Another thought hit me as her explanation unraveled. She’d had both orbs. Red and blue. That explained why she hadn’t been corrupted by the blue orb. Go figure.
I couldn’t tear my eyes away from her. “And Varus? Did he know?”
“Marcus Varus began to suspect,” she said with a nod, “but he never knew of the red orb. After our encounter in Vindonissa, I sent him to Alexandria so that he could lay the foundation for the series of clues needed to send you to Britain. And then here.”
“And then you had him killed…” I growled, remembering that even if everything she’d done had been at the behest of Remus, she’d still murdered an innocent scholar, husband, and father who had been stuck in the middle of all this.
“I had no choice, Jacob,” she said, almost apologetically, but I didn’t buy it. I now realized she’d been playing me well before Britain, before the trap she’d laid for us in Syria, all the way back to the moment we’d met aboard her barge outside the legion camp at Vindonissa. Everything we’d encountered along the way, from her ninja Praetorians corralling us east, to letting us live outside her hastily crafted villa in Syria had all been a part of her plan to get me here.
That didn’t explain why she’d tortured and left the Other Jacob, the one that had crafted Artie 2.0’s timeline, to rot and die in his cargo container for two millennia, but I’m sure an answer to that question was awaiting me as well. Maybe she’d just been so furious in that timeline that she’d gone against Remus’ wishes.
I couldn’t think about it now.
There was far too many other things to focus on.
I shook my head. “So you’re telling me you didn’t have a choice?”
“I didn’t,” she said emphatically. “I had to ensure you arrived here, but knew I couldn’t just ask you to travel with…”
A spark of my earlier rage ignited in my chest again, as I yelled, “Goddamn it, Agrippina… why am I here?!”
“We’re all here, Jacob Hunter…” Remus said from behind me, causing me to jump at his unexpected voice, “…because we have the ability to be here. That is, besides your friend.”
“Yeah,” I said, giving Agrippina a cold and hate filled look before I turned to face him. “So what?”
“We three can control an orb. I the blue, Agrippina the red, and you… both.”
“So? What?” I growled, about at the end of my patience, although I wasn’t sure what I could do to alleviate my frustration.
“You are aware of what the orbs can do together. Of their great ability to manipulate time and transport individuals between worlds. Magnanimous and empowering, but because of that power, they are also not without certain safeguards.”
“Such as?”
Remus released his hands clasped behind his back. “The orbs were meant for Romulus and myself. No two individuals besides the two of us can manipulate the orbs in tandem. Our descendants may have the ability to use them, to varying degrees of potency, or simply be susceptible to their negative energies, but you are quite unique, Jacob Hunter, in that you can use both. As my lost grandson removed by thousands of years, and a grandson to my brother as well, you are the only person known to us who can use the orbs together. I had not known until meeting you in person that such an individual existed.”
My back went rigid and my eyes widened beyond my ability to rein them in, had I even the conscious ability to do so at the moment. After all this time, all the information I’d gained, knowing that Remus, and now Romulus as well, were ancestors mine, I’d never come to really appreciate what that meant. This man was one of my many grandfathers, only with a few hundred “greats” tacked onto the title. Either one of my parents could have been linked to him, or both perhaps, as well as my grandparents and great grandparents and so on and so forth.
Remus nodded as he studied the shock that must have been plastered all over my face. “I see a certain understanding is taking hold in your mind, Jacob. Good. When Agrippina brought me my brother’s orb, I was initially ecstatic, but then quickly dismayed as I knew it to be useless. When she presented me with my own blue orb I was doubly saddened as I quickly discovered that I was still trapped in this realm. I…”
“And where exactly is this realm of yours?” I interrupted, amazed I could so easily interrupt a god.
Remus cocked his head to the side as he thought, but then quickly answered. “I must admit that I am quite fortunate that you come from a time where science has so many answers, theoretical and incorrect as many may be. At least you bring with you a certain lexicon for which I may better explain everything. Poor Agrippina here was quite confused when I tried to explain using her language devoid of such terms.”
I glanced at Agrippina again, who could in no way understand what we were saying, but had a fearful look in her expression that suggested she understood more than I thought.
I looked back at Remus, and twirled a hand at him in an impatient gesture.
“This realm is my prison,” he said. “It is a pocket universe set aside for me, fabricated with enough basic physics and environmental controls to sustain me. It is set apart from the Multiverse, as you would call it, created by Faustulus to contain me.”
I risked a look into the black void beyond the railing, but quickly looked away, all too familiar with what it felt like when something was attempting to drive you insane.
“This isn’t a planet,” I commented.
“A clever deduction,” Remus said, a hint of praise in his voice. “You are correct. My entire world could fit into a high school gymnasium, as you might suggest.”
I hooked a thumb into the darkness. “And that shit is?”
He looked at it but didn’t seem to mind its boundless nothingness. “It is nothing, Jacob. Absolute nothing. The absence of anything. Your scientists might call it dark matter or perhaps negative mass or… perhaps it is simply the center of a black hole, I will most likely never know… nor wish to know.”
My eyes widened again.
Neil deGrasse Tyson’s never going to believe any of this…
I shook my head. “And that world you showed me before. The… Source?”
He nodded. “It is real, but it is not built upon the same principals as this realm. It is merely a world, a planet, but in a different reality, fabricated to generate the power needed to fuel and activate the orbs.”
“With black holes?” I asked, still stupidly skeptical at this point.
“Along with quasars and neutron stars for balance and remediation,” Remus supplied as though he were discussing the building components of Lincoln Logs, “but these celestial bodies do not actually power the orbs, although they are what afford the orbs their purpose. It is the planet itself that gives them the energy they need to operate. The planet’s molten core itself is the power source
By now my eyes were permanently fixed to their widest open positions, and I wasn’t sure I’d ever be able to blink them again. Without thinking, I pulled my bag around my waist and reached in, taking out an orb with each hand. I held them at shoulder level and peered into them, their individual patterns swirling as they always did, but far more calmly than I’d seen before, perhaps sensing each other’s presence and happy to be reunited with their long lost sibling.
I looked back up at Remus in frustration. “How is that possible? They’re just… balls. Baubles! They don’t even bounce for Christ’s sakes! How could they contain such power?”
The look that crossed Remus’ face at my tirade reminded me so much of an old Classics professor’s. Highbrowed and pompous, he’d been my favorite teacher, but he’d also been the kind of man who, when he proposed a question about something so esoteric that only he could answer it, was utterly stupefied and depressed when none of his students had any idea what he was talking about. He’d simply stand there and stare at us in bewilderment at our stupidity – just as Remus did now.
“You think in such three dimensional terms,” Remus said, spreading his hands wide for effect. “You’re whole
society does. You must think in such ways as so many of your fringe scientists do, ignorant though they really are from what I have garnered from your mind. Concepts like quantum physics, string theory, M-theory only brush against the true complexity of the universe. Those spheres you’re holding…” He brought his arms up and pointed at each orb with a hand. “They are made from a material that you cannot even imagine, and yet their makeup is only but a fraction of what makes them so astounding. It’s what they contain that make them truly special.”
I looked at them, trying to see what I’d failed to see for almost seven years.
Remus noticed and stepped forward. He placed a hand on each orb and lowered them out of view, forcing me to return my eyes to his, eyes that were almost a dead match in color and shape as my own.
“That world I showed you, Jacob…” he said, nodding up into the air but at nothing in particular, “…the one filled with black holes and quasars and neutron stars… it is connected through the Multiverse specifically to these orbs. That world is directly linked to what lies within each of your hands.”
“How?” I asked.
Remus almost smiled. “Quite simply, the objects that you are holding contain nothing more and nothing less than a pair of black holes.”
***
The orbs fell from my hands almost immediately, as if getting rid of them would somehow protect me from the destructive force of a black hole. It was a naïve reaction very much akin to how Boudicca had reacted earlier. They clinked off the hard ground and bounced only once before rolling to a corner of the room off to my right. I watched them roll, wonderment in my eyes at the idea of such a thing being possible, a surprising feeling on such a day of stupendous revelations that seemed to just keep on coming,
“But that’s not possible,” I whispered, my eyes unblinking. “Black holes are nothing more than collapsed stars, so dense that they suck in everything around them, including shit like… I don’t know… light!”
“Is that so?” Remus asked, grasping his hands behind his back again and straightening his posture. “I take it you have visited one and are therefore quite knowledgeable about their nature, yes?”
Finally, I looked away and snarled in annoyance. “No.”
“But these scientists… these talking heads on the Science Channel that you were so fond of`… they, surely, must have analyzed such objects in person themselves, no?”
I shook my head, annoyed and completely aware of where he was going with this. “No. We hadn’t t even traveled past our moon yet. Pathetic, I know.”
“Then why treat this with skepticism?”
I shrugged. “The scientific… theory… behind black holes seems pretty sound. It all has to do with gravity, I think. The idea that black holes do what we think they do fits into how we understand the universe. I think what you’re trying to get at is that the orbs contain… wormholes?”
Remus’ lips tugged upwards and downwards basically at the same time, as though he didn’t know how to feel. “It is just so odd to find a man who has time traveled into the past and has visited parallel worlds to be so disbelieving of such information.”
I held out my hands defensively. “Hey, I’m on board with all this science fiction crap suddenly being turned into science fact, believe me. I love some good technobabble. I’m just a little skeptical. Can you really blame me?”
“Black holes. Wormholes. Interchangeable and discordant,” Remus grumbled, his voice growing heavy with impatience. “One and the same and completely different. Need you question me any further, Jacob Hunter? My patience wears thin.”
My eyes found the ground as I tried to think of anything else to ask him. A million questions were swirling through my mind like matter around a black hole. So many details were still left unanswered, and we had only just touched on the subject of the science behind the orbs. We hadn’t even broached history or interpersonal relationships yet. There was so much I needed to know about Merlin and his influence on history – continued influence – or why Remus was stranded and imprisoned here while Romulus avoided the same fate, what society had exactly been like in the age of Romulus and Remus, who exactly the Old God was, how a pair of shepherd boys had grown up to establish a…
The question hit me like a pair of those neutron stars from earlier smashing into one another, igniting a massive supernova – or worse. I looked up, my eyes hard and full of suspicion, my mind no longer certain what to believe or who to believe. My brow was furrowed so deeply that it almost hurt, but I managed to take a commanding step forward, surprising Remus and forcing him to step back.
“How the fuck does a shepherd boy turned co-founder of a primitive, ancient city know so much about any of this shit?”
No one moved as the last few words parted my lips, the severity of how I’d delivered my question freezing everyone, including Remus. All he could do was stare down at me over his broad but distinguished nose, while Agrippina and Boudicca remained as statuesque as victims of the Greek mythological figure, Medusa.
Heartbeats passed into seconds, which seemed to almost stretch into minutes, until Remus finally closed the distance between us, placed his hands on my shoulders, and looked down at me like a father would his young son. “To answer that,” he said, removing a hand so that he could orient me toward the door, “you must begin your training.”
I smacked his hand off of me with a swipe from my own. “What? I’m not too old to begin my training?”
“Very clever,” he said, although he didn’t seem humored by the comment, “but, please, you must learn to reference new source material on occasion. Now, come.” He turned to Agrippina and lifted a hand toward the door. “Come. We may have all the time in the world, but with so much to accomplish, we don’t have a second to waste.
***
After retrieving the orbs, the four of us returned to the dusky, brown hallway to begin our march toward… wherever we were going. Remus led our formation while Boudicca stalked behind us, her eyes never parting from the back of Agrippina’s head. I would have told her to watch Remus instead, but I didn’t think I could whisper quietly enough so that he didn’t overhear.
Instead, I simply fell into step behind Agrippina, who seemed as serious as I’d ever seen her before, and used every last ounce of willpower I still had to keep myself from wringing her neck with both of my hands until she was nothing more than a lifeless, useless corpse that had done nothing but lie to me for years. It was difficult, but I was able to successful rein in my desire to murder her on the spot, but I couldn’t help but bump my shoulder into her roughly as I came up next to her. She looked at me angrily, but to my surprise, she smothered it and immediately looked sad.
I leaned in close and kept my voice low. “Why didn’t you tell me about this?” I whispered, snapping my head at her as we walked. She flinched away, but her expression didn’t change and she didn’t answer, so I continued. “You think I’m just going to trust you now? We’ve been through too much shit, you and me!”
“Shh!” Agrippina hissed back at me as she risked a glance at Remus. “Be quiet!”
I too peeked at him, but he didn’t seem to react as we approached the makeshift control room. As we entered, I couldn’t help but notice the mind control bands lying on the floor, their existence seeming much more real this time after my short conversation with Remus on the balcony. I still couldn’t really believe everything he’d told me – I’d been lied to enough by just about everybody I’d encountered here in this world, Merlin and Agrippina included – but it was becoming harder and harder to deny that there was certainly more at work here than what I could possibly understand. The very idea that Remus and Merlin, or Faustulus, or whatever his real name was, were from some kind of advanced early civilization that predated modern history wasn’t necessarily farfetched. Scholars, or some would say “scholars”, had been writing and talking about precursor societies for decades. It wasn’t necessarily original, but the scope of what I was dealing with certainly seemed
beyond what anyone had been talking about.
Pyramid builders? Boring…
Aliens? Clichéd…
Atlantis? Who cares…
Manipulators of our genetic makeup? Child’s play…
We were talking about entities that could traverse time and travel between alternate dimensions, things that had been done to death in science fiction or for what passed as science fact on the H2 Channel, but not on this scale – although I’d purposefully tried to ignore most of that nonsense, preferring to stick to programs with more actual science in them. Terraforming a planet to act as a power generator and towing around black holes and neutron stars to create wormholes was a concept that had never even entered my mind.
Before I could think on it anymore, Remus crossed the room in a few short strides and placed his hand against the opposite wall. A concealed door cracked open and Remus had to squeeze his hand between the gap so that he could shove it open, a feat he performed with little effort. He stepped into a dark hallway, and we followed.
I turned to Agrippina again. “Let’s say you’re not lying through your teeth for once,” I said, and she looked at me with a question on her tongue but I held up a finger to silence her. “Let’s say you have absolutely no ulterior motive here and that you really are just helping out your old granddaddy’s brother. Then tell me. What’s his story?”
There was silence for only a second or two. “He wishes to go home.”
“And home is where?”
“When, actually,” she said knowingly. “His home. The moment in time when he was banished.”
I rolled my eyes.
Agrippina’s answer, like so many revelations today, seemed so obvious. Of course he would want to go home. But why? To simply return home? Or were his intentions more devious than that? By Merlin’s account, Remus had simply been trapped in a realm he couldn’t escape from, but Remus’ tale suggested he’d been purposefully imprisoned here. What’s more, Remus had made more sense and been more direct with me than anyone else. Ever. Maybe everything I thought I knew about his disappearance was just another lie among so many. I wanted to believe Merlin, but the evidence seemed more clearly in Remus’ favor.
Praetorian Series [4] All Roads Lead to Rome Page 27
