Jeremy thought it over. He didn't have to think very long. He'd already had his own run-ins with the bureaucracy of Agrippan Rome. “No, you're right. I hope we don't have to pull out of here and start over on some other alternate that looks a lot like this one.”
“That would be a nuisance,” Dad agreed. “I wouldn't want to have to say we've lost our grip on Agrippan Rome.” Jeremy and Amanda both made horrible faces. Dad grinned at them. He had no shame-he was proud when he did something like that. Still grinning, he went on, “We're not the ones who make choices like that, anyway.”
“One good thing,” Amanda said: “Even if the locals here found out we're from crosstime, they couldn't do anything about it. As long as we could jump into a transposition chamber, we'd be safe.”
“True enough here,“ Mom said. “But there are alternates where they have the technology to go crosstime themselves if they ever get the idea. Some of those aren't nice worlds at all. Crosstime Traffic has to be real careful in places like that.”
“It might be better if we didn't go to those places ourselves,” Jeremy said. “Then we couldn't give ourselves away.”
“It might, but it might not, too,” Dad said. “If they found out how to build transposition chambers on their own and we didn't know till we bumped into them on some alternate where we were both working… well, that wouldn't be so good, either. So we stay and we watch and we try to be careful and we worry. Sometimes-a lot of the time-there are no clear answers, only hard choices.”
Jeremy thought about that, too. It reminded him- reminded him uncomfortably-of his own worries after he and Amanda got stuck here. He said, “Things don't seem as black-and-white to you as they do to me, do they?”
Dad and Mom looked at each other. They both started laughing at the same time. Jeremy started to get mad. Dad saw that, too. He held up a hand. “No offense,” he said. “Honest, none. It makes us feel good that you're growing up. It really does. It's just that-”
“You don't know how right you are,” Mom broke in.
“You sure don't,” Dad said. “That's what you'll do between now and when you're as old as we are. One of the things you'll do, anyway. You'll find out how right you are.”
“The older you get, the more complicated things look,”
Mom said. “That's not because you'll get smarter. You'll just get more experience.”
“You won't get more RAM,” Dad added. “But you'll have a lot more programs and a lot more files on your hard disk that you can use and read.”
Not all of Dad's comparisons made sense to Jeremy. That one did. He said, “What do we do if somebody from a nasty alternate figures out how to go crosstime?”
Mom and Dad looked at each other again. They didn't laugh this time. Slowly, Dad said, “I don't know. I don't think anybody else knows, either. What do you think we ought to do?“
“A lot depends on when we find out they're doing it,” Amanda said while Jeremy was still chewing on it. “We can do things if we catch them quick that we can't if they have a chance to spread out.”
She was right. Jeremy could see as much. He said, “I just hope it doesn't happen, that's all.”
“Well, so do I,” Dad said. “But it probably will. It's almost bound to, sooner or later.” He raised his winecup in a toast. “Here's hoping it's later.”
They all drank to that.
Two days later, the Robinson family came into Polisso. As Jeremy and his kin had before them, they walked in through the western gate. As far as anyone here was concerned, they came from Carnuto. They were all small and dark. For looks and size, they fit in better than the Solters family did. They too had a boy and a girl. The boy, Michael, was thirteen or fourteen. The girl's name was Stephanie. She was Jeremy's age, and pretty enough almost to make him sorry he was leaving. That was all the more true because she seemed very impressed about what he and Amanda had gone through during the siege.
Amanda noticed Jeremy noticing Stephanie. She got him aside and asked, “Well, are you going to tell her all about what a hero you were?”
“No!” He shook his head violently. That hadn't even crossed his mind. He said, “I never even want to think about that again, let alone brag about it.”
His sister eyed him. After a few seconds, she nodded. He felt oddly relieved. He might have just passed a test, and an important one. Amanda said, “All right.” She started to turn away, then seemed to decide that wasn't enough. “Better than all right, in fact. I wouldn't like it if you got all bloodthirsty on me.”
“You don't need to worry about that,” Jeremy promised. “I saw that guy get shot when I was up on the wall at the start of the siege. It wasn't movie blood or video-game blood. It was real. I could smell it.“ He shuddered. ”And it could have been me as easy as him. Nothing but dumb luck, one way or the other. Anybody who goes on about how glorious war is, should have been there, you know what I mean?“
“Oh, yes.” Amanda nodded again. “I know just what you mean. I was there when that cannonball came down by the fountain. That could have been me, too. And you could see the blood in the cracks between the cobblestones for days afterwards. Maybe you still can, if you get down on your hands and knees and look close.”
Mr. and Mrs. Robinson were hashing things out with Mom and Dad. They were talking about business, and about exactly how big a snoop the city prefect was. It all mattered if you were going to do business in Polisso. Somehow, though, to Jeremy it seemed to be missing the real point.
And what is the real point, if you're so smart? he asked himself. After a little while, he came up with an answer: I suppose the real point is that life is cheap here, and you'll get in trouble if you forget it. He wondered if he should have gone to the beast shows and the gladiator games at the amphitheater. They would have made him sick, but they would have taught him the lesson he needed to know.
He also wondered if he ought to tell Michael and Stephanie Robinson to go. He shook his head. They wouldn't go on his say-so. The locals' blood sports would gross them out, just as they did with him. One way or another, the Robinsons would have to find out for themselves. And, seeing what Polisso was like, they probably would.
In neoLatin, Stephanie was saying, “It smells so bad now that we're in a town again.” She was careful about protecting the secret. Michael made gagging noises to show how he thought Polisso smelled. Jeremy hardly noticed the stink any more.
But he noticed the fresher air when he and his sister and his parents left Polisso the next morning. The breeze was out of the west, so it blew away the city stench as soon as he and his family got outside the wall. He looked back in amazement. Somebody might have sent the air through a washer and dryer. He noticed Amanda and Mom and Dad smiling, too.
They walked out toward the transposition chamber in the cave outside of town. A long line of cranes flew past overhead, bound for a warmer, friendlier country. Jeremy waved to the big, long-legged birds. He felt the same way.
No one in sight in either direction. The road west from Polisso wasn't a busy one. The Solters family didn't have to wait before they went up the hillside to the trap door. Even inside the cave, Jeremy had trouble making himself believe the chamber would really show up.
But then it appeared, on time to the second. The door opened. “In you go,” the operator said. To him, it was all routine. It wasn't routine to Jeremy. It never would be again. So what, though? This time, everything would work fine.
And it did.