Timeline Wars 03 Caesar's Bicycle by John Barnes

Author:John Barnes [Barnes, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781497621602
Publisher: Open Road Media Sci-Fi & Fantasy
Published: 0101-01-01T00:00:00+00:00

10

At least he was slow about getting around to things the next morning as well, so there was a lot of time to just hang out. It might have been tough on the nerves, but on the other hand we didn’t have too much to fear just then, so we played some silly word games, talked about nothing, and generally enjoyed being bored in comfort. Or at least Paula, Chrys, and I did. People in violent occupations learn to enjoy boredom.

Porter was sulking. Teenagers, even when they know there’s violence around, don’t appreciate boredom enough.

We had played “Categories” about one time too many, and we were actually starting to wonder if we should ask the guards for a midday meal when the summons came, and when we got there we discovered we were all supposed to stretch out at the table for Roman-style dining.

There was the expectable vast load of pickled fish and the heavy flat bread; the soup was good, the wine was plentiful, and Caesar seemed mainly interested in talking about the political structure of ATN, and about the people who headed it, and why exactly they might object to one person or support another.

This was making me slightly more uncomfortable than before, but I think I did a decent job of hiding it. It would have been one thing if he had given me the creeps, but although I had certainly seen that he could be cruel and arbitrary, nothing about him was really bothering or repelling me. Which was what the problem was—thus far Caesar had done nothing that would even remotely make me think of shooting him.

Of course he was a first-class jerk, but if I went around shooting all of those, I’d never have to leave my own timeline, and I’d still never get finished. And then again orders were orders … but they hadn’t told me where or when to shoot him. In fact Chief Tribune Scipio had told me that there was a certain amount of historical confusion about the whole thing and thus they figured it would be better not to tell me, because I could easily end up staking out a place where it didn’t happen.

When he had told me that, my judgment had been that he was lying. But he had told me in front of General Malecela, and when I tried to talk to Malecela about it later, Malecela had strongly discouraged the question.

Now I wondered why, and more than that, I wished I had extorted everything they knew from Scipio and Malecela—because I was sure that was much more than they had told me.

And just when had I started distrusting Malecela? It had been a relief to have him show up in the timeline to which we had been carried off, but by a few days later when our party left to come here, I had already begun to wonder what was up. Whatever it was, Malecela was in on it, and something smelled really bad when

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