“Maybe I will, too, dearie,” a woman twice her age said. Everybody except Amanda laughed. And she didn't push it any more. What was the use? She wasn't going to change this alternate single-handed.

She wished she hadn't had that thought. If she really was stuck here, how much would this alternate end up changing her?

Six

The city prefect was a moon-faced, middle-aged man named Sesto Capurnio and nicknamed Gemino, which meant he was one of a set of twins. As far as Jeremy knew, the other half of the pair didn't live in Polisso. Jeremy didn't know whether that meant he lived in some other town or wasn't alive at all.

Sesto Capurnio collected modern art. That meant some-thing different here from what it would have in Los Angeles. Nobody in Agrippan Rome would know what to make of abstract painting or sculpture. Hardly any cultures that hadn't invented the camera produced art that didn't try to represent reality. Photographs reproduced the real world more exactly than painters and sculptors could hope to do. That let them in fact, it almost forced them to-try other things.

What the city prefect called modern art were pieces done by artists of Agrippan Rome from the past couple of hundred years. Even that made him unusual. For most collectors here, the older, the better. If they had an early Roman copy of an ancient Greek original, that was good. If they had the Greek original itself, that was heaven. But Sesto Capurnio was different.

Several busts of recent Emperors stared at Jeremy from behind the city prefect. The effect was eerie, not least because they were painted to look as realistic as they could. Eyes of ivory and colored glass added to the effect. Jeremy had seen the head of Honorio Prisco III in the temple. He still had trouble getting used to the style.

Sesto Capurnio also had several paintings on his wall. Some were landscapes, others scenes taken from mythology. One showed Christ and Mithras beating back a demon together. Official Roman belief mixed faiths in a blender.

And he had a pot made in the shape of a dog's head with a rabbit in its mouth. You drank from the dog's left ear. Jeremy was no art critic, but he knew what he liked. The best thing anyone could have done with that pot was break it. Into little pieces. Lots of them. The more, the better.

“It is good to see you, young Ieremeo,” Sesto Capurnio said. Jeremy could have done without that young. But then, Sesto Capurnio was a pompous fool. He spoke neoLatin in a way that suggested he'd start spouting the classical language any minute. He never quite did, but still…

“I thank you, most illustrious prefect of the great municipality of Polisso.” Jeremy laid it on with a trowel, too. If he sounded as educated as the prefect, Sesto Capurnio couldn't score any style points off him. He went on, “I am glad to see that city garrison has been reinforced. The barbarians will surely know better than to trouble us now.”

“Of course they will,” Capurnio said. They were both lying through their teeth. They both knew it, too. Nobody wanted to see new soldiers coming into the city. If they were here, that meant Polisso was liable to need them.

Jeremy picked up a heavy leather sack full of silver. “I know these men will need supplies,” he said. “Here is my family's small gift to the city, for the sake of the soldiers who have just come.“ He set the sack on the table behind which Sesto Capurnio sat.

“You are generous.” The city prefect picked up the sack. One of his eyebrows jumped in surprise at the weight. “By the gods, you are generous.”

He didn't seem to want to set the money down. Jeremy wondered how many denari would stick to his fingers. Some, no doubt. This was a world that ran on nudges and winks and greased palms. Come to that, most worlds did. This one, though, was more open about it than a lot of them.

With a small sigh, Sesto Capurnio said, “I am sure the soldiers will be grateful for your bounty.” That meant he knew he couldn't get away with lifting the whole sack. If Jeremy told an officer he'd given Capurnio money and the soldiers had seen none of it, that could make the prefect's life difficult.

“It is the least we can do,” Jeremy said. By that, he meant, It is the most we can do. Don't ask us to do anything else.

“Very generous. Very kind. A gift whose like I wish we had from every prosperous citizen of Polisso,” the city prefect said. By that, he probably meant, I will have a gift like this from every man who doesn't want soldiers in his house, drinking the best wine and coming on to the slave women-or to his wife and daughters.

“The town needs to be as safe and secure as it can,” Jeremy said. “And now, most illustrious prefect, if you will excuse me…”

Instead of going through the usual polite good-byes, Capurnio said, “Wait one moment, Ieremeo Soltero, if you would be as generous with your time as you are with your silver. There is something I would like to know from you, and I hope you will be kind enough to tell me.”

“If I can, I will,” Jeremy said. “I should not speak about the secrets of my trade, any more than any other merchant would.”

“Of course not,” the city prefect said. “What I want to know is, why are you making this generous gift, and not your father?”

“Oh,” Jeremy said, as if he'd expected just that question. In fact, it did not surprise him all that much. “My father and mother went out of Polisso a few days ago. That is why.”

“I see.” Sesto Capurnio shuffled through sheets of papyrus and paper and parchment. “I have no record of their leaving the city.”

Jeremy gulped. In Agrippan Rome, not to have a record of something was serious business. Records proved a person was real. They proved that things had really happened. By contrast, not having records meant something hadn't happened at all. That could be a problem. If Jeremy and Amanda were stuck here in Polisso with no escape through a transposition chamber, it could be a big problem.

“I don't know anything about that,” Jeremy said. “They had to go back to Carnuto, and so they did. If your guards don't know about it, they can't have been keeping up with things very well, can they?”

The city prefect had poked him, so he poked back. Accusing the gate guards of not keeping the proper records was like accusing Sesto Capurnio of sleeping on the job. Capurnio glared. “You will give me an affidavit concerning this?” he asked in a harsh voice.

An affidavit would give him the record he wanted. Jeremy nodded. “Sure I will,” he said. He didn't like lying, but he liked being cut off from the home timeline even less.

“Very well.” By Sesto Capurnio's scowl, it was anything but. Jeremy wished he hadn't angered the city prefect. But if Capurnio didn't believe Mom and Dad had left Polisso, what was he going to believe? That Jeremy and Amanda had killed their parents? The punishment for that was putting each guilty person in a sack with a dog, a cock, and a snake and throwing all the sacks in the river. In some ways, Agrippan Rome had changed very little from ancient days.

Sesto Capurnio called in a secretary. The man took down Jeremy's statement, using a stylus to write the words on wax that coated one side of a wooden tablet. That was what the locals used for a scratch pad. When the secretary made a mistake, he rubbed it out with the blunt end of the stylus and wrote over it.

“Let me have that,” Capurnio said when Jeremy was done. The secretary gave him the tablet. He read the affidavit aloud. “Is this the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth?” he asked at the end.

“It is,” Jeremy answered. Some of it was true: his mother and father had left Polisso, and he didn't know when they'd be back. If they hadn't gone out by way of the west gate… the locals didn't need to know that.

“Do you swear by…” Capurnio paused. “You are an Imperial Christian, is that not so?”