot Closers, pushed them from high places, set buildings on fire and shot them as they ran out, exposed them to the naked fury of nuclear reactions. In all this I felt about the same way I did about killing copperheads or rats—i.e., it was a job, and it badly needed doing.

  But somehow this thing with Hasmonea was different. Maybe because I would have an audience—it was quite clear from hints dropped by the servants that most of the staff were looking forward to this in exactly the way they looked forward to gladiatorial combats. The Romans were a people of war, whatever they thought of themselves, and they were always interested in seeing how strangers fought. Having people applaud and cheer while I was killing a Closer seemed too much like having a cheering section while I cleared a poisonous snake from a trail.

  Or then again, maybe I was just afraid; I’m a great believer in using whatever advantage you have, and I’ve never in all the fights I’ve been in worried about “sportsmanship.” When only one of you gets to walk away afterward, it’s pretty stupid to worry about whether it’s with honor. Violence is dirty and ugly, and you can’t beautify it by treating it like a sporting event.

  Not that there would be a referee here, but it was going to be an absolutely fair fight, and I had always preferred having it rigged in my favor, and doing the rigging myself.

  Or then again maybe it was that I knew a little too much. I knew that Hasmonea was his name, and I knew what he looked like, and that he was easily rattled and sometimes said things that weren’t wise. I knew he was frightened by something about me and didn’t carry himself in the well-balanced way of an athlete or a fighting man. And he didn’t have either my reach or my muscle development.

  Chances were good, in short, that I was going to win, and much as I despised what he was, it’s one thing to hate a set of ideas and a culture, like the Closers, and quite another thing to take away the life of a single human individual, especially when you have a pretty good idea of what he must be feeling and experiencing while you do it.

  So there were a lot of good reasons not to be able to sleep. The only good reason for falling asleep, actually, was so that I could win tomorrow. If I won. Which got me back on the same train of thought, and around the track we went again …

  Chrys’s hand gently stroked down the side of my body, running over the hard muscles of my chest, finding my stomach. Her soft lips brushed my ear. “Mark?”

  “I’m awake.”

  “Tell me about it. You’re wound up like a spring. What’s the matter?”

  “Everything, I suppose.”

  “Yeah, I guessed as much.” She snuggled against me; her breasts were still high and firm after our years of marriage, and her skin was still soft and smooth. Her hands worked at my chest muscles. “Jeez, how can a guy clench his chest?”

  “It’s easier than it sounds.”

  “Shh. Don’t talk. Let me fix a few things. Roll over.”

  So I did and she started working on my back. It was great, but I noticed that the lower back was getting all the attention, and then my buttocks. After a while her hands moved around to the front.

  “Do you want to do this?” I asked.

  “I want to because you need it, husband. And if I didn’t usually want to do it with you, I’d never have married you.”

  “Okay.”

  “And if you give me any crap about it slowing you down or spoiling your eye tomorrow, I’ll tie your dick in a knot.”

  I couldn’t help it; I giggled a little at that, and then she licked my neck, which always seems to hit a magic switch. When I rolled over and pressed her thighs apart, she was already warm and ready for me. We had to keep the noise down so as not to wake the others, but occasionally that’s an amusing challenge in its own right.

  Afterward, as we lay together, I kissed her very tenderly; she pressed my head back and returned the kiss—and that’s the last thing I remembered till morning.

  When I woke up, there were pancakes and honey for breakfast, together with a little goat cheese. It was a decent enough way to start the day, but I ate just enough to keep hunger pangs at bay. It’s undignified to throw up on your opponent, even if you go on to kill him.

  The guards arrived promptly, one set to take the women to the arena—they were being “honored” by being allowed to sit in Caesar’s box—and another set to take me to a different door.

  It was cold and clear today; everyone was bundled tight, but the sun was shining brightly, and it made the great plumes of everyone’s breath shine white and silver in the narrow, dim street they led me up. The last couple of blocks, several young women turned up to throw roses at me. I wasn’t at all sure what that symbolized, and I was even less sure I wanted to know.

  9

  What they put us in looked more like holding pens for animals than anything else; it was a stone cell with a barred door and window looking out on a hallway on one side, and a barred door into the arena on the other. I made the mistake of getting too close to that door just once, and suddenly the crowd was going crazy, whooping and cheering.

  They had stripped me to fight; I was wearing a leather jock, a pair of boots, padded fingerless leather gloves, and that was all. They gave me a blanket to keep me warm as well.

  When I backed away from the window, a voice said, “They did the same thing for me, but more of them whistled.”

  Whistling was a sign of disapproval, the chip in my ear informed me. I looked around and saw that Hasmonea was in the cell across the hallway. “I was trying to sleep,” he said.

  He looked about as scared and miserable as a human being can; I decided then and there that since there wasn’t any getting around killing him, I would make it quick. I knew if he had the chance, being a Closer, he would naturally kill me without compunction, and quite possibly torture me first, and I knew how dangerous his kind was—but I saw no reason to inflict any more pain than I had to.

  Hasmonea hung on to the bars and looked at me a little hungrily. “The woman you were with is your wife? The girl is your daughter?”

  “My ward, actually.”

  He sighed. “That’s the tough part of all this. I know what the odds are, which is not going to help my chances any. But I wish I had some way of saying good-bye to my family. Not that they would want me to—that’s a disgrace and so forth. But I’ve noticed, after a lot of missions, that other cultures manage to say good-bye, and mourn for their dead, and it doesn’t seem to hurt their fighting ability.”

  “How many timelines have you been to?” I asked, to keep the conversation going. I didn’t want to be alone with my thoughts, and I doubted he wanted to be alone with his.

  “Just over thirty. Thirty, uh, three, I think. You lose count after a while.”

  “Yeah, I’ve only been to a dozen.”

  “You
’re a Crux Op, aren’t you?”

  “Unhunh.”

  He half groaned. “I knew I shouldn’t ask, and I did anyway. This doesn’t look good for me at all. I’m not even a soldier—I’m just a Slave Searcher.”

  Slave Searchers were the equivalent of our Time Scouts. When a new timeline was identified, there was only so much you could accomplish with hidden cameras, listening devices, and so forth. Sooner or later somebody had to walk through a gate and go see what it was really like over there.

  After that the equivalency ended. Sometimes our Time Scouts were sent into known timelines, to start new branch points that could eventually grow into timelines that might join ATN. Other times a Time Scout just jumped through the gate into a timeline that needed investigating—usually not knowing whether the Closers were active there (and had perhaps started the timeline), whether some independent time-traveling civilization had started it, or whether (perhaps—there were arguments about whether or not this ever happened) it had just occurred naturally.

  In every case the mission was the same. Make contact. Decide whether the civilization was advanced enough and psychologically stable enough to open full relations crosstime. If no, then help them move toward maturity as fast as they safely could (and hope the Closers don’t show up before you do). If yes, then open up relations and see if they’d like to join ATN. Even if they didn’t want to join on, at least they would know where to call for help if Closers invaded, and they could be on their guard.

  The Closer approach was much simpler. Find the most militarily formidable civilization in the timeline. Assist it in conquering the Earth. Find the most ruthless potential dictator and assist him in taking power. When the whole Earth was under the rule of one man or at most a few families, kill the top people and move in to run the show yourselves, turning the whole Earth into one big plantation.

  It had never occurred to me before that there might be any other resemblances between the jobs, but life can surprise you; obviously their Slave Searchers had to know something about the cultures with which they interacted, and perhaps even study them and learn to see things from their point of view. Know thy enemy, and all that, especially if you can know him thoroughly before he knows you’re his enemy.

  Morbid curiosity caused me to ask the next question. “So have you liked this timeline?”

  He shrugged. “At least slaves are cheap, and there’s a wide variety of them. The wine isn’t bad, and the baths are pleasant. But it’s really much too far north, and there are really too many people in the middle class. Most of them would benefit from being owned, even if only by other people like themselves.”

  “Benefit?” I asked.

  “Of course. How many people are really fit to run their own lives? And let’s be honest here … how many servants are any good if they can change masters? They only learn to please when they have no choice. That’s why we always say that an ugly girl you own is better than a whore you rent, and both are better than a wife. They have some reason to be.”

  There might be things worse than being alone with your thoughts, after all. But I asked, “And yet you say you miss your family?”

  He shrugged. “It’s an emotional weakness. Like most of my weaknesses. They couldn’t do anything with me, and I was too high-ranking to sell or kill, so they put me into the Slave Searchers because I was medically unfit for the Army. Every so often I write home to them, and I’ve occasionally gone and visited my sister and her children. They find me very embarrassing—Moloch’s jaws, I find me very embarrassing—but duty is duty, and they let me hang around. Which comforts me a great deal, weak though it is.”

  “Have you liked being a, uh, Slave Searcher?”

  “Oh, actually, a lot. I like observing other cultures. You can learn a lot from them.”

  For an instant there, I thought I might have to kill a Closer I liked, but then he went on, “For example, the Romans make such effective use of crucifixion in keeping slaves in line. It takes the slave a long time to die, and it’s right out in public, so it gets the message through to every single slave without wasting much of the stock. And, of course, it’s fascinating to see how easy or difficult it is to domesticate the various cultures. The Romans are tough and independent and so forth, but they will make better slaves exactly because they are used to seeing the world in terms of masters and slaves. Where some very gentle, even servile populations are hard as Moloch’s teeth to enslave because they don’t understand what it means when we tell them that they are property and they exist only for us.” He sighed. “At any rate, it hasn’t been a bad life, really, and I have few regrets. I wish I had spent more time at home with my mother—I liked that a lot—and I wish I had pleased my father more. It will please him to know I died as a Slave Searcher, heavily decorated, and thus kept up the family honor, but that will never wipe out his memories of how weak I really am.”

  By Closer standards, I realized, this was a sentimental and rather sweet poet-type. Any more sensitive (or any less politically connected), and they’d have fed him to Moloch. But the real reason he was still alive was probably that fundamentally he agreed with them; his impulses toward sensitivity, his interest in other cultures, his preference for real affection—he and his culture both agreed that this was an illness, something that regrettably had not been cured yet.

  “But you’re fond of them?”

  “All babies are,” he said. “Some of us just have more trouble growing up. I’ve even gotten fond of my wife, even though she’s a low-status type and has just as big an affection-craving problem as I do.”

  Whatever he had actually said, “affection-craving problem” was probably as close to the meaning as the translator could get, taking it from his language into Latin and then from Latin into English. But there was something in his tone that made it sound like it was a disease, and a shameful one.

  “And you wish you could kiss her good-bye, hold hands, maybe even hold each other a little or have spent a night sleeping next to each other?”

  He gave me the strangest look I’ve ever seen from anyone, and his voice choked. “Is this a tactic?”

  “If it is, it’s backward,” I said, and suddenly realized just how tired I felt. “Look, it might surprise you, but what you’re feeling is what I think it’s healthy for human beings to feel. That’s all. I probably feel a little less like killing you because of it.”

  He sat there on the cold floor, wrapped in his blanket, and very quietly said, “You know, if anyone had talked to me that way when I was ten, so that I had grown up with maybe a slight idea that it was all right to be the way I am … I’d have ended up fed to Moloch by the time I was twelve.”

  I couldn’t help it—I laughed, and so did he. “Make it quick,” he said, “if you win. I’ll do the same for you. Caesar likes to see people play with each other, but there’s not any reason to do that. As long as Crassus still has the one from your timeline, Caesar will have to keep at least one of us alive. As soon as one of us is dead … well, there you go. Perfect security for the other one.”

  “You’ve got it,” I said.

  Unfortunately, there were two acts ahead of us. One was a couple of Gauls, big crude types who were handed short axes, had their knees tied together, and who simply whaled away at each other until one of them fell over. They came out and cut them apart, carried off the bodies—I wasn’t sure either of them was alive—and then a big cart came out, a lot like the Zamboni at a hockey game, and slaves threw sand all over the arena.

  Caesar hadn’t shown up yet. I guess when you head an army of tens of thousands who all think you’re god, you can be as late as you like, and just enjoy your breakfast.

  The next little crowd-warmer was four naked girls, not much out of puberty, armed with spears, against a very large and not happy bear. It took a long time, and I just kind of sat in the corner away from the front grating, not watching it, hoping Porter and the others had sense enough not to watch. As it ended, Hasmonea said, “It’s over, and, if
you want to know, it looks like two of the girls will live.”

  “Were you rooting for the bear?”

  “Moloch’s jaws, no. These Romans are much, much too crude. I tried to enliven their gladiatorial games a little by suggesting that perhaps they could move away from professional killers and explore what happened with amateurs and with animals. After all, in the timelines where there’s a Court of Nero, there are some wonderful shows. Unfortunately I underestimated their crudity.”

  “One thing I can’t stand, it’s crude barbarity,” I said.

  Hasmonea chuckled. “I think we have again reached the edge of the cultural divide.”

  “Pretty clearly. Has the big cheese shown up yet?”

  “I think so. I think that was all the crowd noise in the middle of the act. Nothing much was happening at the time in the arena. If you want to look again, they’ve carried off the bear, the dead girl, and the one who I think is going to bleed to death. The other two walked off some time ago.”

  “I’ll wait till they get the sand down, thanks.”

  I had the grim and slightly sad realization that if Hasmonea and I had ended up in the same prison together for years instead of hours, we might well have worked out a way to stand each other, and even begun to like each other. Even though I knew, for example, that as a high-ranking Closer he had probably tossed his first child into Moloch … it’s funny what loneliness and stress will make you overlook.

  There was more wild cheering from the arena, and a couple of priests came out to bless all the fresh sand that had been thrown down. Then a bunch of standard-bearers carrying the eagles of Caesar’s various legions came out, and paraded them around while the crowd cheered loudly. There was one voice that sounded like it was coming through a megaphone, and I figured it was probably someone rattling off everything each legion had done.