Delenda Est

3

“And now what?” Van Sarawak slumped on his cot and stared at the floor.

“We play along,” said Everard grayly. “We do anything to get at our scooter and escape. Once we’re free, we can take stock.”

“But what happened?”

“I don’t know, I tell you! Offhand, it looks as if something upset the Graeco-Romans and the Celts took over, but I couldn’t say what it was.” Everard prowled the room. A bitter determination was growing in him.

“Remember your basic theory,” he said. “Events are the result of a complex. There are no single causes. That’s why it’s so hard to change history. If I went back to, say, the Middle Ages, and shot one of F.D.R.’s Dutch forebears, he’d still be born in the late nineteenth century—because he and his genes resulted from the entire world of his ancestors, and there’d have been compensation. But every so often, a really key event does occur. Some one happening is a nexus of so many world lines that its outcome is decisive for the whole future.

“Somehow, for some reason, somebody has ripped up one of those events, back in the past.”

“No more Hesperus City,” mumbled Van Sarawak. “No more sitting by the canals in the blue twilight, no more Aphrodite vintages, no more—did you know I had a sister on Venus?”

“Shut up!” Everard almost shouted it. “I know. To hell with that. What counts is what we can do.

“Look,” he went on after a moment, “the Patrol and the Danellians are wiped out. (Don’t ask me why they weren’t ‘always’ wiped out; why this is the first time we came back from the far past to find a changed future. I don’t understand the mutable-time paradoxes. We just did, that’s all.) But anyhow, such of the Patrol offices and resorts as antedate the switchpoint won’t have been affected. There must be a few hundred agents we can rally.”

“If we can get back to them.”

“We can then find that key event and stop what-ever interference there was with it. We’ve got to!”

“A pleasant thought. But…”

Feet tramped outside. A key clicked in the lock. The prisoners backed away. Then, all at once, Van Sarawak was bowing and beaming and spilling gallantries. Even Everard had to gape.

The girl who entered in front of three soldiers was a knockout. She was tall, with a sweep of rusty-red hair past her shoulders to the slim waist; her eyes were green and alight, her face came from all the Irish colleens who had ever lived; the long white dress was snug around a figure meant to stand on the walls of Troy. Everard noticed vaguely that this timeline used cosmetics, but she had small need of them. He paid no attention to the gold and amber of her jewelry, or to the guns behind her.

She smiled, a little timidly, and spoke: “Can you understand me? It was thought you might know Greek.”

Her language was classical rather than modern. Everard, who had once had a job in Alexandrine times, could follow it through her accent if he paid close heed—which was inevitable anyway.

“Indeed I do,” he replied, his words stumbling over each other in their haste to get out.

“What are you snakkering?” demanded Van Sarawak.

“Ancient Greek,” said Everard.

“It would be,” mourned the Venusian. His despair seemed to have vanished, and his eyes bugged.

Everard introduce himself and his companion. The girl said her name was Deirdre Mac Morn. “Oh, no,” groaned Van Sarawak. “This is too much. Manse, teach me Greek. Fast.”

“Shut up,” said Everard. “This is serious business.”

“Well, but can’t I have some of the business?”

Everard ignored him and invited the girl to sit down. He joined her on a cot, while the other Patrolman hovered unhappily by. The guards kept their weapons ready.

“Is Greek still a living language?” asked Everard.

“Only in Parthia, and there it is most corrupt,” said Deirdre. “I am a classical scholar, among other things. Saorann ap Ceorn is my uncle, so he asked me to see if I could talk with you. Not many in Afallon know the Attic tongue.”

“Well—” Everard suppressed a silly grin—“I am most grateful to your uncle.”

Her eyes rested gravely on him. “Where are you from? And how does it happen that you speak only Greek, of all known languages?”

“I speak Latin too.”

“Latin?” She frowned in thought. “Oh, the Roman speech, was it not? I am afraid you will find no one who knows much about it.”

“Greek will do,” said Everard firmly.

“But you have not told me whence you came,” she insisted.

Everard shrugged. “We’ve not been treated very politely,” he hinted.

“I’m sorry.” It seemed genuine. “But our people are so excitable. Especially now, with the international situation what it is. And when you two appeared out of thin air.…”

Everard introduced himself and his companion. That had an unpleasantly familiar ring. “What do you mean?” he inquired.

“Surely you know. With Huy Braseal and Hinduraj about to go to war, and all of us wondering what will happen.… It is not easy to be a small power.”

“A small power? But I saw a map. Afallon looked big enough to me.”

“We wore ourselves out two hundred years ago, in the great war with Littorn. Now none of our confederated states can agree on a single policy.” Deirdre looked directly into his eyes. “What is this ignorance of yours?”

Everard swallowed and said, “We’re from another world.”

“What?”

“Yes. A planet (no, that means ‘wanderer’)… an orb encircling Sirius. That’s our name for a certain star.”

“But—what do you mean? A world attendant on a star? I cannot understand you.”

“Don’t you know? A star is a sun like.…”

Deirdre shrank back and made a sign with her finger. “The Great Baal aid us,” she whispered. “Either you are mad or.… The stars are mounted in a crystal sphere.”

Oh, no!

“What of the wandering stars you can see?” asked Everard slowly. “Mars and Venus and—”

“I know not those names. If you mean Moloch, Ashtoreth, and the rest, of course they are worlds like ours, attendant on the sun like our own. One holds the spirits of the dead, one is the home of witches, one.…”

All this and steam cars too. Everard smiled shakily. “If you’ll not believe me, then what do you think I am?”

Deirdre regarded him with large eyes. “I think you must be sorcerers,” she said.

There was no answer to that. Everard asked a few weak questions, but learned little more than that this city was Catuvellaunan, a trading and manufacturing center. Deirdre estimated its population at two million, and that of all Afallon at fifty million, but wasn’t sure. They didn’t take censuses here.

The Patrolmen’s fate was equally undetermined. Their scooter and other possessions had been sequestrated by the military, but no one dared monkey with the stuff, and treatment of the owners was being hotly debated. Everard got the impression that all government, including the leadership of the armed forces, was rather a sloppy process of individualistic wrangling. Afallon itself was the loosest of confederacies, built out of former nations—Brittic colonies and Indians who had adopted European culture—all jealous of their rights. The old Mayan Empire, destroyed in a war with Texas (Tehannach) and annexed, had not forgotten its time of glory, and sent the most rambunctious delegates of all to the Council of Suffetes.

The Mayans wanted to make an alliance with Huy Braseal, perhaps out of friendship for fellow Indians. The West Coast states, fearful of Hinduraj, were toadies of the Southeast Asian empire. The Middle West (of course) was isolationist; the Eastern States were torn every which way, but inclined to follow the lead of Brittys.

When he gathered that slavery existed here, though not on racial lines, Everard wondered briefly and wildly if the time changers might not have been Dixiecrats.

Enough! He had his own neck, and Van’s, to think about. “We are from Sirius,” he declared loftily. “Your ideas about the stars are mistaken. We came as peaceful explorers, and if we are molested, there will be others of our kind to take vengeance.”

Deirdre looked so unhappy that he felt conscience-stricken. “Will they spare the children?” she begged. “The children had nothing to do with it.” Eyerard could imagine the vision in her head, small crying captives led off to the slave markets of a world of witches.

“There need be no trouble at all if we are released and our property returned,” he said.

“I shall speak to my uncle,” she promised, “but even if I can sway him, he is only one man on the Council. The thought of what your weapons could mean if we had them has driven men mad.”

She rose. Everard clasped both her hands—they lay warm and soft in his—and smiled crookedly at her. “Buck up, kid,” he said in English. She shivered, pulled free of him, and made the hex sign again.

“Well,” demanded Van Sarawak when they were alone, “what did you find out?” After being told, he stroked his chin and murmured. “That was one glorious little collection of sinusoids. There could be worse worlds than this.”

“Or better,” said Everard roughly. “They don’t have atomic bombs, but neither do they have penicillin, I’ll bet. Our job is not to play God.”

“No. No, I suppose not.” The Venusian sighed.