“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.
4
They spent a restless day. Night had fallen when lanterns glimmered in the corridor and a military guard unlocked the cell. The prisoners were led silently to a rear exit where two automobiles waited; they were put into one, and the whole troop drove off.
Catuvellaunan did not have outdoor lighting, and there wasn’t much night traffic. Somehow that made the sprawling city unreal in the dark. Everard paid attention to the mechanics of his car. Steam-powered, as he had guessed, burning powdered coal; rubber-tired wheels; a sleek body with a sharp nose and serpent figurehead; the whole simple to operate and honestly built, but not too well designed. Apparently this world had gradually developed a rule-of-thumb engineering, but no systematic science worth talking about.
They crossed a clumsy iron bridge to Long Island, here also a residential section for the well-to-do. Despite the dimness of oil-lamp headlights, their speed was high. Twice they came near having an accident: no traffic signals, and seemingly no drivers who did not hold caution in contempt.
Government and traffic… hm. It all looked French, somehow, ignoring those rare interludes, when France got a Henry of Navarre or a Charles de Gaulle. And even in Everard’s own twentieth century, France was largely Celtic. He was no respecter of windy theories about inborn racial traits, but there was something to be said for traditions so ancient as to be unconscious and ineradicable. A Western world in which the Celts had become dominant, the Germanic peoples reduced to a few small outposts… Yes, look at the Ireland of home; or recall how tribal politics had queered Vercingetorix’s revolt… But what about Littorn? Wait a minute! In his early Middle Ages, Lithuania had been a powerful state; it had held off Germans, Poles, and Russians alike for a long time, and hadn’t even taken Christianity till the fifteenth century. Without German competition, Lithuania might very well have advanced eastward…
In spite of the Celtic political instability, this was a world of large states, fewer separate nations than Everard’s. That argued an older society. If his own Western civilization had developed out of the decaying Roman Empire about, say, 600 A.D., the Celts in this world must have taken over earlier than that.