"We are near modern Fishbourne," said Lord Wallace. "The Village Corporate bought the land as soon as the ruins were, ah, discovered. That was two years ago, but the Resources War delayed excavations. Austerity and all that." Vitellan walked his hologram down an excavated path and stared at the foundations he had never set eyes upon when he had lived there. Beneath a large plastic weather dome the mosaic of a blue dolphin in green waves was taking shape under the gentle manipulators of terrier-sized robots on arrays of padded legs.
"I try to remember what it used to be like, but this is too much for me," he admitted. "Seeing one's house in ruins is bad enough, but seeing it made as ancient as this is far worse."
"We may be able to help there," said his host. "Jackson, a full simulation if you please," Lord Wallace said to the air before him.
Walls and tiled roofs shimmered into being over the foundations, hedges and carefully manicured bushes grew out of air. A mathematically level lawn was even being cropped by virtual sheep. Sparrows splashed in the shallow water of a gently bubbling fountain. The walls were gleaming with whitewash, and were all as straight as a lance.
"Would you like to go inside?" asked Lord Wallace. Vitellan nodded and followed him down the path and through a door. Apart from being unnaturally clean, Vitellan could not fault the reconstruction.
"The accuracy of the floor plans and floor mosaics I can understand," said Vitellan as he looked from the dolphin mosaic to a fresco of Diana the Huntress on a nearby wall, "but the furnishings and frescoes should have been impossible. How did you get all that.detail right? Even in the ninth century this place was a pile of rubble."
"The science of archeology can deduce a fantastic amount from very little," Lord Wallace replied. "Fragments of tiles and stones found in the soil show what the roofing and walls were like, and subtle discoloration of the soil reveals where bushes and trees once stood in your garden. We have even used chemical tracers to identify odd corners where people used to piss when caught short."
Vitellan gave a start, as if he had been caught in the act of doing just that.
"Why go to so much trouble?"
"Why? You're the Centurion, our Centurion."
This was meant to explain everything, but although Vitellan did not find it helpful, he was too distressed and disoriented to argue the point. He had seen this place in its prime barely half a decade ago, yet now it was so very old that even its ghosts had surely faded.
"The Village Corporate is building a replica villa about a mile away," continued Lord Wallace with a brief wave to the northeast. "We thought that it could be a soothing place for you to live after the shock of being revived in this century." Vitellan fought hard to resist the temptation to run forward and hide from the gaudy tumult of the twenty-first century in the fantastically realistic image.
"I... I must admit this is wonderful," he stammered. "I never thought that I'd ever again see Roman buildings as anything more than piles of stones. It's been so long, five years—of my life, at least. You say that a solid version of this illusion is being built?"
"The work is scheduled to be completed in four months. The garden was to be given twenty years to grow, and we planned to have people living in the villa for a time to give it a used and comfortable feel by 2054." Comfort! That was it. A comfortable cage, a museum dis-
play case for a museum exhibit, Vitellan realized abruptly. The thought revolted him, and now he just wanted to get out. He shielded the eyes of his hologram from the descending sun as he looked through a door to, the northwest.
"There was another villa out across there, as I remember, about three miles away. Do you know of it?"
"Jackson, did you catch that?" Lord Wallace asked the unseen operator, then assimilated the reply for a moment before turning to Vitellan. "A ruined villa was found there in 2019. It has been mapped by ultrasonics and some preliminary trenches have been dug, but it seemed to be nothing special so no serious work has been done as yet. What can you tell us about it?"
"Someone lived there, a girl who . . . who meant a lot to me." •
Lord Wallace examined his imprint index for a moment. "No written records exist regarding any villa there. Can you give me a name?"
"No! No, forget that I mentioned it. You were right, it's nothing special."
"Would you like to see the Frigidarium now?"
"More ruins?"
"Oh no, the Frigidarium has never been in ruins."
They faded out of the countryside and were reprojected in the grounds of a large Georgian manor with a walled garden of about ten acres. The late afternoon shadows were long and deep, and the fashionable free-growth garden plan seemed more like overgrown neglect to the Roman's mind. The elderly man was still in a long overcoat, but his wide-brimmed hat was gone. As a hologram Vitellan was nervy and hesitant in his mannerisms, as if the direct line to his mind made it harder for him to hide his real mood. From the background noise of traffic and solar cell film-clad office blocks looming beyond the wall, Vitellan deduced that they were within a city now. The stone building that had been built over the entrance to the Frigidarium in the twelfth century was as he had last seen it in 1358, except for over six centuries of additional weathering. A thick evergreen vine smothered the north face with leaves.
"Not as good as it was when new in 1155, but we looked after it," declared Lord Wallace with pride. Vitellan shrugged. "I would not know. It was already two centuries old when I last saw it, in 1358. Even then it had not been used in decades. They had been keeping me in a cave in Wales, because snow and ice were more readily available there."
Lord Wallace turned and walked through the iron-bound oak door after gesturing to Vitellan to follow. Vitellan knew that he could walk wherever the hologram projector could reach. He walked for the door, his hands before him. There was slight resistance imposed by the projection software as he passed through, as if he were pushing a heavy curtain. Hall had said that the effect would be disconcerting for a first-time user. Beyond the door Lord Wallace was holding the glowing hologram of a fluorescent lantern.
"This place was used as a store for five hundred years," he explained as he led the way down the familiar stone steps. "It was a terrible irony that after you were moved to Switzerland, the English climate became cold again, and Durvas was once again able to keep the Frigidarium stocked with ice. In 1870 the Village Corporate decided to restore it to the way it was when you had last used it, in the Middle Ages."
"They did good work. This is very close to what I remember."
"Oh no, this is a more recent restoration, done in 1988. The Victorian effort was sheer butchery and bad taste—
terracotta cherubs, gargoyles, miniature Greek pillars, all that sort of thing. Fortunately the Durvas archives were not all sent to France and destroyed during the Great Revolution of the 1790s. A few plans and drawings were left, so we had a good idea of the authentic layout."
Vitellan counted ninety-two steps to the little stone anteroom, rufus me fecit was still inscribed above the massive wooden door and there was a trickle of meltwater running to a collection trough cut into the stone floor. The outer chamber was stacked with French champagne, Australian chardonnay, and Californian genoeisvine, all on oak racks with bar codes burned into the wood.
"I'll enter with you this time," said Vitellan.
They stepped through into freezing" air, and the hologram projector even fabricated the condensation of breath that was actually leaving Vitellan's nostrils back in Houston. The blocks of ice were now made in a refrigeration unit behind the main house, and were renewed every month instead of seasonally. The stone platform that had been Vitellan's bed for so long was flanked by ten packing cases. He walked over to look at them.
"Those are the Century Roasts," explained Lord Wallace. "Every ten years we unfreeze and roast a century-old sheep, and put another down in its place. It's a very old custom."
"I do not remember it."
Lord Wallace smiled approvingly.
"
Well, for most of us it's very old. The practice was established after you were taken to Switzerland, to try to preserve the tradition of keeping something frozen in this chamber. Everyone in the Village is entitled to a share."
"With two hundred thousand people in Durvas and another fifty thousand working for the Village there can't be much to go around."
"Members of the Village Corporate get a couple of mouthfuls, and the rest is mixed into several tons of. mincemeat for soups and pies. True, it's spread rather thinly by the time everyone who wants to partake has done so, but it's the symbolism that's important. It gives us unity."
"When did it begin?"
"It was started back in the fourteenth century by Icekeeper Guy. The roasts were kept in Wales at first, but then the climate cooled and the tradition was brought back to Durvas and this Frigidarium. Until a few years ago—when your body was moved back to Durvas—it was a rustic, eccentric, and, well . . . very English custom that inspired unity among our employees. People like tradition and certainty, especially when the world around them is changing so fast." Vitellan's mind was racing all the while, because he knew that Lord Wallace and his Village Corporate had plans to turn him into some type of prophet from the century that Christ had lived in. The Luministe attack was certainly due to fear of a rival prophet and leader, but per-haps revenge was also part of it. There were many twisted, convoluted agendas to think about. Durvas had changed a lot since Guy had been Icekeeper—and the villagers had changed a lot too.
"A quarter of a million Durvas people," Vitellan said as he stared at the frozen meat. "In 1358 Durvas was dying, yet Guy built it up again, leading to all this. I seem to be always served by people so much better than me." His host took that as a compliment and gave a litde bow, his hand across his chest.
"This must be your only real link with the past," Lord Wallace said proudly as he held the lantern up to the arch of ice blocks lining the roof.
"I designed it and supervised its building with Rufus and Milos, but from then on I only saw it when I went down to be frozen. Revivals were always up in some house in the village. It was not practical to have roaring fires and tubs of water down here."
Lord Wallace squatted down and pointed to a groove in the stone floor. As a hologram his movements were far more agile than with his real body.
"One point that has bothered us for centuries is the melt-water channel. It allows a little of the warmer air from outside into the inner chamber. Why not have the collection trough inside?"
'The amount of water in the collection trough measures the rate of melting without anyone having to open the door and let even more warm air in."
Lord Wallace arched his eyebrows and nodded his approval. "Like everything else Roman, it's wonderfully simple and practical."
"But I've never been afraid of new and improved technology," Vitellan assured him. "Remember that I consented to move to a better model of this time machine in 1358."
He ran his holographic fingers over the rough stone surfaces, noting familiar marks made by a stonemason who had been a contemporary of Christ. Once, when he pushed too hard, his fingers sank right into the stone. "If you were to freeze me again, how would you do it?" Vitellan asked.
"Ah, we have a synthesized version of the Oil of Frosts,
based on samples taken from your frozen blood in 2016. As for the location, well perhaps we could build an underground site near one of the lunar poles, with liquid nitrogen storage and a refrigerator powered by a solar collector."
"Lunar—the moon!" exclaimed Vitellan.
"Why not? It's the most sensible place. Oh, and we have identified the toxins present in the Oil of Frosts and separated them from the beneficial components, so your health would not be as badly affected. The Oil has had to be modified for use with the lower temperatures that liquid nitrogen provides, but it is still basically much the same mixture. It would be advisable to spend a couple of years on a diet low in radionucleotide traces to reduce the danger from long-term irradiation from trace radioactivity in the environment, and we would build the components of the new chamber from materials made of stable isotopes."
"What sort of period would that allow me to jump across safely?"
"We did a study of this some years ago and found it to be thirty thousand years, with an error margin of five thousand years."
"So twenty-five thousand years, if one was being conservative?"
"Perhaps even more. You could make your next jump say, five hundred years, and use the improvements in technology that have been developed by then. A million years may not be out of the question, in spite of damage from cosmic rays and natural radioactivity. You would have to be monitored for radiation events by some type of advanced scanner, then injected with nanotech repair bio-mechs targeted on the damage sites when you were revived. Current medical technology would allow you a 140-year lifespan, and assuming that you stay awake for about six months between jumps
... with lucjc y°u could get to over two hundred million years. That's assuming you don't have a fatal accident at any stage."
The number was too big for Vitellan, and he was silent for some time as he thought about it. He scanned his imprints for a few facts to cling to, anything to supply a perspective.
"According to my cyclopedia imprint, two hundred million years ago we were triconodont mammals the size of rats, eating insects and dinosaur eggs. In less than six hundred years, while I slept frozen in the Alps, the world has changed so much that any pleb can wield the sorts of powers that Roman gods were credited with in the time that I was born."
"But it would be a journey to end them all," said Lord Wallace, his voice colored by the romance and adventure.
"Would it? Suppose for a moment that some proto-shrew had somehow been preserved in a pocket of ice since the late Triassic, and had then been found and revived. How would it feel about life in a cage, with no dinosaur eggs or familiar insects to eat, and no mate?" He gestured to the door. "It was good to see this place again, but can we go now?" Outside the Frigidarium they were met by two guards dressed rustically in dungaree shirts and moleskin trousers, but carrying quite modern tumble-shot automatics. They had emerged from a neat square of bricks that hinged out of the wall to reveal a long, high tunnel lined with red brick archwork and paving.
"This is new," observed Vitellan.
"It leads back into the manor's cellar," Lord Wallace explained as they turned down the tunnel.
"So that you can get to the wine when it's raining?"
"That too, but it was actually built as an air raid shelter during the Second World War." Vitellan sorted through imprinted databases for a moment. "Bombs dropped from enemy aircraft, I see. But would the, ah, German airmen have attacked a civilian house?"
"Yes. They bombed our cities to rubble, then we flew over to Germany and bombed their cities a lot worse. This place was not hit, but that was only by luck."
"But what evil had the people of all those cities done to be so terribly punished?"
"Evil had nothing to do with it. It was strategic bombing, . to weaken the enemy overall. They were making munitions and general supplies for the war effort, so bombing their cities made it easier to defeat their armies." In spite of his twenty-first-century memory imprints,
Vitellan still had the values of a centurion from the Roman legions. The mass destruction of cities from something as remote as a flying machine offended him, and there was no escaping the fact.
"The pattern of the bricks and brickwork is familiar," Vitellan said as they walked.
"Oh, it's very much in the Roman style. We couldn't have it any other way, that would never do." As they were walking along the tunnel something faint but insistent called to Vitellan from within himself. At first he thought it an imprint malfunction. They were known to happen, and their effect was described as similar to this. He had something like an itch to think about a memory.
He realized that he was aware of having spoken to Baker, and within the past few seconds.
It was a memory without experience, just like an imprint. He had told him that the results of certain tests on his tissues were ready. Dr. Baker had also advised him to return to Houston at once.
"The house itself is the old headquarters of the Village as a corporation," Lord Wallace was saying, "but the functional headquarters of today is wherever the Corporate meets. That's usually at one of the datanode buildings, but this place is still used for ceremonial occasions. The Corporate has been called to meet here in an hour, and I want to show you over the place first."
Vitellan stopped and deliberately made to steady himself against the wall. His hand sank in before the orientation software stopped him and tilted his hologram upright.
"Please, I think I've had enough for now," he said as Lord Wallace turned back. "My real body is tired. Could I come back here later, just before the meeting with the Corporate?"
"Yes, of course. You are the Durvas Centurion. You can do whatever you want."
Houston, Texas: 11 December 2028, Anno Domini
As easily as waking from a dream, Vitellan was back in Houston. The webbing of the couch parted like tearing cobwebs as he sat up.
"Baker?" he asked the form before his unfocused eyes.
"Yeah, that's me. I sent a flagged imprint directly to your brain, rather than the sensory access point at your holograph. That way the message could not be monitored unless someone did a blanket scan."
Vitellan examined the memory of the message that he had neither read nor heard.
"You ... informed me that I am between twenty-four and twenty-six years old," said Vitellan in a flat voice, fighting down his incredulity.
"That's right."
Again there was a moment of silence, except for the soft rushing of the air conditioning. "How?"
"It's a summary of a lot of little things, such as wear on your teeth. Just for the record, the scans of your teeth confirm some very classy laser dental work was done on your molars in 2014, 2017, and 2019. There are ceramic fillings with datable trace radioisotopes mixed in for reference purposes."
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