CHAPTER ONE
Han Trevayne gazed up with large, dark, slightly almond-shaped eyes that held a perplexed look, and spoke with five-year-old gravitas.
“But teacher told us nothing made by people is more than two hundred and eighty standard years old,” she stated firmly.
“She meant on Novaya Rodina where we live, dear,” Li-Trevayne Magda explained to her daughter patiently. “That’s how long ago people first arrived there—”
“Shortly after the Third Interstellar War ended in 2246,” Ian Trevayne put in, unable as always to refrain from historical elucidation.
“—to found a colony,” Magda finished, with a quick glare at her husband for confusing their child with unnecessary details. “But now we’re on the world those people had come from.”
“And where did people come here from?”
“Nowhere, Han.”
The little girl’s puzzlement deepened. “But they must have come from somewhere.”
“That would be true on any planet but this one. But remember, this is where we all came from. This is Old Terra, where people—human people, anyway—originated, a very long time ago.”
“It’s even where I originated—a very long time ago,” said Trevayne drily. Some might have found it an odd remark, coming from a man who appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties.
“And,” Magda continued, forestalling any further digressions, “it was only about five hundred years ago that people first left this planet. For thousands and thousands of years before that, this was the only planet with people on it. That’s why it holds things like this.” She gestured at the half-ruined oval structure of ancient marble before them. “What did you say it’s called, Ian?”
“The Colosseum. As I told you, Han, it’s almost twenty-five hundred years old.” Trevayne gazed up at the always-surprising height of the thing, and wished they had come incognito (as if that were possible) by the subway, the technology of which had of course changed many times but whose station was still in its original, twentieth-century location. That placement had been a bit of artistry, conscious or otherwise, for on emerging from the exit one found oneself, without warning, in the Piazza del Colosseo, staring up at this ancient architectural immensity. The impact was stunning and impossible to forget, especially at night when the Colosseum was floodlit.
But even approached along the Via dei Fori Imperiali, as they had done, it was impressive enough.
“What did they use it for?” Han asked reasonably.
“Games.” Trevayne didn’t go into the nature of those games. There’d be plenty of time later for her to learn the horrors of which humans were capable. “Anyway, there are things here in this city even older than this. Come this way.”
He led the way through the fine afternoon, warm but not hot as Rome could often be in the spring. They passed the Arch of Constantine and proceeded along the Via Sacra, past the vast pit, a dozen feet beneath street level, which held the remains of the Roman Forum, the broken buildings and scattered columns and arches haunted by the psychic residue of all the history that had occurred there. To the left rose the green Palatine Hill where the foundations of the emperors’ palaces still protruded from the earth like the masonry rib-cages of dead titans.
When they had landed at Western Europe’s Galileo Spaceport, it had been Magda’s (and, of course, Han’s) first contact with the soil of Old Terra. Trevayne was determined to show them his native England, and as much else as could be squeezed into their schedule, but the official purpose of the visit had led them here first, and he wasn’t really sorry as he looked around and then raised his eyes to the modern towers of today’s Rome, even taller than he remembered but unobtrusively far away thanks to building restrictions.
“It’s been a long time,” he murmured. “Thank God they’ve preserved the central part of the city unchanged.”
“When was the last time you were here, Ian?” asked Magda.
“Let’s see…That would have been in 2412. I was eighteen at the time.” He spoke casually, although the two statements taken together were enough to raise eyebrows even in these days of antigerone treatments.
“Or, strictly speaking, your first body was eighteen. So…” Magda did some quick mental arithmetic. “In terms of your elapsed consciousness, it was just under forty years ago.”
Han listened to all this with a gravely puzzled frown. She knew there was something unusual about her father’s background, but she had never entirely understood it.
Most people would have sympathized with her bewilderment.
Ian Trevayne had been the hero of the loyalist side in the Fringe Revolution of 2438 to 2444. Cut off from the bulk of the embattled Terran Federation, he had held the loyalist worlds of the Rim for the Federation and come close to fighting his way back along the warplines through the rebelling systems of the Terran Republic. But in the climactic Battle of Zapata in 2443 he had been battered to a standstill, and had almost been among the all-too-numerous dead…almost, but not quite. Close enough, if one considered extensive radiation damage, spine severed below the fifth vertebra, extreme anoxia, concussion, and so forth. So close as to justify his flagship’s chief surgeon’s snap decision as to the only way to preserve his life: quick-freeze in a cryogenic bath without any of the usual elaborate workup. It had been a risky procedure at best…and the damage from the quick-freeze itself hadn’t helped. But the workup for the brain tissue had not been omitted, for irreparable damage to that would have rendered the whole business pointless. The result: an undamaged brain in a body which was essentially unsalvageable because it could not be unthawed and survive, at least not without permanent impairment. And cloning had been ruled out as either impractical or illegal (not to say ethically repugnant); the sheer number of individual organs requiring replacement would have rendered it too hazardous, and cutting the brain out of a full-body clone to replace it with another was murder.
So he had spent eighty-one standard years getting “well and truly freezer-burned” as he himself had later put it. And while he had slumbered in cryogenic suspension, the war had been settled on the basis of the Terran Republic’s independence while the Rim worlds formed the Rim Federation, somehow both in and out of the Terran Federation…which, strictly speaking, no longer existed as such because it had merged with the alien Khanate of Orion to form the somewhat exaggeratedly named Pan-Sentient Union. In short, all he had fought for had become more or less meaningless, washed away by the tides of history.
In due course, the boundaries and limits of medicine’s restorative powers changed as well. It became possible to produce a full-body clone without a brain, hence dead—or, at least, unalive—by legal definition, and force-grown to a biological age of eighteen to twenty. Thus, with the legal objections overcome and the ethical ones rationalized away, Trevayne’s forty-nine-year-old brain had awakened in a perfect replica of his own young-adult body.
Thus it was that, alone among all descendants of Adam, he had three ages. His legal age was a hundred and thirty, for he had been born in 2394. But the biological age of his current body was little over thirty, for an antigerone regimen counteracted the rapid aging of a clone produced from postembryonic cells. (Although, to his sternly unexpressed disgust, he was starting to see the early indicia of the male pattern baldness he’d already had to endure once. And his memory spanned a little over sixty years of consciousness, in two brutally interrupted segments.
It had been sheer coincidence that his second life had commenced, in the Rim Federation whose independent existence he had unintentionally made possible, shortly before that polity had faced a crisis unprecedented in the history of known space. For the first wave of the Arduan Diaspora had arrived…and nothing had been the same since.
The thought of the manner of the Arduans’ arrival, and all its implications, brought with it the unwelcome recollection of why they were here: to participate in the celebration of something to which he was flatly opposed.
“Politicians!” he muttered to himself with a scowl, turning the word into something fit to be scrawled on the walls of public toilets.
Magda saw that scowl and heard that mutter, or perhaps she looked to the cloud-burdened west where the sun was setting into a perfect Roman late afternoon, for she spoke with the voice of female practicality. “We’d better be getting back to the hotel, Ian.”
The hotel which, among its other amenities, provided child care. “Yes,” Trevayne sighed. “I suppose we do have to go to that bloody cocktail party, don’t we?”
“Can’t I come too?” Han piped up, having heard only the word party.
“You wouldn’t enjoy it, dear,” Magda assured her.
You might very possibly enjoy it more than I will, Trevayne mentally groused. But then he looked down at his daughter’s face, which smiled back at him, working its usual magic on his mood.
Those huge dark eyes looked out of a face which reflected its origins. Trevayne had once figured it out: half English (including a dash of African-descended Jamaican), one quarter Japanese, three eights Chinese, and an eighth Tibetan. In short, a fairly typical modern human—but unique as far as Trevayne was concerned, even though he knew he was viewing her with the eyes of every father since time began. And, in fact, there was a uniqueness about her that everyone recognized, derived from her parentage and reflected in her name. There was normally nothing unusual about naming a girl after her grandmother, but in this case the combination of given name and surname never failed to raise eyebrows…
He sighed again. Magda was right about getting back to the hotel, of course, although there was much that he still wanted to show them while they were still in Rome: the Pantheon, the Campidoglio, the Trevi Fountain, and of course Vatican City where the Swiss Guards still marched in their thousand-year-old uniforms and St. Peter’s Basilica had never lost its power to inspire awe even as the beliefs behind it had frayed out. But for now…“Yes, let’s start back.” He took one last look around at the detritus of empire. To the left, the Palatine rose to its northern end, beyond the Via Nova, where a few centuries ago the archaeologists had finally gotten permission to dig up the Farnese Gardens and excavate the foundations of the Palace of Tiberius, confirming that it had been turned into office space for the bureaucracy while subsequent emperors had covered the hill with ever more grandiose residences. After those tumbled stones had yielded their last secrets, they had been left for the moss to cover.
So much for imperial grandeur, Trevayne philosophized as they walked back through the ruins of the Forum.
But he knew it was because of the that very grandeur, rendered even more imposing by the mystique of ancientness, that the government of the Pan-Sentient Union had chosen this city for the ceremony to which he and Magda had been invited. The Orions were particularly impressed, for they had nothing like it, their own birthworld having been wrecked by internecine wars centuries ago. And the symbolism had been heavily stressed: this had been the capital of an empire based on transportation, held together by a network of roads such as this planet would not see again for two millennia. And now, the propaganda line ran, the PSU was following in that tradition, on a scale beyond the imagination of the Romans and using powers beyond the dreams of the Romans’ gods.
You should have tuned the invitation down, Trevayne told himself sourly, not for the first time. But you just couldn’t resist showing Magda and Han this world, could you?
As they walked on, he tried to shake off the mood. Remember what Cromwell said: “I beseech you in the bowels of Christ to think it possible you may be mistaken.” What a hypocrite! He never for a second in his life considered he might be wrong. But the advice is still good. Hopefully, the Roman parallel isn’t deceptive after all.
But then he looked around again, and a chill went through him. On second thought, maybe I should be hoping it is deceptive.
For around him, the Roman Empire lay in ruins.