The Centurion's Empire (33 page)

"In theory, me."

Vitellan began to pace before Lucel's holograph, his arms folded tightly and his head bowed. The insubstantial eyes of
the projection followed him. Somewhere beneath the tangle of electronics and medical support equipment, Lucel herself
sensed that he was disappointed at being let down by his own people in Durvas.

"I wish you could take over again," he confessed. "How do you feel?"

"Absolutely numb," she admitted as her projection looked down into the biosupport unit. "The real me looks a mess."

"You were hit by three rounds from a little robot gun platform. They nearly cut you in two."

"How long ago?"

"Twenty-four hours. Your bones and intestines were bonded back together by the robot arms in the case below you. I
watched."

"Voyeur."

"They put in a new kidney." "I'd have never guessed."

"You were dead for at least ten minutes. You should have had brain damage, according to my cyclopedia imprint. How
did you survive?"

"I've had oxygenation backup built into my tissues in stabilized molecular cages. It's designed to cut in if I stop
breathing for more than two minutes. There's autoclamps for severed blood vessels, and a pacer also fires up to force my
blood to circulate if my heart stops for more than five seconds. I can take a lot of damage and pull through."
Vitellan had been accessing his imprints as she talked. "Micropumps driving and routing blood by selective arterial
contraction, with stabilized molecular cages to store oxygen: the cages were developed from the same stabilized lattices
as the covalent lattice explosives."

"You've got it. Vitellan, could you find my dataspex for me?"

"Yes."

"I want you to interface them with the cables going into this thing that I'm being repaired in. I can see the panel from
here—I'll talk you through the procedure."

"Whatever you say. Do you want to do more database work?"

"Yes, but I want to check what the spex contain as well.

They have a low energy recorder, they've been recording everything going on around them since I was shot."
When he returned from his room the pale holographic head remained in midair above the surgical unit. He plugged
flaccid, flat cables into slots and pressed patterns of studs while the holograph head called instructions and passwords
across the room. As the connection was established the holograph vanished. The Roman suddenly felt like curling up and
going to sleep. Lucel was in charge again so he could relax, yet he was still uneasy about being completely in her power.
Her projected head reappeared just in time to find Vitellan yawning and stretching his arms.

"You should be asleep," she said sternly.

"Spoken like an Icekeeper," he replied, lying back in a contour chair with his arms folded and looking at the ceiling
monitors. "You remind me of a man named Gentor."

"Get some rest, Vitellan. You've been stalked and attacked by professional—"

"As professional killers they were nothing compared to the Danes, or even a well-trained gladiator. I'm a soldier, and I
have survived many battles. Remember that, please, and don't try to seal me up in a box. I don't break easily."

"Is something on your mind?" Lucel's hologram asked, assuming a vulnerable and insecure expression.
I am the Master of the Frigidarium, he reminded himself, I have a right to ask questions about what is done in my name.

"I asked to be revived in the year 2054 of the Christian calendar," he said, now trying to modulate his tone to
unthreat-ening curiosity. "That was to mark two thousand years since my birth. Now I have been revived and it is only
2028. Why was that done?"

"It's a long story. The location of your body in the Alps was preserved in both Durvas and a castle in France after you
were frozen. Late in the eighteenth century there was a successful revolution against the nobility of France, and the
Hussontal castle was burned to a stone shell. Meantime the village of Durvas had maintained a few ceremonies such as
the ice harvest, and even the office of Icekeeper had been filled in an unbroken line all the way back to Guy Foxtread,
whom you probably met."

"Yes, I knew him well."

"Fantastic," she breathed through translucent lips. "Anyway, the Durvas people had folktales, traditions, the original
Frigidarium, and a copy of the map that had been destroyed in France. The folk in Durvas did not know that the map had
been destroyed, however, and they were worried that the French revolutionaries would locate your body and destroy it.
The Icekeeper of Durvas decided to revive the care for your frozen body, but he also decided that a more reliable way of
making ice was needed. Thus Durvas became a center of refrigeration research.

"It soon became obvious that the map in the Hussontal castle had actually been destroyed, because Durvas spies reported
that the castle was set afire during fighting, and was not looted before it burned. The Icekeeper decided that it was still
safe to leave you in the Alps, but the refrigeration research was continued—just in case you ever had to be returned to
Durvas. The village prospered and grew immensely over the next two centuries. In 2016 a decision was finally made to
move your body from Switzerland to England. Greenhouse melting of the alpine ice was given as the official reason, but
there was also some doubt about whether Durvas had a legal claim to you or whether the Swiss could claim you as an
archeological artifact. The move was thus preemptive and done in secret, but once your body was safely in Durvas there
was a general announcement about your existence, and about who and what you are. It caused a sensation worldwide."

"All of that is in my imprints," said Vitellan, unimpressed. "So, I was dug out in 2016, then revived in 2028."

"Yes, although in theory you were meant to stay frozen there until 2054, by your own wish."

"If I was still frozen in some new Durvas Frigidarium, why was I revived early?"

"For the same reason that you were revived in the ninth and fourteenth centuries. There was a crisis, and you were
needed."

"Me? Needed? In
this
century? You must be joking." "No, it's true. Bonhomme was discovered six years after you, but in
those six years a strange groundswell of cults had

sprung up—in the Americas and Africa, but especially in France. In the same way that some nutty groups look to
salvation by aliens from space in UFOs, these people preached salvation by a frozen disciple of Jesus Christ. One group,
the Luministes, began sending its own expeditions into the Alps, and in 2022 they were vindicated when Bonhomme was
found. He was revived at once. After a stomach transplant * and a course of imprint therapy he found himself at the head
of a very large and rapidly growing movement. The Lumin-iste administration is the real power behind him, but his
pronouncements carry a lot of weight."

"I begin to see. After a year or two the Durvas people wanted to revive their own ice-prophet as a counter to Bonhomme."

"In essence, yes. You were their sleeping superhero, their King Arthur, their Ilya Maromyets—check your imprints
later, those two have big entries."

"So, I was unfrozen in Durvas."

"Earlier this year, yes."

"But not revived."

"No."

"But Bonhomme's Luministes had me abducted." "Yes."

"Then revived me." "Yes."

"You then rescued me."

"Yes and no. As far as the modern equivalent of your seneschal, Lord Wallace, and everyone else in Durvas is concerned,
I am an unknown, expensive contract agent. Durvas has been making inquiries about
you,
however, but the clinic has
strict orders not to tell them anything until I am good and ready."

"But Durvas is my village. It only exists to help me travel through time. If I can't trust Durvas people, who can I trust?"

"You could trust me."

"Yes . . . but would it be unreasonable of me to be confused?" "No."

"All right, then, what is going on?"

"I don't know everything that I need to as yet, and mean-

time I will not have you doing anything rash out of sheer ignorance. You
are
in serious danger, but you are obviously
aware of that."

"So I'm to be kept in ignorance?"

"No, no, that's not what I meant. I tell you what: ask one of the staff for a travel-sim called TourHead, and say that you
want to run
Decius Museum, Antarctica.
That should give you more than enough to think about for now."
_5

the declad

Houston, Texas: 10 December 2028, Anno Domini

According to Baker, the wallscreen was a limited tool for doing research, yet Vitellan liked it for that very reason. It was
like watching a play or an oration, so he had a parallel of something like it in his background. He had already tried VR

helmets, but found that he disliked them. It was like being someone else, and Vitellan wondered if he would ever adjust
to that medium. He lay back on his bed, using a remote control unit to select video footage from newsbases. Nearly all of
his searches were on Bonhomme the Prophet. He watched rallies, revival meetings, and airport interviews, and after a
dozen major events Vitellan had the gist of Bonhomme's message: beware false prophets, and win back the world for
Christianity. The face was the same as Vitellan remembered, as was the manner, but Bonhomme had been heavily
imprinted to adjust to the modern world. His meeting with Bonhomme had been only a few days ago at Marlenk, even
though now he was on the other side of the world and over six centuries had passed. The soul of Bonhomme was missing
in this century. Will I too become someone else so that I can adjust to this century, Vitellan wondered. When he had seen
enough, he scrolled down a menu of tourist videos until he found the most recent trip of the
Deciad
time ship.
Paradise Vistas and Tourhead Distribution present THE DECIAD TIME SHIP. Gregory Pine of
Famewar
and
Shore Street

is your sense-host on a tour of the Roman time ship in Antarctica that features in
The De-ciad of Quintus..
See the
Roman time travelers lying frozen and still traveling through time before the Awakening Project begins. Date of
Recording: 17 May 2028. Running Time: 41 minutes. Adapted for
Wallscreen
8
from
True-VR.

As Baker had said, it was adapted from dataspex cameras, and translated badly to a wallscreen. The sense-host walked
down a dimly lit corridor that still contained the litter of recent construction. Vitellan wondered if that was why they
kept it badly lit. At the end his host walked through a pair of sliding doors and into a brightly lit auditorium where about
fifty people were already seated. He sat in the front row, and almost at once the guide arrived. She introduced herself as
Gina Rossi, Italian by birth and Espanic by adoption. Without another word she opened the book that she carried and
began to read:

This is a tale of the world's end, and of the ships that ran before the flames. The vessels were the very peak of our
empire's craft, and they bore the best of our learning and the finest of our citizens.

"So begins the
Deciad,"
said the guide, looking up from the slim, leather-bound volume.

"The author, Quintus Flavius, was an educated stonemason. He was quite familiar with the
Aeneid
of Virgil, that epic
describing the escape of Troy's last nobles after their city fell to the Greeks. He saw this voyage as a similar epic
journey. Perhaps he hoped that his chronicle of the flight from the fall of ancient Rome would become as famous as
Virgil's
Aeneid
itself.

"I think you will agree that there is nobody better qualified to tell the story of this great voyage than Quintus himself,
so I shall read some more passages from the
Deciad
to set the scene. After that there will be a tour of the chambers
and tunnels that he eventually built. The more adventurous among you will also have the option of going for an
excursion on the beach outside."

There was a shuffling restlessness in the tour group, mainly from some classics students. Their faces stood out, alert and
eager; they were awestruck. They were actually
here
at last, at the very site of the famous
Deciad
epic. Vitellan shared
their eager restlessness to get on with the tour. The guide began to read again.

At that time of death and pillage the very gods of Rome herself assembled the best remaining scholars and craftsmen at
the fishing port of Larengi, together with five warships and a small body of marines. We saw little of the fighting while
in that small port. Our days were peaceful and strange, with the marines learning the use of the tools of masonry while
the scholars and craftsmen learned to fight with sword, spear, and bow. Sometimes wounded were brought in from the
fighting around Rome, and this reminded us that the Visigoths were abroad. At that time none of us knew why we were
there, except that we were to help with some mighty undertaking.