The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories Part 34

'We found it, grandmother. We dug it up.'

'You dug it up?'

'In the forest,' I put in. 'We go there every Sat.u.r.day, you know, just wandering around. There was this old mound of dirt--we were poking in it, and we saw something gleaming--'

She turned it over and over in her hands. I had never seen her look so troubled. 'Swear to me that that's how you found it! Come, now, at the altar of Juno! I want you to swear to me before the G.o.ddess. And then I want you to take me to see this mound of dirt of yours.'

Friya gave me a panic-stricken glance.

Hesitantly I said, 'We may not be able to find it again, grandmother. I told you, we were just wandering around--we didn't really pay attention to where we were--'

I grew red in the face, and I was stammering, too. It isn't easy to lie convincingly to your own grandmother.

She held the figurine out, its base toward me. 'Do you see these marks here? This little crest stamped down here? It's the Imperial crest, Tyr. That's the mark of Caesar. This carving once belonged to the Emperor. Do you expect me to believe that there's Imperial treasure simply lying around in mounds of dirt in the forest? Come, both of you! To the altar, and swear!'

'We only wanted to bring you a pretty birthday gift, grandmother,' Friya said softly. 'We didn't mean to do any harm.'

'Of course not, child. Tell me, now: where'd this thing come from?'

'The haunted house in the woods,' she said. And I nodded my confirmation. What could I do? She would have taken us to the altar to swear.

Strictly speaking, Friya and I were traitors to the Republic. We even knew that ourselves, from the moment we realized who the old man really was. The Caesars were proscribed when the Empire fell; everyone within a certain level of blood kins.h.i.+p to the Emperor was condemned to death, so that no one could rise up and claim the throne in years hereafter.

A handful of very minor members of the royal family did indeed manage to escape, so it was said; but giving aid and comfort to them was a serious offense. And this was no mere second cousin or great-grandnephew that we had discovered deep in the forest: this was the Emperor's own brother. He was, in fact, the legitimate Emperor himself, in the eyes of those for whom the Empire had never ended. And it was our responsibility to turn him in to the quaestors. But he was so old, so gentle, so feeble. We didn't see how he could be much of a threat to the Republic. Even if he did believe that the Revolution had been an evil thing, and that only under a divinely chosen Caesar could the world enjoy real peace.

We were children. We didn't understand what risks we were taking, or what perils we were exposing our family to.

Things were tense at our house during the next few days: whispered conferences between our grandmother and our mother, out of our earshot, and then an evening when the two of them spoke with father while Friya and I were confined to our room, and there were sharp words and even some shouting. Afterward there was a long cold silence, followed by more mysterious discussions. Then things returned to normal. My grandmother never put the figurine of Pan in her collection of little artifacts of the old days, nor did she ever speak of it again.

That it had the Imperial crest on it was, we realized, the cause of all the uproar. Even so, we weren't clear about what the problem was. I had thought all along that grandmother was secretly an Empire loyalist herself. A lot of people her age were; and she was, after all, a traditionalist, a priestess of Juno Teutonica, who disliked the revived wors.h.i.+p of the old Germanic G.o.ds that had sprung up in recent times--'pagan' G.o.ds, she called them--and had argued with father about his insistence on naming us as he had. So she should have been pleased to have something that had belonged to the Caesars. But, as I say, we were children then. We didn't take into account the fact that the Republic dealt harshly with anyone who practiced Caesarism. Or that whatever my grandmother's private political beliefs might have been, father was the unquestioned master of our household, and he was a devout Republican.

'I understand you've been poking around that old ruined house in the woods,' my father said, a week or so later. 'Stay away from it. Do you hear me? Stay away.'

And so we would have, because it was plainly an order. We didn't disobey our father's orders.

But then, a few days afterward, I overheard some of the older boys of the village talking about making a foray out to the haunted house.

Evidently Marcus Aurelius Schwarzchild had been talking about the ghost with the polished rifle to others beside me, and they wanted the rifle. 'It's five of us against one of him/ I heard someone say. 'We ought to be able to take care of him, ghost or not.'

'What if it's a ghost rifle, though?' one of them asked. 'A ghost rifle won't be any good to us.'

'There's no such thing as a ghost rifle,' the first speaker said. 'Rifles don't have ghosts. It's a real rifle. And it won't be hard for us to get it away from a ghost.'

I repeated all this to Friya.

'What should we do?' I asked her.

'Go out there and warn him. They'll hurt him, Tyr.'

'But father said--'

'Even so. The old man's got to go somewhere and hide. Otherwise his blood will be on our heads.'

There was no arguing with her. Either I went with her to the house in the woods that moment, or she'd go by herself. That left me with no choice. I prayed to Woden that my father wouldn't find out, or that he'd forgive me if he did; and off we went into the woods, past Agrippina's Spring, past the statues of the pretty boy, past Baldur's Tree, and down the now-familiar path beyond the glossy-leaved oak.

'Something's wrong,' Friya said, as we approached the hunting lodge. 'I can tell.'

Friya always had a strange way of knowing things. I saw the fear in her eyes and felt frightened myself.

We crept forward warily. There was no sign of Quintus Fabius. And when we came to the door of the lodge we saw that it was a little way ajar, and off its hinges, as if it had been forced. Friya put her hand on my arm and we stared at each other. I took a deep breath.

'You wait here,' I said, and went in.

It was frightful in there. The place had been ransacked--the furniture smashed, the cupboards overturned, the sculptures in fragments. Someone had slashed every painting to shreds. The collection of arms and armor was gone.

I went from room to room, looking for Quintus Fabius. He wasn't there. But there were bloodstains on the floor of the main hall, still fresh, still sticky.

Friya was waiting on the porch, trembling, fighting back tears. 'We're too late,' I told her.

It hadn't been the boys from the village, of course. They couldn't possibly have done such a thorough job. I realized--and surely so did Friya, though we were both too sickened by the realization to discuss it with each other--that grandmother must have told father we had found a cache of Imperial treasure in the old house, and he, good citizen that he was, had told the quaestors. Who had gone out to investigate, come upon Quintus Fabius, and recognized him for a Caesar, just as Friya had. So my eagerness to bring back a pretty gift for grandmother had been the old man's downfall. I suppose he wouldn't have lived much longer in any case, as frail as he was; but the guilt for what I unknowingly brought upon him is something that I've borne ever since.

Some years later, when the forest was mostly gone, the old house accidentally burned down. I was a young man then, and I helped out on the firefighting line. During a lull in the work I said to the captain of the fire brigade, a retired quaestor named Lucentius, It was an Imperial hunting lodge once, wasn't it?'

'A long time ago, yes.'

I studied him cautiously by the light of the flickering blaze. He was an older man, of my father's generation.

Carefully I said, 'When I was a boy, there was a story going around that one of the last Emperor's brothers had hidden himself away in it. And that eventually the quaestors caught him and killed him.'

He seemed taken off guard by that. He looked surprised and, for a moment, troubled. 'So you heard about that, did you?'

'I wondered if there was any truth to it. That he was a Caesar, I mean.'

Lucentius glanced away. 'He was only an old tramp, is all,' he said, in a m.u.f.fled tone. 'An old lying tramp. Maybe he told fantastic stories to some of the gullible kids, but a tramp is all he was, an old filthy lying tramp.' He gave me a peculiar look. And then he stamped away to shout at someone who was uncoiling a hose the wrong way.

A filthy old tramp, yes. But not, I think, a liar.

He remains alive in my mind to this day, that poor old relic of the Empire. And now that I am old myself, as old, perhaps, as he was then, I understand something of what he was saying. Not his belief that there necessarily had to be a Caesar in order for there to be peace, for the Caesars were only men themselves, in no way different from the Consuls who have replaced them. But when he argued that the time of the Empire had been basically a time of peace, he may not have been really wrong, even if war had been far from unknown in Imperial days.

For I see now that war can sometimes be a kind of peace also: that the Civil Wars and the Wars of Reunification were the struggles of a sundered Empire trying to rea.s.semble itself so peace might resume. These matters are not so simple. The Second Republic is not as virtuous as my father thought, nor was the old Empire, apparently, quite as corrupt. The only thing that seems true without dispute is that the worldwide hegemony of Roma these past two thousand years under the Empire and then under the Republic, troubled though it has occasionally been, has kept us from even worse turmoil. What if there had been no Roma? What if every region had been free to make war against its neighbors in the hope of creating the sort of Empire that the Romans were able to build? Imagine the madness of it! But the G.o.ds gave us the Romans, and the Romans gave us peace: not a perfect peace, but the best peace, perhaps, that an imperfect world could manage. Or so I think now. In any case the Caesars are dead, and so is everyone else I have written about here, even my little sister Friya; and here I am, an old man of the Second Republic, thinking back over the past and trying to bring some sense out of it. I still have the strange dagger that Quintus Fabius gave me, the barbaric-looking one with the curious wavy blade, that came from some savage island in the Ocea.n.u.s Pacificus. Now and then I take it out and look at it. It s.h.i.+nes with a kind of antique splendor in the lamplight. My eyes are too dim now to see the tiny Imperial crest that someone engraved on its haft when the merchant captain who brought it back from the South Seas gave it to the Caesar of his time, four or five hundred years ago. Nor can I see the little letters, SPQR, that are inscribed on the blade. For all I know, they were put there by the frizzy-haired tribesman who fas.h.i.+oned that odd, fierce weapon: for he, too, was a citizen of the Roman Empire. As in a manner of speaking are we all, even now in the days of the Second Republic.

As are we all.

Mana.s.sas, Again.

Gregory Benford.

There were worse things than getting swept up in the first battle of the first war in over a century, but Bradley could not right away think of any.

They had been out on a lark, really. Bradley got his buddy Paul to go along, flying low over the hills to watch the grand formations of men and machines. Bradley knew how to keep below the radar screens, sometimes skimming along so close to the treetops that branches snapped on their understruts. They had come in before dawn, using Bradley's Dad's luxury, ultra-quiet cruiser - over the broad fields, using the sunrise to blind the optical sensors below.

It had been enormously exciting. The gleaming columns, the acrid smoke of ruin, the distant m.u.f.fled coughs of combat.

Then somebody shot them down.

Not a full, square hit, luckily. Bradley had got them over two ranges of hills, lurching through shot-wracked air. Then they came down heavily, air bags saving the two boys.

They had no choice but to go along with the team which picked them out of their wreckage. Dexter, a big swarthy man, seemed to be in charge. He said, "We got word a bunch of mechs are comin along this road. You stick with us, you can help out."

Bradley said irritably, "Why should we? I want to-"

"Cause it's not safe round here, kid," Dexter said. "You joyriding rich kids, maybe you'll learn something about that today."

Dexter grinned, showing two missing teeth, and waved the rest of his company to keep moving into the slanting early morning glow.

n.o.body had any food and Bradley was pretty sure they would not have shared it out if they had. The fighting over the ridge to the west had disrupted whatever supply lines there were into this open, once agricultural land.

They reached the crossroads by mid-morning and right away knocked out a servant mech by mistake. It saw them come hiking over the hill through the thick oaks and started chuffing away, moving as fast as it could. It was an R cla.s.s, s.h.i.+ny and chromed.

A woman who carried one of the long rods over her shoulder whipped the rod down and sighted along it and a loud boom startled Bradley. The R mech went down. "First one of the day," the woman named Angel said.

"Musta been a scout," Dexter said.

"For what?" Bradley asked, shocked as they walked down the slope towards the mech in air still cool and moist from the dawn.

Paul said tentatively, "The mech withdrawal?"

Dexter nodded. "Mechs're on their way through here. Bet they're scared plenty."

They saw the R mech had a small hole punched through it right in the servo controls near the back. "Not bad shootin," a man said to Angel.

"I tole you these'd work," Angel said proudly. "I sighted mine in fresh this mornin. It helps."

Bradley realized suddenly that the various machined rods these dozen people carried were all weapons, fabrications turned out of factories exclusively human-run. Killing tools, he thought in blank surprise. Like the old days. You see them in dramas and stuff, but they've been illegal for a century.

"Maybe this mech was just plain scared," Bradley said. "It's got software for that."

"We sent out a beeper warning," Dexter said, slapping the pack on his back. "Goes out of this li'l rig here. Any mech wants no trouble, all they got to do is come up on us slow and then lie down so we can have a look at their programming cubes."

"Disable it?"

"Sure. How else we going to be sure?"

"This one ran, clear as anything," Angel said, reloading her rifle.

"Maybe it didn't understand," Bradley said. The R models were deft, subtle, terrific at social graces.

"It knew, all right," Angel said, popping the mech's central port open and pulling out its ID cube. "Look, it's from Sanfran."

"What's it doing all the way out here, then, if it's not a rebel?" a black man named Nelson asked.

"Yeah," Dexter said. "Enter it as reb." He handed Bradley a wrist comm. "We're keepin' track careful now. You'll be busy just takin' down score today, kid."

"Rebel, uh, I see," Bradley said, tapping into the comm. It was rea.s.suring to do something simple while he straightened out his feelings.

"You bet," Nelson said, excitement lacing his voice. "Look at it. Fancy mech, smarter than most of them, tryin' to save itself. It's been runnin away from our people. They just broke up a big mech force west of here."

"I never could afford one of these chrome jobs," Angel said. "They knew that, too. I had one of these cla.s.sy R numbers mean-mouth me in the market, try to grab a can of soya bean stew." She laughed sarcastically. "That was when there was a few sc.r.a.ps left on the shelves."

"Elegant thing, wasn't it?" Nelson kicked the mech, which rolled further downhill.

"You messed it up pretty well," Bradley said.

Dexter said, "Roll it down into that hollow so n.o.body can see it from the road." He gestured at Paul. "You go with the other party. Hey, Mercer!"

A tall man ambled over from where he had been trying to carefully pick the spines off a p.r.i.c.kly pear growing in a gully. Everybody was hungry. Dexter said to him, "Go down across the road and set up shop. Take this kid - Paul's your name, right? - he'll help with the grunt work. We'll catch 'em in a crossfire here."

Mercer went off with Paul. Bradley helped get the dead mech going and with Angel rolled it into the gully. Its flailing arms dug fresh wet gouges in the spring gra.s.s. The exposed mud exhaled moist scents. They threw manzanita brush over the s.h.i.+ny carca.s.s to be sure and by that time Dexter had deployed his people.

They were setting up what looked like traps of some kind well away from the blacktop crossroads. Bradley saw that this was to keep the crossroads from looking damaged or clogged. They wanted the mechs to come in fast and keep going.

As he worked he heard rolling ba.s.s notes, like the mumbles of a giant, come from the horizon. He could see that both the roads leading to the crossroads could carry mechs away from the distant battles. Dexter was everywhere, barking orders, Bradley noted with respect.

The adults talked excitedly to each other about what the mechs would make of it, how easy they were to fool about real-world stuff, and even threw in some insider mech slang - codes and acronyms that meant very little to mechs, really, but had got into the pop culture as hip new stuff. Bradley smiled at this. It gave him a moment of feeling superior to cover his uneasiness.

It was a crisp spring morning now that the sun had beamed up over the far hill at their backs. The perfect time for fresh growth, but the fields beyond had no plowing or signs of cultivation. Mechs should be there, laying in crops. Instead they were off over the rumpled ridgeline, clas.h.i.+ng with the main body of humans and, Bradley hoped secretly, getting their a.s.ses kicked. Though mechs had no a.s.ses, he reminded himself.

Dexter and Bradley laid down behind a hummock halfway up the hill. Dexter was talking into his hushmike headset, face jumping with antic.i.p.ation and concern. Bradley savored the rich scents of the sweet new gra.s.s and thought idly about eating some of it. Dexter looked out over the setup his team was building and said, "Y'know maybe we're too close but I figure you can't be in too close as long as you have the fire power. These weapons, we need close, real close. Easier to hit them when they're moving fast but then it's easier for them to hit you, too."

Bradley saw that the man was more edgy here than he had been with his team. n.o.body had done anything like this within living memory. Not in the civilized world, anyway.

"Got to be sure we can back out of this if it gets too hot," Dexter went on.

Bradley liked Dexter's no-nonsense scowl. "How did you learn how to fight?"

Dexter looked surprised. "Hobby of mine. Studied the great Roman campaigns in Africa, in Asia, then here against the Indians."

"They used ambushes a lot?"

"Sometimes. Of course, after Sygnius of Albion invented the steam-driven machine gun, well sir, then the Romans could dictate terms to any tribes that gave them trouble." Dexter squinted at him. "You study history, kid?"

"I'm Bradley, sir. My parents don't let me read about battles very much. They're always saying we've got beyond that."

"Yeah, that Universal Peace Church, right?"