The Alexander Inheritance Read online

  The transfer of the Kaaba hadn’t happened yet! Would not happen for almost a millennium, if the effect they were going to have on history didn’t change it. Did he pray facing Kaaba in Mecca or the sanctuary in Jerusalem?

  At this distance the difference was miniscule, but it was the intent that mattered. Did Allah placing him and the other modern followers of Islam in this time mean that the Jews were getting another chance, or that they were already lost?

  Islam respected the people of the book. Even Jews. But now the only people of the book were on this ship, and they were mostly Christians. Only the Jews in this time were people of the book. That decided him. For now at least, he would pray facing the temple in Jerusalem. But the comfortable certainty of his faith was missing as he prayed to Allah to guide his steps in this strange world.

  On Formentera Island

  September 16

  Mosicar looked out at the ocean where the giant ship had been and wondered. Mosicar was the owner of a village of fishermen that was only a few miles from where the giant ship had appeared. He had ordered a watch placed on it, and a little after the middle of the night, it had sailed away.

  No. That was wrong.

  There had been no sail involved, nor any oars. No means of propulsion that he could imagine, not that he could imagine anything other than the will of the gods that could move such a structure.

  Yamm must favor their endeavors, and Mosicar didn’t want such people angry at him. Still, he had obligations to the crown in Carthage, and there was—at least potentially—money to be made. The whole village was set to going through the ruins left when the dock arrived, to find anything of value.

  What they found was strange beyond imagining. Aside from the lumber and odd daub-like stuff that made up the walls, there were pipes made of a white material. There were copper wires inside the walls, that were coated in a flexible covering like leather, but fitted around the wires like skin. There were scissors made of the best steel that Mosicar had ever seen. There were books and pamphlets with strange writing on them. Mosicar thought it might be like the Latin script, but he wasn’t sure. It was almost as though they used occasional Latin letters mixed in with a different script.

  None of it made sense, but parts almost did. There were images of people, of beaches and seas, and more of the giant ships—as though the whole world was filled with them and the people that occupied them. There were pools of water on the ships on the upper decks, and that was the strangest of things, for there seemed to be deck stacked upon deck upon deck upon deck, more than any ship could carry.

  “No!” Mosicar shouted when one of the women started to throw away one of the sheets. “We throw away nothing. Collect everything and store it all in casks and amphoras. I will send a boat to Ibiza and hire a ship. This will all go to Carthage to sell at auction.” He looked around as his villagers stared at him. “You will all get a share of the profits. But don’t be too greedy. Hiring the ship will cost money.”

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  For the next few days, the villagers focused on stripping the dock and ruins of anything of any possible value. Two people were injured in collapsing buildings, and one died, but they picked the ruins clean. In doing so, they learned a large amount and made some surprisingly good guesses. They found a battery-powered flashlight and realized that the copper carried the power that produced the light. That explained much of the use of the wires in the walls of the buildings. They realized that light bulbs were light bulbs, and even managed to hook up a light bulb from a ceiling to a battery, and got it to light dimly.

  By then the boat sent to Ibiza had returned, escorted by a larger ship. Mosicar and his wife boarded the ship, along with the goods for the trip to Carthage. This was a major risk, and his wife was going along to make sure Mosicar didn’t screw it up. As a rule in Carthage and its territories, the wife was in charge of dealing with the household gods. And, more generally, the household management.

  Men were left in charge of politics and fighting.

  Queen of the Sea, en route to Egypt, approaching Carthage

  September 17

  The officer of the watch looked out at the galley off the starboard bow. It had come over the horizon from the direction of Tunis—or at least what would be Tunis in a couple of millennia—gotten one good look at the Queen, then turned tail and run for port.

  Honestly, Second Officer Adrian Scott wasn’t at all sure that he blamed them. He pulled up a camera, zoomed in, and took a quick snap. Eighteen oars on a side, a single sail that was not in use at the moment. They were making good time.

  Adrian wondered if the rowers were slaves. He wasn’t sure. He knew that some of the ancients used slaves as rowers and some used soldiers or sailors who got paid. And those were probably Carthaginians, and what Professor Easley had said last night was that very little was known about the Carthaginians, aside from the fact that the Greeks and the Romans didn’t care for them.

  It wasn’t the first ship they had seen on this watch, and probably wouldn’t be the last.

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  Lars Floden waved Al Wiley to the small table in the dining nook of his private cabin. “I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you, Congressman, but the things I absolutely had to do took precedence.” The captain was trying to be polite, but he wasn’t trying all that hard. It wasn’t as if the U.S. Congress was anything he had to worry about three hundred years before Christ was born.

  “I understand that the…urgencies, let’s call them…of command can make the long-term consequences of our actions seem to fade in importance.” Al waved at the window. “I note that we are under power and the rumor is that we are headed for Egypt. Is that true?”

  “Yes, Congressman.” Floden nodded as Wiley took his seat at the table.

  “Is that wise? Wouldn’t it have been better to stay where we were in the hope that we might return to our own time? I only ask these things, Captain, because they are the questions that the passengers are asking me.”

  “We have looked into that question, Congressman, and the answer clearly seems to be that there is no chance we will be returned. Are you familiar with what is called the Minnesota Hypothesis concerning the mysterious disasters that befell the town of Grantville in West Virginia and Alexander Correctional Center in southern Illinois?”

  Al shook his head. He knew about the disasters, of course. Everyone in America did—probably everyone in the world, outside of a few people in places like New Guinea. But he’d never studied the issue.

  “Well, I just spent a fair amount of time with two passengers—both physicists—who have a great deal of knowledge of the matter. The Hypothesis argues that the records from the Alexander disaster are impossible to explain unless an element of deliberate purpose is included in the explanation. The term ‘intelligent design’ is not used, but that is clearly what is being suggested.”

  Al’s expression must have looked skeptical because Floden shrugged his shoulders. “I have no opinion on that matter,” the captain said. “But what is relevant to us is that everything we can determine about our situation is that we have suffered something very much like what seems to have happened to Grantville and Alexander prison.”

  He gestured toward the window. “Consider two things. First, we have definitely been moved in both time and space—more than two thousand years, in terms of time; almost five thousand miles, in terms of space. Second, the…let us call it the transposition, caused almost no damage to the ship and while it did damage the docks, it resulted in only one fatality. What are the chances of that happening if the disaster that befell us did not have elements of purpose? It would be like an explosion right next to someone that caused no damage except a ringing in the ears.”

  Al frowned. “But…what purpose?”

  “I have no idea, Congressman. Neither did the authors of the Hypothesis. But it really doesn’t matter, because what is uncontestable is the third feature of the Grantville and Alexander disaster.”

 
; “Which is?”

  “Whatever happened, no one ever came back. There is no reason at all to think we would either. So, we have come to the conclusion that we have no choice but to assume that we will remain in this new universe we find ourselves in for…perpetuity, let’s call it.”

  Al grunted. “As long as we can stay alive, you mean.”

  The captain smiled thinly. “Your words, Congressman. Not mine.”

  Tug Reliance, in the Mediterranean

  September 17

  Captain Joe Kugan muttered curses. He was still in radio contact with the Queen, but they were over the horizon from him now. The Reliance could only make twelve knots, not the twenty-two that was the Queen’s most efficient cruising speed, so the Queen had left them behind. Using the Queen’s charts and the inertial compass as well as the magnetic, they followed as they could, keeping farther out to sea just to be safe.

  Meanwhile, Joe was cursing himself for a fool for having given away a full load of fuel to the Queen, based on a bill of lading that wouldn’t be good for two millennia and more.

  “Captain, sail off the port bow.”

  Joe looked up from his muttering and saw the monitor for the mast camera. What he saw was just the tip of a sail, and unless they had someone in the crow’s nest, there was no way they had seen the Reliance. “Bring us a point to starboard.” And more delay.

  Queen of the Sea, en route to Egypt

  September 17

  Dag looked at the designs and wondered. It wasn’t as though there was anything in the designs that the ship didn’t either have or at least could make, but it seemed like a lot of work to fight off a bunch of primitives who couldn’t even climb the hull without a lot of help or a lot of luck.

  He was looking at a WikiHow article on how pneumatic cannons worked and could be built. All because Marie Easley was an anal-retentive paranoid. Professor Easley had convinced Jane Carruthers, and Jane had convinced Staff Captain Anders Dahl, that they needed real weapons.

  Anders hadn’t bothered to convince. He’d simply ordered.

  “What do you think, Romi?”

  “It looks fine, Mr. Jakobsen.” Romi Clarke was grinning broadly, displaying the gap in his teeth where he had lost some in a bar fight. Romi had a partial, but it was not something they could easily replace, so he wasn’t wearing it.

  “How long?”

  “It depends. If I have first call on supplies and labor, only a couple of days. We have the piping in stores and the machine shop can turn out what we need. If it’s as we have time, it’ll take a couple of weeks.”

  “I’ll check with the staff captain, but for now treat it as when you have time.” Actually, Dag was pretty sure that the staff captain was going to want a higher priority than that, but Dag and the whole crew had a lot on their plates. They were preparing the ship for anchoring in Alexandria, Egypt, and converting the lifeboats to act as loading boats and transports while not losing their functionality as lifeboats. It was likely that this was going to be the fifth or sixth top priority on the list.

  CHAPTER 3

  Queen of the Sea, off Alexandria

  September 18

  Sixty-seven hours after the Queen of the Sea started the trip, the passengers and crew got their first view of Alexandria. Not that they could see much. It was a bit after 8:00 PM and there weren’t any electric lights in this time. As well, the famed Lighthouse of Alexandria was yet to be built. It was a work very much in progress and it was being built by hand. Lots and lots of hands. It would be dawn on the 19th before they could see much of anything.

  However, the reverse wasn’t true. The citizens of Alexandria—from Dinocrates of Rhodes and Crates of Olynthus, all the way down to the slave workers who were building the outer wall of the bay—could see the mountain of light that had moved into view and sat the better part of a mile out to sea.

  And it was a mountain of light, because the captain had made the decision that they would not try to hide the existence of their technology. Whether to hide the way it worked was another question, and one that was the subject of heated debate onboard the ship.

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  Dinocrates of Rhodes, a tall, good-looking man who normally possessed a dignified air, looked out at the device that made all his works and dreams seem little more than a child building sandcastles. Envy and awe warred in his heart, and the dignified air that he normally showed the world was notable by its absence. It wasn’t real anyway, just a mask he showed to the world. He was as much showman as architect, and compared to the people on that ship he was neither.

  “I don’t believe it,” Crates said for the third time since they had been called from their dinners to the heptastadion, a seven-stadia-long mole that connected the island of Pharos to the mainland and created the harbor at Alexandria. Crates was in part responsible for the heptastadion. He was the hydraulic engineer who was in charge of designing the sewers for Alexandria, sewers made necessary by the fact that Alexandria was being built in a swamp. He was a scholar, and at the same time, practical in his works. Dinocrates had never seen him so bereft of sense as he seemed now.

  “It is, Crates. Believe it or not, it’s there.”

  “But it can’t be. Don’t you understand? Look at the length! Look at the height! It’s not as tall as the Great Pyramid, but it’s longer. You can’t float something that big. No tree on earth is strong enough to take the stresses.”

  Dinocrates simply pointed.

  “I know,” Crates complained, “but it can’t be.”

  “Fine, it can’t be. But what are we going to do about it?”

  Crates shrugged. “Send a message to Ptolemy at Memphis.”

  Dinocrates nodded. With the signal fires the news would reach Ptolemy by morning. The satrap of Egypt would probably be here in three days. “What do we do in the meantime?”

  Crates looked at him, then back at the ship. “Whatever you do, don’t piss them off.”

  Dinocrates laughed. “I agree, but I was asking about the rest of it. There are seventeen ships in the harbor and fifty or more boats. If we don’t do something by tomorrow noon, half those ships and more than half the boats will be gone and the news is going to spread.”

  “I don’t see that there is anything we can do about that,” Crates said. “For myself, I am going to get my instruments and make some estimates of the size of that thing. But I’m not going out to it until I know more. And not in the middle of the night.”

  ☆ ☆ ☆

  Not everyone in Alexandria was so cautious. Atum Edfu slammed his hand down on the table and glared at the oar captain of his family galley. “I told you to get the men to their oars.” The room was dim, lit with oil lamps. This wasn’t Atum’s home, but his dock office. It had large unglazed windows. Atum didn’t miss glazing. It would not be invented for another four hundred years. He and his clerks worked here most days with the shutters open to let in the sea air and the light, but the office wasn’t designed for nighttime use. The dim lamps in nooks on walls filled the room with shadows, adding a spooky feel that Atum noticed no more than he noticed the lack of glazing.

  “I know, sir, but the men are afraid.”

  “Afraid? Afraid! I’ll give you afraid! Half their job is to be the family’s bodyguards at sea! And they’re afraid of a big boat?”

  Atum was a grain seller of mixed ancestry who spoke Egyptian, Greek, Carthaginian, even the language of the barbarian Latins. He looked at the ship and saw profit. Such a ship would need to feed its rowers, for he saw no sails. He didn’t see oars either, but something had to be pushing the ship, and if it wasn’t the wind, whatever it was probably needed to eat. He had calculated that the first merchant to greet them would have the advantage. So, after his first good look at the ship, he had hurried to the docks and rousted out his crew.

  Atum owned a large number of slaves that he used in loading and unloading boats in the harbor, and for farming and other jobs, but he didn’t use slaves to man the oars on the family galley. For
that he used hired rowers who were armed and could fend off pirates. Just at the moment, though, he was considering a change in policy. Slaves wouldn’t be giving him back talk.

  “Well, they will get aboard the galley and they will row me to that ship out there, or they will be looking for new jobs tomorrow morning.”

  It took him almost until midnight to get the crew on the galley, and another half an hour before he could reach the ship.

  “Ahoy!” he offered in Egyptian. Then in Carthaginian. Then in Greek. He had gone through several more languages before he got an answer in what was probably the very worst Athenian accent he had ever heard. He introduced himself in Greek and explained that he was here to trade. By now, looking up the wall of what was starting to look like iron, and hearing the magnified voice out of the ship, he was beginning to wonder if his avarice hadn’t gotten the better of his good sense. It wouldn’t be the first time, after all.

  A hole opened up in the iron wall of the ship, and a ramp was lowered to tie onto the galley. With trepidation starting to win out over greed, but pride now weighing in on greed’s side, Atum made his way up the ramp and into the ship, and was probably more scared than he had ever been in his life. It wasn’t because he was threatened. He wasn’t. There wasn’t a sword or a bow in sight, much less a spear. The men and women in strange clothing were apparently unarmed, though they wore on their belts a strange device that he thought from their gestures might be a weapon of some sort. But he only noticed those at all because his fear was making him more vigilant than usual.