Traveling through time is not unlike...falling off the roof of a building. It's not the falling that hurts, it's the impact, and the further you fall, the greater that impact is. When our mortal masters have to do so, which is rarely and reluctantly, not only because of the impact but also because they have a hard time coping with the food, the lack of sanitation, and the culture shock in general, they travel in style and comfort, with nice cushioned seating, not to mention nice cushioning medication.
When we do so, it's in a packing crate. Literally. And you'd better have an empty stomach.
That was my first sign that something was wrong. When I arrived at Firenza Station, someone should have been there to uncrate me, welcome me, and provide orientation plus possibly also some nice cool mint tea. Instead I remained in my coffin until I felt well enough to punch my own way out, by which time I'd also noticed an uncanny silence. Not a physical silence, but a radio silence. Dr. Zeus builds wireless transmitters and recievers into our heads so we can communicate without the indigenous mortals catching on, and given the number of personnel who were assigned to Firenza during the Renaissance, there should have been plenty of chatter on the public frequencies. Once I got out of the crate, there was no question that I was not in Kansas anymore, Toto. That is a 20th century pop cultural reference which no one will get until 1939. Wait around for The Wizard of Oz, if you can. It's worth it.
The temporal transit station was in a forgotten catacomb under Santa Maria Novella, cleaned up and sanitized, and while this was the proper room-I accessed the cranial database and downloaded the information directly into my brain-it was full of dust, the smell of stale incense and the odor of several centuries old human remains. In fact, several cadavers were lying around in various imperfect states of preservation. Plus there were a couple of mortal guards on the watch for any trespassers, and they had orders to kill. The challenged me before they even caught a glimpse of me, although when they saw I was a woman, seemingly young and defenseless, they decided to 'enjoy' me first. While we undergo intensive mental conditioning to prevent us from hurting mortals, they also build in highly evolved self-preservation instincts to protect our very expensive selves. I rendered the guards unconscious with out much fuss and had a look around the chambers. There were moore old bodies and some odd machinery around, but it was the same place, although the secret exit led through an odd crypt with a statue of a man dressed in the style of King Xerses the First of Persia. Not the kind of thing you expect to find under Santa Maria Novella.
Before I went out, however, I went back to get my credenza. This essential item looked like the kind of cabinet an upper-middle-class fifteenth-century Italian woman might have in her bed chamber for personal items like a Book of Devotions, her hand mirror, a few trinkets, maybe a bundle of old love-letters and a box of sugared almonds. What it was, was a field unit composed of a computer and a formulary synthesizer for manufacturing various organic compounds as needed. Plus it had a basic medi-repair kit and my secret-five pounds of the finest high grade hybrid solid chocolate. Theobroma cacao is the only substance which can give us even a mild buzz. Since it was not only a New World product and anachronistic seven ways from Sunday, but illegal in the so-Neopuritanical twenty-fourth century, I had to hide it. No way was I leaving that credenza anywhere that some mortal could stumble over it-even if it wouldn't open for anyone but me. Spotting a nice high ornamental balcony up by the ceiling, I did the Human Fly bit and scaled up there, only to find a pleasant surprise.
Someone else had the same idea sometime in the past-there was a small chest with two hundred florins in it. An artisan in 1480 Florence might earn fifty florins a year and a well-paid lawyer five hundred, so I would be well-situated for some time to come, if I were prudent. I transferred ten of the florins to my pouch and put the rest in the credenza. Judging from the thick furring of dust on the money chest, no one had disturbed it for at least twenty years and so my unit should be safe for a few hours or days.
Then I went out into a strange new world, not so much fifteenth-century Florence as a world without Dr. Zeus, without a Chief Facilitator to answer to or a security tech monitoring the continuous uplink transmission which ensures the company knows what we're saying and doing every single moment. For the first time in nearly a millennium, I was free...
...but I had no idea what to do with myself.
And let's face it, I didn't have a lot of options. For most of human history, women haven't been people, we've been chattels, like a horse or a cow, only not as useful. And like a horse or a cow, when there was one out there roaming around on her own, people tended to assume they ought to be rounded up until their rightful owner came to claim them—or if they liked the look of the beast, they assumed that possession was nine-tenths of the law. Being without an owner—I mean, without family or connections, I had no social network to appeal to. Disguising myself as a boy was out. No amount of binding would make my breasts flat enough, it's just how I was made.
However, I wasn't going to let such considerations take the bloom off the peach for me on this first day, which I spent wandering around the city, drinking it all in. It wasn't my first visit to Florence, but I didn't see it until the eighteenth century. This was the Golden Age in so many ways—all the artists, the humanist scholars, the philosophers, the architecture—so much to see and listen to!
Then night came. No respectable inn would take in a strange woman with no baggage, no servants, and no family name, not for any money. An unrespectable inn meant a brothel. While that would also solve the question of what my career path would be, I didn't care for whoring. There are some things you love to do as a hobby which would become a grinding chore if you had to make a living at it, and in my mind, sex was one of those things. As far as accommodations go, that left me one option—a convent. The sister at the gate was suspicious—I think she would have liked to believe I had stolen both the fine wool dress I was wearing and the florins in my purse, but I spoke and acted like a lady, and so she let me in and gave me a postulant's cell for the night.
That was the only night I spent there. The nuns prayed every hour on the hour, day and night. While I hadn't taken vows and therefore wasn't under any obligation to pray with them, they woke me up anyway, in case I wanted to give my soul a good brushing-up. At nine hundred odd years old, I need my sleep. The convent would not work. But what would?
I spent my second day walking and thinking. What I would have liked was to attach myself to an artist's bottega as an assistan/apprentice, making paints, prepping surfaces, painting backgrounds and so forth. As an art preservationist, I certainly knew the trade, and it would be nothing to me to imitate any particular style. I could copy anything—but I could not create. They don't foster creativity in us. Our role is to preserve and save. Not to make.
But while there were a few women who worked in art during the Renaissance, they came from families of artists. Again, I had no such connections. This occupied my mind until night fall. I had nowhere to go, no place to lay my head, so instead I took to the rooftops, burning off nervous energy by leaping over streets and scaling walls.
On a whim I climbed Santa Maria del Fiore's bell tower, where some idiot in a hood ran me through with a very sharp blade. (I am actually quite fond of said idiot in a hood these days, by the way) I didn't see or hear or smell him coming. I should have, but I didn't, and it's useless to speculate why when the ground is coming up at you at thirty-two feet per second per second. That is where my analogy of time travel being like falling off a roof breaks down. The impact of falling is much more painful. It even knocked me out.
I took a deep breath and regretted it immediately.
That breath rattled loose a large clot of blood from my punctured lung, and I hacked it out into the remains of my only, and now ruined dress. An internal valve sealed off the damaged lung so the intact one could take over without being flooded, and my self-diagnostic program was refining on what I already knew: I had been stabbed in the chest and fell off the top of a bell tower. Between the flagstones and my unbreakable bones, my immortal flesh had been mashed to a pulp. Multiple soft tissue injuries, massive contusions, joint separations, etc, etc. My biomechanicals were already streaming to the rescue, but barring a meditech team and a day in a regen tank, I was looking at reduced functioning, not to mention a great deal of pain, for at least a week. However, I had bigger problems at hand—namely, not getting damaged any further and getting somewhere safe. I was also disoriented, which explains what happened next.
Mortal or cyborg, it is almost never a good thing for a woman to regain consciousness in agony and in a strange room with two unknown men, her clothing half- cut from her, her body naked to the waist. Not to mention that one of them had been sticking a metal rod into the wound. Rape-murder or vivisection, whatever their intention, it could not be good. "Noli me tangere," I told them, sitting up and clutching the remnants of my clothes to my chest. (which wasn't easy. Normally I, like the rest of my kind, could dodge bullets at point-blank range. No chance of that now...) and scrambling backward as best I could, "Noli me tangere!"
Which means 'Don't touch me,' for anyone unfamiliar with Latin, which the blond guy wasn't because he turned to his friend and said, "I know she said not to touch her, but I know little more Latin than that. I couldn't get into the right schools, given my... irregular birth." He was speaking the local Tuscan dialect.
"Strange to think of you not knowing Latin, Leonardo," the dark one replied, and that made me whip my head around to give the blond one a closer look. Now I recognized him. It was Leonardo da Vinci. Not the old, bald da Vinci of the famous sketch, tired and disillusioned looking, but a young, handsome Leonardo not yet thirty. How did I know? There was hardly any other historical figure under more surveillance by Dr. Zeus operatives than he was-only Shakespeare and Jesus Christ sprang to mind. Long before he was born, anthropologists and preservationists were on hand to record, film and photograph every move he made.
However, I tucked my surprise and shock away to answer. "I speak the vernacular, sirs." I paused to cough up more clots.
"You do?" Leonardo jumped in. "What manner of creature are you?"
"A woman," I replied, "human, even as you are."
"Human, perhaps, but not as we are," his friend refuted, correctly. "Your bones, madonna, are not made of bone. Nor do women often climb to the top of the campanile of Santa Maria del Fiore at midnight."
"Nor do many men," I shot back. Whoever this was, he was unknown to history, and he wore the strangest doublet I had ever seen. It looked more like a tablard of two or three centuries before. "Yet I think that is where I met you."
"Yes. And so I know, as no other, how different you are."
I thought fast. All my programming insisted: Preserve cover. Maintain the secret of your/Dr. Zeus's existence. But Dr. Zeus was not here, and I was alone and this was Leonardo da Vinci I was talking to—and after so many centuries, I knew a little about how to circumvent the prohibitions laid upon what I could and couldn't say.
"Do you know the tales of how, being unable to have children of their own, fairies come to mortal cradles and steal away human babes, which they then render immortal with potions and magics?" I asked them. "Fairy tales are a variety of myth and myths are a form of truth..."
TBC, maybe.
