Dad and Jeremy and Amanda all helped her down to the subbasement. The chamber appeared in the room fifteen minutes later. Dad and the operator eased Mom inside. Dad said, “I'll send a message as soon as we know for sure, and I'll be back as fast as I can.”
“Okay,” Amanda and Jeremy said together. The chamber door slid shut. A moment later, the chamber disappeared. Amanda looked at Jeremy. He was looking back at her. For a little while, they were on their own.
Five
Jeremy thought people were looking at him. He had to go out in Polisso and pretend everything was normal. Mom and Dad had been gone for only a few hours. Jeremy felt as if his shield against the world were gone, too. Responsibilities weighed a million kilos. If he made a bad mistake, he couldn't pass any part of it on to someone else. It was his.
And he worried about Mom. Appendicitis was something simple enough to fix on the home timeline. But all the same, even doctors said the only minor surgery was surgery you didn't have to have. If something went wrong… Or if it turned out not to be appendicitis, but something worse…
He wouldn't think about that. He told himself so, again and again. It was like trying not to think of a green-and-orange zebra. You could tell yourself you wouldn't. You could tell yourself all sorts of things. The thought kept returning just the same.
“Furs! I have fine furs!” a Lietuvan trader shouted. Jeremy kept on walking through the market square. He didn't want furs. He wanted to tell the Lietuvan what he thought of him for selling them. He couldn't. A real Agrippan Roman might not have bought fur, but he wouldn't have minded anyone selling it.
And the locals call the Lietuvans barbarians, Jeremy thought. They're more alike than they are different.
They had reason to be, of course. Rome and Lietuva had lived next door to each other for a thousand years. They'd fought wars against each other. They'd traded. Ideas had gone across their border along with trade goods. NeoLatin had words for things like amber and wax and slave that were borrowed from Lietuvan. Lietuvan had more words taken from classical Latin and neoLatin: a whole host of technical terms, as well as words like wine and wheel and ship.
Another Lietuvan in a fur jacket called, “Here! You are a young man! Buy yourself a slave girl! She's well trained. She'll do what you tell her.” He leered.
The girl he pointed at was blond and skinny and broad-faced, with high cheekbones. She couldn't have been more than twelve years old. Her threadbare tunic was filthy. She didn't look well trained. She looked scared to death.
“You want her?” the Lietuvan asked. “I'll give you a good price.”
“No.” Again, Jeremy kept on walking. Behind him, the Lietuvan said something in his own language. Whatever it was, it wasn't praise. Jeremy didn't care. He discovered he'd only thought being offered furs was disgusting. Now he found the real thing. If he gave the trader enough silver, the fellow would sell him the girl.
He couldn't. Dealing in slaves, even to set them free, was as illegal as could be for crosstime traders. Setting her free wouldn't do her much of a favor, anyhow. What was called freedom here was often only the freedom to starve. Keeping her was just as much out of the question. She would ask questions the traders couldn't answer, see things she wasn't supposed to see, and learn things the locals shouldn't know. Whatever happened to her would just have to happen.
“Good luck,” Jeremy whispered. She would need it. He hoped she got an easy master. There were some: quite a few, in fact. That wasn't really the problem with slavery. The problem with slavery was that there were masters, period.
“Plums! Peaches! Who'll buy my plums and peaches?” a peasant woman called. She wore a bright scarf wrapped around her head. Years of weathering had left her cheeks almost the same color as the plums in her basket. The peaches here were smaller and paler than the ones Jeremy knew from the home timeline. They didn't taste just the same, either. They weren't quite so sweet, but they had a spicy flavor he liked.
He haggled long enough to look normal, then took a small basket full of them back to the house. He'd brought the basket himself. Nobody here gave out shopping bags or anything like them.
Amanda opened the door as soon as he knocked. Smiles wreathed her face. “You've heard from Dad!” Jeremy exclaimed.
His sister nodded. “It was her appendix, and now it's out, and she's going to be fine.”
Some of the weight fell from Jeremy's shoulders. “That's… about the best news there is,” he said. “Did Dad say how long he'll stay back there?”
“A few days,” Amanda answered. “He can't be quite sure yet, 'cause he has to see how Mom's doing. But he said he'd get back here as soon as he could. And Mom shouldn't be more than a couple of weeks-but she'll have to wear a patch of false skin over the scar when she goes to the baths.”
“I hadn't thought of that,” Jeremy said, but it made sense when he did. Nobody here had a scar like that. Agrippan Rome knew no anesthetics. It had no antibiotics. It had never heard of sterile operating techniques. A wound in the belly meant sure death from infection.
“It doesn't matter,” Amanda said. “She's going to be okay. That does.”
“Yeah.” Jeremy nodded. Yes, some of the weight was off. Things would get back to normal pretty soon. Now he could concentrate on how much business he and Amanda did before Dad came back to Polisso.
And he could tell Michael Fujikawa the good news. He stayed up late to try and catch Michael getting up. When he went to the laptop in the hidden part of the basement, he found a message waiting for him. How's your mom doing?
“She went back to the home timeline,” he answered, as if his friend were standing there in front of him. The computer transcribed his words. “It was appendicitis. Dad was right about that. They took out her appendix. She'll be back in a couple of weeks. Dad says he'll be back in a few days-as soon as he's sure she's all right. She should be. The operation went fine.”
He waited. He didn't have to wait long. Michael must have been sitting at the laptop that connected them across the skein of alternates. That's terrific! he said. I'm sorry she had to have the operation, but now she'll be okay. So you and Amanda are by yourselves? How you doing?
“We're okay,” Jeremy said. “We can manage on our own for a little while, anyway. I want to see how much we can sell before Dad gets here again.”
There you go, Michael told him. Show him what you can do by
The message stopped there. Jeremy frowned, waiting for Michael to go on. But only the incomplete sentence stared at him. After half a minute or so, new words formed on the screen: TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED. NO CONTACT WITH HOME TIMELINE.
“What's that supposed to mean?” Jeremy asked. The message program was still running, so those words went up on the monitor, too. “You there, Michael?” That appeared, too. What didn't appear was an answer from Michael Fujikawa.
Muttering, Jeremy ordered the computer to send the message. He got the same error report as before: TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED. NO CONTACT WITH HOME TIMELINE.
“But I'm not even trying to send to the home timeline,” Jeremy protested. He really did swear when he saw those words go up on the screen. Then a chill ran through him. He wasn't trying to send to the home timeline, but everything went through it. He called up the address code for the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad. That was the home timeline's counterpart of this place. “Is everything all right there?” he asked, and told the laptop to send.
TRANSMISSION INTERRUPTED. NO CONTACT WITH HOME TIMELINE.
That wasn't good at all-not even slightly. Something had gone wrong somewhere between here and the world where he'd been born.