“I don't blame you,” Jeremy said. If they really were stuck in Agrippan Rome forever, they would have to make that adjustment sooner or later. They couldn't live here the way they would have back in the home timeline. Polisso was a different place-such a different place!-from Los Angeles. They couldn't look at the world here the same way and hope to survive.
Will I end up buying slaves, then? Jeremy shuddered and shook his head. Nothing could make him do that. Better to be dead than to do that, even if it was as ordinary for someone rich here as owning a fancy car was back in L.A.
“I know what you're thinking,” Amanda whispered. The horror in her eyes matched the horror Jeremy felt. “We can't. No matter what else we do, we can't.”
“No. We won't,” Jeremy said. “Not ever. No matter what.” He did his best to laugh. It sounded pretty ghastly. “This is all dumb, anyhow. Before too long, we'll be back in touch with the home timeline. Mom and Dad will come up from the transposition chamber in the subbasement, and everything will be fine.”
“Sure.” Amanda nodded. But she wouldn't look at him. A cannonball screeched through the air and thudded home fifty meters away. Somebody screamed. That was all real. The home timeline? The home timeline seemed like a dream, and a fading dream at that.
Ten
If I can't go back to the home timeline, what do I have to do to make this one as bearable as I can? The longer Amanda stayed in Polisso, the more she asked herself that question. Asking it was easy. Finding any kind of answer wasn't.
The only thing she could come up with was, Get rich. Stay rich. If she had money, she wouldn't go hungry. The food she did eat would be a little better. Her clothes would be warmer in the winter, and not quite so scratchy. Her bed would be a little softer. She would be able to buy books to help pass the time. If she got sick or hurt herself, she would be able to buy poppy juice-opium-to ease the pain.
And that was about all. So much of what she'd taken for granted would be gone forever. If her teeth gave her trouble, she could either get them pulled without anesthetic or suffer. If she got sick with something that the medicines she and Jeremy had wouldn't cure, she would either get well or die on her own. No doctors worth the name. No hospitals.
She ground wheat into flour in a stone quern. The repeated motion made her shoulder ache. If she did it for years, it would give her arthritis. If she didn't do it, she wouldn't have any bread to eat. The work was boring. It would have gone by faster if she could have gabbed with friends or listened to music or watched TV while she did it. No phone. No CD player. No TV.
“No nothing,” she muttered. Grind, grind, grind. When she baked at home, she'd taken flour for granted, too. Machines made it. It came out of a sack. When you had to make it yourself, you didn't take it for granted. Why couldn't she get more than this pathetic little bit with each turn of the quern? Grind, grind, grind.
Jeremy walked into the kitchen. “How's it going?” he asked cheerfully. Why shouldn't he be cheerful? He wasn't grinding flour. Amanda screamed at him. He jumped half a meter in the air. “Well, excuse me for breathing,” he said when his feet thumped back onto the ground. “What did I say that was wrong?”
Part of Amanda was ashamed at losing her cool. “Nothing, really,” she mumbled. But the rest of her was angry, and she decided she wouldn't sweep it under the rug after all. There weren't any rugs here to sweep it under, anyhow. She shook her head. “No, not nothing. I don't see you in the kitchen. I don't see you with a sore shoulder. I just see you eating bread.”
“I'm making money for us,” he answered.
That was true. And if they were stuck here for good, they would need all the money they could get their hands on. Amanda had just been thinking about that. But even so… “I could do that just as well as you could,” she said.
“You could do it pretty well, yeah,” her brother said. “Just as well? I don't know. Some of the locals get weird about dealing with a girl.”
“That's 'cause they're a bunch of sexist yahoos,” said Amanda, who'd gone all the way through Gulliver's Travels not long before. The parts of the book everybody knew, where he went to Lilliput and then to Brobdingnag, were only the icing on the cake. The real essence came later.
“Sure they are,” Jeremy said. “But just because an attitude is stupid, that doesn't mean it's not real.”
Again, he wasn't wrong. That didn't mean Amanda liked his being right. “If I could only get out of this kitchen more, I'd show you what I can do,” she said.
He didn't say, How are you going to do that? If he had, she wouldn't just have screamed. She would have thrown something at him. Then again, he didn't need to ask the question out loud. It hung in the air whether he asked it or not.
The scary part was, How are you going to do that? had an answer. The answer was, Buy a slave to do the work for me. That was what the locals-the prosperous locals, anyhow- did. They didn't have food processors or kneading machines or automatic dishwashers or vacuum cleaners or washing machines or any of a zillion other gadgets. They had people. They had them, and they used them. That let the ones who weren't slaves take care of their business-and also think about things like literature and what passed for science here.
Seeing slavery was dreadful enough for somebody from late twenty-first-century Los Angeles. Beginning to understand how and why it worked was a hundred times worse. “They'd better find us and get us out of here,” Amanda whispered.
“Yeah,” Jeremy said. Both of them had forgotten the quarrel. As Amanda had followed his thoughts not long before, he hadn't had any trouble knowing what she was thinking. It disgusted him as much as it did her. Yes, this was why the locals kept slaves. Worse, this was why, from their point of view, it made sense.
Amanda shook her head. No matter how much sense it made, it was still awful. “They'd better get us out,” she repeated.
“That's right,” Jeremy said. “If they don't get us out of here, we can sue them.”
“Wait a minute,” Amanda said. Her brother looked back at her, bland as unsalted butter. Amanda made a horrible face at him. It was so horrible, it made him-just barely-crack a smile. She aimed her index finger as if it were a gun. “You're being ridiculous on purpose.”
“What about it?” Jeremy retorted. “It's better than being ridiculous by accident, don't you think?”
She didn't have a good answer for that. As cannon roared and muskets barked, as walls fell down with a crash, she wondered if there were good answers for anything-not just in this world but in any. “I wish we were back in the home timeline,” she said, which wasn't an answer but was the truth.
“So do I,” her brother said. “And that and some silver will buy me wine in a tavern. If they fix whatever's wrong-if they can fix whatever's wrong-they'll bring us home. If they don't, or if it isn't, we figure out how to make the best of things here.“ He strode forward. ”You want me to grind flour for a while?“
“Sure!” Amanda said.
Jeremy was awkward rotating the central stone in the quern. She had to remind him to keep feeding wheat in at the top. Otherwise, he would have happily ground away at nothing. He worked steadily for about ten minutes. Then he started grumbling and rubbing his shoulder. After another five minutes, he stepped away from the counter with a proud smile on his face. “There!”
Amanda clapped her hands-once, twice, three times. She couldn't have been more sarcastic if she'd tried for a week. “Wow! Congratulations! Yippee!” she said. “That's about enough flour for a muffin-a small muffin. Don't stop. You're just getting the hang of it.”