Rogue Emperor Read online

  At the intersections, men in togas stood talking solemnly, oblivious to the jostling crowds of slaves around them. A few looked curiously at Pierce — he was a head taller than most — but no one spoke to him. He overheard fragments of conversations, but could scarcely follow the rapid urban slang. His Latin was good, but far from colloquial. Agency personnel assigned to Rome were taught Latin based on what the Advance Survey teams had learned. The teams, composed largely of classical scholars, had studied the dialect of the upper classes; street Latin was almost another language. Pierce suspected he sounded more like a pretentious hick than a Gaulish merchant: he had the vocabulary, but the musical lilt of upper-class Latin was beyond him.

  He passed into a little square where a fountain splashed water from a bronze lion’s head. On the west side of the square was a high wall topped with sharp spikes, with trees and a brick tower beyond: the palace of the Hesperian embassy. Four foot-soldiers of the Praetorian Guard stood sentry duty outside the tall double doors of the palace gate. A two-story private house on the east side of the square was used, Pierce knew, by Domitian’s spies; they kept the embassy gates under constant observation.

  Well, they could make a note in their little waxed tablets that a Gaulish-looking man had entered the palace; perhaps in a few days they would realize he had not re-emerged. That was no concern of Pierce’s. He reached into his tunic and pulled out the medallion.

  One of the sentries intercepted him as Pierce approached.

  “I hold a pass to enter.”

  The guard glanced at the upheld medallion and shook his head.

  “No one allowed in without special permission today.”

  “I have business in the embassy.”

  “Go talk to the people in the house across the square.” The soldier waved toward the surveillance house. “If they give you a pass, you can enter. Otherwise, no.”

  Pierce paused for a second only, debating whether to force the gate. The four soldiers would be no real problem, not with his reflexes, but the repercussions would be awkward — especially today. He nodded and turned across the square, walked to the surveillance house, and tried the door. When it refused to open he thumped it. A dog barked furiously.

  “Who’s there?” someone called over the dog’s roars.

  “Alaricus Rufus, a Gaul. I need permission to enter the Hesperian embassy.”

  “Go away. No one’s allowed in there today. Orders of the Praetorian Guard.”

  Pierce pounded again, improvising. “Urgent message from the Flavian Amphitheater. The emperor’s slain.”

  “What!”

  A bolt slid back and the door opened. A sandy-haired man in a coarse tunic stood staring at him. He held a short sword with the point aimed at Pierce’s throat; the dog, looking like an underfed German shepherd, strained at the leather leash the man gripped in his other hand.

  “Who are you?”

  “I gave you my name. Where’s your commander here?”

  “Tell me who you are.”

  Pierce gave him the cold glare of an officer annoyed by an enlisted man. “Fool! Will you let me in or will you be crucified?”

  Hesitantly the man stepped back and lowered his sword. Pierce strode into the atrium beyond. A gap in the red-tiled roof, the compluvium, admitted light that reflected from the shallow pool in the center of the atrium. Through a short corridor Pierce could see more light: the garden.

  “Is he in there?”

  “He’s asleep. A little nap after cena. He’s not to be disturbed — but of course this is an exception,” the man added hastily.

  “And who else is in the house?”

  “Two other Praetorians. Some serving maids and the cook, and a couple of male slaves.”

  “Tell them nothing. Lead on.”

  The sandy-haired man guided him into the peristyle and along the colonnaded walk that rimmed it. Pierce looked about with interest. The house was large and well built, doubtless once the home of some wealthy senator or businessman who had fallen foul of Domitian. Now it was the property of the emperor, his window on the comings and goings of the mysterious Hesperians. The Praetorian surveillance team had neglected the place: the peristyle garden was weed-infested and unwatered except for a few pots where the cooks grew herbs. The walls were painted with murals that would have brought a fortune uptime on Earth, even with the recent graffiti scrawled across them by bored soldiers.

  A door stood slightly ajar; the sandy-haired man tapped timidly.

  “Master? Master? Urgent news. The emperor — ”

  “I’ll tell him myself,” Pierce interrupted. He gripped the sandy-haired man by one arm and propelled him into the room. Against the opposite wall a balding man sat up in a narrow bed. He looked at Pierce with dangerous intelligence and reached for the sword leaning against the bedstead.

  “Not so fast, friend. The emperor is dead. I’m ordered into the Hesperian embassy at once.”

  “At whose order?”

  “Need you ask?”

  Still suspicious, the balding man swung his feet to the floor.

  “I don’t trust those Hesperians for a moment. They’re not foreigners, they’re some mystery cult. Sorcerers.”

  “You may well be right. I trust them no more myself. But I have my orders. Give me a written pass, and quickly — I have no time to waste.”

  “I don’t know you, and you speak like a cursed German. Identify yourself or I’ll put you under arrest and we’ll torture your name out of you.”

  “Alaricus Rufus,” Pierce said. “I’m a Gaul, not a German. And I must be inside that accursed wall at once.” The balding man reached into a wooden box and pulled out a scrap of papyrus. With a lump of charcoal he scrawled a few letters on it, then handed it brusquely to Pierce.

  “The emperor is truly dead?”

  “I saw him die myself. Like a thunderbolt from the clear sky.”

  “The oracles were right. A thunderbolt from a clear sky.” He smiled uncertainly at Pierce. “We chose wisely, didn’t we?”

  Pierce grunted ambiguously. “I must go.”

  “In nomine patris, et filius, et spiritus sanctus”

  The farewell struck Pierce like a club. Fighting to keep the surprise from his face, Pierce turned with a choppy wave and hurried out of the room, back across the peristyle toward the door and the square and the guarded gate back to the twenty-first century.

  Two

  The cover story had been a compromise between those who wanted Rome left completely alone and those who wanted to take it over as a protectorate. One night in A.D. 94 an enormous sailing ship had appeared in the harbor at Ostia, twenty kilometers down the Tiber from the capital. The crew all spoke Latin and Greek, and informed the port officials that they were from the land of Hesperia, far to the west across the Ocean. They were descendants of Romans whose ships had been blown off course during the Punic Wars. Making landfall in a rich and unknown country, the castaways had flourished; yet they had not forgotten their Roman heritage, and always dreamed of returning to the patria, the fatherland.

  Like any embassy, the Hesperians sought a patron who could introduce them to the senate and help them negotiate. That patron would of course be the emperor himself, Domitian. When he saw what the foreigners had to offer in trade, the emperor commanded the embassy to attend him in Rome at once.

  The Hesperians had any number of useful gadgets: flashlights, bicycles, and razor blades were especially popular. They also brought new foods and spices: corn, potatoes, chili, cinnamon. Their fabrics were sometimes usefully stout and sometimes scandalously thin and transparent.

  Most important from Domitian’s point of view, the Hesperians brought enormous quantities of beautifully stamped silver coins, each with the head of one of the Hesperian praesidentes and mottos in Latin. The ambassadors were willing to pay cash for what they wanted.

  At first they had wanted mostly art, and their taste had been good: they wanted Greek works, or the very best of the Roman imitations. The empe
ror had grown rich as the intermediary in these transactions, and had sold them one of his palaces as a permanent embassy.

  The Hesperian ship sailed away a year later, and Domitian’s own ships failed to trace it to its home. Only one Roman vessel returned, with a few shivering brown-skinned slaves taken from a sweltering island far off west of the Pillars of Hercules. But a few months later the Hesperians returned with still more goods.

  They also advised the emperor that his wife and slaves were plotting against him, and supplied proof enough to oblige him to execute all the conspirators. In gratitude the emperor was happy to give the Hesperians what they next asked for: permission to take a certain small number of Roman youths back to Hesperia for advanced education. Thereafter, each ship that left Ostia for Hesperia carried a hundred more young men and women. (That had perplexed the Romans: why trouble to educate women? They would be priestesses needed for the most arcane and powerful ceremonies, the Hesperians blandly replied.)

  So far none of the young people had returned, and Domitian had had to silence a few rumormongers who warned that the Hesperians were feeding a Minotaur just as the Cretans had done with the flower of Athens’ youth. Meanwhile the empire flourished, and the emperor more than any.

  But now the emperor was dead.

  *

  The embassy was a sprawling palace set in ornate gardens and orchards covering over five hectares. Two Hesperian attendants, dressed in white linen tunics, met Pierce inside the gates. Both were short men, no taller than the average Roman but thickset and muscular.

  They didn’t know Pierce, and looked at him suspiciously. Pierce knew them very well through his Briefing.

  He stood very still and spoke quietly. Either one, unarmed, could have disabled all four of the Praetorians out on the street; together, they might even be a match for Pierce.

  “Hi, Fred. Hi, Howie. I need to see Robinetti.”

  “Who the hell are you?” asked Fred.

  “An old college buddy. Let’s go.”

  “He’s busy.”

  “Not as busy as he’s going to be. Somebody killed Domitian about an hour and a half ago.”

  The two men did not respond, but fell in on either side of Pierce to escort him down the winding path past fruit trees and an ornamental fish pond to the palace. A few gardeners, all uptimers, watched them go. Looking at the spring colors of the garden, Pierce reflected that it had been built on an ancient graveyard: beneath the beauty was old horror and corruption.

  Two more attendants at the palace doors admitted them; these two had seen Pierce on his way out two weeks earlier, and made no objection. Inside, Pierce looked appreciatively around at the polished mosaic floors and muraled walls. Maecenas himself had built this palace and its gardens during the reign of Augustus, and his taste had been excellent.

  The building had once been on the same plan as the surveillance house across the square, only on a far greater scale and with a fifteen-meter belvedere tower commanding a view of the gardens and the city beyond. Now the original plan was marred by new wings that extended almost to the far west wall of the estate.

  Pierce and his escort crossed the peristyle garden, which was adorned with fountains, fruit trees, and a life-size statue of Domitian. At a small doorway at the end of the colonnade, Fred inserted a small plastic key in the door’s electronic lock. It swung silently open, revealing a bare corridor, When the door behind them closed, another opened at the end of the corridor; beyond was the familiar glow of fluorescent lights.

  The men stepped through and sighed with the pleasure of clean, cool air that smelled of uptime. Printers hummed behind an office door, and Pierce’s enhanced hearing picked up a holotaped hockey game playing down the corridor in a recreation area. He smelled coffee, roast beef, french fries, and the lingering scent of someone’s Old Spice aftershave. A minute later he was in Pete Robinetti’s office — as windowless as every other room in the wing — and Fred and Howie had been dismissed back to their post.

  Robinetti’s hair was cropped short and brushed forward, like most Romans’, but he wore jeans and a sports shirt. He was twenty-one, Trainable of course, and intelligent as well; Trainability and brains didn’t always go together. He sat behind a beautifully inlaid table that held nothing but a few microfiches and a flickerscreen computer. Pierce politely stood until Robinetti waved him into an uncomfortable Roman chair.

  “So Domitian’s dead at last.” Robinetti shook his head and pursed his lips. “Tell me what happened.”

  Pierce did, in the elliptical manner of Trainables talking together.

  “What were you doing in the Colosseum?”

  “Absorbing local culture.”

  “I only went once.”

  “It’s an acquired taste.”

  “Pray to God you don’t acquire it. I’m serious.”

  Pierce smiled vaguely and nodded. “What’s your assessment of the situation now?”

  “Bad,” Robinetti growled. “We’re going to be crawling with people from uptime. Snooping around, upsetting the natives. This’ll really cheer up the Trajanists.” On Earth, Domitian had been succeeded by old Nerva and then by Trajan, one of the greatest of the emperors. Here Trajan was still just the general holding the German frontier, but he had his uptime supporters.

  “Can you blame them?”

  Robinetti shrugged. “Domitian wasn’t Mr. Likable.”

  “We’re not running popularity contests,” Pierce said. “He let us recruit. That made him our boy.”

  “Mr. Pierce, I don’t know you, or where you stand with the powers that be. Fairly high, I suspect. When you go through, would you please tell them for me that someone’s done us a huge favor? Now maybe we can back someone who isn’t totally bananas.”

  “I’ll be glad to pass your views on.”

  “You know how he spent his first year in power? Sitting in his palace, catching flies and stabbing them with his stylus. Did his pinhead get it, too?”

  He meant the microcephalic that Domitian kept as a pet. The boy — a young man now — had accompanied the emperor everywhere, listening vacantly to his master’s rambling monologues. “Yes. So did Domitian’s new wife and a couple of dozen other people.”

  Robinetti rubbed his palms together. “That’s too bad. Even so, this is the best chance we’ve got to bring our Rome policy into line with reality.”

  “First we need to find who killed the emperor.”

  “Of course. A T-60. God. But the important thing is to get our relationship with this culture on a sounder footing.”

  Pierce’s eyebrows lifted slightly, encouraging Robinetti to go on.

  “You were at the games; you saw what went on. This is a psychotic society, and we’re not helping it. Thousands are dying every day of curable diseases, millions are slaves, and they get their kicks out of mass sadism.”

  Pierce held up his hands, palms out. “They give us — ”

  “A few hundred kids a year, I know. Eventually, thousands. Meanwhile they’re infecting us with their vices.”

  “Camography?”

  “Among other things. Ever see any of those videotapes of the games Domitian gave last year? A big hit uptime. I ever find who made those tapes, I’ll put him in the goddamn arena. Plus I hear the Roman mysteries are even making converts on Earth.”

  “You can’t blame the Romans. We’ve got culties getting ideas from everywhere, not just here.”

  Robinetti nodded irritably. “Fine, but Rome is my desk. I want their Trainables, too, but these people deserve better than they’re getting.”

  “Agreed. I’ll pass your views on. Now, I’ve got to go through when the I-Screen comes on tonight, but I presume you’ll keep an investigation going until you find out who did this.”

  “Sure. Otherwise how could I give them a medal?” Robinetti rolled his eyes at Pierce’s pained expression. “Of course, of course we’ll investigate. But God knows how. We’ve got about a hundred base staff here, all of them with too much work, and anot
her hundred on recruiting teams. Maybe somebody heard a rumor, or knows what this oracle business is all about.”

  “You’d heard nothing about an oracle, nothing about omens?”

  “No, and that’s surprising, too. Everybody here is always seeing portents or hearing about prophecies. Domitian was sure he was going to get killed back in ‘96. All the soothsayers were predicting it, and of course we predicted it, too, but we did something to stop it. If someone was planning to kill him now, they’d probably have planted more predictions; and he would’ve got wind of them again. Then he’d have come to us asking for help.”

  “And he didn’t.”

  “Not a whisper.”

  “Any reports of knotholers?”

  “Constantly, but we haven’t caught any yet.”

  Roman art, like that of the Cro-Magnons and medieval Byzantines, was immensely popular uptime. Illegal I-Screens, called knotholes, were often opened — sometimes by would-be traders, more often by smash-and-grab teams. With the illicit trade in Roman art alone running at well over a hundred million International Federation dollars a year, knotholing was highly profitable.

  “So getting here wouldn’t be a problem.”

  “Nor getting away uptime again.”

  Pierce sighed and stood up. He was hungry. “If any illegal uptimer is found here, I want him held until we can pick him up. We’ll give him deep interrogation and get to the bottom of this.”

  Robinetti snorted. “If we catch an artlegger, he’ll probably be working for somebody in the Federation Cabinet. Or am I being too cynical?”

  “No. But if he’s working for someone in the Cabinet, we can certainly arrange a shuffle.” He extended his hand. “Thanks for your time. I’m going to go find some dinner and grab a nap before the I-Screen comes on.”

  *

  A few years before, as a boy growing up in Taos, New Mexico, Pierce had made an easy choice. The economy was collapsing. The draft had been revived, and American soldiers were dying in Venezuela and two or three other places. When he left high school he could expect to be drafted at once; if he wasn’t sent overseas, he’d be helping police some American city, making sure the food shipments weren’t ripped off too badly and sometimes chasing the private armies like the White American Brotherhood and the People’s Action Front.