" Raus! You are the servant of Balg and you will die in hell!"
Gibson blinked. Who the hell was Balg?
It was one of those slow-motion moments. Gibson could see the man who was doing the shouting. He was one of those nonentities who are never noticed in a crowd until the day they go ballistic. The downstairs bouncers were converging on him, hands outstretched in grimly professional desperation, getting to him before he could pull a gun. On the staircase, Raus's own bodyguards were turning, closing on him to protect him with their bodies. The man struggled to reach Raus.
"Abomination! Slave of Balg!"
Nephredana was beside Gibson and he quickly turned. "Who or what is Balg?'l
Nephredana shook her head. "Later."
The bouncers were on the man and he was going down under a half-dozen of them. It seemed that, after all, he was a shouter rather than a shooter. The party on the staircase waited until the weirdo had been dragged away, and then they resumed their downward progress as though nothing had happened. Nat King Cole started up again. It was a slightly shaky start, but he, too, quickly resumed business as usual. It was around then that Gibson noticed that the man immediately behind Raus and slightly to his right looked exactly like Sebastian Rampton. Gibson stiffened. It had to be him-there was no mistaking the round Heinrich Himmler glasses, the stooped shoulders, and the thin, pale face. How in hell could the most suspect of the Nine be here in another dimension and apparently on intimate terms with one of its most powerful men?
Nephredana must have noticed his reaction. "What's wrong?"
Gibson answered without thinking. "I thought I saw someone I knew."
"Who?"
"Sebastian Rampton."
Nephredana turned and beckoned to Slide, who was still talking to me individual with the dueling scars. "You better hear this."
Slide detached himself from the conversation and came over to where they were standing. "Interesting guy, that. He's the Hind-Mancu ambassador. Made his name during the suppression of the Viet Minn back in the sixties."
Nephredana quickly interrupted him. "Gibson thinks he saw Sebastian Rampton in the group around Raus."
Yancey Slide adjusted his sunglasses. "No shit." He peered at Gibson. "Are you sure it was him and not a parallel from this dimension?"
For the life of him, Gibson didn't know why he'd blurted it out to Nephredana in the first place. Had she seen his reaction to seeing the man who looked like Rampton and hit him with some sort of influence? It was too late now, though; the damage was done and he could only go along. "I really can't be sure. I only had a fleeting glimpse but it certainly looked like him. Could the streamheat have maybe brought him here?"
Slide shrugged. "It's possible. You can expect virtually anything from a people that had nuclear weapons in the early seventeenth century."
This last remark took Gibson completely by surprise. "Say what?"
Now Slide was looking surprised. "Nobody told you the history of your traveling companions?"
Gibson was right off balance again. "It seems that nobody tells me anything if they can possibly help it."
Slide was thoughtful. "Even if this Rampton you saw was a parallel from here, I still don't like the fact that he's so close to Raus. Anyone with his makeup is going to be up to no good,"
"You know Rampton?"
Slide nodded. "Oh, yes, I know Rampton." He turned to Nephredana. "Listen, I think I'm going to talk to Raus and see what all this is about."
"What do you want me to do?"
"Stay with Gibson. You might fill him in about the streamheat. Let him know what kind of people he's been fucking with."
Slide walked quickly away and disappeared into the crowd. Gibson looked expectantly at Nephredana.
She took a deep breath. "Let's go and get a drink. I see I'm going to have to continue your education."
They made their way to the nearest bar, and when they both had drinks in front of them, Nephredana started into the story.
"The people you call the streamheat come from a dimension where South and Central America, and not Europe, made the great leap forward. Up until the end of the fourteenth century, their history was running pretty much parallel to that of both your dimension and this one, but, from that point on, events began deviating fast. It all started in 1427 with the Emperor Izcoatl in Mexico. Izcoatl was something of a degenerate, even by the standards of Aztec royalty, but he had this thing about science, and driven by his relentless goading-and, believe me, Izcoatl could goad-his people not only managed to discover the wheel, but really went the distance in thinking through its possible applications. Just three years later, they stumbled across gunpowder and after that, they were off and running. During the next ten years, Izcoatl pushed his empire as far as Texas in the north and Rio de Janeiro in the south. Selective breeding of the northern bison gave him an effective substitute for the horse and, when iron-ore deposits were found in the equivalent of southeastern Brazil, and the Aztecs learned the trick of smelting, there was no stopping them. Izcoatl and his heirs were well on their way to becoming masters of all the Americas."
Gibson was intrigued by the way Nephredana managed to make six-hundred-year-old events sound like they had happened just yesterday.
"Around 1500, the Europeans started showing up, but Montezuma, who was emperor by then, was ready for them, and they were never able to establish a beachhead on the continent. The threat from across the Atlantic, however, really galvanized Aztec science. In less than seventy years, they had electricity, the internal-combustion engine, and powered flight and were taking their first shots at splitting the atom."
Gibson whistled. "You're putting me on?"
Nephredana shook her head. "Not a bit of it, You can't imag-ine what can be achieved in a state run by an absolute, life-and-death autocrat when the motivation's there. And remember something else: All this time they were still practicing the same sun-worshiping, human-sacrificing religion that they'd had when they were living in mud huts, only it had now grown to truly epic proportions. You should have seen the Great Solstice Festival of 1577. They snuffed a quarter of a million people at that four-day bash. Now that's what you call motivation."
"You make it sound like you were there."
Nephredana sighed, "I was. I was having an affair with a fighter pilot from Tenochtitlan at the time, but after that slayfest I had to dump him. Too much blood even for me."
"So what happened next?"
"They let off their first experimental bomb in 1605 and then spent the next ten years perfecting a method for delivering a nuclear holocaust. The means wasn't all that spectacular-a big, clumsy, prop-driven bomber, all fuel and bombload-but it could make it across the Atlantic and that was all that mattered. The Aztecs weren't all that bothered about getting their aircrews home again."
"Extra sacrifices?"
"Exactly."
" So what did they want to do? Nuke Europe back to the stone age?"
"Precisely that. They knew that the Eurotrash in their sailing ships would keep on coming, and, more to the point, they would inevitably pilfer bits and pieces of Aztec advanced technology, upgrade their armaments, and begin posing a real threat. According to Aztec thinking, a preemptory strike was the only answer, and, as an added plus, it would be one fuck of a bonanza of souls for the Sun God. By 1615, the Aztec military industrial complex was in high gear, turning out an armada of planes for the raid on Northern Europe."
"What stopped them?"
"Nothing stopped them."
"I don't understand,"
"That's because you're still thinking in terms of your own dimension. Just because you've still got Europe intact, you assume that everyone else has."