Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  “And so then,” Caesar said, very conversationally, as if we were just guests in his living room, “I suppose that you are yet another person sent to dispose of me. I believe I am in the presence of Marcus Ajax Fortius, if the registry of that inn is to be believed. You really might have had better taste than to stay at Crassus’s place, you know; if you had gone to one of my Barrel Tile Roof franchises, I might still be looking for you.”

  “My mistake,” I admitted. “I’m new here.”

  “You will be happy to hear, I’m sure, that both of your female companions—in addition to this lovely one here—are quite well and safe; in fact if I permitted you to look all the way behind you, you could see them both. I’m afraid their proclivities are a bit like yours; Hasmonea here made some not quite tasteful remark, and the larger and stronger of the women struck with remarkable force. I don’t suppose you’ve actually found the land of the Amazons? You certainly seem to be surrounded by women who are proficient in a fight.”

  “They’re just well trained,” I said. Anything that kept us talking was likely to be better than anything that would happen when the talking stopped.

  “Now,” Caesar said, leaning forward, “I could understand that it was entirely possible that Hasmonea’s insulting behavior and lack of decent breeding”—the Closer beside him stirred a little at that, but not enough to take his eyes off me or Chrys—“might have provoked your female guard to doing what she did. On the other hand, I note with some interest that you looked at both of us and chose him as target with almost no hesitation. At the time that happened you probably believed you were also a dead man.

  “It so happens I am not noted for my modesty. I find myself wondering what about this advisor is of such value and interest that you prefer to kill him rather than to kill Caesar. I know, of course, that there is a deadly war between your kind and his, and that to some extent you have made the Triumvirate and the Senate into mere pieces on the board for your purposes. Thus I can suppose that your reaction was without thought.

  “But this I do not believe. And while Hasmonea has been of immense value to me, I find myself thinking that should anything happen to him, those who sent him will most likely send another. I think this in particular because the most likely reason you are here—or so Hasmonea told me—is to find out what happened to that barbarian fellow Caldwell.

  “Thus if you had killed Hasmonea, I have no doubt his people would have sent someone after him, perhaps someone whose fighting skills and knowledge were as superior to Hasmonea’s as yours are to this Caldwell’s.

  “So it could not have been for a mere momentary advantage that you decided to pass up your opportunity to kill me, and instead decided to kill this agent of the ‘Masters,’ as they style themselves. You had some other reason behind that decision.” Caesar now leaned forward, letting his elbows rest on his knees in a not-at-all-patrician way, and peered intently at my face. “Now, I suggest you explain yourself to me. Think for a long time about how matters are apt to go with you, and decide to tell me the truth.”

  I looked back into his eyes. At the time, Gaius Julius Caesar was just past fifty years old, a vigorous and strong man in the prime of life. He had spent ten years fighting in Gaul and Britain, and though he had certainly had it easier in this timeline than in my own, it was still remarkable that so much warfare had taken so little toll.

  His cheekbones were heavy and relatively low, his brow unusually wide, giving most of his face a flat look, but his nose was thin and sharp, his lips a mere slash in his face, and the intelligence that stared out of his wide-set eyes was terrifying. He was mostly bald and did nothing much to hide it; his face had exactly the kind of “lean and hungry look” that Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar claims to find frightening. This was a man who had made a life out of devouring everything in his path, and he liked that about himself.

  He would be difficult to lie to, not for moral reasons but because he was so sharp, and because he had no sentimental expectations that anyone would ever tell him the truth.

  I let his stare rest on me for a long moment, then watched as his eyes roamed speculatively over Chrys’s naked body. I knew he was doing it to provoke me, to see if he could get my thinking to muddle, and I held myself in check, much as I wanted to grab him by his wisps of remaining hair and batter his face on the table in front of him. I let him have his long pause to challenge me in that way, so that he could see that we were equal in that sense—we didn’t scare each other.

  It occurred to me then that if I did go ahead with killing him, later, that it would be a good idea to get him from behind, when he wasn’t watching out. And that it might be a very long time before he wasn’t watching out.

  Finally I spoke, and I kept my voice soft and reasonable but firm. “Let me tell you of these ones who call themselves ‘Masters,’ but who we call ‘Closers.’ Did Caesar ever speak to my comrade Walks-in-His-Shadow Caldwell about this?”

  “I have not spoken to him in several years; as you well know, he has taken the part of Crassus in these matters. I first met Hasmonea while I was in the field, in Gaul, and he has proved an invaluable advisor on weapons and tactics, though I’m afraid he has a bit of a weak stomach for the real necessities of warfare.”

  So Caesar apparently made the Closer uncomfortable … I wondered if this was a matter of his treatment of prisoners and civilians (which seemed unlikely) or probably just a matter of anyone from a more advanced civilization being used to killing at a distance rather than by shoving a sharpened slab of iron into a human body. I took a long extra moment to consider, and then Caesar said, “So tell me what you know of them.”

  “You know well that they are descendants of Carthage,” I began, “and one might well ask what one of the oldest families of Rome is doing in consorting with a Carthaginian.”

  There was a low stir in the room; a lot of Caesar’s soldiers had heard that, and it sounded like it was news to them. But Caesar himself nodded, and said, “We have suspected this though he has not told us; his native tongue is a bit like Punic. Tell me, then, why it is that you oppose these people.”

  “For the same reason Rome opposed Carthage,” I said, milking it for all it was worth. “Because they are the sworn foes of everyone’s freedom.”

  “Great Caesar—” Hasmonea began.

  “You will remain silent until Caesar has need for you to speak,” Caesar said, without taking his eyes off me. “Now tell me everything, Marcus Ajax Fortius. Tell me why they are called ‘Closers’ and what they are after.”

  For the next half hour I did myself proud at speechmaking. It wasn’t the easiest thing in the world, but at least I had a lot of material. I talked about the Closer view that divides all the timelines, everywhere, into Closers and prey. I talked about the deliberate hardening of their hearts, the systematic extermination of sympathy among them. I talked about the pleasures they took in cruelty and in being obeyed.

  I admitted to my personal biases and told them a little of Closer crimes I had encountered, that my first wife, my mother, and my brother had died at their hands, that my sister Carrie had lost both legs and an arm at the same time. I went out of my way to detail their barbarities in a dozen worlds where I had known them, and laid it on fairly thick that they were still worshiping Moloch.

  That seemed to be getting the kind of attention I wanted; Moloch was a concept that horrified the Romans nearly as much as it would us. He was the crudest of any gods, an enormous metal idol, hollowed inside to form a furnace, into which Carthaginians threw children to be burned alive in his belly. Once, in a very distant timeline, I had burst into a temple of Moloch and had the pleasure of slaughtering the priesthood there. It would never trouble my conscience one iota.

  The reaction around the room was fairly satisfying, but Caesar continued to stare. Finally, he said, “You make your case well. Cato himself could hardly have made a better one.”

  At that name, Hasmonea stirred uncomfortably—in the Closer timelines, Cato had
been the last great opponent of the Carthaginians. His stirring did not go unnoticed—I could hear people muttering and pointing—and I realized that the Closer agent had probably not made himself popular with the common footsloggers in this timeline. Closers think it’s degrading to treat inferiors well; I’ve seen Closers stick knives in their bosses’ backs, literally, because the boss treated them too leniently and thus lost their respect.

  “Now,” Caesar said, “tell me of your own cause.”

  I drew my breath and began with the phrase they always hammer into us. “It is our desire only that each history should find its own way into the future. We would have no quarrel with the Closers had they left every other timeline alone. It is only in their seeking to make everyone else conform to their ways, in their attempt to reduce all of history to a set of identical timelines, that we oppose them.” I went on to sketch out, briefly, as much of ATN’s history as I thought was germane. It took a while, and my first sign that things were going well was that servants arrived with clothing for Chrys and me, plus some warmed wine that Caesar extended with the comment that he had forced me to spend a great deal of time talking without adequate shelter from the cold.

  I would come to realize that that was like him. Caesar could be brutal, perhaps even could enjoy being brutal, but he never did it without cause, and, most especially, he also knew that kindness extended to an opponent could be a powerful weapon as well.

  After the pause for refreshment, Caesar asked some more questions. I knew the Romans admired all things Greek, so I stressed ATN’s connection to the Athenian civilization and to Perikles; I knew they admired courage and soldierly virtues, so I made sure they heard much of ATN’s long-running war, and of our heroes. I kept that notion that Closers were followers of Moloch firmly in front of them, and since it had been only about a hundred years since Rome decided to solve the Carthaginian problem once and for all by leveling the city, this worked pretty well.

  I had anticipated that it would. There are hatreds in the modern world, of course, but few like the one between Rome and Carthage. The wars between them were wars to the death from the outset, and if the Romans had made something of a hero out of Hannibal and his brother Hasdrubal, they had done so only once both men were safely dead. Hannibal’s army had come “within the third milestone”—that is, so far along the road to Rome that they passed mile marker three before being turned back. They had succeeded in turning substantial numbers of Rome’s allies in Italy against her, and this was a thing that stirred Roman paranoia as nothing else did; the Romans believed in being generous to their opponents, in making the enemy from this war the ally for the next one, but necessarily this bred the nervous feeling that their “friends” were not entirely friendly. Anything that involved turning the sympathies of Rome’s allies tended to get Romans at least as freaked out as anything that involves race does the average American.

  All in all, I thought I gave a damned fine performance.

  The question, however, was what Caesar would think of it. He sat there, listening carefully, studying me and my face, occasionally raising an eyebrow to make me nervous or seeing if a glance at Chrys could rile me. (Not at all, now that she was dressed. I thought any hetero guy who didn’t stare at her was blind or crazy.) He was sizing me up at least as much as he was concerned with the case I was making, and we both knew that. There would be a decision of one kind or another, but he wasn’t going to make it till he knew what he thought.

  Then he would probably make it without any regret or remorse in either direction.

  When I finished, he sat back and thought for a long time. “Hasmonea,” he said, “do you deny the essential correctness of Marcus Fortius’s charges? Or do you merely propose to offer me more advantages than Fortius is able to offer?”

  The Carthaginian licked his lips and seemed to take a long time to think. That was probably a mistake—it made you wonder what he was going to say, rather than what he actually thought. Finally, he said, “It is true, Caesar, that I worship Moloch, and you yourself have long known this. And it is true that we of the Masters are destined by our gods to rule all times and places. But we can be generous to those who accept the will of our gods, and in any case the end is not yet—it would be many centuries before direct rule was imposed here.”

  “And thus,” Caesar said, his eyes narrowing, “you tell me that Caesar will not be enslaved, but only his grandchildren, and thus Caesar ought to welcome you?”

  Hasmonea looked a little pale.

  “Moreover,” Caesar said, “I deny absolutely that I had any knowledge of your vile worship. This is a lie made to separate Caesar from his army, and it is a very clumsy lie.”

  Hasmonea seemed to stagger; I realized later that it was only that he had seen that expression on Caesar before, a certain narrowing of the eyes and tightening of the mouth that meant that something unpleasant needed to be done, that Gaius Julius Caesar was just the man to do it, and that he was going to make people pay for forcing him to do it.

  Then the general sat back, stared into space, and said, “It seems to me we have an insoluble problem here. We are told that Hasmonea is from a civilization which is in all ways repugnant to us and threatens to enslave ourselves and our posterity. We are also told that this ATN has supplied a military advisor and engineer to Crassus, our onetime friend and bitter foe.” He appeared to hesitate over the options, and then finally said, “Let us settle this matter by putting it in the hands of the gods. We will prepare the arena here in Fanum Fortunae, and tomorrow, using only their own skills and with no weapons, these strangers from other times will fight each other to the death. Venus, who guards my family, and Mars, whose servant I have ever been, and mighty Jupiter himself, will send victory to he who is deserving.”

  The way Hasmonea turned green told me two things—first of all, that he probably wasn’t trained much at hand-to-hand, and secondly, that he had figured out the same thing I had. I was supposed to win the fight tomorrow.

  I also realized just how he had sealed his doom, and that he had not had any choice in the matter. By telling the truth he effectively sentenced himself to death—that was clear. Caesar’s army were Romans, and patriotic Romans, and the notion of yoking themselves or their grandchildren to Carthage was impossible to accept. Add to that Hasmonea’s worship of Moloch, and you had an open-and-shut case against him; the army would gladly see him executed.

  Moreover, he had accused Caesar of knowing about the Moloch worship. That particular stain had to be scrubbed off right now; Caesar couldn’t afford the kind of evil reputation that would give him in Roman politics.

  But if Hasmonea had lied, it would have gone worse. It would not have forced Caesar to act, as doing this in public had, but it would have shown Caesar at once that he could not trust Hasmonea, and that would have been a different sort of death sentence.

  Could Caesar somehow be aware how the timeline wars were going? Was he trying to get in with the side that seemed to be winning? Did he genuinely prefer us?

  It was impossible to say, and, anyway, tomorrow I apparently had to kill a man with my bare hands. I was glad it was at least a Closer.

  “Let both men be watched, but restore them to their companions for the evening, and let the legates see that they are comfortable and well fed,” Caesar said. “That is Caesar’s decision. Let the combat happen at the second hour after sunrise. Let these men be escorted away and let them be kept away from each other and from their weapons.”

  The “let”s were a minor defect in the translating software, I figured; Latin tended to use the subjunctive to give an order, particularly when who carried it out or how it got carried out was being left up to the discretion of subordinates, and there’s no real subjunctive in English, so instead it kept saying, “Let.” But the message was clear enough; we would be treated well tonight and then tomorrow one of us would kill the other.

  Not the most heartwarming thought I’ve ever heard, but at least it was clear. That night, the bed w
as comfortable, the food was good, and we got caught up on what had happened to Porter and Paula. Apparently the inn had been hit by one of the very first cannon rounds, and Caesar’s cavalry had been there by the time the two of them had managed to get out the front door. The desk clerk was already hanging from the yardarm at that point; they had both been scared silly, and both were deeply annoyed by the cavity search, but “It wasn’t that big a deal, boss, these soldiers are disciplined as all get out. They told us what they were going to do—poke a finger up and see if we had anything hidden—they put oil on the finger first, and they were at least as embarrassed as we were. I think ‘cavity searches’ are probably one of Hasmonea’s innovations—there’s not any really significant weapon in the local technology you could hide there.”

  Paula seemed so anxious to reassure me that I turned immediately to Porter, and said, “So are you all right? Were you scared or hurt?”

  Porter shrugged and kept looking at the floor.

  “Porter,” I said. “It’s me. You can tell me.”

  “Well, it made me feel gross. I wanted to throw up, having an old man feeling around like that. He tried to be polite and all that, but it was still gross.”

  “Yeah,” I said, “it must have been.” I sat down next to her without quite touching her.

  “But I feel like a big baby,” she said. “All you guys just shrug it off—”

  Chrys sat on the other side and took Porter in her arms. “Sweetheart,” she said, “we’re all professional killers. We get strip-searched and messed around with a lot, all the time. Sometimes by people a lot ruder than that. We’re used to it. We all felt terrible the first time it happened. And it’s still not a good thing to do to a person. The fact that it doesn’t bother us is something wrong with us, really.”

  Porter started to cry, quietly, and Chrysamen held her for a long time. I sat and stared like a fool; you can spend an eternity of time and a fortune in cash on keeping bad things away from your family, and they find a way to you anyway. I realized, too, that bad as things had been for Porter, she had probably felt safe after she started living with me and my family and employees—something about the presence of so many people who love you (and who are armed to the teeth and good with what they carry) must breed the feeling that the bad things are all in the past.