Debt of Ages (11 page)

" 'Intensified form' my left one," he muttered as he got to his feet, noting with sour satisfaction that Tylar was recovering his composure with as much difficulty as the rest of them—except Andreas, who was seemingly unaffected.

"Andreas, didn't you
feel
that?"

"Oh, I know what you just experienced. It affected me when I entered your reality. But no, this time there was nothing."

"You see," Tylar explained, back in form, "Andreas is returning to the place in which he
belongs
. The psychic sensation of outraged reality only seems to affect someone making a transition to a timeline other than his own."

"So we won't feel it on our return?" Tiraena asked.

"No, you won't. By the same token, you'll find that a transposition via temportal back to your own twenty-third century—which you've never done in a state of consciousness—will be less unpleasant than one to an era foreign to you. And no, we don't understand the 'why' of it."

"To hell with the 'why' of it," Sarnac grunted, "as long as we've got some light at the end of the tunnel." He turned to Tiraena. "What did you feel?"

"It's hard to describe." She shook her head slowly. "Sometimes, at the moment you wake up from a deep sleep it's as though you're looking at yourself from the outside. You remember your name, and the face in the mirror, but for the barest instant you wonder: 'Who
is
this person?' Well, this was like that . . . but for the
universe
."

The last aftershocks ceased reverberating around Sarnac's skull, and he noted that they were no longer surrounded by the vast metal basket. Instead, the Brobdingnagian mass of hybrid technology that had brought them to this reality was falling away astern. The starry firmament seemed to rotate around them as their ship realigned itself. Then the bright yellow-white star that was the alternate Sol lay dead ahead.

"Now," Tylar announced briskly, "we can proceed to Earth."

There was, as always, no sense of motion. But the transtemporal vehicle seemed to recede from them with impossible rapidity, vanishing from sight before Sarnac could even try to calculate their velocity. The tiny flame of Sol began to grow perceptibly brighter.

"We should be entering Earth orbit in a few hours," Tylar explained. "We may as well stop wasting time by talking of the 'alternate Earth' and the alternate this and the alternate that. As for the alternate Artorius, I suggest we adopt Artorius's suggestion and refer to him as 'the Restorer.' At any rate, we have time for—"

"For listening to you answer a few questions," Sarnac cut in. "For openers, why have we come to the year 485 A.D.? You've been saying all along that 491 is the first year when the course of this timeline's history can be changed."

"Ah, but we want it to
stay
changed. And for that, it will be necessary for us to lay a bit of groundwork, as I mentioned before."

"Groundwork?" Tiraena queried suspiciously. "Yes, I remember you saying something about assuring that this Ecdicius would be inclined to do what you want him to do. . . ."

"Yes: break up the Empire by setting up a separate Western Empire. But there must be more behind the breakup than one man's understandable annoyance at being almost assassinated. Ecdicius will merely provide the leadership for a movement with a genuine East-West incompatibility behind it."

"What 'incompatibility' is that?"

"In our own history, what sundered the two halves of the Empire irrevocably was the schism between their two forms of Christianity. This suggests our obvious avenue of approach."

"Uh, hold on, Tylar," Sarnac said hesitantly. "I'm no history buff, but I do know that the religious wars in European history were pretty damned nasty. Is that what we're going to be starting here?"

"Oh, we won't be starting it, my dear fellow. It started before the timelines branched off, at the moment the Empire took the road of intolerantly exclusive monotheism. Andreas' history doesn't include the Thirty Years' War, but you can be sure that it holds comparable horrors."

"He's right," the young transtemporal explorer admitted. "Instead of wars between sovereign nations espousing different religions—Tylar told me about those—we've had repeated, bloody suppressions of embryonic heresies. Whole ethnic groups were exterminated because they had been 'infected with error.' Doctrinal unity has always been seen as a pillar of Imperial unity, and no challenge to it has ever been tolerated."

Tiraena shook her head. "I still have trouble imagining this kind of thing, in either version. I never heard much about it as a child—I suppose it was something my Terran ancestors weren't proud of in their heritage. And while the history of Raehan has its share of stupidities and brutalities, the Raehaniv have never been inclined to slaughter each other over their various religions."

"The religious atmosphere on Raehan has always been more like that of eastern Asia," Tylar explained. "It was once said that a Chinese gentleman was a Confucian in public and a Taoist in private. But after he died, he expected to enter a Buddhist afterlife. And he was always careful to sacrifice to Animist deities. All, be it noted, with complete sincerity. This seems odd to a Westerner—but no odder than formulations like 'Thou shalt have no other gods before Me' or 'There is no god but Allah' seem to a Chinese . . . or a Raehaniv."

"My background is Western," Sarnac said defensively, "and I'm not intolerant of anybody's religion, or lack of it."

"Of course not. You're a modern, secularized Westerner, a product of the scientific and industrial revolutions and their resultant social disintegration, otherwise known as 'freedom.' We're going to make that possible here. But it will take more preliminary work than I may have indicated. And now—" he indicated Sol, grown to the proportions of a sun "—we have much to do and little time, so you must forego further explanations until after we land."

* * *

Sarnac had approached the night side of fifth-century Earth once before, and no longer felt a bottom-dropping-out-of-the-stomach sensation at the nighttime blackness of an Earth innocent of electric lighting.

The ship dropped down and settled like a feather. It was stealthed against all sensors, including the Mark One Eyeball and Mark One Eardrum that were the only sensors currently available to humans. But Tylar made sure there was no one present to see the hatchway open before he let them step through and emerge into the moonlit spring night beside the old Roman road.

As soon as the hatchway closed behind them, Tylar took out a small device and regarded it silently for a moment. Then they felt a breeze of displaced air as the invisible ship soared silently upward into the low orbit where it would patiently await recall. Then they looked around at each other.

They were all in the same kind of nondescript contemporary clothing, including Tiraena. Tylar had decided that for the moment it would be simplest for her to masquerade as a young man—a simple matter for her in this ill-nourished milieu. She was of average height for a twenty-third-century Raehaniv woman, which made her tall on the standards of her Terran female contemporaries and taller than the average man of the fifth century. She had acquiesced with no good grace. Sarnac, for his part, was looking forward to the newly remembered sensation of being a big guy—it was restful, somehow.

He activated his light-gathering contact lenses, and the moonlit scene became as clear as though seen by daylight. The road ran northeast toward Constantinople, their destination. Off to one side was what had been a roadside shrine to Hermes, long since desecrated by the Christians and its idol removed. The moonlight had invested the crumbling little structure with a flesh-prickling aura of romantic, mysterious antiquity. In the pitiless clarity of the optics, it was merely dilapidated. To the other side, a low cliff overlooked the Sea of Marmara.

The device in Tylar's hands shape-shifted, stretching out to form a staff such as a middle-aged man might use when journeying on foot. A quick calculation told Sarnac that its total volume had increased significantly; it was probably less dense than the wood it now appeared to be.

"Where are we?" Tiraena wanted to know. "I thought we were going to Constantinople."

"As I intimated, we've been researching this era—the temportal we used has been in place for over a year. This is as close to Constantinople as I thought it prudent to land, so I had the portal device left here. We've also infiltrated an agent into the city, with whom I've already been in contact." He didn't say how.

"An agent?" Andreas looked puzzled. "I thought we were going to be on our own."

"In operational terms, we are. Quite simply, I can't risk involving any of my own people except Artorius, whose background is unique. I'm not at all certain of their ability to function effectively in a mission which flies in the face of all their training and conditioning. Imagine a dedicated veteran museum custodian who was suddenly ordered to start smashing the exhibits! But for reasons which will become apparent, we need a contact. So I'm using one of my best men in a supporting capacity. We're to meet him this morning. We'll have a bit of a walk, but we should reach the city just after dawn."

Tiraena ran a hand through her hair, cut even shorter than its norm. "Tylar, should we be travelling in the dark like this? Aren't you worried about, uh, highwaymen, or dacoits, or whatever they're called in this part of Earth?"

"No, I expect no such trouble this close to the capital of an empire as vigorous and effective as this one has become. And if we do encounter any unpleasantness, our ability to see in the dark plus these—" he took from the pouch at his side a slim metallic tube such as they all carried "—should give us whatever advantage we need." He set out along the road, and the other four followed, moving slowly along the coastline of what would one day be called Turkish Thrace in
their
reality. What it would be called in this reality—and, indeed, everything else about the future of this reality—was about to become unpredictable.

* * *

They first glimpsed Constantinople silhouetted against the dawn. By the time they reached the Golden Gate, the city had awoken to roaring life.

They passed through a polyglot throng as they crossed over the sixty-foot-wide moat—dry now, as was normal—and through the outermost of the three-mile-long triple walls Theodosius II had built early in this century to protect a city that had long since outgrown Constantine's original wall. They continued on up a ramp through the twenty-seven-foot second wall, and before them stood the
real
wall of Constantinople, with its massive seventy-foot towers, thick and solid enough to withstand the discharge of the torsion-powered missile-throwers atop them.

Sarnac's experience of the fifth century was limited to the provinces of western Europe, whose rusticity was seldom varied by even so much as a town. Perhaps that was why he—child of a civilization which tamed the energies that powered the suns and the gravity that shaped space—found himself impressed by these walls, remains of which could still be seen in his timeline. In
that
history, nothing had overcome them for a thousand years . . . and even then it had taken the gunpowder artillery of which Theodosius II had never dreamed. He tried to imagine what the construction of these walls had meant to a society on this technological level, but soon gave up.

"Artorius," he asked the former High King, who was wearing a hood lest anyone should notice that his profile was the one on all the coins, "how did your counterpart ever take this place?"

"He didn't. He defeated Zeno in the field. Afterwards, Zeno died during the retreat, and the Sacred Consistory—that's sort of the Emperor's cabinet—unanimously concluded that the Augustus of the West was his late enemy's undoubted heir apparent. The Senate ratified the decision, which is its only remaining function, and the Restorer made a triumphal entry through this very gate."

Sarnac shook his head. "So it was as though the civil war had never happened. This must be a pettifogging lawyer's paradise—as bad as twentieth-century North America!"

"Oh, I don't know if I'd go
that
far. But it's true that the Roman Empire, from its inception, had no clear-cut law of succession. The 'Tetrarchy' scheme that Diocletian set up in the third century only muddied the waters. So it's always been necessary to come up with rationalizations for the current power grab—especially since the Empire became Christian. It's believed that the emperor holds office by virtue of God's will . . . and who's to say how He'll express His will? Nowhere is it written that He has to act through heredity! So whoever currently occupies the throne, however he got there, is by definition the rightful emperor." He paused. "The Restorer is trying to solve this problem by returning to the system of adoptive heirs that worked for a little while in Rome's great days. In Andreas' history, he succeeds."

They continued on, wending their way through obviously new construction to the Old Golden Gate in what was left of the Wall of Constantine, largely cannibalized for its stones. Then they proceeded along Middle Street, the greatest of the thoroughfares that crisscrossed the dense mass of narrow, crooked streets—urban footpaths, really—that made up most of Constantinople. The teeming warrens were visible beyond the porticoes that lined Middle Street. Sarnac's implanted knowledge included a map showing only the main routes; he wondered if one even existed which showed every detail of what might jokingly be called a street plan—it would have looked like a plate of spaghetti.

The deeper they penetrated into the city the harder they had to push through a colorfully dressed crowd which was as diverse socially as racially. Glancing to left and right, Sarnac saw that the dwellings of rich and poor interpenetrated as thoroughly as did their occupants. That was something else he "remembered": Constantinople, unique among big cities (including those of his own twenty-third century) had no fashionable residential districts. Of course, the rich didn't have to huddle together to find privacy from the rabble—the architecture of their homes, organized around a central court and presenting a blank stone face to the tenements around them, saw to that. But Sarnac wondered if there might be something more to it, in this empire which recognized only the god-emperor and his subjects, of whom the richest was as much a slave as the poorest.