Gunpowder Empire

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.

Jeremy and his father put on knee-length woolen tunics. Jeremy's was undyed, his father's a dull blue. Both tunics had embroidery around the sleeves and the neck opening, Dad's more than Jeremy's. Jeremy's socks were also of wool, hand-knitted; his sandals were leather, with bronze buckles. His underwear came down to his knees. It was wool, too. It itched. A plain floppy felt hat finished his outfit. Dad's hat boasted a braided leather band and a bright pheasant feather sticking up from it.

Mom and Amanda wore tunics that fell all the way to their ankles. Amanda's was blue like Dad's. Mom's was saffron yellow, which showed the family had money. So did her shiny brass belt, the gold hoops in her ears, and her lace headdress. Amanda wore a brass belt, too, but not such a wide one. Her headdress was lower and flatter than Mom's. That meant she wasn't married.

A computer guided the transposition chamber. An operator sat in the chamber with the travelers. He didn't change, and looked like the odd man out. He had manual controls in case of emergency. Fortunately, emergencies were rare. Emergencies where the manual controls would do any good were even rarer. Jeremy chose not to dwell on that.

He tried to tell when the chamber reached the right alternate. He tried whenever he went crosstime, and he always failed. If he'd been waiting for the chamber, he would have seen it materialize. Inside it, he might as well not have left the home timeline.

The trip to the alternate seemed to take about forty-five minutes. When he got out and looked at the sun, though, it would be in the same place in the sky here as it had in the home line. Duration across timelines was a tricky business. Quantum physics seemed simple beside it.

Out of the blue-or so it felt to Jeremy-the operator said, “Okay, you're here.” Jeremy muttered to himself. Caught by surprise again.

He got up and stretched. The ceiling of the chamber was only a few centimeters above his head. Tall in his own timeline, he would seem taller in the alternate. The locals weren't as well nourished as people back home. I'd make the basketball team here, he thought. I'd play center, too.

Somebody had scribbled something on the wall by the door. He leaned closer to get a better look. THE ONE AND ONLY HOMEMADE TIME MACHINE, it said. He grinned. That hadn't been there the last time he came to Agrippan Rome. Odds were it wouldn't be there when the chamber came back for his family. The company usually made that kind of stuff disappear in a hurry.

“Here you go.” The operator opened the door, the way a steward would on a shuttlecraft. The air they'd brought with them from the home timeline mingled with what the locals breathed. That was cool and damp. The transposition chamber had materialized in a cave two or three kilometers from Polisso. The cave overlooked the road to the west. That road never had a whole lot of traffic. When video cameras in the cave showed it was clear in both directions, people could go down and head for town with the locals none the wiser.

Dad was the first one out the door. “Time to make the best deals we can,” he said in neoLatin. He used English as little as he could while they were in the alternate. So did everybody else. What people in Polisso didn't hear, they couldn't wonder about.

Jeremy and Amanda followed their father around to the cargo compartment. The first things Dad got out were two swords in leather sheaths. He gave Jeremy one and buckled the other one on himself. No one here traveled cross-country unarmed. Then he pulled out four packs full of trade goods. Everybody in the family got one of those.

“A good thing bandits don't know we're coming, or we'd really have things to worry about,” Mom said as she slung her pack on her back.

“Need more than swords to keep off bandits,” Dad agreed.

Jeremy put on his own pack. Like the others, it was full of wind-up pocket watches almost the size of a fist, mirrors in gilt-metal frames, straight razors, Swiss army knives, and other examples of what would have been thoroughly outdated technology in his world. Here, though, no one could match it. No one could come close. Traders from Crosstime Traffic got wonderful prices.

If they'd been limited to what they could carry on their backs, they would have lost a lot of business. But they weren't. Another transposition chamber brought more trade goods to a subbasement under the house they used in Polisso. People hardly ever traveled through that one. If strangers appeared in Polisso from nowhere, the locals would wonder how they got there. Walking in and out through the west gate was a different story. Anybody could understand that.

Dad was checking the monitors to make sure nobody could see the family when they came out of the cave. Jeremy went over to look at the screens, too. They showed grassy hillsides. Motion and an infrared blip drew Jeremy's eye. It was only a rabbit hopping along. He relaxed. The Roman military highway arrowed off toward the west, as scornful of the landscape it crossed as any American interstate.

“Looks good,” Jeremy said.

Dad nodded. “Yes, I think so, too.” He raised his voice a little. “Come here, Melissa. See anything you don't like?”

Mom took a long, careful look at the monitors. She shook her head. “No, everything looks fine.”

“Let's go, then,” Dad said.

The mouth of the cave wasn't wide enough to let anyone in or out. A camouflaged trapdoor nearby took care of that. Jeremy and Amanda hurried down the hillside to the highway. When Jeremy got to it, the soles of his sandals slapped against the paving stones. That road had been there for two thousand years. It wasn't heavily traveled, but still… How many others had walked it before him?

The breeze blew from out of the west. The grass on either side of the road rippled like seawater. A starling flew by overhead. It made metallic twittering noises. Jeremy didn't hate starlings here the way he did in California. They belonged here. They weren't imported pests.

“Cooler here than when we left,” Mom said. Jeremy nodded. She was right. It didn't mean much, though. Weather changed randomly from one timeline to another.

“Let's go,” Dad said. They started east toward Polisso, which lay not far past the curve of the next hill.

Amanda could see the walls of Polisso ahead when the wind shifted. She wrinkled her nose. Dad broke a rule: he dropped into English to say, “Ah, the sweet smell of successpool.” The pun wouldn't work in neoLatin.

“Funny,” Amanda said, meaning anything but.

Horse manure. Garbage-old, old garbage. Sewage. Wood smoke, thick enough to slice. People who hadn't bathed for a long time. Those were some of the notes in the symphony of stinks. The scary thing was, it could have been worse. People here knew about running water. There were public baths. But the pipes only went through the richer parts of town. The baths were cheap, but they weren't free. Not everybody could afford them.

After coughing, Amanda said, “Those who travel across time learn things about smells that those who stay home never imagine.” It sounded more impressive in neoLatin. It would have been true no matter what language she spoke.

“In a few days, you won't even notice,” Mom said. That was also true. Amanda wouldn't have believed it the first time she came to Polisso. She'd wanted to throw up. She hadn't, quite. Some people did when they first went crosstime. Living in cultures that knew little about sanitation and cared less took work.

Sandstone walls, lit by the sinking sun, seemed to turn to gold. The long black barrels of cannon stood on wheeled carriages atop the wall. More big guns poked out from the tall, narrow windows of siege towers that strengthened the fortifications. Some of those towers and parts of the wall were visibly newer than others. Polisso had stood siege before.

A wagon drawn by half a dozen horses came rattling and squealing out of the gate. The horses' iron-shod hooves and the iron tires on the wagon wheels banged and clanked against the paving stones of the highway. The horses strained against their harness. The wagon was full of sandstone blocks. Pulling it couldn't have been easy for the animals.

The driver was a swarthy little man with a big black mustache. He wore a tunic like Jeremy's, but shabbier and with less embroidery. “Gods look out for you,” he said, as Amanda and her family stepped off onto the grass by the side of the road to give the wagon plenty of room to go by.

“And for you as well,” Dad answered politely.

“Thanks, friend,” the driver said. His neoLatin had an accent a little different from what Amanda had learned through her implant. That guttural undertone said he came from the province of Dacia-probably from right here in Polisso. Amanda sounded as if she came from Italy, or perhaps Illyricum or southern Gallia.

With a leer for Amanda, or for Mom, or maybe for both of them, the local flicked the reins. Men here weren't shy when they liked somebody's looks. Amanda stuck her nose in the air. So did her mother. The driver just laughed. You couldn't discourage them that way. The Solters family walked on toward Polisso.

A gate guard yawned, showing two broken teeth. He and his comrades wore surcoats of dull red linen over light mail-shirts. They tucked baggy wool trousers into rawhide boots that rose almost to their knees. Their helmets had a projecting brim in front and a downsweeping flair in back to protect their necks.

They all wore swords on their hips. Some of them carried pikes twice as tall as they were. The rest shouldered heavy, clumsy-looking matchlock muskets. A lot of them had nasty scars. They'd seen action somewhere.

“God look out for you,” Dad called to the guards.

“Gods look out for you as well,” answered the guard with the broken teeth. He had a small plume of red feathers sticking up from his helmet. That meant he was a sergeant. It also meant he could read and write, which many of the other guards couldn't do. And it meant he was going to ask nine million questions and write down all the answers. Sure enough, he pulled out an enormous book with pages made from parchment, a reed pen, and a brass bottle of ink. “Your names?”

“I am Ioanno Soltero, called Acuto,” Dad answered.

Scratch, scratch, scratch, went the pen. “They call you clever, eh?” the sergeant said. “Should they?”

With a wry shrug, Dad answered, “If I were as clever as that, would I let people know I was clever?”

“Huh,” the sergeant said. “And the people with you?”

“My son, Ieremeo Soltero, called Alto,” Dad said. The sergeant nodded as he wrote that down. Jeremy was tall. Dad went on, “My wife, Melissa Soltera. My daughter, Amanda Soltera.” Women didn't have semiofficial nicknames tacked on after their family names.

“Occupation?” the sergeant asked.

“We are merchants,” Dad replied. “We work with Marco Petro, called Calvo, whom you will know. If you do not recognize us, some of your men will.”

Several guards nodded. One said, “I remember the Solteri from last year and the year before that. Don't you, Sarge?”

“Of course I do. You think I'm stupid?” the sergeant snapped. “But that doesn't matter. We've got to have the records.” He turned back to Dad. “Nature of your trade and merchandise?”

“Hour-reckoners, mirrors, knives with many attached tools, razors, and other such small things of great use, all at best prices.” Dad got in a quick sales pitch.

Scratch, scratch, scratch. The sergeant wrote it down without changing expression. He paused to reink the pen, then asked, “Declared value of your merchandise?”

“Nine hundred aurei,” Dan answered. Merchants bringing more than a thousand goldpieces' worth of goods into a town had to pay a special tax. Nobody admitted bringing in more, not if there was any way around it.

The sergeant grunted. He knew the rules at least as well as Dad. If he wanted to be difficult, he could search the Solters' packs. His broad-shouldered shrug made his mail-shirt clink. Merchants whose goods were worth more than a thousand aurei were rich enough to land a nosy sergeant in hot water. He seemed to decide snooping beyond what the law required was more trouble than it was worth. “Religion?” he asked. “Your greeting and your names make you Christians or Jews.”

“We're Imperial Christians,” Dad said. “We're peaceful people. We don't cause trouble.”

Another grunt. “Yeah, that's what they all say.” The sergeant wrote it down, though. “Now-your home province and birthplace?”

It went on and on. Agrippan Rome floated on a sea of parchment, papyrus, and, in recent years, paper. The Empire had been a going concern for more than two thousand years. Amanda wondered if anyone had ever thrown anything out in all that time. Somewhere in Polisso, were there records of travelers who'd come through this gate five hundred or a thousand or fifteen hundred years before? She wouldn't have been surprised. Had anybody looked at them since a bored guard took them down? That would have surprised her.

After what seemed like forever and was almost half an hour, the sergeant said, “All right. Everything seems in order. Entry tax for a grade-three town, a family of four, merchant class, is… Let me see.” He had to check a sheet of parchment nailed to the guardhouse wall. Once he had checked it, he did some figuring on his fingers. “Eighteen denari.”

Dad grumbled. Grumbling was good form. It said you weren't too rich to worry about money. Grumble a lot, though, and you risked annoying the guardsmen. “Here.” Dad handed over the small silver coins. They weren't all quite the same size or shape, but they all weighed the same. The Empire was careful about its coinage.

The sergeant counted the denari. Twice. Then he nodded. “You have paid the entry tax,” he said formally. “You do not have the seeming of Lietuvan spies. Enter, therefore, into the city of Polisso. May your dealings be profitable. You will report to the temple of the spirit of the Emperor for the required sacrifice. If not, your failure will be noted.” He sent Dad a hard look.

In this paperwork-mad society, not sacrificing would be noticed. But Dad only said, “We will. I told you, we're Imperial Christians.”

Christianity here had the same name as it did back home, but it wasn't the same thing. In this world, it never had become the most important faith in the Roman Empire. The Empire here hadn't gone through the troubles it had in Amanda's world. It had stayed strong and mostly prosperous. People hadn't worried so much about the next world. For most of them, this one had seemed enough. The new belief and the old ones had mingled much more here. Even the Christians who didn't call themselves Imperial were less strict about other gods than the ones in the home timeline.

Judaism here wasn't as different as Christianity, but it wasn't the same, either. Jews here didn't believe the Emperor was divine, the way most people did. But they did think of him as God's viceroy on earth. They would sacrifice to his good health and good fortune, but not to his spirit.

In this world, Muhammad had never been born. It was a different place, with a different history. Finding things in it the same as they were back home would have been the real shocker.

“Come on,” Jeremy said. “Let's get moving.”

“Why are you in such a hurry?” Mom asked. He didn't answer, but pushed on into Polisso. The rest of the family followed.

Once upon a time, the town had been a camp where a Roman legion stayed. It still kept the square layout and grid of main streets it had had then. In between those streets that joined at neat right angles, little lanes and alleys wandered every which way. Houses had their lower story of stone or brick, the upper floors of timber. Some of them had balconies that reached across the lanes toward balconies reaching from the other side. Amanda wondered how sunlight ever trickled down there. By the damp, nasty smell, it often didn't.

A triumphal arch sprouted in the middle of a square. Men on horseback, ox carts, and people on foot went past it or under it. They didn't look at it twice. Why should they? To them, it was just part of the landscape. Amanda pointed to the figure in relief above the keystone. 'There's Agrippa.“

Even after almost two thousand years of weathering, even with bird droppings streaking his face and his ceremonial armor, Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa still looked tough. The sculptor showed him as a burly, muscular man with bushy eyebrows, a big nose, and a chin that stuck out. Here, as in Amanda's world, he'd been a lifelong friend and helper to Augustus, the first Roman Emperor. In both worlds, Augustus had married his daughter to Agrippa. He'd given Agrippa his ring during an illness, showing he wanted Agrippa to be his heir.

Augustus was always getting sick-and always getting better. Agrippa was the picture of health-till, in Amanda's world, he died in 12 B.C. He was only fifty-one. Augustus kept right on getting sick-and getting better-for another quarter of a century before he finally died, too.

In this world, Agrippa had stayed healthy. It made an enormous difference. Augustus tried to conquer Germania, the way his great-uncle, Julius Caesar, had conquered Gallia. When the Germans rebelled, in Amanda's world Augustus had had to send a bad general against them. Agrippa was already more than twenty years dead. The other general-his name was Varus-got three Roman legions massacred. The German revolt succeeded. In Amanda's world, the Roman frontier stopped at the Rhine till the Empire fell.

Things weren't the same in this world. Here, Augustus had had Agrippa to use against the Germans. Agrippa was old by then-he was the same age as Augustus-but he knew his business. He beat the Germans and killed their chief. Settlers from the Empire came in, as they had in Gallia. Germania became a Roman province. Here, it still was a Roman province.

And when Augustus finally died here, who succeeded him? Agrippa. “My hair is white, but I am still strong,” he said when he became Emperor. He proved it, too. He reigned for twelve years on his own, and he conquered Dacia-the land that had become Romania in Amanda's world. The Romans had conquered it in her world, too, but not for almost another hundred years. They'd never held it very firmly there. Here, it was still called Dacia, and it still belonged to Rome.

One man, Amanda thought, looking up at Agrippa. One man made all that difference. In her world, the German invasions helped bring down the Roman Empire. In this one, the people of Germania became Romanized. They came to speak and read and write Latin. Cities sprang up there, Roman cities. Some great Roman Emperors and some great scholars and writers-and a lot of good soldiers-here had had German blood. The same held true for Dacia, though not quite to the same degree.

With the lands and people it hadn't had in her world, the Roman Empire here never fell. It went on and on, staying itself and not changing much, the way China had in her world. It had known a couple of dynasties of nomad conquerors from off the steppe, but in time it had swallowed them up. They were like a drop of ink in a lake. They couldn't turn all that water black. There weren't enough of them.

Dad pointed to a sign. LUCERNARIUS, it said: lamp-seller. Sure enough, the little shop stocked lamps of pottery and polished brass. “There's a man trying to rise above his place here,” Dad remarked.

“How come?” Amanda said, and then, “Oh! The sign's in classical Latin.”

“You bet it is,” Dad said. “In neoLatin, it'd just be lucerno.“

The sounds of neoLatin had changed less from the old language than those of Italian or Spanish or French. But its grammar worked like theirs-and like English's, too, come to that. Word order told who did what in a sentence. Man bites dog meant something different from Dog bites man.

Classical Latin had another way of doing things. You could use almost any word order you wanted, because word endings were what counted. If a lamp-seller bit a dog, he was a lucernarius. If the dog bit him, he was a lucernarium. If you gave him a dog, you gave it to a lucernario. After that, it was his dog, canis lucernarii-or, if you preferred, lucernarii canis. And if you wanted to speak to him about it, you called out, Lucernarie! All nouns changed like that. Adjectives changed with them. Verbs had their own forms.

It made for a language more compact than English. Classical Latin didn't need a lot of the helping words English used. Its word endings did the job instead. If you didn't have an implant, classical Latin was probably harder to learn than English.

And classical Latin wasn't dead in Agrippan Rome. Far from it. People spoke neoLatin in their everyday business. But the men who mattered-the bureaucrats who kept the Empire going whether the ruler was a genius or a maniac or a murderer or all three at once-wrote in the classical language. So did scholars and historians and poets. They looked down their noses at neoLatin. Learning the old tongue, learning to be elegant in it, was a big part of what raised a man to the higher classes of society here.

Sometimes the upper crust even spoke classical Latin among themselves-usually when they didn't want ordinary people to know what they were talking about. In Amanda's world, the Catholic Church had used Latin the same way into the twentieth century.

“The lamp-seller won't get in trouble for writing his sign like that, will he?” Jeremy asked.

Dad shook his head. “It's not against the rules. Just-snooty. Maybe he sells to rich people. Maybe he wants poor people to think he sells to rich people, so he can get away with charging more.”

“Snob appeal,” Mom said.

Agrippan Rome had its share of real snobs, its share and then some. Aristocrats here carried on an old, old tradition, and boy, did they know it. They looked down their noses at anybody who wasn't one of them. In a way, that made Amanda want to laugh. For all his gold and all his slaves, even the richest aristocrat here didn't have a car or a phone or a computer or a refrigerator or air-conditioning or a doctor who knew much or any of a million other things she took for granted when she was home.

But people were people, in her timeline or any of the alternates. Knowledge changed. Customs changed. Human nature didn't. People still fell in love-and out of love, too. They still schemed to get rich. They squabbled among themselves. And they needed to feel their group was better than some other group. Maybe they had more money. Maybe they had blond hair. Maybe they spoke a particular language. Maybe they had the one right religion-or the one right kind of the one right religion. It was always something, though.

And they showed off. A woman stood in the middle of the street holding up a puppy. Her friends gathered to pet it. It snapped at one of them. She smacked it in the nose. It yipped. The woman who owned it smacked it, too. People here didn't worry about cruelty to animals. That was custom, not human nature. Too bad, Amanda thought.

She and her family went up the main street that led into Polisso from the west gate. At the third good-sized cross street, they turned left. All the houses and shops and other buildings had numbers on them. That let the vigili-the police-find any place in town in a hurry. It let the city prefect collect taxes more easily, too. The numbers didn't look just like the ones Amanda was used to, but they used the same system. What she thought of as Roman numerals were for display here, the same as they were in her world.

Dad turned right on the next big cross street. The important streets, like that one, were paved with cobblestones. You had to be careful when you walked, or you could turn an ankle. The lanes and alleys that branched off from the main streets weren't paved at all. They were dusty when it was dry and streams of stinking mud when it rained.

“Here we are-24 Victorious Emperor.” Dad looked pleased with himself for remembering the way. The house-an upper story of whitewashed wood above a lower one of whitewashed stone-showed little to the street. Only narrow windows with stout shutters and a door with heavy iron hinges interrupted the stonework. All the display would go on the inside, in the rooms and in the courtyard.

The door also had a heavy iron knocker. Before Dad could grab it, Jeremy did. He raised it and brought it down three times. Bang! Bang! Bang!

“Welcome, welcome, three times welcome!” Marco Petro, called Calvo, was a stout man with blue eyes and a big nose. His bald head gave him his nickname. In Jeremy's world, his name was Mark Stone. He clasped hands with Dad and Jeremy and blew kisses to Mom and Amanda. “Come in, come in, come in.” People here liked saying and doing things in threes. They thought it was lucky. That way why Jeremy had knocked three times.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Dad answered. Jeremy shot him a suspicious look. Marco Petro had sounded normal. He was just… talking. The way Dad said it, he might have been poking fun at the custom he was following.

Or, then again, he might not have. You never could tell with Dad.

By the way Marco Petro boomed laughter, he thought Dad was sending up local customs. He stood aside to let the Solters family come in, then closed the door behind them. It was close to ten centimeters thick, of solid oak. He set a stout iron bar in brackets to lock it.

Closing the door cut off most of the light in the entry hall. Jeremy blinked, trying to help his eyes adapt. Marco Petro laughed again, on a different note. Now he too sounded like somebody gently-or maybe not so gently-mocking the culture in which he'd been living. “Good to see you folks,” he said. He kept on using neoLatin, but in a way that suggested he would rather have spoken English. “Messages by thinking machine are fine, but real live people are better.”

Mom curtsied. “Thank you so much for the generous praise. Better than a thinking machine!” She couldn't come out and say computer. It wasn't just that the word didn't exist in neoLatin. The idea behind the word didn't exist, either.

Marco Petro bowed to her. “More sarcastic than a thinking machine, too. Take your packs off. Make yourselves at home. You will be at home for the next three months. Come out into the courtyard, why don't you? We'll get you something wet.“

Bees buzzed among the flowers in the courtyard garden. A fountain splashed gently. This house had running water. It was cold, and the germs in it would give you stomach trouble in nothing flat if you weren't immunized, but it ran. A statue of Agrippa's son and successor, the Emperor Lucius, stood not far from the fountain. It was a small recent copy of a famous piece in Rome. It wasn't all that well carved, but the gilding on the armor and the lifelike paint on the flesh and face helped hide flaws.

Jeremy thought painted statues were gaudy, to say nothing of tacky. But the ancient Greeks and Romans had always done that. In Jeremy's world, the custom had died out. It lived on here. When in Agrippan Rome, you did as the Romans did.

“Lucinda!” Marco Petro called as he hurried into the kitchen. “Bring out some wine, will you, dear? The Solteri are here.” He wouldn't serve the guests himself. He was the head of a family. That would have been beneath his dignity. He had his daughter do it instead.

In most households this wealthy, a servant or a slave would have brought the wine. But Crosstime Traffic rules prohibited owning or dealing in slaves. Even if they hadn't… Jeremy shook his head. He'd seen slavery here, and it sickened him. How could one person buy, sell, own another? The locals did, though, and it bothered them not a bit. Some-not all, but some-slaves seemed contented enough. That puzzled Jeremy, too.

Servants also weren't a good idea here. Along with the transposition chamber in the subbasement, this house had other gadgets and weapons from the home timeline. The locals thought the merchants who lived here were eccentric for doing their own housework. But there was no law against being eccentric.

Marco Petro came back out into the courtyard. His wife came out, too, from another door. Her name was Dawn. Here, she went by Aurora, which meant the same thing. “Welcome, welcome, three times welcome!” she called. “Marco, are you getting something for them?”

“Lucinda's taking care of it, dear,” Marco Petro answered.

He sounded like someone holding on tight to his patience. His wife nagged. Jeremy had seen that before. The merchant turned toward the kitchen. “How are you coming, Lucinda?” “Ill be right there, Father.”

Lucinda Petra came out carrying a big tray of hammered copper. On the tray were an earthenware jar of wine, seven hand-blown glass cups, a loaf of brown bread, and bowls of honey and olive oil for dipping. In this world, only Lietuvans and other barbarians ate butter.

Lucinda was Jeremy's age. She had blue eyes like her father. She didn't have a big nose, though, or, as far as he could see, anything else wrong with her. She was the main reason he'd hurried into Polisso. He never had got up the nerve to tell her how cute he thought she was.

Even without his saying anything, Amanda could tell what he was thinking. “Stop staring,” she whispered.

“Stifle it,” Jeremy answered sweetly.

After Lucinda set the tray on a table, she poured wine for everybody. Agrippan Rome thought of wine the way a lot of Europeans did in Jeremy's world. Babies here started drinking watered wine as soon as they stopped nursing. As children got older, they watered it less and less. It was probably safer than drinking the water.

In his own world, there were good reasons not to let kids drink wine. They had plenty of other things to drink: water and milk that wouldn't make them sick, fruit juices, soda. They could get behind the wheel of a car and kill themselves and other people. And they were just starting out in life. Who his age or Amanda's was ready to take a place in the grown-up world?

There wasn't much else to drink here. There were no cars.

People started working at twelve or thirteen-sometimes at eight or nine-and worked till they dropped. The line between children and adults blurred. It was a different world. One whiff of the ripe, ripe air told how different it was.

Marco Petro splashed a little wine on the paving stones of the courtyard. “To the spirit of the Emperor,” he murmured.

Everyone else imitated the ritual. The traders would have done it with their customers. They did it among themselves, too, to stay in practice. The paving stones showed plenty of stains, some old, some new, If they hadn't, the locals would have wondered why. The most obvious answer was that the people here didn't wish the Emperor well. That would have been dangerous.

“By what you've sent back home, business has been good here,” Dad remarked, dipping a chunk of the brown bread into olive oil.

“Not bad at all,” Marco Petro agreed. “Hour-reckoners and mirrors, especially. Everybody who's anybody wants to pull out an hour-reckoner and see what time it is. All the people with hour-reckoners want everybody else to see them seeing what time it is. They want to show off, you know. And if you've been looking at yourself in polished bronze, or not looking at yourself at all, a real mirror seems like a miracle.”

Lucinda smiled. “They do wonder why we'd rather have grain than gold.”

“They always have,” Jeremy said. Talking about trade with Lucinda was easier than talking about other things. “As long as they don't wonder where it goes, everything's fine.”

“We make sure of that,” Aurora Petra said. Jeremy nodded. Most of the grain went back to the home timeline through the transposition chamber in the subbasement. Some went out in wagons, though: enough to make it look as if more did. That grain didn't go any farther by road than the chamber outside of town. The locals saw it leave Polisso. That was what counted.

“It'll be funny, going back to Cincinnati after living here for a while,” Lucinda said. “Do without things for a while, and they don't seem real any more.”

“It's like jet lag, only more so,” Jeremy said.

“That's just what it's like,” Lucinda agreed. Jeremy felt proud. His sister made a face at him. He ignored her.

“I hope things stay quiet with Lietuva,” Mom said.

“The guard at the gate was talking about Lietuvan spies,” Amanda put in.

“They aren't keeping Lietuvan merchants out of the Empire, so it should be all right,” Marco Petro said. The kingdom to the north and east ruled what were Poland and Belarus and Ukraine and the Baltic countries and some of European Russia in Jeremy's world. Every generation or two, it fought a war with Rome. Neither side ever gained much, but they both kept trying. No, human nature didn't change much across timelines.