The Centurion's Empire (40 page)

"Guillaume of Chalon. He was a priest, and apparently a respected scholar. As Jacque Bonhomme he was a compelling
orator, as well as being an exceptional organizer and tactician. He was the right man at the right time, he led the
Jacques superbly, and nearly brought down a kingdom with that rabble."

"And he's doing it again!" exclaimed Lord Wallace with theatrical indignation, as if he regarded Bonhomme's success as
a personal insult.

"No, he's not."

"What do you mean?"

"The Bonhomme of the Luministes is neither Jacque Bonhomme nor Guillaume of Chalon, Oh, he has the right face
and body, and some of Guillaume's memories and motivations, but the man who I have seen in the vids giving orations to
prayer meetings and ranting to the media is someone different."

Vitellan looked up and down the arms of the table. Several faces had lost color, others still sat vacantly attentive.

"It must be imprints," said the Corporate treasurer, a woman near the end of the table.

"Undoubtably. He crossed several centuries in a single step, and now he's leading hundreds of millions of Lumin-
istes in the twenty-first century. He could never do that without heavy imprinting. I've had terrible trouble adjusting so
far, and yet I'm an old hand at ^waking in new centuries. This was the first time for Bonhomme."
The.chronicler picked up the unintended pun and visibly suppressed a laugh. Lord Wallace looked puzzled. Anderson
raised his hand.

"A lot of the therapy used in Bonhomme's revival is public knowledge," the marshal explained. "First he had an imprint
to help him with modern French, then they gave him an adaptive overlay to help him adjust to our culture and
technology. These have been repeated every few days for six years, so they are part of him now. His charisma showed
through very early, and people were impressed, but they probably credited him with greater powers than he really had. In
a sense what he can do is unimportant, it's just that people have a reason for following him. He's from the past, so he's as
special as if he had stepped out of a UFO. Someone probably realized it the moment that he was successfully revived.
There's a lot of evidence that a very carefully crafted campaign was staged to promote him by a worldwide alliance of
militant Christian groups that saw his value as a rallying point."

There were murmurs of assent.

"That explains the attempts to kill the Centurion," Lord Wallace added. "Anyone equally special would draw worldwide
media attention away from Bonhomme. The Luministes feared him as a rival."

Lord Wallace nodded to the chronicler, who began a holovid documentary projection describing how a Lumin-iste survey
team had discovered some fourteenth-century gold coins at the foot of a Swiss glacier in 2022. An artificially shaped
boulder was visible within the ice.

The entire operation had been recorded on holovid. The hollowed-out boulder was dug out of the ice by the Lumin-iste
archeologists. Bonhomme's body was discovered inside, and it was quickly realized that he had been treated with an
antifreeze compound.

Pie boulder was sliced apart with abrasion jets, and the core of ice carefully melted back to the body. Bonhomme
was dressed in his priest's robes, and both body tissue and cloth were carbon dated as fourteenth century. The body
temperature was raised to a few degrees above freezing while doctors determined that all the tissues were at a uniform
temperature. Ultrasound profiling revealed extensive ulceration and perforation in his stomach, and trauma
stabilization gels were applied by microsurgical flexors. His body was warmed further, and his blood replaced by
oxygenated synthetic plasma. The body on the contoured bench gradually took on the color of a living human. Brain
function, heart, and respiration were all restored before he was given a transfusion of real blood and actually revived.
There was much speculation by both the scientific experts and the media about the shock effect of being revived in a
state-of-the-art twenty-first-century hospital. Thus a medieval bedchamber was constructed and furnished with careful
attention to detail. The sleeping priest was brought in, still wearing the cranial webcap that was maintaining a
controlled coma. Staff who had been given imprints for Latin and medieval French were dressed in fourteenth-century
costumes, then the webcap was removed.

Hidden holocameras recorded the awakening as if it were part of a great holovid epic. Bonhomme's eyelids flickered,
then he was awake, looking about him in alarm.

"Who are you?"

The first words were a wheezing croak. His throat was inflamed from drinking the Oil of Frosts without accustoming
rtimself to it slowly. A nurse bent over his bed. She had been selected for having an especially good manner with parents.

"You have been frozen for more than six centuries. We ire scholars and physicians. We revived you."
Bonhomme remained suspicious. "Do you know who I im?"

"No, you will have to tell us that."

He closed his eyes for a moment. "I am a simple scholar md priest. I did not expect to be asleep so long. Tell me ibout
your kings and popes. Let me . . . let me read your :hronicles . . ."

He lapsed into sleep again, already exhausted and over-

whelmed by no more than a minute in the distant future. The holovid was stopped. Wallace leaned forward over the
table.

"He later said he was a Christian prophet who was escaping persecution by the medieval nobility. When asked where he
had got the Oil of Frosts he said that he was a Roman who had met Christ. Christ had given him the Oil of Frosts, then
told him to travel through time to preach the True Word, and make sure that His original message was not corrupted."

"Plausible, but a lie," Vitellan commented.

"He also gave his own version of the 1358 peasant rebellion."

"I can guess what he said about that. How fast did he rise to power?"

"Almost as soon as Bonhomme was revived he found himself at the head of the Luministes, a militant Christian
revivalist movement. They knew his value as a figurehead, and they promoted him very, very skillfully. He played a very
minor part in the building of his own legend at first. His ulcerated stomach had to be replaced and he had to be brought
up-to-date with the twenty-first century first, Imprint technology was more primitive back then, so it took several
months.

"The trouble began soon enough, though," the chronicler added. "He had immediate appeal for the French, who had
been humiliated by three major invasions over the past century and a half."

"I don't follow," said Vitellan.

"It's a very French thing. Once the French attitude used to be 'Monsieur, I am a very civilized man, and if you step over
my borders I shall slap your face.' After World War Two it became 'Monsieur, I am a very dangerous psychopath, and if
you step over my borders I shall blow your head off and nuke your homeland.' The latter attitude has proved itself for the
past eighty-two years, and Bonhomme fitted in with it perfectly. He certainly is a dangerous psycho. There were also
wars in Africa, Asia, and South America fought in his name, nasty little wars that the Christian sides always won.
Bonhomme began to take a more active part in political life. The major religious leaders might not
have liked him, but they recognized that he had given Christianity a boost in popularity on a scale not seen since the
great missionary expansions of the nineteenth century. It's six years since his revival now, and a quarter of the world's
population is influenced by him to some degree."

"I do not remember him as a good Christian," said Vitellan. "He hated authority and he hated Christianity when I knew
him in 1358. He also feared divine retribution for what he had done at the head of the Jacques mob. He even stole my
new Frigidarium to escape hellfire."

"Now
that
is consistent," said the marshal. "Luministe nations have put a huge amount of money and effort into medical
research disguised as philanthropy—even the Village does a lot of contract work for them. He may want to be refrozen
eventually, to escape an appointment with his creator."

"But he's hardly a Christian saint, anyone can see that," said Vitellan with ill-disguised contempt.

"But he
is
a type of crusader," countered Lord Wallace. "You lay frozen during the Crusades, you never saw how easily
people can be led by scoundrels."

"I didn't have to witness the Crusades to see that."

"Well then, you should understand Bonhomme's position. He only had to declare himself a Christian to get some
Christians following him—he has charisma, after all, and he has a flair for organization and tactics. He nearly destroyed
the French nobility at the head of an untrained and badly armed mob in 1358. Now he knows that you are still alive, and

you
could easily become a rival prophet: you're a man whose father met Christ, it says so in our chronicles. You also
know who really led the revolt of the Jacques, so you are both a rival and a threat. He wants you dead, and he has access
to resources and firepower that could have wiped out the Roman Empire hundreds of times over. The Village can protect
you from him, but you must return to us."

"You were not much help last time he sent his people after me," said Vitellan doubtfully. "I was kidnapped from the
Village's own research park in Durvas."

"We were infiltrated and caught off-guard," said Lord Wallace defensively. "That will not happen again. It's
war

between the Luministes and the Village now. Bonhomme must be stopped. When will you come back to the safety of
Durvas?"

"When I am satisfied about the safety of Durvas. Meantime I want a line of credit opened up to my node in the clinic in
Houston. When I have checked certain matters, I shall consult you about when it is safe to return."

"How much credit do you want?" asked Lord Wallace suspiciously.

"That is none of your business. My bill? will not break your annual budget, but I want them paid instantly. Do you have
any objections?"

"No, Centurion," replied Lord Wallace, but he was clearly unhappy.

Houston, Texas: 15 December 2028, Anno Domini

Vitellan had secretly been fairly confident about the security arrangements in Durvas. The real problem was that the
Village Corporate had wanted him to come back to Durvas physically and be their leader, but he had no intention of
doing that. Vitellan knew that he was at his best leading groups of a few dozen, but Durvas was now huge, powerful, and
daunting. He knew that he had no hope of being more than a figurehead, just as Bonhomme was to the Luministes. A
centurion could not run an empire. In Houston, in the SkyPlaz Clinic, he had at least a scrap of real authority, even if it
had been bought with the money of the reluctant Village Corporate. Security was, however, not an implausible reason
for staying where he was after all that had happened to him. The Corporate agreed to wait for Vitellan, and the
Corporate agreed to pay whatever bills he saw fit to incur. Baker and Hall's bills were large, but Vitellan felt less uneasy
with them than with anyone else that he knew: he was paying the two specialists, and that seemed like control.
Four days after the telepresence meeting with the Village Corporate, Hall and Baker had their equipment collected and
calibrated. As they strapped, bonded, interfaced, and tuned Vitellan in to the quantum-effect scanning gear he felt
that it was all strangely familiar, as if he were entering a new type of Frigidarium. Oxygenated blood was fed directly
into his circulatory system so that his breathing reflex could be suppressed. He was held totally rigid, it was like being
frozen in warm ice and remaining conscious.

Vitellan's impression was of complete darkness, then spears of light touched memories, memories that were all his own.
The bloody head of a Dane dangled by the woman who had just been raped by him, the bonfires in front of the gates of
Meaux, the creak of ropes aboard a ship approaching Ostia, the chill wind of the northern garrisons ... everything was
confident and clear, it all meshed together.

"That was the voluntary gates," the Texan drawl echoed somewhere in the distance. "How did it look?"

"I did all that," Vitellan thought within the imprisoning blackness, and his words echoed from a distant speaker.

"You did? Even that costume stuff I saw on the monitor screen?"

"Yes."

"Weird. New gates coming up now. This won't be as nice."

The feeling jerked him like a spear through a fish, a perspective he had never seen/felt/believed. It was being not-him.
An alien certainty was skewering his very existence.

"Vitellan, how're you doin' there?"

"That was bad."

"Bad as in hurts?"

"Bad as in—bad because it wasn't me. Something picked me up and walked with me for a moment. Not. . .
comprehensible. I tried to fight back, but I could not hit anything."

"Oh, you hit it okay, son. Killed it too. That particular gate is all you now—what was left of the guy underneath just lost
a big chunk of his remaining brain function to your imprint."