5. The First Assignment
After several more weeks, when flying lessons with Captain Tavia and fighting lessons with Kursk had become routine and even boring, Coel Rydin and Cinquemain were summoned to a classroom at a time with no scheduled class.
“This is it!” the little machine said.
“What is?” Rydin asked, confused.
“They’ve been watching you.”
“So? They watch all the time.”
“Yes, but now you are ready.”
“For what?”
But his question never got an answer, because by then they were going through the door. Inside the room, seated at one of the long tables, was Captain Tavia. On the tabletop beside her Skeezicks stood poised in a spider chassis indistinguishable from Cinquemain’s.
“Sit down, both of you,” the captain said.
Rydin took a chair. Cinquemain climbed on the table and froze in waiting.
“You will take on your first assignment,” Tavia said. “We need to brief you.”
Rydin felt a surge of expectation. Several times during his training, he had expressed a personal interest in botany. It was the mainstay of the Lune economy, and he wanted to contribute to his people’s ongoing study of the biosphere. He knew the Jongleur Troupe sanctioned missions back to prehistoric times, past the devastation of the Fire Strike, to search out novel genomes and gene sequences that had been lost. Rydin thought he would be good at this.
“I have been studying the genetics of woody plants,” he began.
Tavia scowled. “And what has that got to do with anything?”
Cinquemain’s carapace crouched down in embarrassment.
“You are going to Rome,” she said. “Highest priority.”
Skeezicks continued with an explanation. “A culture which we call ‘the Builders’—one which arose about twenty-five hundred years ago—also dabbled in time travel, although using a different mechanism and with a different purpose than our travels. They employed a novel approach to temporospatial mathematics, based on the calculation of probabilities, to navigate from one point in time and space to the next. With it, they created an extensive network of nodes, or fixed points among the potential multiverses. We have now determined that Rome was the first node at the center of their system.”
“The Troupe des Jongleurs,” Tavia said, “has been meaning to disrupt their network for some time now. Every year that we wait, we risk their bringing back some piece of the world’s former history that will undo the present.”
Here Rydin thought about Cinquemain’s story of the “Ancestor.”
“We have been debating the best approach,” Tavia continued. “Attack from the edges, attack at the center, work downstream from the network’s inception, or take the nodes apart, one by one, working upstream. The Builders’ nodal system was in business for a long time, historically speaking. At its peak, their contact points persisted from Europan prehistory right up until the Fire Strike. But in their own place and time—southwestern Mitteleuropa, fifty-two hundred years after the Strike—they managed the entire construction phase in just a century or less.”
Cinquemain raised a claw. “Why was Rome at the Builders’ center?”
“Because,” Skeezicks replied, “it’s one of the longest continuously inhabited locations in Ancient Europe, never completely abandoned since its legendary founding roughly seven hundred years before the Christus. Athens was another such place, but the culture and influence of Rome at its peak were stronger and lasted longer. Egypt and Mesopotamia had much older cultures—thousands of years older—but their cities rose, flourished, and regularly disappeared into the sand, like wildflowers. And they were all outside Europa proper, which the Builders seemed to favor for cultural reasons. No, Rome had staying power—and for most of its early history, political power as well.”
“The Troupe’s instructions,” Tavia finished, “are for the two of you to approach this Rome early in its history and locate the node.”
Rydin absorbed all this, comparing the Builders’ story with the one Cinquemain had told about the other travelers, the Compradoro. He could find almost no similarities. Was it really possible to travel without ships, by moving from point to point, between fixed nodes lodged in the deep past, navigating among other dimensions and … the “multiverses”? But he thought of a more immediate problem.
“If we attack this first node, in Rome,” he said, “they will know we’re coming.”
Captain Tavia smiled, and it was chilling. “Who is coming? Who is ‘we’?”
“The Troupe des Jongleurs,” he answered. “We would tip our hand.”
“They don’t know about us,” Skeezicks answered. “Even the Compradoros are a thousand years into the Builders’ future. And we are that much further beyond them. The Builders are relative primitives. They won’t know what hit them.”
“What if we change something in the past?” Rydin persisted. “Wouldn’t that change the future we live in now?”
“Our calculations show that global disruptions during the Fire Strike and other civilizational collapses would overwhelm any small distortions you could create,” the machine said. “However, you might change your own temporal reality. That would be unsettling.”
“ ‘Best laid plans,’ ” Cinquemain murmured.
Rydin turned to face him. “What was that?”
“Nothing,” the pilot replied. “Just poetry.”
“You will, of course, be buffered by your neural imprints,” Captain Tavia added. “Nevertheless, you will also be discreet. And you will go disguised.”
She pulled from below the table’s edge and placed on its surface a transit case designed to attach to a liteship and sealed against vacuum. She unsnapped the latches, pushed back the cover, and pulled out a garment made of loosely woven cloth that was almost shapeless. “Stand up.”
Rydin stood. The captain came around the table, positioned herself before him, and held the garment against his shoulders. It draped to mid-thigh. He covertly felt the weave with his fingertips and found it rough, scratchy, and not entirely clean.
“This is a tunic,” she said, “such as a boy or a slave would wear. You will also have an undergarment, a loincloth of the same material, and sandals. They are in the case.”
“Am I going as a boy?” he asked.
“Our physical stature and features are genetically altered,” she said. “The changes that give us long lives and resilience to adverse conditions also make us smaller and less obviously pubescent, less … hairy. In the eyes of pre-Strike humans, we appear as children. Jongleurs usually pass as such.”
Tavia took out of the box what appeared to be a small, brown animal. She worked it in her hands, and the thing expanded into a fluffy circle. She reached up, slipped it over the skin of his skull, and stroked it into some kind of shape. “There,” she said with a smile that was less chilling. “An unusually handsome boy.”
“Are you going to teach me their language?” he asked. “What—Roman?”
“Latin,” Cinquemain said. “But our phonetic records are fragmentary.”
“That is why we decided you will pose as a slave,” Tavia told him.
From the box, she pulled a wide collar made of bronze. “Servus Praestigiatorum” was inscribed around its face, written in glyphs which resembled a simplified form of the Ongleterre script from his own reference now.
“What does it mean?” Rydin asked, pointing to the inscription.
“That you are a slave of the guild of conjurors, soothsayers, and other street artists,” she replied. “It’s nonsense really—a bit of Troupe humor.”
“I see. And what, exactly, is a … ‘slave’?”
“The Romans owned human beings,” she said, “individually and in groups, as servants and laborers. Their economy was based on such ownership. This collar was a sign of servitude. When you wear it, people will not look at you. For them, you will be just a pretty slave, a rich man’s toy.”
“If I can’t speak this ‘Latin,’ won’t people be suspicious of me?”
“They will think you are from a faraway place—which you are.”
“Rome was full of foreigners,” Cinquemain put in. “They ran a big empire. Travelers from our time—and those from the Builders—will not attract notice.”
“What if someone asks me a question?” he asked.
“Keep your mouth shut and gesture,” she replied.
Captain Tavia put his wig, slave clothing, and collar back in the box. Then she sealed it and stood back. When Rydin hesitated, she tipped her head for him to pick it up. The interview seemed to be at an end.
“Why do I get this honor?” he asked.
“Because you are a fighter,” Tavia said.
“But I’m just going to scout and observe.”
“Oh, no! We want you to destroy this node.”
“And you expect the Builders will fight back.”
“I would.” The captain smiled. “Wouldn’t you?”
As they were walking over to the hangar for their liteship, with Rydin carrying the box containing his disguise, Cinquemain made a burbling sound, like static interference. Rydin had decided this noise was the robot equivalent of laughter. “What?” he asked.
“You must have been a bad boy,” the machine said.
“I was,” he replied. “But how is that relevant now?”
“Because this is a suicide mission. The Troupe has already sent a dozen new recruits before you to take on the Builders. No one has ever been able to destroy a node. Not all the teams have come back.”
“What do you care? You can’t actually die.”
“Why do you say that?” Cinquemain asked.
“Because you are not technically alive.”
“Walk a mile on my traction pads.”
“What?”
“It’s an old Indian joke.”
“Who?”
“Never mind.”
——
Before they could take off, Cinquemain instructed Rydin to requisition for them another complete liteship, a compact mobile chassis for himself, and a spare biosuit for his human. The ship parts were collapsed and furled into a long package that, under Cinquemain’s instruction, Rydin strapped against the length of their own ship’s central core. The suit he folded, stuffed inside its helmet, then secured to one of the panel struts. The legs of the chassis reflexively curved inward and, when Cinquemain sent it a remote signal, it clutched another of the struts.
“Why do we need this redundant equipment?” Rydin asked.
“Troupe protocol. When visiting distant times, take spares.”
The extra weight did not alter the ship’s flight profile. Once again, it lifted easily, floated out of the building and over the compound, then streaked off into the sky. Their acceleration created no surge of speed, and Cinquemain could see Rydin relax because he no longer had to hold himself against even the pull of gravity. The ship made no sound as it moved, other than a faint buzzing that Cinquemain could sense through his connection points along the columnar core. He traced the vibration to one of the film panels, which was fluttering along its forward edge—an effect caused by the rush of wind and a loose tensioning wire—and he made note of it for later adjustment. The vibration ceased as they rose into the perpetual night above the atmosphere.
“There’s blue fire all around us,” Rydin’s voice whispered over the radio.
This transmission alarmed Cinquemain. “What is burning? And where?”
“The energy panels, the ones shaded from the sun. I see a blue glow.”
“Nonsense. Their energy release is beyond the visible spectrum.”
“But I can see it, a definite blue sheen, above the surfaces.”
“It’s your human eyes. They are simply playing tricks.”
Once his passenger calmed down and began to enjoy himself, Cinquemain decided to give him the bad news. “We have a long way to go,” he explained. “First, we must transit back up the time stream more than ten thousand years, to Earth in the period just after the Christus. Second, we must make up the distance that Sol system will have traveled around the Milky Way in this time. The total is seven-point-three-three and a fraction light years.”
“We have to travel a distance of light years?” Rydin exclaimed. “Spend more than seven years in deep space? You might be able to do that, being a machine, but you’re forgetting the human factor. This suit doesn’t hold air, water, or nutrients for a week, let alone years. Besides, I’ll … I’ll die of boredom.”
“Relax, Boss. The trip will take hours, maybe a day at most.”
“Do you mean this ship can travel faster than light speed?”
“Sure. We’re bending the gravity equation at both ends.”
Cinquemain engaged the full power of the singularity, and below them the green and blue Earth, with its haze of atmosphere and patina of white clouds, vanished in a blink. The dome of stars shifted above them, but that was only the rotation of the ship as Cinquemain took a bearing to determine a course to the place where their home system had been ten millennia in the past. Even when the ship was moving toward that point at several million kilometers per second, his passenger would feel no acceleration. And the human’s eyes would not be able to detect the change—which was obvious to Cinquemain’s digital sensors—in the overall star pattern.
“Are we moving at all?” Rydin asked.
“Faster than ever. Now let me drive.”
Eventually, one star in the field became brighter than the rest and continued to grow steadily. By the time it had achieved an angular diameter of half a degree, Rydin spoke up eagerly. “I think I see Jupiter! And, over there, Saturn—”
Almost before Cinquemain’s human could finish the thought, the liteship approached and was hanging above the Earth again. From this perspective, it appeared to be the same planet. Even with Cinquemain’s highly discriminating imaging system, it showed the same colors of land and sea, the same shape to the continents. In his own time, even the scars left over from the Fire Strike would have been too small to notice at this altitude unless he searched for them.
Descending to an altitude of thirty kilometers, he moved the liteship eastward with the planet’s rotation, passed over the broad and featureless Atlantic Ocean, and came upon the long, blue finger of the Mediterranean Sea—the “middle earth” of the ancient world. There even Rydin would be able to see one obvious difference: the distinct leg-shape of the Italian peninsula, which was whole once more, without the semicircular gouge eaten out below the knee in the third millennium.
“I’ve made our first approach in the second century, one hundred and fifty years after the Christus,” Cinquemain said. “This puts us—and Rome—at the peak of the city’s political power in the first millennium. If we’re looking for anomalous activity by a collective of rogue historians, this is a good place to start.”
“And that’s your plan?” Rydin asked. “Just drop down and look around?”
“Well, it would be nice if the Builders’ nodes showed up in the infra—”
A sudden thought appeared from the random number generator that Silicate intelligences used in place of human imagination and inspiration.
“What?” Rydin asked. “Your transmission broke off. Are you malfunctioning?”
“I will take us down to a thousand meters above the city,” Cinquemain said instead. “And the energy panels are now polarized, to pull moisture out of the air. Anyone looking up from below will see our liteship in the form of a small cloud.” As he spoke, a mist enveloped the upper and lower halves of the craft.
“What good does that do?” Rydin asked. “Now I can’t see anything.”
“The Romans used primitive resources,” Cinquemain explained. “They burned wood for their heating and cooking, charcoal for metalworking, and oil lamps for lighting. All create extremely weak thermal images. Presumably, a portal that forces a connection to alternate dimensions of space and time will throw off a large amount of excess energy. It should light up like—”
Again he fell into abrupt silence. His cameras, augmented by the ship’s external sensor array, had already picked up a bloom of unnatural infrared radiation, glowing even against the background of sun-warmed earth and stone. He overlaid a topological map of ground echoes on the imaging data and triangulated to place the bloom six hundred meters, give or take, north-northeast of the large island in the bend of the dark river.
“There!” he exclaimed, pointing with a manipulator.
“What!” Rydin said. “We’re still in a thick cloud.”
“It’s there. Our source. I see it even if you can’t.”
“Well then, take me down. It’s time to explore.”
——
Coel Rydin watched the mist boil up around the film panels and then dissipate as Cinquemain moved the ship rapidly northward. He saw the rooftops of the ancient city slide off toward the south, followed by a dark patch of river, then more open ground. They were traveling out into the countryside to cache their spares. When the ship slowed to a hover, its wrapping of mist gathered once again. They were above an olive grove, just off a main road, and Cinquemain dropped the ship down among the trees.
“Here should be safe enough,” the little robot said. “We won’t be staying long.”
Together they unstrapped the pieces of the spare ship, Rydin’s extra suit, the redundant chassis, and the transit case with his disguise. He stripped out of his biosuit and put on the loincloth, tunic, sandals, and slave collar. He stretched the net of the wig and fitted it to his scalp. When he was finished, he turned around and saw that Cinquemain had already lifted off and was passing the treetops.
“Where are you going?” he called. “What about me?”
“You should start walking back to the city now.”
“Oh, no! We wait until nightfall. Then you fly me in on your cloud and leave me on some open space.” He recalled an oblong trace with plenty of flat ground near the bend in the river. “That racetrack—the one off to our left as we flew out—should work.”
Cinquemain appeared to think about that. “The Stadium of Domitian?” he asked.
Rydin suddenly realized that his pilot had probably come to this place and time before, perhaps shepherding some other candidate in search of the node. The thought did not increase Rydin’s confidence.
“Why not put you on the roof with the heat bloom?” Cinquemain suggested.
“Better yet,” he agreed. But he wondered if he was walking into a trap.
Four hours after sunset, when the sky was fully dark and torches along the city streets were finally being doused, the little cloud touched on a shallowly canted roof of ceramic tiles. When Rydin stepped off the ship, he put down a hand to steady himself.
“This surface is warm!” he told Cinquemain eagerly.
“Mostly heat gathered from the sun,” the other said.
Rydin felt a pang of disappointment. “But still …”
“Well, yes—warmer than anyplace around here.”
The robot extended one of his claws through a gap in the energy panels. It held a dull, copper-colored disk the size of his thumb. “Keep that with you,” he said. “Squeeze it when you want to be retrieved.”
Rydin tucked the disk into a leather pouch on the belt that cinched his tunic.
“Remember, you are on enemy ground now,” Cinquemain warned, “where a lot of actions can alter the immediate time stream. Don’t forget to keep taking neural imprints.”
Rydin nodded and touched his eyelid—he still felt nothing from the exchange.
As he looked for a way down off the roof and into the building, the cloud around the liteship thickened and drifted upward. He was on his own.
The roof offered no obvious door, hatchway, or entry point. Rydin walked across it until he determined that the building itself was an open rectangle, with the outer edges bordered by city streets five stories below, and a courtyard the same distance down on the inside. The outer wall was sheer except for the shallow lintels and sills bracketing windows on each upper floor. The inner wall was broken by stretches of open balcony and covered walkways. He saw that he could hang from the edge of the roof on that side, swing his feet inward, and land on a balcony. From there it was no trouble finding a set of stairs—awkward things, less convenient than a smooth ramp, and not sized to his shorter steps—which took him down to the ground level. He found a wide entry gate that passed through the outer wall, presumably leading to the street on the other side, but at this time of night it was closed and barred.
Rydin settled into a corner, pulled the hem of the tunic around his shins, and relaxed into a quiet watchfulness which soon became a light doze.
Some hours later, he discovered that the block’s inhabitants appeared to rise with the sun, before the sky was fully light, because an old woman was kicking his legs. She was haranguing him as well with a complaint that he could not understand—not the words, anyway, but certainly her intent. He leaped to his feet, nodding and smiling, trying to placate her. She just pushed him toward the gate, which now stood open. Rydin went through it and found himself on the cobbled street, among people who were already walking with purpose, and a few carts that seemed to be empty and all moving in the same direction out of the city. These carts were drawn by long-legged beasts that he guessed must be horses, or maybe oxen—both fit his notions of the ancient, pre-Strike bestiary.
Rydin did not want to lose sight of his target building, because the residential block on the other side of the street—and on the street corners at either end, and everything else he had seen the day before from the air—were all made of the same brick and plaster, all had the same arched doorways into small alcoves and rooms set in the outer walls, and none of the buildings bore a sign he could read or a numbering system he could try to remember. But first he had to find someone to give him food and water. And a place to relieve his bladder—other than an empty alcove—would also be welcome.
In the end, he learned that any doorway off the street with a certain set of marks above it and an evil smell coming from inside, worse than the smells in the street itself, was a place of stone benches that had oval holes cut into them side by side. This was a very public lavatory, which connected directly to a sewer placed far below ground that echoed with the sound of running water. It was not as neat as the enzyme-digestion systems cultivated in the treehouses of Lune—and far less pleasant—but it would serve. Rydin quickly learned to suffer the embarrassment of dropping his loincloth while half a dozen men and women nearby chattered and tended to their own business.
He also learned that the doorways cut into the outside walls of the residential blocks were places of commerce. They sold bread and pastries, cooked meats and vegetable dishes, and various fermented beverages. All of them required to be paid for their services, and Rydin had no money—other than the coin Cinquemain had given him, and he could not spend that. But he saw small boys, figuratively like himself, hanging around these shops. If any food was left out on the tiled counters for more than a minute—and one baker had a habit of stacking his loaves too near the doorway—a small hand was sure to grab and carry it off triumphantly. By copying them, and being quicker than any natural child, Rydin managed to feed himself.
Using the same trick to snatch something to drink—mostly, in these shops, a thick red wine or a thin and sour beer—was impossible. The vendors handed their customers single cups filled directly from a clay jar and then watered, and the jars themselves held tens of liters and were too big to carry. But Rydin soon learned that most of the public squares had fountains that bubbled fresh water into shallow basins. Average citizens came up with their pitchers and buckets to take unlimited amounts for private use. Rydin’s own jug was his two cupped hands, but at least he was no longer thirsty.
While taking care of his physical needs, and dodging the attentions of both angry shopkeepers and the other boys, who thought he was stealing more than his share, Rydin managed to keep an eye on the building with the unexplained heat bloom. When the old woman was not in sight, he would sneak in through the gate and explore the interior as far as he could go. The upper levels were divided into separate living spaces, and each day he could only blunder into so many of them—then back out with a fawning grimace when challenged. None of these spaces seemed to conceal any modern machinery that might belong to a portal into other dimensions.
When he was not exploring, he watched the main gate from various vantage points on the street, reasoning that travelers from another time frame would not stay in the house itself but move out into the city and from there across the Roman Empire. Rydin quickly developed a feeling for the personality, bearing, and appearance of average Roman citizens, even the slaves, belonging to that time and place: loud, busy, impatient, preoccupied, and quick to cuff a child. He guessed that any traveler from another millennium would look and feel different—although Rydin seemed to be attracting no special notice himself. He studied each person who came or went through the gate for signs of an anomaly.
On the fifth day, when he was finally ready to give up, call for Cinquemain, and suggest some other plan of approach, Rydin saw a tall man striding toward the gate dressed in the finest local clothing. But his tunic shone in the sunlight with a faint iridescence, as if from the residue of cleaning agents unknown to the ancient Romans. His shoulders and limbs were draped in a woolen toga—Rydin had seen enough of them on important people already—but this one was pure white with a broad purple stripe along one edge. That marked him as a man of high rank, a senator or magistrate. But instead of the traditional red shoes secured with leather straps, this man wore shiny black boots—just visible beneath the hem of his gown—which were secured by metal buckles. He was holding a tablet in his left hand, and that was something a scribe or a slave would ordinarily carry, not a senator. And then, when Rydin focused on the tablet, he saw that instead of a wooden tray covered with wax for taking scribbles—the notepaper of ancient times—this device was made of silvery metal and faced with a sheet of black glass. When he squinted at it, Rydin could just make out a cursive script glowing in white lines.
He followed this false senator in through the gate, up the stairs to the third level, and—at a discreet distance, with Rydin loitering from corner to corner—down a hallway to a wooden door he had never before tried to open. The man fished in the pocket-fold of his toga, took out a small, noticeably un-Roman key made of brass with sharp, even teeth, and pushed it into a slot in the door that was disguised as a crack in the paneling. The door opened silently, the man slipped inside, and it closed behind him. The door was shut tight before Rydin could reach it. He saw no obvious latch or lock mechanism, nothing to suggest a way to open it without that anomalous key.
Rydin had found what he was looking for, although he could think of no way forward, no way to get into that locked room, not with the tools he had in his current naked state. That left only one thing for him to do.
He took out Cinquemain’s coin and squeezed it.