Gunpowder Empire

“Sure.” Jeremy flogged his memory. “'That slave you sold me died yesterday,' a man told a halfwit. The halfwit said, 'By the gods, he never did anything like that when I owned him!'“

Whiskers did laugh this time, which seemed to be the cue for his pals to do the same. “Not bad,” he said. “Keep going.”

How many can I remember? Jeremy wondered. The ancient Roman joke book did seem better suited to Polisso than to Los Angeles. He brought out another one: “An astrologer cast a horoscope for a sick man and said, 'You'll live another twenty years.' The man said, 'Come back tomorrow, then, and I'll give you your fee.' 'But what happens if you die tonight?' the astrologer said.”

They needed a couple of seconds to get it. When they did, though, they howled scandalized laughter. Despite common sense, some people in Los Angeles believed in astrology. Here, people believed in astrology. They didn't know all the things about the way the universe worked that people in the home timeline did. Astrology let them think they knew more than they did.

“Not bad,” Whiskers said. “Not bad at all. I knew a guy like that. He said he knew everything there was to know, but he didn't even know his girl was seeing somebody else on the side. You got any others?”

“Sure.” Jeremy told as many jokes as he remembered. Some got laughs. Some were groaners-but if you told a lot of jokes, some would always be groaners. The three punks slapped him on the back. Whiskers reached out and affectionately messed up his hair. After that, they paid him the best compliment they could-they went off and left him alone.

From then on, he knew he wouldn't worry when he haggled with people in Polisso. How important was haggling over money or grain, really? He'd just won a dicker for his own skin.

Mom dug a big blob of bread dough out of an earthenware bowl. She slammed it down on the countertop and started to knead it. Half a meter away, Amanda was chopping cabbage. There was an odd sort of pleasure in making the family's food from scratch. If it was good, you deserved all the credit. (If it wasn't, you deserved all the blame. Amanda didn't like to think about that. If I make it, it will be good, she told herself.)

Pleasure or not, making food from scratch was much more work than cooking at home. No microwaves here. No computerized ovens that did everything but blow out the candles on a birthday cake. They had a wood-burning oven for baking, and the fireplace for soups and stews and for roasting. That was it.

Mom paused. “I'm going to bring in a stool,” she said. “I'm sick and tired of standing up.”

“It's all right with me.” Amanda hoped she didn't show how startled she was. Local women always worked standing up in the kitchen. Always. And Mom had always been a stickler for doing things the way people here did them. To see her changing her ways was a surprise.

Even after she got the stool, she didn't seem comfortable. She kept shifting her weight, leaning now this way, now that. Watching her made Amanda nervous.

Finally, when she couldn't stand it any more, she asked, “Are you all right, Mom?”

“I'm fine,” her mother said quickly. Too quickly? Her right hand rubbed her stomach and got bits of cabbage on her tunic. “I've had kind of a stomach ache the last couple of days, though.”

“Probably getting used to what Polisso calls food again,” Amanda said.

“I guess so,” Mom said, but then she contradicted herself: “It doesn't feel like that.” She shrugged then. “I don't know what else it could be.” She went back to kneading what would be a loaf. If the dough wasn't well kneaded, the bread would be dense and chewy.

“Antibiotics don't always get everything,” Amanda said. You could catch almost anything from food in Polisso. The only way to be perfectly safe would have been not to eat or drink. Unfortunately, that had drawbacks of its own.

“It doesn't feel like food poisoning,” her mother said. “Only an ache. It's not bad. Just-a

But there wasn't time for much worrying. There wasn't time for anything except chores from dawn till dusk: cooking and washing and cleaning and doing business. After the bread went into the oven, you couldn't walk away and forget about it till it was done. No thermostats here. Amanda had to watch the fire and feed wood into it at the right rate to keep it from getting too high or too low. Otherwise, the loaves would come out scorched or soggy. Either way, they wouldn't be worth eating. All the work that went into making them, starting with grinding grain into flour, would be wasted.

Mom used a flat wooden peel to slide the loaves out of the oven: the same tool a cook at a pizza place used in the home timeline. After the bread had cooled, Amanda ate a piece. She wished she could have said it was far better than anything she could get at home because she'd helped make it herself. She wished she could, but she couldn't. It was gritty. The quern that ground the grain was made of stone, and tiny bits of it got into the flour. The bread was also coarse-grained; the quern didn't grind as fine as modern milling machines. And, in spite of everything, it had stayed in the oven a couple of minutes too long. It was okay, but nothing to get excited about.

Her mother had some, too. Amanda watched to see if she had trouble eating. She didn't seem to, even if she also looked disappointed at how the bread turned out. Amanda asked, “How do you feel?”

“I'm all right,” Mom answered. “Like I said, a nuisance, that's all.”

“Have you told Dad?”

“Yes, I've told your father. He's the one who wouldn't tell me. He wouldn't want me to worry.” Mom rolled her eyes. “I don't want him to worry, either, but I want him to know what's going on.”

“What if it… really is something?” Amanda didn't want to say that. She didn't even want to think it. She knew something about loss. Two of her grandparents had died. But Mom and Dad were different. They were supposed to be there, no matter what; they were the rocks at the bottom of her world.

Part of Amanda knew her parents were people. She knew things could happen to people. The rest of her recoiled from that like a nervous horse shying from a rattler. Move the rocks at the bottom of the world and you made an earthquake.

Mom came over and gave her a hug. “The very worst that can happen is that I go back to the home timeline for a little while and get it fixed, whatever it is. Then I come back here again. Okay?“

“Okay.” Amanda hugged her back, hard. She was very, very glad for the transposition chamber down in the subbase-ment here, just in case. Doctors in Agrippan Rome not only didn't know anything, they didn't even suspect anything. The really scary part was, they were better than doctors other places in this world. Roman doctors got fat salaries teaching medicine in Lietuva and Persia.

That evening, Jeremy got into an argument with Mom over nothing in particular. He would do that every once in a while, mostly because he couldn't stand admitting he might be wrong. He was right most of the time. That made it harder for him to see he was wrong some of the time. It also made him a first-class pain in the neck.

And tonight, it made Amanda furious. “You leave Mom alone!” she yelled at him. “Don't you know anything?”

Nothing made Jeremy madder than even hinting that he was dumb. “I know what a miserable pest you are,” he said.

He would have gone on from there, too, but Dad held up a hand. “That will be enough of that,” he said. “That will be enough of that out of both of you, as a matter of fact. There are four of us here, and thousands of people in Polisso. If we can't count on each other, we may as well go home.”

It wasn't that he was wrong. He was right, and Amanda knew it. And he knew Mom wasn't feeling right, so he'd taken that into account. But so did Jeremy. And he kept steaming. He hadn't said all he wanted to, and he was itching to let out the rest. He pointed at Amanda. “She started it.”