Caesar's Bicycle (The Timeline Wars, 3)

by John Barnes

  The day came, and I finally got to see Porter and Paula, though I was still too dizzy to sit up, so they had to kind of hug me on the pallet where I was lying. Paula was in worse shape than Porter, but both of them were crying. “Boss, I’m so sorry—even now I could—”

  I shook my head emphatically, and whispered back, “Are you crazy? Do you know what impalement involves? Just think about having a stake forced into you till it comes out your mouth, if you get tempted to confess. The only reason you shot the bastard, instead of me, was because you got there with a gun first, that’s all. We’d have had to kill him. He’d never have left Porter alone, and he’d never have stopped threatening us, if we had just tried to scare him off with the pistols. So I’m just as guilty as you are, and I get a lighter sentence.”

  “Crucifixion is a lighter sentence?” Paula demanded, still whispering.

  “Comparatively, comparatively. I’m a scholar by trade, you know, we make these fine distinctions.” I started to giggle; concussions do strange things to you.

  After that little performance, Paula and Porter tried to persuade a couple of surgeons to take a look at me—the universal reaction seemed to be that if I was conscious, I was fit to be crucified. After all, it wasn’t as if I were going to be doing any of the work.

  At least they didn’t put me on the upright cross; that would have been a little tough on a boy who was raised as a good Episcopalian. They used the X-shaped cross that is sometimes called the Cross of St. John or the Cross of St. Andrew; it occurred to me as they were dragging me off the litter that it was probably an honor, among the saints, to get a cross named after you, even if you had to share honors with some other saints, but that what you had to do to get your own cross was pretty tough.

  It looked like I might be asking them about it myself in a bit. I wondered in that dizzy kind of way, unable to focus, just how the problem of so many alternate souls was handled in heaven. I mean, what do you do with four thousand Mother Teresas, sixty-seven hundred Francises of Assisi, and so forth? It made me giggle again, which got me slapped hard enough to take out a front tooth. My face was exploding with pain, but I was a little too disconnected to be able to concentrate even on how much my face hurt.

  My limbs were limp and heavy after the slap—probably he’d started the bleeding in my brain again—so there was no putting up a fight as they held me down on the rough, X-shaped wood. Since one beam lapped over the other, it meant the whole thing pushed a big, heavy beam directly into the small of my back, with my left arm and right leg jammed a bit back behind me. I could tell that in normal circumstances my back would be getting all my attention, but I was still running my tongue over the broken place where my left front tooth had been, and wondering if what I felt on my upper lip was blood from an abrasion there, or if maybe the guy had ruptured a sinus.

  The nails hurt, but they hurt most for the second while they go through. They don’t put them in your palms, no matter what the religious paintings have told you, or through your wrists either. Your palms are too frail to carry your weight and would tear through; and a nail among the wrist bones would probably bend, and very likely cut an artery and allow you to expire much too quickly.

  They put them into the forearm, well up toward the hand, with your thumb turned slightly back to open the space between the radius and ulna, and they put a couple of them in just to be on the safe side. They do the same number with the tibia and fibula on the lower leg.

  It hurts like hell, but flesh is soft and the Roman carpenters were practiced at this—each nail went in in just two or three quick strokes, the first one going all the way through the flesh into the wood, the next usually burying the special broad head into the flesh and taking the nail the rest of the way into the crosspiece.

  The first jolt of each nail going through was pretty bad, even through the fog of my brain injuries, and the second and third, as the nail moved through my flesh, wasn’t so great either. It sort of gave me perspective on my other injuries and the pain where my back was pinned backward.

  Then they set the cross up, and my arms and legs had to take the load. The nails tore the flesh a bit before settling into their new positions, and that hurt quite a lot; I apparently screamed and lost consciousness.

  I woke up as they threw a bucket of vinegar over me; the strong smell in my cracked sinuses actually hurt a lot worse than the nails. I hung there, sputtering and gasping, while Pompey and Crassus made speeches that I didn’t quite catch the gist of, except that they dwelt at great length on what a bad fellow I was, what a swell guy Caesar had been, and just how much I deserved this.

  Already I was beginning to feel a little warmer; I was being crucified naked, and I had been kind of counting on hypothermia to give me some anesthesia.

  There was quite a crowd, I realized, and I seemed to be the center of attention. I was vaguely bothered by the fact that I couldn’t do anything to cover up. I looked around the crowd for a familiar face, but just the effort of doing that made them swirl and whirl like people had when my brother Jerry, my sister Carrie, and I had ridden the “Tempest” at the county fair, as kids. Jeez, with such a big event, I wished they could be here to give me a little support, they’d never missed my football games—

  Holding my head steady gradually stabilized the view, and I began to think a bit more coherently. Very slowly I looked around, noting that my arms and legs already felt dead but very warm. Then I saw a face under a hood and felt my heart leap up for a second with happiness, because on a big day like this, with so many people here, I really wanted—

  Something made me rear against the nails, sending agony through my arms as I convulsed savagely several times. I felt myself foaming and my tongue coming out of my mouth; I was vaguely aware of the cries of disgust from the soldiers standing guard around my cross, as I lost bowel and bladder control. I could smell the effect even through the vinegar still burning in my wounded sinuses.

  It got really dark, and this time there were nightmares.

  “Mark? Are you awake?”

  I stretched and found that I could move my arms and legs; this seemed like a good sign. I sighed, let my eyes open, and looked up to see the most beautiful sight in the world—Chrysamen ja N’wook bending over my bed. “Am I at—”

  “Hyper Athens, of course. You’ve been under for a week. The nanos are asking for overtime pay, hubby. When the Romans decide to mess a guy up, they’re awfully thorough.”

  I drew a deep breath. “Porter and Paula—”

  “Waiting to go back with us. Porter’s getting treated like royalty—apparently some of her later recordings in this timeline are definitive pieces of music for them. Though they’re being very careful not to let her hear them—I mean, imagine what could have happened if the young Beethoven had gotten to hear the Ninth Symphony. So she’s just playing her early compositions, and some Roman music, and of course some of her piano show-off stuff. Oh, and she’s doing a great job of putting off meeting with Thebenides, who’s frantic to lobby her for something or other.”

  “Any girl who can say no to Julius Caesar shouldn’t have any trouble fending off a two-bit politician,” I said. “How long till they let me get up?”

  “About one more day. Meanwhile, at least, they’re letting me feed you. Will it be hospital soup, hospital noodles, or hospital hot cereal first?”

  It’s amazing that a civilization that advanced can’t come up with hospital food that tastes any better than ours. I didn’t mind, all the same. The company was good.

  For some reason it’s a big deal to Mark that everything gets recorded. I don’t know why he writes these books about our adventures since they can’t possibly be published, and Porter and his father and sister all hear the story directly from his own lips anyway. Probably all historians are crazy. But since he asked, and since I have most of today while he’s resting, I’m writing this while my memory is fresh.

  When Mark ducked into the alley in Falerii, I was going after him until all of a s
udden a hand twined in my hair (the damned curls are a little too perfect for being grabbed by). The next thing I knew, I was being pinned by Pompey and two of his centurions—they had gone into the burning city looking for a hostage or for anything that might make them valuable to Crassus, with the army lost. It was the kind of bold maneuver Pompey did without worrying much about the risk, the sort of thing that meant he was never more dangerous than when almost defeated, and this time it paid off.

  In the process of getting me tied up, one of them lost an eye, the other one got a broken arm, and I lost a couple of hanks of hair. If Pompey hadn’t been there, insisting he wanted me alive and unhurt, I suspect they’d just have stomped me to death there in the alley.

  The whole thing took just a few minutes; then they faded into the refugee train that poured out of the city, commandeered a cart, tossed me into it under a load of straw, and carried me off to where Pompey’s army was regrouping.

  No matter what the incentive, the Romans of that day just could not get it through their heads that a woman might be dangerous, particularly an unarmed woman. And the fact that I was out in public, and not an aristocrat, made them think I must be some kind of camp follower, which is the polite word in the history books for “soldiers’ whore.” So, sure enough, I got a guard to untie me by promising to show him something he’d never seen before, and then showed him the road to Hades with a quick maneuver that snapped his neck, just when he thought we were about to get to the good part.

  I saw Mark ride by on the Via Flaminia, but I was staying off the road for safety’s sake. I figured I’d meet up with him in Rome.

  After a while I joined a refugee column, stole myself some rags to make a generic “beggar” disguise, and got into the city that way. I had lost all my gear except the holy-shit switch, so I had no way of locating Mark, but clearly Pompey’s balloon was the biggest thing going on at the time, so I figured I needed to penetrate the compound on top of the Palatine Hill. There were so many more muskets than there were men to use them that it was no trouble to steal eight of them from the Campus Martius, and since I figured they were pretty useless singly, with their short range and miserable accuracy, I did a little tinkering, saving only the barrels and lashing those together with the fireholes all facing inward to a single percussion cap, to make sort of a giant shotgun.

  Then I mounted it in a window facing a guard post, set a fuse to make it go off, and figured it could serve as my diversion. It worked like a charm—that was the “volley of musket fire” that Mark heard that night.

  They were looking for at least ten guys, of course, so a single woman slipping through the shadows could get pretty much what she wanted. The trouble was, it turned out all the action was at the balloon, which was still under heavy guard, and I had no way of fighting my way aboard that. So I kept skulking, and a few times I ran into soldiers in dark alleys. When that happened, I hit hard and silently, generally before they knew they were attacked, and they died right there.

  It might not have been sporting, but this was hardly a game. If I were Mark, I guess I’d give you the details of each knifing, but it’s the sort of shoptalk that doesn’t interest me. Sure, everyone is different on some level, but basically the experience of cutting a man’s throat so suddenly that he can’t cry out, or of smothering his cry for the critical second while you open his femoral artery and kidneys to knock him unconscious, is alike every time. And, to use a great word I learned from Porter, it’s mega-icky.

  Anyway, I heard the roar of Mark’s .45 and got back to the platform just in time to see him departing, hanging on to the sandbag on Pompey’s balloon. I really thought he would try the drop onto the roof of the Temple of the Great Mother—it was a lot better bet than trying to fight his way aboard—but what can I say, we’re all individuals. He does things his way, I do them mine.

  It seemed to me there was now a good chance that Mark would start working some deal with Pompey, or maybe with Crassus, and since we already had an “in” with Caesar, and were about to have one with the other army, it was probably best to stay loose and see what else I could manage. You never know when the ability to act independently can come in handy.

  Naturally I followed Caesar’s army south—and that was quite a ride, the worst part of the whole job really, especially since I had to pull over to avoid his rear scouts now and then, and then make up the distance after they’d gone on. I got to Cannae just in time for the aborted battle, and figured I would walk in and say “hi” to Mark the next day, once it was clear that the deal was firm.

  Well, as they say, things get in the way. I didn’t get a clear shot at helping Mark out of that jam until they actually had him nailed up, so I used my idle days to burgle Caesar’s effects and retrieve a bunch of ATN hardware, including the NIFs, which I did some field-programming on so that I could have an effect that looked like “having a major seizure from neural damage and then dying on the cross” and would leave him in a pretty cold coma for a day or so. It worked fine; I gave Mark one shot of that, let them return his body to Porter and Paula, then slipped into their tent and at last hit the holy-shit switch. ATN grabbed all four of us, neat as you please, and that was the end of that mission.

  I suppose Mark will complain that I didn’t dwell on things enough, but really, though it was scary at times, it was a pretty standard ATN mission. And don’t get me wrong—for all his tendency to over-dramatize, my husband is the guy I’d most prefer to have on my side in a fight, anything from a barroom brawl to a duel with atom bombs, anywhere and anytime.

  Well, Chrys absolutely refuses to expand that part at all, and since I wasn’t there, I can’t revise it into anything more interesting. You’ll just have to take my word for it that she’s terrific and much too modest.

  A couple of days later, subjective, we stepped back onto the pavement in a parking lot in Weimar, Germany, in our own timeline, where a battle had just finished the day before. The place was crawling with media—when an internationally renowned child-prodigy pianist disappears in a UFO, and then pops back into existence twenty-four hours later just as was promised, I suppose you have to expect that.

  You’ve all seen the speech she made, and nowadays every grade-school kid sees it, so it’s probably time to admit, at least in this book, even if it can never see publication for centuries, that Porter had had weeks to think about what she wanted to say. But the words were her own, and they weren’t lies. If you look at the story she told, it wasn’t that far from the truth. There are forces out there greater than we are, and they do want us to live at peace with each other—and they have left it up to us to find a way to do so.

  It helped too that she had never played better than she did that night in the National Theater. There were a lot of ghosts in Weimar that night, I think, and most of them would have been very proud to be present at the first of Porter’s dozen Concerts for Peace.

  I think that Chrys and I were actually the only people who made it to all of them, even the one in Ulster that was almost canceled because of the threats. It’s a pretty strange world when you’re sitting there, bursting with pride, because the kid you’ve tended, worried about, loved as your own for so many years, is working so hard to put you and your wife out of work.

  Pretty strange, but you can get to like it.

  AFTERWORD

  Every so often I take it into my head to rush in where angels fear to tread, and usually the way I do that is to set one of these adventures in a period that’s familiar. Hardly any historical period of Western history has received, over the last few centuries, the attention that the collapse of the Roman Republic in the last century before Christ has received. The cast of characters alone is wonderful; the heights of courage and depths of depravity are all there.

  As may also be obvious, I am not in sympathy with what has been the most common reading of the period; it seems to me that this was not the time when Roman freedom was lost, but merely an inevitable change of jailers. The Senate had stymied every possib
le measure to empower the poor and to alleviate their sufferings. It was no surprise, then, that ambitious men made the just demands of the poor into the ladder on which they climbed to power. The tragedy was not that the “Old Romans” fell from power, but that they had ever held it in the first place—and that the ones who toppled them were truly little better, indeed, were men of the same kind.

  For those who like a history full of noble Brutuses and wise Ciceros, I remind you only that at that time the Latin word libertas, the root of our word “liberty,” had nothing to do with what we would think of as civil liberties—and everything to do with preserving the privileges of the few, though it brought the world crashing down around their ears.

  But I am forgetting myself; at the end of these, I always remind you that these are works of fiction, and that after all they have nothing to do with our present-day lives, or indeed even with our own real pasts.

  And also, I always thank that wonderful gang of picky people, the best players of the game of alternate history I know, the group of writers and historians that meets in the Alternate History category of the Science Fiction Round Table (SFRT1) on the GEnie online service. I could have done it without them, I guess, but what fun would that have been?

  This time around, though, I guess I should remind you strongly that the ideas here are mine; credit the folks below for anything that’s accurate, and for being inspiring people to bounce ideas off of, and throw the errors or the parts you don’t like at my door. I’d like to thank: Tony Zbaraschuk, Bill “Sapper” Gross, Tom Holsinger, Robert Brown, Kathy Agel, Steve Stirling, Todd “The Mule” Huff, David Burkhead, Timothy “Squire” O’Brien, Al Nofi, Susan Shwartz, Daniel Dvorkin, William Harris, and Dana Carson.

  About the Author

  John Barnes has lived in Denver for many years. Off and on, he has made his living as a writer, teacher, designer, performer, and statistician, in show business, politics, academia, marketing research, software, and publishing, and amused himself with cooking, martial arts, and ballroom dance. He says it all overlaps if you look at it right.