“I won't make the claim,” Jeremy said. Lucio Claudio looked smug. Jeremy added, “I am going to remind you there's a war on, though. If King Kuzmickas and the Lietuvans lay siege to Polisso, I don't know if I can get the official report in on time. Flying cannonballs make it hard to write.” He didn't want Lucio Claudio thinking himself the only one who could be sarcastic.
“I suggest you get to work on the report now, then.” Lucio Claudio sounded just like a teacher when a student complained about too much work. “The sooner you start, the sooner you'll finish.”
Thanks a lot, Jeremy thought. He almost said that out loud. Just in time, he swallowed it instead. He already had enough problems here. Why make things worse by offending Lucio Claudio? Sitting there eating honey cakes and sipping wine with him made the next half hour the most uncomfortable time Jeremy had ever spent. It wasn't a year before the local finally left. It only seemed that way.
Amanda looked up from the official request to her brother. She said, “Well, I know the best thing we can hope for.”
“What? The Lietuvans blow up Polisso?” he asked.
“No. Mom and Dad get back before we have to give the prefect the report.”
“Oh.” Jeremy thought about that. He nodded, but not as if his heart was in it. “We can hope, yeah, but I just don't know. Something's got really messed up in the home timeline. If it hadn't, we wouldn't have been stuck here by ourselves so long already.”
It wasn't that he was wrong. He was right. He was, in fact, much too right. Amanda had done her best not to think about why no one had sent them any messages, why no transposition chamber had shown up in the subbasement-or, for that matter, in the cave a few kilometers away.
If the Lietuvans besieged Polisso, that cave wouldn't do the Crosstime Traffic people much good. They'd be on the outside looking in. Could they get through a whole army? Maybe, but Amanda didn't see how.
She had to look at staying here not just for a summer with her folks, but forever. Forever. She couldn't imagine a scarier word. Only one thing kept her from breaking down and crying in something as close to panic as made no difference. She didn't want Jeremy laughing at her for going to pieces like a girl.
It never occurred to her to wonder how close Jeremy was to going to pieces himself.
“Sooner or later, they're bound to come after us,” he said. Was he talking to convince her, or to convince himself? “They can't just leave us here.” If he'd stopped there, it would have been a pretty good pep talk. But he went on, “I wish I knew what happened at the other end.”
“Maybe…” Amanda let her voice trail away.
“Maybe what?” Jeremy asked.
Amanda said the worst thing she could think of: “Maybe somebody… found Crosstime Traffic.”
People from the home timeline had only been traveling to the alternates for about fifty years. They hadn't discovered all of them. The math said they probably couldn't discover all of them. They hadn't even scratched the surface of the infinite swarm of alternates that were out there. They sure hadn't discovered anyone else who could go from one timeline to another.
But just because they hadn't discovered anyone like that didn't mean there wasn't anyone. In a timeline that had branched off from theirs long, long ago, other people might have figured out how to go crosstime five hundred years ago, or five thousand. They might have their own trading zone-or their own crosstime empire. And if they did, and if they noticed newcomers… they might not be friendly. They might not be friendly at all. That could be very bad news indeed.
“Nice, cheerful thought, all right,” Jeremy said. “But I don't believe it. Why now? Why not before?”
“I don't know,” Amanda said. “But why not now? If you've got a good reason, I'd love to hear it.”
She really hoped her brother would come up with something. Jeremy was smart. And he was a year older. Most of the time, that didn't matter. Every once in a while, it did. If he knew why crosstime travelers from a faraway alternate couldn't have found the home timeline, that would have been wonderful.
But he just said, “It doesn't seem likely, that's all.” “Getting stuck here doesn't seem likely, either!” Amanda burst out. “But we are! Why?”
“Something went wrong somewhere-that's got to be it,” Jeremy said, which was true but wasn't reassuring. “It doesn't mean the home timeline's been invaded by one where Alexander the Great discovered transposition chambers.”
“It could mean that. You know it could,” Amanda said.
“It could mean all kinds of things. Bombs. Earthquakes. Who knows what?“ Jeremy was trying very hard to be reasonable. ”Why come up with something that's never happened before and probably isn't happening now?“
“Because I never got stuck in an alternate before,” Amanda blazed. The more reasonable Jeremy tried to be, the less reasonable she wanted to be.
He went right on trying: “It has to be something natural, something possible, for heaven's sake.“
“What's so impossible about somebody else discovering crosstime travel?” Amanda asked. “We did ourselves, and we worry about it on some of the timelines that aren't far from ours. Why not somebody else, a long time ago?”
“Well, if somebody else did do it, they're liable to come up from the subbasement and wipe us out in the next twenty minutes,” Jeremy said. “What are we going to do about that?”
Amanda hadn't the faintest idea. She hadn't thought she could feel any worse than she did already. Now she discovered she was wrong. “Thanks a lot,” she told her brother. “You just gave me something brand new to worry about.”
He shook his head. “Nope. No point worrying about that, because we can't do anything about it. What we can do is worry about this lousy official report, and about selling as much as we can, and about doing whatever we can to make sure the Lietuvans don't take Polisso. Getting captured and sold into slavery can ruin your whole day.“
“So can getting killed,” Amanda pointed out. “That, too,” Jeremy said.
He was so grave, so earnest, so serious, that Amanda started to laugh. She couldn't help it. When Jeremy was being reasonable, she didn't want to think. When he was being serious, she wanted to act like a clown. What went through her mind was, Anybody would think he's my big brother, or something.
“I don't know what else we can do except wait and hope and keep trying our best as long as we're stuck here,” he said now.
That was what she'd been thinking, too. She hadn't liked the idea. It was the best they could manage. No doubt of that. It still seemed grim. Or it had seemed grim, till he said it. Then, all of a sudden, it was the funniest thing in the world. That made no sense at all, which didn't stop it from being true. She giggled.
Jeremy gave her an odd look. “You're weird,” he said.
“You only just noticed?” Amanda laughed harder than ever. It was probably no more than reaction to too much stress carried for too long. It felt awfully good anyhow.
Solemn as usual, Jeremy shook his head again. “No, I'd suspected it for a while now.”
“Really? What gave you the clue, Sherlock?” I'm punchy, Amanda thought. Well, who could blame me? I've earned the right.
The market square was a busy place these days. Everybody who lived in Polisso was trying to get hold of enough food to last out a siege. The soldiers who'd come to reinforce the garrison were laying in food, too. They all reminded Jeremy of squirrels gathering nuts for the winter. But that was important business for the squirrels, and this was important business for the locals.