Studying this new history with her students, Penny had come to understand how much harm the Brikanti and their continental cousins, who Penny had grown up knowing as the Celts, had suffered at the hands of the Romans. Once the Celtic nations had prospered across Europe from Britain to the Danube, but the Romans’ empire-building expansion had driven them back. Though Britain, in this history, had remained independent of Rome, elsewhere the Celts had been crushed. When Caesar had invaded Gaul—a prosperous, settled and literate country of a population of eight million—he had slaughtered one million and enslaved another million. One detail particularly remembered by Brikanti historians was that Caesar had severed the hands of rebels, so they could not gather their harvest. This history was not well-known in Penny’s timeline. Here, it had never been forgotten.
And Brikanti had grown traditions of its own. This was no empire; it was a federation of nations, and a democracy, of sorts, with traditions inherited from both its British and Scandinavian forebears. That old fort on the hill was now the seat of the Althing, an assembly with representatives of Brikanti holdings around the world, and the most powerful single individual was not a hereditary emperor but an elected logsogumadr, a law-speaker.
But this was a world that had been industrialized for centuries, a process that had proceeded without conscience or compensation. So, even on a bright midsummer day like today, a pall of smog hung over the city. No trees survived in Eboraki, save in the carefully preserved oak groves. In this capital people dressed brightly, in embroidered cloaks over colorfully striped tunics and leggings, adorned with beads of blue glass or amber, and with torcs of steel or silver at their necks. But they routinely wore face masks and goggles to keep the muck out of their eyes and lungs, and life expectancy in a culture capable of sending ships to the planets was shockingly low. Nobody here, of course, could imagine things could be different. It was when Penny was least busy, when she walked in the city looking at the children coughing into their filthy masks, that she most acutely missed the world she had left behind.
And yet, as the months had passed, to walk these streets at the times of solstice, midsummer and midwinter, with the low sun of morning or evening suspended over the streets and filling the city with light, had pleased her in ways she would have found hard to describe.
The meals in the small refectory were prepared by students as part of their education, under the supervision of a few townspeople. The fare, served at rough-hewn wooden tables, was traditional Brikanti, meat-heavy, laden with butter and vegetable sauces and served with slabs of gritty bread—although Roman fare was also available, cheese, olives. Rice and potatoes were expensive foreign luxuries, even in the Brikanti capital. All the Tatania crew had had problems with this diet, mostly from a lack of roughage. But Penny had learned not to try to change some things, such as the Brikanti habit of serving meals, even to very young children, with watered-down mead or beer. Or the habit of eating your food with the knife you wore at your belt.
Still, the meat, a richly stewed beef, was tender and tasty, and for a while they ate without speaking.
At length Ari said, picking up the conversation where they’d left off, “You don’t need to thank me for visiting. For one thing it’s my job; I’m expected to report to the Navy funding body who provided the cash for all this. For another it’s a pleasure to see how you’re getting on. I sometimes feel as if I connect you all, the crew of the Tatania.”
“We are all rather scattered,” Penny admitted.
“But that’s not a bad thing. It shows you’re finding places in a society that must be very strange to you. How’s Jiang, by the way?”
“Doing fine. Our house is comfortable. You know that he is working at the college; he gives classes in kernel engineering, among other topics.”
“I can understand he will be finding it a particular challenge here. We like to believe we are world citizens, we Brikanti. In fact it is very rare to see a Xin face, even here in Eboraki, the capital.”
Marie Golvin said, “Well, he wouldn’t call himself Xin, but the point’s taken. He doesn’t go out much.”
“He’ll be fine,” Penny assured her. “And so’s General McGregor, we hear.”
“I saw him recently,” Ari said. “Lecturing junior officers on the command and control techniques of your International Space Fleet.” Through his smooth Brikanti, it was odd to hear him break into English. “He’s very impressive.”
“He always has been. And I’ve known him since he was seventeen years old,” Penny said, feeling a little wistful.
Ari watched her sharply. “That’s true in one of the reality strands you inhabited, so I hear. In the other—”
“Yes, yes. In the other it was my twin sister who knew him—save she wasn’t a twin, for I didn’t exist at all. Whatever. I always knew Lex would land on his feet, wherever he ended up.”
“You can see he wishes he could shed three decades and fly with the youngsters. To battle the Xin for the treasures of the Tears of Ymir!”
“That sounds like Lex, all right. He’s visited us a few times. He’s most struck by the special relativity we teach here. In our reality, so he says, he always struggled with math. Here, you had no relativity theory. But you did have the kernels, and you discovered relativity experimentally, by driving your kernel ships up against the light barrier, and finding out the hard way that the clocks slow and the relativistic mass piles up.”
Marie said, “I heard of engineers being executed because they couldn’t make their ships travel faster than light.”
“That was the Romans and the Xin, not us,” Ari said. “And the stories are apocryphal anyhow.”
Penny mopped up her vegetable stew with her rubbery bread. “And Beth? How is your new wife, Ari?”
He smiled, but Penny sensed reserve. “Well, you understand that she is not formally my wife, since she had no family to give her away… She is fine.”
Penny and Marie shared a glance.
Marie said, “That’s all you have to say? How’s the baby? She’s overdue, isn’t she?”
He seemed to consider his words carefully. “We are dealing with the challenge of the birth in our own way.”
Penny frowned. “‘Challenge’? What’s challenging about it? Your medicine is pretty good when it comes to childbirth. I checked it over myself when Beth said she was pregnant, and I had Earthshine consult too. Her age would always be an issue; she is thirty-eight now… Why is this a challenge?”
“This is a private matter,” he said coldly, his pale face empty. Suddenly he had never seemed more alien to Penny, more foreign.
“But—”
“Instead, let us talk of Earthshine. It is he who has made the most dramatic entry into our society, as I’m sure you know. Even if his true nature is carefully kept a secret. As far as most people know he is simply another survivor of a ship of mysterious origin.
“And he seems to be attempting superhuman feats. You must know that he is now at Höd.” The Brikanti name for Ceres. “He intends, with the party of supporters he has gathered around him, to move on to Mars. In a way this fulfills the promise of the images he showed us when we first encountered you: the great buildings on the Mars of your reality. But here, he claims, he will achieve much more.”