Harry Turtledove - Gunpowder Empire

“No, thanks,” Jeremy answered. “If I had mice, I'd get some of it from you. They'd all run away.”

“Funny,” the local said. “Ha, ha, ha, ha. There. You hear me laughing?”

“No,” Jeremy told him. “I didn't hear me joking, either.” The local sent him a gesture that meant something nasty. The one Jeremy gave back meant something just as nasty. They parted on terms of perfect mutual loathing.

Jeremy headed back to the house without any meat. On his way there, though, he heard two men who looked like blacksmiths talking about the army coming up from the south. That left him scratching his head.

He told Amanda about them. “What do you think?” he asked. “Were they listening to the other guy's brother-in-law?”

“Who knows?” she answered. “We'll just have to wait and see, that's all. Maybe everybody's saying, 'Yes, there's an army coming,' because we're all sick of being cooped up here. But maybe there really is an army. We won't know till it starts shooting at the Lietuvans. If it ever does.”

“Schrodinger's army,” Jeremy said, thinking of cats. Amanda made a face at him. He made one right back. She was his sister, after all. He couldn't let her get away with something like that. But he hadn't been joking with her, either. If you couldn't tell whether an army was real till it showed up- or didn't show up-how much good did it do you?

The only thing an army that might be real did was to pump up hope. That could help for a little while, maybe. But if more time went by and the army didn't show up, wouldn't hope sink lower than it would have if it hadn't been lifted in the first place?

He wondered if the city prefect or the garrison commander had got worried about morale in Polisso. Even if the rumors about an approaching Roman army weren't true, they might think it was in their interest to start them. Or people who were in danger of losing hope on their own might have started the rumors, to make themselves feel better. Or…

Jeremy gave up. He couldn't tell. He just didn't know, and he didn't have any real evidence one way or the other. Sooner or later, he'd find out. Till then…

Till then, I'll worry. That's what I'll do, he thought.

Amanda set her palm on the proper spot in the basement wall. The concealed door slid aside and let her into the chamber the locals weren't supposed to discover. The electric lights in there came on. Seeing them made tears sting her eyes. Some small part of the tears came because the lights were bright after the gloom of the basement. But most of them sprang from the lights' being electric. They were things from the home timeline. Every time she came down here, not being able to go back there ate at her more.

It's home, she thought as the door silently slid shut behind her. How can anybody blame me because I want to go home, because I don't want to stay here? People from Polisso would find Los Angeles endlessly marvelous, endlessly exciting. But they might well want to come back to the timeline of Agrippan Rome once they'd seen what there was to see. And Los Angeles was a richer place where you could do more things-do more kinds of things-than you could in Polisso. If it wasn't home, even that wouldn't matter. When it was…

The lights weren't all that reminded her of home. The sheet-metal cabinets, the table with the plywood top, the blue plastic chair with the slotted back-they were ordinary things, but they were things from her world. In the home timeline, you didn't have to be somebody important to sit in a chair with a back instead of on a stool. That wasn't a big difference between the two worlds, but it was a difference. Differences gnawed at her spirit like acid now.

And the computer. The difference there was what the PowerBook could-or rather, couldn't-do now. It was supposed to connect her to the home timeline, to the world that knew how to move between worlds, how to talk between worlds. It was supposed to, but it didn't. It was like a friend who'd let her down. It was a friend who'd let her down.

Amanda had to make herself walk to the blue plastic chair. She had to make herself pull it out, had to make herself sit down in it. And it took everything she had in her to make herself look at the laptop's monitor. Her brother said the same thing. She and Jeremy had been disappointed so many times.

Is anybody there?

Three little words. She'd heard that I love you was supposed to hit you like that when the right person said those three little words. These three? Nobody talked about these three. But I love you, even when she heard it from the right person, was going to have to do some pretty fancy work to top them.

She blinked. Is anybody there? stayed on the screen. She wasn't imagining it. If King Kuzmickas had taken Polisso without getting one single soldier scratched, he might have let out a whoop with one tenth the joy of the one that burst from Amanda's lips. She sprang out of the chair. She jumped up and down. She did the wildest, whirlingest dance the world had ever seen.

And then she did something a lot harder than that. Instead of answering right away, she turned her back on the beautiful monitor. She left the secret basement. The door closed behind her again, shutting her out. She went upstairs to primitive, smelly, besieged Polisso.

Jeremy was watering the herbs in the herb garden. A few spices, like pepper and cinnamon, were expensive, imported luxuries here. As for the rest, the ordinary ones like basil and thyme, you grew your own if you wanted them. Otherwise you did without.

“There's something I think you ought to see,” Amanda said.

She tried to sound calm, to hold the excitement out of her voice. She tried, but it didn't work. Jeremy's head came up as if he were a wolf scenting meat. “Is it-?” He stopped, as if he didn't want to go on for fear of hearing no.

But Amanda said, “Yes!”

Her brother whooped even louder than she had. He was out in the open, not in a soundproof basement. He didn't care at all, and neither did Amanda. Somebody next door exclaimed in surprise. They didn't care about that, either. Jeremy set down the water jug. It was a wonder he hadn't dropped it and smashed it. He grabbed Amanda's hands. They did sort of a two-person version of the crazy dance she'd done by herself down below.

They were both laughing and panting when they finally stopped. “What does it say?” Jeremy demanded. “Tell me what it says!”

“Come see for yourself,” Amanda told him. But then, as they both hurried to the stairs, she added, “It's just asking if we're here. I haven't even answered it yet.”

“Well, we'd better!” Jeremy said.

“You bet.” Fear filled Amanda as she set her palm on the patch of wall where it was supposed to go. The door slid aside, opening the secret part of the basement. She and Jeremy hurried in. They both ran to the PowerBook on the table. Her fear grew. Would the message still show on the screen? Had she imagined she saw it because she wanted to see it so badly?

Is anybody there?

The words were real. Seeing them there again, seeing Jeremy see them, made Amanda as happy as she had been when she saw them the first time. She would have been glad to go back to the temple to make one more thanks-offering.

Those three words made her more grateful than anything else she'd ever known.

“Wow,” Jeremy said, his eyes wide and shining. Amanda nodded. Jeremy shook his head, as if fighting to believe it. Amanda understood that, all right. Her brother started to say something, then stopped and shook his head again. He turned to her and almost bowed. “You found it. You do the talking.”

“Okay.” With that, she switched from neoLatin to English. “Answer.” That was an oral command the computer recognized. She paused to think for a moment, then just spoke simply: “This is Amanda. Jeremy and I are both here. We're all right, but the Lietuvans have Polisso under siege. What went wrong back there?”