awakened.
But mostly he noticed that now he was looking into a human face. Human . . . but inhumanly perfect.
It was the man they had seen in the Agora and in the inexplicable cavern under the Acropolis. Now he sat at his ease in a chair of local manufacture. His wavy hair was an unmistakable shade: a unique kind of blond-black, like an alloy of gold and iron. His eyes were large and luminous, the color of amber. His lips were full without being thick. There was no indentation between his brow and the bridge of his ruler-straight nose.
“Well,” he said in his strangely compelling voice, “what are we to do with you?” He spoke in twenty-fourth century Standard International English.
Jason made himself blink with incomprehension before swallowing to moisten his dry throat and speaking in indignant Greek. “What is this barbarian babble? Who are you? And how dare you hold us prisoner? I am a nobleman of Macedon, and this is my retainer. And we are friends of the strategos Themistocles! Release us at once or it will go hard on you.”
The perfect lips quirked in a momentary smile. “It’s no use. Our instruments detected the energy surge your arrival produced. It was just by chance that we happened to be in the vicinity at the time, between Athens and Eleusis.” The man gave an irritated headshake. “And it was an unfortunate chance that you happened to spot Pan. It’s all your fault, you know. We would have preferred to simply avoid you and let you return to your own time, blissfully ignorant. We still wish we could have. If only you hadn’t meddled—!”
Jason had almost stopped listening after the word instruments, for he suddenly recalled what Chantal thought she had seen, and what he had definitely seen in the shrine on the Acropolis north slope. “Who the hell are you?” he blurted, all thoughts of dissimulation forgotten. “You’re brought advanced technology back in time! That is flatly contrary to the regulations of the Temporal Regulatory Authority, besides being a felony under the Revised Temporal Precautionary Act of 2364.”
This time the full lips formed a smirk. “We don’t concern ourselves with either.”
Jason stared at him. “You must be from our future.”
“Evidently not, since we didn’t know you were going to be here in this time-period. If we had known, it would have made things awkward for us, as this expedition is essential to us but, like you, we make it a point to avoid creating possibilities for different time travelers to encounter each other. That’s one rule of the Authority which we follow—an uncharacteristically sensible one. We would have had to go to great lengths to avoid attracting your attention.”
“But if you’re not from our future, how can you be here? The Authority certainly didn’t send you.”
Another smirk. “We have our own arrangements.”
“You keep saying ‘we.’ Will you kindly answer my question and tell me who you are? What’s your name, for God’s sake?”
For an instant the man seemed to weigh the pros and cons of revealing the information. Then he smiled as though pleasurably anticipating the effect his answer would have.
“I am Franco, Category Five, Seventy-Sixth Degree.”
Jason stared. “But that’s a—”
“Yes. I am a genetically upgraded agent of the Transhuman Dispensation.”
“What are you trying to put over on us?” demanded Mondrago, now fully awake. “The Transhuman movement was wiped out a generation before Weintraub discovered temporal energy potential.”
“So you Pugs think.” From history lessons, Jason recognized the Transhumanist acronym for products of uncontrolled genetics—their term for the human race in its natural form. “You truly believe you successfully stood in the way of evolutionary destiny. You merely delayed it. Our inner circles withdrew into concealment, in various hidden places all around Earth and the Solar System, where we have secretly continued our great work.”
“Too bad,” remarked Jason. “We really did think the universe had been cleansed of the Transhuman abomination.”
Franco leaned forward, and his amber eyes glowed as though fervor burned like a flame behind them. “It is you who are the abomination: a form of life that has outlived its time but refuses out of mere parochialism and nostalgia to step aside and get out of the way of its successors. Humanity is clinging to its primordial state—a race of randomly evolved apes—when for centuries it has had the technology to transform itself into a consciously, rationally self-created race of gods—”
“—And monsters.” Jacob shook his head irritably. “Why am I wasting my breath talking to you? I