Gunpowder Empire

“I'm sure you are,” Amanda said softly. People in Agrippan Rome liked to swagger and brag. They often made themselves out to be richer or more clever or more skilled than they really were. This didn't sound like that. Mallio Sertorio was stating the facts as he saw them.

“Thirty years.” The smith set down the Swiss army knife. His hands-hands callused from work and scarred by cuts and burns-bunched into fists. “Thirty years, and I see this, and I also see I might as well be an apprentice in my first day at a smithy. How did they do this work?“

Machinery your culture won't invent for quite a while, if it ever does, Amanda thought. But she couldn't tell him that. Instead, she had to repeat, “I don't know.” She felt embarrassed, even a little ashamed. How was a man with nothing but hand tools supposed to match this mechanical near-perfection? And even if he did somehow do it once, how could he keep on doing it again and again?

Mallio Sertorio saw that, too. People in Agrippan Rome were ignorant, yes. They weren't stupid. He said, “You have dozens of these knives, don't you? Hundreds of them, even? But each one has to take months, maybe a year, to make. How?“

Amanda didn't say anything. She didn't see anything she could say. It probably wouldn't have mattered. Mallio Sertorio was talking to himself-to himself, and to the Swiss army knife. “How?” he said again. “Whatever the answer is, by the gods, I'll find it.” He picked up the knife and held it out to Amanda. “I will buy this. Write me up a fancy contract in old-fashioned Latin. You want grain? I'll get you grain. I must have this. I've got so much to learn.”

The smith had to make his mark on the contract. Amanda witnessed it. “You know how many modii of wheat?” she asked.

“Oh, yes,” he answered. “I know numbers. Words- especially in the old language-words I'm not so good with.”

At supper that evening-bread, cheese, and a stew of rabbit, onions, garlic, and parsnips-Amanda mentioned the smith's driving urge to know. Her mother nodded. She said, “That's one of the things we want here.”

“You bet,” Dad said. “That's why we sell them things that aren't impossibly far ahead of what they can make. There's a story about an African who saw an early airplane, but it didn't mean anything to him-it was magic. Then he saw a team of horses pulling a carriage. He laughed and clapped his hands and said, 'Why didn't I think of that?' It was beyond what his people knew how to do then, but not too far beyond. This culture has been stuck in a rut for a long time. Along with everything else we're doing, maybe we can help shake it loose.“

“Then what happens?” Amanda asked.

“With luck, things go forward here,” her father answered. “By themselves, gunpowder empires don't change very much or very fast. A poke here and a poke there, though, and who knows? In a few hundred years, this may be a different place.” He sounded as if he were sure he would come back here to see the changes.

To Amanda, a few hundred years didn't begin to seem real. She had enough trouble trying to figure out where she'd be and what she'd do when she got out of high school year after next. She wasn't going to worry about whether Agrippan Rome had its own industrial revolution a long, long way down the line.

One of the reasons Jeremy's folks brought him and Amanda to Agrippan Rome with them was so they'd look normal. Everyone here expected grownups to have children. Who else could take over the family business after they were gone? That meant he and his sister had to go out into Polisso and do the things kids their age did here. They had to be seen doing them, too. If they weren't out there being visible, what point to bringing them along?

The trouble with that was, Jeremy didn't like most of what the kids his age in Polisso did. A lot of those kids were already working hard at their trades. When they weren't working, they gambled with dice or knucklebones. They played sports different from the ones he knew, and they didn't seem to care if they maimed one another. Or they went to the amphitheater. Jeremy didn't have the stomach for that.

Here, the Roman Empire had never lost its taste for blood sports. People swarmed into the amphitheater to watch bears fight wolves. They gave condemned criminals to lions. Thousands cheered as what they called justice was done. And they set men against men. Gladiators who won their matches were heroes here, the way ru

People here said seeing bloodshed made for better soldiers. Of course, people here also said the sun went around the Earth. They said some men were slaves by nature. They said there were one-eyed men and men with their faces in the middle of their chests off in some distant corner of the world. They said the streets in China were paved with gold. (In China in this alternate, they said the streets in the Roman Empire were paved with jade. The Chinese were no less ignorant than anybody else.)

That Jeremy was a visitor in Polisso didn't make things any easier. People picked on him because he came from somewhere else. It could have been a farm more than ten kilometers from town as easily as Los Angeles in the home timeline. And Polisso had its street gangs, too.

Things could have been worse. By local standards, Jeremy was very large. That made some of the town's less charming inhabitants think twice. Unfortunately, they often hunted in packs.

As much as he could, he stayed out of the alleys and lanes that wound between the main streets. Anything could happen there. The bigger streets, on the other hand, were pretty well patrolled. Gangs mostly steered clear of men with muskets, armor, and short tempers.

Mostly, though, didn't mean always. And the vigili couldn't be everywhere at once. Three locals came up to Jeremy on the street just around the corner from where he was staying. They were his age or a little older: one of them had the fair begi

That was a loaded question. If he said yes, they'd call him a liar and jump on him. If he said no, they'd call him a stranger-and jump on him. Even if none of them came up much past his chin, one against three made bad odds. Sometimes people didn't come back from summer trading runs. He said, “No,” but then, before they could jump on him, “But I've got some new jokes from Carnuto.” The town to the west was a reasonable place to say he'd come from.

And the prospect of jokes was enough to make the punks pause. They could find people to beat up any old time. Jokes were something else, something special. In a world without the Web, TV, radio, movies, and recorded music, entertainment was where you found it. “All right, let's hear 'em,” said the gangbanger with the whiskers. The other two nodded, trying to look tough. Plainly, they followed his lead. He leaned forward and stuck out his jaw. He was better at being menacing than his pals. “They better be good.”

“They are.” Jeremy hoped he sounded more confident than he felt. The jokes came from a real Roman joke book called The Laughter-Lover. Dad had got it so the family could have jokes to tell that came from Rome, not from Los Angeles. Trouble was, by Los Angeles standards, they were some of the lamest jokes in the world. With luck, things were different here. Without luck…

“Go on, then,” Whiskers said.

“A halfwit wanted to see what he looked like when he was asleep, so he stood in front of the mirror with his eyes closed.”

Jeremy waited for the punks to commit literary criticism on his person. Instead, they gri