The Centurion's Empire (41 page)

"That can't be right. It was like being swept along in a riptide."

"I'll light him up again. Get in, look around quickly. If I keep the gate open too long your imprints will move into a
bigger area. We're killing him a little by even doing this."

Ruins. The host brain had been taken by force, whatever

came in was the victor. Vitellan touched memories. Blue sky, green waves, unfamiliar seagulls on a foreshore lawn.
They dissolved like ashes as he examined them, only his perspective of the memories remaining.
Dry summer evening heat, driving through a large town or a city. His host was tired, he had been at the wheel of the car
for some time. There was also something wrong with the landscape, Vitellan quickly realized. Things were missing that
should have been there. He turned into a road that ran beside a beach, the blazing red disk of the sun on the horizon, the
roar of an internal combustion engine under the bonnet of a sportscar. Austin Healey Sprite, Mark 3A, he was aware of
what it was. There was a metal plaque bolted to the dashboard with the words "Vintage Restorations" and dated 2014. He
felt the weight of a hand on his leg as he drove, but his host did not turn to look directly at his passenger. He knew the
make of the car, but not his passenger's name! You will remember fragments, bits will be missing but don't Fight it, Hall
had said. There seemed to be three or four images superimposed, all a fraction of a second apart, and the last was the
strongest. A right-hand-drive car, aviation yellow, slowing, parking, a row of dowdy terrace cottages, lurid green patches
of lawn. The girl who got out of the car with him was svelte, wearing a green, leaf-pattern cotton dress. She was sweating
in the heat. His host found that very alluring.

Vitellan pulled back a fraction, observing rather than being. The girl unlocked the door to a cottage, sunlight streamed
down the corridor. They went to the kitchen, sat down and drank rum and Coke with ice. He had two, the girl four, she
was proud, yet unhappy too. His body was aroused, this was a seduction. There were Christmas decorations strung from
the picture rails, and a tiny tree surrounded by presents in one corner of the breakfast bar. At its summit was a kangaroo
wearing a red coat and white whiskers.

After some small talk about their drive in the countryside they walked to the front bedroom hand in hand. He helped her
undress, and he was so eager that his hands were shaking. They rolled on the bed naked for a few seconds, then he
was astride her, he pushed in hard, almost the length of his shaft in the first thrust. She gasped but did not scream or
complain. He ejaculated after a few seconds.

No style, no affection, Vitellan thought to himself. This man could afford to be as inconsiderate as he wished, he had
power or privilege—or both. He did not care what people thought about him, least of all his lovers.

"Repeatin' son, if you hear my voice, move toward it. You been down there three hours, fifty-eight minutes. Not safe to
stay much longer. Can you hear me? If you hear—"

"I'm back."

"Hey there, just you hold it. Let me get a fix." "What do I do?"

"Just sit tight. How does that feel?"

"Bad. I can feel the clamp again."

"You're back. Okay, lights coming on now, clamps off."

Vitellan sat up—and passed out. He was lying on a bed wearing a green clinic gown when he awoke. He related the
visions and sensations to Hall and Baker, who had been watching them on a monitor screen. They were pleased with the
results.

"Four hours," said Vitellan. "I would have said one."

"The pickup was badly attenuated, we had to do a lot of regenerative sweeps."

Vitellan ran his fingers through his hair. "All that meant nothing to me. The memories were not mine, I never drove a
car like that, I never got into bed with that woman. Even the city was—all wrong."

"You were on the west coast of some city that has Christmas in summer, and in a country with right-hand-drive cars.
That was an Austin Healey Sprite, a 1964 model that was running gasoline, but all the other cars that I noticed were
2020 models or earlier. I saw a billboard ad for
SOMS Honeymoon,
and that was released early in 2022."
2022. Memories of 2022. The host body's owner had been leading a normal life in 2022. Six years were required to fully
stabilize a total overlay of another personality, and this was 2028. The implication was that Vitellan's real body had been
revived and interfaced with whoever this person might be for six years.

"So who am I?" Vitellan blurted out before he could stop himself. 'This is not the body that I was born with."

"Hey there, the real agenda!" exclaimed Baker.

"I want this body identified, and I want to know what has been done to—to make me what I have become."
Hall held up a sheaf of hard copy covered in symbolic imprint delineators.

"No attempt was. made to disguise or hide the imprints and gates inside your head," Hall explained. "You really are a
thick layer of imprints on a host brain. I've never seen anything like it, you must have spent billions and taken years to
get that done. Anyhow, it's all illegal as well. There's some countries where folk could be tied to a post and shot for doing
that sort of work on a human brain. In most others they'd be locked up for more years than you're liable to live. How can
I say in downspeak—say, you got a cyclopedia tag for the Apollo project?"

"The first human landings on the moon, 1969 to 1972."

"That's it. A quarter-million folk involved, twenty-six billion dollars in old-time money, nearly every switch and wire
leading edge. Now imagine that going to the moon is illegal, a capital crime, but someone still manages to pull off a
Project Apollo.
That's
what I just saw inside your head: classy work and fully stabilized, really wonderful stuff. Why I
never thought I'd live to see that sort of thing done, you know?"

Vitellan had his answer, but it was of no help at all. One thing at a time, he told the maelstrom of questions in his mind.

"Can I find out whose memory fragments are below that overlay of imprints that are me? I want to know whose
experiences I just relived."

"We have a bunch of images on disk, so let's find out,", said Baker.

Baker used Durvas funds to engage a datavend who wanted to be known as Seishi. He was a slight, self-effacing little
ex-Yakuza who had survived to middle age by living his life as a valued tool. He worked for a sieve company in the
Christmas Island databoard node. After viewing Vitellan's

memories of the sportscar and seduction, he sent out a
help
notice from a bogus client wanting data on Austin Healey
Sprites in countries with right-hand drive: Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. The sunset over the water had already
narrowed the search down to Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth—the kangaroo-Santa also suggested Australia. Melbourne
seemed to be a good contender at first, being built around a wide bay and having rows of older houses looking out over
the water to the west.

Christmas Island returned real estate beachfront property guides, and Vitellan identified a line of single-story terrace
houses in South Fremantle, near Perth. This reduced the number of eligible cars to four. Seishi probed further, and
noted that one car had belonged to Mark Stannel, an English undergraduate at the University of Western Australia. He
had returned to Britain without graduating. A privacy bar cut in there, and he vanished from the records. The other three
owners of similar cars were quickly identified and cleared. Seishi checked the university archive database, which was
scanned from hard copy and of limited use, but it yielded the subjects that Stannel had studied. These led to student
publications that were only in hard copy and not scanned, but Seishi hired an investigator from Ozcover Services to go to
the University Library. Within twelve hours an annotated photograph taken at a faculty ball in 2021 appeared on the
wallscreen before Vitellan.

The man behind the memories stared from the photograph into Vitellan's face. The jawline was familiar, as was the way
he tilted his head back slightly.

"He reminds me of Lord Wallace of Durvas," said Vitellan. "Check if he has a son."
Now it became easy for the datavend, for Robert Wallace was the only son of Lord Wallace. He had been sent to Oxford
University but he had made himself a bad name. When he lost control of a car and killed a pedestrian there was a lot of
bad publicity that even the Village could not blank out unless . . . Bribes were paid and favors called in. Robert Wallace
was given a bond, then he was sent to Perth incognito to get a university degree and blow off steam out of sight.

"The girl that you saw him with was Emeline Dorcas," the datavend reported in a cluneal tone. "She was another
student at the university, studying economics. She works for a stockbroking firm in Singapore at present. Her parents
lived at that house on the beachfront when she was at the university, but they must have been away when she brought
you home."

"Not me, they were imprint memories," muttered Vitellan. "As you say, sir, so shall it be," agreed Seishi, his face
blank.

Baker sent Seishi out of the room. Vitellan looked at his hands, then regarded himself in a mirror.

"Just who am I supposed to be?"

"Your body, especially your face, has had extensive cosmetic work," said Baker, scanning the report on his dataspex,

"but you know that already."

"Someone has altered my host's face to resemble the Centurion of Durvas, but why and who?"

"Someone with access to a lot of money and clinic tech, that's who."

"It has to be Lord Wallace. He has access to big capital."

Baker closed his eyes and snapped his fingers. "There you go, man!" he exclaimed. "You've got a big future in PI if you
want it, Mr V." He leaned over to a voice node. "Seishi, get back in here."
Seishi scanned the datafarms for Robert Wallace, who had been born late in his father's third marriage, in 2002. He gave
a running commentary as he probed.

"Robert Wallace features extensively on paparazzi data-boards that carry a lot of, ah, soiled news about the rich and
famous. In 2022, soon after he returned to Durvas, he dated a young Italian girl and took her to a resort in Portugal for a
holiday. She decided that he was not her type on the first night, so he performed date-rape upon her. He also left her to
find her own way home. Her father was old Mafia, and a week later a half-kilo of covalent lattice collapsed under
Robert's car on the estate of a man named McLaren, near Durvas. He was rushed straight into the Durvas clinic by
McLaren, but six years later he is apparently still there."

"Is any of that what you want to know?" Baker asked.

Vitellan slowly sifted through real and imprinted memories, wishing that he could share some of the complexity with
Hall and Baker, but not daring to confide in them fully as yet.

"McLaren was a member of the Village Corporate and leek—well, he died recently. Lord Wallace is a ruthless man, or
so Lucel has told me. Perhaps some very illegal experiments in whole-mind overlay were done." He spread his hands
wide as he sat there. "Here's the son's body, and overlaid on the brain is me—yet can that be possible? I was told that
imprints fade if not renewed."

Vitellan already knew the answer, but in this environment of lies and half-truths, his only weapon was cross-checks.

"Hell son, ordinary memories fade too," said Hall, who had been quietly observing the debate. "It's just that they fade a
whole lot slower. Imprints can be 'fixed' by intensive reinforcement sessions, but that's expensive work for something the
size of the human mind. The tag for the computing power needed would cost out at hundreds of millions, maybe
billions."

Vitellan sat up, but the room seemed to break loose from reality and tumble about an oblique axis. He flopped forward
with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.

"I need to have another talk with Lord Wallace," he said into his hands. "Get the telepresence gear ready, if you please,
and give me a dose of something for this nausea."

Durvas, Britain: 17 December 2028, Anno Domini

The hologram of Lord Wallace lost color in sympathy with his distant body. It gave Vitellan's hologram a curiously blank
stare.

"Yes, your body is that of my son," he said simply, then turned and beckoned Vitellan to follow him. They walked down
a corridor in silence, stopping at a heavy steel door. Lord Wallace extended a hand which slid smoothly into the
electronic lock. It opened with a dull clunk.

"I thought holograms could not move things," said Vitellan.

"There's an internal optical scanner inside," Lord Wallace explained.

In the room beyond was a small electronics laboratory, yet it was somehow too neat, and the equipment was chunkier
than Vitellan was used to seeing in this century. This too was a museum.

"We can talk here," Lord Wallace said, and he switched on a link for Vitellan's node.

"Where is my real body?"

"In an intensive care clinic, about a quarter of a mile straight down."