Harry Turtledove: Gunpowder Empire

It made for a language more compact than English. Classical Latin didn't need a lot of the helping words English used. Its word endings did the job instead. If you didn't have an implant, classical Latin was probably harder to learn than English.

And classical Latin wasn't dead in Agrippan Rome. Far from it. People spoke neoLatin in their everyday business. But the men who mattered-the bureaucrats who kept the Empire going whether the ruler was a genius or a maniac or a murderer or all three at once-wrote in the classical language. So did scholars and historians and poets. They looked down their noses at neoLatin. Learning the old tongue, learning to be elegant in it, was a big part of what raised a man to the higher classes of society here.

Sometimes the upper crust even spoke classical Latin among themselves-usually when they didn't want ordinary people to know what they were talking about. In Amanda's world, the Catholic Church had used Latin the same way into the twentieth century.

“The lamp-seller won't get in trouble for writing his sign like that, will he?” Jeremy asked.

Dad shook his head. “It's not against the rules. Just-snooty. Maybe he sells to rich people. Maybe he wants poor people to think he sells to rich people, so he can get away with charging more.”

“Snob appeal,” Mom said.

Agrippan Rome had its share of real snobs, its share and then some. Aristocrats here carried on an old, old tradition, and boy, did they know it. They looked down their noses at anybody who wasn't one of them. In a way, that made Amanda want to laugh. For all his gold and all his slaves, even the richest aristocrat here didn't have a car or a phone or a computer or a refrigerator or air-conditioning or a doctor who knew much or any of a million other things she took for granted when she was home.

But people were people, in her timeline or any of the alternates. Knowledge changed. Customs changed. Human nature didn't. People still fell in love-and out of love, too. They still schemed to get rich. They squabbled among themselves. And they needed to feel their group was better than some other group. Maybe they had more money. Maybe they had blond hair. Maybe they spoke a particular language. Maybe they had the one right religion-or the one right kind of the one right religion. It was always something, though.

And they showed off. A woman stood in the middle of the street holding up a puppy. Her friends gathered to pet it. It snapped at one of them. She smacked it in the nose. It yipped. The woman who owned it smacked it, too. People here didn't worry about cruelty to animals. That was custom, not human nature. Too bad, Amanda thought.

She and her family went up the main street that led into Polisso from the west gate. At the third good-sized cross street, they turned left. All the houses and shops and other buildings had numbers on them. That let the vigili-the police-find any place in town in a hurry. It let the city prefect collect taxes more easily, too. The numbers didn't look just like the ones Amanda was used to, but they used the same system. What she thought of as Roman numerals were for display here, the same as they were in her world.

Dad turned right on the next big cross street. The important streets, like that one, were paved with cobblestones. You had to be careful when you walked, or you could turn an ankle. The lanes and alleys that branched off from the main streets weren't paved at all. They were dusty when it was dry and streams of stinking mud when it rained.

“Here we are-24 Victorious Emperor.” Dad looked pleased with himself for remembering the way. The house-an upper story of whitewashed wood above a lower one of whitewashed stone-showed little to the street. Only narrow windows with stout shutters and a door with heavy iron hinges interrupted the stonework. All the display would go on the inside, in the rooms and in the courtyard.

The door also had a heavy iron knocker. Before Dad could grab it, Jeremy did. He raised it and brought it down three times. Bang! Bang! Bang!

“Welcome, welcome, three times welcome!” Marco Petro, called Calvo, was a stout man with blue eyes and a big nose. His bald head gave him his nickname. In Jeremy's world, his name was Mark Stone. He clasped hands with Dad and Jeremy and blew kisses to Mom and Amanda. “Come in, come in, come in.” People here liked saying and doing things in threes. They thought it was lucky. That way why Jeremy had knocked three times.

“Thank you, thank you, thank you,” Dad answered. Jeremy shot him a suspicious look. Marco Petro had sounded normal. He was just… talking. The way Dad said it, he might have been poking fun at the custom he was following.

Or, then again, he might not have. You never could tell with Dad.

By the way Marco Petro boomed laughter, he thought Dad was sending up local customs. He stood aside to let the Solters family come in, then closed the door behind them. It was close to ten centimeters thick, of solid oak. He set a stout iron bar in brackets to lock it.

Closing the door cut off most of the light in the entry hall. Jeremy blinked, trying to help his eyes adapt. Marco Petro laughed again, on a different note. Now he too sounded like somebody gently-or maybe not so gently-mocking the culture in which he'd been living. “Good to see you folks,” he said. He kept on using neoLatin, but in a way that suggested he would rather have spoken English. “Messages by thinking machine are fine, but real live people are better.”

Mom curtsied. “Thank you so much for the generous praise. Better than a thinking machine!” She couldn't come out and say computer. It wasn't just that the word didn't exist in neoLatin. The idea behind the word didn't exist, either.

Marco Petro bowed to her. “More sarcastic than a thinking machine, too. Take your packs off. Make yourselves at home. You will be at home for the next three months. Come out into the courtyard, why don't you? We'll get you something wet.“

Bees buzzed among the flowers in the courtyard garden. A fountain splashed gently. This house had running water. It was cold, and the germs in it would give you stomach trouble in nothing flat if you weren't immunized, but it ran. A statue of Agrippa's son and successor, the Emperor Lucius, stood not far from the fountain. It was a small recent copy of a famous piece in Rome. It wasn't all that well carved, but the gilding on the armor and the lifelike paint on the flesh and face helped hide flaws.

Jeremy thought painted statues were gaudy, to say nothing of tacky. But the ancient Greeks and Romans had always done that. In Jeremy's world, the custom had died out. It lived on here. When in Agrippan Rome, you did as the Romans did.

“Lucinda!” Marco Petro called as he hurried into the kitchen. “Bring out some wine, will you, dear? The Solteri are here.” He wouldn't serve the guests himself. He was the head of a family. That would have been beneath his dignity. He had his daughter do it instead.

In most households this wealthy, a servant or a slave would have brought the wine. But Crosstime Traffic rules prohibited owning or dealing in slaves. Even if they hadn't… Jeremy shook his head. He'd seen slavery here, and it sickened him. How could one person buy, sell, own another? The locals did, though, and it bothered them not a bit. Some-not all, but some-slaves seemed contented enough. That puzzled Jeremy, too.

Servants also weren't a good idea here. Along with the transposition chamber in the subbasement, this house had other gadgets and weapons from the home timeline. The locals thought the merchants who lived here were eccentric for doing their own housework. But there was no law against being eccentric.

Marco Petro came back out into the courtyard. His wife came out, too, from another door. Her name was Dawn. Here, she went by Aurora, which meant the same thing. “Welcome, welcome, three times welcome!” she called. “Marco, are you getting something for them?”