Gunpowder Empire Page 7

  Things could have been worse. By local standards, Jeremy was very large. That made some of the town’s less charming inhabitants think twice. Unfortunately, they often hunted in packs.

  As much as he could, he stayed out of the alleys and lanes that wound between the main streets. Anything could happen there. The bigger streets, on the other hand, were pretty well patrolled. Gangs mostly steered clear of men with muskets, armor, and short tempers.

  Mostly, though, didn’t mean always. And the vigili couldn’t be everywhere at once. Three locals came up to Jeremy on the street just around the corner from where he was staying. They were his age or a little older: one of them had the fair beginnings of a beard. None of them would ever belong to the Polisso Chamber of Commerce. The one with the shaggy chin said, “You’re not from here, are you?”

  That was a loaded question. If he said yes, they’d call him a liar and jump on him. If he said no, they’d call him a stranger—and jump on him. Even if none of them came up much past his chin, one against three made bad odds. Sometimes people didn’t come back from summer trading runs. He said, “No,” but then, before they could jump on him, “But I’ve got some new jokes from Carnuto.” The town to the west was a reasonable place to say he’d come from.

  And the prospect of jokes was enough to make the punks pause. They could find people to beat up any old time. Jokes were something else, something special. In a world without the Web, TV, radio, movies, and recorded music, entertainment was where you found it. “All right, let’s hear ’em,” said the gangbanger with the whiskers. The other two nodded, trying to look tough. Plainly, they followed his lead. He leaned forward and stuck out his jaw. He was better at being menacing than his pals. “They better be good.”

  “They are.” Jeremy hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. The jokes came from a real Roman joke book called The Laughter-Lover. Dad had got it so the family could have jokes to tell that came from Rome, not from Los Angeles. Trouble was, by Los Angeles standards, they were some of the lamest jokes in the world. With luck, things were different here. Without luck…

  “Go on, then,” Whiskers said.

  “A halfwit wanted to see what he looked like when he was asleep, so he stood in front of the mirror with his eyes closed.”

  Jeremy waited for the punks to commit literary criticism on his person. Instead, they grinned. They didn’t laugh out loud, but they didn’t start kicking him, either. The skinnier one of the pair behind Whiskers got up the nerve to speak for himself: “Tell us another one.”

  “Sure.” Jeremy flogged his memory. “‘ That slave you sold me died yesterday,’ a man told a halfwit. The halfwit said, ‘By the gods, he never did anything like that when I owned him!’”

  Whiskers did laugh this time, which seemed to be the cue for his pals to do the same. “Not bad,” he said. “Keep going.”

  How many can I remember? Jeremy wondered. The ancient Roman joke book did seem better suited to Polisso than to Los Angeles. He brought out another one: “An astrologer cast a horoscope for a sick man and said, ‘You’ll live another twenty years.’ The man said, ‘Come back tomorrow, then, and I’ll give you your fee.’ ‘But what happens if you die tonight?’ the astrologer said.”

  They needed a couple of seconds to get it. When they did, though, they howled scandalized laughter. Despite common sense, some people in Los Angeles believed in astrology. Here, people believed in astrology. They didn’t know all the things about the way the universe worked that people in the home timeline did. Astrology let them think they knew more than they did.

  “Not bad,” Whiskers said. “Not bad at all. I knew a guy like that. He said he knew everything there was to know, but he didn’t even know his girl was seeing somebody else on the side. You got any others?”

  “Sure.” Jeremy told as many jokes as he remembered. Some got laughs. Some were groaners—but if you told a lot of jokes, some would always be groaners. The three punks slapped him on the back. Whiskers reached out and affectionately messed up his hair. After that, they paid him the best compliment they could—they went off and left him alone.

  From then on, he knew he wouldn’t worry when he haggled with people in Polisso. How important was haggling over money or grain, really? He’d just won a dicker for his own skin.

  Mom dug a big blob of bread dough out of an earthenware bowl. She slammed it down on the countertop and started to knead it. Half a meter away, Amanda was chopping cabbage. There was an odd sort of pleasure in making the family’s food from scratch. If it was good, you deserved all the credit. (If it wasn’t, you deserved all the blame. Amanda didn’t like to think about that. If I make it, it will be good, she told herself.)

  Pleasure or not, making food from scratch was much more work than cooking at home. No microwaves here. No computerized ovens that did everything but blow out the candles on a birthday cake. They had a wood-burning oven for baking, and the fireplace for soups and stews and for roasting. That was it.

  Mom paused. “I’m going to bring in a stool,” she said. “I’m sick and tired of standing up.”

  “It’s all right with me.” Amanda hoped she didn’t show how startled she was. Local women always worked standing up in the kitchen. Always. And Mom had always been a stickler for doing things the way people here did them. To see her changing her ways was a surprise.

  Even after she got the stool, she didn’t seem comfortable. She kept shifting her weight, leaning now this way, now that. Watching her made Amanda nervous.

  Finally, when she couldn’t stand it any more, she asked, “Are you all right, Mom?”

  “I’m fine,” her mother said quickly. Too quickly? Her right hand rubbed her stomach and got bits of cabbage on her tunic. “I’ve had kind of a stomach ache the last couple of days, though.”

  “Probably getting used to what Polisso calls food again,” Amanda said.

  “I guess so,” Mom said, but then she contradicted herself: “It doesn’t feel like that.” She shrugged then. “I don’t know what else it could be.” She went back to kneading what would be a loaf. If the dough wasn’t well kneaded, the bread would be dense and chewy.

  “Antibiotics don’t always get everything,” Amanda said. You could catch almost anything from food in Polisso. The only way to be perfectly safe would have been not to eat or drink. Unfortunately, that had drawbacks of its own.

  “It doesn’t feel like food poisoning,” her mother said. “Only an ache. It’s not bad. Just—annoying.” She hardly ever complained. When she did, Amanda worried.

  But there wasn’t time for much worrying. There wasn’t time for anything except chores from dawn till dusk: cooking and washing and cleaning and doing business. After the bread went into the oven, you couldn’t walk away and forget about it till it was done. No thermostats here. Amanda had to watch the fire and feed wood into it at the right rate to keep it from getting too high or too low. Otherwise, the loaves would come out scorched or soggy. Either way, they wouldn’t be worth eating. All the work that went into making them, starting with grinding grain into flour, would be wasted.

  Mom used a flat wooden peel to slide the loaves out of the oven: the same tool a cook at a pizza place used in the home timeline. After the bread had cooled, Amanda ate a piece. She wished she could have said it was far better than anything she could get at home because she’d helped make it herself. She wished she could, but she couldn’t. It was gritty. The quern that ground the grain was made of stone, and tiny bits of it got into the flour. The bread was also coarse-grained; the quern didn’t grind as fine as modern milling machines. And, in spite of everything, it had stayed in the oven a couple of minutes too long. It was okay, but nothing to get excited about.

  Her mother had some, too. Amanda watched to see if she had trouble eating. She didn’t seem to, even if she also looked disappointed at how the bread turned out. Amanda asked, “How do you feel?”

  “I’m all right,” Mom answered. “Like I said, a nuisance, that’s all.”
/>   “Have you told Dad?”

  “Yes, I’ve told your father. He’s the one who wouldn’t tell me. He wouldn’t want me to worry.” Mom rolled her eyes. “I don’t want him to worry, either, but I want him to know what’s going on.”

  “What if it…really is something?” Amanda didn’t want to say that. She didn’t even want to think it. She knew something about loss. Two of her grandparents had died. But Mom and Dad were different. They were supposed to be there, no matter what; they were the rocks at the bottom of her world.

  Part of Amanda knew her parents were people. She knew things could happen to people. The rest of her recoiled from that like a nervous horse shying from a rattler. Move the rocks at the bottom of the world and you made an earthquake.

  Mom came over and gave her a hug. “The very worst that can happen is that I go back to the home timeline for a little while and get it fixed, whatever it is. Then I come back here again. Okay?”

  “Okay.” Amanda hugged her back, hard. She was very, very glad for the transposition chamber down in the subbasement here, just in case. Doctors in Agrippan Rome not only didn’t know anything, they didn’t even suspect anything. The really scary part was, they were better than doctors other places in this world. Roman doctors got fat salaries teaching medicine in Lietuva and Persia.

  That evening, Jeremy got into an argument with Mom over nothing in particular. He would do that every once in a while, mostly because he couldn’t stand admitting he might be wrong. He was right most of the time. That made it harder for him to see he was wrong some of the time. It also made him a first-class pain in the neck.

  And tonight, it made Amanda furious. “You leave Mom alone!” she yelled at him. “Don’t you know anything?”

  Nothing made Jeremy madder than even hinting that he was dumb. “I know what a miserable pest you are,” he said.

  He would have gone on from there, too, but Dad held up a hand. “That will be enough of that,” he said. “That will be enough of that out of both of you, as a matter of fact. There are four of us here, and thousands of people in Polisso. If we can’t count on each other, we may as well go home.”

  It wasn’t that he was wrong. He was right, and Amanda knew it. And he knew Mom wasn’t feeling right, so he’d taken that into account. But so did Jeremy. And he kept steaming. He hadn’t said all he wanted to, and he was itching to let out the rest. He pointed at Amanda. “She started it.”

  “That’s the oldest excuse in the world—in any world,” Dad said. “She got the first word, you got the last word, and that’s plenty. If it goes on from there, the only thing you’ll both do is get angrier. What’s the use? Answer me, please.”

  Jeremy didn’t. Maybe he wanted to. He probably did, in fact. But arguing with Dad was usually like playing chess against the computer at the high level. You could try it, and it would make good practice, and you’d even learn something, but you wouldn’t win.

  Mom sat quietly through the whole thing. She often did during squabbles. Dad enjoyed stamping on fires, and she didn’t. But she seemed too quiet tonight.

  Or maybe I’m imagining things, Amanda thought. She knew she sometimes borrowed trouble. She couldn’t help it, any more than Jeremy could help being a know-it-all. But she feared this trouble didn’t need borrowing. It was really here.

  Most of the house the merchants from Crosstime Traffic used would have seemed ordinary to the people of Polisso. Most, but not all. That was why they had no servants. Servants would have seen things that couldn’t be explained to anybody from this alternate. The basement and subbasement were cases in point.

  Part of the basement wouldn’t have seemed strange to the locals. A lot of houses here had storerooms under them. This one did, too, but its were different.

  Jeremy took a lamp with him when he went down the wooden steps into the storeroom that held sacks of grain, baskets of onions, strings of garlic, and big clay jars full of olive oil and wine and the fermented fish sauce that went into every kind of cooking here the way soy sauce and salsa did back home. As usual, the lamp didn’t defeat darkness. It did push back the hem of its black cloak. Jeremy could walk around without banging his head.

  There was a smooth patch on the wall above one particular jar of wine. Jeremy let his hand rest on it for a moment. Software scanned his palmprint and fingerprints. A well-camouflaged door silently slid open. The camouflage was all the better down here, with only lamplight to see by.

  As soon as Jeremy walked through the door, it closed behind him. Real lights, electric lights, came on in the ceiling. High-capacity batteries powered them—and everything else down here. The flickering flame of the lamp was suddenly next to invisible. Jeremy blew it out. He would light it again when he left the basement.

  The wall behind the palm lock was reinforced concrete. So was the ceiling. The locals might be able to blow them open, but they wouldn’t have an easy time of it. The subbasement where the transposition chamber came and went had another layer of shielding. But the most important shield was making sure nobody in Polisso suspected the house had a special basement, let alone a subbasement.

  On a table sat a PowerBook. It was sleeping to save power. Jeremy touched a key to rouse the laptop. It was the house’s link to the home timeline and all the alternates Crosstime Traffic visited. “Michael Fujikawa,” he said into the microphone, and then an eight-digit number that defined the alternate where his friend was spending the summer.

  “Go ahead,” the computer told him.

  “You around, Michael?” Jeremy asked. “It’s me, Jeremy.” He didn’t really expect that Michael would be there. North China, where his parents traded, was six hours ahead of Romania. Michael would probably be snoring in the wee small hours. “How’s it with you? What you been up to? Give me a yell when you get a chance. ’Bye.”

  The PowerBook turned Jeremy’s spoken words into written ones. Text took up a lot less bandwidth to send than voice did. Jeremy knew he ought to go back up into the world of Agrippan Rome. Instead, he started a game. The computer, which was playing the aliens invading Earth, was knocking the snot out of him when the incoming-message bell rang.

  “Quit. Don’t save,” Jeremy said with relief. The twisted World War II vanished from the screen. He wouldn’t lose tonight, anyway. A human player would have screamed at him for grabbing the excuse to bail out. The PowerBook didn’t care.

  Words formed on the monitor. Hey, Jeremy, Michael said. Good to hear from you. I was wondering when I would.

  “We’ve been getting settled in,” Jeremy said. “You could have messaged me, too, you know. And what are you doing up so early?”

  Sunrise ceremony today—yawn, Michael answered. We’ve been busy, same as you. It happens. How’s business?

  “Pretty good,” Jeremy said. “The locals are starting to wonder how come we can do things they can’t, though. One of them gave my sister a hard time about it. They may start trying to snoop harder. That wouldn’t be so good, not when traders have spent so much time making connections here.”

  If you have to pull out, you have to pull out. Plenty of alternates, and they’re all easy to get to. Crosstime will find one that’s not too different, and you’ll start over. Michael could be practical to the point of cynicism.

  “I suppose so.” Jeremy knew Crosstime Traffic had had to abandon some alternates. Most of those had technology a lot higher than Agrippan Rome’s, though. And that wasn’t really what was on his mind, anyhow. After a pause, he said, “Other thing that’s been going on here is, Mom doesn’t feel good.”

  What’s wrong? The question came back at once. Michael had spent so much time at the Solters’ house, Mom sometimes seemed to be almost as much his mother as Jeremy’s.

  “Some kind of stomach trouble,” Jeremy said.

  Something she ate?

  “Maybe. I hope so. That would be the easiest to fix and the least to worry about,” Jeremy answered. As he spoke, the dictation program on the PowerBook put his worries on the monitor, w
here he could see them as well as think them. He didn’t like that. It made them seem more real. When he said, “The antibiotics she took didn’t do much,” the words on the screen took on a frightening importance.

  They also must have seemed important to Michael, who was reading them not just in another place but in another universe. That doesn’t sound so good, he said. Do you think she’ll have to go back to the home line to get it looked at?

  “I don’t know,” Jeremy said. On the monitor, that looked very bald and very helpless. “As long as she’s all right, nothing else matters.”

  Sure, Michael replied. Listen, tell her I hope she’s feeling better. He wasn’t somebody who talked for the sake of being polite. What he said, he meant. He went on: I wish I were close enough to do something. You let me know what’s going on, you hear? You don’t, you’re in big trouble when I see you this fall.

  “I will,” Jeremy said. “Thanks.” Michael wouldn’t tell him anything like, If you need somebody to talk to, I’m here. Coming right out with something like that would only embarrass both of them. But there were ways to get the message across without saying the words.

  Take care of yourself. I’ve got to go. The rising sun is calling me. Like Jeremy, Michael took part in rituals he didn’t fully believe in. The locals believed in them, and that was what counted.

  “You watch yourself, too.” Jeremy waited for an answer…and waited, and waited. Michael really had gone, then. Jeremy softly said something else—softly, but not quite softly enough. The words formed on the PowerBook’s screen. He laughed. “Erase last six,” he said, and they disappeared.

  He wanted to say something that would make the monitor burst into flames. But that wouldn’t help, either, even if it might make him feel better for a little while. He didn’t know what would help. He didn’t know if anything would help.

  He was seventeen. He took care of most things on his own. Some of them, his folks never found out about. Taking care of your own troubles—learning how to take care of your own troubles—was a big part of what growing up was about. But having Mom and Dad there as backups felt awfully good. And when the trouble was that something was wrong with one of them…He said some more things he had to tell the computer to erase.