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.