Pirates of the Timestream (10 page)

They had not long to wait. Soon—and afterwards Boyer suspected it was sooner than it seemed—a distant whisper of sound was heard, and the flicker of approaching torches could be seen. Someone had brought out additional torches from the chest, and now these were ignited.

The sound became a hum, and then became singing, rising to a keening harmony. With Zenobia in the lead, they joined in the singing, to welcome the dead. And a line of men brought the dead man into the circle of torchlight, borne on a kind of hammock.

Now, in the light of the torches, Boyer could see that a grave had already been dug, and that a very crude coffin lay beside it. He tried to follow along in the singing, whose words he could not comprehend.

They laid the dead man down. He was wearing a shirt, and—unusually for a seaman of this era—a pair of crude socks. Boyer refrained asking Zenobia about that shirt, for there were no nanas, or old women of the village, available here to make it as was proper. But that, like so much else, might well be an accretion of later times. And besides, this was no time to speak to Zenobia. By some silent transformation, she had ceased to be a she-pirate and become a high priestess.

Some of the precautions for keeping the duppy in the grave were already more or less as he knew them, even this far back in time. This became apparent as various items were removed from the chest and used. The dead man’s nose, mouth, underarms and crotch area were rubbed with lime and nutmeg. After he was lowered into the coffin, a pillow stuffed with parched peas and corn—but not coffee beans, which were doubtless unavailable—was placed under his head. Then the socks and the cuffs of the shirt were nailed down. Zenobia stepped forward and spoke to the dead.

“We nail you down hand and foot. You must stay there. If we want you we come and wake you.”

A low chanting began in response. Boyer joined in. He suddenly felt more relaxed, and agreeable to whatever Zenobia might say. . . .

With a sudden shock, he remembered reading of an implant the Transhumanists had used, causing the voice to emit a subsonic wave that reduced its hearers to docile acceptance. This, he was coldly certain, was what he was now experiencing. But it was only effective with those who were not aware it was being used on them. He grimly concentrated on retaining control of his own will.

Now the coffin was closed and nailed shut. Bottles of rum were handed out. As they were opened, the first drink out of each was poured into the grave for the dead. Then more parched corn and peas were thrown in. Finally, the coffin was lowered in. As the rum was drunk, some of the men began to recount Anansi stories from Africa—the germ of the later “Uncle Remus” tales of the North American plantation states, although with somewhat different animals—because duppies were believed to find them entertaining.

Zenobia turned to face her crew . . . and a low moan went up. Boyer could see why. In the dim light of the torches, her eyes now glowed with a fluorescent yellow-white light that was clearly supernatural.

Clearly, at least, to anyone who doesn’t know about bionic eyes, and some of the features that can be built into them
, thought Boyer, who now knew that Zenobia’s large, finely shaped black eyes were not her own. He wondered what other special capabilities, besides that of lighting up, they might possess. Infrared vision, perhaps, or microscopic or telescopic focusing . . . ?

First the vocal implant, and now this. What else, I wonder?
Clearly, this woman was a cyborg designed for one purpose: the founding of a cult of the sort the Transhumanist underground used to subvert history.

So we keep coming back to the question of why they were chasing her, and why she was so desperate to keep away from them.

Boyer had no chance for further reflection, because Zenobia began singing and he had to concentrate on resisting that which vibrated below the level of sound in her voice. The men also sang, in response to her, and as they did their bodies began to sway in a kind of dance in the flickering torchlight.

“Ah Minnie wah oh, Ah Minnie wah oh!” crooned Zenobia.

“Saykay ah brah ay,” responded the men.

“Yekko tekko, yekko tekko, Yahm pahn sah ay!” Zenobia cried.

“Ah yah yee-ai, Ah yah yee-ai, ah say oh,” the men replied.

Zenobia put her splendid body through a violent dance movement and cried out again:

“Yekko tekko, ah pah ahah ai!”

And then the whole thing was repeated, the dance movements growing more furious with each repetition.

Boyer did his best to follow along, with more success than he would have dreamed possible. Maybe it was that which underlay Zenobia’s voice. More likely, it was the fact that he knew much of this already, for the traditions of the
Koo-min-ah
evidently were very persistent across the centuries.

But then, abruptly, Zenobia halted and fell down into a crouch, and as she did all motion and all sound instantly ceased. Then she raised her head, and the light in her artificial eyes was extinguished. When she stood up and spoke, her words were relatively matter-of-fact.

“We have not been able to do everything we should for the duppy. We cannot remain here for the Nine Night. And we have no goat to sacrifice and drink its blood.” (Boyer was just as glad for that omission.) “But we have done all we could, and the duppy must go on to his rest and do the living no harm.” An affirmative-sounding murmur arose from the men. “And most of all, the duppy knows he must stay away from the demons. We all know this. And we all know that the living must avoid them as well.”

The murmur of agreement rose a notch, almost to the level of frantic affirmation, and a shudder of fear and revulsion ran through the group.

What’s this?
thought Boyer, suddenly jolted out of his comfortable feeling of familiarity.
There’s not supposed to be anything about “demons” in this kind of ritual.

“Yes,” Zenobia continued, her words reinforced by the subsonic siren song of her vocal implant. “You all know that demons can do only ill. And I have taught you how to recognize them. They wear flesh—paler flesh than that of the white men—and they walk on two legs like men. But they are not men. Their flesh is a
different
flesh, not that of men, for they are of star-stuff. They are taller than men by two heads. Their hair is pale, and gleams of silver and gold. Their faces are long and thin and sharp and cruel—worse than those of the white men. And their ears are not as those of men. And their huge eyes are blue . . . but not like the blue eyes of some of the white men. No, they are blue throughout, with no whites, as though the blue has seeped out into the whites. All of this you know, for I have told you many times so you will recognize them for what they are if you ever see them—and know them for the enemies of man.”

“We know, we know,” came a general murmur, like distant surf.

This isn’t right,
thought Boyer.
What’s she talking about?

But then the murmuring gradually subsided, and there was silence. The African magic had departed from the clearing. There were only ragged men in torchlight, and a fresh grave.

“Let’s be going,” said Zenobia, her vocal implant no longer activated. “It’s a long row back.”

* * *

“Well,” breathed Jason after hearing Boyer’s description of Zenobia’s bionics. “Now we know how she dominates her crew.”

“That, and the fact that she’s obviously a product of genetic upgrade,” added Mondrago. “She can probably beat most of them at arm wrestling!”

Boyer struggled to stay awake. It had been well into the small hours by the time the boats had returned to Zenobia’s ship, after another row that had given him no opportunities to sound her out, and still later when he had made his way back to the inn and awakened Jason and Mondrago. Now it was almost dawn, and he was fending off the enveloping dark arms of exhaustion. But a thought shook loose.

“There’s just one more thing. Almost everything about the ceremony was recognizably part of the origins of Jamaican folklore. But when it was over, Zenobia said some things that simply didn’t fit in. She started talking about some kind of demons that duppies have to be persuaded to have nothing to do with, and that the living should avoid and oppose at every turn. She even launched into a physical description of them so they’ll be easy to recognize. It was obvious that they had heard it from her many times before. She was just reinforcing it.”

“A physical description?”

“Yes. And it was like nothing I’ve ever heard of in any Jamaican legends.” Boyer repeated what Zenobia had said, as nearly as his fatigue-deadened brain could recall it. By the end, he was almost dozing off. “As I say, this really doesn’t mesh with . . .” His voice trailed off and he snapped back to alertness as he saw the haunted looks in his listeners’ faces.

“Henri,” said Jason slowly, “you have just described a Teloi.”

CHAPTER TEN

“But the Teloi are all supposed to be dead!” bleated Irving Nesbit. “You said—”

“I never said anything of the kind, Irving,” sighed Jason. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mondrago glance first at Nesbit’s back, then over
Oxford
’s rail and down at the Caribbean waters, and finally at Jason with an urging, almost pleading look. He gave the Corsican a quelling glare and then turned back to Nesbit.

“Let me explain it one more time, Irving. I said I was as sure that all the Teloi on Earth have died out a long time ago as I could be of anything that can’t be proved. I gave no guarantees.”

“But I’ve heard the stories of your last two expeditions!”

“Then you must have misconstrued them. Let me go over it again. In 1628 B.C. we discovered the truth behind the Greek myths and other similar bodies of legend: that a group of Teloi had established themselves on Earth a hundred thousand years ago, setting up shop as gods. They genetically engineered
homo erectus
into
homo sapiens
in the northeast African and southwest Asian region, to be their slaves and worshippers
.
We were able to permanently strand most of them—their older generation, the ones known then as the ‘Old Gods’ and remembered in the Greek legends as the Titans—in their private extradimensional ‘pocket universe’ by arranging for its only interface portal to be obliterated by the volcanic explosion of Santorini.” A shadow crossed Jason’s mind as he recalled the sacrifices that outcome had required. A human, Sidney Nagel, had given his life. So had Oannes, the last of the Nagommo, the amphibious race that had been the Teloi’s inveterate enemies. “We did it with the tacit cooperation of the Teloi’s own younger generation—the ones known at the time as the ‘New Gods.’ They were not trapped. They are remembered as the Olympian gods and also as various other pantheons across the Indo-European zone. But they had lost most of their self-repairing high-tech paraphernalia, and they belonged to the last Earth-born generation, whose life expectancy had declined greatly from the near-immortality of the earliest arrivals. In addition, they had become infertile. Essentially, they were running a bluff after that.

“Nevertheless, on our subsequent expedition to 490 B.C. we found they were still alive, although even less sane than ever by our standards. That last, plus their ignorance concerning time travel, was why the Transhumanists had been able to trick them into an alliance by promising to change history so as to restore their worship. When they found out they had been made fools of, they went mad with rage—even madder than their norm, not that the change was especially noticeable. They and the Transhumanists mostly killed each other off. I listened to Zeus’ last words,” Jason added with a reminiscent smile, recalling that day on a mountain overlooking the battlefield of Marathon. “But,” he concluded firmly, “they weren’t all killed. The one known to the Greeks as Aphrodite definitely survived, and there were several others about whom I couldn’t be sure.”

“But,” Nesbit protested, “that was well over two thousand years ago! And you said their lifespans were greatly reduced. How can any of them still be alive now?”

“I didn’t expect them to be,” Jason was forced to admit. “The possibility of encountering them on this expedition never even entered my mind.”

“Another point,” said Grenfell, who had been listening thoughtfully. “From what you’ve told us, the area of operation of the ‘New Gods’ stretched roughly from Ireland to northern India. They certainly never established their worship in the Western Hemisphere. So even granting that they are present
now
, what are they doing
here
?”

“I don’t know. I don’t even have a theory. Actually, there are only two things we
do
know for certain. The first is that some Teloi are still around; Zenobia’s description, as repeated by Henri, is too exact for coincidence. The second is that Zenobia is aware of them and regards them as her enemies. From Henri’s account, she uses even a funeral as an excuse for a kind of sermon warning her followers to watch out for them.”

Da Cunha’s brow furrowed with thought. “And when we first saw her, she was fleeing from the Transhumanists—of whom we seem to be assuming she’s one. And the last time you saw
them
, they were having a falling out with the Teloi, who had been their allies. . . .” Her brow furrowed even more intensely. “Of course, we have no idea what point in the future she—or the Transhumanists who were chasing her, or both—come from.”

“I’m getting a headache,” Mondrago complained.

“This is
terrible!
” Nesbit exclaimed. “Commander, you
must
use a message drop to inform the Authority of this appalling new development!”

Jason expelled a long, exasperated sigh. He swept his arm out in a gesture that encompassed the ship and the Caribbean all around it. “How, precisely, do you suggest I do that, Irving?”

Even Nesbit seemed to understand.

The message drop system was subject to almost crippling limitations. First of all, it required a site that was sufficiently geologically stable and out-of-the-way to remain fairly unchanged until the twenty-fourth century. Port Royal itself was out of the question for obvious reasons, and the Palisadoes were subjected to repeated change over the centuries under the lash of earthquake and hurricane, while the shores of Kingston Harbor would be overrun by construction. So a spot a few miles northeast of the harbor, in the foothills of the Blue Mountains, had been selected. But that ran headlong into the
other
requirement for a message drop site: accessibility. No one had pretended to have any clear idea how Jason was going to have an opportunity or an excuse to struggle up there.

Now, of course, the question was academic, for they were en route to Cow Island where Morgan’s fleet was to rendezvous, aboard HMS
Oxford
. (The “HMS” was still appropriate, Grenfell had quipped, although now it should be interpreted as standing for “Henry Morgan’s Ship.”) The frigate’s original hundred-and-sixty-man crew had been augmented up to about two hundred and fifty, including Jason and his party. This was the usual way of pirate ships, which carried large numbers of men to provide overwhelming boarding or landing parties, not to mention prize crews. The practice had persisted aboard
Oxford
even though the frigate, unlike the usual pirate ship, was primarily intended as a formidable gun platform. It didn’t exactly make for privacy, especially below decks. They were carrying on this conclave amidships on the spar deck, but Jason knew they’d have to break it up soon, for they were already drawing the kind of glances that indicated suspicion of “being in a plot against the Brethren.”

A sound from abaft caught Jason’s attention. The quarterdeck hatch leading down a short ladder to the captain’s cabin had opened, and Henry Morgan had emerged.

The very fact that he had a cabin spoke eloquently of this expedition’s uniqueness, and of his. Typically, the pirates took one of their captured merchant ships and ripped out all below-decks bulkheads, whether used for cargo storage or for individual cabins. The resulting open space belowdecks had a practical function—to accommodate the excessive number of men these ships carried—but it went deeper than that. The buccaneers had never heard of any such word, or concept, as “ideology,” but theirs was still the very basic democracy of the original
boucaniers
of the Antillean coasts: no man had any special right to a greater share of anything than any other. This extended to quarters aboard ships. And among them the captain was not the absolute despot he was to become in naval tradition. He was only in command during battle or when pursuing or being pursued—during which periods his word was law. Otherwise, he was just one among peers, and the most important man was the elected quartermaster who was the “business manager.”

Looking out over the billow toward the accompanying ships, Jason saw Zenobia’s
Rolling-Calf
, and knew from Boyer’s description that she was typical in all these respects. And it worked even though she was a woman. She slept in the common space, and no one dared molest her, for all knew her to be uncanny.

Morgan, in his own way, was also special. Partly it was the nature of the ship. No one would have dreamed of performing upon this specialized fighting machine the kind of radical surgery practiced on ordinary merchantmen. And Morgan himself, although everyone still addressed him as “captain,” was the elected admiral of the buccaneers, and had been even before his fabulously lucrative sack of Portobello. The ordinary rules didn’t apply to him.

Not that he was dressed exceptionally at the moment. At sea, he wore shirt, breeches and boots like everyone else, with his usual scarlet kerchief tied around his head. He looked about him and began sauntering in their direction.

“Let’s break it up, people,” said Jason in a low voice. Then, as an afterthought: “Except you, Roderick. Stay with me.”

Morgan paused and spoke to various crewmen as he walked, laughing and joking in his deep, resonant voice. But always, in some indefinable way, there was a certain intangible distance, an unspoken consciousness of command. Morgan was one of these men, able to match them drink for drink and violent act for violent act . . . but not quite one of them. It might, Jason thought, have something to do with the fact that Morgan, aside from his eloquence and assurance, spoke in the accents of an educated man—the gentleman he insisted he was. These men might have turned their backs on this century’s deeply class-conscious society, but they were inescapably products of it.

Or, just as likely, it was something about the man himself.

“Jason!” he greeted. “We’ve a fair wind. It shouldn’t be too long before we raise Cow Island.”

“Aye, Captain. Think you the rest of the ships will be there?”

“The Frogs? Oh, they’ll be there, most of them. What they’ve heard about our haul from Portobello caused them to have a change of heart about me. And besides, they no longer have that lunatic Francois L’Ollonais to follow.” Morgan chuckled. “Have you heard the story of how he died?”

Jason did know, from Grenfell’s background lectures, how the appalling French sadist had met his richly deserved end. But he wondered if Morgan would tell a different version. “No, Captain.”

“In Nicaragua, he managed to make the Darien Indians his enemies, by his mad cruelties and slaughters.” Morgan shook his head and looked disdainful. One of the secrets of his own success in his eighteen-month rampage through Central America had been his ability to forge alliances of convenience with the local Indians, who had excellent reasons for hating the Spaniards. “They captured him and tore him to pieces while he was still alive, burning each part as soon as it came off and scattering the ashes into the winds to make absolutely sure no trace remained of such a creature.” Morgan chuckled grimly. “They’re cannibals, but they must have lacked all appetite for
him
.”

“We
have
heard a lot of stories about L’Ollonais,” Grenfell prompted.

“They probably fell short of the truth. He particularly enjoyed pulling out men’s tongues. But when he’d
really
fly into one of his wild rages he’d cut a prisoner’s chest open, reach in, and pull out the heart. Then he’d take a bite out of the heart himself before making another prisoner finish it off. He boasted that he never let a Spaniard live.”

“We’ve also heard a few stories about what went on at Portobello when you took it, Captain,” said Grenfell. Jason held his breath, fearing that Grenfell might have gone too far. But Morgan showed no sign of taking offense. Instead, he turned discursive.

“As you know, persuading people to reveal where they’ve hidden their valuables often requires questioning with the usual ceremonies.” The last five words, as Jason knew, meant
torture
in piratical argot. “And having a reputation for doing it works wonders—saves you no end of trouble. I learned my lesson at Puerto Principe.” Morgan scowled at the recollection of the one time he had, in spite of taking a Spanish town, come away with too little booty to secure the enthusiastic loyalty of his men. “I was too soft. I didn’t make that mistake again at Portobello. I had an obligation to my men, who had a right to expect healthy shares, and I did what was needed to fulfill it.
That’s the difference between me and L’Ollonais: purpose. For him, slashing people to ribbons and racking them and woolding them were simply
fun.
”

It took Jason a moment to recall that “woolding” meant tying a rope around a prisoner’s head and tightening it, tourniquetlike with turns of a stick, until the eyeballs popped out of their sockets. It was standard procedure on both sides of the ongoing war between the buccaneers and Spain. He began to understand. Morgan sincerely disapproved of L’Ollonais, but his disapproval was rooted in the Frenchman’s lack of
professionalism.

“You must have also learned something of that kind of thing when you first arrived in Jamaica, in the fighting against the escaped slaves,” he ventured.

“Yes, we’ve heard various different stories about how you happened to be there,” said Grenfell, a little too eagerly. Jason gave him a cautioning look. But once again, Morgan proved to be in an expansive mood.

“I was ‘Barbadosed,’ as people say: thumped on the head and shipped off to Barbados as an indentured servant. To get away from that, I ran off and joined Penn and Venables when they put in at Barbados on their way to Hispaniola—even though they were damned Parliamentarians! God’s blood, how could that canting bastard Cromwell have found such a pair of incompetent buffoons in all of England? But I must admit I learned a lot from them: how
not
to organize an expedition, how
not
to deal with the Indians, how
not
to fight the Spaniards, and above all how
not
to lead men.”

Jason saw Grenfell’s eyes light up at the resolution of the long-standing controversy over how Morgan had gotten to the New World. The other theory—the more respectable one—was that he had been with the Penn/Venables expedition all the way from England, as a junior officer. In fact, it seemed he really had come up from nothing. Esquemeling would write as much in 1678, which was one of the things for which Morgan would sue his publishers, for by that time he would be Lieutenant Governor Sir Henry Morgan and would require a more high-toned background. At the present time, he could still afford to be honest.