" 'Nero is the one who deserves to die.'
"Severus is not a thinking man. I did not tell him that a Caesar who was so profligate and uncaring about the lives of his gladiators would give rise to unease among his own guards who had, after all, been recruited from gladiatorial schools. It was not one of my increasingly rare timesightings but a simple calculation of present cause and future effect.
"The pictures forming behind my closed eyelids at the time were of a Circus Maximus increased to planetary dimensions, and a sapient species of primitive technology waging hopeless, defensive war against an enemy who would make the monstrous Nero seem gentle and kind by comparison.
"The Jarridians…"
–
Forward to Day 36.549…
–
"… The arena has not dried out sufficiently after the abortive sea battle of Day 36,511 for the scheduled chariot race to take place, so that it was replaced by another and always popular event, a mass execution of the Christians who, rumor had it, had been responsible for the fire that had razed a large part of the city to the ground. The Christians ranged in age from very young children to the most senile of adults, and included many family groupings. On this occasion Nero, rather than filling the arena with crosses, the symbol of their dead and supposedly resurrected Redeemer, having the victims tied them to them and then drenching them with oil before putting them to the torch, had decided to give the crowd the sight and smell of raw rather than cooked flesh. The Christians would be armed with sharpened stakes, and lions that had been starved of food for many days would be sent against them.
"For the further amusement of the crowd, Nero had arranged that the pile of crude, wooden weapons for the Christians' use would be too small in number to arm all of their adults so that they would fight among each other for possession of them while the lions were being released. But perversely they did the unexpected.
"Instead of fighting barehanded among themselves for one of the weapons, the old ones moved forward into the path of the lions to slow their approach with their own bodies while the younger, who had armed themselves, formed a wide, protective circle around their young, with the unarmed ones standing close by to seize the weapons of the fallen. Strangely there were few screams of fear or agony, except from the children who could be forgiven their weakness, as the jungle cats began ripping their victims into bloody shreds.
"Severus had turned his head away from the arena, saying that he was accustomed to the sight of blood but had never liked looking at it, and this was like watching cattle being killed in a particularly inefficient slaughterhouse. He spent the remainder of the show trying to attract the attention of a young female several tiers behind him. I merely closed my eyes and my ears to the bestiality taking place because there was much I had to think about.
"I thought about this most powerful and populous of empires and of the strange cult of gentleness and extraordinary bravery growing here in its heart, of the sentient and sapient yet bestial crowd around me who venerated the deranged human monstrosity that was their leader, and of the defenseless people in the arena that he hated simply because they had been taught and believed, no, they knew, that there was eternal life on the other side of their individual deaths. I would have liked to meet this teacher of theirs, because this is not a concept that sits comfortably on the mind of an already long-lived Taelon.
"In spite of my ability to isolate mentation from external sensory input, the cries of fear and the dying sounds made by the children in the arena intruded and affected the quality of my thinking. They are like terrified puppies: normally playful, harmless, innocent, affectionate, and with the unconscious ability to attract the affection of others. It must be a hitherto unsuspected weakness in me, a scientist who should remain emotionally aloof to any problem, but I feel that I will not be able to continue thinking constructively until something has been done, no matter how small that thing may be, to reduce the number of unnecessary deaths among such innocent beings
…"
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
Ma'el Report. Day 112,586. local calendar date 309 AD…
The return to Rome three Earth centuries after my previous visit has proved to be both a comfort and a disappointment. The violence and excesses are reduced in volume and their practice has become less overt, but the subsequent events including the death of Nero, last of the once proud family of Caesar to hold the position of Emperor, did not come about exactly as I had foreseen. There can be little doubt that my precognitive faculty has become untrustworthy and, considering my complete misreading of the outcome of the sea raid off Finisterre among other incidents, the possibility exists that I may be regressing toward the avatus state and losing it entirely. I dread being like these creatures around me who can see ahead only in the dimensions of space but not through time.
"In an effort to discover the reason for this, I have subjected my entire sensorium and memory network to a full empathic inventory and feel sure that I have uncovered the problem. Regrettably the solution, if adopted, will destroy the objective worth of this investigation, and there is a strong probability that it could bring about the premature termination of my own life as well as those of my servants, who are becoming much more to me than two subjects for study out of this worlds' many billions.
"The lives of Sinead and Declan are short enough as they are…"
–
Talking incessantly in a respectful near-whisper, and with his enormous body bent almost double, Klum'bgaa led the way through a seemingly endless system of low-ceilinged tunnels. He was being, closely followed in silence by Ma'el, with Sinead and Declan, who were each weighed down with a large bundle of torches, bringing up the rear. In spite of its softness the Nubian's voice came back clearly to Declan.
They passed the last resting places of countless martyrs. The majority of them were narrow, horizontal niches in the rock walls containing the dusty, cloth-wrapped bones of their nameless occupants while a few were beautifully and elaborately decorated. Klum'bgaa said very little about them because, he insisted, there were too many here who were now wearing martyrs' crowns in Heaven for a few to be given preferment. Instead he kept trying to discover, in a respectful and roundabout fashion that the diplomat spy Brian would have admired, why a foreigner was wanting so badly to visit this hallowed ground. When they paused briefly to rekindle a fresh torch from the dying flame of an old one, Ma'el answered him.
"I am interested in the beliefs of others," he said, "and especially those who fear the pains of dying, as all of you do, but not death itself because they believe it to be but a curtain through which they will pass to a better life. I am not Christian and believe nothing. But I am interested in hearing the reason why so many of you believe in such a strange and illogical thing. Can you explain the thinking and proofs on which it is based?"
Klum'bgaa shook his head. "My master can introduce you to men more learned than I who will explain or debate these matters with you. He might even arrange an audience with Constantine, who is a firm and just man who has a mind, my master says, that has no closed doors. It is expected, or perhaps it is only a hope, that he will become the first Christian Emperor. But I myself can tell you only of stories and sacred writings that have been handed down to us for three centuries, and others that come from even further in the past. But I have no proof of their truth, only a strong belief that they are true.