Fortuna

by Nicholas Maes

  To my beloved family

  I would gladly travel across time for you

  Chapter One

  Caesar brought his charger to a stop. The pair was standing in the middle of the river. As the current eddied about the horse’s fetlocks, the general studied the terrain beyond. It was mostly open farmland and easily travelled. Enemy forces could be seen from a distance and its farms would be rich in provisions. All in all, this land was perfect … apart from the fact that it was strictly off-limits.

  The air was still. If Caesar closed his eyes, it would be easy to imagine he was alone in that landscape, so quiet were the soldiers of the thirteenth legion, even though they were marshalled directly behind him. There was no talk, no coughing, no groans of fatigue, never mind he’d pushed them mercilessly. They were gazing at the river, excited and abashed at their appointed task.

  The river. It was maximum three ulnae in breadth, a cubit deep, and its current was tame. It was nothing like the foreign rivers: the Arar, Rhodanus, Rhenus, Sequana, and, strangest of all, the winding Tamesis, its banks lined with Celts when he’d last sailed its waters. Such rivers could have swallowed his legion, unlike this Rubicon, which was just a feeble stream. And yet. On its northern bank he was a general of Rome; on its south he was nothing….

  “So? What’s it to be?” a voice addressed him. Caesar smiled. His right-hand man Marcus Antonius had joined him.

  “Ave Marce. It’s a funny thing. On this bank I’m in Cisalpine Gaul. I’m its leader and can act as I please. Across this trickle lies Italy. On its soil my imperium dies. If I lead my troops across, I’ll no longer be Rome’s champion but her back-stabbing son.”

  “Don’t tell me Caesar is getting cold feet? The victor of the Belgae, Suebi, and Helvetii has met a boundary that gives him pause?”

  “You know how matters stand. If I cross my army over, I’ll start a civil war. The Senate will pronounce me a hostis — me, Julius Caesar, a loyal Roman! There will be no peace until I’ve crushed their troops, or they’ve crushed mine. Blood will be shed, good Roman blood, and the land will teem with widows and orphans.”

  “So you won’t cross? These troops have marched behind you in vain? The legions that did your bidding in Gaul and wish to see you honoured — you would spurn their dedication? You would have them disband and go home to their families?”

  “The decision is too great for one man alone, even such a man as I.”

  Caesar considered the river. A mist was rising from its surface. The land on its far side was calling to him. The sun, too, was glaring down, either admiring Caesar’s brashness or appalled by it. Retreat or attack, which would he choose? The issue lay beyond all human judgment and he needed … help. He reached for the pouch that dangled from his cingulum.

  “Are you consulting your mistress?” Antonius joked.

  “She’s never failed me yet,” Caesar said. He was holding four astragali or knucklebones. Shaking them in his right hand, he muttered a prayer and rolled them onto his palm. With one brisk motion, he rolled them onto his open palm. He studied the effects and smiled grimly.

  “What did you throw?” Antonius asked. His bantering was gone and he was serious now. Caesar held the bones out. “Mehercule! You’ve thrown a Venus!” Antonius cried. “Surely Fortuna must favour this venture.”

  “So it would seem,” Caesar agreed, prodding his horse forward. “Signal the men. We’ll cross the river and gamble on war. The knucklebones have spoken. Alea jacta est!”

  A whistle startled Felix from his reading. His book, Suetonius’s Lives of the Caesars, slipped from his fingers to the floor of his g-pod. He sat up straight and looked around. The passengers in the shuttle were sitting calmly and gave no sign of having heard the signal. He consulted a Teledata screen to see where they were. The craft was over Iceland and fifteen minutes from the depot in Toronto. So why the whistle?

  “Honoured passengers,” a voice broke in, “InterCity Services is pleased to inform you that Global President Siegfried Angstrom will be addressing the world in precisely five minutes. Please stay tuned for this important broadcast.”

  “I was expecting this,” Stephen Gowan yawned. He was seated beside Felix and had engaged the speaker. How typical. Whenever he was on the same transport as Felix, he’d sit beside him and jabber away.

  “What were you expecting?” Felix asked, retrieving his book.

  “It’s been a year,” Stephen drawled, “since that problem started. I can’t remember what the problem was, but the president must be speaking to mark the occasion.”

  Felix smiled ruefully. It was hard to believe that a year ago today a deadly plague had stormed the planet. Even harder to believe was his discovery of a text that had shown this plague had struck in Roman times and its cure back then had been the lupus ridens. Because the flower was extinct in 2213, he’d travelled back to ancient Rome, using the secret Time Projection Module (or TPM). Carolyn Manes had gone with him and together they’d tracked down the lupus ridens, brought it to the future, and stopped the plague in its tracks.

  As incredible as this “mission” seemed, it was even crazier that people had forgotten the disaster. Once rescued from the jaws of destruction, the victims had shrugged and resumed their routines, as if their lives had never hung in the balance. Over the last twelve months, since the plague had been contained, not once had anyone referred to it in public, as if it had been a hiccup and nothing more. How could people forget so quickly?

  How? That was obvious. Enhanced ERR. And Mem-rase.

  “Honoured passengers,” the voice spoke again, “InterCity Services is pleased to inform you that our Global President Siegfried Angstrom will be addressing the world in precisely three minutes. Please stay tuned for this important broadcast.”

  “Yeah right,” Stephen smirked. “It will be as important as that book you’re reading. What’re you wasting your time on now?”

  “Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars.”

  “As in Caesar salad?” Stephen joked.

  “Caesar as in Julius. I found the book in Holland. It was left out in the garbage.”

  “That’s where it belongs!” Stephen sneered. “You really are something. You could study genetics, programming, or syn-chem; instead you read these fairy tales! If you’re not careful, you’ll end up being useless.”

  As if to underline this point, the lights in the cabin flickered for an instant. This had happened a lot in recent days, and people just ignored it.

  For his part, Felix shrugged. Whenever Stephen talked to him, the guy would go nuts about his interest in Latin. Felix always wanted to say it was his knowledge of Latin that had saved the world, not Stephen’s precious computer skills. But like most folks, Stephen didn’t remember the crisis and Felix couldn’t disclose his exploits. When General Manes had shown him the TPM, Felix had been forced to swear that he wouldn’t breathe a word about it, on pain of life imprisonment off-world. And when he’d flown to it in recent days, to spend time with Carolyn, the general had reminded him to keep his mouth shut.

  But it was odd. For all the good his Latin had done, he was inclined to agree with Stephen Gowan.

  Over the last six months his dad’s health had been off. His condition wasn’t serious, but he couldn’t manage the Repository on his own — as Felix had often explained to Stephen, the Repository was the last collection of books on earth. This meant Felix had to help his dad out. Instead of studying math or syn-chem, as Stephen suggested, he spent his days roaming the planet and amassing books that needed saving. And when he wasn’t hopping all over the place, he was cataloguing items and making repairs. The work was tedious, but necessary; otherwise the authorities would shut them down. And if the Repository closed, its books would perish.

  But he often wondered: was this his
future? He would rescue books and keep them safe for people who had no interest in them? He would master languages that were no longer spoken and study subjects that had long been forgotten? The Repository was a graveyard of ideas. Was this where he wanted to pass his days…?

  “I spoke to Carolyn,” Stephen said. “She said you’re meeting later.”

  “Yeah. We’re playing Halo Ball.”

  “Tell her to dress nicely tonight. And that my parents hate it when guests show up late.”

  “She’s meeting your parents?”

  “All of us are attending the awards ceremony.”

  “What awards ceremony?”

  “Geez, you’re out of it, aren’t you? I won a contest. Carolyn came in second. Boy, she hated losing.”

  Again the lights wavered briefly.

  Felix was too distracted to question this flickering. Six months ago he and Carolyn had been flying to Prague to rescue yet another cache of books. They’d been debating the novel ERR limits when Stephen had told them to keep it down. Felix had introduced Carolyn to Stephen and she’d taken a shine to the geek. Since then, the pair had seen a lot of one another….

  “Honoured passengers,” a voice broke in, “InterCity Services is pleased to inform you that our Global President Siegfried Angstrom will be addressing the world in precisely ten seconds. Please stay tuned for this important broadcast.”

  “And she should adjust her skin tone,” Stephen added. “She’s way too pale.”

  Before Felix could answer, a face appeared on every screen in the transport: Siegfried Angstrom. As always he looked terrific, with his leonine nose, stark blond hair, and glacier-blue eyes — his retinal implants augmented their brightness. Felix was thrown back a year, to the night he’d called the Angstrom Show and revealed that the lupus ridens might be a cure for the plague. Angstrom had ignored him with withering contempt.

  He was even more forbidding now. Felix thought of Sajit Gupta, the former president. Unlike Angstrom, who was ice in human form, Gupta had been warm and friendly. That’s why Angstrom had thrust him aside.

  Once the world recovered from the plague, it had reviewed Gupta’s stewardship and found it wanting. People thought that he’d shown too much feeling; there was a rumour, too, that he’d had his Emotional Range Reduction (ERR) removed. Disgusted with his feely-mealy ways, the population had forced him to resign. Elections had followed and Angstrom had won.

  Because he’d run on an anti-feeling platform, his first act was to broaden the ERR range. The effects were obvious. When Felix talked with strangers, he might have been addressing a pile of rocks. It had been months since he’d heard anyone weep, scream, or laugh. And because he refused to endure the treatment himself, people thought that he was the freak when he smiled, frowned, or spoke with feeling.

  While ERR was bad, Mem-rase was worse. This too was Angstrom’s doing. Convinced the past had nothing to teach them, he’d broadened the old Mem-rase program, permitting citizens to delete their memories of the plague. This was why people couldn’t recall the disaster.

  And there was more. Because Angstrom had no attachment to the past, his officials found the Repository to be a waste of funds. Over the last few months, e-briefs had arrived, to the effect that the Repository was being “reconsidered,” a fancy way of saying it would be closed in future. In fact …

  “Greetings,” Angstrom spoke, interrupting his thoughts, “let me get straight to the point. It has been one year since we faced that ‘disruption’ and, after hesitating greatly, I decided to mark the occasion. Why my hesitation, you’ll ask? Because by mentioning the ‘disruption,’ I might seem to be admitting that we erred somehow, that luck saved us more than anything else, and that we must change the way we confront the world, from our science-bound perspective to something more emotional. But this is not my intention at all.”

  Angstrom bristled here, as if daring viewers to challenge this statement. Felix thought the former talk host was glaring straight at him.

  “Let me emphasize right now that we did everything right. It was our cold, hard reasoning that saw us through, and if we owe a debt to anyone, it’s to our engineers and scientists. Luck didn’t achieve our success, just as our ‘feelings’ had nothing to do with it, either. In fact, if we erred in any way, it was by relying too much on ‘feelings’ and ‘luck,’ as if these had more to deliver than science and logic. If the ‘disruption’ taught us anything, it’s that we need more science and less of everything else.”

  “Did you hear that?” Stephen barked. “Science saves us, not your stupid books.”

  “Shortly after the disruption,” Angstrom continued, “I was voted in as president and decided that, yes, some changes would be productive. But far from rejecting our reasoned outlook, I was determined to embrace it even more than before. That’s why my first act was to broaden ERR and to place an even greater brake on our emotions. I also urged citizens to enroll in the new Mem-rase program and thereby reduce our ties to the past. Have my initiatives borne fruit? I’ll leave that to the people to decide, but it is worth pointing out global efficiency rates have never been higher.”

  When he said the word “efficiency,” the lights wavered off and on.

  “He’s so cool,” Stephen crooned, oblivious to the lights. “One day I hope to be like him.”

  “I wish to leave you with two thoughts,” Angstrom concluded. “First, the hallmark of our lives is utility, not humour, art, beauty, or sentiment. We humans are at our best when we’re useful, not effusive. More to the point, we belong to the future. There’s no utility in looking to the past, only embarrassment that, for so long, we depended on luck and emotion to save us. That’s why I urge you, having honoured the scientists who steered us to safety, to jettison this ‘disruption’ to the junk heap that is history. The past is over. Let’s delete it from our hard drives. By focusing on the future alone, we’ll ensure good order and logic prevail.”

  Angstrom glared at them one final time and his face quickly melted. It was replaced by a map showing the shuttle’s position. They were flying over Labrador.

  “What a guy,” Stephen crowed. “I’m glad I had my memories erased, the ones involving that stupid ‘disruption.’”

  Felix was distressed by the speech. Aware he couldn’t speak his mind, he was about to make some lukewarm comment when a full-blown power outage cut him short. One moment every system was working; the next every screen fell blank, the lights died completely and the engine was silent. Their steady flight slowed and … the craft started falling.

  Within seconds they’d built up a terrific speed. The craft was nosing downward and Felix’s knees were at his ears. There was a crushing sensation on his chest and face. His head was pounding. He was dripping sweat. He’d never been so scared before; at the back of his throat a scream started forming.

  As abruptly as it had failed, the power returned. The engine was humming, the lights flicked on, and the craft swiftly straightened itself. Every screen was back online and a voice was explaining that the ship was fine and InterCity Services regretted the outage.

  Felix tried to calm himself. He took deep breaths and pressed his hands together, even as he looked the cabin over. His heart almost stopped. Everyone was calm. They’d been faced with death mere seconds before, yet they were serene, bored, utterly unfazed. As if nothing untoward had happened, Stephen was saying that Carolyn should dress in blue that evening.

  The fear Felix had experienced when the craft had failed? It was nothing like his terror just then, faced as he was with a crowd of human robots.

  Chapter Two

  Thehe August sun was burning hot and threatening to scour the plain of Pharsalus. The Enipeus River was almost boiling over, while the trees were shrinking into themselves. Already birds were wheeling on high. They weren’t bold enough to descend just yet, not with troops strolling among the corpses, but knew they would feed when evening arrived. They numbered less than fifty then. Within minutes their flocks would be so thick
that they would shade the plain against the dazzling sun.

  Caesar was picking his way through the carnage. Four hours back, his position had been bleak: Pompey’s troops had outnumbered his, had better provisions and occupied the high ground. For someone who’d beaten impossible odds, Caesar didn’t look pleased. His expression was pained more than anything else. His left fist, too, was tightly clenched.

  The scene was awful. Corpses littered the soil as far as the eye could see. In some places they were lined up, as if Death had reaped them with one blow of his scythe. In others they were heaped in piles, some as high as a two-storey house. Many of the bodies exhibited multiple wounds. One centurion had three pila in his chest and an arrow in his thigh. His hand was gripping on to his sword whose blade was buried in his killer’s neck — for all eternity they’d embrace each other so. There were headless corpses, legless corpses, armless corpses and unblemished ones. Perhaps their hearts had suddenly stopped or terror had kept their lungs from drawing breath.

  And then there were the horses. There was nothing so graceful as a horse in full canter and nothing so awkward as one in death. Their legs seemed to multiply when death stilled their movements; they burst from a trunk at impossible angles and seemed to kick fretfully in every direction, as if unable to believe their lives had been stilled.

  And the blood. There was a sea of it. A man who has seen the aftermath of battle understands that living things are leathern sacks of red dye. Intelligence, wit, athletic skill, and kindness are reduced in final analysis to this, a lake of blood that even Charon couldn’t chart with his raft.

  It was comic how people would distinguish blood: a senator’s or patrician’s was richer than a pleb’s. Was there anyone on that field of battle who could tell the blood of optimi from the gore of common soldiers?

  “Ave Caesar!” a voice called out. “Congratulations on today’s victory. It’s as final as it is deserved.”