Debt of Ages (10 page)

"Okay, so how do we accomplish this subtle nudging? How can you be clear on the details of Andreas's history, about which he doesn't claim to be an expert?"

"He's not—but we were able to access his memories, including all the history he was ever taught, whether or not he consciously retained it. Most of it was valueless, as is generally true of the history that filters down to educational bureaucrats for dissemination in required courses. But one fact stood out: when the Restorer died in 491, his adopted successor was assassinated. I'll let Artorius trace the steps our research has taken from there."

"You'll be pleased to know, Robert," Artorius smiled, "that our inquiries led us to the alternate version of an old acquaintance of yours: Sidonius Apollinaris."

"Oh, yeah, Sidonius! He seemed much too nice a guy for the lousy fate Tylar told me was in store for him."

"Well, his fate was a happier one in the alternate reality—up to a point. In 483 he was elected Pope."

"Pope! Uh, did that mean as much then as . . . ?"

"Perhaps not officially; the Bishop of Rome was elected locally like any other bishop of the period. Until the early fourth century, he was known as just that: Bishop of Rome. But then, in the bishopric of Silvester, the pontifical title was added as a recognition of the primacy he had always been accorded as successor of Saint Peter. So the election was a matter of wide importance, and Artorius . . ." Artorius trailed to a rueful halt. "Let's call him 'the Restorer' to avoid confusion. The Restorer took steps to assure the election of his loyal supporter, Bishop Sidonius of Clermont. Then, in 491—"

"Wait a minute!" Sarnac sifted through his new-old memories. "Tylar, didn't you tell me that Sidonius died at age forty-eight? Wouldn't that come to 480 or so?"

"Ah, but that was in
our
reality, in which he endured appalling hardships withstanding several Visigothic sieges of Clermont, only to be sold out by the Western Empire for which he had held the Auvergne—one of that empire's final sellouts before its richly-merited demise. And afterwards he was imprisoned for years by the Visigoths. It's scarcely surprising that he lost his will to live. In the alternate timeline there were no sieges, no imprisonment, and no heartbreak at witnessing the death of the empire in which he'd believed."

"I'm glad
somebody
had a better life in my history," Andreas said bitterly. Then he remembered himself and gave the former High King an apprehensive look. But Artorius took it with his usual affability.

"Actually, quite a lot of people did. My counterpart forestalled the Dark Ages, which was certainly a good thing in the short run. Of course, after witnessing enough history one grows skeptical of good things in the short run."

"Didn't somebody once say, 'In the long run, we're all dead'?" Sarnac couldn't resist putting in.

"John Maynard Keynes," Artorius replied unhesitatingly. "Author of an economic theory which infallibly bankrupted any nation that embraced it and led directly to the fall of the West little more than a century after his time. You'll forgive me if I view his aphorisms with a degree of irreverence. But, to continue, the alternate Sidonius was only better off until 491, when he was killed by an aristocratic clique with its own ideas about who should succeed to the purple. Killing the Pope hadn't been part of their plans; he just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time, with his brother-in-law the heir."

"Brother-in-law?"

"Yes. You'll recall that I was childless," Artorius continued evenly. "So to secure the succession, the Restorer revived the custom of the Antonine emperors and adopted an heir. He chose Ecdicius, one of his top cavalry generals."

"Anybody I know?" Sarnac asked, reviewing his memories.

"No. I never met him, myself, although I knew of him as the brother of Sidonius's wife Papianilla. They were the children of Avitus, who had been Augustus of the West from 455 to 457. After my . . . departure, he formed a small private unit of cavalry, financed by the income of his own estates, to resist the Visigoths. His aggressive, hit-and-run operations were the reason it took King Euric five years to conquer the Auvergne. On one occasion, he lifted one of the sieges of Clermont with only eighteen men!"

"Sounds like quite a guy," Sarnac remarked, summoning up from his own land's history the image of Nathan Bedford Forrest.

"Indeed," Tylar nodded. "He was a swashbuckler born long before his time—a proto-Musketeer. By sheer gallantry, he held back the night for a little while. But he could not halt it. In the end, he escaped into the land of the Burgundians and entered their service. His struggle had been hopeless from the first."

"I like him more and more," Sarnac said. "Blame it on my background. Where I come from, we've always been suckers for lost causes."

"Yes, his was a lost cause—in
our
reality. In the alternate timeline . . . well, imagine what the man who fought the Visigoths to a standstill for five years with no resources except his own private ones could have accomplished on the
winning
side, with the full support of a triumphantly resurgent empire!"

Sarnac thought about it. Tylar observed his expression and nodded. "The alternate Ecdicius led his band of cavalry to join the alternate Artorius in time to help smash the Visigoths before the walls of Bourges."

"All
right!
" Sarnac exclaimed, carried away. Tiraena rolled her eyes heavenward.

"In the subsequent campaigns he became the Restorer's right-hand man," Tylar continued. "His military prestige plus his connections—son of an Augustus and brother-in-law of the Pope—made him the logical choice as the adopted heir. The fact that he wasn't a Briton also helped; the Restorer needed to broaden his base of support. And then in 491, with the Restorer on his deathbed, Ecdicius was assassinated."

Sarnac's face fell. Tylar continued relentlessly. "This is the point at which it is possible, using minimal overt force, to effect a change in the alternate history's course. We will save Ecdicius and Sidonius from death."

"Wait a minute, Tylar," Sarnac said hesitantly. "Don't get me wrong; from everything you've told me about Ecdicius, I'd like nothing better than to save his life. But how is this going to fundamentally change the course of the alternate history? I mean, if Ecdicius survives he'll just succeed to the throne of the reunified Roman Empire you want to torpedo!"

"Oh, my! I see I haven't made matters altogether clear." Tylar seemed to gather his forces. "You see, my dear fellow, we're going to have to lay a bit of groundwork first, to assure that Ecdicius, after having been saved, will be more than willing to act as our instrument to set in motion the changes we want."

"Just what changes
do
we want?" Tiraena wanted to know.

"Consider: in our reality, the Roman Empire split into Eastern and Western halves, and subsequently the Western part devolved further into the competing nation-states in which the scientific and industrial revolutions could occur. In the alternate history, the Restorer aborted this process by reuniting East and West. Well, we're going to make sure the process resumes. Ecdicius is going to lead the West into secession!"

The transtemporal vehicle traced its cold, dark orbit through regions where Sol was just another zero-magnitude star. Its remoteness, as much as the stealth technology of Tylar's people, had concealed it from the sensors that kept watch on the borderlands of one of the Pan-Human League's two capital systems.

They gazed at it in silence, standing on the immaterial force-field floor of what Sarnac had decided to think of as the observation deck of Tylar's ship. The spherical chamber had, at the touch of the time traveller's thoughts, seemed to vanish. Their eyes told them that they stood, impossibly, in empty space, silhouetted against the star-fields. But from some unidentifiable source came enough light to see each other and the mammoth construct they were approaching.

"We decided it would be most straightforward to equip it with a time-distortion drive—not a very efficient one, but it only had to travel from Alpha Centauri to Sol," Tylar explained. "Then we brought it back from the twenty-ninth century to the twenty-third when we came to fetch you."

"Gee," Sarnac attempted lightness. "A temportal just for little old me!"

"Scarcely," Tylar said deflatingly. "We already had one at Sol at this particular time—a rather crucial time, given the discovery of a second Korvaash successor-state, though not to be compared with fifteen years ago. So we decided to use it. Can't just go anywhen, you know!"

"So that's why you picked me up fifteen of my years later, and not right after our last acquaintance when I was still young and full of beans. I'd wondered about that."

"Also," Tiraena spoke up from the semidarkness, "it explains why you moved this monstrosity to Sol instead of just leaving it at Alpha Centauri, which in our time is just a newly-established colony that doubtless doesn't rate a temportal."

"Precisely," Tylar affirmed. "Temportals are quite expensive—even for us. Having to emplace one in 485 A.D. expressly for this operation was bad enough."

"485 A.D. . . . ?" Sarnac began on an interrogatory note. But Tylar hurried on in his patented question-deflecting way.

"We then equipped this vehicle with our power sources so it can operate with a lower probability of failure—Andreas was very lucky to survive the transition to our reality! Fortunately, we didn't have to rebuild it to carry a larger payload, since this ship is actually smaller than the one-man craft that was to have carried Andreas to the inner system of Alpha Centauri A. Still, it's been through a few changes.

"I can tell." Sarnac couldn't take his eyes off the huge artifact toward which they seemed to be magically gliding through open space. The original structure was like a colossal junk-sculpture representing pathologically overcomplex technology. But the Baroque massiveness was here and there overlaid by the jarringly contrasting additions of Tylar's people, which like all their machines didn't look like machines, having been grown in nanotechnological embryos. As Sarnac watched, one of them reconfigured, its unfamiliar metal writhing as it shape-shifted to perform the next stage of the preparations for departure.

"I hardly recognize it." Andreas sounded lost.

Then they seemed to swoop around it and begin their approach, entering a kind of open latticework funnel that reminded Sarnac of the front end of a twentieth-century artist's conception of a Bussard ramscoop—one of the many concepts that unanticipated discoveries had left behind in realms of the hypothetical and the irrelevant. The massiveness of that delicate-seeming framework became apparent as they settled into its enclosure, which easily held the ship that, despite the evidence of their eyes, surrounded them.

"And now," Tylar said briskly, "we can proceed to the temportal."

There was no sensation of motion. But the stars precessed around them, and ahead Sarnac could see that which he had uncomprehendingly glimpsed fifteen years earlier: a torus of space-distorting force, visible only by the wavering and twinkling of the stars beyond it. It began to grow as the transtemporal vehicle that held their ship in this clenched magnetohydrodynamic hand accelerated toward it under the reactionless drive he kept meaning to ask Tylar to explain.

"Must be a tight fit," he remarked, gesturing aft at the stupendous mass of the construct that bore them.

"Not really," Tylar assured him. "You'd be surprised at the temportal's diameter."

In fact, the barely perceptible circle was enclosing more and more of the sky as they neared it. They were moving slowly compared to the Korvaash battlecrusier aboard which Sarnac had previously made such an approach, and he had time to brace himself for what he knew was coming.

It was as bad as he remembered—like the disorientation that accompanied a displacement transition, only worse. The sensation of wrongness was somehow only heightened by the fact that the sky was still the familiar one of Sol, not the new one that greeted one who emerged from a displacement point into a different stellar system.

But not quite the same sky. A before-and-after photographic comparison would have shown the slight changes wrought by eighteen centuries of random stellar motion. And as he regained his mental equilibrium his eyes swung toward Canis Major. Yes, its brightest star was even brighter than it was supposed to be . . . and it was red, not blue-white. What Sarnac's epoch knew as Sirius B had not yet collapsed into the white dwarf stage, bequeathing some of its mass to its companion. Far outshining the future Sirius A, it was still the red giant that the ancient astronomers had observed. And he knew that at this moment, far sunward, lay an Earth whose people still believed the sun and planets and stars revolved around it. An Earth where the Western Roman Empire had met its overdue end nine years earlier and Europe was a swirling barbaric chaos within which the future gestated—at least in this, his own familiar reality.

As though reading his thoughts, Tylar harrumphed. "The next step is the transition to the point in the alternate timeline congruent to this one. Robert and Tiraena, I should warn you to expect the same phenomena we just experienced, only in intensified form."

"Oh, shit!" Sarnac breathed.

"You have almost a minute to prepare yourselves," the time traveller assured them. "It takes that long for our power sources to charge the capacitors that make up most of this vehicle's mass, making possible the truly titanic power surge required."

"It took us days," came Andreas' faint voice. No one else commented. The silence stretched. Sarnac's left hand felt the pressure of Tiraena's grip. He returned it.

"It is time," Tylar stated. And within Sarnac's head, Creation went mad.

When he could think again, he found himself crouched on the immaterial floor, staring at the stars light-years beneath him. They were unchanged. And Sirius was still as ruddy as when he had last glanced at it. But there was no room for doubt that
something
had happened.