But if no one from the home timeline was here to get curious, the masters and guards had it made. Exploring and exploiting alternates on your own was as illegal as illegal could be. This whole setup showed why, too.
"Tomorrow," Birigida murmured to Annette as they came back from the garden plots one chilly evening. "I can feel things getting ready inside me." She sighed. "Most of me doesn't want to go back, but I guess I have to."
"I'm afraid so." Annette was really afraid her face would give her away. It must not have, which only proved she was a better actress than she thought.
She stepped out at sick call the next morning, complaining of a sore shoulder. If she were someone like Birigida, she wouldn't have got away with it. But nobody thought she was faking, because she had a reputation as a hard worker. She stayed behind when the other women went to work.
Birigida stayed behind, too. Annette saw and heard exactly how she managed that. The blond woman went up to a guard and spoke in English: "My stretch is up." She might have been talking about getting out of jail, except she'd volunteered for this. She went on, "Time for me to go back to the home timeline."
The guard looked at her. "Oh. You're one of those. I might have known." He looked and sounded disgusted. Annette wondered if he would keep her here even if she was one of those. The joke would be on her if he did. Annette almost thought she deserved it. But keeping someone from the home timeline here might make people back there ask questions they shouldn't. Still scowling, the guard went on, "Go over there and wait while we call up the transposition chamber." He pointed to the door from which new slaves came up into the manor.
Birigida had a newfound spring in her step when she went over to stand by the armed guard who waited there. He growled at her and gestured with his rifle for her to keep her distance. Like his pal, he didn't soften up much when she spoke to him in English. She'd really made herself beloved while she was here.
She had to wait about fifteen minutes before the guard used a card from his wallet to open the lock on the door. Annette thought that was clever. People from a low-tech alternate would never figure it out, where they might if the lock used an old-fashioned key.
Down the stairs Birigida went. The guard locked the door behind her again. He yawned. Annette looked off in another direction before his eye fell on her. Birigida didn't come out again. Maybe some of the house slaves wondered what was happening to her. Maybe some of them thought she was getting killed down there. Maybe some of them thought she had it coming, too.
Annette knew what was going on. She was glad when Birigida didn't come out. That meant the blond woman was on her way back to the home timeline. With a little luck, I can get back there, too. Hope was supposed to feel wonderful, and it did. But it also hurt. If something went wrong, Annette would never get another chance. She really would be a slave here forever—or else she'd just get killed.
When Jacques mentioned Birigida's name, Dumnorix spat into the chewed-up dirt at his feet. ''''That one!" he said. "I don't know what happened to her, and I don't care. Gods be praised, she's not from my clan. I wouldn't have wanted such a fool among us."
Practice helped Jacques follow his words much better than when he first started trying to talk with the other man. "My friend said she was nothing but trouble at work."
"Your friend? The dark one with the nice teeth? She's pretty." Dumnorix grinned at him, then swung his pick. Jacques shoveled up the dirt the other man loosened. A guard, seeing them busy, nodded and went on walking. Dumnorix scratched, then said, "Some people are fools. They can't help being fools, any more than they can help having blue eyes. Birigida, she was like that. Do you know what's happened to her?"
"Not me," Jacques said. Khadija knew, or said she did. That box or room or transposition chamber or whatever it was would take Birigida back to where she really came from. Wherever it was, Khadija came from there, too. Jacques wondered what it was like.
That wasn't his worry. Looking busy enough to keep the guards happy was. He and Dumnorix had the rhythm they wanted. They weren't going fast enough to wear themselves out, or slow enough to get in trouble. The work seemed more real to Jacques than Birigida's disappearance did. It seemed much more real to him than Khadija's talk about other worlds. He believed her. With all the strange things that had happened to him since the slave raiders caught him, he couldn't help believing her. But believing in your head and believing in your belly were two different things.
The guards always carried those little boxes that talked. One of the boxes chirped now. The guard snatched the box off his belt and spoke in the language that sounded like English—that Khadija said was English. The box answered him. Jacques supposed Khadija would tell him that wasn't magic. It sure seemed like magic, no matter what she'd tell him.
That guard called out to his comrades. He pointed east, into the country where the fancy road was going. Four or five guards trotted that way, with the businesslike lope of soldiers moving into action.
"Don't get cute," one of the men who'd stayed behind said in Arabic. "We're still watching you." He repeated himself in the several languages the slaves used. Nobody got cute. The men had seen what those repeating muskets could do.
Jacques wouldn't have thought an ant could hide on the open ground there to the east. He would have been wrong, though. An ambush party of locals had sneaked to within a quarter of a mile. He wondered how whoever was on the other end of the words coming out of the box knew. The locals weren't too far from getting in range with their bows.
When they realized the guards had spotted them in spite of everything, they popped up and started shooting. It did them exactly no good. The guards sprayed bullets out in front of them. They might have been farmers sowing seed, but they sowed death instead. Archers had some kind of chance against ordinary musketeers, because they could shoot so much faster. Not against these pitiless men. Rat-a-tat-tat! Rat-a-tat-tat! The guards didn't care how many bullets they used, as long as they flushed out the locals and then killed them.
And they did. The last couple of raiders tried to run when they saw fighting was hopeless. Running didn't help, either. The guards laughed as they shot them down from behind. One of the men in mottled clothes paused and bent over a body. Oh, yes, Jacques thought. He's the one with the necklace of ears.
"How can you fight them?" Dumnorix asked bitterly. "They have the thunder weapons, and they have the armor that keeps out arrows. I am a man. I am a warrior. Against them, I am not even a woman. I am a little girl."
"I know something about thunder weapons, and I feel the way you do," Jacques said. "They . . . are very strong."
"Someone should treat them the way they treat others," Dumnorix said. "They deserve it."
That was Jesus' Golden Rule, turned on its head. Jacques nodded. He felt the same way. "But can anyone do it?" he said. Dumnorix gave back a gloomy shrug, as if to say he doubted it. Jacques doubted it, too. But Khadija had hope. He made himself remember that. Khadija had hope.
Eleven
People talked about having a poker face. Annette didn't play poker—she didn't know anybody her age who did. But she knew what the phrase meant. She kept her face as still as she could, not wanting any of the guards to see what lay behind it. She wasn't just playing for money here. Money was nothing, or might as well have been. She was playing for her life.
If anything went wrong this morning, she would stay a slave for the rest of her life. And the rest of her life might not last long, either. They might knock her over the head or shoot her to make sure she never had another chance to get away.
Do I really want to do this? Fear made her heart pound and left the palms of her hands cold and wet with sweat. But if she didn't try now, when would she have a better chance? And if she didn't try, what did she have to look forward to? Life? the scared part of her suggested. The rest of her shouted it down. Life as a slave on a low-tech manor in some unregistered alternate wasn't worth living.
The breakfast mush sat like a boulder in her stomach as she went out to morning roll call. Emishtar said something. Annette answered her. She hardly noticed what the older woman said, let alone what she said herself. It must have been all right, because Emishtar nodded.
They lined up in rows of ten, to make them easier for the guards to count. When a man in camouflage gear walked by, Annette took a couple of steps toward him. He frowned. "What do you want?" he asked in Arabic. He didn't sound angry or suspicious, the way he would have with Birigida. But he didn't sound what you'd call friendly, either.
Here we go. All or nothing. Annette answered him in English, with the same words Birigida had used: "My stretch is up. Time for me to go back to the home timeline."
His eyes widened. He wasn't bad-looking, which made Annette sorry to despise him. "You?" he said, also in English.
"Yes, me," he said. She didn't want him thinking she'd memorized the one phrase.
"How about that?" He shook his head. "I tell you, I wouldn't have guessed. Most of the the visitors"—a nice, bloodless name— "you have an idea who they are, even if you can't be sure. They're—goofy is the nicest thing I can say. But I have to hand it to you. You fit right in, didn't get in trouble, didn't make trouble or anything. My hat's off to you." He really did tip his splotched cap.
"Thanks." Annette had never got a compliment she wanted less. You made a good slave. Oh, boy! "How do I leave? They didn't talk a whole lot about that."
Whatever she said could get her in trouble. To her relief, the guard answered, "Yeah, they never do." He made a sour face. "Some of those people don't have it all in one bag, you know?" He pointed to the guard in front of the doorway that led down to the transposition chamber. "Go talk to Paul over there. He'll call your cab."
Annette smiled to let him think she liked the joke. She walked over to Paul. With that name, he could have grown up speaking English or French or German. With the implant you'd never know, not by listening to him. "What is it?" he asked, also in Arabic. That was the language everybody here thought she spoke.
"A transposition chamber back to the home timeline," she said in crisp English.
"You?" Paul said, as the first guard had. "Son of a gun!" There was that same unwanted compliment again. "Okay. I'll fix you up." He took from his belt what looked like an ordinary cell phone and thumbed a few buttons. After waiting for a moment looking at the gadget's little screen, he nodded. "Chamber's on its way."
"Thanks. Um, if I'm going to get aboard, you'll have to let me go down the stairs," Annette said.
"Coming up." Paul used the card on the lock, as he had for Bi-rigida. He even opened the door for Annette. "Maybe we'll see you again one of these days." He meant doing another turn as a slave.
"Maybe you will." Annette meant coming along with Crosstime Traffic people and as many policemen or soldiers as they needed to put this place out of business for good. She had to fight to keep anticipation out of her voice.
Down the stairs she went, before Paul could find anything else awkward to say—and before he could start wondering if the manor really had a paying slave scheduled to go home right then.
The transposition chamber was already waiting in the sub-basement. Traveling from the home timeline to an alternate or from one alternate to another didn't take any time. You felt time when you traveled inside it, depending on how far apart two alternates were. But that wasn't really time—it was only duration. That was how they explained it in training, anyhow. The math of going crosstime made quantum mechanics and genetic physics seem simple by comparison. Without massive computing power, it never could have happened.
All Annette cared about was that the chamber was there. The door sensed her and opened. She jumped in—literally. The door closed behind her. "Please take your seat and fasten your safety belt," a recorded voice said. "Transposition is about to begin."
Annette clicked the belt shut. She'd never figured out what good it would do in case of trouble, but habit died hard. She couldn't tell just when the chamber left the room under the manor, but she knew she'd got away. She let out a fierce, exultant whoop that would have made Jacques wonder which of them was the warrior.
She felt like a warrior. She'd escaped the enemy—well, at least some of the enemy. After doing that, she at least had a chance of getting away from the others. And then . . . she'd be back. With reinforcements.