The Fourth Rome (2 page)

She didn’t have Quo’s intellectual understanding of TC 779 ’s systems, but her own control of the transportation capsule was
instinctively light and precise. Above all she knew her people, their weaknesses and their strengths. Central had made Nan
Roebeck leader of Team 79, but her teammates followed her by their own decision.

“It’s pretty straightforward, isn’t it?” Tim Grainger said. “We eliminate the revisionists in 9
AD
, then take out the laboratory in 1992.”

He gave Quo a quirky grin. “And the population of 50,000 BC goes up by a dozen or so.”

The Anti-Revision Command didn’t kill—except as a last resort—those who tampered with time, nor did it exactly imprison revisionists.
The ARC Riders took their captives to North America in the case of males, Australia for women, and released them in 50,000
BC
, 50K, before human beings had reached those continents in the course of history. Each group of revisionists was separated
from others by a century.

Though unharmed, the naked captives were of no further danger to the temporal continuum. They’d have to be both lucky and
skillful to survive their first winter in their new environment. Those running the Anti-Revision Command might choose not
to kill, but they were sufficiently ruthless in carrying out their mandate.

“I’m concerned that they use a psychic technique for temporal displacement,” Quo explained. “It’s not particularly subtle
or flexible, but just because it’s unique—that’s correct, isn’t it, Gerd?”

The analyst nodded agreement.

“Because it’s out of our—out of Central’s—previous experience,” Quo continued, “there may be something to trip us up. I can
understand any of the mechanical displacement methods we’ve run into, but this notion of mentally projecting people into the
past is—”

Quo was small without being slight. She couldn’t compete in peak strength with the team’s males or even with Nan’s own rangy
body, but her stamina—mental as well as physical—was remarkable. She fluttered her stubby, capable fingers. She used wands
for choice to control electronics; her hands were the most expressive part of her body.

“—magic. Fantasy. To me.”

“‘Nevertheless it moves,’“ Gerd said, quoting Galileo. “We can expect to increase the sum of our experience on this mission,
indeed. And Central’s experience as well.”

He smiled again. There was always something sad behind Gerd’s humor. It seemed to Nan that the analyst was really laughing
at himself and his own vain hopes.

“Speaking of experience,” Nan said, “have any of us worked in this sector before? I haven’t. Early Roman Empire, I mean. Soviet
breakup period we’ve done as a team.”

“I did when I was in training,” Pauli said. “But that was 3d century
BC
Sicily, and this is the Rhine area three hundred years later, right?”

Gerd nodded again. “Two hundred and sixty-four years after you were in saving Hamilcar Barca, Pauli,” he said. “Effectively
a different world. And none of the rest of us have been involved with the region at all. I’m looking forward to the experience.”

“Gerd, you looked forward to the Black Death,” Tim said. “Believe me,
I
didn’t trust Central’s vaccination that far.”

“At least we don’t have to worry about our timing at the early locus,” Nan said after the general chuckle. “On the other end,
we’ll be upstream of our 1991 insertion, so that’s safe enough.”

Tim grinned at Quo. “Unless these psychic Slavs are making time run backward,” he said. “Then we’re in deep trouble.”

Two versions of the same entity couldn’t exist in the same continuum. An ARC Rider vanished if he visited a timeline for the
second time. Maybe she was ejected into another lifetime, maybe he was dead. Maybe she drifted for all eternity in a timeless
gray limbo.

In any case the duplicated Rider was no longer able to carry out the directives of the Anti-Revision Command, so the internal
database prevented a transportation capsule from displacing to a timeline where any of the Riders had been before. That didn’t
keep somebody from displacing to a time before his previous visit and staying too long, though Nan had never heard of that
happening.

Individual displacement suits didn’t have all the safety features of a capsule. At least two Riders
had
managed to eliminate themselves temporally by getting hasty in their suits.

“Speaking of fantasy,” said Rebecca Carnes, “that’s what the revisionists’ whole plan looks like to me. Did they really think
changing history is so simple?”

She gestured toward the display. Beyond the steam-powered tank, teams of oxen hitched to poles were pushing forward a pair
of wheeled bulwarks. Musketeers sauntered along behind the loopholed bulwarks. Tendrils of smoke drifted from their broad-brimmed
hats. They carried spare matches in their hatbands in case the one burning in the gunlock went out.

“Permit me to introduce Trainee Rebecca Carnes,” Roe-beck said dryly. “Late of the 20th century, late of Team 79. She’ll be
with us while Jalouse is on leave.”

“Hey, Beckie,” Weigand said. “Good to have you back.”

“I put in for you guys but I wasn’t sure they’d let me,” Rebecca said. “I’m glad they did.”

Beckie Carnes was smart though not brilliant. Technology didn’t scare her, but she wasn’t technically oriented. She was in
good physical condition for a woman of forty, but that wouldn’t have earned her a slot in the ARC Riders either.

Beckie didn’t panic, and she didn’t quit. As a combat nurse in Vietnam she’d been in the middle of situations as bad as any
in Anti-Revision Command’s scope. She’d come through them—and come through still human, still able to care.

Besides, Nan was glad to have somebody on the team who thought her primary job was to help people.

“If we’ve got a trainee along, then Central thinks it’s a milk run,” Tim said. “Not that you’re really a trainee, Beckie.”

“If Central were perfect,” Nan said before Quo could respond, “then you and I wouldn’t have as many scars as we do, Tim. But
we are all pleased at the assignment, Beckie.”

Team 79 had snatched Carnes from a timeline that had to be destroyed. They’d needed her local knowledge to understand a period
that didn’t exist in the continuum in which their database was set.

After that operation was completed, Beckie had the choice of a comfortable existence in the 26th century—to which she was
completely alien; or joining the ARC Riders herself. She’d taken the second option, just as Tim Grainger had done on an earlier
mission. She was an asset to the organization and to Team 79.

Gerd nodded. “Rebecca,” he said, “you’re correct that the revisionists’ concept is more a religious myth than a historical
paradigm. That’s unfortunately common in political discourse. After Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, Russian clerics
invented the notion that as secular power had passed from Rome to Constantinople when the emperor created the new capital
in 330
AD
, SO power had passed from Constantinople to Moscow in 1472 when the czar married the last Byzantine princess.”

“It makes as little objective sense as Manifest Destiny or the Divine Right of Kings,” Chun Quo said. “But those were good
enough reasons in their times, too. Reasons to kill.”

“The monk Philotheus of Pskov said, ‘Two Romes have fallen and the third stands,’” Gerd quoted. “‘There will never be a fourth.’”

He looked at his display and added, “Of course, that’s what the revisionists want to change.
Their
Moscow has fallen. They want to create a continuum in which a new Moscow rules the world, a Fourth Rome. The display shows
what they would have achieved.”

The tank had come to a halt. One of its eight bogeys sank to the wheel hubs in soft ground. Officers in carriages shouted
abuse at one another and at the stolid footmen nearby. Sparks from a smokestack had started a grass fire. It was likely to
spread out of control if everyone continued to ignore it.

“These revisionists were the scientific elite of a superpower,” Pauli said. “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, they became
the detritus of a Third World country that couldn’t even feed itself. No wonder they’re willing to grasp at straws.”

He’d crossed one ankle over the other knee; his hands rested lightly on his thighs. Somebody who didn’t know Pauli would think
he was relaxed. Nobody really relaxed before a mission, and nobody with any experience trusted that a mission was going to
be as simple as it looked in ARC Central.

“This is the revised timeline’s military technology,” Nan said. “What do their cities look like?”

“About what you’d expect,” Gerd said. He adjusted the flat gray device he was using to control the display at the moment.
It was a multifunction sensor, display, and processing unit in its own right. Nan knew the analyst would sooner lose his right
arm than give the device up. “Mud, hovels, and churches.”

The display shifted to a village of round-topped huts, each in its own fenced yard. Pigs and chickens wandered through the
unpaved streets, picking at the garbage. The onion-domed church was the only building constructed of stone rather than wood
or wattle and daub.

“The revisionists’ concept was rather clever.” Gerd said. “Though the Romans began to exercise administrative control over
all Germany during the reign of Augustus, their power effectively stopped at the Rhine after Quinctilius Varus was defeated
in 9
AD
. TO Romans the frontier was a zone rather than a line in the sense that later ages thought of boundaries between states.
By trade and military contacts—raiding on both sides, and from German mercenary service in the imperial armies—the German
elite became aligned with the Roman elite. They had more in common with each other than either did with its own rural population.”

“And when central authority in the West collapsed,” Quo said, “the German elites were ready to replace Rome.”

“Exactly,” Gerd agreed. “What Central—and I—predict our revisionists intend is to permit the Roman Empire to continue expanding
eastward to the Vistula River. That way the zone of assimilation will be among Slavs, not Germans, and the successor state
will be a Slavic Fourth Rome instead of a Germanic Holy Roman Empire.”

“They should have looked at what resulted when Moscow really did replace Constantinople as the power in the Balkans after
1453,” Tim said. “Why would they expect the result to be any better if it included Central Europe as well?”

“Because they were desperate, Tim,” Beckie Carnes said softly. “You and I don’t have to look any farther than the worlds we
grew up in to know what kind of bad decisions desperate people make.”

She’d been a nurse in an Asian war her United States fought for thirty years, until war and nation ended with American warlords
slinging nuclear weapons at enemies both at-home and abroad. Oh, yes, she understood desperation.

Nan stood up. Gerd switched off the image of squalor.

Nan looked her team over one by one and smiled. “Revisionist proposes, ARC Central disposes,” she said. “Let’s go shift a
little population back to 50K, people.”

C
arrying his personal kit in a cylindrical bag no bigger than his muscular upper arm, Pauli Weigand followed the rest of the
team down the narrow red-outlined walkway. There were eight transportation capsules in a docking bay that could hold twenty.
If you stepped outside the markings there was always the chance that you’d be standing in the spot another capsule transferred
into.

A technician in the cab of a robotic workstation had removed a section of outer hull from TC 754, baring the ceramic core.
Three members of Team 54 watched with studied unconcern. They had no part in dockyard maintenance like this, but they were
well aware that the hull matrix held the electronics that displaced their capsule in time and space. PauJi understood why
you might want to watch even if that was all you could do. He’d been there himself.

The hatch in the middle of TC 779’s port hull bulged and opened as Nan reached it. The vehicle was a cylinder with rounded
ends, a little under three meters in diameter and almost nine meters long. Now with its systems off, TC 779 looked gray and
was mottled with marks of stress and repaired damage. A chameleon program would give the outer skin whatever color and pattern
the operator chose, though it couldn’t change the hull’s basic shape.

Voroshilov turned from 754 and waved. He shouted, “Timothy, come see me when you get back.” The bay’s volume drank his booming
voice. “I’ve got some schnapps you must try. Not vodka, schnapps!”

Grainger paused in 779 ’s entrance lock. “Wish us luck, Kli-menti,” he called back.

Tim and Voroshilov had trained together. Both had been born in earlier centuries, giving them a bond of sorts in an organization
largely recruited in the 26th century. They probably thought of themselves as outsiders; which was true, but
any
ARC Rider was an outsider. Even ARC Central itself, though located “in” the 26th century, was slightly out of temporal phase
with the sidereal universe.

The only way to enter or leave ARC Central was by time machine. The psychic distance separating ARC Riders from their contemporaries
was as complete as Central’s separation from the continuum.

Voroshilov came from a period in which nationalism was still a powerful force. How would he react if this mission had gone
to his team instead of 79?

You had to assume Voroshilov wouldn’t have gotten through ARC screening if that was going to be a problem he couldn’t overcome.
Besides, no Russian nationalist would want the result these revisionists had achieved, whatever he might think of the idea
in the abstract.

Gerd walked just ahead of Pauli. Instead of entering the vehicle, the analyst started around the blunt bow. Pauli caught him
by the elbow and guided him back across the line. “I thought you were coming with us, Gerd,” he said mildly.