Ghosts of Time (16 page)

CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

Their temporal displacement was worse than usual, for the inevitable disorientation was compounded by the abrupt transition from the conditioned air of the displacer dome to suffocating, absolutely windless heat. They were instantly bathed in sweat.

And this is dawn!
thought Jason, head spinning, as he gasped at the almost unbreatheably stifling air.
What is it going to be like with the sun up?

The combination was almost too much for Jason and Mondrago, veterans though they were. It was entirely too much for Chantal Frey, who had had only one experience of time travel. She collapsed to the sand. Mondrago was promptly at her side, helping her to her feet.

“Thank you,” she gasped, and tried to manage a smile. “I’ll be all right.”

“That’ll make one of us,” grunted Mondrago. He looked north, at the bay on whose opposite shore was the tiny village of Liguanea, where Kingston, Jamaica, was soon to be founded as a refugee camp for earthquake survivors. The sun was just peeking over the hills to the east, turning the dawn from violet to blue, and it shone on water that was so absolutely still as to resemble a pane of glass. “Earthquake weather,” he stated succinctly.

They stood on the Palisadoes, the long, narrow peninsula—glorified sand spit, really—which separated Kingston Harbor (as it would come to be called) from the Caribbean Sea to the south, and at whose western end Port Royal stood. On his previous expedition to seventeenth century Jamaica, Jason’s party had arrived at the eastern base of the Palisadoes and walked the whole way, in deference to the Authority’s chronic jitters at the thought of some early-rising local witnessing time travelers appearing out of thin air. But he had managed to convince Rutherford that that had been overcautious . . . and that Chantal might not be up to the hike. So this time they had materialized only two miles from Port Royal.

Of course, that proved to be one hell of an “only” under these conditions. As the sun climbed higher into the cloudless sky, the heat grew more oppressive, and they were tormented by more mosquitoes than Jason remembered here, away from the jungle, for there was no sea-breeze to help. Roderick Grenfell had mentioned that a brief, violent burst of rain in May had failed to relieve the drought, serving only to bring out unprecedented numbers of the obnoxious little bloodsuckers.

The historian had been extremely helpful, altering his schedule to come to Australia and give them a series of in-depth briefings on what they were getting into. So Jason looked at the loose sand of the Palisadoes with new eyes, knowing that Port Royal sat on a thirty- to sixty-foot layer of the stuff, atop coralline sandstone and gravel. And he knew what that was going to mean for Port Royal, four days from now. “Building on sand” was not just a figure of speech here.

Approaching the city, they attracted no particular attention, and given the limited life expectancy of pirates they were highly unlikely to encounter any of their old shipmates from twenty-four years earlier. They could even use their actual names. Jason and Mondrago were dressed as they had been on their last entry into Port Royal, in buccaneer style—coarse cotton shirts, rawhide breeches and broad-brimmed hats—and armed to match, with cutlasses, pistols, and muskets that were flintlocks now rather than the wheellocks they had carried in the 1660s. As before, their cover story was that they were pirates down on their luck. Chantal wore a long colorful skirt and frilly blouse that would cause her to be assumed to be a whore in Port Royal, but if necessary her status as Jason’s exclusive property would be forcibly established. (All of this had been explained to her, and she had nodded after just one gulp.) She would be French, from the nascent colony of Saint-Domingue on the island of Hispaniola, so no one would remark on any oddities in her pronunciation of the seventeenth-century English which had been hastily imprinted on the speech centers of her brain. For all these reasons, their preparation had taken less than two weeks.

It soon became apparent that the port was more heavily defended than it had been. There were no less than five small forts, the largest and newest of which was called Morgan’s Fort after the buccaneer admiral who had, in 1675, been knighted and appointed deputy governor of Jamaica, with instructions from King Charles II—presumably issued with a straight face—to suppress piracy. According to Grenfell, he had done it with such gusto that Port Royal was now changing. It was still a haunt for privateers, but they no longer owned the place, and outright pirates were regularly hanged on Gallows Point. The sugar industry was the wave of the future, as Morgan had foreseen, and by the time he had died in 1688 at age fifty-three (of dropsy brought on by decades of an alcohol intake that was legendary even among pirates) he had been the richest landowner on the island. The random cruelty of the corsairs was giving way to the organized, industrial-scale cruelty of plantation slavery.

They entered the town, passing the cemetery where, it occurred to Jason, Henry Morgan must lie.
Must look him up and pay my respects,
Jason thought. They proceeded north of the respectable areas on relatively high ground where the affluent in their impractical London-fashion clothes lived in their multistory brick houses—even more impractical, as they were soon to discover. Instead Jason led them to the waterfront district—precisely the area that was going to vanish beneath the waves with the most thoroughness. It was still only midmorning, and the innumerable grog shops had only a few patrons, engaged in desultory gambling that would grow dangerous as the day progressed and more rum was consumed. But Grenfell had mentioned that there were two captured French ships in the harbor, and the privateers had obviously been drinking up their proceeds, for now they lay unconscious in the muck of the stinking alleys between the taverns with equally unconscious whores draped over them. Nearby, they passed the two prisons—the Bridewell for “strumpets” and the Marchalsea for violent criminals—where malefactors were even now being locked into the stocks where they would spend the rest of the hellish day enduring whatever substances passersby chose to throw at them. They also passed Fishers Row, where business was under way and seafood and tortoises and poultry were being slaughtered on the spot just before cooking, lest they spoil.

Jason kept glancing at Chantal, wondering how she would react to the sights and smells of the town known as the “Sodom of the New World.” But she seemed to be holding up. And as they proceeded along a cobblestoned street paralleling the dockside, Jason saw that there was one assault to her sensibilities she would not have to endure. There was no lash-driven disembarkation of brutalized Africans from noisome slave ships, as he had been expecting since Grenfell had told them that by this time the island was importing over fifteen hundred of them annually. In fact, the harbor with its huge warehouses and variegated merchants’ establishments seemed a good deal less busy than he remembered, although there were plenty of ships tied up at the wharves. A glance out over the unnaturally still waters, with becalmed ships motionless in the distance, showed him why. Those ships couldn’t make the dock, and the ships loaded with Jamaica’s exports of logwood and sugar couldn’t depart, in this stupefying windlessness.

Jason began seeking out dockside idlers and tavern-crawlers, who gloomily affirmed that business was at a virtual standstill. But that was just a conversation opener. As casually as possible, he made inquiries as to a black female privateer captain, leader of a Maroon crew. That got him some uneasy looks, for Zenobia had always been regarded as more than a little uncanny, if not a witch, although no one dared to say it to her face. No one was particularly eager to talk about her, but Jason finally got grudging confirmation that, yes, her ketch
Rolling-Calf
was in the harbor and she had come ashore by boat several times on some mysterious and doubtless ill-omened errands. But no one seemed to know her current whereabouts.

“Isn’t it a little indiscreet for her to be here, if not positively dangerous?” Chantal asked Jason. “After all, from what I understand about this society . . . well, she’s obviously African, and aren’t the Maroons who follow her escaped slaves?”

“Along with a few of the native Taino people of Jamaica,” Jason nodded. “Her base of operations is what will later be called Port Morant at the eastern end of the island, near the Maroon settlements in the Blue Mountains. But as for coming to Port Royal . . . you’ve got to understand that the usual rules sort of go by the boards around here where pirates are concerned.”

“‘Privateers’,” Mondrago corrected. “Or else ‘Brethren of the Coast.’ Calling one of them a ‘pirate’ is a good way to get your throat cut.”

“Besides which, this colony passed anti-piracy laws in 1687,” Jason affirmed. “These people operate under letters of marque—or ‘commissions’ as they’re called in this period—which aren’t all that hard to get. And since the English crown is too cheap to provide naval protection, the privateers are the only defense Jamaica has got against whoever England is currently at war with—France, this year. So however little the respectable element may like a lot of things about privateer behavior—such as their acceptance of any recruits they can get, including runaway indentured servants and slaves—they don’t bitch about it too loudly.”

Further inquiries yielded nothing but surly uncommunicativeness, and they turned down a side street in search of relatively habitable accommodations for their short stay. They had received the “controllable” Special Operations TRDs; as mission leader, Jason would be able to activate them at his discretion, with the understanding that he would do so in no more than four days, during which the displacer stage would be kept pristinely clear. Rutherford, torn between concern for their safety and the temptation to obtain recorded observations of the great Port Royal earthquake, had agreed to leave the matter up to Jason’s on-scene judgment.

“This is the day we’re supposed to make contact with her, according to Gracchus’ letter, right?” asked Mondrago.

“Right. But before we do any more searching we need to make sure of a place to stay.” Jason turned to Chantal. “I warn you, any place we can get is going to be kind of, er, basic. But the further we are from the waterfront—”

“Jason?” Chantal prompted, for he had abruptly fallen silent.

He didn’t hear her, for his implant had picked up functioning bionics. Following the sensor readings, he turned a corner . . . and was no longer aware of anything in the street except the back of a figure up ahead—a very female figure, but one dressed in seafarer’s garb, and topped with a head of tightly curled black hair under a broad-brimmed plumed hat.

“Zenobia!” he called out, as soon as he could speak.

She froze in her tracks, then slowly turned around. All at once, the sheer impact of her came rushing back.

The genetic engineering that had produced her must have carried with it longevity, for to all appearances she had hardly changed at all since early 1669. But that must have been merely incidental; the real purpose of her masters in the Transhumanist underground had been to give the depraved cult they had sought to establish among the slaves of Hispaniola a perfect founder. They had sought to craft an archetypal African high priestess, if not a living African goddess.

They had, Jason thought, succeeded beyond their wildest expectations.

She was as tall as Jason, who was a tall man in this era, and her figure combined full curves and a slender waist with long, lean muscularity. Her ebony-skinned face featured lips that were full without being everted, and a nose with wide nostrils but a narrow, delicately curved bridge. It was more than a highly individual face; it was a unique one, which rose to a kind of beauty whose universality transcended race and fashion. Jason doubted that even the nineteenth-century white Southerners of his recent acquaintance would have been immune.

No doubt about it, the Transhumanists had achieved their aim . . . in every respect save one. They had never dreamed that their tame goddess would rebel, strand herself in the past by slicing her TRD out of her own bleeding flesh, and devote her life to undoing the foulness to which they had made her an accessory.

“So it’s you,” she finally said. “You haven’t changed.” Her voice was low and melodious. Jason knew it could be a great deal more than that if she chose, by virtue of a bionic vocal implant imparting to it a subsonic wave that induced a tendency toward acceptance of whatever was being said. Likewise, her beautiful black eyes were bionic, with various features that included night vision and a capacity to give off a seemingly supernatural glow in the dark. It was all part of her overall design, to fit her for what the Transhumanist underground had created her to do.

By the definitions of Jason’s society, she was a cyborg—an abomination. And he now came to the realization that he didn’t care.

At the same instant, another realization stabbed him like an icicle through the gut. Or, rather, he belatedly made a connection from which his mind had unconsciously shied despite its obviousness.

Gracchus had told him that she had not long to live after this date. And given what he now knew about what was going to happen in four days . . .

“You haven’t changed,” Zenobia repeated with a smile, derailing Jason’s unwelcome train of thought. He became aware that Mondrago and Chantal had rounded the corner and come to a halt behind him. For a moment they all stood in silence, ignoring and ignored by the passersby. (Minding one’s own business was good policy in the streets of Port Royal, and it was too early in the day for many of the local residents to be drunk enough to forget that.)

“I remember you too, Alexandre,” Zenobia finally said. She eyed the small pale woman beside him somewhat askance. “And this is . . . ?”

“Chantal Frey, a . . . consultant of ours. And,” Jason continued, “you haven’t changed either. But of course you know
why
I haven’t changed, don’t you?”

“Of course. You wouldn’t have, even though it’s been a long time for me.” Zenobia drew an unsteady breath. “So you’ve come back. Why?”