Time Travel: Recent Trips Read online

  John Harrington knew he would be talking about this moment for the rest of his life. He knew he had managed to sound like a captain was supposed to sound—like a man who had absolute control of the situation, and assumed everyone who heard him would obey his orders. Now he had to see if they really would submit. He had to stand here, fully exposed to a stray shot, and give them time to respond.

  Captain Zachary was slumping against the railing of the deckhouse with his hands clutching his stomach. The two slavers who were standing directly in front of him had turned toward Harrington when they had heard his roar. Their eyes settled on the muskets leveled at their chests.

  Zachary raised his head. He muttered something Harrington couldn't understand. One of the slavers immediately dropped to one knee. He placed his pistol on the deck.

  "The captain says to surrender," the sailor yelled. "He says get it over with."

  Harrington lowered his sword. He pushed himself across the deck—it was one of the hardest things he had ever done—and picked up the musket.

  "You have my sincerest thanks, Captain Zachary. You have saved us all much discomfort."

  "This is my project, Emory. I was given complete control of the cameras and the final product. Do you have any idea what you and the whole chrono bureaucracy would look like if I handed in my resignation because you tried to bully me while I was doing my job?"

  "I'm not trying to bully you. You're the one with the power in this situation. No one has to draw me a power flowchart. I'm got my own record of the dueling incident. Anybody who looks at my recording—or yours for that matter—can see you've ignored a dramatic, critical event and focused on a peripheral incident."

  "Don't you think those blackbirds deserve a little attention, too? Do you think they're having a fun time caught between two groups of money hungry berserkers?"

  Dawkins was picking up the slavers' weapons as they collected near the starboard rail. Five other hands were aiming their muskets over the slavers' heads. Harrington had positioned the musket men six paces from their potential targets—close enough they couldn't miss, far enough none of their prisoners could convince themselves they could engage in a rush before the muskets could fire.

  The regulations said the slavers had to be transported to Sparrow. The prize crew he assigned to the slaver would have enough trouble looking after the Africans. How many prisoners could he put in each boatload as they made the transfer, given the number of men he could spare for guard duty? He could put the prisoners in irons, of course. But that might be too provocative. They had been operating in a milieu in which chains were associated with slavery and racial inferiority.

  He turned to Terry, who had taken up a position behind the musket men. "Keep an eye on things, Mr. Terry. I think it's time I ventured into the hold."

  The world around the space/time bubble turned black—the deepest blackness Emory had ever experienced. They had known it could happen at any time—they had even been exposed to simulations during their pre-location training—but the reality still made him freeze. There was nothing outside the bubble. Nothing.

  The world snapped back. A male slave near the front of the ship was staring their way with his mouth gaping. He gestured with a frantic right hand and the elderly man beside him squinted in their direction.

  Harrington had known the hold would stink. Every officer who had ever served in the West African squadron agreed on that. He had picked up the stench when the boat had approached the ship's side but he had been too preoccupied to react to it. Now his stomach turned as soon as he settled his feet on the ladder.

  In theory, the slavers were supposed to wash their cargo down, to fight disease and keep it alive until they could take their profit. In practice, nothing could eliminate the stink of hundreds of bodies pressed into their storage shelves like bales of cotton.

  The noise was just as bad as the odor. Every captive in the hold seemed to be jabbering and screaming. The slaves in a cargo could come from every section of the continent. They were brought to the coast from the places where they had been captured—or bought from some native chief who had taken them prisoner during a tribal war—and assembled in big compounds before they were sold to the European slave traders. It would be a miracle if fifty of them spoke the same language.

  He paused at the bottom of the ladder and stared at the patch of blue sky over the hatch. He was the commander of a British warship. Certain things were required.

  He unhooked the lamp that hung beside the ladder and peered into the din. White eyes stared at him out of the darkness. A glance at the captives he saw told him Captain Zachary had adapted one of the standard plans. Each slave had been placed with his back between the legs of the slave behind him.

  He had been listening to descriptions of slave holds since he had been a midshipman. He had assumed he had been prepared. The slaves had been arranged on three shelves, just as he had expected. They would spend most of the voyage staring at a ceiling a few inches above their faces. The passage that ran down the center of the hold was only a little wider than his shoulders.

  "We have encountered a space/time instability," the hal said. "I must remind you an abort is strongly recommended."

  "We have to stay," Emory said. "We haven't captured the liberation of the slaves. There's no finale."

  The mission rules were clear. Two flickers and the hal would automatically abort. One, and they could stay if they thought it was worth the risk.

  No one knew if those rules were necessary. The bureaucrats had established them and their electronic representative would enforce them. Time travel was a paradox and an impossibility. Intelligent people approached it with all the caution they would confer on a bomb with an unknown detonating mechanism.

  Giva kept her eyes focused on her screens. If she voted with him, they would stay. If they split their vote, the hal would implement the "strong recommendation" it had received from its masters.

  The slave who had pointed at them seemed to have been the only person who had seen the instability. There was no indication anyone else had noticed the apparition that had flickered beside the hull.

  "I think we should stay," Giva said. "For now."

  "The decision will be mandatorily reconsidered once every half hour. A termination may be initiated at any time."

  Harrington made himself walk the entire length of the passage. He absorbed the odor. He let the clamor bang on his skull. He peered into the shelves on both sides every third step. He couldn't make his men come down here if he wasn't willing to do it himself.

  On the deck, he had yielded to a flicker of sympathy for Zachary. Stomach wounds could inflict a painful slow death on their victims. Now he hoped Zachary took a whole month to die. And stayed fully conscious up to the last moment.

  He marched back to the ladder with his eyes fixed straight ahead. He had lost his temper in the boat when he had seen Zachary's cutthroats using their captives as human shields. It had been an understandable lapse but it couldn't happen twice in the same day. His ship and his crew depended on his judgment.

  Terry glanced at him when he assumed his place on the deck. Most of the slaver's crew had joined the cluster of prisoners. Some of them even looked moderately cheerful. They all knew the court at Freetown would set them free within a month at the most. An occasional incarceration was one of the inconveniences of their trade.

  "There should be at least four hundred," Harrington said. "Two thousand pounds minimum. And the value of the ship."

  Emory made a mental calculation as he watched the first boatload of prisoners crawl toward the Sparrow. At the rate the boat was moving, given the time it had taken to load it, they were going to sit here for at least two more hours.

  Giva was devoting half her screens to the crew and half to the Africans but he knew he would look like a fool if he objected. The crew were stolidly holding their guns on their prisoners. The Africans were talking among themselves. The two Africans who were chained on either side of the fallen woman
had dropped to their knees beside her.

  The moment when the slaves would be brought into the sunlight was the moment Emory considered the emotional climax of the whole episode. He had been so enthusiastic when he described it during their planning sessions that Peter LeGrundy had told him he sounded like he had already seen it.

  I ordered the liberated captives brought to the deck as circumstances allowed, Harrington had written. They did not fully comprehend their change in status, and I could not explain it. Our small craft does not contain a translator among its complement. But the sight of so many souls rescued from such a terrible destiny stimulated the deepest feelings of satisfaction in every heart capable of such sentiments.

  "You think we could press this lad, captain? We could use some of that muscle."

  Harrington turned his head. He had decided he should let the men standing guard take a few minutes rest, one at a time. Dawkins had wandered over the deck to the Africans and stopped in front of a particularly muscular specimen.

  "I wouldn't get too close if I were you," Harrington said. "We still haven't given him any reason to think we're his friends."

  Dawkins raised his hands in mock fright. He scurried back two steps and Harrington let himself yield to a smile.

  "We'd get a sight more than five pounds for you if we took you to Brazil," Dawkins said to the African. "A blackbird like you would fetch three hundred clean if he scowled at white people like that for the rest of his jet-black life."

  Giva was smiling again. She hadn't said anything about the way the British sailors used the word blackbird but Emory was certain she was noting every use she recorded. Emory had first encountered the word when he had started collecting memoirs and letters penned by men who had served in the antislavery patrol. Slave trading had been called "blackbirding" and British sailors had apparently started applying the term to the people they were supposed to rescue. Peter LeGrundy claimed the British thought up insulting names for every kind of foreigner they met.

  "They called Africans blackbirds and other derogatory terms," Peter had said, "in the same way they attached contemptuous epithets to most of the inhabitants of our planet. Frenchmen were called frogs, for example, apparently because there was some belief they were especially fond of eating frogs. People from Asian countries were called wogs—an ironic acronym for Worthy Oriental Gentlemen."

  Harrington watched the next-to-last boatload pull away from the slaver. The mob of prisoners had been reduced to a group of seven. Three of the prisoners were crouching beside their captain and offering him sips of water and occasional words of encouragement.

  "Mr. Terry—will you please take a party below and bring about fifty of the unfortunates on deck? Concentrate on women and children. We don't have the strength to handle too many restless young bucks."

  "Your ancestor doesn't seem to have much confidence in his ability to handle the animals," Giva said. "What do they call the African women? Does?"

  "If you will do a little research before you edit your creation," Emory said, "I believe you'll discover British young men were called young bucks, too. It was just a term for young men with young attitudes. They would have called you a restless young buck if you'd been born male, Giva."

  Harrington hadn't tried black women yet. His sexual experience had been limited to encounters with the kind of females who lifted their skirts for sailors in the Italian and South American ports he had visited on his first cruises. Bonfors claimed black women were more ardent than white women but Bonfors liked to talk. It had been Harrington's experience that most of his shipmates believed all foreign women were more ardent than their English counterparts.

  Some of the women Terry's men were ushering on deck looked like they were younger than his sisters. Several were carrying infants. Most of them were wearing loose bits of cloth that exposed their legs and arms and other areas civilized women usually covered.

  Harrington had read William Pitt's great speech on the abolition of the slave trade when he had been a boy, and he had read it again when his uncle had advised him the Admiralty had agreed to give him this command. There had been a time, Pitt had argued, when the inhabitants of ancient Britain had been just as savage and uncivilized as the inhabitants of modern Africa, "a time when even human sacrifices were offered on this island."

  In those days, Pitt had suggested, some Roman senator could have pointed to British barbarians and predicted "There is a people that will never rise to civilization—there is a people destined never to be free—a people without the understanding necessary for the attainment of useful arts, depressed by the hand of nature below the level of the human species, and created to form a supply of slaves for the rest of the world."

  The women in front of him might be barbarians. But they had, as Pitt had said, the potential to rise to the same levels the inhabitants of Britain had achieved. They had the right to live in freedom, so they might have the same opportunity to develop.

  A woman sprawled on the deck as she emerged from the hatch. Two of the hands were pulling the captives through the opening. Two were probably pushing them from below.

  One of the sailors on the deck bent over the fallen woman. His hand closed over her left breast.

  "Now there's a proper young thing," the sailor said.

  The sailor who was working with him broke out in a smile. "I can't say I'd have any objection to spending a few days on this prize crew."

  The officer who was supposed to be supervising the operation—the gunnery officer, Mr. Terry—was standing just a step away. John Harrington had been watching the slaves stumble into the sunlight but now he turned toward the bow and eyed the seven prisoners lounging in front of the forward deckhouse.

  The next African out of the hatch was a scrawny boy who looked like he might be somewhere around seven or eight, in Emory's unpracticed judgment. The woman who followed him—his mother?—received a long stroke on the side of her hip as she balanced herself against the roll of the ship.

  "The African males don't seem to be the only restless young bucks," Giva said. "These boys have been locked up in that little ship for several weeks now, as I remember it."

  "It has been one-half hour since your last mandatory stay/go decision," the hal said. "Do you wish to stay or go, Mr. FitzGordon?"

  "Stay."

  "Do you wish to stay or go, Ms. Lombardo?"

  "Stay, of course. We're getting some interesting insights into the attractions of African cruises."

  Harrington ran his eyes over the rigging of the slaver. He should pick the most morally fastidious hands for the prize crew. But who could that be? Could any of them resist the opportunity after all these months at sea?

  He could proclaim strict rules, of course. And order Terry to enforce them. But did he really want to subject his crew to the lash and the chain merely because they had succumbed to the most natural of urges? They were good men. They had just faced bullets and cannon balls to save five hundred human souls from the worst evil the modern world inflicted on its inhabitants.

  And what if some of the women were willing? What if some of them offered themselves for money?

  He could tell Terry to keep carnal activity to a minimum. But wouldn't that be the same as giving him permission to let the men indulge? He was the captain. Anything he said would have implications.

  "Mr. Terry. Will you come over here, please?"

  Harrington was murmuring but the microphones could still pick up the conversation.

  "I'm placing you in command of the prize, Mr. Terry. I am entrusting its cargo to your good sense and decency."

  "I understand," Terry said.

  "These people may be savages but they are still our responsibility."

  Emory nodded. Harrington was staring at the two men working the hatch as he talked. The frown on his face underlined every word he was uttering. "That should take care of that matter," Emory said.

  Giva turned away from her screens. "You really think that little speech will have an effect,
Emory?"

  "Is there any reason to think it won't? He won't be riding with the prize crew. But that lieutenant knows what he's supposed to do."

  "It was a standard piece of bureaucratic vagueness! It was exactly the kind of thing slot-fillers always say when they want to put a fence around their precious little careers."

  "It was just as precise as it needed to be, Giva. Harrington and his officers all come from the same background. That lieutenant knows exactly what he's supposed to do. He doesn't need a lot of detail."

  "When was the last time you held a job? I've been dealing with managers all my life. They always say things like that. The only thing you know when they're done is that you're going to be the one who gets butchered if anything goes wrong."

  Harrington stood by the railing as the last group of prisoners took their places in the boat. A babble of conversation rang over the deck. The African captives they had brought out of the hold had mingled with the captives who had been used as shields and they were all chattering away like guests at a lawn party.

  It was an exhilarating sight. He had never felt so completely satisfied with the world. Five hours ago the people standing on the deck had been crowded into the hell below decks, with their future lives reduced to weeks of torment in the hold, followed by years of brutal servitude when they finally made land. Now they merely had to endure a three or four day voyage to the British colony in Freetown. Half of them would probably become farmers in the land around Freetown. Some would join British regiments. Many would go to the West Indies as laborers—but they would be indentured laborers, not slaves, free to take up their own lives when they had worked off their passage. A few would even acquire an education in the schools the missionaries had established in Freetown and begin their own personal rise toward civilization.

  He had raised the flag above the slaver with his own hands. Several of the Africans had pointed at it and launched into excited comments when it was only a third of the way up the mast. He could still see some of them pointing and obviously explaining its significance to the newcomers. Some of them had even pointed at him. Most liberated slaves came from the interior. The captives who came from the coast would know about the antislavery patrol. They would understand the significance of the flag and the blue coat.