Debt of Ages

Debt of Ages by Steve White Page B

Book: Debt of Ages by Steve White Read Free Book Online
Authors: Steve White
Tags: Science-Fiction
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visited us should make their common humanity obvious."
    "Oh, yeah," Sarnac temporized. "This visitor you mentioned. How can it be possible for him to be in our reality?"
    "Why don't we let him explain that?" Tylar beamed.
    "Huh? You mean he's here now?"
    "Quite. I thought a little preparation would be in order before letting you meet him, so I asked him to wait." He drained his wineglass and rose to his feet. "Shall we go?"

Chapter Three
    Andreas Ducas was thirtyish, olive-complexioned, regular-featured, solidly-built, clad in a utilitarian one-piece garment on loan from Tylar. As he rose to greet them in the lakeside pavilion, Sarnac couldn't avoid the irrational feeling that someone from the future of an alternate timeline ought to have something just a little bit out of the ordinary in his appearance. But Andreas didn't.
    Nor was there anything remarkable about the fact that he had been born on Alpha Centauri A III. "We've known for some time that there was a planet with water and free oxygen at Alpha Centauri," Sarnac explained to him after the introductions were complete. "But since there's no displacement point there . . . uh, are you familiar with displacement points?"
    Andreas nodded—up and down for affirmation, Sarnac noted with relief; he'd once tried to communicate with a Bulgarian. "Yes, Tylar has explained the concept to me." He spoke in the fifth-century military Latin that was the only language they had in common. He had acquired it courtesy of the same kind of implant which had, fifteen years before, conferred it on Sarnac. Tylar had decided against cluttering his mind with unnecessary languages like Standard International English. "It accounted for what happened almost three centuries before my time. But continue, Admiral Sarnac."
    " 'Robert,' please. Well, until fifteen years ago that was the only means of interstellar travel available to us. Then we acquired the continuous-displacement drive from the Raehaniv . . . uh . . ."
    "Yes," Andreas smiled encouragingly. "Tylar explained about them too. And about the drive."
    "Then you know it freed us from dependence on displacement points. There's now a thriving infant colony on your planet . . . or what is, or will be, your planet in your reality." Sarnac's head was starting to throb again.
    "Yes," Tylar put in. "It will be quite an important place by the twenty-ninth century. We'll have a kind of listening post in the outer system, and it will . . ." He stopped and shook his head in annoyance. "Latin is even more impossible for discussions of time travel than Standard International English, you know—the same lack of several requisite tenses, including 'subjective-past,' which is what I should be using now. I'll have to use past tense. Better still, I'll let you use it, Andreas. Why don't you explain matters to Robert, starting with an overview of your history?"
    "I'll try, but as you know I'm no historian." Andreas frowned with concentration as he organized his thoughts. "Tylar has described your history to me, so I know that by the twenty-first century your Earth was engaged in interplanetary exploration. We were only up to steam pumps and black powder firearms at that time—sixteen centuries after the Restorer."
    "The Restorer?" Sarnac glanced at Artorius, who gave a rueful nod. "So, Tylar, you were right after all. . . ."
    "Yes. Instead of messy but technologically fruitful political disunity, Europe got a reunited and expanded Roman Empire which imposed a kind of . . . Byzantine Mandarinism is as good a term as any. It was as deadly to innovation as the restored Chinese Empire in the same era of both timelines. The result was as Andreas has described. Naturally, none of this affected the Korvaash Unity in any way—except that there were no Raehaniv for it to encounter, and no Raehaniv navigational data for it to capture. So its expansion in Earth's direction was somewhat slower in the years before the great realignment of the

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