“I can’t get Mom,” Jason explained.
Dad’s face got a pinched look on it and Jason got even more scared. Almost in desperation Jason asked, “Dad, if I can’t get Mom, how come I can get you?”
“Good question!” Dad seemed relieved. “It could be that the phones are in range of each other. A cell phone is a small radio combined with a computer, and good ones like ours have the ability to talk directly back and forth if they are close enough. That’s how we can share photos when our phones get close to each other. But it might be the ship. I think the cell providers have restrictions built in. Let’s look it up.”
That was Dad’s answer to everything. “Let’s look it up.” Dad called up the ship specs and got a rate listing, a chart of how much cell calls, wifi, and internet cost per minute or megabyte. A couple of links below that was a description of how it worked. The Queen of the Sea was wired to a faretheewell, with hotspots and wired connections all through the ship. Those led to the ship’s Communications and Data Center. That, along with mirror sites and catching, constituted the ship’s cloud. All phone and internet access first went into the ship’s cloud. A phone call from one cell phone on the ship to another never left the ship’s cloud. But you still got charged for the call as though it were going through the satellite. That was even true on some of the ports, because the Queen of the Sea had its own cell tower, called a repeater. In fact, it had three. One forward, one amidships, and one near the stern. Each station had a satellite link, a cell repeater, and ship-to-ship and ship-to-shore radios. That gave the ship’s cloud considerable range, so if you were on an island excursion and called someone on the ship, it usually went through the ship’s cloud. The reason there were three was to ensure that there was adequate bandwidth, and as a safety feature, redundancy in case of accident. Finding all that out took time, and long before they finished, a history professor decided to take a hand.
☆ ☆ ☆
In Stateroom 601, Marie Easley, a small woman with black hair and just a touch of gray, looked over at her daughter. Josette Easley was looking frightened. She was recently divorced and, as amicable as it had been, she needed to get away for a while. Marie got dragooned into accompanying Josette because she didn’t want to go alone. And now it looked like the trip was going to be a lot more life-changing than either of them had thought. Not that Marie hadn’t had enough life-changing since being widowed three years ago.
“Mom,” Josette asked, “what was going on in 321 BCE before the common era?”
It was a perfectly reasonable question, since Marie had a doctorate in history with a specialization in Ptolemaic Egypt.
“Well, Alexander is dead, and so is Aristotle. A shame, that. I would have liked to meet the philosopher.”
“Not Alexander?”
“Didn’t you ever listen to our discussions around the dinner table, Josette?” Marie grinned. “Alexander the Great may well have been the greatest man of his time, but almost anyone who comes down in the history books with ‘the Great’ attached to their name has piled up a very impressive body count. Alexander was certainly no exception. He was anything but a good man by any modern standard of ‘good.’ He and his cronies make the characters in Game of Thrones seem positively benign.”
She thought for a moment. “Well, Epicurus was alive—is alive—and I suspect I would like to meet him. Perhaps even more than Aristotle.”
“Do you think the captain and crew can get us back home?”
Marie considered. It seemed highly unlikely on the face of it. And if the captain and crew were unlikely to be able to do so, how likely was it that anything would take them home? There was a tightness around Marie’s abdomen as she considered the world they were now in and the possibility…no, face it squarely, Marie…the almost certainty that they were here permanently.
“No, dear, I don’t. Wait here. I need to speak to someone in the crew about this. There is information they are going to need and they are going to need it sooner rather than later.” Marie grabbed her laptop as she left the room and headed for the information desk.
☆ ☆ ☆
The Help Desk was, unsurprisingly, swamped by people asking questions that the staff was in no position to answer. So Marie answered them. “No, Alexander the Great died two, possibly three, years ago in Babylon.”
“What about the Romans?”
“Rome owns a strip of the west coast of Italy, but not much more.” Marie stopped and thought. She wasn’t nearly as familiar with Rome in this period as she was with Greece and Egypt but, yes, this was the middle of the second Samnite War. She wasn’t sure, but she thought the battle of the Caudine Forks was either about to happen or was recent—
Never mind. “Rome is a republic of sorts, but it makes banana republics look good. Also, it doesn’t control enough territory to be of much use.”
A teenager was scrolling through his phone. “What about Carthage? Aren’t they the great sea power of the age?”
“Very little of Carthage is known. But, honestly, young man, most of what is known isn’t very complimentary. At this point, we are between the second and third of the Greek-Punic wars.”
By now there was a crowd around Marie, and the clerk at the Help Desk called her over and asked about her credentials.
☆ ☆ ☆
“Captain, we’ve found an expert,” Jane Carruthers said. “Professor Marie Easley is a professor with a specialization in the history of Ptolemaic Egypt and we are in the time of the first Ptolemy.”
“Fine, Jane. Get her up here. We need to decide what to do, and soon.”
Jane knew that better than the captain did. Even though they were limiting portions now—which might cause resentment among the passengers and crew—they were going to run out of food in no more than a fortnight. They needed a supply base and they needed it now.
☆ ☆ ☆
Jane escorted Marie toward the captain’s conference room, explaining the situation, what they knew of it, and what they needed.
“We need to go to Egypt,” Marie said, as soon as they’d entered the conference room. Everyone sitting at the table in the center looked at her.
“Please explain why,” said the man at the head of the table. He had a Scandinavian accent but it wasn’t pronounced. Marie wasn’t quite sure of the meaning of the various insignia on his uniform, but she thought this was the ship’s captain. Although she cautioned herself not to jump to conclusions. She might be influenced by the fact that he was distinguished looking and rather handsome, in a late middle-aged sort of way—the way a ship’s captain was supposed to look.
“There are several reasons,” she said, “but the most important are that Egypt is the richest province in the Macedonian empire and will be the richest in the Roman empire. It’s the breadbasket of the Mediterranean, even more than Sicily. And Sicily is in conflict at the moment between the Greeks and the Carthaginians. Also, I don’t speak Phoenician, but I may be able to get by in Macedonian Greek. Certainly, I can write in Greek, even if the spoken language has changed more than we think.”
“We can be off the coast at Alexandria in two days, Captain,” said the man sitting next to him, who was looking at his computer screen. There were coffee cups scattered across the table, and the internal lights made the windows night black. “Fuel isn’t a problem. We were just loading up and the Reliance filled our tanks to capacity. Water isn’t a problem, either. We can purify what we need as long as we have fuel, but food will become an issue.”
The one he’d addressed as “Captain” nodded, then smiled at Marie and gestured toward an empty chair. “Please, Professor Easley, have a seat. Before we go any further, some introductions are in order. I am Lars Floden, the captain of this ship. This fellow”—he nodded toward the man who had just spoken—“is Staff Captain Anders Dahl. My executive officer, if this were a naval vessel. Next to him is our environmental compliance officer, Dag Jakobsen.”
Now he nodded toward a woman seated at the far end of the ta
ble. “That is our chief purser, Eleanor Kinney. Who, judging from the way she is fidgeting, has something urgent on her mind.”
He said that in the sort of relaxed, good-humored way that Marie recognized as the mark of a capable team leader. She relaxed a little and slid into the seat he’d indicated. Having an effective ship’s captain would be critical in the situation they were in.
As soon as she sat down, Kinney spoke. Her accent was American—from somewhere on the east coast, Marie guessed. Not New York or Boston, though.
“That still leaves the question of how we’re going to pay for it,” the chief purser said. “It’s not like we can pull out the ship’s credit card and charge it to the company account.”
“Good point, Eleanor,” said Floden. “What do we have that we can afford to sell? We need an inventory of all goods owned by all the shops on the ship. Also ship’s stores. Nothing irreplaceable if we can avoid it. What can we make in the machine shops?”
“We can probably restock the ship once, maybe twice, out of the jewelry onboard. But that’s not a renewable resource,” Eleanor said. “The same thing is true of the fabrics on the ship but, again, it’s not a renewable resource.”
“Maybe not, but the laundry is. We can wash local fabrics. I don’t know how much of a market there will be for that, but it’s something.”
“Wait a moment, Captain,” Marie said. “You are assuming that these are civilized people.”
“Well, of course. I mean, Aristotle was Alexander’s tutor.”
Marie opened her mouth, then she closed it. Opened it again. “Alexander the Great truly was great for his time. He had a wide view of humanity, one that included not only his native tribe, but Persians and other Greeks as well. But Alexander was an exception. As much of an exception for his time as Martin Luther King, Junior, was for his. And Alexander would be tried for war crimes in our century. Murder, rapine, slavery, brutalization, theft by force of arms—all these things are considered perfectly acceptable, even honorable, behavior in this day and age. Failure to kill your enemies is considered insane weakness.
“In the years after Alexander’s death, every single member of his family was murdered. Some of them quite brutally, and often killed by other members of the family. His mother Olympias killed his half-brother, Philip III, and forced Philip’s teenage wife Eurydice to commit suicide. Well, will kill. It hasn’t happened yet. Alexander’s wife, Roxane, had his other two wives killed within a week of his death, and she was later murdered herself, along with his only legitimate son, Alexander IV. Of the roughly two dozen top military commanders who launched the decades-long civil war that followed Alexander’s death, only three survived—Seleucus, Antigonus—not the first one, called ‘the One-Eyed,’ but his grandson—and Ptolemy. And Ptolemy, perhaps the sanest of his generals, founded a line of monarchs where incest was not just allowed, but required.”
She looked around the table. “We have arrived in the historical period known as ‘the Age of the Diadochi.’ That’s a Greek term that means ‘successors.’ Have any of you seen the TV series Game of Thrones?”
Anders shook his head; Floden and Kinney nodded.
“Well, you can think of the Age of the Diadochi as Game of Thrones on steroids. Captain Floden, these are not civilized people we will be dealing with. I can say with a high degree of certainty that the only civilized people on the planet are on board this ship. And I am actually an admirer of Alexander and Ptolemy, if you take them within their context. Further, we are just at the beginning of the wars of the Diadochi. The political and military situation of the eastern Mediterranean and the Middle East is out of control right now, rudderless because Alexander was the rudder, the center that held everything together. As brutal and ruthless as the people of this era were in ordinary times, they will be even less civilized now.”
She moved her finger in a circle, indicating her surroundings. “They will attempt to take this ship by force of arms and failing that, by treachery. Any other course would be rank insanity by the standards of the time.”
Floden took a deep breath and let it out. “What do you recommend then, Professor Easley? Should we go back to the island? Should we head for America? Understand, we will be out of food by the time we get there, but we can get there.”
“No. We will have to deal with Egypt. It’s probably the most civilized place on Earth. But deal with them with guns out and armed, and with one hand on your wallet.”
Floden made a face. “Professor Easley—”
“Call me Marie, please.” She smiled. “You’ll wear yourself out if you plant ‘professor’ in front of my name every time we talk.”
He returned the smile. “Marie, then.” He made no reciprocal offer but Marie wasn’t offended. There were good reasons to keep calling a commander by his title in a situation like this. Her title just got in the way.
“This is not a warship, Marie. We have a total of twenty pistols locked in a safe,” Floden said.
“Well, bring them out and have the security people start wearing them,” Marie said. “And see if you can get them some swords and armor too. Something that the Greeks and Egyptians will recognize as weapons. Understand me, Captain, this ship is worth fighting a war for. Worth risking a thousand men in a foolish charge, if there is one chance in fifty of taking it.”
“Come now, Prof—ah, Marie. I know that we are…” Anders Dahl’s voice trailed off as he ran out of the right words to say what he wanted to convey.
Marie could make a good guess at what that was. However advanced their technology, they were only five thousand people and only one ship. Granted, it was the biggest and best ship in the world, but still only one. That had to put a hard limit on its value. She understood, and even sort of wished the staff captain was right. Instead, she shook her head.
“No, Staff Captain Dahl. If any king in this world could, he would trade his capital city for this ship without a moment’s hesitation. Babylon, Memphis, Athens—all of them together don’t represent so much wealth, in machines, in knowledge, even in direct ability to exert power. Pack them to the deck heads and you can put an army of twenty thousand men on any coast, anywhere in the world, in days or, at most, weeks.”
“We’ll run out of fuel,” Anders started, unwilling, or perhaps unable, to give up his point.
“We have the new flex fuel engines, sir,” Dag Jakobsen said. “They were designed to be environmentally friendly, but in our situation they mean we can burn just about anything liquid. Alcohol, crude oil…if it’s liquid and it burns, we can use it.
“Our best bet is crude oil. It’s not the most environmentally sensitive choice, but under the circumstances, it has the best combination of energy density and availability.”
“Are you sure of that, Dag?” the captain asked. “I agree about energy density, but availability? Wouldn’t it be easier to just use alcohol? The Egyptians have been brewing beer for centuries.”
“Sure. But beer doesn’t burn. That takes a much more concentrated form of alcohol. We would have to introduce large-scale distillation and that’s effectively a new industry. I’ve been digging into the computers. Back in the eighteen fifties, they drilled a producing well in Trinidad that was something like two hundred fifty feet deep. And some in Wisconsin that were as little as fifty feet deep. I don’t know where we’re going to get it. They may even have it around here, but the cheapest way to get fuel is to drill a well. And, at least for the well in Trinidad, we have grid coordinates. We can fabricate a drilling rig in the ship’s shops onboard a lot easier than we can fabricate a whole distilling industry. I looked at Google maps. We know pretty close to right where to dig in Trinidad.”
“Write me up a report, Dag. Once we have stocked up on food, we might find it necessary to cross the Atlantic and set up some sort of a base. Meanwhile, for right now, I think we have to take Professor Easley’s advice. We’ll head for Egypt.”
☆ ☆ ☆
Rabbi Benyamin Abrahamson sat on the loveseat i
n his cabin and prayed. He recited from the Torah under his breath as he tried to wrap his mind around the news. God had sent them back to this time. A time that some scholars insisted included the next best thing to polytheism in Judaism. It wasn’t the time of Moses, but Moses was closer to them in time than was the modern world. Even Abraham was closer to them than the world they had left.
What did God want of him to put him here?
☆ ☆ ☆
Lawrence Hewell, a Baptist minister, was having a similar reaction, if one that was perhaps more emotionally confusing. “Dear Lord! Father in Heaven, why have you sent me into this wilderness? Not just among the heathen, but to a time when the entire world was heathen! A time before our blessed savior had come among us to offer himself in sacrifice.”
Lawrence wasn’t mumbling. It was closer to a wail of despair. Close enough to a wail, in fact, that someone in the next cabin banged on the wall and a woman’s voice shouted, “Would you mind holding off on your spiritual crisis till we’ve gone to dinner?”
Even here on this ship, where at least at this moment the only Christians in the world are! Lawrence thought. Even here, calling on the Lord brings the wrath of the unrighteous! Is that why God brought me here? To be John the Baptist? Three hundred years early? To prepare the way?
☆ ☆ ☆
In his quarters below decks, Yaseen Ali prepared to pray and stopped. Mecca was that way. He had an app on his phone that used the ship’s net to provide the direction and the app was working again. The problem was that the Kaaba wasn’t there yet, or if it was, it was the altar to a pagan god. The focal point for prayer had, for the first thirteen years of Islam, been the Noble Sanctuary, the temple of Jews in Jerusalem. Allah had moved it in the middle of prayers. Yaseen had always assumed that the move was because Allah was angry with the Jews. Allah, not Muhammad, later politics, or later mullahs. Allah. The Jews had rejected the teachings of Christ and then they rejected the teachings of Muhammad and Allah had had enough. So Yaseen had believed—no, known, with confidence and comfort in his certainty. That wasn’t the problem. The problem was that the transfer of the Kaaba had happened at a certain very specific time. Seventeen months after Muhammad had taken his followers to Medina. During noon prayers on February 11, 624 of the Common Era. Nine hundred forty-two years from now.