Waiting for the Olympians

He looked at me strangely. “Writing sci-roms?” he asked.

“No, of course not! That’s good enough for me, but you’ve still got your extrasolar probe to keep you busy.”

“Julie,” he said sadly, “where have you been lately? Didn’t you see the last Olympian message?”

“Well, sure,” I said, offended. “Everybody did, didn’t they?” And then I thought for a moment, and, actually, it had been Rachel who had told me about it. I’d never actually looked at a journal or a broadcast. “I guess I was pretty busy,” I said lamely.

He looked sadder than ever. “Then maybe you don’t know that they said they weren’t only terminating all their own transmissions to us, they were terminating even our own probes.”

“Oh, no, Sam! I would have heard if the probes had stopped transmitting!”

He said patiently, “No, you wouldn’t, because the data they were sending is still on its way to us. We’ve still got a few years coming in from our probes. But that’s it. We’re out of interstellar space, Julie. They don’t want us there.”

He broke off, peering out the window. “And that’s the way it is,” he said. “We’re here, though, and you better get inside. Rachel’s going to be tired of sitting under that canopy without you around.”

* * * *

The greatest thing of all about being a bestselling author, if you like travelling, is that when you fly around the world somebody else pays for the tickets. Marcus’s publicity department fixed up the whole thing. Personal appearances, bookstore autographings, college lectures, broadcasts, publishers’ meetings, receptions - we were kept busy for a solid month, and it made a hell of a fine honeymoon.

Of course any honeymoon would have been wonderful as long as Rachel was the bride, but without the publishers bankrolling us we might not have visited six of the seven continents on the way. (We didn’t bother with Polaris Australis - nobody there but penguins.) And we took time for ourselves along the way, on beaches in Hindia and the islands of Han, in the wonderful shops of Manahattan and a dozen other cities of the Western Continents - we did it all.

When we got back to Alexandria the contractors had finished the remodeling of Rachel’s villa - which, we had decided, would now be our winter home, though our next priority was going to be to find a place where we could spend the busy part of the year in London. Sam had moved back in and, with Basilius, greeted us formally as we came to the door.

“I thought you’d be in Rome,” I told him, once we were settled and Rachel had gone to inspect what had been done with her baths.

“Not while I’m still trying to understand what went wrong,” he said “The research is going on right here; this is where we transmitted from.”

I shrugged and took a sip of the Falernian wine Basilius had left for us. I held the goblet up critically: a little cloudy, I thought, and in the vat too long. And then I grinned at myself, because a few weeks earlier I would have been delighted at anything so costly. “But we know what went wrong,” I told him reasonably. “They decided against us.”

“Of course they did,” he said. “But why? I’ve been trying to work out just what messages were being received when they broke off communications.”

“Do you think we said something to offend them?”

He scratched the age spot on his bald head, staring at me. Then he sighed. “What would you think, Julius?”

“Well, maybe so,” I admitted. “What messages were they?”

“I’m not sure. It took a lot of digging. The Olympians, you know, acknowledged receipt of each message by repeating the last hundred and forty groups—”

“I didn’t know.”

“Well, they did. The last message they acknowledged was a history of Rome. Unfortunately, it was 650,000 words long.”

“So you have to read the whole history?”

“Not just read it, Julie; we have to try to figure out what might have been in it that wasn’t in any previous message. We’ve had two or three hundred researchers collating every previous message, and the only thing that was new was some of the social data from the last census—”

I interrupted him. “I thought you said it was a history.”

“It was at the end of the history. We were giving pretty current data - so many of equestrian rank, so many citizens, so many freedmen, so many slaves.” He hesitated, and then said thoughtfully, “Paulus Magnus - I don’t know if you know him, he’s an Algonkan - pointed out that that was the first time we’d ever mentioned slavery.”

I waited for him to go on. “Yes?” I said encouragingly.

He shrugged. “Nothing. Paulus is a slave himself, so naturally he’s got it on his mind a lot.”

“I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else?”