The Centurion's Empire (56 page)

to Vitellan as he sat watching Lucel's sleeping body through a window. As the procedure commenced there was nothing
physical to see, and as the hours passed there was nothing more for Vitellan to do but watch the steady rise and fall of his
lover's chest. When Gulden finally approached him he was not smiling.

"It's worse than I could have imagined," the Icekeeper reported. "Some sort of irreversible random placement has been
used, something developed privately that we have no documentation on."

"Couldn't you do anything?"

"We did indeed repair some gating, but it barely scratched the surface. Now I need a decision on how to proceed, and an
authorization to do so. One way is to begin removing the gates and imprints individually and hope that a faster
technique is soon developed. Another is to try filtering blocks and reimprinting Lucel with herself. That will take no
more than six years, but she will not awake the same woman. The third course is to keep her confined ..."
Vitellan gazed at her sleeping body and shook his head.

"She is very resourceful. Sooner or later she will escape and begin stalking the Temporian Romans, nothing is more
certain. The fourth course is to kill her."

"I never said—"

"Of course not, but someone had to say it. There is also a fifth way to cure her."

"Another way? This is my specialty, I doubt that I have missed any alternatives."

"She can be frozen until all the Romans are dead, so she would awake in a world where there are no triggers to make
her dangerous. Anyway, in a few decades there may be imprint techniques that can reverse the Luministe imprinting in
a matter of weeks, rather than years."

"You are talking about fifty years, or even more."

"Hah, a mere trifle. In the meantime Durvas can set up a research foundation to develop techniques for repairing such
imprint damage. As Centurion of Durvas, I hereby order it."

A refinement of what was once known as Oil of Frosts was administered to Lucel before she was revived. Vitel-
Ian watched from the observation room, then came in as she opened her eyes. He was wearing a clinic gown himself.

"It failed," said Lucel.

"I haven't said a word," replied Vitellan.

"No, but you are wearing an Alpha-level security badge, and you only need to wear one of those when visiting an
extremely dangerous patient. If I'm still dangerous, then Gulden and his team failed."

"You are right, of course," Vitellan admitted. "Dr. Gulden has just given me the results of the exploratory scan. Wait
fifty years, or a hundred, and a therapy will be developed to reverse your obsessions and vector keys. You will have to be
frozen until then."

Lucel turned away from him and stared at the wall.

"You were right to snatch a few days of playing lovers with me, Vitellan. Dammit, I'm like a race car, tuned up to all hell
but burned out after only a couple of hours of com: petition. Was it all worth it?"

"Was I worth it?"

"If you were not, nobody else is."

"That's not an answer."

"It was not meant to be."

Vitellan sat on the edge of the bed and put his arm around her shoulders. She turned back and flung her arms around
him at once.

"It's said that adjusting to a new century is a real bitch," Lucel whispered. "Who said that?"

"Some Roman I know, a real charmer. He's had a lot of experience."

"Good, good. He'll be there to help out when you wake up."

"What?" she cried.

Lucel sat up and seized Vitellan by the shoulders, her bloodshot eyes bulging with incredulity as she looked him up and
down.

"Yes, the gown, the, the . . . You
would
do it, you really would."
She hugged him again, convulsively. He stroked her hair,

his eyes closed and bis mind blank, savoring the minutes that would soon slow into years. r

"You need to key a legal release into the bedside console," Vitellan began, but Lucel reached out and batted out a
pattern before he could say any more.

"How long have we got?" she asked.

"A minute, an hour, a day if you like. You have to stay in here, of course, but where you stay, I stay."

"It's a cage, cages suck. I wouldn't make my best friend stay in a cage and you're my best friend."

"It doesn't have to be so frantic, Lucel."

"Yes it does. Don't underestimate me, Vitellan, I know what I am. I know that there might be surviving travelers from
Imperial Rome out there. We've been through all this before. Maybe I blew up a tiltfan loaded with frozen wax dummies,
maybe it was all a hoax to activate the psycho circuits in my head to show what I can do." She placed a finger on his lips
as he parted them to speak. "Don't tell me anything, lover. Right?"

"Right," Vitellan agreed.

Gulden watched as the two bodies were lowered into the cryogenic chambers together. Fumes billowed from the liquid
nitrogen, and one by one the sensor ikons on a wallscreen beside him turned from red to green. Covers glided into place,
sealed, then locked.

The 121st Icekeeper of Durvas sighed with relief. The Master was safely frozen again, after a most harrowing few
months in the world outside.

"A close call, Master," Gulden whispered. "Ah, Icekeeper McLaren was so loyal. It grieves me that the truth about what
he did for you cannot be shouted to the world's media and turned into another Durvas legend. He shook the world to keep
you alive, Master. The older you grow, the fiercer does our loyalty become."

He touched a key, and the guard circuits switched to automatic-live. The lights dimmed in the Deep Frigidarium.

"I am honored to have known you, but I am glad that you will sleep for most of my tenure. We love you, Master, but we
fear the madness that fires us to protect you."

* * *

Some minutes later Gulden was back on the surface, chatting with Dellar and Burgess in an overgrown garden that was
full of spring blooms and birdsong. They had stopped before the twelfth-century building that guarded the entrance to
the original Frigidarium.

"So they're both down now," said Dellar. "The Master and his true love."

"Repulsive woman, I don't know what he sees in her," muttered Burgess.

"We had better start planning for the revival of 2054," warned Dellar.

"He will not want to stay awake long if Lucel remains frozen, Sir Peter," Gulden replied confidently.

"And Lucel? You had all the Luministe obsession gates scrubbed out of her mind?"

"Yes, it was easy. Just after she was sedated for freezing I gave her an imprint explaining everything. The most she can
do to me at the time she is revived is jump up and down on my grave."

"Five of those Temporian Roman sleepers have just been revived, including Decius himself, " Dellar remarked, as if he
expected Gulden to be following his thoughts.

"I know, I've been following the interviews with them. They said they were part of a secret bureaucracy of time travelers
that ran the Roman Empire, and nearly every government on Earth has been sending urgent requests for more
information. These men and women from our past might end up changing our world more than the crew of a UFO could
hope to. It's like First Contact, in fact in a sense it really is First Contact."

"All of a sudden the Durvas time traveler is old news," said Burgess wistfully.

"Yes, isn't it wonderful!" exclaimed Gulden his elation undisguised. "All those psychologists had been queuing up to
study the Master as soon as we hinted at an early revival, but now they're off to study the Temporians."

"They had a point," Dellar reminded him. "Now that time-jumping is to be part of our lifestyle we heed to see how peo-
pie like Vitellan managed to adjust to awakenings in new centuries. Until recendy he was priceless for that reason."

"Ah, but now nobody cares about us freezing him again," said Gulden. "The Romans from Antarctica are even older
than our Master, and they can teach us an actual science of administration by time travel."

"Are you absolutely positive Lucel is safe?" asked Burgess. "If any of the Temporian Romans decide to be refrozen, then
she could cause a lot of trouble in the future if her treatment is incomplete."

'Trust me, Lucel is now harmless," replied Gulden. "I worked from the original imprint maps when I reversed what had
been done to her. The Luministe imprint analysts left an encrypted README imprint in her mind explaining what they
had done, and I had the encryption key from McLaren's records in the Deep Frigidarium. When Lucel and Vitellan are
eventually revived together, they can look forward to many happy years with each other."
Sir Peter Dellar sighed with relief and satisfaction. He was concerned for the Master's welfare, but he also wanted him
to be happy. Gulden had engineered a win-win outcome.

"So when will that joint revival be, Dr. Gulden?" Dellar asked.

"Not during my lifetime, Sir Peter. I want it written in the
Village Corporate Chronicles
that the Master remained safe
and secure during my tenure as the Icekeeper of Durvas, and that is most likely to be the case if he is frozen."

- Look for-
souls

in the

great machine

Available in hardcover June 1999

I

Champions

Fergen had not noticed a suspicious pattern in the pieces on the board by the seventh move. Champions was his best
game and he had even its most exotic strategies and scenarios memorized. The Highliber advanced a pawn to threaten
his archer. The move was pure impudence, a lame ploy to tempt him to waste the archer's shot. He moved the archer to
one side, so that his knight's flank was covered.

The Highliber sat back and tapped at the silent keys of an old harpsichord that had been cut in half and bolted to the wall
of her office. Fergen rubbed plaster dust from his fingers. All the pieces were covered in dust, as was the board, the
furniture, and floor. The place was a shambles. Wires hung from holes in the ceiling; partly completed systems of rods,
pulleys, levers, pawls, gears, and shafts were visible through gaps in the paneling, and other brass and steel mechanisms
protruded from holes in the floor. Occasionally a mechanism would move.

Fergen gave the game his full attention, but Highliber Zarvora tapped idly at the harpsichord keys and seldom glanced at
the board. A rack of several dozen marked gear wheels rearranged their alignment with a soft rattle. The mechanisms
were part of a signal system, the Highliber had explained. Libris, the Mayoral library, had grown so big that it was no
longer possible to administer it using clerks and messengers alone.

The Highliber leaned over and picked up a knight. With its base she tipped over one of her own pawns, then another.
Fergen had never realized that she had such small, pale hands. Her knight toppled yet another of her pawns, then turned
as it finally claimed an enemy piece. Such a tall, commanding woman, yet such small hands, thought Fergen,
mesmerized. The knight knocked another of its own pawns aside, then his king fell.

For some moments he stared at the carnage on the board, the shock of his defeat taking time to register. Anger,
astonishment, suspicion, incomprehension, and fear tore at him in turn. At last he looked up at the Highliber.

"I must apologize for the surroundings again," she said in the remote yet casual manner that she used even with the
Mayor. "Did the mayhem in here disturb your concentration?"

"Not at all," replied Fergen, rubbing his eye. Behind it, the early symptoms of a migraine headache were building. "I
could play in a cowshed and still beat anyone in the known world in less than fifty moves. Do you know when I was last
beaten at champions?"

The question had been rhetorical, but the Highliber knew the answer.

"Sixteen seventy-one GW."

She tapped again at the silent keyboard. The little gears, marked with white dots, clicked and rattled in their polished
wooden frame.

"And now it's sixteen ninety-six," he said ruefully. "I've played you before, but you never, never made moves like
these."

"I have been practising," she volunteered.

"You take a long time between moves, but oh, what moves. I have learned more from this game than from my previous
hundred. You could take my title from me, Highliber Zarvora. I know mastery when I see it."
The Highliber continued to tap the silent keys and glance at the row of gears. The same slim, confident fingers that had
harvested his king so easily now flickered over the softly clacking keys in patterns that were meaningless to Fergen.

"I am already the Highliber, the Mayor's Librarian," she said without turning to him. "My library is Libris, the biggest
in the world and the hub of a network of libraries stretching over many mayorates. My staff is more than half that of the
Mayoral palace. Why should your position interest me?"

"But... but a Master of the Mayor ranks above a mere librarian," spluttered Fergen.

"Only in heraldic convention, Fras Gamesmaster. I enjoy a game of champions, but. my library means more to me. I
shall tell nobody about your defeat."