No one barred our path as she led me up a long flight of stairs and onto the roof. Outside, I could hear the sounds of shouting as the Senate tried hard to rally a defense of the city. A few hundred armed men were running toward the walls, while weapons were being distributed and veterans were hastily being pressed back into service. But morale looked low, from what little I could see, and many of the veterans wouldn’t be enthusiastic about fighting Pompey’s son. Rumors of how he’d died had already spread through the city. The Senate might have hated him, but he was a hero to the ordinary citizens—and to his men.
“The city will fall,” she said. “And they brought their fate on themselves.”
I nodded in agreement. The Senate had played with fire once too many times. In the original history, Caesar had been pushed into rebellion and eventually won the war. Now, my stepson would be leading the fight to show the Senate just how idiotic it was to provoke a man with an army—and with an awareness that defeat or surrender meant certain death. Would Pompey the Younger be better or worse than Octavius? In the end, it didn’t matter.
It was over. No matter what I’d done, the Roman Republic was dead. It had committed suicide.
I turned to face her. “Who are you?”
The woman smiled. “Don’t you know?”
I shook my head. Pompey had speculated that she might be the goddess Venus, but I’d never been raised to believe in the Roman gods.
“I am Nemesis,” the goddess said. “And I cannot be denied.”
Historian’s Note
Historically, the Roman Republic—particularly the Senate—was suspicious and fearful of military commanders who managed to win fame and fortune, creating an odd atmosphere where individual achievement was both praised and punished by society. (And serious problems were allowed to ferment because no one could be trusted with the military might to handle them.) As the Roman Republic reached the height of its power, its politics became increasingly dangerous for military officers.
Pompey did not have the mindset of a new emperor, despite serving Sulla during his dictatorship. He wanted to be loved rather than feared—thus his attempts to please the Senate rather than impose his own order. Unfortunately, this made him look weak, and daggers (metaphorically) were drawn. The Senate, at first fearful of Pompey’s colossal army, relaxed and started trying to marginalize him as soon as he disbanded the army. Caesar, when faced with demands that he disband his army and return to Rome as a private citizen (which meant disgrace and exile at the very least), decided it was safer to go into revolt than surrender to the Senate.
Sadly, it is unlikely the Roman Republic could have endured for much longer, even without Caesar. Those with the talent to succeed were unlikely to tamely accept attempts to cut them down indefinitely.
A Word from Christopher Nuttall
I’ve always enjoyed historical debates about what could have happened if something had been a little different, but—at the same time—I’ve studied history long enough to know that there are some places in history where the outcome is almost completely immutable, no matter what happens. The Roman Republic was doomed to fall simply because of its internal contradictions; Caesar might have been the chosen executioner, but someone would have taken his place if he’d simply never impinged on history at all.
For those interested, Nemesis was one of the Greco-Roman goddesses, specifically charged with punishing hubris—in this case, that of both Julia and the Roman Republic. Short stories are really not my thing, so I think I may redo the story as a full novel at some point. Comments and thoughts are always welcome.
And me? I’ve been writing since 2004 and I’ve recently had some success on Kindle, as well as with a couple of small presses. You can download free samples of some of my books from my site (www.chrishanger.net) and then download them from Amazon at a very reasonable price.
Rock or Shell
by Ann Christy
“Hey! You, over there! Can you see me?”
The girl, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, looks startled for a moment—then hunches down as if she can hide behind the thick mist that surrounds us. Her near flinch tells me just about all I need to know about her. At least all I need to know to make contact.
“Don’t worry. I’m not like some of the others. I won’t hurt you,” I say, and motion her forward in my most non-threatening manner.
She shuffles forward warily a few steps, and then stops—eyeing me, my piles of stuff, and the forest of wires attaching me to those piles. I can’t blame her for that. I’m probably not the only one who’s figured out this trick—this method of hanging on to possessions in this no man’s land where time is in constant flux—but I don’t think there can be many others.
Now that I get a good look at her, I can see that she’s a bit lost at sea, so to speak. She’s certainly a teen—or close enough that it doesn’t matter—but she has the eyes of a girl who’s seen too much. Her lips are cracked and dry, her cheeks sunken; her hair is greasy at the crown and her face is in need of a good wash. And her jeans and fashionably thin t-shirt aren’t the best clothes to be trapped wearing, in this in-between of time and nothingness.
But she isn’t covered in filth like some of the others that have happened across my nest. And she’s upright and moving. She couldn’t have been roaming about in the mist for too long or she’d look even worse. More likely she’d be dead.
Yet the most remarkable thing about her is her weary eyes. The hollows beneath them are so profound and dark that I know she hasn’t slept since landing here.
And here I am, lounging on a giant mattress surrounded by stuff.
She looks longingly at my mattress, at the cup in my hand. She gives a sniff, as if the aroma of the coffee has finally reached her. That seems to settle the matter, and she walks those last few steps toward me without any hint of hesitation.
I carefully maneuver myself backward on the mattress to make room, always keeping my great harness of wires in mind, and I give the mattress a little pat to let her know she’s welcome to sit.
With the grace of youth, she folds herself onto the surface, and a sigh escapes her that almost breaks my heart. I hold out the cup of coffee I’ve been sipping and say, “It’s got cream and sugar. The cream is just the powdered stuff, though.”
Tears spring into her eyes so quickly that I know she must be exhausted almost beyond reason. She accepts the cup with one hand, the other remaining tightly fisted in her lap, and drinks it down without even testing the temperature. Under the cup her throat bobs, and I see how thin it is. Her jeans look as if they’re gapped a bit at the waist, and there are hollows in her cheeks and temples. Perhaps she’s naturally thin—or perhaps she’s been here much longer than I had first thought.
The cup is upended once more, so she can drain every last drop, and then she regretfully holds the cup out for me to take. Her nails are dirty and ragged, and the lines in her fingers are starkly outlined by ground-in dirt.
“I’m Gertie,” I say, and take the cup from her.
Her eyes grow nervous once more, and she takes quick glances around: at the many five-gallon pails around my mattress, at my hands—most likely checking for a weapon—and then into the pale mist that encloses our island of color and substance.
“I’m Sarah,” she says at last. “Thank you for the coffee. I’ve not had anything to drink in a long while.”
Her voice is rough, as if she hasn’t spoken in a while, but what surprises me is her accent. It isn’t just British, it’s posh TV British. It’s the kind of accent you only get from just the right sort of expensive schooling in just the right place. Of the ones I’ve come across who speak English, most do so with a decidedly North American accent.
“Then you’re probably hungry,” I say, and her eyes tell me her answer. “Well then, let me get you some food. First, let’s get the ground rules out of the way, shall we?”
Sarah tenses a little, but doesn’t pull away. “Ground rules?”
I wave toward
my wires and then all the other things around us and say, “You know that whatever we’re connected to—even if only through some conductive medium—comes with us?”
She looks a little confused and shakes her head.
“Well, it does. It’s too late now, but you could have brought things. These wires are what keeps it all here, so you mustn’t touch them or anything.” I pause, and pull up the hem of my shirt to show her the wide belt of coiled wires that circles my belly. Given that she’s already trusted a total stranger enough to join them on a mattress, I probably don’t need to add a warning, but I feel I should. “This is where all the wires connect to me. If I should die—well, you’ve seen what happens then, right?”
She gulps and blushes, then nods. That also tells me she understands at least a little of what’s going on here in the mist.
“I, uh, saw someone disappear,” she says quietly. The fist she’s had clenched from the moment I saw her tightens, the knuckles whitening.
“Okay, we can talk about that later. Just no touching the wires, okay? And the only other rule is no yelling or being loud. If anyone comes near enough to hear but not see, you could lead them right to us. Got it?”
She nods and looks into the mist once more. A deep sigh escapes her, and she says, “I’m very happy to follow those rules. I’ve not sat down on anything but that mist in days. I never thought I’d see a mattress again, let alone sit on one.”
I give her a smile and then scoot around toward my little gas stove, which rests on a couple of pails. I brought a whole load of those small green bottles of gas, but I try to use them as sparingly as possible. I get water from one of my many containers, a cup of macaroni from another, and I let the little stove do its work.
Pointing to a bin just behind the girl’s back, I ask, “Can you grab me a packet out of that, please?”
Whatever object the girl’s been gripping in her fist, she now transfers it to her mouth, so as to free up both her hands. The object rounds out her cheek—like a squirrel’s, I think. The girl carefully lifts the lid, taking care not to jostle the wires, and when she looks inside the bin, she gives a little gasp at the contents. She lifts out a freeze-dried meal bag and gazes at it for a long moment, her eyes scanning the colorful photo of a tasty-looking meal, before handing it to me. She doesn’t let go until my own hand is firmly on the packet.
“The tricky part is getting things into other things,” I say, to break the silence.
She doesn’t understand me, so I point to the macaroni. “When I dump anything in, if I’m not careful, it’s suspended for a moment and… poof. Everything has to touch something.”
Sarah transfers the object from her mouth back to her hand, and squeezes her fist closed before she speaks. “Sort of like this, only the opposite.” She lifts her fist so I’ll know she’s speaking of the object in her hand.
I nod and stir the macaroni. Food preparation here is very hard to accomplish, but I’ve learned a few tricks to make it easier. Several small metal clips are attached to my shirt, and each one has a wire wrapped carefully around it, connecting it back to my harness. I take one off, raise it for her inspection with a smile, and then clip it to the bag she just retrieved.
She laughs and says, “You’ve thought of everything!”
“Shh,” I say, but gently and with a smile so she knows I’m not angry. Her face has lost years in the minutes that she’s been here, and her posture is relaxed, almost slumped. I can see she’s itching to lie down, relax, and sleep. Whether it’s because she’s just worn out, or because I’m probably about the same age as her mother would be, she seems to have decided to trust me entirely. And no matter the many comforts I may have, I confess that I’m delighted to have company. In this unchanging place, the most oppressive thing is the solitude. I don’t even have a dawn to cheer me, or a sunset to mark the passing of a day.
When the food is ready, we settle in and share it right from the pot. Sarah is a good guest, careful to fill her spoon only as much as I fill my own, and take only one bite for each of mine. It’s an impressive show of restraint, since I know she must be starving.
After a dozen small bites, I sigh and lean back, and say, “You have the rest. I can’t eat as much as you young people.”
More than half the food is left in the pot, and she tries to hide the eagerness she feels, but her tongue darts out to touch her lips in anticipation. While she eats I fill a bottle with water, and I wait until she comes up for air before offering it.
With only one hand free—her object is still clenched tightly in her fist—she takes a moment to be sure the pot still has its clip before setting it down. Then she drinks until I think she might drown. The water bottle is back in my hands less than a second before Sarah’s head is back at the pot, shoveling in bite after bite.
While she eats, I look out at the mist, making sure no one is coming upon us. It isn’t really mist, of course. There’s no water to condense on the skin, like with a true mist. And it’s not a haze either. Yet those are the two most common terms used to describe it. One time a professor from a university in Hamburg happened upon me. He spoke excellent English, and his fascination with this place made him almost immune to the situation he found himself in. We shared a meal, just like I was now doing with this girl, and he told me that he felt the mist was something explainable, even if he couldn’t explain it.
He told me that the distance one can see through the mist is directly related to the size of the area one occupies, which might be the reason why I can see as far as ten paces from my nest, while others say they can see only five or so. He was a kind man.
“Be careful, you’re losing some,” I say when I see her losing her focus. Just as I say that and she raises her head, we both see a piece of pasta fall off the side of her spoon and disappear as if it had never existed. In fact, it hasn’t existed now. It is gone from space as well as time.
Like everything else in the world. Unless I’m right, and everything works out like I hope it will, that is. And for that, I will need this young girl.
“Oh,” Sarah groans, mourning the loss of that bit of food. She looks back at me, perhaps expecting me to be upset, and says, “I’m sorry. I’ll be more careful.”
I see her hand grip the spoon more tightly, either because she’s trying hard to lose nothing or because she doesn’t want me to take it away from her. I just give her a nod and sip some of the water from the bottle, waiting for her to finish.
We’re left with a dirty pot, which Sarah licks almost clean—even going so far as to wipe her fingers around the bottom where she can’t reach using her tongue. When she’s finally done, I do the “easy clean-up” trick, to put her at ease and lighten the mood. After a thorough wipe-down with a wet paper towel, I toss the dirty wipe into the air above us, where it disappears. I toss the empty food packet after it.
Sarah smiles and says, “Well, there’s always something good to be found in every situation.”
I nod. She gives a yawn, and I know she must be exhausted beyond belief, but I don’t want to wait to find out her story. People who are tired—and I discovered this long before winding up here in this world of no time—are more likely to simply get things over with and tell the truth when questioned. Once rested, they may be more coherent, but they’re also more likely to put up their defenses.
“Sarah, I know you’re tired, but before I sleep this close to someone I don’t know, I’d like to know a little bit about you. How you wound up here and all,” I say. It’s a reasonable request.
She stretches and then grips her stomach in sudden discomfort. I might think it a ploy, except that I can hear the gurgling even across the giant mattress. Her stomach has been without food a long time.
“How long have you been here?” I ask.
“I don’t know. I tried to keep track, checking out there to see when it was dark or light, but I lost track. I think at least five days,” she answers, her voice soft.
Time is relative here, so I know t
hat doesn’t mean much. I’ve been here for nineteen days in my time, based on my watch, but for her it may be only five. Even that long without water would leave her dead or barely alive. Yet she’s walking and talking.
“What have you been eating and drinking?”
She flushes again, but this time with embarrassment. “I’ve had nothing to eat. I popped out to drink a few times, and…”
The way she trails off, I guess that she’s been forced to recycle a little fluid. I’ll leave that line of inquiry alone. I’m much more interested in her popping out.
“You could breathe out there? What was it like?”
Looking out into the mist again, she grows thoughtful and distant. Her voice becomes so soft and quiet that I have to lean forward to hear her next words.
“No, you can’t breathe out there now. There’s nothing.” She pauses then and looks at me, her eyes intense. “It’s just rock, covered with this dark sand. In some places it’s very deep, and other places it’s just bare rock. There are pools of water all over, and steam comes up from them when it first gets light.”
That confuses me, because the last time I went out there it was much like she described, and I couldn’t tolerate it for more than a few seconds. Certainly not long enough to find a clean patch of water. I’m not sure I would drink it anyway. Who knows what’s in it? And popping out is impossible for me now that I’m tethered like I am—at least, if I want all that I have to remain intact. I lost several of my pails once when they fell away from the uneven patch where I landed.
“How did you stay out there that long?” I ask, genuinely curious.
Now it’s her turn to have information that I don’t, and she’s eager to share it, to pay for her meal and place on the mattress. She smiles and says, “You can travel. All you have to do is think it when you pop in and out.”
At my expression she waves a hand out at the mist and says, “It’s something about this place that does it. I pop out—you know, just focus on dropping back out—and then take a quick look to see if there’s water, and then come back in. If there’s no water, then I just keep doing it until I do see water somewhere, and then I just focus on that location and pop out right there.” She shrugs then, both of us understanding that all of it is entirely inexplicable. Our common language of life in the mist is all that we have.
Synchronic: 13 Tales of Time Travel Page 18