Gunpowder Empire

“That's the oldest excuse in the world-in any world,”

Dad said. “She got the first word, you got the last word, and that's plenty. If it goes on from there, the only thing you'll both do is get angrier. What's the use? Answer me, please.”

Jeremy didn't. Maybe he wanted to. He probably did, in fact. But arguing with Dad was usually like playing chess against the computer at the high level. You could try it, and it would make good practice, and you'd even learn something, but you wouldn't win.

Mom sat quietly through the whole thing. She often did during squabbles. Dad enjoyed stamping on fires, and she didn't. But she seemed too quiet tonight.

Or maybe I'm imagining things, Amanda thought. She knew she sometimes borrowed trouble. She couldn't help it, any more than Jeremy could help being a know-it-all. But she feared this trouble didn't need borrowing. It was really here.

Most of the house the merchants from Crosstime Traffic used would have seemed ordinary to the people of Polisso. Most, but not all. That was why they had no servants. Servants would have seen things that couldn't be explained to anybody from this alternate. The basement and subbasement were cases in point.

Part of the basement wouldn't have seemed strange to the locals. A lot of houses here had storerooms under them. This one did, too, but its were different.

Jeremy took a lamp with him when he went down the wooden steps into the storeroom that held sacks of grain, baskets of onions, strings of garlic, and big clay jars full of olive oil and wine and the fermented fish sauce that went into every kind of cooking here the way soy sauce and salsa did back home. As usual, the lamp didn't defeat darkness. It did push back the hem of its black cloak. Jeremy could walk around without banging his head.

There was a smooth patch on the wall above one particular jar of wine. Jeremy let his hand rest on it for a moment. Software sca

As soon as Jeremy walked through the door, it closed behind him. Real lights, electric lights, came on in the ceiling. High-capacity batteries powered them-and everything else down here. The flickering flame of the lamp was suddenly next to invisible. Jeremy blew it out. He would light it again when he left the basement.

The wall behind the palm lock was reinforced concrete. So was the ceiling. The locals might be able to blow them open, but they wouldn't have an easy time of it. The subbase-ment where the transposition chamber came and went had another layer of shielding. But the most important shield was making sure nobody in Polisso suspected the house had a special basement, let alone a subbasement.

On a table sat a PowerBook. It was sleeping to save power. Jeremy touched a key to rouse the laptop. It was the house's link to the home timeline and all the alternates Crosstime Traffic visited. “Michael Fujikawa,” he said into the microphone, and then an eight-digit number that defined the alternate where his friend was spending the summer.

“Go ahead,” the computer told him.

“You around, Michael?” Jeremy asked. “It's me, Jeremy.” He didn't really expect that Michael would be there. North China, where his parents traded, was six hours ahead of Romania. Michael would probably be snoring in the wee small hours. “How's it with you? What you been up to? Give me a yell when you get a chance. 'Bye.”

The PowerBook turned Jeremy's spoken words into written ones. Text took up a lot less bandwidth to send than voice did. Jeremy knew he ought to go back up into the world of Agrippan Rome. Instead, he started a game. The computer, which was playing the aliens invading Earth, was knocking the snot out of him when the incoming-message bell rang.

“Quit. Don't save,” Jeremy said with relief. The twisted World War II vanished from the screen. He wouldn't lose tonight, anyway. A human player would have screamed at him for grabbing the excuse to bail out. The PowerBook didn't care.

Words formed on the monitor. Hey, Jeremy, Michael said. Good to hear from you. I was wondering when I would.

“We've been getting settled in,” Jeremy said. “You could have messaged me, too, you know. And what are you doing up so early?”

Sunrise ceremony today-yawn, Michael answered. We've been busy, same as you. It happens. How's business?

“Pretty good,” Jeremy said. “The locals are starting to wonder how come we can do things they can't, though. One of them gave my sister a hard time about it. They may start trying to snoop harder. That wouldn't be so good, not when traders have spent so much time making co

If you have to pull out, you have to pull out. Plenty of alternates, and they're all easy to get to. Crosstime will find one that's not too different, and you'll start over. Michael could be practical to the point of cynicism.

“I suppose so.” Jeremy knew Crosstime Traffic had had to abandon some alternates. Most of those had technology a lot higher than Agrippan Rome's, though. And that wasn't really what was on his mind, anyhow. After a pause, he said, “Other thing that's been going on here is, Mom doesn't feel good.”

What's wrong? The question came back at once. Michael had spent so much time at the Solters' house, Mom sometimes seemed to be almost as much his mother as Jeremy's.

“Some kind of stomach trouble,” Jeremy said.

Something she ate?

“Maybe. I hope so. That would be the easiest to fix and the least to worry about,” Jeremy answered. As he spoke, the dictation program on the PowerBook put his worries on the monitor, where he could see them as well as think them. He didn't like that. It made them seem more real. When he said, “The antibiotics she took didn't do much,” the words on the screen took on a frightening importance.

They also must have seemed important to Michael, who was reading them not just in another place but in another universe. That doesn't sound so good, he said. Do you think she'll have to go back to the home line to get it looked at?

“I don't know,” Jeremy said. On the monitor, that looked very bald and very helpless. “As long as she's all right, nothing else matters.”

Sure, Michael replied. Listen, tell her I hope she's feeling better. He wasn't somebody who talked for the sake of being polite. What he said, he meant. He went on: I wish I were close enough to do something. You let me know what's going on, you hear? You don't, you're in big trouble when I see you this fall.

“I will,” Jeremy said. “Thanks.” Michael wouldn't tell him anything like, If you need somebody to talk to, I'm here. Coming right out with something like that would only embarrass both of them. But there were ways to get the message across without saying the words.

Take care of yourself. I've got to go. The rising sun is calling me. Like Jeremy, Michael took part in rituals he didn't fully believe in. The locals believed in them, and that was what counted.

“You watch yourself, too.” Jeremy waited for an answer… and waited, and waited. Michael really had gone, then. Jeremy softly said something else-softly, but not quite softly enough. The words formed on the PowerBook's screen. He laughed. “Erase last six,” he said, and they disappeared.

He wanted to say something that would make the monitor burst into flames. But that wouldn't help, either, even if it might make him feel better for a little while. He didn't know what would help. He didn't know if anything would help.

He was seventeen. He took care of most things on his own. Some of them, his folks never found out about. Taking care of your own troubles-learning how to take care of your own troubles-was a big part of what growing up was about. But having Mom and Dad there as backups felt awfully good. And when the trouble was that something was wrong with one of them… He said some more things he had to tell the computer to erase.