The Centurion's Empire
Page 29
"You were not much help last time he sent his people after me," said Vitellan doubtfully. "I was kidnapped from the Village's own research park in Durvas."
"We were infiltrated and caught off-guard," said Lord Wallace defensively. "That will not happen again. It's war
between the Luministes and the Village now. Bonhomme must be stopped. When will you come back to the safety of Durvas?"
"When I am satisfied about the safety of Durvas. Meantime I want a line of credit opened up to my node in the clinic in Houston. When I have checked certain matters, I shall consult you about when it is safe to return."
"How much credit do you want?" asked Lord Wallace suspiciously.
"That is none of your business. My bill? will not break your annual budget, but I want them paid instantly. Do you have any objections?"
"No, Centurion," replied Lord Wallace, but he was clearly unhappy.
Houston, Texas: 15 December 2028, Anno Domini
Vitellan had secretly been fairly confident about the security arrangements in Durvas. The real problem was that the Village Corporate had wanted him to come back to Durvas physically and be their leader, but he had no intention of doing that. Vitellan knew that he was at his best leading groups of a few dozen, but Durvas was now huge, powerful, and daunting. He knew that he had no hope of being more than a figurehead, just as Bonhomme was to the Luministes. A centurion could not run an empire. In Houston, in the SkyPlaz Clinic, he had at least a scrap of real authority, even if it had been bought with the money of the reluctant Village Corporate. Security was, however, not an implausible reason for staying where he was after all that had happened to him. The Corporate agreed to wait for Vitellan, and the Corporate agreed to pay whatever bills he saw fit to incur. Baker and Hall's bills were large, but Vitellan felt less uneasy with them than with anyone else that he knew: he was paying the two specialists, and that seemed like control. Four days after the telepresence meeting with the Village Corporate, Hall and Baker had their equipment collected and calibrated. As they strapped, bonded, interfaced, and tuned Vitellan in to the quantum-effect scanning gear he felt that it was all strangely familiar, as if he were entering a new type of Frigidarium. Oxygenated blood was fed directly into his circulatory system so that his breathing reflex could be suppressed. He was held totally rigid, it was like being frozen in warm ice and remaining conscious.
Vitellan's impression was of complete darkness, then spears of light touched memories, memories that were all his own. The bloody head of a Dane dangled by the woman who had just been raped by him, the bonfires in front of the gates of Meaux, the creak of ropes aboard a ship approaching Ostia, the chill wind of the northern garrisons ... everything was confident and clear, it all meshed together.
"That was the voluntary gates," the Texan drawl echoed somewhere in the distance. "How did it look?"
"I did all that," Vitellan thought within the imprisoning blackness, and his words echoed from a distant speaker.
"You did? Even that costume stuff I saw on the monitor screen?"
"Yes."
"Weird. New gates coming up now. This won't be as nice."
The feeling jerked him like a spear through a fish, a perspective he had never seen/felt/believed. It was being not-him. An alien certainty was skewering his very existence.
"Vitellan, how're you doin' there?"
"That was bad."
"Bad as in hurts?"
"Bad as in—bad because it wasn't me. Something picked me up and walked with me for a moment. Not. . . comprehensible. I tried to fight back, but I could not hit anything."
"Oh, you hit it okay, son. Killed it too. That particular gate is all you now—what was left of the guy underneath just lost a big chunk of his remaining brain function to your imprint."
"That can't be right. It was like being swept along in a riptide."
"I'll light him up again. Get in, look around quickly. If I keep the gate open too long your imprints will move into a bigger area. We're killing him a little by even doing this."
Ruins. The host brain had been taken by force, whatever
came in was the victor. Vitellan touched memories. Blue sky, green waves, unfamiliar seagulls on a foreshore lawn. They dissolved like ashes as he examined them, only his perspective of the memories remaining. Dry summer evening heat, driving through a large town or a city. His host was tired, he had been at the wheel of the car for some time. There was also something wrong with the landscape, Vitellan quickly realized. Things were missing that should have been there. He turned into a road that ran beside a beach, the blazing red disk of the sun on the horizon, the roar of an internal combustion engine under the bonnet of a sportscar. Austin Healey Sprite, Mark 3A, he was aware of what it was. There was a metal plaque bolted to the dashboard with the words "Vintage Restorations" and dated 2014. He felt the weight of a hand on his leg as he drove, but his host did not turn to look directly at his passenger. He knew the make of the car, but not his passenger's name! You will remember fragments, bits will be missing but don't Fight it, Hall had said. There seemed to be three or four images superimposed, all a fraction of a second apart, and the last was the strongest. A right-hand-drive car, aviation yellow, slowing, parking, a row of dowdy terrace cottages, lurid green patches of lawn. The girl who got out of the car with him was svelte, wearing a green, leaf-pattern cotton dress. She was sweating in the heat. His host found that very alluring.
Vitellan pulled back a fraction, observing rather than being. The girl unlocked the door to a cottage, sunlight streamed down the corridor. They went to the kitchen, sat down and drank rum and Coke with ice. He had two, the girl four, she was proud, yet unhappy too. His body was aroused, this was a seduction. There were Christmas decorations strung from the picture rails, and a tiny tree surrounded by presents in one corner of the breakfast bar. At its summit was a kangaroo wearing a red coat and white whiskers.
After some small talk about their drive in the countryside they walked to the front bedroom hand in hand. He helped her undress, and he was so eager that his hands were shaking. They rolled on the bed naked for a few seconds, then he was astride her, he pushed in hard, almost the length of his shaft in the first thrust. She gasped but did not scream or complain. He ejaculated after a few seconds.
No style, no affection, Vitellan thought to himself. This man could afford to be as inconsiderate as he wished, he had power or privilege—or both. He did not care what people thought about him, least of all his lovers.
"Repeatin' son, if you hear my voice, move toward it. You been down there three hours, fifty-eight minutes. Not safe to stay much longer. Can you hear me? If you hear—"
"I'm back."
"Hey there, just you hold it. Let me get a fix." "What do I do?"
"Just sit tight. How does that feel?"
"Bad. I can feel the clamp again."
"You're back. Okay, lights coming on now, clamps off."
Vitellan sat up—and passed out. He was lying on a bed wearing a green clinic gown when he awoke. He related the visions and sensations to Hall and Baker, who had been watching them on a monitor screen. They were pleased with the results.
"Four hours," said Vitellan. "I would have said one."
"The pickup was badly attenuated, we had to do a lot of regenerative sweeps."
Vitellan ran his fingers through his hair. "All that meant nothing to me. The memories were not mine, I never drove a car like that, I never got into bed with that woman. Even the city was—all wrong."
"You were on the west coast of some city that has Christmas in summer, and in a country with right-hand-drive cars. That was an Austin Healey Sprite, a 1964 model that was running gasoline, but all the other cars that I noticed were 2020 models or earlier. I saw a billboard ad for SOMS Honeymoon, and that was released early in 2022." 2022. Memories of 2022. The host body's owner had been leading a normal life in 2022. Six years were required to fully stabilize a total overlay of another personality, and this was 2028. The implication was that Vi
tellan's real body had been revived and interfaced with whoever this person might be for six years.
"So who am I?" Vitellan blurted out before he could stop himself. 'This is not the body that I was born with."
"Hey there, the real agenda!" exclaimed Baker.
"I want this body identified, and I want to know what has been done to—to make me what I have become." Hall held up a sheaf of hard copy covered in symbolic imprint delineators.
"No attempt was. made to disguise or hide the imprints and gates inside your head," Hall explained. "You really are a thick layer of imprints on a host brain. I've never seen anything like it, you must have spent billions and taken years to get that done. Anyhow, it's all illegal as well. There's some countries where folk could be tied to a post and shot for doing that sort of work on a human brain. In most others they'd be locked up for more years than you're liable to live. How can I say in downspeak—say, you got a cyclopedia tag for the Apollo project?"
"The first human landings on the moon, 1969 to 1972."
"That's it. A quarter-million folk involved, twenty-six billion dollars in old-time money, nearly every switch and wire leading edge. Now imagine that going to the moon is illegal, a capital crime, but someone still manages to pull off a Project Apollo. That's what I just saw inside your head: classy work and fully stabilized, really wonderful stuff. Why I never thought I'd live to see that sort of thing done, you know?"
Vitellan had his answer, but it was of no help at all. One thing at a time, he told the maelstrom of questions in his mind.
"Can I find out whose memory fragments are below that overlay of imprints that are me? I want to know whose experiences I just relived."
"We have a bunch of images on disk, so let's find out,", said Baker.
Baker used Durvas funds to engage a datavend who wanted to be known as Seishi. He was a slight, self-effacing little ex-Yakuza who had survived to middle age by living his life as a valued tool. He worked for a sieve company in the Christmas Island databoard node. After viewing Vitellan's
memories of the sportscar and seduction, he sent out a help notice from a bogus client wanting data on Austin Healey Sprites in countries with right-hand drive: Britain, Australia, and New Zealand. The sunset over the water had already narrowed the search down to Melbourne, Adelaide, and Perth—the kangaroo-Santa also suggested Australia. Melbourne seemed to be a good contender at first, being built around a wide bay and having rows of older houses looking out over the water to the west.
Christmas Island returned real estate beachfront property guides, and Vitellan identified a line of single-story terrace houses in South Fremantle, near Perth. This reduced the number of eligible cars to four. Seishi probed further, and noted that one car had belonged to Mark Stannel, an English undergraduate at the University of Western Australia. He had returned to Britain without graduating. A privacy bar cut in there, and he vanished from the records. The other three owners of similar cars were quickly identified and cleared. Seishi checked the university archive database, which was scanned from hard copy and of limited use, but it yielded the subjects that Stannel had studied. These led to student publications that were only in hard copy and not scanned, but Seishi hired an investigator from Ozcover Services to go to the University Library. Within twelve hours an annotated photograph taken at a faculty ball in 2021 appeared on the wallscreen before Vitellan.
The man behind the memories stared from the photograph into Vitellan's face. The jawline was familiar, as was the way he tilted his head back slightly.
"He reminds me of Lord Wallace of Durvas," said Vitellan. "Check if he has a son." Now it became easy for the datavend, for Robert Wallace was the only son of Lord Wallace. He had been sent to Oxford University but he had made himself a bad name. When he lost control of a car and killed a pedestrian there was a lot of bad publicity that even the Village could not blank out unless . . . Bribes were paid and favors called in. Robert Wallace was given a bond, then he was sent to Perth incognito to get a university degree and blow off steam out of sight.
"The girl that you saw him with was Emeline Dorcas," the datavend reported in a cluneal tone. "She was another student at the university, studying economics. She works for a stockbroking firm in Singapore at present. Her parents lived at that house on the beachfront when she was at the university, but they must have been away when she brought you home."
"Not me, they were imprint memories," muttered Vitellan. "As you say, sir, so shall it be," agreed Seishi, his face blank.
Baker sent Seishi out of the room. Vitellan looked at his hands, then regarded himself in a mirror.
"Just who am I supposed to be?"
"Your body, especially your face, has had extensive cosmetic work," said Baker, scanning the report on his dataspex,
"but you know that already."
"Someone has altered my host's face to resemble the Centurion of Durvas, but why and who?"
"Someone with access to a lot of money and clinic tech, that's who."
"It has to be Lord Wallace. He has access to big capital."
Baker closed his eyes and snapped his fingers. "There you go, man!" he exclaimed. "You've got a big future in PI if you want it, Mr V." He leaned over to a voice node. "Seishi, get back in here." Seishi scanned the datafarms for Robert Wallace, who had been born late in his father's third marriage, in 2002. He gave a running commentary as he probed.
"Robert Wallace features extensively on paparazzi data-boards that carry a lot of, ah, soiled news about the rich and famous. In 2022, soon after he returned to Durvas, he dated a young Italian girl and took her to a resort in Portugal for a holiday. She decided that he was not her type on the first night, so he performed date-rape upon her. He also left her to find her own way home. Her father was old Mafia, and a week later a half-kilo of covalent lattice collapsed under Robert's car on the estate of a man named McLaren, near Durvas. He was rushed straight into the Durvas clinic by McLaren, but six years later he is apparently still there."
"Is any of that what you want to know?" Baker asked.
Vitellan slowly sifted through real and imprinted memories, wishing that he could share some of the complexity with Hall and Baker, but not daring to confide in them fully as yet.
"McLaren was a member of the Village Corporate and leek—well, he died recently. Lord Wallace is a ruthless man, or so Lucel has told me. Perhaps some very illegal experiments in whole-mind overlay were done." He spread his hands wide as he sat there. "Here's the son's body, and overlaid on the brain is me—yet can that be possible? I was told that imprints fade if not renewed."
Vitellan already knew the answer, but in this environment of lies and half-truths, his only weapon was cross-checks.
"Hell son, ordinary memories fade too," said Hall, who had been quietly observing the debate. "It's just that they fade a whole lot slower. Imprints can be 'fixed' by intensive reinforcement sessions, but that's expensive work for something the size of the human mind. The tag for the computing power needed would cost out at hundreds of millions, maybe billions."
Vitellan sat up, but the room seemed to break loose from reality and tumble about an oblique axis. He flopped forward with his elbows on his knees and his face in his hands.
"I need to have another talk with Lord Wallace," he said into his hands. "Get the telepresence gear ready, if you please, and give me a dose of something for this nausea."
Durvas, Britain: 17 December 2028, Anno Domini
The hologram of Lord Wallace lost color in sympathy with his distant body. It gave Vitellan's hologram a curiously blank stare.
"Yes, your body is that of my son," he said simply, then turned and beckoned Vitellan to follow him. They walked down a corridor in silence, stopping at a heavy steel door. Lord Wallace extended a hand which slid smoothly into the electronic lock. It opened with a dull clunk.
"I thought holograms could not move things," said Vitellan.
"There's an internal optical scanner inside," Lord Wallace explained.
"We can talk here," Lord Wallace said, and he switched on a link for Vitellan's node.
"Where is my real body?"
"In an intensive care clinic, about a quarter of a mile straight down."
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.