Harry Turtledove: Gunpowder Empire

“Oh,” Jeremy said-much later than he should have. “Sure.”

From Bucharest to Moigrad, the little town by the site of what was Polisso in the alternate and had been Porolissum in ancient days, was a little less than four hundred kilometers. The Fiat wheezed and chugged going over the Transylvanian Alps. They drove through Cluj, the only good-sized town between Bucharest and Moigrad, an hour before they finally got where they were going.

In this world, Porolissum was a ruin, a place where archaeologists dug. A hundred years earlier, they'd rebuilt one gate to look the way it had back in Roman days. Amanda supposed they'd been trying to lure tourists. They hadn't had much luck. If Moigrad wasn't the middle of nowhere, you could see it from there.

The reconstructed gate didn't look much like the one in Polisso. That had bothered Amanda when she saw first one and then the other. It didn't any more. In the alternate, Polisso had been a going concern for two millennia. People there must have repaired or rebuilt the gate half a dozen times.

With a sigh of relief, Dad parked in front of the Crosstime Traffic office in Moigrad. Two men in the white, grays, and black of urban camouflage came out of the building. They both carried assault rifles. “Are they guards or bandits?” Jeremy asked.

“Guards,” Dad said. In a low voice, he went on, “Romania's poor, and it's proud. Not everybody here likes multinationals.”

Amanda eyed the rifles. That sounds like an understatement, she thought. Her father rolled down his window. He spoke to the guards in Romanian. They smiled, but the smiles didn't reach their eyes. One of them said something. Dad handed him his passport. The guard studied it, nodded, and gave it back. He spoke again.

“Show him your passports, too,” Jack Solters said. Mom and Amanda and Jeremy got out the documents. They handed them to Dad, who gave them to the guard. He looked them over, then returned them. He nodded again. He and his partner stepped back and waved toward the office.

“Looks like we're okay,” Mom said. She opened the car door. As she got out and stretched, the second guard said something.

Dad translated: “Our luggage will have to go through the sniffer. He knows we are who we say we are, but they aren't making any exceptions.”

“I don't mind,” Amanda said. “Have they had trouble here?”

After some back-and-forth with the guards in Romanian, Dad shook his head. “He says they haven't, and they don't want any, either. They've got some hotheads, some big talkers, and they aren't taking any chances.”

“Don't people realize what a mess we'd be in without the alternates?” Amanda said.

“In a word,” Dad answered, “no.”

Two

Going from the home timeline to an alternate should have been dramatic. It should have been exciting. Jeremy had seen video of a Saturn rocket blasting off for the moon. This should have been something like that, all noise and flame. Why not? He and his family were traveling between worlds, too.

No drama here, though. They sat in the same kind of seats as they had for the suborbital hop from Los Angeles to Bucharest. They got even less leg room here than they'd had in the shuttlecraft. They couldn't see out. Jeremy had always wished you could see things change as you passed from one alternate to the next. Things didn't work out that way, though. When you traveled between alternates, you weren't properly in any of them till you stopped. That meant there was nothing to see, and no point to a window.

One by one, the family changed into clothes that wouldn't look out of place in Polisso. Tank tops and shorts wouldn't do. Sandals would, but not sandals of bright blue-and-red plastic.

Jeremy and his father put on knee-length woolen tunics. Jeremy's was undyed, his father's a dull blue. Both tunics had embroidery around the sleeves and the neck opening, Dad's more than Jeremy's. Jeremy's socks were also of wool, hand-knitted; his sandals were leather, with bronze buckles. His underwear came down to his knees. It was wool, too. It itched. A plain floppy felt hat finished his outfit. Dad's hat boasted a braided leather band and a bright pheasant feather sticking up from it.

Mom and Amanda wore tunics that fell all the way to their ankles. Amanda's was blue like Dad's. Mom's was saffron yellow, which showed the family had money. So did her shiny brass belt, the gold hoops in her ears, and her lace headdress. Amanda wore a brass belt, too, but not such a wide one. Her headdress was lower and flatter than Mom's. That meant she wasn't married.

A computer guided the transposition chamber. An operator sat in the chamber with the travelers. He didn't change, and looked like the odd man out. He had manual controls in case of emergency. Fortunately, emergencies were rare. Emergencies where the manual controls would do any good were even rarer. Jeremy chose not to dwell on that.

He tried to tell when the chamber reached the right alternate. He tried whenever he went crosstime, and he always failed. If he'd been waiting for the chamber, he would have seen it materialize. Inside it, he might as well not have left the home timeline.

The trip to the alternate seemed to take about forty-five minutes. When he got out and looked at the sun, though, it would be in the same place in the sky here as it had in the home line. Duration across timelines was a tricky business. Quantum physics seemed simple beside it.

Out of the blue-or so it felt to Jeremy-the operator said, “Okay, you're here.” Jeremy muttered to himself. Caught by surprise again.

He got up and stretched. The ceiling of the chamber was only a few centimeters above his head. Tall in his own timeline, he would seem taller in the alternate. The locals weren't as well nourished as people back home. I'd make the basketball team here, he thought. I'd play center, too.

Somebody had scribbled something on the wall by the door. He leaned closer to get a better look. THE ONE AND ONLY HOMEMADE TIME MACHINE, it said. He grinned. That hadn't been there the last time he came to Agrippan Rome. Odds were it wouldn't be there when the chamber came back for his family. The company usually made that kind of stuff disappear in a hurry.

“Here you go.” The operator opened the door, the way a steward would on a shuttlecraft. The air they'd brought with them from the home timeline mingled with what the locals breathed. That was cool and damp. The transposition chamber had materialized in a cave two or three kilometers from Polisso. The cave overlooked the road to the west. That road never had a whole lot of traffic. When video cameras in the cave showed it was clear in both directions, people could go down and head for town with the locals none the wiser.

Dad was the first one out the door. “Time to make the best deals we can,” he said in neoLatin. He used English as little as he could while they were in the alternate. So did everybody else. What people in Polisso didn't hear, they couldn't wonder about.

Jeremy and Amanda followed their father around to the cargo compartment. The first things Dad got out were two swords in leather sheaths. He gave Jeremy one and buckled the other one on himself. No one here traveled cross-country unarmed. Then he pulled out four packs full of trade goods. Everybody in the family got one of those.

“A good thing bandits don't know we're coming, or we'd really have things to worry about,” Mom said as she slung her pack on her back.

“Need more than swords to keep off bandits,” Dad agreed.

Jeremy put on his own pack. Like the others, it was full of wind-up pocket watches almost the size of a fist, mirrors in gilt-metal frames, straight razors, Swiss army knives, and other examples of what would have been thoroughly outdated technology in his world. Here, though, no one could match it. No one could come close. Traders from Crosstime Traffic got wonderful prices.