On the Oceans of Eternity by S. M. Stirling Read Free Book Online

ready to turn to liquid jelly at the slightest quiver, every-damn-thing was so stable that nobody noticed until they checked the star patterns. That and the rest of the world being 1250 B.C.’s. Accidents just don’t happen like that.”
    “Well, chunks of land just don’t get displaced three millennia, either,” Vicki said, but she nodded. That was the reasoning behind one of the major schools of thought about the Event. No way to check, of course. “Whoever or Whatever it was that did it could have integrated the ancient Nantucket into our slot just as easily,” she pointed out.
    “Yes, but a technology that advanced—not just raw power, but subtlety—could as easily have not moved Nantucket at all.” At Vicki’s expression she grinned slyly. “They could have scanned Nantucket, right down to the positions of every atom, and then re-created it here and now. Then we’d get the two separate histories, the way Doreen Arnstein says—she’s the scientist, I never could get my head around that quantum mechanics stuff. And our doppelgangers—our original selves—would go on up in the twentieth without even noticing.”
    Vicki gave a low whistle. “You know, that’s a really clever idea. And completely, utterly useless!”
    “It beats thinking about my family problems,” Hollard said, with a wry twist of her mouth.
    “Mmmmm, if you don’t mind me asking ...”
    Hollard shrugged. “Everyone else is going to know, soon enough. You know Ken—Brigadier Hollard—rescued Raupasha while he was mopping up the Assyrians north along the Euphrates, just south of the Jebel Sinjar?”
    Vicki nodded. “Way I heard it, she’d killed the Assyrian King.”
    “Tukulti-Ninurta, yes. His father killed her father—that was when the Assyrians took over what was left of the Kingdom of Mitanni, which wasn’t much by then—and Raupasha was smuggled out by loyal retainers. In the original history, she probably married some local squire and vanished from sight.”
    “Yeah. Then we came along and retumbled the bingo-balls.”
    “Mmmm-hmmm. This time around, Tukulti-Ninurta showed up there with some odds-and-sods of his guard and court, after we and the Babylonians smashed their army. Made her dance for him, then he was going to drag her off and rape her. She got him first, knife in her sleeve and slit his throat neat as you please when he grabbed her. Then Ken arrived, just before they lit the fire under her feet.”
    Vicki nodded. Even by the ungentle standards of the ancient Orient, the Assyrians were first-order swine; the locals all hated them. That didn’t make the memory of bombing runs over Asshur much more comfortable, though. She went on, pushing aside the thought of burning rubble collapsing on kids like her Uncle Jared’s:
    “Yeah, I’ve seen the princess a couple of times. Smart girl, charismatic as all hell. Asked a lot of questions the time we had her up in Emancipator, and I got the feeling she really understood about atmospheric pressure and buoyancy.”
    “Mmmm -hmmm,” Hollard said. It was a verbal trick Vicki had noticed Commodore Alston use. “Learned English fast, and all the rest of it—well, she had a pretty good education by local standards, already spoke and wrote four languages.”
    “Was it the Babylonians’ idea to make her queen of Mitanni, or ours?” Vicki asked curiously.
    Officially, it had been Kashtiliash’s father’s notion all the way, but that was diplomacy for you. Limp as an official explanation wasn’t a proverb for nothing.
    “Oh, ours, but Kash and his father liked it. As a vassal kingdom, they’d get tribute and troops from Mitanni and without the bother of garrisons and officials. It was Princess Raupasha who shoveled the manure into the winnowing fan, right after the battle with those Hittites, the ones Walker talked into rebelling against their King.”
    Vicki nodded. She’d ferried wounded from that fight back to Ur Base. “Offered your brother the crown, or