Vestiges of Time Read Online Free

legion” and serve again as a mercenary. The man who sold me the
    identity, a shady type who I hoped was more trustworthy than he looked, assured me that HarkosNor was a real person, though dead now, and that my identity would hold up under the closest scrutiny. I hoped he wasn’t lying.
    So there I was, officially, if illegally, a member of the local culture. I was as ready as I’d ever be to go into the city of VarKhohs to try to find myself a time machine.
    Finding what I was searching for was just about as difficult as finding this world in the first place, but there are always people around who are ready to offer information about supposedly secret things if you cross their palms in the proper fashion. Thus it was that after several weeks in VarKhohs I began spending a great deal of time in a place with an unpronounceable name that was a combination restaurant, lounge, massage parlor, steam bath, and brothel, frequented by members of a moderately-high caste and their hangers- on—the caste given over to electronic engineering and other technologies. And it was there that I made the acquaintance of a certain RyoNa, not a technician himself, but a member of one of the administrative castes and supposedly a friend of the engineers and technicians.
    It would have been difficult to say exactly what time it was, getting on toward the wee hours, and both my new friend RyoNa and I were close to exhaustion. We’d eaten and drunk our fill in the lower levels of the elaborate and luxurious pleasure-house and then had moved upward to the levels devoted to the games and the girls. We’d gambled for a while, losing more than We won, and had picked up a brace of twins, girls even darker of skin than most of the locals, with long black hair and flashing black eyes, dressed in styles that revealed not only their profession but the lovely tools of their trade. As they led us off to their
    bedroom apartments in the towering building, I felt a pang of guilt at betraying Sally, again, and wondered if she was being as faithful to me as I was to her. I hoped not!
    We parted company, RyoNa and his girl, I and mine, and indulged ourselves in the wicked pleasures of the flesh—and I discovered that the dark-skinned girl, whose name I’d already forgotten, was a past mistress of the arts of sexual pleasure. When I’d finally told her good-bye, with a kiss and a handful of bank notes, I was totally exhausted and felt the beginnings of a hangover.
    Downstairs, in one of the lounges, I found my buddy RyoNa exactly where he’d said he would be, drinking a dark, heavy liquid from a tall tumbler. A similar tumbler, this one full, was on the opposite side of the table.
    “Sit down, Harkos,” RyoNa said, seemingly still amused by the outlandishness of my name. “I’ve already ordered for you.”
    “I see. What is it?” I asked as I sat down.
    “Try it.”
    I did, and found it to be a very pleasant fruit mixture that probably would have been rated ninety proof or better on a world that rated alcoholic content in that fashion.
    “Is it good?” RyoNa asked.
    I grunted, nodded.
    “And was she good?”
    I grunted, nodded again.
    “I told you she would be. Those EstarSimirian girls are just about the best around. Raised from childhood to master the arts of bed pleasure, you know.”
    “I certainly wasn’t disappointed,” I told him with a weary sigh.
    “And what did she think of you?”
    “Me?”
    RyoNa nodded, and smiled with a wicked gleam
    in his eyes. “It is very rare for a fair-skinned barbarian to bed with the girls of a VarKhohs pleasure-house.”
    “Oh, yeah.” I sighed, and sipped my drink again.
    Though I hadn’t yet really begun to sort out the, history of this world and its many cultures, I had some idea of what he was referring to. The fair-skinned people of northern Europe, on this Line, were not the first ones to develop a technological civilization. That fell to the darker people of the eastern Mediterranean,