[What Might Have Been 01] Alternate Empires

by Anthology

  “Yes, yes, his brother. The one you like. The one he made Procurator of Judaea.”

  “That’s the one. Well, Tiberius rode day and night to bring Drusus the best doctors in Rome. He almost didn’t make it. They barely pulled Drusus through.”

  “Yes?” I said encouragingly. “And what then?”

  She looked uncertain. “Well, I don’t know what then.”

  I poured some more wine. “I guess I could figure out some kind of speculative idea,” I said, ruminating. “Especially if you would help me with some of the details. I suppose Tiberius would have become Emperor instead of Drusus. You say he was a good man; so probably he would have done more or less what Drusus did—restore the power of the Senate, after Augustus and my revered great-great Julius between them had pretty nearly put it out of business—”

  I stopped there, startled at my own words. It almost seemed that I was beginning to take Sam’s crazy idea seriously!

  On the other hand, that wasn’t all bad. It almost seemed that Rachel was beginning to take me seriously.

  That was a good thought. It kept me cheerful through half a dozen more dances and at least another hour of history lessons from her pretty lips … right up until the time when, after we had gone back to her house, I tiptoed out of my room toward hers, and found her butler, Basilius, asleep on a rug across her doorway, with a great, thick club by his side.

  I didn’t sleep well that night.

  Partly it was glandular. My head knew that Rachel didn’t want me creeping into her bedroom, or else she wouldn’t have put the butler there in the way. But my glands weren’t happy with that news. They had soaked up the smell and sight and feel of her, and they were complaining about being thwarted.

  The worst part was waking up every hour or so to contemplate financial ruin.

  Being poor wasn’t so bad. Every writer has to learn how to be poor from time to time, between checks. It’s an annoyance, but not a catastrophe. You don’t get enslaved just for poverty.

  But I had been running up some pretty big bills. And you do get enslaved for debt.

  Chapter 4

  The End of the Dream

  The next morning I woke up late and grouchy and had to take a three-wheeler to the Hall of the Senate-Inferior.

  It was slow going. As we approached, the traffic thickened even more. I could see the Legion forming for the ceremonial guard as the Pharaoh’s procession approached to open the ceremonies. The driver wouldn’t take me any closer than the outer square, and I had to wait there with all the tourists, while the Pharaoh dismounted from her royal litter.

  There was a soft, pleasured noise from the crowd, halfway between a giggle and a sigh. That was the spectacle the tourists had come to see. They pressed against the sheathed swords of the Legionaries while the Pharaoh, head bare, robe trailing on the ground, advanced on the shrines outside the Senate building. She sacrificed reverently and unhurriedly to them, while the tourists flashed their cameras at her, and I began to worry about the time. What if she ecumenically decided to visit all fifty shrines? But after doing Isis, Amon-Ra, and Mother Nile, she went inside to declare the Congress open. The Legionaries relaxed. The tourists began to flow back to their buses, snapping pictures of themselves now, and I followed the Pharaoh inside.

  She made a good—by which I mean short—opening address. The only thing wrong with it was that she was talking to mostly empty seats.

  The Hall of the Alexandrian Senate-Inferior holds two thousand people. There weren’t more than a hundred and fifty in it. Most of those were huddled in small groups in the aisles and at the back of the hall, and they were paying no attention at all to the Pharaoh. I think she saw that and shortened her speech. At one moment she was telling us how the scientific investigation of the outside universe was completely in accord with the ancient traditions of Egypt—with hardly anyone listening—and at the next her voice had stopped without warning and she was handing her orb and scepter to her attendants. She proceeded regally across the stage and out the wings.

  The buzz of conversation hardly slackened. What they were talking about, of course, was the Olympians. Even when the Collegium-Presidor stepped forward and called for the first session to begin. the hall didn’t fill. At least most of the scattered groups of people in the room sat down—though still in clumps, and still doing a lot of whispering to each other.

  Even the speakers didn’t seem very interested in what they were saying. The first one was an honorary Presidor-Emeritus from the southern highlands of Egypt, and he gave us a review of everything we knew about the Olympians.

  He read it as hurriedly as though he were dictating it to a scribe. It wasn’t very interesting. The trouble, of course, was that his paper had been prepared days earlier, while the Olympian transmissions were still flooding in and no one had any thought they might be interrupted. It just didn’t seem relevant anymore.

  What I like about going to science congresses isn’t so much the actual papers the speakers deliver—I can get that sort of information better from the journals in the library. It isn’t even the back-and-forth discussion that follows each paper, although that sometimes produces useful background bits. What I get the most out of is what I call “the sound of science”—the kind of shorthand language scientists use when they’re talking to each other about their own specialties. So I usually sit somewhere at the back of the hall, with as much space around me as I can manage, my tablet in my lap and my stylus in my hand, writing down bits of dialogue and figuring how to put them into my next sci-rom.

  There wasn’t much of that today. There wasn’t much discussion at all. One by one the speakers got up and read their papers, answered a couple of cursory questions with cursory replies, and hurried off; and when each one finished he left, and the audience got smaller because, as I finally figured out, no one was there who wasn’t obligated to be.

  When boredom made me decide that I needed a glass of wine and a quick snack more than I needed to sit there with my still-blank tablet, I found out there was hardly anyone even in the lounges. There was no familiar face. No one seemed to know where Sam was. And in the afternoon, the Collegium-Presidor, bowing to the inevitable, announced that the remaining sessions would be postponed indefinitely.

  The day was a total waste.

  I had a lot more hopes for the night.

  Rachel greeted me with the news that Sam had sent a message to say he was detained and wouldn’t make dinner.

  “Did he say where he was?” She shook her head. “He’s off with some of the other top people,” I guessed. I told her about the collapse of the convention. Then I brightened. “At least let’s go out for dinner, then.”

  Rachel firmly vetoed the idea. She was tactful enough not to mention money, although I was sure Sam had filled her in on my precarious financial state. “I like my own cook’s food better than any restaurant,” she told me. “We’ll eat here. There won’t be anything fancy tonight—just a simple meal for the two of us.”

  The best part of that was “the two of us.” Basilius had arranged the couches in a sort of V, so that our heads were quite close together, with the low serving tables in easy reach between us. As soon as she lay down, Rachel confessed, “I didn’t get a lot of work done today. I couldn’t get that idea of yours out of my head.”

  The idea was Sam’s, actually, but I didn’t see any reason to correct her. “I’m flattered,” I told her. “I’m sorry I spoiled your work.”

  She shrugged and went on. “I did a little reading on the period, especially about an interesting minor figure who lived around then, a Judaean preacher named Jeshua of Nazareth. Did you ever hear of him? Well, most people haven’t, but he had a lot of followers at one time. They called themselves Chrestians, and they were a very unruly bunch.”

  “I’m afraid I don’t know much about Judaean history,” I said. Which was true; but then I added, “But I’d really like to learn more.” Which wasn’t—or at least hadn’t been until just then.


  “Of course,” Rachel said. No doubt to her it seemed quite natural that everyone in the world would wish to know more about the post-Augustan period. “Anyway, this Jeshua was on trial for sedition. He was condemned to death.”

  I blinked at her. “Not just to slavery?”

  She shook her head. “They didn’t just enslave criminals back then, they did physical things to them. Even executed them, sometimes in very barbarous ways. But Tiberius, as Proconsul, decided that the penalty was too extreme. So he commuted Jeshua’s death sentence. He just had him whipped and let him go. A very good decision, I think. Otherwise he would have made him a martyr, and gods know what would have happened after that. As it was, the Chrestians just gradually waned away…. Basilius? You can bring the next course in now.”

  I watched with interest as Basilius complied. It turned out to be larks and olives! I approved, not simply for the fact that I liked the dish. The “simple meal” was actually a lot more elaborate than she had provided for the three of us the night before.

  Things were looking up. I said, “Can you tell me something, Rachel? I think you’re Judaean yourself, aren’t you?”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, I’m a little confused,” I said. “I thought the Judaeans believed in the god Yahveh.”

  “Of course, Julie. We do.”

  “Yes, but—” I hesitated. I didn’t want to mess up the way things were going, but I was curious. “But you say ‘gods.’ Isn’t that, well, a contradiction?”

  “Not at all,” she told me civilly enough. “Yahveh’s commandments were brought down from a mountaintop by our great prophet, Moses, and they were very clear on the subject. One of them says, ‘Thou shalt have no other gods before me.’ Well, we don’t, you see? Yahveh is our first god. There aren’t any before him. It’s all explained in the rabbinical writings.”

  “And that’s what you go by, the rabbinical writings?”

  She looked thoughtful. “In a way. We’re a very traditional people, Julie. Tradition is what we follow; the rabbinical writings simply explain the traditions.”

  She had stopped eating. I stopped, too. Dreamily I reached out to caress her cheek.

  She didn’t pull away. She didn’t respond, either. After a moment, she said, not looking at me, “For instance, there is a Judaean tradition that a woman is to be a virgin at the time of her marriage.”

  My hand came away from her face by itself, without any conscious command from me. “Oh?”

  “And the rabbinical writings more or less define the tradition, you see. They say that the head of the household is to stand guard at an unmarried daughter’s bedroom for the first hour of each night; if there is no male head of the household, a trusted slave is to be appointed to the job.”

  “I see,” I said. “You’ve never been married, have you?”

  “Not yet,” said Rachel, beginning to eat again.

  I hadn’t ever been married, either, although, to be sure, I wasn’t exactly a virgin. It wasn’t that I had anything against marriage. It was only that the life of a sci-rom hack wasn’t what you would call exactly financially stable, and also the fact that I hadn’t ever come across the woman I wanted to spend my life with … or, to quote Rachel, “Not yet.”

  I tried to keep my mind off that subject. I was sure that if my finances had been precarious before, they were now close to catastrophic.

  The next morning I wondered what to do with my day, but Rachel settled it for me. She was waiting for me in the atrium. “Sit down with me, Julie,” she commanded, patting the bench beside me. “I was up late, thinking, and I think I’ve got something for you. Suppose this man Jeshua had been executed, after all.”

  It wasn’t exactly the greeting I had been hoping for, nor was it something I had given a moment’s thought to, either. But I was glad enough to sit next to her in that pleasant little garden, with the gentled early sun shining down on us through the translucent shades. “Yes?” I said noncommittally, kissing her hand in greeting.

  She waited a moment before she took her hand back. “That idea opened some interesting possibilities, Julie. Jeshua would have been a martyr, you see. I can easily imagine that under those circumstances his Chrestian followers would have had a lot more staying power. They might even have grown to be really important. Judaea was always in one kind of turmoil or another around that time, anyway—there were all sorts of prophecies and rumors about messiahs and changes in society. The Chrestians might even have come to dominate all of Judaea.”

  I tried to be tactful. “There’s nothing wrong with being proud of your ancestors, Rachel. But, really, what difference would that have made?” I obviously hadn’t been tactful enough. She had turned to look at me with what looked like the beginning of a frown. I thought fast, and tried to cover myself. “On the other hand,” I went on quickly, “suppose you expanded that idea beyond Judaea.”

  It turned into a real frown, but puzzled rather than angry. “What do you mean, beyond Judaea?”

  “Well, suppose Jeshua’s Chrestian-Judaean kind of—what would you call it? Philosophy? Religion?”

  “A little of both, I’d say.”

  “Religious philosophy, then. Suppose it spread over most of the world, not just Judaea. That could be interesting.”

  “But, really, no such thing hap—”

  “Rachel, Rachel,” I said, covering her mouth with a fingertip affectionately. “We’re saying what ifs, remember? Every sci-rom writer is entitled to one big lie. Let’s say this is mine. Let’s say that ChrestianJudaeanism became a world religion. Even Rome itself succumbs. Maybe the City becomes the—what do you call it—the place for the Sanhedrin of the Chrestian-Judaeans. And then what happens?”

  “You tell me,” she said, half amused, half suspicious.

  “Why, then,” I said, flexing the imagination of the trained sci-rom writer, “it might develop like the kind of conditions you’ve been talking about in the old days in Judaea. Maybe the whole world would be splintering into factions and sects, and then they fight.”

  “Fight wars?” she asked incredulously.

  “Fight big wars. Why not? It happened in Judaea, didn’t it? And then they might keep right on fighting them, all through historical times. After all, the only thing that’s kept the world united for the past two thousand years has been the Pax Romana. Without that—why, without that,” I went on, talking faster and making mental notes to myself as I went along, “let’s say that all the tribes of Europe turned into independent city-states. Like the Greeks, only bigger. And more powerful. And they fight, the Franks against the Vik Northmen against the Belgiae against the Kelts.”

  She was shaking her head. “People wouldn’t be so silly, Julie,” she complained.

  “How do you know that? Anyway, this is a sci-rom, dear.” I didn’t pause to see if she reacted to the “dear.” I went right on, but not failing to notice that she hadn’t objected. “The people will be as silly as I want them to be—as long as I can make it plausible enough for the fans. But you haven’t heard the best part of it. Let’s say the Chrestian-Judaeans take their religion seriously. They don’t do anything to go against the will of their god. What Yahveh said still goes, no matter what. Do you follow? That means they aren’t at all interested in scientific discovery, for instance.”

  “No, stop right there!” she ordered, suddenly indignant. “Are you trying to say that we Judaeans aren’t interested in science? That I’m not? Or my Uncle Sam? And we’re certainly Judaeans.”

  “But you’re not Chrestian-Judaeans, sweet. There’s a big difference. Why? Because I say there is, Rachel, and I’m the one writing the story. So, let’s see—” I paused for thought—“all right, let’s say the Chrestians go through a long period of intellectual stagnation, and then—” I paused, not because I didn’t know what was coming next, but to build the effect—“and then along come the Olympians!”

  She gazed at me blankly. “Yes?” she asked, encouraging but vague.

  “D
on’t you see it? And then this Chrestian-Judaean world, drowsing along in the middle of a prescientific dark age—no aircraft, no electronic broadcast, not even a printing press or a hovermachine—is suddenly thrown into contact with a supertechnological civilization from outer space!” She was wrinkling her forehead at me, trying to understand what I was driving at. “It’s terrible culture shock,” I explained. “And not just for the people on Earth. Maybe the Olympians come to look us over, and they see that we’re technologically backward and divided into warring nations and all that … and what do they do? Why, they turn right around and leave us! And … and that’s the end of the book!”

  She pursed her lips. “But maybe that’s what they’re doing now,” she said cautiously.

  “But not for that reason, certainly. See, this isn’t our world I’m talking about. It’s a what if world.”

  “It sounds a little far-fetched,” she said.

  I said happily, “That’s where my skills come in. You don’t understand sci-rom, sweetheart. It’s the sci-rom writer’s job to push an idea as far as it will go—to the absolute limit of credibility—to the point where if he took just one step more the whole thing would collapse into absurdity. Trust me, Rachel. I’ll make them believe it.”

  She was still pursing her pretty lips, but this time I didn’t wait for her to speak. I seized the bird of opportunity on the wing. I leaned toward her and kissed those lips, as I had been wanting to do for some time. Then I said, “I’ve got to get to a scribe; I want to get all this down before I forget it. I’ll be back when I can be, and—and until then—well, here.”

  And I kissed her again, gently, firmly and long; and it was quite clear early in the process that she was kissing me back.

  Being next to a rental barracks had its advantages. I found a scribe to rent at a decent price, and the rental manager even let me borrow one of their conference rooms that night to dictate in. By daybreak I had down the first two chapters and an outline of Sidewise to a Chrestian World.