Rome was busy, as always. There was a bullfight going on in the Coliseum and racing at the Circus Maximus. Tourist buses were jamming narrow streets. A long religious procession was circling the Pantheon, but I didn’t get close enough to see which particular gods were being honoured today. I don’t like crowds. Especially Roman crowds, because there are even more foreigners in Rome than in London, Africs and Hinds, Hans and Northmen — every race on the face of the Earth sends its tourists to visit the Imperial City. And Rome obliges with spectacles. I paused at one of them, for the changing of the guard at the Golden House. Of course, the Caesar and his wife were nowhere to be seen — off on one of their endless ceremonial tours of the dominions, no doubt, or at least opening a new supermarket somewhere. But the Algonkian family standing in front of me were thrilled as the honour Legions marched and countermarched their standards around the palace. I remembered enough Cherokee to ask the Algonkians where they were from, but the languages aren’t really very close and the man’s Cherokee was even worse than mine. We just smiled at each other.
As soon as the Legions were out of the way I headed for the train.
I knew in the back of my mind that I should have been worrying about my financial position. The clock was running on my thirty days of grace. I didn’t, though. I was buoyed up by a feeling of confidence. Confidence in my good friend Flavius Samuelus, who, I knew, no matter what he was doing with most of his brain, was still cogitating an idea for me with some part of it.
It did not occur to me that even Sam had limitations. Or that something so much more important than my own problems was taking up his attention that he didn’t have much left for me.
I didn’t see Sam come onto the skipship, and I didn’t see him in our compartment. Even when the ship’s fans began to rumble and we slid down the ways into the Tyrrhenian Sea he wasn’t there. I dozed off, beginning to worry that he might have missed the boat; but late that night, already asleep, I half woke, just long enough to hear him stumbling in. “I’ve been on the bridge,” he said when I muttered something. “Go back to sleep. I’ll see you in the morning.”
When I woke, I thought it might have been a dream, because he was up and gone before me. But his bed had been slept in, however briefly, and the cabin steward reassured me when he brought my morning wine. Yes, Citizen Flavius Samuelus was certainly on the hover. He was in the captain’s own quarters, as a matter of fact, although what he was doing there the steward could not say.
I spent the morning relaxing on the deck of the hover, soaking in the sun. The ship wasn’t exactly a hover any more. We had transited the Sicilian Straits during the night and now, out in the open Mediterranean, the captain had lowered the stilts, pulled up the hover skirts, and extended the screws. We were hydrofoiling across the sea at easily a hundred miles an hour. It was a smooth, relaxing ride; the vanes that supported us were twenty feet under the surface of the water, and so there was no wave action to bounce us around.
Lying on my back and squinting up at the warm southern sky, I could see a three-winged airliner rise up from the horizon behind us and gradually overtake us, to disappear ahead of our bows. The plane wasn’t going much faster than we were — and we had all the comfort, while they were paying twice as much for passage.
I opened my eyes all the way when I caught a glimpse of someone standing beside me. In fact, I sat up quickly, because it was Sam. He looked as though he hadn’t had much sleep, and he was holding a floppy sun hat with one hand against the wind of our passage. “Where’ve you been?” I asked.
“Haven’t you been watching the news?” he asked. I shook my head. “The transmissions from the Olympians have stopped,” he told me.
I opened my eyes really wide at that, because it was an unpleasant surprise. Still, Sam didn’t seem that upset. Displeased, yes. Maybe even a little concerned, but not as shaken up as I was prepared to feel. “It’s probably nothing,” he said. “It could be just interference from the sun. It’s in Sagittarius now, so it’s pretty much between us and them. There’s been trouble with static for a couple of days now.”
I ventured, “So the transmissions will start up again pretty soon?”
He shrugged and waved to the deck steward for one of those hot decoctions Judaeans like. When he spoke it was on a different topic. “I don’t think I made you understand what I meant yesterday,” he said. “Let me see if I can explain what I meant by an alternate world. You remember your history? How Fornius Velio conquered the Mayans and Romanized the Western Continents six or seven hundred years ago? Well, suppose he hadn’t.”
“But he did, Sam.”
“I know he did,” Sam said patiently. “I’m saying suppose. Suppose the Legions had been defeated at the Battle of Tehultapec.”
I laughed. I was sure he was joking. “The Legions? Defeated? But the Legions have never been defeated.”
“That’s not true,” Sam said in reproof. He hates it when people don’t get their facts straight. “Remember Varus.”
“Oh, hells, Sam, that was ancient history! When was it, two thousand years ago? In the time of Augustus Caesar? And it was only a temporary defeat, anyway. The Emperor Drusus got the eagles back.” And got all of Gaul for the Empire, too. That was one of the first big trans-Alpine conquests. The Gauls are about as Roman as you can get these days, especially when it comes to drinking wine.
He shook his head. “Suppose Fornius Velio had had a temporary defeat, then.”
I tried to follow his argument, but it wasn’t easy. “What difference would that have made? Sooner or later the Legions would have conquered. They always have, you know.”
“That’s true,” he said reasonably, “but if that particular conquest hadn’t happened then, the whole course of history would have been different. We wouldn’t have had the great westward migrations to fill up those empty continents. The Hans and the Hinds wouldn’t have been surrounded on both sides, so they might still be independent nations. It would have been a different world. Do you see what I’m driving at? That’s what I mean by an alternate world — one that might have happened, but didn’t.”
I tried to be polite to him. “Sam,” I said, “you’ve just described the difference between a sci-rom and a fantasy. I don’t do fantasy. Besides,” I went on, not wanting to hurt his feelings, “I don’t see how different things would have been, really. I can’t believe the world would be changed enough to build a sci-rom plot on.”
He gazed blankly at me for a moment, then turned and looked out to sea. Then, without transition, he said, “There’s one funny thing. The Martian colonies aren’t getting a transmission, either. And they aren’t occluded by the sun.”
I frowned. “What does that mean, Sam?”
He shook his head. “I wish I knew,” he said.
CHAPTER 3
In Old Alexandria
The Pharos was bright in the sunset light as we came into the port of Alexandria. We were on hover again, at slow speeds, and the chop at the breakwater bumped us around. But once we got to the inner harbour the water was calm.
Sam had spent the afternoon back in the captain’s quarters, keeping in contact with the Collegium of Sciences, but he showed up as we moored. He saw me gazing towards the rental desk on the dock but shook his head. “Don’t bother with a rental, Julie,” he ordered. “Let my niece’s servants take your baggage. We’re staying with her.”
That was good news. Inn rooms in Alexandria are almost as pricey as Rome’s. I thanked him, but he didn’t even listen. He turned our bags over to a porter from his niece’s domicile, a little Arabian who was a lot stronger than he looked, and disappeared towards the Hall of the Egyptian Senate-Inferior, where the conference was going to be held.