“Me, too. Text messages just aren't the same,” Michael said. “I wish there was bandwidth enough for video between alternates.”

“There is-if you're a gazillionaire,” Jeremy said. That disgusted him. If you were rich enough, you could get whatever you wanted. If you weren't, you had to put up with e-mail as primitive as it had been a hundred years earlier. Even still-photo attachments were iffy.

“We'll be glad to see each other when school starts, that's all,” Michael said.

“Sure.” Jeremy nodded again. “You be careful, you hear?” That wasn't idle advice. Michael was going to a violent place. What warlords there wanted, they reached out and took. People who didn't like it could easily end up dead.

“You, too,” Michael told him.

“Me? Don't worry about me. I'll be fine.” Jeremy laughed. “Hardly anything ever happens in Agrippan Rome. The Empire's more than two thousand years old there, and they've spent all that time making it more complicated. You have to fill out sixteen different forms before you can swat a fly, let alone catch a mouse.” He was exaggerating, but only a little.

“Be careful anyway,” Michael said. “If you're not careful, you get in trouble.” Jeremy's folks always said the same thing. He didn't mind it so much from his friend. Michael pointed. “There's your sister.” He waved. “Hi, Amanda.” When he and Jeremy were smaller, he'd done his best not to notice her. Now he was polite.

“Hi, Michael,” she said, and then started, “'No more stylus, no more screen-'”

“Not you, too!” Jeremy broke in.

“Why not?” Amanda said. “They sing the same kind of song in Polisso, where we're going.” She started a chant in neoLatin.

“In my alternate, too,” Michael said, and sang in the Japanese-Chinese pidgin merchants used there. That didn't mean anything to Jeremy, who'd never soaked up the language through his implant. Michael had taught him a few phrases, most of them dirty, but he didn't hear any of those. He'd done the same for his friend with neoLatin, which was an excellent language to swear in.