Time Travel: Recent Trips Page 20

  For he deserved it.

  THE MISTS OF TIME

  Tom Purdom

  The cry from the lookout perked up every officer, rating, and common seaman on deck. The two-masted brig they were intercepting was being followed by sharks—a sure sign it was a slaver. Slave ships fouled the ocean with a trail of bodies as they worked their way across the Atlantic.

  John Harrington was standing in front of the rear deckhouse when the midshipman's yell floated down from the mast. His three officers were loitering around him with their eyes fixed on the sails three miles off their port bow—a mass of wind-filled cloth that had aroused, once again, the hope that their weeks of tedious, eventless cruising were coming to an end.

  The ship rolling under their own feet, HMS Sparrow, was a sixty-foot schooner—one of the smallest warships carried on the rolls of Her Majesty's navy. There was no raised quarterdeck her commander could pace in majestic isolation. The officers merely stood in front of the deckhouse and looked down a deck crowded with two boats, spare spars, and the sweating bodies of crewmen who were constantly working the big triangular sails into new positions in response to the shipmaster's efforts to draw the last increment of movement from the insipid push of the African coastal breezes. A single six-pound gun, mounted on a turntable, dominated the bow.

  Sub-lieutenant Bonfors opened his telescope and pointed it at the other ship. He was a broad, well-padded young man and he beamed at the image in his lenses with the smile of a gourmand who was contemplating a particularly interesting table.

  "Blackbirds, gentlemen. She's low in the water, too. I believe a good packer can squeeze five hundred prime blackbirds into a hull that long—twentyfive hundred good English pounds if they're all still breathing and pulsing."

  It was the paradox of time travel. You were there and you weren't there, the laws of physics prohibited it and it was the laws of physics that got you there. You were the cat that was neither dead nor alive, the photon that could be in two places at once, the wave function that hadn't collapsed. You slipped through a world in which you could see but not be seen, exist and not exist. Sometimes there was a flickering moment when you really were there—a moment, oddly enough, when they could see you and you couldn't see them. It was the paradox of time travel—a paradox built upon the contradictions and inconsistencies that lie at the heart of the sloppy, fundamentally unsolvable mystery human beings call the physical universe.

  For Emory FitzGordon the paradox meant that he was crammed into an invisible, transparent space/time bubble, strapped into a two-chair rig shoulder to shoulder with a bony, hyperactive young woman, thirty feet above the tepid water twenty miles off the coast of Africa, six years after the young Princess Victoria had become Queen of England, Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and all the heathen lands Her government ruled beyond the seas. The hyperactive young woman, in addition, was an up-and-coming video auteur who possessed all the personality quirks traditionally associated with the arts.

  "Four-minute check completed," the hal running the bubble said. "Conditions on all four co-ordinates register satisfactory and stable. You have full clearance for two hours, provisional clearance for five hours."

  Giva Lombardo's hands had already started bustling across the screenbank attached to her chair. The cameras attached to the rig had started recording as soon as the bubble had completed the space/time relocation. Giva was obviously rearranging the angles and magnifications chosen by the hal's programming.

  "It didn't take them long to start talking about that twenty-five hundred pounds, did it?" Giva murmured.

  John Harrington glanced at the other two officers. A hint of mischief flickered across his face. He tried to maintain a captainly gravity when he was on deck but he was, after all, only twenty-three.

  "So how does that break down, Mr. Bonfors?"

  "For the slaves alone," the stout sub-lieutenant said, "conservatively, it's two hundred and sixty pounds for you, eighty-nine for your hard working first lieutenant, seventy-two for our two esteemed colleagues here, sixteen for the young gentleman in the lookout, and two-and-a-half pounds for every hand in the crew. The value of the ship itself might increase every share by another fifth, depending on the judgment of our lords at the Admiralty."

  The sailing master, Mr. Whitjoy, rolled his eyes at the sky. The gunnery officer, Sub-lieutenant Terry, shook his head.

  "I see there's one branch of mathematics you seem to have thoroughly mastered, Mr. Bonfors," Terry said.

  "I may not have your knowledge of the calculus and other arcane matters, Mr. Terry," Bonfors said, "but I know that the quantity of roast beef and claret a man can consume is directly related to the mass of his purse."

  Harrington raised his head. His eyes ranged over the rigging as if he was inspecting every knot. It would take them two hours—perhaps two and a half—to close with the slave ship. Sparrow was small and lightly armed but he could at least be thankful she was faster than her opposition. Most of the ships the Admiralty assigned to the West African antislavery squadron were two-masted brigs that wallowed through the water like sick whales.

  How would they behave when the shooting started? Should he be glad they were still bantering? This would be the first time any of them had actually faced an armed enemy. Mr. Whitjoy was a forty-year-old veteran of the struggle against the Corsican tyrant but his seagoing service had been limited to blockade duty in the last three years of the Napoleonic wars. For the rest of them—including their captain and all the hands—"active service" had been a placid round of uneventful cruises punctuated by interludes in the seamier quarters of foreign ports.

  "We'll keep flying the Portuguese flag until we come into range," Harrington said. "We still have a bit of ship handling ahead of us. We may sail a touch faster than an overloaded slaver but let's not forget they have four guns on each side. Let's make sure we're positioned straight across their bow when we bring them to, Mr. Whitjoy."

  Giva had leaped on the prize money issue during their first planning session. She hadn't known the British sailors received special financial bonuses when she had applied for the job. She had circled around the topic, once she became aware of it, as if she had been tethered to it with a leash.

  The scholar assigned to oversee the project, Dr. Peter LeGrundy, was a specialist in the cultural and social history of the Victorian British Empire. Peter claimed he normally avoided the details of Victorian military history—a subject his colleagues associated with excessive popular appeal— but in this case he had obviously had to master the relevant complexities. The ships assigned to the West African antislavery patrol had received five pounds for every slave they liberated, as a substitute for the prize money they would have received if they had been fighting in a conventional nation-state war. Prize money had been a traditional wartime incentive. The wages the Crown paid its seaborne warriors had not, after all, been princely. The arbitrary five-pound figure had actually been a rather modest compensation, in Peter's opinion, compared to the sums the Sparrow's crew would have received in wartime, from a cargo the government could actually sell.

  Peter had explained all that to Giva—several times. And received the same reaction each time.

  "There were five hundred captives on that ship," Giva said. "Twenty-five hundred pounds would be what—two or three million today? Audiences aren't totally stupid, Peter. I think most of them will manage to see that the great antislavery crusade could be a very profitable little business."

  John Harrington had been reading about the Napoleonic Wars ever since his youngest uncle had given him a biography of Lord Nelson for his ninth birthday. None of the books he had read had captured the stately tempo of naval warfare. He knew the British had spent three hours advancing toward the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar but most authors covered that phase of the battle in a handful of paragraphs and hurried straight to the thunder that followed. Lieutenant Bonfors and Lieutenant Terry both made two trips to their quarters while Sparrow plodded across the gentle Africa
n waves toward their quarry. They were probably visiting their chamber pots, Harrington presumed. Mr. Whitjoy, on the other hand, directed the handling of the ship with his usual stolid competence. Harrington thought he caught Whitjoy praying at one point, but the master could have been frowning at a patch of deck that needed a touch of the holystone.

  Harrington had stifled his own urge to visit the chamber pot. He had caught two of the hands smiling the second time Bonfors had trudged off the deck.

  It had been Midshipmen Montgomery who had spotted the sharks. The other midshipman, Davey Clarke, had replaced Montgomery in the lookout. Montgomery could have gone below but he was circling the deck instead. He stopped at the gun every few minutes and gave it a thorough inspection. Montgomery would be assisting Mr. Terry when the time came to open fire.

  Giva had started defending her artistic integrity at the very beginning of her pre-hiring interview. "I get the final edit," Giva had advised the oversight committee. "I won't work under any other conditions. If it's got my name on it, it represents my take on the subject."

  Giva had been in Moscow, working on a historical drama. Emory had been staring at seven head-and-shoulder images on his living room imaging stage and Giva had been the only participant in the montage who had chosen a setting that accented her status. All the other participants had selected neutral backdrops. Giva had arranged herself so the committee could see, just beyond her shoulder, two actors who were dressed in flat, twenty-first century brain-link hats.

  "There's one thing I absolutely have to say, Mr. FitzGordon," Giva said. "I appreciate your generosity. I will try to repay you by turning out the best possible product I can. But please don't think you can expect to have any influence on the way I do it. I'm not interested in creating public relations fog jobs for wealthy families."

  Emory had listened to Giva's tirade with the thin, polite smile a tolerant parent might bestow on a child. "I wouldn't expect you to produce a fog job," Emory responded. "I believe the facts in this case will speak for themselves. I can't deny that I specified this particular incident when I offered the agency this grant partly because my ancestor was involved in it. I wouldn't have known the Royal Navy had engaged in an antislavery campaign if it hadn't been part of our family chronicles. But I also feel this episode is a typical example of the courage and devotion of a group of men who deserve to be remembered and honored. The crews of the West African antislavery patrol saved a hundred thousand human beings from slavery. They deserve a memorial that has been created by an honest, first-class artist."

  The committee had already let Emory know Giva Lombardo was the candidate they wanted to hire. Giva had friends in the Agency for Chronautical Studies, it seemed.

  She also had ability and the kind of name recognition that would attract an audience. Emory had been impressed with both the docs that had catapulted Giva out of the would-be class. The first doc had been a one-hour essay on women who bought sexually enhancing personality modifications. The second had been a rhapsodic portrait of a cruise on a fully automated sailing ship. The cruise doc was essentially an advertisement funded by the cruise company but it had aroused the enthusiasm of the super-aesthete audience.

  Emory's family had been dealing with artists for a hundred and fifty years. His great-grandfather's encounter with the architect who designed his primary residence was a standard item in popular accounts of the history of architecture. It had become a family legend encrusted with advice and observations. All interactions between artists and the rich hinge on one basic fact, Emory's great-grandfather had said. You need the creatives. The creatives need your money.

  Harrington placed his hands behind his back. The approach was coming to an end. Mr. Whitjoy had placed Sparrow on a course that would cross the slaver's bow in just four or five minutes.

  He took a deep breath and forced the tension out of his neck muscles. He was the captain of a ship of war. He must offer his crew a voice that sounded confident and unperturbed.

  "Let's show them our true colors, Mr. Whitjoy. You may advise them of our request as soon as we start to raise our ensign, Mr. Terry."

  Lieutenant Bonfors led the boarding party. The slaver hove to in response to Lieutenant Terry's shot across its bow and Lieutenant Bonfors settled his bulk in the stern of a longboat and assumed a rigid, upright dignity that reminded Emory of the recordings of his great-grandfather he had viewed when he had been a child. Harrison FitzGordon had been an ideal role model, in the opinion of Emory's father. He was courteous to everyone he encountered, according to the family catechism, but he never forgot his position in society. He always behaved like someone who assumed the people around him would treat him with deference—just as Lieutenant Bonfors obviously took it for granted that others would row and he would be rowed.

  Bonfors maintained the same air of haughty indifference when he hauled himself aboard the slaver and ran his eyes down its guns. Two or three crewmen were lounging near the rear of each gun. Most of them had flintlock pistols stuck in their belts.

  A tall man in a loose blue coat hurried across the deck. He held out his hand and Bonfors put his own hands behind his back.

  "I am Sub-lieutenant Barry Richard Bonfors of Her Majesty's Ship Sparrow. I am here to inspect your ship and your papers in accordance with the treaties currently in effect between my government and the government of the nation whose flag is flying from your masthead."

  "I am William Zachary," the officer in the blue coat said, "and I am the commander of this ship. If you will do me the honor of stepping into my cabin, I will be happy to present you with our papers."

  "I would prefer to start with an inspection of your hold."

  "I'm afraid that won't be possible, sub-lieutenant. I assure you our papers will give you all the information you need."

  "The treaties in effect between our countries require the inspection of your entire ship, sir. I would be neglecting my duties if I failed to visit your hold."

  Captain Zachary gestured at the guns. "I have two twelve-pound guns and two eighteen-pounders on each side of my ship, sub-lieutenant. You have, as far as I can tell, one six-pounder. I have almost fifty hands. What do you have? Twenty-five? And some of them boys? I'm certain a visit to my cabin and an inspection of my papers will provide you with a satisfactory report to your superiors. As you will see from our papers, our hold is stuffed with jute and bananas."

  Zachary was speaking with an accent that sounded, to Emory's ear, a lot like some of the varieties of English emitted by the crew on the Sparrow. Giva's microphone arrangement had picked up some of the cries coming from the slaver's crew as Bonfors had made his progress across the waters and Emory had heard several examples of the best-known English nouns and verbs. The ship was flying a Brazilian flag, Emory assumed, because it offered the crew legal advantages they would have missed if they had sailed under their true colors. British citizens who engaged in the slave trade could be hanged as pirates.

  The legal complexities of the antislavery crusade had been one of the subjects that had amused Emory when he had been a boy. The officers of the West African Squadron had operated under legal restrictions that were so complicated the Admiralty had issued them an instruction manual they could carry in their uniforms. The Royal Navy could stop the ships of some nations and not others and it could do some things on one country's ships and other things on others.

  Emory had been five when he had first heard about John Harrington's exploits off the African coast. Normally the FitzGordon adults just mentioned it now and then. You were reminded you had an ancestor who had liberated slaves when your elders felt you were spending too much time thinking about some of the other things your ancestors had done, such as their contributions to the coal mining and timber cutting industries. In Emory's case, it had become a schoolboy enthusiasm. He had scoured the databanks for information on Lieutenant John Harrington and the great fifty-year struggle in which Harrington had participated. Almost no one outside of his family had heard about the Roy
al Navy's antislavery campaign, but the historians who had studied it had all concluded it was one of the great epics of the sea. Young officers in small ships had fought the slavers for over half a century. They had engaged in hotly contested ship-to-ship actions. They had ventured up the rivers that communicated with the interior and attacked fortified slaveholding pens. Thousands of British seamen had died from the diseases that infested the African coast. The African slave markets north of the equator had been shut down. One hundred thousand men, women, and children had been rescued from the horrors of the slave ships.

  The campaign had been promoted by a British politician, Lord Palmerston, who had tried to negotiate a general international treaty outlawing the slave trade. Palmerston had failed to achieve his goal and British diplomats had been forced to negotiate special agreements country by country. The officers on the spot were supposed to keep all the agreements straight and remember they could be fined, or sued, if they looked in the wrong cupboard or detained the wrong ship.

  In this case, the situation was relatively straightforward. The ship was flying the flag of Brazil and the Sparrow therefore had the right to examine its papers and search its hull. If the searchers found any evidence the ship was engaging in the slave trade—such as the presence of several hundred chained Africans—the Sparrow could seize the slaver and bring the ship, its crew, and all its contents before the courts the navy had established in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

  "Look at that," Emory said. "Look at the way he's handling himself."

  Bonfors had turned his back on Captain Zachary. He was walking toward the ladder on the side of the ship with the same unhurried serenity he had exhibited when he came aboard.