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order to expedite interrogation, they rammed their language into my brain by a brute-force version of what you are going to be undergoing, with no chemical cushioning. The language’s utterly alien structure didn’t help either. Nevertheless, I came through the experience with about the level of comprehension that would be expected of a reasonably bright secondary-school graduate in a foreign language. By a reversal of the process, this was downloaded from me, and can now be provided to you—with great gentleness, of course. If we do encounter any surviving Teloi, you ought to be able to haltingly communicate with them . . . if the opportunity to do so should arise, and if you should want to.”
    Chantal, in her excitement, ignored the cautionary tone of Jason’s last few words. With her and Landry both properly motivated, the team proceeded to the labs.

    The rest of their linguistic preparation was relatively free of emotional hurdles, involving as it did conventional learning techniques supplemented by the kind of neuro-electronic “sleep teaching” technology that was an accepted part of their social background. They acquired a basic ability to read the Classical version of the Greek alphabet—unnecessary for Landry, who would be available to see them past any difficulties—for literacy was widespread among Greeks of their assumed social status. It was an accomplishment that Athenians would find impressive in natives of an ill-regarded place like Macedon, and would help offset the social stigma of such an origin.
    Also, Rutherford drilled them in the Ionic Greek speech that had been impressed on their brains, assuring himself that they could actually converse in the language. This was more difficult for Chantal and Mondrago than for Landry, who already knew it as a written language, and Jason, for whom it fell somewhere between his own ancestral Demotic Greek and the harsh ancestor of Mycenaean Greek he had acquired for his last expedition.
    For the Teloi tongue, Jason was of course the only one who could perform this training function. He took them through exercises, playing the role of a Teloi.
    “Is something bothering you?” Landry asked him solicitously during one of these sessions. “A few times I’ve noticed—”
    “No,” replied Jason, more curtly than he had intended, for in fact he did find this more disturbing than play-acting should have been, awakening memories that he’d thought he had suppressed, and other memories he’d forgotten—or never known in the first place—that he had. His annoyance with himself for feeling this way, and for taking it out on Landry, helped clear his mind of his distaste. “All right,” he said briskly, “you next, Chantal.”
    She stepped forward eagerly, showing no signs of having shared Landry’s observations. It was during this part of the training that she seemed to truly come alive, and this, too, disturbed Jason, for reasons he could not put his finger on.

CHAPTER FOUR

    Orientation often involved an actual jaunt to the target area, for purposes of familiarization. In this case, Rutherford deemed it unnecessary and possibly counterproductive, given almost twenty-nine hundred years’ worth of changes. And in Landry’s case—and, to a lesser extent, in Jason’s—modern Greece was old hat anyway. Instead, he took them on virtual tours, enhanced by modern scholarship’s best guesses as to what the landscape in question had looked like. Jason knew from experience that those guesses were sometimes surprisingly good . . . and sometimes not. He dared hope that the former was the case for the city of Athens, which had been the subject of centuries of dedicated and painstaking archaeological work.
    They were also drilled in the historical background of the period—or at least Jason, Chantal, and Mondrago were. Given his academic credentials, Landry was an integral part of the instructional staff, and quickly came to dominate it. For this, Jason eventually