Laughing Wolf (2 page)

“Has he ever had a real job?” Stephen smirked.

“Ten years ago he uncovered a temple in France. It was hidden from sight for two thousand years until he discovered its existence through an old Roman text.”

“What's a temple?”

“It's a building where people gathered and gave thanks to … they communicated with something they called gods.”

“The way we admire Reason on World Union day?”

“Yes. Something like that.”

“That sounds exciting,” he said, implying the exact opposite with his tone, “but I think we've arrived.” As if to confirm his observation, a voice announced the shuttle had docked in Toronto's Central Depot and passengers should disembark at their leisure. There was no further mention of “disinfectant protocols.”

“Nice to meet you,” Felix called to Stephen who, now that the seals on his pod had opened, was standing in the aisle and hurrying away, as if anxious to escape this talk of books and ancient temples. When he failed to answer, Felix shrugged and packed away his book.

It was the same old story. As soon as people learned about his interest in the past, they assumed he was crazy and refused to talk to him further. His father suffered from the exact same problem — apart from his wife, he didn't have any friends — and was always warning Felix that their studies of the past would lead to ridicule and isolation.

By now the shuttle was empty. With a sigh, Felix climbed to his feet, headed to an exit, and made his way into the station. As always, it was crowded with people from all over the globe, Buenos Aires, Nairobi, Jerusalem, Mecca. Moving toward a Dispersion Portal, he admired the totalium vault overhead, then let his glance drift to the lower western wall, part of which was built on the building's earliest foundations that could be dated to a time when people travelled by train. His father, too, had once mentioned a door that led to something called the subway system, a network of tunnels served by underground transport. Felix had always wanted to explore this system, but the law clearly stated that this subterranean area was strictly off limits.

He joined a lineup at the Dispersion Portal. As passengers were catabolized in the doorframe's wave of current, he thought about the
Life of Crassus
and how he had to finish it before his father arrived home …

Wait. What was that? A short distance off, a woman had stumbled — one moment she'd been walking; the next she had collapsed to the floor. Had she slipped …? No, she was lying in a motionless heap. As the crowd paused and wondered what to make of this scene — their ERR prevented them from reacting promptly — Felix started forward to offer his assistance. He'd taken just a couple of steps when two Service Units pulled up and stopped him in his tracks. Signaling that this was another Health Priority, they ordered people to keep away from the woman. What …?

The crowd was backing off. The two units had formed a stretcher between them and lifted the woman onto its surface. As they floated soundlessly toward an exit, Felix glimpsed the woman's hands: the fingertips were crimson.

The room returned to normal. With the Service Units gone, the travellers hastened to their docking ports. For his part, Felix retreated to the Portal and, moments later, was poised at the head of the line.

“Destination, please?” a voice asked politely, as the Portal's turquoise current swirled, like water on the verge of freezing over.

“Area 2, Sector 4, Building 9,” Felix answered.

“Processing,” the voice announced. Then a moment later, “Please advance.”

Felix stepped into the field. In the instant it took his atoms to be scrambled, dispatched across the city and reconfigured in the Portal outside his home, he just had time to register the thought that something was askew in their carefully ordered world.

Chapter Two

C
rassus was standing in front of his tent. He was dressed in a sculpted breastplate of silver, a helmet with a horse's crest and a blood-red cloak whose folds reached his calves. His face was stern as he eyed his legate Mummius. Ten metres away, five hundred soldiers were waiting at attention; despite their ramrod posture, they were ill at ease.

“Spartacus worsted you and your legions?”

“Yes, sir. He attacked us from two sides at once.”

“And you lost three thousand men?”

“That's correct,
imperator
.”

“And these cowards dropped their arms as they fled from the slaves?”

“Yes, sir. But with all due respect, Spartacus has beaten two other armies —”

“Silence! Our discipline is slipping and must be restored!”

Eyeing his troops, Crassus told them to muster into fifty groups of ten. With typical Roman efficiency, they organized themselves within a matter of seconds. Strolling past these ranks, Crassus selected a single man from every decade, until fifty troops stood apart from the others.

“Sir!” Mummius pleaded. “Not a decimation! It wasn't our fault …!”

“Quiet!” Crassus thundered. “Romans die before they flee! And if ordered to retreat, they never drop their arms! To instill these truths, these men must die. Maybe then the others will remember their training. Swords drawn!”

Instantly, the troops who hadn't been chosen unsheathed their swords. Their fifty friends stood motionless, intent on meeting death like Romans.

At a nod from Crassus the killing began….

“Excuse me, Felix. Might I make a suggestion?”

At the sound of Mentor's voice, Felix looked up from the
Life of Crassus
. As soon as he'd arrived home, he'd greeted Mentor, “purified” himself in an ultraviolet scan and settled at a table to finish studying for his lesson. He still had thirteen chapters to go.

“Of course you can, Mentor.”

“According to my sensors, you are low on protein.”

“I am a little hungry. I wouldn't mind a fruit shake, please.”

“My thoughts exactly. Processing time, forty-five seconds.”

Felix smiled as Mentor's circuitry hummed. The sound brought back a host of happy memories. Mentor was a 3L Domestic System and had been installed in the house when Felix had been born. His father hadn't wanted a machine to tend his son, but had soon agreed that Mentor was a marvel, feeding Felix, guarding him, and teaching him to speak. Over the years new versions had appeared on the market, ones with many more features than Mentor, but Felix had refused to replace his friend. “Mentor's part of the family,” he'd insisted, and his parents had agreed to hang onto this system.

“Here is your shake,” Mentor spoke, producing the drink from a nearby dispenser. Seating himself in the kitchen, Felix sipped his drink.

“Thank you, Mentor. It's delicious as always.”

“Did you have an interesting day?”

“I studied several temples in the Roman Forum.”

“After you have read with your father, we must go over some physics.”

“Fine, Mentor, fine. By the way, a man fell ill on the shuttle home and was picked up by a Medevac. And a woman collapsed in the Toronto depot.”

“That is unusual. I hope these events did not prove too upsetting.”

“No, well, I don't know. I hope those people are okay.”

That said, Felix finished his shake and placed the glass in Mentor's hygiene recess. As he climbed to his feet, Mentor sterilized the cup and cleaned the counter with an ultraviolet “burst.”

“Have you viewed your mother's message?” the computer asked.

“Not yet. I was intending to watch it when my father comes home.”

“My records reveal your father viewed it at work.”

“Oh. In that case, I'll look at it now.”

Felix entered the living room and approached a flashing Holo-port. Moments later, light cascaded from sixteen lasers and assumed the shape of his mother's lean features. Her face displayed its usual animation and Felix grinned as the hologram began to speak. As always happened when he viewed such recordings, he shivered at the thought that she was standing on Jupiter's moon, Ganymede.

“Hello, my sweets,” the hologram spoke. “I would have called sooner but the interference is terrible. We've also had some problems with the units — the oxygen leads are inefficient — but have managed at last to bring them on line. We now have fifty portables up and the colony's impressive, if I say so myself.”

Felix's heart surged. He was proud of his mother. As the chief engineer for CosmoComm, a company that specialized in off-world projects, she was always travelling to distant regions, Mars, Deimos, the moon, and Ganymede, to ensure new portables were properly installed. Before her departure they'd toured the Clavius observatory, home to the earth's biggest space telescope. Studying a screen that had projected scenes of Ganymede's surface, they'd detected a tiny cluster of lights, from the outpost erected by the region's first explorers. Barely able to control her excitement, she had revealed that she loved to construct portables because they formed the foundations for future cities and would spread human life even farther afield.

“Apart from the units, there's not much else to report,” she went on. “No, wait. Two days ago we were struck by a comet. It shook the moon's surface and blasted a crater over two miles wide. But other than that, my routines are the same. I miss you badly and can't wait to return. I'm getting tired of the same old view. Here, let me adjust the camera so you can see for yourself.”

His mother's face vanished and an alien landscape took shape. In the foreground was a plain of ice, with a brown hue due to the atmosphere's ions. In the distance were hulking crags of rock, the result of prehistoric crater collisions: their rough-hewn peaks craned up to the sky, desperate to catch a glimpse of the sun, which wobbled into view once a week for three hours. Of course there wasn't any greenery present — no trees, no shrubs, not a single blade of grass. And because there was a total absence of wind, everything was preternaturally still, as if Felix were looking at a photograph or painting.

Jupiter was hovering above this landscape, seemingly within arm's reach of its moon. It was … vast. At one stage the camera was pointed straight at the planet and its bulk took up nine-tenths of the sky. Like its moon, it was beautiful but forbidding.

“Lonely, isn't it?” she said, appearing again, “And do you know what the earth looks like from here? It's no different from one of a billion stars. I sometimes find it hard to believe that on a tiny speck of light like that there are oceans, lakes, flowers, birds, trees, buildings, and crowds of people.”

Felix nodded and was reminded, of all things, of his father's place of work. The building contained millions of books on shelves that reached right up to the ceiling's rafters. Exploring its aisles, he imagined each volume, with its collection of ideas, represented a world in miniature and that the repository itself was a universe …

“On a more cheerful note,” she added, “My job here will be finished in a month. The trip home will take at least two weeks — I'll be transferring twice, on Mars and Deimos — but in six weeks time we'll be together.

I can't wait —”

Her face dissolved and reassembled, like a pond whose surface has been broken by a pebble.

“Oh dear,” she said. “The interference is increasing. I'd better say goodbye before the signal disappears. By the way, the disruption will be bad for awhile, so I might not call for the next three weeks. Take care, both of you. I love you with all —”

The hologram ended before she finished her sentence.

Felix glanced outside the living-room window. It afforded him a view of the city's downtown region, with its mile-high skyscrapers whose totalium finish reflected the afternoon light. Strange to say, he was reminded of the ruins in the Roman Forum. Decrepit piles of brick and marble, the temples, basilicas, and pockmarked arches had at one time convinced each ancient Roman that his empire and wealth would endure forever. And now? The city's aqueducts, roads, religion, buildings, and poems were long forgotten.

“You are frowning. If the sun is bothering you, I can tint the window.”

“That's okay, Mentor. I'm enjoying the view.”

“It is very fine.”

“Populations think their ways will last forever. But I bet these buildings will vanish one day, like the Parthenon, the pyramids, or the Coliseum.”

“A totalium structure should last eight hundred and sixty-two years on average.”

“That's not what I mean. I'm saying we don't care about the people before us. A hundred years from now, who'll remember we existed?”

“Forgive me, Felix. I have not been programmed to address such feelings.”

“Never mind. It's my mother's message. They always turn me inside out.”

“You should sit outside until your father arrives. The tranquility will you do good.”

“That's a fine idea, Mentor. I'll follow your suggestion.”

Retrieving the
Life of Crassus
, Felix approached a door, which Mentor swiftly opened. Outside was a spiral staircase that led into a well-trimmed garden. As he stared into the greenery below, Felix was thinking that he'd lied to Mentor. His mother's call didn't bother him so much as the collapse of those two people that day. His instincts told him something odd was going on.

Still, he had his lesson to think of. Descending the stairs, he put his worries aside and pretended he was entering the distant past.

Crassus was standing in the thick of his army, forty thousand men, all told. They were in Assyria, in an empty plain, with the nearest source of water some ten miles distant. A small Parthian army crowned the hills before him. An hour ago their ranks had been thicker and their archers had fired constant volleys of arrows, pinning every Roman down and preventing battle at close quarters. Finally his son had led a cavalry charge and, in true Roman fashion, beaten the enemy back. Proud of his son's manliness, Crassus was awaiting his return.