The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories (86 page)

When I woke, I thought it might have been a dream, because he was up and gone before me. But his bed had been slept in, however briefly, and the cabin steward reassured me when he brought my morning wine. Yes, Citizen Flavius Samuelus was certainly on the hover. He was in the captain’s own quarters, as a matter of fact, although what he was doing there the steward could not say.

I spent the morning relaxing on the deck of the hover, soaking in the sun. The ship wasn’t exactly a hover any more. We had transited the Sicilian Straits during the night and now, out in the open Mediterranean, the captain had lowered the stilts, pulled up the hover skirts, and extended the screws. We were hydrofoiling across the sea at easily a hundred miles an hour. It was a smooth, relaxing ride; the vanes that supported us were twenty feet under the surface of the water, and so there was no wave action to bounce us around.

Lying on my back and squinting up at the warm southern sky, I could see a three-winged airliner rise up from the horizon behind us and gradually overtake us, to disappear ahead of our bows. The plane wasn’t going much faster than we were - and we had all the comfort, while they were paying twice as much for passage.

I opened my eyes all the way when I caught a glimpse of someone standing beside me. In fact, I sat up quickly, because it was Sam. He looked as though he hadn’t had much sleep, and he was holding a floppy sun hat with one hand against the wind of our passage. “Where’ve you been?” I asked.

“Haven’t you been watching the news?” he asked. I shook my head. “The transmissions from the Olympians have stopped,” he told me.

I opened my eyes really wide at that, because it was an unpleasant surprise. Still, Sam didn’t seem that upset. Displeased, yes. Maybe even a little concerned, but not as shaken up as I was prepared to feel. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “It could be just interference from the sun. It’s in Sagittarius now, so it’s pretty much between us and them. There’s been trouble with static for a couple of days now.”

I ventured, “So the transmissions will start up again pretty soon?”

He shrugged and waved to the deck steward for one of those hot decoctions Judaeans like. When he spoke it was on a different topic. “I don’t think I made you understand what I meant yesterday,” he said. “Let me see if I can explain what I meant by an alternate world. You remember your history? How Fornius Velio conquered the Mayans and Romanized the Western Continents six or seven hundred years ago? Well, suppose he hadn’t.”

“But he did, Sam.”

“I know he did,” Sam said patiently. “I’m saying
suppose.
Suppose the Legions had been defeated at the Battle of Tehultapec.”

I laughed. I was sure he was joking. “The Legions? Defeated? But the Legions have never been defeated.”

“That’s not true,” Sam said in reproof. He hates it when people don’t get their facts straight. “Remember Varus.”

“Oh, hells, Sam, that was ancient history! When was it, two thousand years ago? In the time of Augustus Caesar? And it was only a temporary defeat, anyway. The Emperor Drusus got the eagles back.” And got all of Gaul for the Empire, too. That was one of the first big trans-Alpine conquests. The Gauls are about as Roman as you can get these days, especially when it comes to drinking wine.

He shook his head. “Suppose Fornius Velio had had a temporary defeat, then.”

I tried to follow his argument, but it wasn’t easy. “What difference would that have made? Sooner or later the Legions would have conquered. They always have, you know.”

“That’s true,” he said reasonably, “but if that particular conquest hadn’t happened
then,
the whole course of history would have been different. We wouldn’t have had the great westward migrations to fill up those empty continents. The Hans and the Hinds wouldn’t have been surrounded on both sides, so they might still be independent nations. It would have been a different world. Do you see what I’m driving at? That’s what I mean by an alternate world - one that might have happened, but didn’t.”

I tried to be polite to him. “Sam,” I said, “you’ve just described the difference between a sci-rom and a fantasy. I don’t do fantasy. Besides,” I went on, not wanting to hurt his feelings, “I don’t see how different things would have been, really. I can’t believe the world would be changed enough to build a sci-rom plot on.”

He gazed blankly at me for a moment, then turned and looked out to sea. Then, without transition, he said, “There’s one funny thing. The Martian colonies aren’t getting a transmission, either. And they aren’t occluded by the sun.”

I frowned. “What does that mean, Sam?”

He shook his head. “I wish I knew,” he said.

* * * *

Chapter 3

In Old Alexandria

The Pharos was bright in the sunset light as we came into the port of Alexandria. We were on hover again, at slow speeds, and the chop at the breakwater bumped us around. But once we got to the inner harbour the water was calm.

Sam had spent the afternoon back in the captain’s quarters, keeping in contact with the Collegium of Sciences, but he showed up as we moored. He saw me gazing towards the rental desk on the dock but shook his head. “Don’t bother with a rental, Julie,” he ordered. “Let my niece’s servants take your baggage. We’re staying with her.”

That was good news. Inn rooms in Alexandria are almost as pricey as Rome’s. I thanked him, but he didn’t even listen. He turned our bags over to a porter from his niece’s domicile, a little Arabian who was a lot stronger than he looked, and disappeared towards the Hall of the Egyptian Senate-Inferior, where the conference was going to be held.

I hailed a three-wheeler and gave the driver the address of Sam’s niece.

No matter what the Egyptians think, Alexandria is a dirty little town. The Choctaws have a bigger capital, and the Kievans have a cleaner one. Also Alexandria’s famous library is a joke. After my (one would like to believe) ancestor Julius Caesar let it burn to the ground, the Egyptians did build it up again But it is so old-fashioned that there’s nothing in it but books.

The home of Sam’s niece was in a particularly run-down section of that run-down town, only a few streets from the harbourside. You could hear the noise of the cargo winches from the docks, but you couldn’t hear them very well because of the noise of the streets themselves, thick with goods vans and drivers cursing each other as they jockeyed around the narrow corners. The house itself was bigger than I had expected. But, at least from the outside, that was all you could say for it. It was faced with cheap Egyptian stucco rather than marble, and right next door to it was a slave-rental barracks.

At least, I reminded myself, it was free. I kicked at the door and shouted for the butler.

It wasn’t the butler who opened it for me. It was Sam’s niece herself, and she was a nice surprise. She was almost as tall as I was and just as fair. Besides, she was young and very good-looking. “You must be Julius,” she said. “I am Rachel, niece of Citizen Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus, and I welcome you to my home.”

I kissed her hand. It’s a Kievan custom that I like, especially with pretty girls I don’t yet know well, but hope to. “You don’t look Judaean,” I told her.

“You don’t look like a sci-rom hack,” she replied. Her voice was less chilling than her words, but not much. “Uncle Sam isn’t here, and I’m afraid I’ve got work I must do. Basilius will show you to your rooms and offer you some refreshment.”

* * * *

I usually make a better first impression on young women. I usually work at it more carefully, but she had taken me by surprise. I had more or less expected that Sam’s niece would look more or less like Sam, except probably for the baldness and the wrinkled face. I could not have been more wrong.

I had been wrong about the house, too. It was a big one. There had to be well over a dozen rooms, not counting servants’ quarters, and the atrium was covered with one of those partly reflecting films that keep the worst of the heat out.

The famous Egyptian sun was directly overhead when Basilius, Rachel’s butler, showed me my rooms. They were pleasingly bright and airy, but Basilius suggested I might enjoy being outside. He was right. He brought me wine and fruits in the atrium, a pleasant bench by a fountain. Through the film the sun looked only pale and pleasant instead of deadly hot. The fruit was fresh, too - pineapples from Lebanon, oranges from Judaea, apples that must have come all the way from somewhere in Gaul. The only thing wrong that I could see was that Rachel herself stayed in her rooms, so I didn’t have a chance to try to put myself in a better light with her.

She had left instructions for my comfort, though. Basilius clapped his hands and another servant appeared, bearing stylus and tablets in case I should decide to work. I was surprised to see that both Basilius and the other one were Africs; they don’t usually get into political trouble, or trouble with the aediles of any kind, so not many of them are slaves.

The fountain was a Cupid statue. In some circumstances I would have thought of that as a good sign, but here it didn’t seem to mean anything. Cupid’s nose was chipped, and the fountain was obviously older than Rachel was. I thought of just staying there until Rachel came out, but when I asked Basilius when that would be he gave me a look of delicate patronizing. “Citizeness Rachel works through the afternoon, Citizen Julius,” he informed me.

“Oh? And what does she work at?”

“Citizeness Rachel is a famous historian,” he said. “She often works straight through until bedtime. But for you and her uncle, of course, dinner will be served at your convenience.”

He was quite an obliging fellow. “Thank you, Basilius,” I said. “I believe I’ll go out for a few hours myself.” And then, as he turned politely to go, I said curiously, “You don’t look like a very dangerous criminal. If you don’t mind my asking, what were you enslaved for?”

“Oh, not for anything violent, Citizen Julius,” he assured me. “Just for debts.

* * * *

I found my way to the Hall of the Egyptian Senate-Inferior easily enough. There was a lot of traffic going that way, because it is, after all, one of the sights of Alexandria.

The Senate-Inferior wasn’t in session at the time. There was no reason it should have been, of course, because what did the Egyptians need a Senate of any kind for? The time when they’d made any significant decisions for themselves was many centuries past.

They’d spread themselves for the conference, though. The Senate Temple had niches for at least half a hundred gods. There were the customary figures of Amon-Ra and Jupiter and all the other main figures of the pantheon, of course, but for the sake of the visitors they had installed Ahura-Mazda, Yahweh, Freya, Quetzalcoatl, and at least a dozen I didn’t recognize at all. They were all decorated with fresh sacrifices of flowers and fruits, showing that the tourists, if not the astronomers - and probably the astronomers as well - were taking no chances in getting communications with the Olympians restored. Scientists are an agnostic lot, of course - well, most educated people are, aren’t they? But even an agnostic will risk a piece of fruit to placate a god, just on the chance he’s wrong.

Outside the hall, hucksters were already putting up their stands, although the first sessions wouldn’t begin for another day. I bought some dates from one of them and wandered around, eating dates and studying the marble frieze on the wall of the Senate. It showed the rippling fields of corn, wheat, and potatoes that had made Egypt the breadbasket of the Empire for two thousand years. It didn’t show anything about the Olympians, of course. Space is not a subject that interests the Egyptians a lot. They prefer to look back on their glorious (they
say
it’s glorious) past; and there would have been no point in having the conference on the Olympians there at all, except who wants to go to some northern city in December?

Inside, the great hall was empty, except for slaves arranging seat cushions and cuspidors for the participants. The exhibit halls were noisy with workers setting up displays, but they didn’t want people dropping in to bother them, and the participants’ lounges were dark.

I was lucky enough to find the media room open. It was always good for a free glass of wine, and besides, I wanted to know where everyone was. The slave in charge couldn’t tell me. “There’s supposed to be a private executive meeting somewhere, that’s all I know - and there’s all these journalists looking for someone to interview.” And then, peering over my shoulder as I signed in: “Oh, you’re the fellow that writes the sci-roms, aren’t you? Well, maybe one of the journalists would settle for you.”