She nodded as she pulsed the doors locked. 'To Japan?"
"Not this time, that was to throw off the Luministe agents. I decided to pick a Moscow clinic at random from a register and have some imprint work done here instead. Details of your therapy visit will leak out to the data brokers in a day or two, but we'll be long gone by then. You're safe, and I've bounced a message saying just that off a geosat to where we are going."
"Geosat, artificial moon—"
"Stop it! For now, just access the cyclopedia imprint when you need to. Okay? Later I'll teach you imprint embedding techniques."
They left the van and took the elevator to street level. After meandering through a number of streets like late-season tourists they had lunch at a cafe. Thermal plastic film in a sunflower print pattern was peeling from the wall in places, and the menu seemed to be confined to bread rolls, Coca-Cola, and black coffee. A holoposter above the Cafe-matic advertised the Australian Gold Coast. The place felt lived-in and smelled stale, but it offered Vitellan something comforting that he could not identify. He wanted to stay longer, but Lucel would not allow it. She pulsed for an autocab using the black market American Express credit key, bought only an hour earlier from a snow bear. After two minutes a red, driverless wedge caked in grime pulled over to where they were standing and opened its door. They stepped in, and the autocab began driving itself with inhuman precision and alarming speed while Lucel'calmly scanned the cabin for bugs.
"How's your English?" she said as she powered off the scanner. "Do you still have that echo effect when listening to what I say?"
Vitellan shook his head. "Not as badly as before. It's not even noticeable unless I concentrate on it."
"The imprinter is an .amazing machine. It ran through some basic grammatical rules and a few thousand words while you slept, using Latin as base reference."
"It seems alive and magical, like a sprite."
"No, it's a machine, a machine like a book. You don't read it, but it puts memories into your head." He considered that for some time, wrestling with concepts alien to all three cultures that he had lived in until now.
"Memories? Perhaps memories of what did not happen?"
Lucel whistled. "That's smart thinking, Vitellan. Yes, it can be used for that."
"Then it could make me into someone I am not."
"Yes, although there's more than that involved. The process is illegal and expensive, and nobody has ever tried it—officially, at any rate."
"Most of what has been going on around me seems to be illegal."
"True." She glanced at the expression of apprehension on the mask over his face. He was holding together in spite of an enormous overload of new concepts and sensations, but there was no sense in pushing him harder than was necessary.
"Personality distortion is possible in a limited sense, but it can be reversed by the right therapies," she said reassuringly. "Don't worry about it for now."
Vitellan looked out of the window of the autocab. The drab cityscape was unending, and the sunlight was far less flattering than the streetlights had painted it as they arrived on the maglev. He estimated that they had traveled several times the length of ancient Rome in a matter of minutes.
"For the whole of my life a man could not move across the land as fast as this, not even the Emperor himself with all his wealth. Now it seems commonplace."
"You're in for quite a few more shocks, Vitellan, but most are like your new face: just a cosmetic trick that's harmless and reversible—but unsettling if you look in a mirror without being warned."
"A new face. If you can do all this, is anything left of me? Are my own memories real? They seem so clear, yet they have nothing of this world."
"I'll be honest," she said, looking him in the eyes. "Your mind has been tampered with, but I can't explain everything to you for now."
Vitellan looked out of the window again. The buildings, cranes, and leafless trees continued to drift past, interspersed with chaotic jumbles of shanty-towns. Brightly glowing signs exhorted him to buy Microsoft Traveler, the
>Jew Buran Electric, McDonald's Healthburgers, Sony, /olkov AP Vectors, and Dyushin. There was a strange uni-brmity about the cityscape, as if they were traveling in a rreat circle and passing the same places over and over.
"I wanted to see Japan."
"Why Japan?"
"Just an odd infatuation. Before the cyclopedia imprint was put on me I thought it was a city of India. Now I know hat Japan is a group of islands, similar to Britain—but is it ike Britain?"
"The clinic where you were to be scanned is in SCagoshima, a city in the south." "Kah-gow-shima?"
"Yes. It's called the Naples of the East, and is something yf a health resort. People lie on the beach covered in black volcanic sand for therapy, that sort of thing. There's a volcano there too."
"Naples, a pretty place. As a teenager I lived near there for five years at Boscoreale, on the slopes of a volcano. My father had left me there with my grandparents after my mother died. When he left the army he lived there tiimself." Lucel blinked and sat up, suddenly interested.
"Do you know what happened to Boscoreale, Hercula-neum, and Pompeii in the Christian year 79?"
"The terrible eruption? Yes, I saw it from Naples. I had just been visiting my father, and was on my way back to my garrison in Britain. He had inherited the family farm and was settling down to eat, drink, and be comfortably prosperous for the rest of his life."
"So he died in the eruption?"
"Yes, poor man. All those long, dangerous years in the legions, yet he enjoyed mere months as lord of his own little estate. The entire farm was buried under the ash. It seems so recent, to me it was only fifteen years ago."
"Have you read the account of the eruption by Pliny the Younger?"
"No. Is it well known?"
"Very."
"I don't recall it, I'm sorry. There was a Pliny who was
admiral of the Mediterranean Fleet. The ash and fumes killed him too. I knew his nephew. A few years later we exchanged letters comparing our memories of what happened that day."
The classics scholar Lucel came to life, eager and hungry.
"I don't believe it! You exchanged letters with Pliny the Younger himself?",
"If you say so, yes, I suppose that was he. He was a friend of the Emperor."
"Yes! Yes, but what did—do you, I mean, what happened to the letters?"
"My servants kept them for a time. The tradition in my village of Durvas has it that parchments and gold were buried when the law and order of Rome started to break down. I visited the site of my old villa once. The walls were gone. The locals had used them to build a church. It was all grassy mounds, nothing more."
"So you could easily find it again."
"Perhaps, but not easily. It depends on how much the south of Britain has changed since the ninth century."
"The ninth—that's when you were last there? Next you'll say you knew King Arthur."
"Arthur? I've met a Wessex swineherd named Arthur, but no king. Perhaps Artor? Artorius? There was Artorius, a sea chief from, ah, Scotland as you would say. He lived and died while I was sleeping in the ice, so I never knew him." The autocab turned onto a freeway feeder and began to accelerate through a great paved canyon between drab, uniform buildings. Lucel took a pair of dataspex from her jacket pocket and slipped them over her eyes. Soon she was partly away somewhere, although the dataspex allowed her to see the cab clearly while she was connected to distant databases and infomarts. The lenses were transparent yellow, with a spiral bus cable leading down from one thick arm to a netnode clipped to her belt. It had a dull brdwn case, and was flecked with gold highlights. The arms of the dataspex passed over induction cell arrays just below the skin behind her ears, and the control came from within her head. The unit at her waist linked into the cab's cordless pickup.
"Are you busy?" Vitellan asked.
"Busy but interruptible. When I do deep surfing the lenses turn black."
&n
bsp; "Deep surfing: scanning information networks. So that's what you are doing?"
"Yes. I have a little pet research project to learn a few sensitive things about the Luministes. It's professional. I'm an assassin."
"You move like a trained fighter, but not a soldier. More like a gladiator."
"So I'm a gladiator? Tell me more."
"Your attitude is never far from violence. It is black and white, no colors at all."
"That's all?"
"Perhaps with better language imprints I could say more. Can your memory machines teach me more than they have done already?"
"They can, and will. History imprints are easy. Language is much harder because it imposes a bigger load on the brain. The brain tissue literally heats up, and too much heat will cook it like mince in an oven. You should not have become so fluent with English so quickly, but. .. I'll tell you later, I'm not sure I understand it myself as yet."
"Were you ever given false memories?"
Lucel's lips curled up at the edges. "Once. I had parts of my mind gated."
"Gated?"
"Partitioned off while I was taught skills and memories, taught to be someone else. It was voluntary, and it took three years. I was being taught to be like I am now: competently dangerous."
"What were you like before the imprinting?"
"I was a scholar turned junior tutor. I had a good reputation in my field, and I got laid occasionally by some very pleasant men. I liked my food and my figure was built for comfort. There are vids of me from around 2020. Switch the windows and watch."
Tiny holograms of Lucel in a bikini at some sort of fancy dress party with a 1950s theme appeared in midair between them. She had been not fat so much as well proportioned
and healthy. A prime example of the post-AIDS, post-drac, goodlife look popular with young professionals of the time.
"So someone changed and controlled your mind?"
"Not quite. Total mind control is still one of the holy grails of modern brain research. The preferred—and illegal—method is to imprint another personality into redundant areas of the brain with a control gate to let it take over. The imprints don't last forever, unless used continually or renewed and boosted for years. The more renewals you get, the better they stick. Mine were renewed quite a lot, and they weren't from Microsoft, Tensai, Durvas, or any of the other legal companies."
"Why did you have it done?"
"I needed the skills to rescue you, Vitellan. I knew that the Luministes were going to abduct you even before they knew it. My imprints were from a particularly potent female terrorist. She sold them for a fortune, I'm told."
"Did my village pay for all this?"
"In a manner of speaking, yes."
The little holographic images winked out and Vitellan sank back into the soft seat of the cab, his arms folded and his head bowed.
"Last month I was traveling through the Swiss Alps, escorted by a French knight and his men-at-arms. Now I wake up to be rescued by a female knight and a squad of machines."
Liquid crystal pigments in Lucel's mask displayed the blush on the skin beneath, and she giggled before she could stop herself.
"Me, a knight! Vitellan, you're a dear man and I'm very flattered. It's the romantic in me, I suppose." Vitellan sat forward, took her hand in his and kissed it lightly, just as he had kissed the hand of the Countess of Hussontal only three of his days earlier.
"The courtly kiss, just a light brush of the lips and not a big slobber," she observed, then practiced on Vitellan's hand. It was the lightest of flirtations and quite asexual, Vitellan thought as she released his hand.
"The original warrior-woman who provided your imprints must have been very impressive."
"Yes indeed."
"How did you get along?"
Lucel's eyes narrowed, although her smile remained. 'Well enough," she volunteered. Vitellan settled back in the cab's seat again to assimilate what he had been told into the tangle of memories and imprints that was his mind. Lucel plunged back into the world of infobanks and datafarms through her dataspex.
"Sir Lucel Hunter," she said dreamily. "What a zap. I owe you for that one, Vitellan." Associations suddenly snapped together in the Roman's mind and he sat bold upright in the seat.
"How—how did you know that the Luministes were going to abduct me even before the senior Luministes knew it?"
"Because it's my business to know," she mumbled distractedly.
"But how, why?" "I can't explain yet."
"Who are you—really?" demanded Vitellan, exasperated.
"For your own safety I can't tell you that yet. Please accept my word on that, Vitellan." He watched the buildings continue to blur past, but there was little that he could focus upon to study. He began to doze.
"What was it like in the fourteenth century?" Lucel asked as she powered off her dataspex ten minutes later. Beyond the windows of the cab the Moscow suburbs had given way to farmland beneath deep snow. He shook his head and stretched.
"I was only there from 1356 to 1358.1 lived in England for eighteen months, then traveled through France to Switzerland in 1358."
"Thirteen fifty-eight. That's when Bonhomme was frozen. They could tell from the coins and clothing found with him, and from carbon isotope mass spectrometry— that's a dating technique, in case your imprint doesn't cover it."
"Bonhomme. My imprint says he is a religious cult leader. I knew him in 1358."
"What do you know of him?" "You tell me what you know first." Lucel considered, but did not take long to make up her mind.
"Okay. The airport's getting close, but I'll try. Bonhomme was the third of the ice people to be dug out of the glaciers of the Alps. The first was found in 1991. He was a Neolithic hunter about five thousand years old, but his body had been desiccated by the wind before he had been frozen and he did not have the benefit of your Oil of Frosts. Obviously he was not revivable at all. You were announced, rather than discovered. That was in 2016, when the Village Corporate moved your body from Switzerland back to Durvas. There was so muchjnterest when the public announcement was made that your block of ice had to be put on display in the British Museum for a week. Bonhomme was found in the Alps in 2022. He had also been treated with a type of antifreeze oil, the same as was found in a sample from your frozen flesh."
"Jacque Bonhomme."
"He only calls himself Bonhomme or Goodman."
"He was the leader of the peasants' rising in France in 1358—a bad man, an evil man. He was a renegade priest with great charisma. He stole my Glacier-Frigidarium for the price of a little girl's life."
"Ah, that fits with Bonhomme. Now he's a major cult leader. He could tell millions, maybe billions to jump and they'd do it at once. Ah, the airport's coming up."
Snow-shrouded farm buildings had ceased to blur past beyond the windows. Everything was flat, lacking even trees or fences.
"Where are you taking me?"
"Eventually, to your village, Durvas. It's quite a big place now. The Luministes snatched you from there. I snatched you from the Luministes. I suppose you were shocked by the trail of bodies I left while doing it, but it's a tough world out there, Vitellan."
"I can remember seeing men fight each other to the death in public arenas, and for nothing more than sport. Christians were covered in pitch and burned alive as human torches in
the century that I was born. I have seen the remains of a French nobleman who had been burned at the stake, and I helped to bury the womenfolk of his family that the mob had ravished while he burned. Later the king of that mob was crowned with a circlet of red-hot iron by other noblemen. Is your world as tough as that?"
"Sometimes," replied Lucel, but with new respect in her voice. "How many people have you killed—with your own hands?"
"I have killed two hundred and ninety," replied Vitellan. "I keep a running tally as best I can." "Why?"
"Respect for the dead."
"I've killed seventeen over the last two years," Lucel said calmly
, coldly. "The CV agent in my office manager keeps a tally—encrypted, of course."
"Are you really a professional assassin?"
"I'm a contractor, and a weapon. I maintain myself well."
She rolled up her sleeve and flexed the muscles in her arm. They were impressive, with the texture of pore-polymer on steel, and were interfaced to a bypass-boosted nervous system. Other tools of her trade were the ability to withstand most knockout gases and frank darts, and to store oxygen reserves in molecular cages within her body tissues and call on them at will.
"Addictive, this life," she admitted without prompting. "Like becoming a cat after living as a mouse."
"The Frigidarium is the same. Survive the first jump and you want more. I turn two thousand in twenty-six years."
"Happy birthday."
"If everyone did it, the world would be a different place." "I don't think so. As an amateur historian I think it's the same, century after century: same shit, different flies." "I first heard that said when Nero was emperor." "Did you meet him?"
"I saw him in the distance, at the chariot races and the games."
"The games? As with gladiators and lions? I thought you were a Christian, or are the Durvas folktales all wrong?"
"My father sometimes took me to the games to see what happens to Christians who get careless." "So the lions won?"
"Nearly always. The lions cost money. Christians and hu-miliores were free."
"You will find this a rather godless century after living in the pious Middle Ages."
"I like the principles that Christ taught, but I care nothing for the religions that sprang up in his wake. That sort of talk would have got me burned at the stake in the fourteenth century, of course, so I displayed as much piety, as I needed to blend in. To travel through time one has to adapt very quickly."
"And you certainly adapt quickly, Vitellan. If an adaptability imprint could be made from your mind we could lease it to Microsoft to sell to the icehead market. You could be a rich man—but then you're already a rich man."
"Am I really?"
"Oh yes indeed."
Moscow South Orbital was a vast snowfield fed by underground maglev lines and surface freeways from the city and other airports. As the runways were enormous maglev lines in themselves, no other aircraft could use them. Vitellan gazed through the panoramic window of the lounge at the massive angular spearhead shapes that floated at about a man's height above the snow. Sub-Orbital Maglev Spacecraft, or SOMS, the cyclopedia told him. They were held above the ground by superconducting magnets in the runway. During takeoff, the magnets also accelerated the SOMS to hypersonic speed by the end of the runway, where ramjets took over. They were braked by a reverse process when they landed. A dragchute and lightweight skids were included for emergencies, but had not been used in twenty years of SOMS operation.
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