The Centurion's Empire (42 page)

Under the pretense of consulting his cyclopedia imprint, Vitellan took some seconds to assimilate this revelation.

"I would like an explanation, Lord Wallace."

"I can—"

"And I would ask you to remember that I have access to my own sources, and I've not told you all that I know. Be truthful
and don't waste our time. Why have I been kept revived but unconscious since 2022? Why was your son interfaced with
me while he was being grown and grafted back together after that car bomb shredded him on Icekeeper McLaren's
driveway?"

Wallace's composure gracked a little, possibly on cue.

"Centurion, you know what happened after Bonhomme's revival. Massive upheavals, a new crusade for Christianity to
put Islam in its place, and vendettas against the rich and powerful. Meantime,
we
had the problem of what to do about

you.
Would you be the same as Bonhomme? We would have
had
to do some psychological tests eventually. Our Village
charter states that we must revive you in 2054, and it's the cornerstone of everything that we do. We just wanted a
preview of what you were like, using a host that we could control."

Lord Wallace's holograph looked down and frowned, as if he was pained by the topic. Even as Vitellan was tempted to feel
sympathy, Hall's warning echoed through his mind: if he's imprinted with Fujitsu Shakespearean 6.2 he will be a
brilliant actor.

"Let's not mince words," said Lord Wallace, squaring his shoulders and drawing himself up straight, seeming to steel
himself to approach an unpleasant subject. "My son Robert had been an embarrassment for several years. That's a cruel
thing for a father to say, but one should not let tragedy gloss over the truth. You know that he received terrible injuries
from that car bomb, but did you know that his mind went into shock-induced catatonia?"
Vitellan checked his imprints for the unfamiliar term, annoyed at the delay needed for the retrieval routines and the
comprehension algorithms to work. He was obviously a novice with the words and ideas, it was all so humiliating that he
wanted to give up and just trust his people. Still, he knew that there was no real alternative to this slow-motion fight
with a fast-forward opponent.

"No, most of the gates behind my imprints have not been explored as yet," he replied. It was a smooth, convincing lie.
Vitellan had been imprinted with Fujitsu Shakespearean 6.2 that very morning.

"Just as well, the real Robert's mind was ... hopeless. We thought it—well, we imprinted some of my own memories and
attitudes on Robert to try to provide a level of stability for him. It was highly illegal, you understand, but the boy was
beyond hope, so my conscience was clear. Only Icekeeper McLaren and I knew the truth. My son was gone, just a
vegetable . . . but maybe not forever. It took nearly a year to transfer temporary imprints to test his brain function."

"A year, you say?"

"Yes, and the Resources War was not far off by then. It became hard to scrounge up supercomputer time, and we needed
a lot of processing power to do the transfers and imprint fixing. It was so slow because we were doing illegal work, so we
had to do almost everything by ourselves—we even invented some new technologies."

"Two men, working alone?" said Vitellan skeptically. "I find that unlikely."

"You
are the living proof. For example, we had a problem with heat dispersal in Robert's brain, because there was so
much neural rewiring going on. We had to cool the arterial blood supply while boosting the oxygenated red cell level."

"All this so that you could check out my emotional stability? You could have done that by just reviving me and having a
chat. It would have saved you billions."

Lord Wallace hung his head, obviously disappointed that Vitellan seemed neither to believe him nor share his
enthusiasm for the work.

"The Resources War alone cost the world hundreds of times what we spent on your imprinting."

"This is still not credible," Vitellan insisted, rubbing his eyes. "Someone in the Village must have noticed that a lot of
investment capital was out of circulation, and that a lot of work was going on that involved my body."
Lord Wallace sighed and shook his head. "No wonder there is such a legend surrounding you, Centurion. You really are
fantastically capable and adaptable. Yes, you're right, there was a secret within a secret. Your body also needed medical
treatment and extensive surgical procedures. The ice and rocks where you were last frozen had a slightly higher level of
background radiation than in most other parts of the Alps—there was a radioactive mineral deposit nearby, pitchblende
or something. Over the centuries your frozen cells accumulated tissue damage, and when you were unfrozen you
developed tumors and leukemia. The medical work to save you disguised the, the other procedures. All right then, it was
not just McLaren and me, but all the other people involved only had a small part of the picture. We disguised it in the
general research budget, and oddly enough it paid off. We developed technologies and patents that made Durvas a world
leader in imprinting while working on you. The whole exercise may turn in a profit by as early as 2035, according to the
Durvas Councillor of Treasury."

Vitellan considered this with care, painstakingly drawing facts out of his imprinted learning, matching them up with
other facts, then placing them in a bigger picture. He was oddly annoyed when forced to concede that Lord Wallace was
telling a plausible story.

"And if I'd passed the tests, if I was not another Jacque Bonhomme? What then?"

"The real you would have been revived."

"And the me in this body?"

"Centurion, that imprint is not stable, it will fade suddenly after a few weeks. Our idea was to put Robert's body
into a comatose state and let the test-imprint of you fade without you regaining consciousness. The real Centurion
would not have your memories, but that would not matter."

Vitellan considered this carefully, but did not take long to make up his mind.

"We have a problem, Lord Wallace. I have been awake and active for a month, and now I
do not
want to lose my
experiences from that time. It would be like having an alternate 'me' die. Besides, I have had experiences and collected
insights that I would have been shielded from as a two thousand-year-old celebrity. You say I passed your tests for ...
whatever you wanted to know."

"Oh yes, better than our wildest hopes."

"But if I failed you'd hardly tell me."

"Centurion—"

"Can you transfer my memories of the past month to my real body?"

"It would be possible to get some of your experiences across and permanently fixed, but the longer you leave it the more
you will lose when your overlay in Robert's brain begins to fade. You
must
return to Durvas."
The explanation was convincing, but a long-dead Roman teacher's words returned to Vitellan yet again. Never be
completely satisfied with any report, always probe for cracks.

"Durvas security still worries me," he responded doubtfully. "Why was your security so lax for a project worth billions?

How did the Luministes get into your research clinic so easily and abduct this body?"
Lord Wallace waved his hands in exasperation and seemed to lose his composure. "Pah, hindsight, the wisdom of fools!"
he snapped. "Whoever briefed you did a very one-sided job. Check your imprint cyclopedia for
Challenger,
January 26th,
1986. A billion-dollar American spacecraft and its crew was blown out of the sky for the sake of a couple of rubber rings.
History is full of that sort of thing, and people never learn. Back in 1969 a huge Soviet moon rocket exploded because
some idiot left a spanner in the fuel system and it fell into a pump. Sheer importance and cost does not proof a project
against stupidity."

Vitellan thought back to the Battle of Poitiers and could not help but agree. "Well then, what did happen?" he asked.

"Durvas security was good, but we trusted the Luministes more than we probably should have. We had a lot in common,
after all, and had a good business relationship with them. We even did some cooperative work on cryogenic research.
Some of their scientists on secondment with us must have been spying. Initially your brain and my son's were connected
by a long and expensive data bus, but Icekeeper McLaren began to complain about access delays and data bottlenecks.
The Village Corporate eventually gave permission for your body to be brought up to the surface clinic so that a shorter,
higher-capacity link could be used. The imprinting arrays were too bulky to take down to the Deep Frigidarium. Maybe
it was all a Luministe plot to make you more vulnerable. If so, it worked only too well."
Yet again, Lord Wallace's story continued to be plausible. When the Luministes had attacked and taken the wrong body,
they had not been far away from the original. The Roman had not been in the vault, a quarter of a mile below the clinic,
he had been on the surface inside the clinic itself. They had detonated a lattice bomb to act as a diversion. The
interlocked-slab clinic had partly collapsed, and the wrong body had been taken in the confusion.

"Would you like to see yourself?" Lord Wallace asked, now genial again.

"How difficult would it be?"

"Not hard at all. Merely a switch of your hologram reference point to down into what we call the Deep Frigidarium."
It took Lord Wallace some minutes to arrange a switch to the other projector node. "I happen to be down there with some
medical staff just now. Allow me a moment to detach from the telepresence transponder and brief them, then you will be
switched down."

Vitellan waited, and after no more than a minute his hologram was switched to a brightly lit chamber with a low ceiling.
The real Lord Wallace met him and gestured to the door in a partition. He was more slow on his feet than his
holographic projection.

The Roman centurion contemplated his own body lying on a padded bench. Familiar old scars were there, white weals
amid new, thin, red and white lines.

"What are those new scars?" Vitellan demanded.

"Ah—oh, those are for various operations. To repair damage done by the antifreeze oil to your stomach, for example.
The form that you had been drinking was full of toxins and they were slowly killing you. Other work was to remove
tumors, cysts, and part of an arrowhead, and to repair minor injuries from the Luministe attack."
The chest was rising and falling with regular breath, and a monitor followed its pulse.

"Don't be alarmed by what you are about to see," warned Anderson, whom Vitellan recognized from the Village
Corporate meeting. "An operator is controlling the movements from a VR board in the next room."
The body's eyes opened, then it raised itself slowly on chalky white arms. A flaccid amber cable trailed from beneath its
left ear, as limp as a dead worm. It swung its legs over the edge, but did not attempt to step down to the floor.

"Vocals please," said Anderson.

"This is a sensory test," the body said with the Welsh accent of an unseen operator. "I can hear your words clearly, and
can see you standing together. Mr. Anderson has his arms folded. Lord Wallace is also there, and the hologram of an
unidentified visitor is present. The hologram needs boosting, it is attenuated enough to see through. The visitor's
hologram has his hands behind his back."

Vitellan peered intentiy at the automation that his body had become. It was not readily familiar. There had been few
good mirrors in his pre-twenty-first-century life, and he was not used to seeing himself so clearly. The eyes and head
were alert, but they only paralleled the operator's movements.

"What is in the head?" Vitellan asked.

"Your brain, in bypass mode," replied Anderson. "The real Centurion Vitellan will remember nothing of this."

"But I
want
the real Centurion to remember this, and the month past as well. Lord Wallace tells me that I am running
out of time. Can a transfer be done before I fade from this host?"

"I say yes," said Anderson. "A restoration could take as long as six months of live body time, but there are leading-edge
methods that might work faster. We could imprint selections of your memories onto a dozen volunteers—not enough to
hurt them, we would just use redundant capacity in their brains. Each of those would in turn be imprinted and fixed in
your real body's brain, and you would be brought to a full revival with your present memories in, say, August next year.
I'd stake my career on it."

"That's all very comforting, but
I'm
staking my identity," replied Vitellan. "I'll have to think about what you propose."
Houston, Texas: 17 December 2028, Anno Domini

The telepresence meeting left Vitellan drained mentally, yet physically fresh. He wandered about aimlessly in the
SkyPlaz clinic for an hour, unable to make much of what he had just been through. Finally he called Baker and Hall,
and asked them to meet him in an executive ward that had been converted to a lounge.