The Centurion's Empire

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The Centurion's Empire Page 28

by Sean McMullen


  Vitellan's jaw dropped to say "Impossible!" but he caught himself in time.

  "What were the other tests?"

  "Bone joint condition, skin conductivity, a whole bag of cellular tests for mutation, telomere erosion, and the buildup of trace environmental pollutants such as dioxin."

  "I seem to have scars missing from my body. Have I had plastic surgery?"

  "Sure, there's evidence of it. Could you tell us where the scars were?"

  "Later." Vitellan put his hands together and pressed his fingertips against his lips. He turned to Hall. "Soon I have to return to the telepresence tour of my Village in Britain. When I get back here from that telepresence session I want a... a diagnostic scan of my imprints done. Is that the right term?"

  "Sure is."

  "After that, I want certain locked memories probed directly. I believe that can be done."

  "Big bucks," interjected Baker. "You would have to guarantee the Village to underwrite that sort of work."

  "I can do that. How long would it take you to set up the equipment?"

  "Get the credit for a deep scan and we can be doing it within, say, four days," said Hall. Durvas, Britain: i I December 2028, Anno Domini

  Vitellan's historic meeting with the Village Corporate had not been originally planned as a telepresence event, but while the Durvas Centurion had demanded that it be held at once, he also refused to leave the safety of Houston until he was more confident about his own staff. His attitude was quite understandable, given all that had happened to him since his body had been unfrozen.

  So this is what it is to be a ghost, he thought as he materialized in the unfamiliar room. It was a high-ceilinged anteroom decorated in a vaguely eighteenth-century style, although the furniture ranged from early Georgian tables to a chunky art deco lounge suite. Vitellan tried to walk, but it was no more effective than treading water.

  "Will yourself in the direction you wish to move in, sir," said a software tutor's gentle voice. The sound seemed to enclose him.

  He floated over to a wall, where a gold-leaf strip divided coffee cream painted plaster from red wallpaper. He tried to reach out—that same mistake again. Before the tutor came* to his aid he extended his sense of touch and felt the texture of the red velvet wallpaper. Looking carefully, he noted that the velvet did not show the impression of a finger as he trailed his senses along it.

  "What will the Village Corporate see?" he asked on the auditory band.

  "A hologram of yourself dressed as you are in Houston, sir."

  Vitellan drifted across to a full-length Victorian mirror in i rosewood frame. A fuzzy green sphere about the size of a melon hung in midair.

  "Then why do I look like a green snowball?"

  "That is only a position-point hologram, sir. It is for courtesy referencing. Full projection facilities have been installed in the Corporate room only."

  So, I obtain a body only as I enter the room, he realized. I enter clumsily, feel a fool, begin the meeting on the back foot. He moved forward and extended arm-equivalent force to the door handle. A rubbery resistance barred his way.

  'The Village Corporate is not yet ready to see you, sir," the disembodied voice explained with a blend of patience and regret.

  "Inform the Village Corporate that I am to be admitted at once or they can come in here and talk to me as a green position-point snowball. I am going to count to ten," he added without elaborating. He reached seven. The door opened of its own accord. Vitellan drifted forward, then found himself abruptly anchored in a simulation of his body. It had weight characteristics and could not be willed to float like a wisp of smoke. He held up a hand briefly, as if to satisfy himself with the hologram's quality, then walked forward. The Village Corporate's boardroom was brightly lit, with spot-lights playing down at the space enclosed by a U-shaped table of varnished oak. Each member's place was encrusted with interface studs and navigation pads. There were seventeen members, and all wore white silk knee-length kimonos over business suits. Although the effect was meant to be Roman, it came across as a tasteless combination of smoking jacket and laboratory coat. There were six women, and nobody was under forty, Vitellan noted. Lord Wallace was present as a hologram.

  The walls were frescoed with art nouveau images of Durvas history. They featured an early Roman occupation idyll, Alfred of Wessex fighting the Danes, Durvas bowmen in the Hundred Years War, the great revival in the fifteenth century, and the Village's rise as an industrial center during the nineteenth century. Vitellan noticed that the trip through time ended with a Durvas elder shaking hands with a scruffy-looking little man who wore an ill-fitting suit and top hat, and smoked a cigar. An early wide-gauge steam train was belching smoke in the background. A display case full of weapons and ice-compacting equipment covered the remaining space.

  "The wall is about due for another extension of the mural," Lord Wallace explained, following Vitellan's gaze. The Corporate remained standing, stiff and uncertain. Vitellan looked to where the usher was beckoning him, a point at the focus of the U-shaped table. He ignored him and walked toward one of the glass-fronted cabinets. Upon extending a hand he felt the image stopped at the glass. He made a fist and punched through the glass. Nothing shattered, but there was about the same resistance as a sheet of paper would have offered. He ran his finger along a familiar-looking blade. It was hard and cold to the touch. The sensors in the room's projector could apparently scan through glass.

  "I recognize this Saxon half-sword, the one with the two nicks in the blade," he said, almost as if he were talking to himself.

  "A fine and prized relic," Lord Wallace explained, breaking ranks with the others and walking over. "It is said to have belonged to the Centurion himself—well, I mean . . ."

  Vitellan turned, frowning as if trying to recall something in the very distant past. "Yes, I remember using it in the fighting against the Danes."

  That broke the decorum. The rest of the Village Corporate abandoned the table and crowded around to share in this magical moment of reunion, this confirmation that they had indeed served the Centurion well.

  "We had it restored very carefully, Centurion," the Durvas conservator assured him, "but someone had butchered the blade by grinding it to a more tapering point."

  "Ah yes, it was I who modified it," replied Vitellan. "I preferred the balance of a blade with the long, tapering point of the Roman gladius."

  The conservator seemed to shrink before his eyes. Vitellan withdrew his hand and walked his hologram briskly to the table. The Corporate members hurried back as well, but the hologram Vitellan took a short-cut through the table and sat down in Lord Wallace's chair. The usher came running

  up with a spare chair as the others stood beside their seats. When Lord Wallace's hologram finally sat down the rest took their seats. There was a welcome speech for the Centurion, delivered by the Corporate herald from a carved oak lectern. The text read very strangely, having been carefully sculptured and remolded over many centuries by Durvas elders who had all wished Vitellan to hear their words—even though they would not be alive to speak them. After that, Lord Wallace went to the lectern and read from the Chronicles of Lew and Guy, written in the Swiss village of Marlenk in 1359 and brought back to Durvas a few years later. The reading was from the later pages, and concentrated on the Centurion's crossing of war-ravaged France and the confrontation with Jacque Bonhomme at Marlenk.

  Vitellan frowned during the reading, unsettling those members of the Corporate who noticed. Something was amiss; the Centurion was displeased.

  "That was probably written by the Marlenk priest under direction from Lew and Guy," Vitellan commented as Lord Wallace finished. "They would not have written about theology and such matters so very fluently." As the members of the Corporate realized that the frown was for the long-dead, the mood relaxed as palpably as if a terrorist had placed his machine pistol on the table and raised his hands.

  "But Centurion, is it accurate?" asked the Corporate herald, who was sitting u
p straight with his hands so tightly clasped that his nails were digging into the skin.

  "Accurate but limited. Father Guillaume, Jacque Bonhomme, whatever you call him, he was not the sniveling, cowering wretch that this chronicle describes. He was proud, charismatic, cunning, and fairly brave."

  "But in the final analysis, a medieval priest," said the chronicler. "How could he possibly run a major religious movement in the twenty-first century, one based on mass media? The chronicle is so specific, Bonhomme was a coward, an inept leader—"

  "Not so. I met him only weeks ago, but in the fourteenth century. / ought to know." The chronicler still seemed unhappy, but he said no more.

  The reality of who Vitellan really was tended to smother his own status as the ultimate authority on the history of Durvas.

  "What else can you tell us, Centurion?" asked the marshal, Anderson.

  Jacque Bonhomme and his followers were seldom far from Vitellan's thoughts.

  "The Jacques did indeed commit atrocities against the nobles, but not on the scale described by Lew, Guy, or other contemporary chroniclers such as Froissart. Most Jacques just wanted to eat the nobility's food and loot their houses. If there were folk weaker than they to victimize, they would do it. I'll not deny that there was a lot of torture, rape, and murder as well, and none of that was excusable, but most of the Jacques were just yokels grasping for riches and pleasures. The nobility were not entirely innocent either, but then is anyone?"

  "So who is Bonhomme?" asked the chronicler.

  "Guillaume of Chalon. He was a priest, and apparently a respected scholar. As Jacque Bonhomme he was a compelling orator, as well as being an exceptional organizer and tactician. He was the right man at the right time, he led the Jacques superbly, and nearly brought down a kingdom with that rabble."

  "And he's doing it again!" exclaimed Lord Wallace with theatrical indignation, as if he regarded Bonhomme's success as a personal insult.

  "No, he's not."

  "What do you mean?"

  "The Bonhomme of the Luministes is neither Jacque Bonhomme nor Guillaume of Chalon, Oh, he has the right face and body, and some of Guillaume's memories and motivations, but the man who I have seen in the vids giving orations to prayer meetings and ranting to the media is someone different."

  Vitellan looked up and down the arms of the table. Several faces had lost color, others still sat vacantly attentive.

  "It must be imprints," said the Corporate treasurer, a woman near the end of the table.

  "Undoubtably. He crossed several centuries in a single step, and now he's leading hundreds of millions of Lumin- istes in the twenty-first century. He could never do that without heavy imprinting. I've had terrible trouble adjusting so far, and yet I'm an old hand at ^waking in new centuries. This was the first time for Bonhomme." The.chronicler picked up the unintended pun and visibly suppressed a laugh. Lord Wallace looked puzzled. Anderson raised his hand.

  "A lot of the therapy used in Bonhomme's revival is public knowledge," the marshal explained. "First he had an imprint to help him with modern French, then they gave him an adaptive overlay to help him adjust to our culture and technology. These have been repeated every few days for six years, so they are part of him now. His charisma showed through very early, and people were impressed, but they probably credited him with greater powers than he really had. In a sense what he can do is unimportant, it's just that people have a reason for following him. He's from the past, so he's as special as if he had stepped out of a UFO. Someone probably realized it the moment that he was successfully revived. There's a lot of evidence that a very carefully crafted campaign was staged to promote him by a worldwide alliance of militant Christian groups that saw his value as a rallying point."

  There were murmurs of assent.

  "That explains the attempts to kill the Centurion," Lord Wallace added. "Anyone equally special would draw worldwide media attention away from Bonhomme. The Luministes feared him as a rival."

  Lord Wallace nodded to the chronicler, who began a holovid documentary projection describing how a Lumin-iste survey team had discovered some fourteenth-century gold coins at the foot of a Swiss glacier in 2022. An artificially shaped boulder was visible within the ice.

  The entire operation had been recorded on holovid. The hollowed-out boulder was dug out of the ice by the Lumin-iste archeologists. Bonhomme's body was discovered inside, and it was quickly realized that he had been treated with an antifreeze compound.

  Pie boulder was sliced apart with abrasion jets, and the core of ice carefully melted back to the body. Bonhomme was dressed in his priest's robes, and both body tissue and cloth were carbon dated as fourteenth century. The body temperature was raised to a few degrees above freezing while doctors determined that all the tissues were at a uniform temperature. Ultrasound profiling revealed extensive ulceration and perforation in his stomach, and trauma stabilization gels were applied by microsurgical flexors. His body was warmed further, and his blood replaced by oxygenated synthetic plasma. The body on the contoured bench gradually took on the color of a living human. Brain function, heart, and respiration were all restored before he was given a transfusion of real blood and actually revived. There was much speculation by both the scientific experts and the media about the shock effect of being revived in a state-of-the-art twenty-first-century hospital. Thus a medieval bedchamber was constructed and furnished with careful attention to detail. The sleeping priest was brought in, still wearing the cranial webcap that was maintaining a controlled coma. Staff who had been given imprints for Latin and medieval French were dressed in fourteenth-century costumes, then the webcap was removed.

  Hidden holocameras recorded the awakening as if it were part of a great holovid epic. Bonhomme's eyelids flickered, then he was awake, looking about him in alarm.

  "Who are you?"

  The first words were a wheezing croak. His throat was inflamed from drinking the Oil of Frosts without accustoming rtimself to it slowly. A nurse bent over his bed. She had been selected for having an especially good manner with parents.

  "You have been frozen for more than six centuries. We ire scholars and physicians. We revived you." Bonhomme remained suspicious. "Do you know who I im?"

  "No, you will have to tell us that."

  He closed his eyes for a moment. "I am a simple scholar md priest. I did not expect to be asleep so long. Tell me ibout your kings and popes. Let me . . . let me read your :hronicles . . ."

  He lapsed into sleep again, already exhausted and over-

  whelmed by no more than a minute in the distant future. The holovid was stopped. Wallace leaned forward over the table.

  "He later said he was a Christian prophet who was escaping persecution by the medieval nobility. When asked where he had got the Oil of Frosts he said that he was a Roman who had met Christ. Christ had given him the Oil of Frosts, then told him to travel through time to preach the True Word, and make sure that His original message was not corrupted."

  "Plausible, but a lie," Vitellan commented.

  "He also gave his own version of the 1358 peasant rebellion."

  "I can guess what he said about that. How fast did he rise to power?"

  "Almost as soon as Bonhomme was revived he found himself at the head of the Luministes, a militant Christian revivalist movement. They knew his value as a figurehead, and they promoted him very, very skillfully. He played a very minor part in the building of his own legend at first. His ulcerated stomach had to be replaced and he had to be brought up-to-date with the twenty-first century first, Imprint technology was more primitive back then, so it took several months.

  "The trouble began soon enough, though," the chronicler added. "He had immediate appeal for the French, who had been humiliated by three major invasions over the past century and a half."

  "I don't follow," said Vitellan.

  "It's a very French thing. Once the French attitude used to be 'Monsieur, I am a very civilized man, and if you step over my borders I shall slap
your face.' After World War Two it became 'Monsieur, I am a very dangerous psychopath, and if you step over my borders I shall blow your head off and nuke your homeland.' The latter attitude has proved itself for the past eighty-two years, and Bonhomme fitted in with it perfectly. He certainly is a dangerous psycho. There were also wars in Africa, Asia, and South America fought in his name, nasty little wars that the Christian sides always won. Bonhomme began to take a more active part in political life. The major religious leaders might not have liked him, but they recognized that he had given Christianity a boost in popularity on a scale not seen since the great missionary expansions of the nineteenth century. It's six years since his revival now, and a quarter of the world's population is influenced by him to some degree."

  "I do not remember him as a good Christian," said Vitellan. "He hated authority and he hated Christianity when I knew him in 1358. He also feared divine retribution for what he had done at the head of the Jacques mob. He even stole my new Frigidarium to escape hellfire."

  "Now that is consistent," said the marshal. "Luministe nations have put a huge amount of money and effort into medical research disguised as philanthropy—even the Village does a lot of contract work for them. He may want to be refrozen eventually, to escape an appointment with his creator."

  "But he's hardly a Christian saint, anyone can see that," said Vitellan with ill-disguised contempt.

  "But he is a type of crusader," countered Lord Wallace. "You lay frozen during the Crusades, you never saw how easily people can be led by scoundrels."

  "I didn't have to witness the Crusades to see that."

  "Well then, you should understand Bonhomme's position. He only had to declare himself a Christian to get some Christians following him—he has charisma, after all, and he has a flair for organization and tactics. He nearly destroyed the French nobility at the head of an untrained and badly armed mob in 1358. Now he knows that you are still alive, and

  you could easily become a rival prophet: you're a man whose father met Christ, it says so in our chronicles. You also know who really led the revolt of the Jacques, so you are both a rival and a threat. He wants you dead, and he has access to resources and firepower that could have wiped out the Roman Empire hundreds of times over. The Village can protect you from him, but you must return to us."

 

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