Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  According to General Malecela, the Romans appeared to be generous with technical assistance, material goods, and everything else, and seemed to have very little urge to meddle in anyone’s affairs except for a strong desire for an open trade door. This didn’t surprise me—the Roman Empire, in my timeline, was noted for always starting out with as generous a policy as possible, usually by making nations into honored allies and friends.

  Of course if the honored ally and friend were ever so stupid as to try to give up the benefits of Roman alliance, then they stomped them flat.

  Chrys and I, not knowing what might be bugged, managed to communicate our concern about those issues to each other (her timeline diverged from mine shortly after the death of Mohammed, so we shared the same Roman Empire in our past) without coming up with anything we could do about it.

  Besides, I was much too bothered about the rest of it.

  They didn’t want to spill any more details than they already had, but it was clear that when the Romans found ATN, they were really just coming home; this timeline had been founded by an ATN Special Agent, and it was one of the “lost” timelines, one of the cases where a timeline got started and then communication was lost so thoroughly that it wasn’t possible to find it again, to pick it out from all the myriad streams of events that made up time across all the parallel histories. So whatever had happened to the Special Agent, a fellow named Walks-in-His-Shadow Caldwell, no Crux Op had been dispatched to find him.

  Or rather, that was what ATN thought. Caldwell had been dispatched about twenty years before General Malecela’s time, in a failed ATN project where they spent an enormous amount of energy to move a gate through a gate—in this case, moving it to Diego Garcia in the early 1200s A.D. Thus there was nobody there to be interfered with, and it was possible to erect a huge power plant to drive the gate, and to send a dozen Special Agents farther back in time than anyone had ever gone before.

  Unfortunately, every one of those timelines had promptly gone off the map; the farther back you go, the more widely things can diverge, and in these cases they had diverged so far and so fast that no one had been able to track them.

  Until now, when this one had shown up, won the war, and made everybody happy.

  Well, everybody except certain diehards like Thebenides, who were worried about the independence of all the ATN timelines and about whether the people liberated from the Closers would ever have any free choice.

  And me, of course. Because it seemed to be universally agreed that I was going to kill Julius Caesar and that this was a good thing. And now it was clear that as a Crux Op, what I should do is go back to the lost timeline in 49 B.C.—or 704 A.U.C., as the Romans counted time—and get things back on track, apparently by murdering Caesar. Indeed, they weren’t sure of all the details, but it didn’t look like Mark Antony or Pompey was supposed to make it through the year either. Cicero, on the other hand, was supposed to live another thirty years, till he was almost ninety, retiring to write more books, instead of being murdered by Mark Antony’s agents.

  “So, just to begin with,” I said, “every Latin student in thousands of timelines is going to hate me.” I was pacing the floor in the gigantic bedroom they had given us.

  “Be serious,” Chrysamen said. “It’s all right to tell me what you’re upset about. I’m your wife, remember?”

  I sighed and flopped down backward on the bed. “Well, look, the first thing to say is that I don’t really see a way out of this, and even though they haven’t exactly asked, I’m certainly going to go back there and see what I can do. And you know, I’ve shot a historical figure or two in my time, and been there when people who should have lived to ripe old ages died, and so forth. But the fact is, Chrys, you know they always send us back in a state of complete ignorance. We know a timeline is out of whack, and we’re just supposed to bring it back into line, that’s all.

  “This is totally different. What if, in my judgment, old Julius—”

  “Gaius.”

  “What?”

  “Gaius. His first name is Gaius. If you’re trying to make fun of him by being informal, that’s what you call him. Julius is the family name and Caesar is the branch of cousins he belongs to.” Her eyes had a slight twinkle to them, and her mouth had a funny turn; she seemed to be enjoying needling me. I wasn’t sure why she didn’t see it as being as serious as I did, and wasn’t sure I wanted to know, either.

  “Okay, anyway, what if this guy Gaius looks to me like the good guy in the picture? It could happen, you know. The Roman Civil War is pretty complicated, there’s never fewer than three sides in the game, and what happens if I look around and say to myself that the best thing is for our boy Gaius to win?”

  She shook her head sadly. “Mark, you’re making too big a deal out of this. What if you had jumped back into the first timeline you ever fought in and decided that Hitler was the good guy? What if you jumped back into some other one and decided Mao or Stalin was? It isn’t going to happen with cases like that. And Caesar was not a good guy. He was a good administrator, but he destroyed Roman self-government for all time, he got his famous victories in Gaul mostly by breaking the laws of war of his time, and in short he’s just about the model of a power-mad dictator. If you have to see that for yourself first, go right ahead. Then shoot him. And then we’ll go back home, to your timeline, and live a pleasant retired life with tons of money. You can chair the Brunreich for President Committee for Allegheny County, and I’ll have another six babies or so. What’s the problem?”

  “Well … jeez, Chrysamen, I wish I could explain it to you better. It just doesn’t seem like a Crux Op job. We’re supposed to have some kind of judgment in all of this, you know … we’ve always jumped in as the only good guys in the timeline—and what I’m supposed to be doing this time feels more like a mob hit. And I really don’t like the short list of people who ‘died in mysterious circumstances’ in that same year, either. It sounds like I’m supposed to be a serial killer.”

  “So do them in parallel.”

  “Chrys!”

  “Mark, I’m sorry,” she said. “I can understand how upset you must be about the idea of just going back into a timeline to kill somebody. That’s a natural enough reaction. But in fact that isn’t the whole reason you’re going, or even the major part of the mission. You’re supposed to find out what happened to Walks-in-His-Shadow Caldwell, first of all, and secondly to do whatever you think best. It just happens to be known in advance that what you think best is going to involve shooting Gaius Julius Caesar, that’s all. You could just look on it as having more information than usual going in.”

  I groaned. If I couldn’t explain what was bothering me to Chrys, I probably couldn’t explain it to anyone.

  “Look,” she said, “I know it’s not the usual job. But it’s the job that wins the war. And you seem to be bothered just because it’s crossing up your ideas about free will or something. Well, all right, so it’s not quite as free as some of your other jobs have been. On your first one you didn’t even know that you were ever going home. And here you end up knowing in advance what you’re going to decide. I can understand how that feels, but it’s not the worst thing that could happen. Not by a long shot. A few days ago subjectively, we were thinking we would grow old and die with the war still going on—if one of us didn’t have to see the other one blown to pieces. Now it’s all different. Now there’s going to be real peace and a real chance to lead a more or less comfortable, more or less normal life. And it’s all going to come to us through your efforts! You’re a hero for all time, Mark … and so I’m having a little trouble seeing why you’re complaining about having to follow that particular script.”

  I shrugged, and said, “Well, as I said, I’m certainly not going to turn the assignment down. There’s no way I could walk away from it in the circumstances. But I just don’t like it. I really just don’t like it.”

  And it didn’t seem practical—partly because the room might be bugged, but
also because she seemed to have no sympathy with the viewpoint—to say that I was beginning to think old Thebenides might have a point. The citizen-senator might have rubbed me the wrong way, but it did seem to me that putting ATN in the position of being a client state to a vastly superior civilization was not exactly in line with what we got into the war to do. We were the Allied Timelines for Nondeterminism—meaning all the timelines that did not want to go down the Closer road to become giant, hierarchical slave states—and it seemed to me that our Roman “friends” were bound to do a lot of determining.

  It didn’t seem like a change of masters was all that we should be accomplishing after all the fighting.

  I got another unpleasant surprise the next day when it turned out that according to the Roman historical records, Chrys and Porter had been along on the expedition, too. Apparently we had all returned safely, or else everyone was keeping up a brave front about it.

  There was no mention of Paula in the list, but if Porter was going, she wanted to go. After all, she’d been guarding the kid for years, and if Porter was going to jump into danger, Paula wanted to be there. I took advantage of that to see how much clout I had. Malecela seemed very displeased, but Scipio was actually pretty reasonable about it; he agreed that if Paula wanted to go, she could, noting only that since there was no evidence for her in the historical record, it didn’t look good. “But on the other hand, our attitudes about women weren’t terribly enlightened at the time,” the Chief Tribune added. “We know about unusual things that Friend-mother ja N’wook and Ms. Brunreich did. We don’t know about Ms. Renatsky. That may only mean she didn’t do anything that a historian or chronicler of the time found interesting. Or it may mean something went very wrong, very early in the mission. We have no way of knowing. But if she is willing to assume the risk, we’re certainly willing to have her assume it.”

  At least it ticked off Malecela, which meant I could sound him out on how he felt about our new ally.

  One reason that the idea of Paula going didn’t sit very well with Malecela, of course, was that this was supposed to be an ATN operation. As far as he was concerned, all we were doing was borrowing these high-tech Romans’ gear to get a Crux Op back to a crux for a normal search-and-rescue operation. And Malecela didn’t want to send untrained (by him) and inexperienced operatives back to a crux. He had bowed grudgingly about Porter (and I wished he hadn’t!) because it was clear from the records that she had gone, but Paula, as far as he could see, ought to be sent home and told sternly not to talk about what she had seen. And having anything else happen—against his wishes—meant that ATN wasn’t in charge of the operation.

  That seemed like a sympathetic enough view. We were sitting out on a terrace, drinking coffee while he tried to persuade me to ask Scipio to send Paula home instead of with me, and I decided to see how he felt about the whole problem of connecting ourselves to a larger and more powerful civilization, up at the other end of time.

  It didn’t do me any good. He’d seen the wonders of what they could do nine centuries ahead of this, and he’d heard them declare a complete “open labs” policy, so it looked as if they really intended to share everything they knew. The mopping-up operation against the Closers was going so fast that the Romans were already opening up a lot of timelines to tourism. He himself was actually thinking about retirement and about what he might enjoy doing—horse-breeding seemed to be his choice, and with all the grasslands of all of history to pick from, he was really more interested in talking about the perfect place for a ranch.

  In short, just like Chrys, he could taste the victory so thoroughly that the “free will” issue seemed like mere abstract philosophizing to him. Of course it wasn’t his free will that was being tampered with …

  So there seemed to be nothing more to do than get our gear together and get ready to go. Malecela had thoughtfully brought along SHAKK- and NIF-reload materials (the weapons make their own ammo, but it helps to be able to put the right mix of chemical elements into the hopper) and a fresh set of PRAMIACs; Paula got the equivalent of a SHAKK from the Romans, as did Porter. We were probably well enough armed to take on a small infantry division back home.

  The step through the gate went about as it always did; over a period of time that you could perceive but not measure, the world around us went away, and then came back. We stepped out onto a bleak, freezing cold Roman road, north and east of Rome, not far from modern Bologna, in January of 49 B.C.

  “Not a real prepossessing place, is it?” Chrys commented.

  The road wound around a large mountain on one side of us, and crossed an arched bridge over a stream before going straight over a hill on the other side. The day was gray and a bit foggy, with an unpleasant spitting mist that seemed to blow right through the heavy, hooded cloaks we had been fitted with. As my cloak flapped open and the wind blew in and around my short fighting tunic, I had a sudden, acute appreciation of why so many women complained about miniskirts.

  The land around us was a patchwork of green and brown, green on the hills where it was pasturage, brown down lower where it was tilled fields. There were some low, not yet fully grown windbreaks of trees in the distance—that hadn’t been a Roman practice, so I figured it was some evidence that Special Agent Caldwell had passed this way.

  In the hollows and on the north sides of trees and rocks, there were little patches of grainy, soggy snow. At least we all had new boots.

  “Well,” I said, “the orders were to try heading north from here. We should reach Fanum Fortunae by dusk, if they managed to put us where they were supposed to—but not if we just stand here.”

  We started walking. The Roman roads were rightly famous; despite the wet weather, and even this close to the coast, this one had no puddles or standing water, and it was easy enough to walk along. Of course, in the rotten weather, it was still anything but pleasant, but at least it wasn’t storming, and we were probably no more than a two-hour walk from the Fanum Fortunae city gates.

  We rounded one wide turn and saw the sea off to our right, the broad Adriatic; today it was gray-green and looked terribly cold. I had been along this coast several times in my own timeline. I had worked a dig here a long time ago, and we weren’t far from Pesaro, where Chrysamen had dragged me a few times on pilgrimage—it was Rossini’s hometown, and there’s a festival of his operas there that’s pretty terrific. January was just not the best time of year for this coast.

  Back home in my timeline, Fano is a little fishing port and light-industrial city, just a spot on the coast road between Ancona and Pesaro—but in Roman times, Fanum Fortunae was a vitally important city, in many ways the key to Italy, because that was where the Via Amelia, the coastal highway between Ancona and Ariminum (or Rimini if you’re looking at a modern map) met the great Via Flaminia, the major highway leading to Rome. If you were invading Italy from the north or the west, the Via Flaminia was your best, straightest shot toward Rome itself.

  Not to mention that in time of peace a huge amount of trade flowed through it. It was one of those places that was important because it was on the way to so many other places—sort of the Sioux Falls, or the Columbus, Ohio, of its day.

  Right now we were walking into the city from the southeast, as if we were coming in from Ancona. The day before, Julius Caesar had defied the Roman Senate and consuls, just as he had in our timeline. They had ordered him to keep himself and his army within Cisalpine Gaul, the province he was supposed to be governor of (which he had enlarged by overrunning everything else up to Scotland—clearly a difference since in our timeline he had been turned back by the Britons). The southern border of Cisalpine Gaul, on this western side of Italy, was a little river only fifteen miles long, the Rubicon, and our boy Gaius had taken his troops across it—which meant they had told the general “no,” and he had said, “yes.” The Civil War was on.

  He would have to take Fanum Fortunae within a short time, and so we needed to be in the city, undercover, waiting for him. Our best guess was t
hat he would be there in three to five days, at the pace at which legions could march comfortably, assuming, too, that he was keeping his army close together. Thus we were walking north toward him; he was marching south toward us; and though he didn’t know it, we had a date in Fanum Fortunae.

  “Boss,” Paula said, “I just want you to know I’m having trouble believing all this.”

  “That’s pretty much the way everyone reacts on their first trip in time,” Chrysamen said, sympathetically.

  “No, not being in ancient Rome and all that,” she said. “I mean that there’s a guy on a bicycle coming up behind us.”

  7

  We turned and looked. She was absolutely right.

  Half a mile behind us, just coasting down the hill, was a man in the full regalia of a legate—that is, what we’d call a junior officer—riding a bicycle. We moved out of his way as he came over the hill, but he didn’t bother to look at us.

  The bicycle had wooden spoked wheels, but the tires were pretty obviously rubber. The “chain” was a knotted rope, which ran through large wooden pin gears, and it didn’t look like they’d developed the coaster brake yet, which may have explained why the helmet was in the shape of a modern bicycle helmet and had a number of prominent dents.

  Of more interest to me was the fact that he had what looked like a crude shotgun slung over his shoulder, and a brace of seventeenth-century horse pistols across his chest.

  Still, apparently nothing had yet made the Romans wear pants; he was wearing a short tunic, and the bicycle was what I’d have called a girl’s model, though not to this guy’s face, if he was half as tough as he looked. The bicycle had pannier baskets, which seemed to be carrying dispatches, over its rear tire.

  He rolled on by and vanished up the road. I noted that on the back of his tunic was the phrase “Necesse litterae transeat.”