Rogue Emperor Read online

  Dodging the draft was out of the question: he simply couldn’t afford the bribes. His stepfather, a highway patrolman, had been killed on duty a year earlier, and he and his mother were living on a pension barely enough for one. Pierce would have no chance for a civilian job, least of all a draft-exempted one.

  “Why don’t you try this new Training Test?” one of the school counselors had suggested. “At least if you pass, you’ll go in the service as an officer.”

  Training was new then, a half-experimental mix of drugs and electronics. It was based on a perception aptitude that usually emerged in mid-adolescence. A Train-able, once Trained, could read a closely printed page in a tenth of a second or less and recall it perfectly. About twelve percent of all people were Trainable, but if the procedure was delayed too long the opportunity vanished; by age nineteen, Trainability degenerated into an ability to speed-read, and nothing more.

  Pierce Tested out as an Alpha-18; probably not more than a couple of hundred people in the country were faster. The army took him into a basic training program that lasted six hours, and then gave him a week’s worth of graduate school. He emerged as a T-Major with many new abilities and one incapacity: he could no longer see movement in motion pictures, which now seemed like awkward slide shows.

  A Trainable and a decent computer could process enormous quantities of data, see patterns, and act quickly on the results. One girl turned five hundred dollars into a couple of million on the commodities market; a boy reviewed the total current literature on cancer and identified twelve crucial factors in carcinogenesis. But the chief function of Trainables, in those last hard years of the twentieth century, was to try to hold things together.

  The world economy was in ruins; even in the U.S., barter and robbery were the chief means of distributing wealth in most of the country. The Trainables kept things working a little better than they would have otherwise: a little more food could be grown, a few more bandits could be arrested, a few more schools kept open.

  Pierce himself had known it couldn’t last. Even with the powers he enjoyed during the Emergency, when the Constitution had been suspended and he had been the de facto ruler of Idaho and eastern Oregon, he had realized that total collapse could be only postponed.

  Then in 1998 a young graduate student at Fermilab, Richard Ishizawa, accidentally built a time machine.

  It was a hypermagnetic field, intended only to focus particle beams intensely. Instead, on the night he first turned it on in Cave 9 of the Superconducting Supercollider, the field had opened up. On the other side was a forest in the Illinois of a different world, a world in the year 1787.

  Ishizawa, a lover of the poetry of William Blake, had named his beautiful new world Beulah. After some cautious exploration, he and his colleagues secretly announced the discovery to a handful of major scientists and administrators.

  The implications were understood at once. Beulah was not Earth; interference in events on Beulah created no paradoxes on Earth. But all the resources that Earth had squandered were still there on Beulah: the same oil fields, the same gold deposits, unimaginable expanses of fertile, unpolluted soil and seas teeming with fish.

  Soon Ishizawa and others found more worlds still further back in time: Eden in the twelfth century, Ahania in the first, and others stretching back through the ice ages of prehistory to Tharmas at almost 71,000 years B.C. These chronoplanes, as they were called, eventually totaled eleven — each a clean, beautiful world ripe and empty of all but a few “endochronic” natives. At the worst moment in modern history, humanity had found an escape hatch for its starving, angry billions.

  Pierce had followed events closely, and was one of the first to learn of Ishizawa’s sudden death when he opened up a chronoplane in the future.

  This time the field had opened onto an airless world burning under the sun in a black sky. Ishizawa and everyone else in his laboratory had been sucked through to die in vacuum.

  Other researchers set up their own fields (now called I-Screens) and probed ahead to the dead world called Ulro. Before long they realized that it had suffered a catastrophic death on April 22, 2089. On that day a beam of energy had struck the Earth at the equator. For perhaps seventeen days the beam had stayed focused while the Earth revolved beneath it. The oceans had boiled away into superheated steam, and then the atmosphere itself had either been blown into space or combined with the glowing rock of the planet’s surface. Relieved of the burden of water and air, the crust was rebounding in a geological convulsion that would go on for millions of years.

  A few months later another future chronoplane was discovered. Like Ulro, Urizen was dead. Volcanic outgassing had given it a little atmosphere, and a few hardy fungi grew here and there. But the causes of its death were as unknown as those of Ulro.

  The prospect of Doomsday within a century spurred the creation of the International Federation, a world government that directed exploitation of the downtime chronoplanes while trying to find the reason for the impending disaster.

  One ground for hope was the knowledge that neither uptime world had known about the chronoplanes. On both worlds economic and social collapse in the early twenty-first century had proceeded as the Trainables had foreseen. The population had fallen in a couple of decades from six billion to one billion. The survivors lived in regimented, technically advanced societies governed by Trainables. Those societies had had no inkling of their doom.

  The phenomenon of the “Heisenberg cascade” had turned Ishizawa’s field generator into a door between worlds. The Ishizawas on Ulro and Urizen had performed their experiments, gone on to other work, and died in food riots in 2007. But on Earth a few subatomic particles had chosen to behave slightly differently; that had triggered still more variant behavior until a genuine difference evolved between Earth and the two uptime chronoplanes: the failure of a microcircuit in Ishizawa’s apparatus. Obviously such a difference would not stave off a major catastrophe like Doomsday, but at least humanity on Earth knew it was coming and could take steps.

  The IF had established the Agency for Intertemporal Development to deal with the Doomsday problem. AID supervised the migration of millions to downtime chronoplanes. Meanwhile it Tested endochronic children; those who could be Trained were moved uptime to Earth for their education. Every Trainable was needed: for research, for administration, for communications.

  Sixteen-year-old Stone Age savages were PhDs by age seventeen, and working as engineers, scientists, and synthesists. Not all wanted to go uptime; not all unTrainables wanted them to go either. Political resistance to AID policy was sometimes intense. Pierce’s job was to remove that resistance.

  He loved his work. The Agency made sure of that.

  *

  The Polymath in Eric Wigner’s office signaled that information was coming in, urgent and high priority. Wigner put it on the screen and it began to flash at him at the steady rate of ten pages per second.

  An anti-emigration riot in Singapore: ten thousand Thai refugees didn’t want to go downtime to Luvah. Some ecological congress complaining because starlings had become established in North America on Ore. An anthropologist protesting in the media that his pet Neanderthal community on Tharmas had been wiped out by Milan flu. A report from Albion that a cultie group, the Church Militant, had apparently abandoned its colony site in Yugoslavia and taken off into the woods. (Blessings in disguise, thought Wigner: the Church Militant had been a real nuisance before its deportation. Its many enemies had referred to it as “Christian Jihad.” With any luck at all, they had massacred most of themselves.) Violent demonstrations in Edmonton and Dallas by unemployed oil workers; they wouldn’t go downtime to work in the new fields, and all the oil left on Earth was too expensive to take out of the ground.

  As permanent deputy for operations, Wigner was responsible for the Agency’s handling of all these concerns and more. In a sense, these troubles were the side effects of the greatest mass migrations in history: billions of men, women, and children from score
s of nations and hundreds of cultures, moving out of the exhausted twenty-first century and back into the clean wealth of the downtime chronoplanes. Most went willingly, eager to carve out empires for themselves and to raise their children in greater prosperity than they had ever dreamed of.

  Some, like the Church Militant and many other cult groups, went under compulsion. So did most criminals.

  The International Federation, struggling to fend off Doomsday, had no time to rehabilitate or even to punish; it simply deported those who refused to cooperate, and let them take their chances in the wilds of some Ice Age chronoplane. Sometimes the results were brutal, not only for the deportees but for the poor Stone Age savages who encountered them; that was unfortunate, in Wigner’s view, but an acceptable price to preserve humanity’s future.

  “Eric, I have an override from Piggly Wiggly,” said the computer.

  Good old Jerry Pierce. Wigner leaned back and rubbed his eyes, grateful for the interruption. “Put him through, Polly.” Pierce’s face appeared on the screen: hard-faced, cheeks covered in red stubble, still in his Gaulish tunic. “Hi, old son. What’s new in Rome?”

  Pierce explained tersely.

  “An antitank missile? Who?”

  Wigner glanced around the austere office: the plain, crowded bookshelves, the Polymath computer, the Robert Bateman print of a Labrador retriever in a field of yellow summer grass.

  “Hang on a second, Jerry. Polly!”

  The cartoon figure of a little girl appeared in the lower right corner of the computer screen. She smiled at him. “Yes, Eric.”

  “Get me the Rome/Ahania files for the last six weeks, but don’t run them just yet.”

  “Sure, Eric.”

  “And copy the following conversation.”

  “I’ll be glad to.”

  “Thanks. Okay, Jerry, tell me the whole story.”

  Pierce did so. Wigner asked:

  “You were in the stadium, just killing time? What did you think of the fighting?”

  “Amateurish.” Pierce sounded annoyed. “I’ll spare you the detailed review. What’s more important is the Praetorian officer’s password.”

  “Yes, that’s very interesting. You’re lucky he didn’t want some password from you as well.”

  “Christians have no business being in the Praetorian Guard at this point, much less being involved in plots against the emperor. The last I heard, the Praetorians were solidly behind Domitian.”

  “Old son, that problem is so bizarre I propose to ignore it for the time being. We’ll get to the bottom of it, but first we’ve got to get a new emperor in position.”

  “Trajan?”

  “Don’t know who else. Ideally I’d like one of our Roman Trainables, but they’re too young and none of ‘em has the right connections to please the army. Besides, their experience with us could make them suspect.”

  “We’ll have to move fast. Whoever killed Domitian must have an agenda, and it’s not ours.”

  “This is probably true, old son. Any guesses?”

  “Rome is full of knotholers. The art trade. And carnography.”

  “Indeed.”

  “Or something completely different.”

  “Want to track it down?”

  “I’ve been Briefed and Conditioned for over two weeks. I’d like to come down and rest for a while.”

  “B&C is no fun. Trouble is, Jerry, we’re barely coping with the routine stuff, never mind assassinations. You’re on the scene; we could send you back, get some news, and take it from there. You can take along some Pentasyn to handle the B&C backlash. Shouldn’t take you more than a few days.”

  Pierce swore. Wigner looked pained.

  “All right, then, a compromise? Do a quick report for me, a situation assessment. Then catch a plane up to Geneva and get deBriefed. We’ll keep an eye on Ahania; if everything settles down, you can take a holiday. If it doesn’t, we’re all in trouble and we’ll throw you back in without even apologizing.”

  “If I go back, I’ll need more help than a bottle of pills. A Roman Trainable.”

  “You can take your pick. I’m not sure about their conditioning, however. Amazing how culture-dependent the whole process is.”

  “Are you doubting their loyalty?”

  “Let’s just say it hasn’t been tested yet. But we’d certainly set you up with a good, smart kid.”

  “All right. You’ll have your report tonight. Then I’m logging out.”

  “That’s my lad. Talk to you soon.”

  When Pierce had hung up, Wigner ordered his computer to do a voice analysis. The conclusions were as he had suspected: Pierce had been under B&C too long. Ideally he should be deBriefed and put out to pasture for six months or a year. But this was not an ideal world.

  He ran through the Rome/Ahania file: nothing. A few anti-Hesperian murmurs in the senate, the murder of a couple of Jewish scholars in Alexandria, a nasty outbreak of what was probably uptime measles in Athens and Corinth. Routine problems.

  Wigner sighed, smiled, and went back to work. Life was good.

  Three

  Wherever the International Federation established an I-Screen, it founded a Transferpoint to serve it: usually a single large building with warehouses, machine shops, offices, and apartments for those who oversaw the orderly transfer of people and material from one chronoplane to another.

  The Rome Transferpoint, like an insula, covered an entire city block, but it rose ten stories. The site of Maecenas’s estate, in the early twenty-first century, overlooked the church of Santa Maria Maggiore and an almost-depopulated city. On this crisp autumn day in 2005 the air was clear and sweet; few vehicles were about, except in the vicinity of the Transferpoint. Over half of Rome’s people had moved downtime — not to Ahania, but to much earlier chronoplanes where Italy divided the Mediterranean into two huge lakes, and snow never left the Apennines, and Sicily was a vast forest.

  Pierce prowled about in his transient’s apartment on the eighth floor, eating dried apples that tasted bad compared to those the Campanian peasant had sold him. He was showered and shaved, his sensitized skin reveling in cleanliness and stinging from every razor nick; his tunic had been exchanged for casual slacks, a cotton shirt without necktie, and a light sportcoat. Despite his comfort he was impatient and irritable.

  Wigner’s reaction to the news from Ahania had been all too typical these days: Ahanian Rome was a political embarrassment, but otherwise of no special concern. Beset with hundreds of urgent demands, AID set priorities in its own interest. Wigner could not be expected to grasp at once the significance of Domitian’s assassination.

  Still, it seemed unfair to be stuck with the job of sorting things out when he was frayed and exhausted by two weeks of B&C. The thought of going back into the stink and squalor of ancient Rome was not appealing. He had had to be deloused immediately after coming through the I-Screen.

  The phone rang. “Your cab has arrived, Signor Pierce.”

  “Grazie.” He left the apartment with relief, glad to be moving. Because of his sensory enhancement, the deliberately bland decor of the apartment bored and angered him.

  The cab was a sleek new Fiat; Pierce chatted in Croatian with the Yugoslav driver as they drove across town to the Accademia della Federazidne Intemazionale.

  “Rome is a dull place these days,” the driver said. “Just as well. Back before the Federazidne, the gunmen were everywhere. My uncle was shot by the Brigati. Now it’s all peaceful and quiet.”

  “Do you ever think of emigrating downtime?”

  “Oh, maybe — when they get things just like here. Tell me, sir, are you interested in art?”

  Pierce’s eyebrows rose a little. “Of course. I’m especially fond of classical art.”

  “I know a fellow you might like to meet. He has some statuettes from ancient Rome, you know? Erotica. Very lovely. And very cheap.”

  “I thought such stuff was illegal,” Pierce said with a chuckle. He admired the driver’s gall: after
all, his passenger was going to an Agency institution, and the Agency enforced intertemporal law.

  The cabdriver shrugged. “Legal, illegal — it’s here, it’s beautiful, someone will enjoy it. If not you, then the next fellow.”

  “Give me your phone number. Perhaps you can introduce me to your friend after I’ve run my errand to the Accademia.”

  “A pleasure.”

  At the gateway to the Accademia the cabdriver waved a cheerful farewell; Pierce waved back and turned to go through the checkpoint. Four guards in pale-blue Agency uniforms scrutinized his identification and then escorted him through the tank traps to the main door. Doubtless excessive security: the anti-Trainable riots were over a decade in the past, back in the bad old days before the I-Screen. Trainables were still unpopular, but ordinary people were too distracted to worry about them.

  A young Trainable secretary, no more than sixteen but very poised, welcomed Pierce in the marble foyer.

  “A pleasure, Mr. Pierce. Welcome to the Accademia,” he said.

  “Thank you. I believe the director knows I’m coming.”

  “Right this way.”

  The building dated to the fifteenth century, but its interior had been utterly transformed. Beyond the foyer lay a labyrinth of corridors and cubicles that reminded Pierce of the windowless wing of the Hesperian embassy. Down each corridor, at intervals of three meters, solid doors stood firmly shut. Behind them were apprentice Trainables: some developing the skills, some already using them to gain encyclopedic knowledge.

  “We are almost at the end of a Training cycle,” the secretary said quietly. “Each cohort now takes only three weeks from orientation to first assignment.”

  “Remarkable.” Pierce thought of the urban cohorts clubbing their way through the mob in the Forum; the new Trainables’ jobs would be roughly similar.