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We left the Korvaasha eating our dust at Sirius! Nothing happened on our trip from there to Sol; it was almost anticlimactic."
    "Yes," Tylar nodded. "So you remember. It was at the instant before the Korvaasha overhauled you in the outliers of the Solar System that we cut off your memories. The battlecruiser you thought you had eluded had in fact followed you from Sirius using a captured Raehaniv continuous-displacement drive. It was commanded by a Korvaash officer with whom you had previously crossed swords, on Danu."
    A chill struck into Sarnac. "The Interrogator!"
    "Yes, I believe that was what he called himself. At any rate, we maneuvered a temportal, as we call it, into the path of the Korvaash ship, thus transposing them—and you—seventeen centuries into the past. You see, we had need of you in the fifth century of the Christian Era, for reasons I later explained to you. Afterwards, we regrettably had to delete your memories of everything except your humdrum voyage from Sirius. We then returned you to your own time, on course for Sol. After which you, to use a traditional and deservedly popular phrase, lived happily ever after . . . except for the recurring dreams that resulted from a faulty job of memory erasure."
    For a long moment, the silence stretched to the snapping point. Then Sarnac spoke in a voice choked with rising fury.
    "So you used me and Tiraena for God-knows-what purposes of your own, and then stole our memories! Why, you cynical, dishonest, manipulative old bastard!"
    "Actually, I'm not all that old—at least not on the standards of my own society. And it would be more accurate to say I borrowed your memories." His sheepish look would have been funny on anyone else under any other circumstances. "You see, while your minds still held those memories I took the liberty of recording them. It wasn't exactly 'by the book,' as I believe you'd put it, but it seemed a shame to let them simply vanish into oblivion."
    "So on top of everything else you're a mental voyeur!"
    "My dear fellow, I should think you'd be grateful to me." Tylar sounded deeply hurt. "If I hadn't artificially preserved your memories, it wouldn't be possible to restore them to you, as I now propose to do."
    "What? You can do that? You can, uh, 'play back' recorded memories into the brain?"
    "Yes . . . with some difficulty, and some initial disorientation for the individual involved. You'll still have your memories of the years since then, of course; so you'll remember fifteen years of not remembering the events you'll now remember! I'm told it can be quite disconcerting at first. Knowing this, are you willing to undergo it? I'll not compel you."
    Another interval of strained silence passed. Then Sarnac grinned crookedly. "Yeah . . . you know damned well you don't have to compel me, don't you? There's no way I could possibly turn back now."
    "Well then," Tylar beamed, "shall we?" He gestured toward a foot path, and they proceeded toward the villa.
    * * *
    The brutally massive Korvaash ship looming impossibly astern, laden with its cargo of nightmare . . .
    The torus of reality-distortion they flashed through, and the impossible little ship that overtook them at a substantial fraction of lightspeed and then stopped dead and tractored the great hulking Korvaash battlecruiser . . .
    Tylar being his inimitable self . . . "We were so concerned, after this dreadful mix-up . . . Dear me! This is going to be even more difficult to explain than I thought . . . It occurs to me that if you prefer to make some use of your time in this era, you could perhaps assist us in our research . . ."
    The three of them, moving dreamlike through the nearly forgotten Gallic campaign of the British High King Riothamus: Tylar as Tertullian, secretary to tinsel-age litterateur Sidonius Apollinaris; Tiraena as Lucasta, a lady-in-waiting to Riothamus's consort; and Sarnac as the British soldier of fortune Bedwyr, bodyguard to Tertullian and