Gunpowder Empire Read online

  Amanda pointed to a bin full of apples that were almost the same color as the navel oranges across the aisle from them. “What are these?”

  “They’re weird,” Jeremy said. He was suspicious of unfamiliar food.

  Amanda wasn’t. “Let’s try them.” She picked out two nice ones and dropped them into the bag. Even though petroleum didn’t get burned much any more, it still had a million uses. Making every kind of plastic under the sun was one of the most important.

  As if to make up for the orange apples’ strangeness, Jeremy chose two golden deliciouses from the RAISED RIGHT HERE bin. He pulled off a bag of his own. In went the apples. Even so, he pointed at the sign and said, “That’s really lame. We’re so mixed up with the alternates by now, who can tell what started out here and what didn’t? And who cares, anyway?”

  “Some people don’t like anything new. Some people probably didn’t like TV and telephones when they were first starting up,” Amanda said. She took an apple from a different bin.

  Her brother grabbed another one, too. “I know, I know. They ought to look at what things are like in some of the alternates. That would teach them a lesson.”

  “I doubt it,” Amanda said. “People like that don’t learn lessons.”

  “Don’t I wish you were wrong.” Jeremy put another apple in his sack. “How much have we got?” They set both bags of apples on the tray of a produce scale, and added fruit till they had two kilos. Then they took the bags to the express checkout line.

  The checker gave them a dirty look. “Why didn’t you buy all the same kind?” he said.

  “Because we like different kinds,” Amanda answered.

  “But they all have different prices per kilo,” the checker grumbled. Jeremy probably would have got angry by himself. Amanda only smiled, which worked better. The checker muttered something, but he pulled out his handheld so he could see which kind cost what. He looked at the total on the register. “It comes to 557 dollars.”

  “Here.” Amanda gave him five benjamins, a fifty-dollar piece, and a smaller ten-dollar coin. He ran the benjamins through a reader to make sure they were genuine, then put them and the coins in the register. He gave her back three little aluminum dollars. She stuck them in the hip pocket of her shorts.

  Jeremy grabbed the apples. “Come on,” he said, looking at his watch. “There’ll be a northbound bus in five minutes.”

  They crossed the street and caught the bus. It wasn’t a school bus, so they had to pay 125 dollars each for the ride. From the stop where they got off, it was two blocks to their house. A squirrel was nibbling something under the mulberry tree in the front yard. Fafhrd watched it wistfully from a window. The big red tabby was an indoor cat. That kept him safe from cars and dogs and the occasional raccoon and coyote, to say nothing of fleas and other cats with bad tempers. He still knew what he was supposed to hunt, though. Every line of his body said, If I ever get the chance, that squirrel is dinner.

  “Poor thing,” Amanda said as she walked up the brick path to the front door. She didn’t mean it. Fafhrd was an indoor cat because the last one they’d had hadn’t looked both ways before he crossed the street.

  She opened the door. She and her brother hadn’t even got out of the front hall when their mother called from the kitchen, “Did you remember the apples?”

  “Yes, Mother,” Amanda said, and then, under her breath, “I knew she was going to do that.” Jeremy nodded. Raising her voice again, Amanda went on, “Why didn’t you call when we were on the bus, to make sure?”

  She’d intended that for sarcasm. Her mom took it literally. “Well, I was going to,” she said, “but your Aunt Beth called me just then, and I got to talking with her. I forgot what time it was till I saw you out front. I’m glad you remembered all by yourselves.” She’d never believe they weren’t still four years old.

  As they took the apples into the kitchen. Fafhrd rubbed against their ankles and tried to get them to trip over him. Amanda bent down and scratched behind his whiskers. He purred for fifteen seconds or so, then trotted away. Yes, she still adored him. That was all he’d needed to know.

  “What kind did you get?” their mother asked when they plopped the apples on the kitchen table. Melissa Solters looked like an older, shorter version of Amanda. Jeremy got his lighter brown hair and eyes that were hazel instead of brown from their father.

  “You didn’t say you wanted any kind in particular, so we bought a bunch of different ones,” he said now.

  “Don’t be ridiculous,” Mom said. “Apples don’t—”

  “Grow in bunches.” Amanda waved a finger at her. “I knew you were going to do that.” Mom made silly jokes. Dad, on the other hand, made puns. Amanda had never decided which was worse.

  “Haven’t seen these funny-colored ones before,” Mom said, peering into the bag. “They must be from a newly opened alternate.”

  “Orange you glad we got them?” Jeremy asked, deadpan. He took after Dad in more ways than looks. Amanda felt like taking after him, preferably with a baseball bat.

  “How was school today?” Mom asked. Either she hadn’t noticed what Jeremy had said or she was pretending she hadn’t. Sometimes it was one, sometimes the other. Amanda could never be sure which.

  “Okay,” she answered. “I got an A-minus on my lit paper.”

  “In my day—” Mom shook her head. “They’ve tightened up since my day. Most people got A’s then. An A-minus meant you weren’t doing so well.”

  “What’s the point of having grades if everybody gets the same thing?” Amanda asked.

  “I don’t know. I guess that’s why they tightened up. It’s not the first time they’ve had to do it, either,” Mom said. “Getting rid of grade inflation, they call it. The other kind of inflation, the kind with money, just goes on and on. When your grandfather was little, a dollar was worth almost as much as a benjamin is now.”

  Amanda thought about bygone days when people got good grades without working hard. She thought about even more distant days, when dollars were real money instead of afterthoughts in small change. The only answer she could see was that she’d been born in the wrong time.

  The last day of school was always a half-day. When the final bell rang at twenty past twelve, soft whoops—and a couple that weren’t so soft—came from every corner of Jeremy’s homeroom. “Have a great summer,” the teacher said. “See you in September.”

  Out trooped the students. They were saying, “Have a great summer,” too, and, “See you senior year,” and, “See you online,” and all the other things Jeremy had said and heard ever since the first grade. Somebody from another class started singing,

  “No more stylus, no more screen,

  No more teachers—they’re obscene.”

  Other boys and girls—mostly boys—joined in right away. People always did. Jeremy couldn’t see why. Kids escaping school had probably sung that song since the days of the Pyramids.

  Jeremy waved to Michael Fujikawa, who was coming out of a room a few doors down. When they were smaller, they’d got together almost every day during summer vacation. Not now. Now it was, “See you in September.” They both said it at the same time, and not just because they didn’t live two houses apart any more.

  “Good luck in your alternate,” Jeremy added.

  “Same to you,” Michael said. His parents traded in an Asian-dominated alternate world, the same as Jeremy’s did in Agrippan Rome. In the alternate where the Fujikawas worked, Chinese fleets had kept Europeans out of the Indian Ocean. Trade patterns and all later history were very different there. These days, Japanese warlords dominated China in that alternate, as German warlords had dominated the Roman Empire here. Michael went on, “It’ll be good getting back. I’m starting to know people over there, too.”

  Jeremy nodded. “So am I. But it’s not the same. It can’t be the same. Too many things we know, but we can’t tell them.”

  “Yeah.” Michael walked on for a few steps. Then he said, “Friends ar
e one thing. I wonder what happens if you fall in love in an alternate.”

  “People have,” Jeremy said. “They say people have, anyway. It’s usually supposed to be a mess. I don’t see how it can be anything else.” He didn’t even want to think about that. Instead, he changed the subject: “I miss the days when we could fool around together all summer long.”

  “Me, too. Text messages just aren’t the same,” Michael said. “I wish there was bandwidth enough for video between alternates.”

  “There is—if you’re a gazillionaire,” Jeremy said. That disgusted him. If you were rich enough, you could get whatever you wanted. If you weren’t, you had to put up with e-mail as primitive as it had been a hundred years earlier. Even still-photo attachments were iffy.

  “We’ll be glad to see each other when school starts, that’s all,” Michael said.

  “Sure.” Jeremy nodded again. “You be careful, you hear?” That wasn’t idle advice. Michael was going to a violent place. What warlords there wanted, they reached out and took. People who didn’t like it could easily end up dead.

  “You, too,” Michael told him.

  “Me? Don’t worry about me. I’ll be fine.” Jeremy laughed. “Hardly anything ever happens in Agrippan Rome. The Empire’s more than two thousand years old there, and they’ve spent all that time making it more complicated. You have to fill out sixteen different forms before you can swat a fly, let alone catch a mouse.” He was exaggerating, but only a little.

  “Be careful anyway,” Michael said. “If you’re not careful, you get in trouble.” Jeremy’s folks always said the same thing. He didn’t mind it so much from his friend. Michael pointed. “There’s your sister.” He waved. “Hi, Amanda.” When he and Jeremy were smaller, he’d done his best not to notice her. Now he was polite.

  “Hi, Michael,” she said, and then started, “‘No more stylus, no more screen—’”

  “Not you, too!” Jeremy broke in.

  “Why not?” Amanda said. “They sing the same kind of song in Polisso, where we’re going.” She started a chant in neoLatin.

  “In my alternate, too,” Michael said, and sang in the Japanese-Chinese pidgin merchants used there. That didn’t mean anything to Jeremy, who’d never soaked up the language through his implant. Michael had taught him a few phrases, most of them dirty, but he didn’t hear any of those. He’d done the same for his friend with neoLatin, which was an excellent language to swear in.

  “Here comes our bus, Jeremy,” Amanda said. “Last time this year. I like that.”

  “Everybody likes that,” Michael said.

  Jeremy grabbed his hand before getting on the bus with Amanda. “We’ll message back and forth all the time.”

  “Sure,” Michael said. “See you. So long, Amanda.”

  “So long,” Amanda said. As she and Jeremy climbed into the bus, she added, in a low voice, “I didn’t used to think much of Michael, but he’s okay.”

  “He is the best of men,” Jeremy said in neoLatin. His sister poked him in the ribs.

  She sat down with a girl she knew. Jeremy sat in the seat right behind her. Somebody in the back of the bus sang out, “‘ No more stylus, no more…’” Jeremy stuck his fingers in his ears. The guy who’d sat down beside him laughed.

  People called good-byes as their friends got off the bus. They waved through the windows. The ones who’d left waved back and then headed home. Some would go out to the alternates for the summer. Some would work here. Some would just take it easy till September. Lucky, Jeremy thought.

  Jeremy and Amanda got out at their stop. He hurried up the street toward their house. “What’s the rush?” Amanda called.

  “Don’t you want to finish packing so we can leave?” Jeremy asked. He wished they could have left weeks ago. Amanda didn’t need to think very long. She caught up with him in three long strides. They went on together.

  Amanda’s stomach didn’t have time to do more than lurch on the suborbital hop to Romania. Then weight returned, the sky went from black to blue once more, and down they came, outside of Bucharest. “Now for customs,” Jack Solters said. “That’ll take longer than getting here did.”

  Amanda thought her father was exaggerating. He turned out not to be. They stood in line for an hour and a half before a man in a muddy brown uniform examined their passports with microscopic care. He took their thumbprints and retinal prints and compared them to the data in the passports. “Purpose of your visit?” he asked. He spoke with a thick accent. Romania wasn’t a wealthy country. Not many people here had implants. The customs man had learned English the hard way, the old-fashioned way. It showed.

  “We are in transit,” Dad answered. “We are doing business in an alternate.”

  “Papers,” the customs man said.

  “Right here.” Amanda’s father handed him a thick sheaf of them. Some were in English, others in Romanian. The official called over another man in a fancier uniform. They put their heads together and talked in their own language. Amanda thought she recognized a word here and there. Romanian and the neoLatin she knew both sprang from classical Latin, though they’d gone in different directions.

  Dad spoke up in fluent Romanian. He’d learned it through his implant. The man in the fancier uniform answered him. They went back and forth for a minute or two. The Romanian gestured. He and Dad stepped off to one side. They talked some more. Then they smiled and shook hands. After that, everything went smoothly. The junior customs man stamped the Solters’ passports. No one searched their bags. They went on to the rental-car counter.

  As they drove the little, natural gas-powered Fiat north and west up Highway E-68, Jeremy said, “What did you do, Dad? Slip him a couple of hundred benjamins?”

  “Of course not,” their father answered. “That would be illegal.”

  At the same time, Mom pointed to the dome light. Jeremy looked blank. Amanda got it right away. She grabbed her stylus and scribbled on the screen of her handheld. She showed it to Jeremy: THE CAR’S BUGGED, DUMMY.

  He stared at the dome light. Amanda couldn’t figure out why he would do that. For somebody who was smart—and Jeremy was, no doubt about it—he could act pretty foolish sometimes. A microphone right out there in the open where anybody could see it wouldn’t make much of a bug.

  “Oh,” Jeremy said—much later than he should have. “Sure.”

  From Bucharest to Moigrad, the little town by the site of what was Polisso in the alternate and had been Porolissum in ancient days, was a little less than four hundred kilometers. The Fiat wheezed and chugged going over the Transylvanian Alps. They drove through Cluj, the only good-sized town between Bucharest and Moigrad, an hour before they finally got where they were going.

  In this world, Porolissum was a ruin, a place where archaeologists dug. A hundred years earlier, they’d rebuilt one gate to look the way it had back in Roman days. Amanda supposed they’d been trying to lure tourists. They hadn’t had much luck. If Moigrad wasn’t the middle of nowhere, you could see it from there.

  The reconstructed gate didn’t look much like the one in Polisso. That had bothered Amanda when she saw first one and then the other. It didn’t any more. In the alternate, Polisso had been a going concern for two millennia. People there must have repaired or rebuilt the gate half a dozen times.

  With a sigh of relief, Dad parked in front of the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad. Two men in the white, grays, and black of urban camouflage came out of the building. They both carried assault rifles. “Are they guards or bandits?” Jeremy asked.

  “Guards,” Dad said. In a low voice, he went on, “Romania’s poor, and it’s proud. Not everybody here likes multinationals.”

  Amanda eyed the rifles. That sounds like an understatement, she thought. Her father rolled down his window. He spoke to the guards in Romanian. They smiled, but the smiles didn’t reach their eyes. One of them said something. Dad handed him his passport. The guard studied it, nodded, and gave it back. He spoke again.

  �
�Show him your passports, too,” Jack Solters said. Mom and Amanda and Jeremy got out the documents. They handed them to Dad, who gave them to the guard. He looked them over, then returned them. He nodded again. He and his partner stepped back and waved toward the office.

  “Looks like we’re okay,” Mom said. She opened the car door. As she got out and stretched, the second guard said something.

  Dad translated: “Our luggage will have to go through the sniffer. He knows we are who we say we are, but they aren’t making any exceptions.”

  “I don’t mind,” Amanda said. “Have they had trouble here?”

  After some back-and-forth with the guards in Romanian, Dad shook his head. “He says they haven’t, and they don’t want any, either. They’ve got some hotheads, some big talkers, and they aren’t taking any chances.”

  “Don’t people realize what a mess we’d be in without the alternates?” Amanda said.

  “In a word,” Dad answered, “no.”

  Two

  Going from the home timeline to an alternate should have been dramatic. It should have been exciting. Jeremy had seen video of a Saturn rocket blasting off for the moon. This should have been something like that, all noise and flame. Why not? He and his family were traveling between worlds, too.

  No drama here, though. They sat in the same kind of seats as they had for the suborbital hop from Los Angeles to Bucharest. They got even less leg room here than they’d had in the shuttlecraft. They couldn’t see out. Jeremy had always wished you could see things change as you passed from one alternate to the next. Things didn’t work out that way, though. When you traveled between alternates, you weren’t properly in any of them till you stopped. That meant there was nothing to see, and no point to a window.

  One by one, the family changed into clothes that wouldn’t look out of place in Polisso. Tank tops and shorts wouldn’t do. Sandals would, but not sandals of bright blue-and-red plastic.