The Fourth Rome Read online

  Gerd nodded. “Rebecca,” he said, “you’re correct that the revisionists’ concept is more a religious myth than a historical paradigm. That’s unfortunately common in political discourse. After Constantinople fell to the Turks in 1453, Russian clerics invented the notion that as secular power had passed from Rome to Constantinople when the emperor created the new capital in 330 AD, SO power had passed from Constantinople to Moscow in 1472 when the czar married the last Byzantine princess.”

  “It makes as little objective sense as Manifest Destiny or the Divine Right of Kings,” Chun Quo said. “But those were good enough reasons in their times, too. Reasons to kill.”

  “The monk Philotheus of Pskov said, ‘Two Romes have fallen and the third stands,’” Gerd quoted. “‘There will never be a fourth.’”

  He looked at his display and added, “Of course, that’s what the revisionists want to change. Their Moscow has fallen. They want to create a continuum in which a new Moscow rules the world, a Fourth Rome. The display shows what they would have achieved.”

  The tank had come to a halt. One of its eight bogeys sank to the wheel hubs in soft ground. Officers in carriages shouted abuse at one another and at the stolid footmen nearby. Sparks from a smokestack had started a grass fire. It was likely to spread out of control if everyone continued to ignore it.

  “These revisionists were the scientific elite of a superpower,” Pauli said. “With the collapse of the Soviet Union, they became the detritus of a Third World country that couldn’t even feed itself. No wonder they’re willing to grasp at straws.”

  He’d crossed one ankle over the other knee; his hands rested lightly on his thighs. Somebody who didn’t know Pauli would think he was relaxed. Nobody really relaxed before a mission, and nobody with any experience trusted that a mission was going to be as simple as it looked in ARC Central.

  “This is the revised timeline’s military technology,” Nan said. “What do their cities look like?”

  “About what you’d expect,” Gerd said. He adjusted the flat gray device he was using to control the display at the moment. It was a multifunction sensor, display, and processing unit in its own right. Nan knew the analyst would sooner lose his right arm than give the device up. “Mud, hovels, and churches.”

  The display shifted to a village of round-topped huts, each in its own fenced yard. Pigs and chickens wandered through the unpaved streets, picking at the garbage. The onion-domed church was the only building constructed of stone rather than wood or wattle and daub.

  “The revisionists’ concept was rather clever.” Gerd said. “Though the Romans began to exercise administrative control over all Germany during the reign of Augustus, their power effectively stopped at the Rhine after Quinctilius Varus was defeated in 9 AD. TO Romans the frontier was a zone rather than a line in the sense that later ages thought of boundaries between states. By trade and military contacts—raiding on both sides, and from German mercenary service in the imperial armies—the German elite became aligned with the Roman elite. They had more in common with each other than either did with its own rural population.”

  “And when central authority in the West collapsed,” Quo said, “the German elites were ready to replace Rome.”

  “Exactly,” Gerd agreed. “What Central—and I—predict our revisionists intend is to permit the Roman Empire to continue expanding eastward to the Vistula River. That way the zone of assimilation will be among Slavs, not Germans, and the successor state will be a Slavic Fourth Rome instead of a Germanic Holy Roman Empire.”

  “They should have looked at what resulted when Moscow really did replace Constantinople as the power in the Balkans after 1453,” Tim said. “Why would they expect the result to be any better if it included Central Europe as well?”

  “Because they were desperate, Tim,” Beckie Carnes said softly. “You and I don’t have to look any farther than the worlds we grew up in to know what kind of bad decisions desperate people make.”

  She’d been a nurse in an Asian war her United States fought for thirty years, until war and nation ended with American warlords slinging nuclear weapons at enemies both at-home and abroad. Oh, yes, she understood desperation.

  Nan stood up. Gerd switched off the image of squalor.

  Nan looked her team over one by one and smiled. “Revisionist proposes, ARC Central disposes,” she said. “Let’s go shift a little population back to 50K, people.”

  ARC Central

  Out of the temporal universe

  Carrying his personal kit in a cylindrical bag no bigger than his muscular upper arm, Pauli Weigand followed the rest of the team down the narrow red-outlined walkway. There were eight transportation capsules in a docking bay that could hold twenty. If you stepped outside the markings there was always the chance that you’d be standing in the spot another capsule transferred into.

  A technician in the cab of a robotic workstation had removed a section of outer hull from TC 754, baring the ceramic core. Three members of Team 54 watched with studied unconcern. They had no part in dockyard maintenance like this, but they were well aware that the hull matrix held the electronics that displaced their capsule in time and space. PauJi understood why you might want to watch even if that was all you could do. He’d been there himself.

  The hatch in the middle of TC 779’s port hull bulged and opened as Nan reached it. The vehicle was a cylinder with rounded ends, a little under three meters in diameter and almost nine meters long. Now with its systems off, TC 779 looked gray and was mottled with marks of stress and repaired damage. A chameleon program would give the outer skin whatever color and pattern the operator chose, though it couldn’t change the hull’s basic shape.

  Voroshilov turned from 754 and waved. He shouted, “Timothy, come see me when you get back.” The bay’s volume drank his booming voice. “I’ve got some schnapps you must try. Not vodka, schnapps!”

  Grainger paused in 779 ’s entrance lock. “Wish us luck, Kli-menti,” he called back.

  Tim and Voroshilov had trained together. Both had been born in earlier centuries, giving them a bond of sorts in an organization largely recruited in the 26th century. They probably thought of themselves as outsiders; which was true, but any ARC Rider was an outsider. Even ARC Central itself, though located “in” the 26th century, was slightly out of temporal phase with the sidereal universe.

  The only way to enter or leave ARC Central was by time machine. The psychic distance separating ARC Riders from their contemporaries was as complete as Central’s separation from the continuum.

  Voroshilov came from a period in which nationalism was still a powerful force. How would he react if this mission had gone to his team instead of 79?

  You had to assume Voroshilov wouldn’t have gotten through ARC screening if that was going to be a problem he couldn’t overcome. Besides, no Russian nationalist would want the result these revisionists had achieved, whatever he might think of the idea in the abstract.

  Gerd walked just ahead of Pauli. Instead of entering the vehicle, the analyst started around the blunt bow. Pauli caught him by the elbow and guided him back across the line. “I thought you were coming with us, Gerd,” he said mildly.

  You got used to Gerd wandering off. At least here Pauli was in a position to stop him. That hadn’t always been the case.

  “I wanted to see if TC 712 was in one of the berths on the other side of us,” Gerd explained. “I like to keep track of the movements of other capsules.”

  “I talked to Metcalf yesterday in the canteen,” Pauli said. “712’s in the synchronous dock. She’s been losing eight minutes every displacement, no big thing, but this past mission she started to gain instead. That’s got them looking for the problem.”

  “Ah,” Gerd said, nodding in appreciation. Pauli didn’t bother wondering why he wanted the information. For all he knew, Gerd might chart the movement of clouds every time he was under an open sky. The analyst did his job and then some. If he was weirder than the norm even for Anti-
Revision Command, well, then he was weird.

  “Pauli,” Gerd said, “do you ever wonder who we’re preserving the continuum for?”

  Pauli blinked. The rest of the team was in the vehicle, but it’d take a few minutes for them to stow their kit and check on-board gear like weapons and displacement suits. Besides, an ARC Rider had all the time in the world.

  Grinning faintly at his unvoiced joke, Pauli said, “Well, for everybody, I guess. I mean, people in the past as well as the folks Up The Line.”

  “Sometimes I wonder if we work for human beings at all,” Gerd said. “Our century didn’t create the Anti-Revision Command, you know. We just staff it. And there’s no reason that the persons who made ARC Central and the capsules and the suits—the folks Up The Line, in the future we can’t reach with their equipment—”

  He smiled. On anybody else it would have been a sad expression, but with Gerd you could never be sure.

  “There’s no reason they have to be related to us,” the analyst went on. “Whoever succeeds man on Earth would have an equally good reason for not wanting the continuum revised.”

  Pauli felt his guts go cold for a moment, then he laughed.

  “Gerd,” he said, “my job is to make sure that my parents get born the way they were supposed to, and all my friends’ parents get bom, and all my nieces and nephews and everybody else. That’s a job I’m proud to do. I wish I were better at it, maybe, but I’ll keep doing it as long as they let me. And if I’m working for cockroaches three million years Up The Line—well, that’s all right. It’s still a job worth doing, and they’re welcome to the place after we’ve left it.”

  “Pauli?” Rebecca Carnes called from the hatch. “I can’t carry you so you better come yourself. Gerd, you I can carry so you’d damned well better come.”

  “Sorry, Beckie,” Pauli said. His arm shepherded the analyst forward. He didn’t actually touch the smaller man. “We’re having a discussion about the human condition.”

  “I don’t think cockroaches are the most probable successors,” Gerd murmured, “though it’s an interesting concept. And you’re quite right, of course, that it doesn’t really matter.”

  He stepped aboard TC 779. “Measured against the heat death of the universe, at any rate,” he added.

  TC 779

  Displacing to 9 AD

  Rebecca Carnes waited, feeling a little awkward. She was starting her first operational deployment as an ARC Rider and she didn’t really have a job.

  Nan was at the capsule’s console, though for the moment the software controlled their displacement. The main screen turned the curving forward bulkhead into either a display or an apparently clear window to what was outside TC 779. While the capsule displaced, the exterior was a gray blur.

  Quo sat with her back to the team leader, watching her personal display with a short wand in either hand. She would take over if something happened to Nan and the primary system.

  The Riders’ ordinary uniform was a body stocking with multiple pockets and the ability to change color as the user desired. The stocking and soft boots acted as undergarments for the rigid-walled displacement suits that Tim and Pauli wore as they faced the hatchway with weapons ready. The suits had integral time travel capacity, but for the moment the two men used them as armor against a possible threat outside the vehicle.

  Tim held a fléchette gun with an electromagnetic pulse generator clipped beneath the barrel. The Anti-Revision Command didn’t like its personnel to kill, but sometimes lethal force was the only practical option. High-velocity osmium fléchettes could penetrate armor or a vehicle, while the EMP generator fried electronics without damaging people or structures.

  Pauli had an EMP generator also, but his was attached to a shoulder-stocked gas gun that could also fire acoustic grenades. A gas bomb paralyzed everyone in an area of two hundred square meters for up to three hours, while the sudden pulse of an acoustic grenade stunned people instantly over a similar area. Between them the two shooters could expect to handle any problem that arose.

  Gerd Barthuli sat beside Nan at the bow controls, but his eyes were on an air-formed holographic display that from any other angle quivered like a heat refraction. The analyst’s job was to browse the datastream TC 779’s sensors would encounter as soon as the capsule reached a temporal location. Until then he was probably reviewing background materials downloaded for this mission.

  Rebecca was backup for all the other team members. She sat before a flip-down console from which she could pilot TC 779 or direct its sensors. In her lap was a light plastic microwave pistol that would knock a man flat at fifty paces or give him a headache at twice that distance. Its twin barrels projected pulses of high-frequency energy that converged on the target to produce an 8-Hertz difference tone of very high amplitude. The effect was much like the kick of a mule.

  There was almost no chance Rebecca would be called on to use any of those capabilities, but she noticed with some inner amusement she wasn’t concerned that she’d screw up if she had to act. She’d had lots of experience dealing with extremely complex devices—human beings—in circumstances where there were a lot more ways to go fatally wrong than be right and there wasn’t any time to think about it. That’s what nurses do.

  “Ten seconds,” Quo murmured. Displacement—in time or space—took a perceived eighty-nine seconds irrespective of the distance involved. From inside, the only indication that a transportation capsule was displacing was the unnatural silence and the gray emptiness of the main screen.

  Displacement suits supposedly had the same temporal engines as a capsule did, but Rebecca had never been able to believe the process was identical. Displacing in a suit was a taste of purgatory that missed being hell only because it ended. She was never sure the enveloping limbo would end.

  Nan was as still as a wax image at the console. Her hands were spread above the keyboard controls. The pilot of a capsule on preset commands had nothing to do unless something went wrong. In that case she’d better do it right.

  “Engagement,” Quo said. The cabin brightened as if TC 779’s hull had vanished and the crew stood in a marshy clearing. The main screen could again display the sidereal universe. There was no human being in sight. A long-eared squirrel chattered angrily at something in the branches above it.

  “I have the controls,” Nan said. Her hands now rested on the keyboard. Light shimmered before her, displays projected for her eyes alone instead of as sidebars to the main screen.

  “Accuracy to within one meter and three minutes,” Quo reported. She tried to keep the statement neutral, but there was obvious pleasure in her voice. Everything was going as smoothly as a training exercise.

  “There are no revisionists on this time horizon,” Gerd announced without emphasis.

  Time travel affected the continuum the same way a tossed pebble affects the ocean. Even ARC transportation capsules left wakes, and the cruder techniques of revisionists experimenting with techniques new to them were more disruptive by orders of magnitude.

  Instruments in ARC Central registered the disturbances, plotted them, and vectored a field team to readjust space-time to its original pattern. A capsule’s own sensors were only marginally less capable than those at the base. Gerd had used them to cross-check the original tasking. This time the check contradicted Central.

  Rebecca stood up for a better look at the main screen. To keep the pistol out of the way she thrust it into the cargo pocket on her right thigh. The problem wasn’t one that she could help by shooting something.

  “Temporal parameters check,” Nan said. Her voice was calm but sounded thin.

  “Sensors check!” said Quo.

  Gerd Barthuli’s fingers moved on the flat surface before him. Rather than a keyboard, the analyst used an unmarked plate to achieve greater flexibility of control. His face was still and he didn’t speak: he’d said all he had to say at this moment.

  Tim Grainger looked toward the bow. It was easier to switch the display within a
suit’s featureless helmet than it was to turn since the helmet was rigidly locked to the shoulder piece, but in a crisis Tim was likely to fall back on old reflexes. He preferred the speed and flexibility of the bodysock and wore armor only when he was ordered to.

  “It’s the phase lock!” he said, his voice booming through the suit’s external speaker. “Drop us straight in. We’ll be all right!”

  As initially calibrated, TC 779 hadn’t quite reentered the continuum. It hovered a fraction of a millisecond out of temporal phase, invisible—nonexistent—to eyes in the sidereal universe but still able to observe that universe through its sensors. Sound waves and the electro-optical spectrum were shifted a few angstroms, but the capsule’s AI could adjust that in the rare instance it made any difference.

  Tim was saying that the capsule’s being out of phase was causing the sensors to miss the presence of temporal anomalies. Rebecca couldn’t imagine why that would be, but she didn’t have a better notion.

  Apparently neither did Nan Roebeck. “We’re going in,” she said and touched a control. TC 779 wobbled minutely as it settled into boggy soil.

  The squirrel vanished to the other side of the trunk. Its furious chattering resumed a moment later.

  “There are still no revisionists on this horizon,” Gerd said. “This isn’t a sensor failure. All the background readings show proper variation. The indications that Central noted are not present on the horizon.”

  “They spotted us and displaced,” Pauli said. He remained poised by the hatch; as good a place as any and the one he’d been given before the problem occurred. Solid as a tree, Pauli was.

  “If they had been here, there’d be traces in the continuum,” Quo said in a brittle tone. Her wands moved in short, sharp arcs like the tapping of a bird’s beak. She scowled at whatever her display showed. “They’re not here!”

  Rebecca had a sudden vision of TC 779’s presence buffeting naked figures aside like flotsam caught in a speedboat’s bow wave. The revisionists’ displacement technique was radically different from the bubbles of separate space-time generated by ARC transportation capsules. Different, and on the evidence incompatible.