“What about you?” Dag asked.
“Why do you think I’m a Mormon?” Lacula said. “The old gods will destroy the world, but the new god, the god of Jesus and Joseph Smith, he will stop them.”
Which made as much sense as any other religion Dag had ever heard of. Dag had been raised Lutheran, but not very Lutheran, and at this point he was a committed agnostic. Something had moved the Queen of the Sea from the twenty-first century to the here and now, and he didn’t think it was an accident any more than the skipper did. That, to Dag’s mind, pretty much blew “just happened” out of the water. But, whether it was an all-powerful god or a committee of little green men, Dag didn’t have a clue.
All he did know was that he was never going to charge a fortified position with spears and not enough ladders because someone told him the gods required it.
Captain Floden looked at Lacula and finally nodded. “Mr. President, are you still determined that the Reliance should go up the Orinoco?”
“Yes, Admiral, I am. I want it packed to the deck heads with troops too, and towing a fleet of canoes to deliver those troops. One good demonstration, or year after year of pinprick raids, until one of them catches us unprepared and everyone in Fort Plymouth dies for our restraint.”
“Adrian?”
Adrian looked a little sick, but said, “He’s right, Skipper.”
Floden looked over at Dag and Roxane, at Eurydice, Philip, and Cleopatra. And everyone was in agreement. Marie Easley was looking very grim indeed, but she too nodded. The locals weren’t even hesitant.
“You have to prove your strength,” Eurydice said. “Not just the strength in your arms, but the strength in your heart, or you can never make peace.”
“What about fuel?” Floden asked, and Dag nodded. The Reliance had sold its whole load to Ptolemy. The Queen’s tanks, when full up, would take them to Europe and back, but not with that much fuel left over. If they were going to be going around the Med, picking up delegates to the convention, they were going to need extra fuel.
“That’s a problem, Skipper,” Adrian said. “It’s not the transit time that worries me, even going slow to make sure we have the depth we need. It’s all the stops as we drop off troops and burn out villages.”
“Do we…” Dag started, then stopped. Roxane was looking at him. So were Eurydice, Cleopatra and, especially, Lacula. Yes, they had to burn out the villages. Just proving they could wasn’t going to convince the locals that they had the will to do it.
“I would recommend that the Queen stay here and help with the rebuilding. Also, the university students and other passengers can be familiarized with the local products. That way the Queen will remain available in case there are difficulties.” Marie looked at Captain Floden. “Lars, about the radios? What about range limitations?”
“We can use the shortwave transmitters and atmospheric bounce, and mostly stay in contact. But shortwave is iffy. Atmospheric conditions can prevent its working. I think an hourly commo check, situation and location report. If we go twelve hours without a commo check, the Queen will go after them. But once they get upriver, it’s going to take us almost a full day—maybe even a day and a half, depending on how far upriver they are and how fast the current in the Orinoco River is.”
“Skipper,” said Adrian, “for my peace of mind make it six missed checks and you come get us. Maybe it will turn out that it was just bad weather, but all it will really mean is the passengers get a cruise up the Orinoco.”
Captain Floden nodded, and the decision was made.
Queen of the Sea, Trinidad
July 15
Epicurus watched the reciprocating steam engine operate. It wasn’t hooked up to a boiler, but to an air pump. Even so, the mechanics were clear enough.
Hamilcar grinned over at Epicurus, his oiled curly black beard shining in the artificial lights of the lab. Hamilcar had been picked up at Carthage and was a member of the upper end of their trading class. “A useful device, I grant, but not nearly so flexible as a slave.”
Epicurus found himself smiling back. Partly it was because he realized that Hamilcar was just teasing him. Not that the Carthaginian didn’t mean what he was saying, but he was open at least to the possibility he might be wrong. Hamilcar was what the ship people would call amoral, and what a Carthaginian called practical. No, that wasn’t entirely true. Hamilcar had a religious respect for contracts. What he didn’t have was any belief in innate good or innate evil.
Epicurus, along with reading all of his own works that had survived and the commentaries on them, was finding the whole issue of philosophy more complicated than he had thought. But he liked Hamilcar because he wasn’t what Mike Watson called a “superior sumbitch,” as so many of the Greek philosophers were, justifying slavery as necessary to allow the better people the time to dedicate to the public good and social duties.
“I still say that Oscar Wilde’s quote precludes slavery. ‘Selfishness is not living as one wishes to live, it is asking others to live as one wishes to live.’”
“Then you should not indulge in slavery. But doesn’t the same quote preclude you from requiring my agreement? In any event, as a Carthaginian I prefer Wilde’s remark that anyone who lives within their means suffers from a lack of imagination.”
Epicurus shot him the finger, a gesture he had learned on the Queen of the Sea and Hamilcar laughed.
Like the gesture, the language they were using came from the ship people also. They called it “English,” although Epicurus had been told by the woman scholar Marie Easley that by now the language had so many new loan words and grammatical changes that it was definitely a new dialect and she wouldn’t be surprised if in a century or two it became a brand new language of its own.
The university at sea was proving a very interesting place. There were Latins, Carthaginians, Greeks of all sorts, Egyptians, Jews and Canaanites, none of them in a position to impose their will on the others. And the issue of slavery had become a main focus of the debate. In response to the ship people’s abhorrence of slavery, many of the locals—people from this time—had taken the opposing view and started justifying slavery as a natural and just institution. And they were good at their justifications, good enough to reduce some of the ship people to gibbering fury. Especially when they did basically what Hamilcar had just done and used the ship people’s justifications of capitalism as justification for slavery. The notion that the better, more capable, people would rise to the top of such a system also implied that the worse, less capable people should be allowed to sink to the bottom into “that state of servitude that their natures assign them to.”
☆ ☆ ☆
Across the lab, Julius Crassus looked at the raining crystals of casein in a chemical experiment and saw a future of wealth, only dimmed a little by the fact that this knowledge wasn’t exclusively his. He had enough influence that he could probably get an exclusive grant to make the stuff, at least in that part of Italy that Rome controlled. All he had to worry about was the damn Carthaginians and their ships. Julius Crassus was uninterested in the debate over slavery, save that he wasn’t going to give up his.
☆ ☆ ☆
“Yes, it does happen, but not nearly as often as you seem…” Hamilcar paused to let the noise of the strike roll over them. They were in the Hoypoloi Lounge and the two lane bowling alley was occupied. “…to think.”
“Once is too often,” Moses Wilson said.
“Of course, it is. Which is why you refused to send the Reliance on a punitive expedition to kill children on the Orinoco River. Oh, but wait! You did send the expedition, and you personally were cheering when they left.”
They were talking about the practice of child sacrifice, which Hamilcar didn’t like either. But the self-righteousness of the ship people could, as they would say, “get under your skin.”
“It’s not the same,” Moses insisted.
“No, it’s not. The gods require it of us. You’re doing it on your own. For mere politic
al gain.”
Moses sputtered a moment but said, “God doesn’t require human sacrifice.”
“Maybe not in the twenty-first century that you came from. And even then it’s more that he doesn’t require them directly than that he doesn’t require them. Considering the people killed in his name according to your histories—” Hamilcar pulled himself back from what Marie Easley called debate mode and held up a hand. “I don’t approve of the practice myself, and as I tried to say before, it’s not nearly as common as you seem to think. It started out as a way of making it easier for the parents of children who died naturally to cope, saying the gods blessed a family that lost a child. But we are a merchant people and somehow it changed. If the gods bless the family when they take a child, how much more will they bless a family and how much wider will the blessing spread if the family willingly gives up the child?
“And when a drought or a plague or a war happens, well, people get desperate and require greater sacrifices of their neighbors. Most of the time it isn’t child sacrifice. It’s children that the gods have chosen to take early and so they are cremated and put in urns in the playground of the dead. That’s a poor translation, but it’s a type of cemetery for children to reflect a special sort of heaven for the children. Ice cream and candy and never a bellyache. The actual sacrificing only happens when there is something dire going on,” Hamilcar insisted.
That was mostly true, though some of the great houses adopted slave children and sacrificed them to get extra blessings. But Hamilcar decided not to mention that part, though he didn’t doubt some of the Greeks would point it out.
☆ ☆ ☆
So it went. Not just across the lab, but across the ship, as students of the Queen of the Sea university learned to make plastics and laws, steam engines and plays, math and science, theology, English, Greek, and Phoenician…the list went on.
Reliance, Gulf of Paria
August 11
Adrian looked at Fort Plymouth with eyes considerably older and colder than they had been just weeks earlier. Also, filled with a profound gratitude to be back among at least nominally civilized people. The things he had seen on both sides of the punitive expedition up the Orinoco River would be giving him nightmares for a long time, probably the rest of his life.
The Queen of the Sea blew its air horn in welcome. And the Reliance, now a warship in truth, fired a blank cannon round in response.
“Message from the Queen, Captain,” said Pierre Minuet. Pierre was one of the retired military who had volunteered to go on the expedition, and was now the radio operator because he had broken his right arm a week into the mission. “They say that since we’re here, they are heading out, and they will see us in Alexandria.”
CHAPTER 27
Queen of the Sea, Straits of Gibraltar
August 18
The passengers were having a party. It was a tradition of the ship. Each time they passed the Pillars of Hercules, they had a party. The type of party varied with the passengers and off-duty crew involved, but there were ship people traditions about crossing the equator or the international date line or passing through the Pillars of Hercules. Since The Event, the Queen hadn’t done the equator or the date line, but this would be their fourth time through the straits. They deserved a party.
Allison Gouch showed Captain Floden the bottle, which was a piece of theater because Lars Floden was by preference a beer man, not a wine snob. “Whatever you think, Allison.”
“Oh, bring him a beer,” Marie Easley said. “No reason to put on the act on my account. On the other hand, what have you got?”
“It’s a passable Persian wine we picked up in Alexandria last trip,” Allison said. “A bit of a fruity tone and a little smoke.”
Marie Easley was a wine snob. Connoisseur, she would call it. Lars smiled at the way the scholar was fitting in with the crew. Then he looked at her, and his smile warmed. The respect he had felt for her from the outset had developed into something more since, although neither he nor Marie was ready to come to any conclusions yet as to exactly what that “something more” would wind up being. For a certainty, though, it was nice not to wake up alone every morning.
He turned his thoughts back to business. “What is the political situation likely to be?”
“I’m not sure. The women do play a significant role in the politics, but almost nothing of them—with the exception of Olympias, Roxane, and Eurydice—is recorded. Even Philip’s mother, Philinna, isn’t recorded beyond her name. Nor any of the wives of Antipater. Their influence, though often behind the scenes, is powerful. At least two of the wars of the successors are, from what Roxane and Cleopatra tell me, at least in part caused by cat fights between the wives and/or girlfriends of the successors in question.”
“Which ones?” Lars asked curiously.
“Cassander and Polyperchon. Cassander’s sister, Nicaea, hated Polyperchon’s wife with a passion. Something from when Nicaea was a girl. So when, in that other history, Antipater gave the regency to Polyperchon, it’s a safe bet—according to Cleo—that Nicaea would have encouraged Cassander to rebel.”
“I thought it was just because he’s a conniving little creep.” Lars Floden had lived and worked among Americans for decades now, and their expressions were insidious.
“Well, he is. At least according to Eurydice and Roxane. But Cleopatra isn’t as convinced. Cassander was Antipater’s aide and assistant, and did most of the day-to-day parts of Antipater’s job. What he isn’t, is personally courageous. And the Macedonians, even more than the rest of the locals, put personal courage—or perhaps personal viciousness—as their top virtue. That’s why Dag impressed them so much. When he tossed that grenade to Kleitos, he demonstrated not just personal courage, but a willingness to kill that impressed the Macedonians a lot.”
Lars shook his head. “I can follow that logic—my ancestry raising its atavistic head, I suppose—but only with difficulty.”
Marie gave his forearm an affectionate little squeeze. “We’re doing rather well, I think. Much better than I would have projected in the days right after The Event. Any semblance of a democratic and egalitarian society is still a mist in the future, but we have accomplished two critical things.”
“And what are they, as you see them?”
“First, we’re playing a big role in keeping Alexander’s empire from shattering into pieces. That makes a difference, Lars, it really does. Not only does it mean the chaos and bloodshed isn’t what it would have been without us, but it also means that any social and cultural advances we foster get spread rapidly.”
He nodded. “Yes, I can see that. And I suppose the second critical accomplishment you would point to is that by turning the Queen into the world’s greatest university we are driving those advances forward.”
She smiled widely. “Oh, but it’s not just a university, Lars! The Queen is also the world’s greatest safe house—no, let’s call it the world’s greatest time-out for over-aged and way-too-powerful children. That’s possibly the greatest role we’re playing in keeping the empire intact. Whenever one of the major players feels too threatened, they can come on board and relax instead of lashing out at their enemies.”
Captain Floden laughed, then. “In other words, I’m still a cruise ship captain. Making people whose heads and wallets are too big feel that they’re properly appreciated.”
“Well…Yes. Except these people spill blood when they don’t feel appreciated, instead of cutting the tip.”
☆ ☆ ☆
Dag leaned over and kissed Roxane. She kissed him back while Alexander IV watched. Dag might have had a bit too much to drink, but this had been coming since the first time he saw her. Roxane kissed him back vigorously, which surprised him.
“Why are you kissing Mommy?” The king didn’t sound upset, just curious.
“I just wanted to,” Dag said.
“I think it’s time for you to go to bed,” Roxane said to her son.
“No. Don’t want to
.” There was a short, considering pause, like the king was marshaling his arguments. “It’s a party.”
Alexander pointed at someone who was poking at the food on a table she could barely reach, and made what he obviously considered the clinching argument. “Her mommy isn’t making Dorothy go to bed and she’s not even a princess.”
Dag laughed. He couldn’t help it. Which got him a glare from Roxane. “There will be time,” he offered. “Let’s let him watch the fireworks.”
The Queen had fireworks again, a side effect of the New America armaments industry. Also useful, in the captain’s opinion, to impress the locals.
At the request of the Carthaginians, the first stop this trip was to be Formentera Island, where they were assured the locals had repaired the docks. That was just under four hundred miles from the Straits of Gibraltar. The Queen would be arriving there tomorrow afternoon.
“Plenty of time,” Dag said again, and hugged Roxane to him.
☆ ☆ ☆
In another part of the ship, Philip III of Macedonia managed, with great difficulty, to put an arm around his teenaged wife. She stiffened for a moment then leaned into him, which almost made him pull back.
Touching still wasn’t something he was comfortable with, but it was something he knew he had to learn to do. And in a strange way, it was something he wanted, even though it terrified him. He had always wanted it, even when he was a child, but he had been unable to stand being touched. Unable to trust the feelings it engendered.
“It’s still hard for me, Eurydice, but I am learning.”
“I know, Philip,” Eurydice agreed. “You are getting better.” She hugged him back, hard. That was another thing that they had learned since the ship people came. It was the soft, gentle touch that made him twitch away, not the strong touch.
Eurydice hugged Philip and wondered if he would ever be ready for the more intimate contact that true marriage required. But this was one issue—perhaps the only issue—over which she was prepared to be patient and bide her time.