Western Dacia
Roman Empire
May 20th, 170 CE
“Looks good,” Jeremey McCladden said, standing in the stirrups and shading his blue eyes with a hand.
Or Julius Triarius Claddenius does it, he thought sardonically.
That was the name on the libellus that had granted him Roman citizenship; he was just a citizen so far, though he already had more than enough to meet the property qualifications for membership in the Equestrian Order. All of the Americans did, but only the Prof had bothered to become a narrow-stripe man, as the locals put it. Since the Emperor had invested him with fairly high military rank, which automatically both needed and carried the status of an eques with it. You couldn’t be much above middling-centurion level unless you were that at the very least.
Romans had no equivalent of his name, Jeremey, either. Understandably, since it was Hebrew in origin. For that matter, ninety percent of men used the same twenty or so popular praenomena, the first names. The cognomena, the last names that were rough equivalents of an American surname had started out as peasant nicknames too, and still showed it.
So Spurius means bastard, and Crassus means fatso, and Arvina means lard-ass, and Flaccus means floppy-eared, he thought. And Cicero means wart-face. The upper crust… what Senator Fatso said in reply to the noble address of Senator Lard-Ass, with crucial commentary by Wart-Face. Nobody laughs at it, either. Unless they’re drunk.
They’d both gotten here, to what he thought of as central Hungary just east of the Danube, very newly annexed to the Empire, by a long day’s travel starting at noon. Him, Filipa, and their respective entourages, the military escort…
And it doesn’t bother me being nearly alone… just one other American… and traveling around, he thought. Not any more. All five of us are getting used to being here. It’s been months since I got one of those weird feelings of this can’t really be happening that make you feel like you’ll wake up and it’ll all be a dream. Baptism by total immersion!
They were east of Acquincum—what he thought of as Budapest, on the good macadamized road that had been pushed through after the annexation.
Got to stop that, he mused. Get used to the local terminology, too! It’s been going on five years now and this is where you’re going to stay. We’re sixteen Roman miles east of Acquincum and it’s never going to be Budapest—the Magyars are hunting or herding reindeer somewhere in Siberia right now and they’ll probably stay there. Until the Romans arrive!
The city of Acquincum had been a border town until recently; now it was well behind the border, thanks to the Americans and the rapid end of the Marcomannic War. It would still provide a good market for fresh produce, and the Danube was a major transport corridor. In fact, the city would grow fast with the flow of trade and settlers now that the river Danube was all inside the Empire on both banks from its source to the Black Sea.
With big-ass mines up north, now, too. It’s a pretty river, he thought. Mostly. As well as useful. I’ll get a house in Aquincum too… but the country is a lot healthier for kids, here. Your priorities change when you’re a parent. Plenty of game for hunting here, as well.
It was good-looking land; the mounted members of the party had halted on the crest of a gentle swale. To the north in the distance was a set of forested hills carpeted in big ash and oak and beech and maple. There were more trees stretching out into the grassland along several smallish rivers, what an American would call big creeks. Southward and eastward was a very gently rolling plain of loess soil—air-born fine dust, originally, back a long time ago during the last glacial period—under what he thought of as tall-grass prairie rippling in the warm green-scented breeze from the south.
It reminded him of what he’d seen of little scraps of native vegetation in southwestern Wisconsin, fragments of the great grasslands that had covered the eastern and central Midwest before the white settlers arrived to put them under the plow. They’d stopped now and then to sample the soil and it was black as coal and rich as cake. Most of the species were different, but the overall gestalt was very much the same as the prairie parts of his home state.
Birds swarmed, including high V’s of ducks and geese and whatnot with their cries drifting down. You noticed that here; birds were fantastically abundant, and ground-based wildlife only a bit less so. The Roman members of the party … and Sarmatian and Germanic and Celtic, all Romanized to various degrees… looked up at the birds with obvious hunt-and-feast thoughts.
And so do I! he thought. Face it, dude, you were destined for the second century CE. You’re more comfortable here than you ever were in the Twenty-first. Especially at Harvard. That was… talk about acting a role!
He smiled to himself and recited under his breath:
“Lay on, MacDuff
Lay on with the soup and haggis and stuff
For though ‘tis said you are my foe
What side my bread’s buttered on you bet I know!”
Flowers starred the thigh-high grass, long spikes of blue bugleweed, round white addersmeat, the yellow buds of archangel and many more, nodding in the wind that bent it in waves and rustled in an endless soughing amid an intensely flowery smell leavened by horse-sweat. The grass was vivid green where it wasn’t the odd straw-colored leftovers from last year, and the leaves on the trees had that sharp-cut early summer look. There weren’t any herds of cattle and sheep and horses around here right now, since the bulk of the Sarmatian nomads who’d lived here—which was the Roman name for tribes who were sort of Early Northern Iranian types—had left after the still-new annexation.
They’d be fighting for their lives well north and east of here, back on the steppes north of the Black Sea, where their ancestors had come from long ago. Needless to say, their distant relatives to the northeast weren’t inclined to share the grazing.
His five bodyguards were all mounted too, all ex-gladiators, Germani except for a Sarmatian, all freedmen and all tough as nails. They liked working for him too; he wasn’t dimwit enough to neglect the men he depended on to guard his life. First-rate pay and perks, and they respected his dogged approach to learning the local fighting-skills.
There was a coach stopped over a dozen yards away on the tail-end of the macadamized road, another concept they’d introduced to the Roman army. Ditches and then rows of stakes with twists of cloth tied to their tops stretched away eastward, showing where the extra mileage would go when the legions got around to linking up this stretch with the older province of Dacia further east. They’d be putting in another twenty miles or so this year…
Dacia had been shaped like a thumb stretching up from the Danube with the tip pointing northwest. Now it was two and a half times larger, and a quasi-rectangular block.
The vehicle stopped behind them was modelled on a Western stagecoach but on new steel springs; his two girlfriends—
Concubines, dammit, he reminded himself.
That was the Roman word, and it implied a quasi-contractual relationship. Not to mention that he was their patron, since he’d bought and freed them when he got them knocked up that first year on the Villa Lunae.
His concubines Livia and Valeria were in that, with the kids, all four faces peering out with the personal maids and nannies in the background; he had a son and a daughter going on three now, formally adopted and hence legitimized, and there would be more in the future. Both the girls were also somewhere around nineteen going on twenty to his thirty-quite-soon, which was A-OK by Roman standards. They were also very good friends with each other, which upped the entertainment quota as far as he was concerned.
And it’s all OK by my standards, he thought sardonically. Some of the others get a bit tight-lipped about it sometimes. But Liv and Val are plenty happy about it. They’re freedwomen now, and their kids are full citizens—since I freed them before the births—and they’re a rich man’s kids and heirs and have good prospects… including looking after their mothers eventually.
Fil and her girlfriend Sarukê were there too, also on horseback, armed like him with sword and dagger—they had cased bows, he had one of the new crossbows slung from his saddle. Though they didn’t bother with bodyguards yet. Sarukê had been a bodyguard herself since she’d gotten out of the arena years ago, courtesy of Josephus ben Matthias. She still thought of herself as chief bodyguard to the Prof…
Artorius, he thought. Get it straight, dude!
… though that was more and more theoretical. She also thought of the Prof as her pledged war-chief. Sarmatians had that mind-set, and she was fanatically loyal and very probably would be for life.
Both his party and hers had big baggage wagons along, late 19th-century types drawn by six horses each. Those held their tents and gear and supplies, and one of them had two red deer carcasses gutted and headless hanging by their heels from the rear hoop of the canvas covering. Yearling males, and plump with the good grazing set free here when most of the nomads left. Sarukê had shot one from the saddle yesterday with her bow, displaying casual ease after a brief whooping pursuit, and he’d gotten the other with his crossbow as it ran past. They’d all be eating venison tonight.
There were a round dozen of servants, wagon-drivers and roustabouts along too, more than half of them his. And most of a turma—squadron—of cavalry in the official party from the provincial governor’s HQ.
Marcus Abronius Metellus pointed to one of the creeks. He was a centurion with the sideways crest on the helmet slung at his saddlebow, one risen from the ranks like around half of those indispensable military gearwheels, and self-educated. He was also on the staff of the governor of the enlarged province of Dacia and an equestrian by social rank, promoted into that too. A lot of the practical side of Roman administration was in the hands of army men like that.
He rode well, in a stolid no-nonsense fashion, and had an air of hard common sense. Shown not least by the new-style saddle with stirrups he used, and his ease with it. The squadron behind him used them too; from their looks and accents they were mostly from far-off Britannia. Auxiliary cohorts and ala—cavalry regiments—got moved around a lot.
Like most Roman soldiers… those who stayed in the army after the initial brutal training and constant marching and drilling… the centurion also looked strong in the way that someone who ate well and worked very, very hard did.
And tough enough to chew rocks and shit gravel, as the Prof puts it in that down-home Texan way.
He was in his thirties and looked older to American eyes the way most people here did, between weathered tan and scars. Otherwise he was a generic south-central European, brownish hair and grey eyes and blunt features, except that he was only five-seven… which was tallish for this period and place. And two inches over the Roman army’s minimum height requirement.
The five ex-Americans were all towering-tall by local standards; the two women among them were as tall as the average Roman man or a bit more, and the three men were all skyscrapers by local standards. He was five-eleven-and-a-bit himself, the shortest of the American males, and had gotten used to looking at the tops of peoples’ heads. That did no harm—they were quasi-supernatural to most locals, and Gods, demigods and incarnate spirits were supposed to be tall. Most of the locals weren’t surprised to meet such, since their stories were full of things like that.
For that matter, Sarukê was five-nine. Her people had a high-protein diet, mostly meat and dairy products with bread a minor element since they traded for their grain or got it in tribute rather than growing it themselves, and she’d been the daughter of a minor chief who ate well all her childhood. The roving life of nomads exposed them to less disease, too.
“There, sir.”
The centurion pointed.
“That little river is the division between your land and the… ladies’… fields.”
He accompanied ladies—which was dominarum in Latin—with a sideways glance at Fil and Sarukê. Like many Romans he found them distinctly odd, but the Americans’ quasi-supernatural prestige kept him polite; so did their connections to the top in the form of Marcus Aurelius’ patronage. And Fil’s Korean looks helped with that, vastly exotic here, like an elf-maiden out of a Romano-Celtic tale. Romans often didn’t take women very seriously… except when high social rank or great wealth or supernatural mojo or a combination of the three adjusted their attitude.
Then they transitioned seamlessly to deference: he’d noticed inconsistency didn’t usually bother them.
Jeremey nodded. “Fil?” he said.
“Well, it’s excellent grazing and hay-land,” she said… in Latin. “Good land for horses, and we can begin our breeding program right away. Good for crops, too, of course.”
They generally used Latin unless something had to stay strictly private these days. English sounded very, very strange to the locals; not just an unknown language, but a weird one. There weren’t any with its stripped-down positional grammar in this part of the world either yet, and its sounds were eccentric too.
Sarukê nodded vigorously, her long reddish-blond braid bobbing.
“Good for cut hay, raise fodder,” she said. “They say, winters milder here than… where my tribe Aorsi come from.”
That was her tribe’s name for themselves; their homeland was in what he thought of as central Ukraine, around and southeast of the site of Kiev in his home century.
Winters there aren’t Siberian, but it’s not for want of trying, he thought. Brrr! Wisconsin was bad enough! Living there in tents and felt huts on wheels… brrrr! No wonder they’re tough and brave—the fires of hell would be a welcome relief.
The Roman centurion came from what Jeremey thought of as Switzerland, the portion that was the province of Raetia here; it had been part of the Empire for over a hundred years, since early in the reign of Octavian, the first Augustus. Many of its people had Roman citizenship. His legion was stationed in Pannonia Inferior—which meant Downstream Pannonia, in Latin—and he was on detached duty with the Britannian cavalry ala, regiment.
The legion would probably be moved several hundred miles north and east in the not-to-distant future, since that wasn’t on the frontier anymore.
“Milder winters than where I came from, Domina,” he said—the title meant roughly respectable lady, which Sarukê rated because she was the…
Recognized mate, he thought. Sort of like Antinous with Hadrian, only innies instead of outies and they’re the same age, pretty much, which Romans find very odd. Takes a little getting used to, you keep running into really, really different concepts of what human beings are here.
… of someone with Imperial court connections.
Romans didn’t have any concept of ‘being gay’. Not beyond the most basic likes boys or likes girls level. Their concept of sexuality focused instead on who was pitching and who was catching. All penetration was masculine, all passive roles were feminine regardless of your sex, it was all tightly linked to social standing, and most Romans… Roman men, at least… assumed that when women had sex together it was all dildoes.
Dick worshipers, he thought, mentally quoting Paula Atkins. Jesus in the foothills, and people thought I was a knuckle-dragger on feminism before we landed here. I’m a bleeding-edge leftie by… no, not by a second-century viewpoint, they don’t have that concept herel…
“It’s mountains there in Raetia,” the Centurion went on. “Snow and ice in sight of the valley where I was born, even in summer.”
Sarukê nodded to him, cordial enough. “Ah, have heard mountains make things colder.”
The centurion grinned. “And poorer, lady. It’s a good place to come from… once you’ve left.”
Sarukê looked at him for an instant, then chuckled as the mild joke penetrated her rather eccentric command of Latin. Centurions were quite well paid. Then she turned to Jeremey.
“Where you build villa, think you, Jem?”
Her Latin was accented much worse than his, with the choppy sibilants of her original East-Iranian native language. Which was not quite like anything he’d heard in his native century—it was as close to Proto-Indo-Iranian as it was to anything spoken back up in the twenty-first, and a third of the way back to Proto-Indo-European. Just for starters it had a fiendishly complex inflectional syntax, which included joys like three separate grammatical genders.
She’d been born far northeast of here, and captured by Roman troops—auxiliary cavalry, to be precise—when the raiding warband she’d been in was smashed on what had then been the northeastern frontier of Dacia. Then she’d been sold as a slave, ended up a gladiatrix—a female gladiator, which was uncommon and considered mildly scandalous but not unknown among the kinkier sort of arena afficionado—until she was bought and emancipated as a bodyguard by Josephus ben Matthias.
Who’d now and then taken full advantage of the way Romans didn’t associate female garb with warrior. Not until their faces were rubbed in it, or their ribs slotted by a dagger.
She’d been there with him when the Americans woke up alongside Professor Fuchs’ body, in full Amazonian Sarmatian fig… and ended up working for the Prof. Saved his life more than once, in fact, and probably…
Our whole shebang, he thought. God… or the Gods… know what we’d have done without him, that first year or two. Hell, I know—we’d have done badly, or very badly, or very very badly, as in get killed badly.
Jeremey thought the Sarmatian amazon was one smokin’-hot lady in a big strapping blond country-girl athletic way, if you didn’t mind some tattoos and scars… and scary, as well.
Fil lucked out, he thought. She’s happy. But spare me from luck like that! Scary as hell, you betcha.
“Well, I’m not certain yet,” he said.
The land he’d purchased—at a nominal price, it really paid to have connections here and they all did, with a vengeance—was about twenty Roman square miles. Or as they’d put it around twenty-four thousand iūgerum, which was a unit about two-thirds the size of an American acre. That was huge by Roman standards. Even great landlords here usually owned multiple smaller units of a few thousand acres scattered across whole provinces and beyond.
To avoid bad weather in one spot…
And because there weren’t all that many economies of scale in agriculture. Some, but lots of bottlenecks too… Until we arrived!
His gifts from the Emperor included several thousand acres of land from the res privata, the vast imperial estates, all rented to tenants of various sizes. Imperial properties were all leased out, since they were just too large—over twelve percent of all the farmland in the Empire—to be managed directly, even in part.
But with the modern agritech they’d introduced, currently at about 1870-1880 standards, a unit this size was fully doable. And without renting chunks of it out, which landlords here had done because of the need for massive amounts of harvest labor… Which had been much reduced by cradle-scythes, and when they got the McCormick reapers to go with the riding plows and disk-harrows and multirow cultivators and seed drills they were already using… and a second sugar-beet refinery… this was prime beet land and Romans hadn’t had any sweeteners but honey until they arrived…
His father had run a seed-and-feed business in a small Wisconsin town, and Roman agriculture had been his study-focus, so he’d been the closest to an agricultural expert the five Americans had. Except for the Prof, and his family had been ranchers in West Texas, which wasn’t like anyplace around here. He went on aloud:
“But offhand, I’d say I’ll put the HQ… the villa… there—” he pointed northeast with his riding crop “—in the lee of those hills, see where the slope breaks from steep to gentle? That’ll break the storm-winds in winter, it’s protected from the north and east. Well-drained, close to timber and firewood and building stone, and it’ll have a good view southward over the bulk of the open country, what’ll be the fields. The village for the farmhands a bit further east. Easy to build small dams and bring running water in, too. Which means it’ll be easy to set up a slow sand filter system.”
That meant an arrangement of sand in a stone or concrete box with a drain at the bottom. Only a few Romans understood why it worked so far, but most Romans were absolute pragmatists about anything technical once it had been demonstrated that it did work. They weren’t terribly inventive themselves, but they’d take anything useful and run with it and tinker with it and do it on a bigger scale than anyone else.
Slow sand filters purified water by biological action, the film of algae that grew in the first inch or so, and if you had a natural flow of water it didn’t need powered pumps or any chemicals.
Just an occasional shut-down and raking and some fresh sand. De nada!
The neighbors of the Villa Lunae had taken it up, once experience had shown it cut disease massively—and given the prevalence of slavery here, big landowners had a direct interest in doing that besides saving their own guts and their families’. A dead slave was a dead loss, and even an ordinary laborer’s cost was usually equivalent to the price of a good new car back up in the 21st. Though the campaigning and prisoner-taking of the successful incorporation of the Barbaricum had knocked prices down by about a third for a while.
A few cities in Pannonia Superior had started using it too once the urban bigwigs had grasped what it meant for their health. The Emperor was deep in plans to put Rome’s water supply through it likewise… which would cut the mortality rate in the great city a good deal, possibly down to replacement level so that it didn’t need to suck in tens of thousands of countryfolk every year just to stay even.
Fil and Sarukê leaned their heads together and spoke… in Sarmatian, which Fil had been learning as fast as she could. They’d all known Latin when they arrived here, though that had required weeks of work to be comprehensible beyond commonplaces through their weird accents, which were now a lot less obtrusive but still noticeable. All of them except Paula had known Greek, too, and she’d learned it since.
They were all good at languages—the Austrian physicist Fuchs had specified classicists who did know the old tongues, which had made them a minority in 2032’s academia though a substantial one.
And when he was in the Rangers, the Prof always took a copy of Xenophon’s March Up-Country and The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius with him in his pack—both in the original Greek.
Fil pointed north and a little west. “Good idea, Jem. We’ll do something similar over there—not more than a mile or two, depending on which valley looks best. Sheltered from the north wind in winter, like you said. And plenty of good sites for watermills, too!”
He nodded. “Ah, that’s a thought. Flour’s more profitable than wheat, if you’re close enough to ship it without it spoiling. Ditto sugar.”
They were… and with the Danube close, close enough to other markets up and down the river in terms of transport costs and reach. When the canal around the Iron Gates downstream of here was done—it was in the planning stages now, with surveyors swarming over the rocky site—they could ship it to the Black Sea and from there into the Mediterranean. Miter-gate canal locks were another thing the Roman engineers had taken up and run with.
There were plenty of cities down in the south there, and they all wanted flour and salt meat… and now potatoes and cornmeal, too. Ultimately the new northern territories would want wine and brandy; and with grain and the new-crop basic foodstuffs cheaper, markets for meat would expand as the common folk had more money in their…
Pockets, not belt-pouches, soon enough! Of course with the Emperor’s gifts and our shares in the new mines, we’re rich anyway… but I sort of fancy myself as a squire and I surely don’t want to live in a Roman city. Even with our antibiotics, they’re deathtraps. Just visiting them is dangerous enough. No wonder they always put wine in their water if they can afford it. Literally a lifesaver!
The two women were deep in a conversation in Sarmatian and bits and pieces of Latin and Greek, leaning together and smiling.
And Fil and Saruke both love horses… in sort of different ways… I like riding myself… and breeding better ones will help with modernization, now that we’ve got stirrups and horseshoes and collar-harness going across most of the Empire. And it’ll be fun to have them in visiting distance—I even miss Mark and Paula, now that they’re down near Rome getting the Galen Medical Institute started. Guess I’m more sociable than I thought. Or homesick, now and then; the five of us are as close to home as we’re ever going to get. Home is ruins and fallout. This place is rough and tough, but it’s inside heaven’s gate compared to that.
“Good for us to be fairly close,” he said, and then cocked an eye at the sky.
He dropped into English for a sentence: “Not as if you can hop a plane to somewhere warm in the winter, either; no spring break in Florida.”
Fil nodded and rolled her eyes; few years ago she’d observed that thirty miles was twenty minutes where they were born, and an endless aching whole day in the saddle here. That had been after a day-long ride in cold fog-drizzle-rain. They’d both been horse enthusiasts in their teens back home, and the Prof had been in the saddle from the age of six on his family’s ranch, but even so…
Romans did a fair amount of traveling, and by second-century standards it was easier in the Empire than anywhere else, with Roman roads and organization. But to the Americans it was brutal here even though they could stop at a mansio, the official guesthouses strung out along the Roman highways. Even riding a horse or sitting in a horse-drawn carriage was physical work, and it felt so slow if you were in a hurry.
You could do a hundred miles a day with relays of horses… but that wrung you out like a damp cloth. Only specialists like Imperial couriers did that often.
“Looks like it’s going to be a nice night, but we should camp soon, it rains half the time here,” he added, falling back into Latin.
“Oh, the dry season’s starting… still, you’re right,” Fil replied.
“Tomorrow we can pick exact spots, drive stakes along the boundaries, things like that.”
Sarukê nodded, then grinned, showing white even teeth.
Her folk had better smiles than Romans, usually, since they ate less bread and other carbohydrate-rich foods and hence had less plaque. Plus she’d have caught the improved, gene-modified version of Streptococcus mutans from Fil, which chased all the bad bacteria out of your mouth. That and regular brushing solved a lot of problems. Which was fortunate since Roman ideas of dentistry usually involved metal tongs and a long, strong pull…
The Sarmatian spoke:
“Takes time, with Romans, make camp. We Aorsi, good weather like now, we just stop wagons, light cook-fire. Sleep under wagon.”
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Filipa Chang lay back and felt her breathing slow. She and Sarukê lay sweaty and entangled on what amounted to a broad wool-stuffed futon encased in linen sheets—all of it innovations. So was the big dome tent with interior partitions and jointed supports, though the legions were copying it, especially for officers.
The Sarmatian grinned at her and stretched and lay back with one hand behind her head, and Fil’s head on her shoulder.
“Why do you yell like that?” Fil asked.
It had been sort of an ululating screech at a critical moment…
I’m used to it by now, but… God, did it startle me the first time!
“Why not?” Sarukê replied. “Makes things feel better. Why you not yell? At first, I think… thought? Thought I’m not doing things right for you.”
“It’s… not the custom, where I was raised,” Fil said.
And I don’t like giving Jem entertainment, she thought. Although he and his girlfriends were making enough noise earlier! He’s in bro-hog-heaven, with a threesome anytime he wants it. Men! Though I’ve got to admit, compared to Roman men American ones look like models of enlightenment.
Romans also had less… much less… sense of body privacy than Americans in the twenty-first. The lower classes because they were crowded together on top of one another in one or two-room peasant huts or city apartments or slave quarters, and the upper because they had servants swarming around all the time, sex and defecation included, which still struck her as sort of gross.
Not to mention what their public bathrooms look like… that’s the baths and the privies. Everything out in the open, like it’s a coffee shop, and conversations accompanying their bowel movements. That’s much more stressful than gossiping in the calidarium, the hot-room.
What body-privacy qualms Romans did have were deeply alien, mostly upper-class women being modest… though they thought nothing of using a chamber-pot in front of female friends or servants of either gender. And Roman attitudes towards sex were deeply, deeply strange. Nothing like her home milieu, nothing like what she’d covered in undergrad survey courses of early-modern or medieval Western Civ, and certainly nothing like modern or ancient Korea.
Sarmatians were even less concerned with privacy—they might be nomads roving over the vast Eurasian plains, but they lived fairly densely packed with entire extended families in a tent, or a small hut on wheels. You could ride out on the steppe for privacy… but that risked anything from hungry wolves to another clan’s warriors out to carry on a blood-feud. Their attitude to human and animal wastes was unpleasantly casual too even by Roman standards, since they moved on from by-products every couple of days instead of trying to make them go away. They wore more clothes than Romans because their native climate was colder, and that was about it.
And Sarukê’s spell in the arena didn’t help. Like being imprisoned in a cross between a football locker-room and a concentration camp run by professional sadists. She doesn’t talk much about it… and I don’t blame her. Twitches and moans in her sleep sometimes. I’m glad she started taking baths before we met, though!
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Copyright © 2025 by S.M. Stirling