When she got to the hospital she was directed to a kind of operating theater. She’d glimpsed this place before; it looked to her more like a butcher’s shop, with alarming-looking surgical instruments suspended on the wall. But, she was told, it was hygienic enough; Michael and his Greek-trained medics and their Arab advisers knew enough about antisepsis and the risk of infection to keep the place reasonably clean.
Here she found Yuri, slumped in a chair, and the ColU—or rather its processing unit, a baroque tangle of metal and ceramic—sitting on a tabletop. Titus Valerius stood by, the big veteran soldier who had caused Quintus Fabius so much trouble with his small rebellion on the day Stef and the others had walked out of the Hatch.
And, standing in the center of the room, looking scared and uncomfortable, was a boy, dark, Asiatic, slim, age perhaps thirteen or fourteen—but he was so skinny it was hard for Stef to be sure. He wore a grubby tunic and no shoes; his feet were filthy. Medicus Michael hovered by the boy, looking abstracted, fascinated.
Stef made her way toward Yuri, nodding at Titus. The big man was picking at the nails of his one good hand with the top of a full-scale sword, a gladio, propped in his opposing armpit. He nodded back to Stef, and his gaze raked over her elderly body in the way of all legionaries. But she felt as safe with Titus as she did with any of the Romans; she had met his young daughter, Clodia, who he had brought on this space mission as a small child, after the death of her mother.
Yuri looked up, pale, but he smiled. “Good trip?”
“Eye-opening. Are you OK? What’s going on here?”
“It’s not about me, for once. In fact you’re just in time.” He gestured at the boy. “This is something new. Introduce yourself again, son.”
In decent Latin, the boy said in a wavering voice, “My name is Chu Yuan. I am fourteen years old. My family are scholars and merchants in Shanghai. My father is a soldier with the Twenty-fourth Division of the Imperial Army of Light. He was stationed in Valhalla Inferior. He took his family there, including myself, the eldest son…”
Yuri winked at Stef. “Valhalla Inferior—South America. For centuries you’ve had tension between the Chinese coming in from the west, basically holding the coastal plain and the Andes, and the Romans coming in from the east through Amazonia, as well as south from their holdings in Mesoamerica.”
“And the native people caught in the crossfire.”
The ColU said drily, “At least they were not exterminated by crowd plagues, as in our history. The Vikings—the ‘Scand’ allies of the Brikanti—had already been traveling to the Americas for centuries, allowing immunity a chance to build up. But the war fronts ebb and flow.”
“Our fort was overrun,” Chu said now. “My father was killed. My mother ran away. I was captured, enslaved by the glorious soldiers of Rome.”
That made Stef pause. “He’s a slave?”
Yuri shrugged. “His parents were grooming him to be a scholar, I think, or a clerk. But the Romans caught him, and he ended up a slave on this tub.”
Stef stared at this boy, trapped in a category of humanity she never thought she would have to deal with. She’d found it almost impossible to function in the colonia, for the slaves were everywhere, if invisible to a Roman eye. And it wasn’t just the subjugation of human beings that distressed her but the level of daily, almost casual brutality. Even for routine punishments there were blood-stained stakes, lead-tipped whips. She’d always rather admired the Romans, for their literacy, their order, their engineering, their respect for the law. Now, she was finding, she’d never fully imagined this side of their civilization.
“Well, what’s he doing here?”
Michael beamed. “He is a gift, at the orders of Centurion Quintus Fabius. He has been delighted by the work of Collius in the colonia, the advice on soil preparation, crops, irrigation.”
The ColU, sitting on its tabletop, seemed to Stef to twinkle. “I’m Collius the oracle now.”
“Shut up,” said Yuri mildly.
“Yes, Yuri Eden.”
“So the centurion, you see, aware of the ColU’s cut-down state, has kindly donated him the legs of this boy here.”
Stef frowned. “I don’t understand.”
Michael said hastily, “Let me explain. I have adapted your backpack, Yuri Eden.” He drew this out from under a bench; it looked much as it had before, save the straps had been shortened. He brought this to the boy who slipped it on. “The ColU itself will ride in the pack. And then your talking, all-seeing glass…”
Yuri’s slate had been set into a leather pouch, and Michael now hung this around Chu’s neck, fixing it with straps around his chest.
Stef said, “I don’t believe it. This boy is going to be your pack mule, ColU?”
“We have been rehearsing,” the ColU said. “Chu. Walk forward. Turn right. Turn left.”
The boy marched across the theater floor, as passive and obedient as a puppet, head downturned. A slave’s walk.
“This is obscene,” Stef said.
Michael held up his hands. “Now, madam, Yuri warned me you might react like this—”
“It could have been a lot worse, Stef,” Yuri said. “Why do you think Michael here is involved at all?”
“Tell me.”
“Because the centurion’s first idea was to have the pack and slate stitched to Chu’s flesh, so they couldn’t be stolen.”
Titus Valerius raised a hand tentatively. “Can I speak? I’m part of the centurion’s idea also. I will accompany the boy wherever he goes, to ensure the safety of the oracle.”
Stef grinned sourly. “I know the military mind. A nice cushy job to buy you off after that business with the granary, Titus?”
Titus shrugged massively. “I follow orders.”
“Well, it’s still obscene,” Stef said.
Yuri said mildly, “Would you send Chu back where he came from?”
Chu turned his head at that, looking alarmed.
“I will care for this boy,” the ColU said firmly. “I will ensure his own needs are met, as he serves mine. We cannot save all the slaves in this Roman Empire of theirs, Stef Kalinski. But I can save this one, this boy.”
Stef bowed to the inevitable. “Fine. I suppose all other options are worse…”
She tried to tell Yuri and the ColU something of what she’d learned that day.
“So these people, these Romans, send ships to the stars and build Hatches without any understanding of why. Purely as a ritual, a mechanism, as ants build a nest.”
“Perhaps that’s a good analogy, Stef Kalinski,” said the ColU. “The nest as a whole benefits from the actions of individuals. In the same way the Hatch network must benefit in some way.”
Michael had listened closely to their conversation. He offered, “Perhaps it fits the Romans’ character too. At least, these soldiers. They are used to serving a larger entity without question—I mean, the Empire, the army. I, a Greek, can see this.”
“I resent that,” said Titus Valerius.
“Oh, you do?”
“Yes! Legionaries aren’t ants. We know precisely why we’re fighting. For our companions.”
Michael sighed. “Just as ants follow the lead of their neighboring ants, and so the structure of the hive miraculously emerges. My point exactly.”
Titus growled, baffled.
Stef said, “Yuri, did you know that kernels have been used in war here? On Earth itself. For centuries, I think.”
“Somehow I’m not surprised,” Yuri said weakly. “Can you think of any way in which this new humanity is better than the old?”