That was the best idea yet. It gave me a chance to confirm with my fingers what my eyes, ears, and nose had already told me; this was a very attractive young woman. She had insisted on changing, but fortunately the new gown was as soft and clinging as the old, and the palms of my hands rejoined in the tactile pleasure of her back and arm. I whispered, “I’m sorry if I sound stupid. I really don’t know a whole lot about early history—you know, the first thousand years or so after the Founding of the City.”
She didn’t bother to point out that she did. She moved with me to the music, very enjoyable, then she straightened up. “I’ve got a different idea,” she announced. “Let’s go back to the booth.” And she was already telling it to me as we left the dance floor. “Let’s talk about your own ancestor, Julius Caesar. He conquered Egypt, right here in Alexandria. But suppose the Egyptians had defeated him instead, as they very nearly did?”
I was paying close attention now—obviously she had been interested enough in me to ask Sam some questions! “They couldn’t have,” I told her. “Julius never lost a war. Anyway”—I discovered to my surprise that I was beginning to take Sam’s nutty idea seriously—“that would be a really hard one to write, wouldn’t it? If the Legions had been defeated, it would have changed the whole world. Can you imagine a world that isn’t Roman?”
She said sweetly, “No, but that’s more your job than mine, isn’t it?”
I shook my head. “It’s too bizarre,” I complained. “I couldn’t make the readers believe it.”
“You could try, Julius,” she told me. “You see, there’s an interesting possibility there. Drusus almost didn’t live to become Emperor. He was severely wounded in a war in Gaul, while Augustus was still alive. Tiberius—you remember Tiberius—”
“Yes, yes, his brother. The one you like. The one he made Procurator of Judaea.”
“That’s the one. Well, Tiberius rode day and night to bring Drusus the best doctors in Rome. He almost didn’t make it. They barely pulled Drusus through.”
“Yes?” I said encouragingly. “And what then?”
She looked uncertain. “Well, I don’t know what then.”
I poured some more wine. “I guess I could figure out some kind of speculative idea,” I said, ruminating. “Especially if you would help me with some of the details. I suppose Tiberius would have become Emperor instead of Drusus. You say he was a good man; so probably he would have done more or less what Drusus did—restore the power of the Senate, after Augustus and my revered great-great Julius between them had pretty nearly put it out of business—”
I stopped there, startled at my own words. It almost seemed that I was beginning to take Sam’s crazy idea seriously!
On the other hand, that wasn’t all bad. It almost seemed that Rachel was beginning to take me seriously.
That was a good thought. It kept me cheerful through half a dozen more dances and at least another hour of history lessons from her pretty lips… right up until the time when, after we had gone back to her house, I tiptoed out of my room towards hers, and found her butler, Basilius, asleep on a rug across her doorway, with a great, thick club by his side.
I didn’t sleep well that night.
Partly it was glandular. My head knew that Rachel didn’t want me creeping into her bedroom, or else she wouldn’t have put the butler there in the way. But my glands weren’t happy with that news. They had soaked up the smell and sight and feel of her, and they were complaining about being thwarted.
The worst part was waking up every hour or so to contemplate financial ruin.
Being poor wasn’t so bad. Every writer has to learn how to be poor from time to time, between cheques. It’s an annoyance, but not a catastrophe. You don’t get enslaved just for poverty.
But I had been running up some pretty big bills. And you do get enslaved for debt.
Chapter 4
The End of the Dream
The next morning I woke up late and grouchy and had to take a three-wheeler to the Hall of the Senate-Inferior.
It was slow going. As we approached, the traffic thickened even more. I could see the Legion forming for the ceremonial guard as the Pharaoh’s procession approached to open the ceremonies. The driver wouldn’t take me any closer than the outer square, and I had to wait there with all the tourists, while the Pharaoh dismounted from her royal litter.
There was a soft, pleasured noise from the crowd, halfway between a giggle and a sigh. That was the spectacle the tourists had come to see. They pressed against the sheathed swords of the Legionaries while the Pharaoh, head bare, robe trailing on the ground, advanced on the shrines outside the Senate building. She sacrificed reverently and unhurriedly to them, while the tourists flashed their cameras at her, and I began to worry about the time. What if she ecumenically decided to visit all fifty shrines? But after doing Isis, Amon-Ra, and Mother Nile, she went inside to declare the Congress open. The Legionaries relaxed. The tourists began to flow back to their buses, snapping pictures of themselves now, and I followed the Pharaoh inside.
She made a good—by which I mean short—opening address. The only thing wrong with it was that she was talking to mostly empty seats.
The Hall of the Alexandrian Senate-Inferior holds two thousand people. There weren’t more than a hundred and fifty in it. Most of those were huddled in small groups in the aisles and at the back of the hall, and they were paying no attention at all to the Pharaoh. I think she saw that and shortened her speech. At one moment she was telling us how the scientific investigation of the outside universe was completely in accord with the ancient traditions of Egypt—with hardly anyone listening—and at the next her voice had stopped without warning and she was handing her orb and sceptre to her attendants. She proceeded regally across the stage and out the wings.
The buzz of conversation hardly slackened. What they were talking about, of course, was the Olympians. Even when the Collegium-Presidor stepped forward and called for the first session to begin, the hall didn’t fill. At least most of the scattered groups of people in the room sat down—though still in clumps, and still doing a lot of whispering to each other.
Even the speakers didn’t seem very interested in what they were saying. The first one was an honorary Presidor-Emeritus from the southern highlands of Egypt, and he gave us a review of everything we knew about the Olympians.
He read it as hurriedly as though he were dictating it to a scribe. It wasn’t very interesting. The trouble, of course, was that his paper had been prepared days earlier, while the Olympian transmissions were still flooding in and no one had any thought they might be interrupted. It just didn’t seem relevant any more.
What I like about going to science congresses isn’t so much the actual papers the speakers deliver—I can get that sort of information better from the journals in the library. It isn’t even the back-and-forth discussion that follows each paper, although that sometimes produces useful background bits. What I get the most out of is what I call “the sound of science”—the kind of shorthand language scientists use when they’re talking to each other about their own specialities. So I usually sit somewhere at the back of the hall, with as much space around me as I can manage, my tablet in my lap and my stylus in my hand, writing down bits of dialogue and figuring how to put them into my next sci-rom.
There wasn’t much of that today. There wasn’t much discussion at all. One by one the speakers got up and read their papers, answered a couple of cursory questions with cursory replies, and hurried off; and when each one finished he left, and the audience got smaller because, as I finally figured out, no one was there who wasn’t obligated to be.