Ghosts of Time (11 page)

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

Jason was in no mood to appreciate the view as they topped the crest of the Blue Ridge and the Valley spread out below, with the river the Indians had named Shenandoah, or “Daughter of the Stars” gleaming in the distance like a narrow, winding stream of mercury under the afternoon winter sun.

As soon as they had been able to walk, their captors had bound their wrists behind them and marched them a little further along the road and then off to the left, following the ridge line on a trail that looked like it would be just barely accessible by horses. Presently they came to a level clearing below an overhanging crag. A crude but substantial and surprisingly large log building nestled under the crag, almost seeming to grow out of the mountainside at the rear of the ledge. A smaller, rickety shed where a row of four horses were stabled stood to the side. They were unceremoniously prodded forward, into the log building.

The room they entered was a study in incongruities: crude wooden tables flanking the rough stone fireplace held a variety of compact high-tech devices. Jason was glumly sure he recognized the functions of some, but he had no time to examine them closely, for they were shoved through a heavy inner door into a smaller room sunk into the semi-subterranean rear of the building; only the left-hand wall had a small window, and it was sturdily boarded up, admitting only narrow shafts of sunlight. There were no furnishings save a scattering of filthy blankets on the dirt floor. While the Transhumanist leader watched, one of his underlings cut their bonds while the other two stood by with leveled Colt revolvers. They were what the Service called the goon-caste types. Naturally they didn’t belong to the Transhuman castes whose obscenely visible bionics and grotesque genetic modifications shouted their divergence from the human norm—those would have been too conspicuous in past ages, and even in the twenty-fourth century the Transhumanist underground had to keep them carefully concealed—but Jason could recognize the subtle indicia.

“Your other man will be brought shortly,” said the leader, addressing Jason for the first time.

Other
man,
singular,
thought Jason.
Does that mean he doesn’t know about Aiken? Maybe he assumes the man who got away last night when they captured Dabney is one of us here.
He automatically activated his map display and saw that Dabney’s TRD was, indeed, nearing their present location. Aiken’s was still at Rectortown.

And how
did
he identify the two of them as time travelers?

I’d better not try to draw him out on that. I might inadvertently say something that would let him know Aiken is still at large. His ignorance of that is the only card I have left to play.

“May we know your name?” he asked.

“Captain Esau Stoneman, CSA . . . or USA, depending on which uniform I find it convenient to wear at any given time, in this typically pointless brawl among Pugs.”

“Products of unregulated genetics,”
Jason automatically translated the acronym—the Transhumanist term for all humans other than themselves.
So he’s not taking the trouble to conceal what he is.
Aloud: “I mean your
real
name—or, rather, designation.”

“It would mean nothing to you. You’ll have to be content with ‘Stoneman.’ Not very original, I admit; it was the name of a Federal cavalry officer who led a raid through Virginia last year. But it tickled my fancy.” The Transhumanist turned on his heel to go.

“Why did you kill the horses?” Nesbit suddenly blurted.

Stoneman (as Jason decided he must think of him) paused, turned, and gave Nesbit a puzzled look, as though he didn’t understand the question. “Why not?” Then he was gone, motioning his men after him, and the door closed, leaving them in semi-darkness.

* * *

It wasn’t long before the door was opened again and Dabney was shoved through, clearly weary and famished. The food they were given—more of the cornbread that Jason was coming to heartily detest, and scummy water—did little to alleviate the latter. And Jason couldn’t let him sleep just yet.

“Did you tell them anything?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” declared Dabney with a woozy headshake. “They didn’t ask me anything.” His head drooped. “I’m sorry I got taken, Commander. I’m the cause of all this.”

“Don’t blame yourself. You clearly didn’t stand a chance. Did they happen to say how they recognized the two of you for what you are?”

“No. They hardly said
anything.
” But Jason’s question seemed to cause something to occur to Dabney, and he looked around the semicircle of faces. “Where is Ai—?”

Jason hissed through his teeth and gave a surreptitious shushing motion with a one hand. A search by him and Mondrago had failed to turn up any surveillance devises in the crude room, but he saw no reason to take chances. Dabney understood, even through his haze of exhaustion, and shut up. Jason also shot Nesbit a look that he hoped would be self-explanatory. He knew he didn’t have to worry about Mondrago or Logan.

Dabney fell asleep. For the rest of them, time dragged excruciatingly by, with no acknowledgment of their existence from their captors. After a while, boredom was aggravated by hunger. Stoneman was, of course, trying to wear down their morale; in Nesbit’s case Jason was afraid he would be successful, and Dabney also began to show the signs after he awoke. He himself at least had the distraction of periodically checking his map display. He forced himself to show no reaction when the red dot of Aiken’s TRD began to move northwestward from Rectortown.

Finally, the heavy door was opened with a startling suddenness which Jason was sure was intentional. Two goons with drawn revolvers entered and flanked the door, followed by Stoneman. The latter wore the look of arrogant contempt that Jason had learned to associate with the leader castes, although he wasn’t as blatant about it as Franco, Category Five, Seventy-Sixth Degree, or Romain, Category Three, Eighty-Ninth Degree had been. It was impossible to avoid the impression that, while Stoneman might be no more intelligent than those other two Transhumanists of Jason’s acquaintance, his intelligence was less banked down by conceit.

“I’m sure I needn’t tell you why you are still alive,” he said without preamble. “You should be a useful intelligence asset. We have a number of questions to put to you.”

Jason kept his voice level. “First, I’ve got one for you. When you captured Dabney, here, how did you know that he and this man—” (he indicated Logan) “—were time travelers?”

This was a crucial moment. To Jason’s inexpressible relief, Nesbit revealed no reaction. His relief deepened as he watched Stoneman’s face and saw no reaction there either. The Transhumanist’s expression reflected nothing but a moment’s hesitation before concluding that the information could do no conceivable good to a man already condemned to death.

“We are well aware of your ability to keep track of your personnel by means of the tracking devices incorporated in their TRDs—we naturally use the same technique ourselves. By the time my expedition was temporally displaced—and I believe we come from a point slightly in the future of your own departure time—we had developed a sensor that can detect those devices. It can only do so at a range of a few yards, unfortunately. But it still has its uses.”

Jason kept his face carefully expressionless. The Transhumanists’ possession of such a capability was bad news indeed. But Stoneman had just confirmed that he didn’t know of Aiken’s existence—and he wouldn’t be able to detect him unless the young Service man came practically cheek by jowl with him.

“So,” Jason said, “you could emplace this thing by the side of the road you knew we’d come along, following Dabney, and know it was us . . . which is why you’ve now captured all of us.” (
No harm in reinforcing that last misconception,
he told himself.) “But I’m curious: how did you know what road to emplace it beside the other night, when Dabney and Logan rode by?”

“We can detect the energy surge accompanying temporal displacement,” said Stoneman, and Jason unconsciously nodded, for he already knew this was true. “We’ve been aware in general of your movements since you arrived. By good fortune, we were operating in this area, and some of my men—wearing their blue costumes—were with Frazar’s cavalry. Your face is a well-known one among us. Unfortunately we had no opportunity to do anything at the time, but had to lie in wait. And now I think I’ve allowed you quite enough questions. Soon it will be time for
my
questions. I expect you to be a fruitful source of information on all aspects of the Temporal Service, especially the Special Operations Section that you head.”

“Torture,” Jason stated rather than asked. “It’s been tried on me before.”

“I wonder if it’s ever been tried on subordinates of yours—especially non-Service personnel for whom you’re responsible—while you were forced to watch. But set your mind at rest. I’ve always been skeptical of the value of torture. It’s inconclusive and unreliable. And I don’t need it. I have drugs and devices that can obtain the information I need despite any quixotic efforts by you to withhold it. The basic field-model mind probe I have available will take a great deal of time, especially inasmuch as I have other matters to engage me and will only be here at intervals. But we’ll have plenty of time.” Stoneman smiled as though at some obscure jest. Then he gestured at the room beyond the door. “You doubtless noticed a number of items there.”

“Yes: blatantly anachronistic technology that you lunatics are reckless enough to bring into the past.”

Stoneman’s façade of rational equanimity vanished as his eyes went incandescent with fanaticism. “’Recklessness is what you Pugs always call boldness! You were afraid to use to the fullest the godlike tools that biotechnology and nanotechnology had placed in your hands by the late twenty-first century. But our ancestors were willing to follow these developments out to their ultimate logical conclusion.”

“Carrying any idea out to its ‘ultimate logical conclusion’ regardless of consequences is a form of insanity. The only people who do it are totalitarian fanatics: the Nazis, and the Stalinists . . . and the Transhuman Movement.”

“Those others were merely confused, half-hearted precursors of ours. While you, in your fear, crawled back into evolution’s womb, our ancestors reinvented themselves as a rationally designed race of superbeings.”

“I can tell,” Mondrago muttered drily.

“And instead of accepting extinction and passing the torch on to your successors,” Stoneman went on, showing no sign of having heard him, “you sought to exterminate them. You nearly succeeded. Now we have to hide in the shadows . . . until The Day.”

“Ah, yes,” nodded Jason. “
The Day
, when all your plots you’re riddling the past with come to fruition simultaneously, sort of like a time-on-target salvo.” He cocked his head. “Since of course you have no intention of letting me return to my own time alive, it wouldn’t do any harm to share that date with me, would it?”

“I see no reason why I should. In fact, I demean myself by talking to a randomly evolved primate that would make such a suggestion. And besides,” Stoneman added with a tight little smile, “you’re quite wrong. I have every intention of letting you and your men be retrieved alive—as mindless husks, after we have wrung from you all the information you possess. Oh, yes, we also have the capability of performing mindwipe. It is a small, portable unit like all our equipment—even our temporal displacement technology has limits—but the technology can be miniaturized.”

“I know that much about selective memory erasure,” said Jason, recalling the single-shot unit he had taken back to the seventeenth century to excise from Henry Morgan’s mind memories it could not be permitted to retain. “I also know you’re lying about it. It doesn’t do what you claim it does. It only erases certain memories.”

“Ah, but do you know that it is ‘selective’ only because of the safety thresholds built into it? Our device has the option of removing all those restraints—
all
of them. When on this setting, it is uncontrollable: it obliterates all memories, all personality, reducing the subject to a blank-minded moron. This process takes practically no time at all. But, at any rate, we’ll have plenty of time.”

“You’ve used that phrase before.”

“Yes.” The Transhumanist’s smile grew crafty. “You see, when we return the drooling mass of non-sentient flesh that was formerly Jason Thanou to the Authority, we will do so with an additional twist.”

“And what might that be?” Jason could see that Stoneman, while he might be a cooler article than the other leader-caste Transhumans he had encountered, shared their inability to resist an opportunity to hold forth to someone—even a Pug—other than their own yes-men.

“You are naturally familiar with temporal stasis bubbles,” said Stoneman with seeming irrelevance.

“Naturally,” Jason echoed, although he didn’t pretend to any in-depth understanding of the theory. It was fairly new technology in the late twenty-fourth century, generating a field within which the passage of time was retarded, so that a second within the bubble might equal a very long time indeed in the outside universe—an all-or-nothing process that caused time to practically stop. It was expensive, but it had its uses—various medical applications, and also the preservation of extremely ancient sites which the pollution of the Hydrocarbon Era had almost eaten away. Jason recalled the view of the Acropolis from Kyle Rutherford’s Athens office.

“In the seventeenth-century Caribbean,” Stoneman continued, “you prevented us from achieving our planned technology exchange with the Teloi battlestation that was passing through the Solar System at that time—destroyed the battlestation, in fact. Nevertheless, the surviving members of our expedition had overheard enough generalities from Ahriman, our Teloi liaison, to be able to provide us on their return with certain hints—pointers, if you will. In the world of research and development, knowing for certain that a thing is possible is often half the battle. And the Teloi had learned to fine-tune the temporal stasis bubble phenomenon . . . and even to
reverse
it.”