Harry Turtledove: Gunpowder Empire

That summed up what the home timeline needed to know, and what she and Jeremy most wanted to find out. She had another frightened moment when she sent the message. Would the laptop tell her it couldn't go through, the way the machine had so many times before?

It didn't. From everything she could tell, the message went crosstime just the way it was supposed to. Softly, she clapped her hands. Beside her, Jeremy said, “Yeah.”

Then they had to wait. That hadn't occurred to her. Back in Porolissum in the home timeline, wouldn't somebody be watching the monitor every single minute? She'd thought somebody would. Maybe she was wrong.

Five minutes went by. Ten. Fifteen. She wanted to kick something. She also wanted to scream. Had the message made it back to the home timeline?

And then the screen showed new words. Even before she read them, she and Jeremy both cheered again. Why not?

They weren't cut off any more. Only now, as the isolation ended, did Amanda realize how bad it had been.

She leaned forward to get a better look at the monitor. This is Dad, the new message began. She grinned at Jeremy, who was grinning back. Gladder than I can tell you that you're okay. We're starting to get things sorted out here, too.

“What happened?” Amanda asked again.

This time, the answer came back right away. Terrorists. Nationalist terrorists, Dad said. They bombed a lot of crosstime sites here in Romania, all on the same day. It was a nice piece of work, if you like that kind of thing.

“Terrific,” Jeremy said.

“Hush,” Amanda told him. “There's more.”

And there was. Their father went on, That would have been bad enough by itself, but they also planted tailored viruses at some of the blast sites. Guess what? Both of the ones that connect to Polisso in Agrippan Rome got lucky. They've finally managed to decontaminate enough to set up computers here, but I'm wearing a spacesuit to talk to you guys.

“Urk,” Jeremy said. This time, Amanda didn't hush him. She felt like going urk herself. Making real viruses these days was almost as easy as making computer viruses had been at the start of the twenty-first century. And real viruses could do as much damage in the real world as computer viruses had in the virtual world. They could, if you were ruthless enough to turn them loose. Nagorno-Karabakh and a big chunk of Azerbaijan next door were still uninhabitable. Armenians blamed Azerbaijanis; Azerbaijanis blamed Armenians. No one was ever likely to know who'd really used that Ebola variant. It was so hot, it had probably killed off whoever started it. That was poetic justice of a sort.

Fighting tailored viruses was dangerous enough in the home timeline. If one of them got loose in an alternate like Agrippan Rome, it might take out a third of the population or more. Natural epidemics had done that in the past. Unnatural epidemics… Amanda didn't even want to think about it.

“How's Mom?” Jeremy asked.

She's fine. She sends her love, Dad answered. Amanda breathed a sudden sigh of relief. If Mom's appendix had waited a little longer to act up, she would have got stuck here. That could have been very bad. Amanda couldn't think of anything much worse, in fact.

She asked, “How long before you're able to come and get us?”

Crosstime Traffic and the Ministry for the Environment here both have to decide it's safe, Dad said. A week or two, probably. But you said there was a war going on there?

“That's right,” Amanda said. She and Jeremy took turns telling what had happened since they got cut off. “We've had to sell for money instead of wheat and barley,” she put in at one point. “We didn't have any place to put the produce, and then we didn't want the locals calling us hoarders.”

Don't worry about that, Dad said. No one will complain that you went against the grain.

For a second, Amanda just accepted that. She opened her mouth to start to answer it. Then she saw the revolted look on her brother's face. She read the message again. She made a horrible face, too. “Well, that's Dad for sure,” she said.

“You better believe it,” Jeremy said. “Nobody else in the world makes puns that bad.” From revolted, his expression suddenly went crafty. “Except maybe me.” He spoke to the PowerBook: “Answer. Wheat like to tell you to clean up that last message. We could barley understand it. It seemed pretty corny. Send.“

“Ow!” Amanda exclaimed. “Where's something I can hit you with?” Jeremy looked proud of himself, which wasn't what she'd had in mind.

There was a pause at the other end. Amanda hoped Dad wasn't running out and throwing up. That could be awkward in an antivirus spacesuit. At last, he answered, Your sense of humor is as rye as I remember. He must have typed that in instead of dictating it. If he'd spoken into the computer, it would have written wry, which was right, and not rye, which was wrong, to say nothing of ghastly. For good measure, he added, But I don't want to be on the oats with you.

“That's rice,” Amanda said. Jeremy groaned, not quite in praise. It wasn't the best comeback, but they were running out of grains.

Dad got back to business. Just hang on till we finish decontaminating here, he said. That's all you need to do now. Like I told you, it won't be too long.

“As long as the Lietuvans don't get into Polisso again, we'll be fine,” Jeremy said. Amanda thought he'd put in one word too many, but it was too late to stop him.

Sure as houses, Dad wrote back, Again?

“They got some men in at night,” Amanda said. “Not too many, though, and Polisso is crawling with Roman soldiers. We had to pay the prefect a sort of a bribe to keep from having any quartered on us. They drove the Lietuvans out again.”

Are you all right? Is the house all right?

“We're fine,” Jeremy said quickly. “And the house is okay. A couple of cannonballs hit the roof and smashed some tiles, but that's it.”

He didn't say anything about the broken-down front door. It was just about as good as new, so Amanda could understand that. And he didn't say anything about the Lietuvan soldier who'd stumbled when the table broke under him. He didn't say anything about stabbing the Lietuvan, either. Amanda supposed she could also understand that. Jeremy didn't want to think about it, and it was all over with anyhow, and it would only worry Dad. We're fine was an awful lot simpler-and it was the truth.

Maybe one of these days I'll get the whole story out of you, Dad wrote. Even when he couldn't see faces and hear voices, he wasn't so easy to fool. But he went on, For now, I'm just glad you are fine. I hope I'll see you soon. I've got to go get out of this suit and clean up now. I love you, and so does your mom.

“'Bye,” Amanda and Jeremy said together. They didn't get an answer. Amanda wished they would have, but Dad had already said he was going. “They found us again!” she said. She couldn't imagine a more wonderful sentence.

“Yeah.” By the glow in Jeremy's eyes, neither could he.

But then Amanda found one: “We're not going to have to stay here.”

“Yeah!” Jeremy said again. “That would have been- pretty bad. I kept trying not to worry about it, but…” His voice trailed away. “Sometimes you can't help it.”

“No. You can't.” Amanda had thought about living out the rest of her life here, and wondered how long it would be. It would certainly have seemed long, with hard work filling so much of it. She wouldn't have had the whole world and lots of alternates at her fingertips, the way she had back home. Anything outside of Polisso would have faded to a whisper, almost to a dream.

She would have had to live with stench and dirt the rest of her life. Sooner or later, the drugs they had here would have run out or got too old to do any good. Doctors in Agrippan Rome didn't know anything, and mostly didn't know they didn't know anything. Dentists were even worse. If her wisdom teeth gave her trouble when they came in, what could she do? Take poppy juice and hope for the best.