Pirates of the Timestream (17 page)

A dog was brought forth. All four of its paws were chopped off, and it was buried alive, putting an end to its howls and whimpers.

There was a series of responsive chants which seemed to be signifying that the dog was insufficient. Then Romain and the two goons walked toward the group of bound prisoners. They carried thin cords. They untied Pauline Da Cunha.

“Zenobia, what’s happening?” she demanded as the goons tied her again, this time with the cords they carried. Zenobia made no reply. She seemed unable to speak.

Romain stepped in front of Jason and spoke softly in Standard International English. “The cords are thin, but they have the tensile strength of cello strings. They are, you see, made from the well-cured intestines of the previous sacrificial victims, who therefore in a sense bind their successors. Rather poetic.” He smiled and then turned and walked away.

All at once, Jason understood. He watched as they used the cords to drag the still bewildered Da Cunha to the coffin . . . which served as a low table, onto which they tied her.

Jason turned a searing look on Zenobia. “Why didn’t you tell me?” he rasped.

“I couldn’t,” she whispered, not meeting his eyes. Then she looked up and spoke defiantly. “What good would it have done you—or her—to know in advance?”

Jason had no answer. He turned toward the coffin as the knife descended on the naked figure stretched out on it, and the blood and the screams began.

* * *

Afterwards, Jason’s recollections of what happened were never entirely clear. But he forced himself to remember as much as possible. He needed to remember it.

He and Zenobia were the only ones who watched it all. Mondrago shouted Corsican curses until one of the goons came over and knocked him unconscious. Nesbit soon fainted. Grenfell withdrew into a state of shock and simply hung against his bonds, saliva drooling from a corner of his mouth.

Jason wanted with all his soul to join them in oblivion. But he made himself watch. He vomited when the quartering commenced, but he still watched. He watched the cooking, and smelled it.

The new converts were not allowed to share in the meat—that was only for the adepts, and even they consumed only a small amount. This was a sacrifice to the Teloi “god,” and he did most of the eating.

Finally it was over. Words were spoken and chanted which seemed to indicate that the Teloi found the sacrifice adequate. The hovering Kestrel speared the clearing with another blinding beam of light, under cover of which the Teloi turned and walked back into the jungle.

Romain walked over to stand before Jason and Zenobia. His face wore a look of dreamy satiety. His mouth gleamed with grease. With his right hand he held a wet mass of guts in front of Zenobia’s face.

“They’ll be dried and cured, and used to bind you—the prize victim—at the climactic ceremony. As I said, one leads the next.” He turned to Jason and smiled, licking the grease from his lips. “See, I told you. Even Pugs can have their uses.”

Jason said nothing. His expression did not change. He held Romain’s eyes as long as possible, while imprinting on his memory every smallest detail of that face.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

The remains of the sacrifice were burned. As it happened, Pauline Da Cunha’s TRD, in addition to her deactivated brain implant, was still among those remains, and therefore fell down into the heap of greasy ash where the closed coffin had been. The little light on Jason’s map display would remain there, as a reminder he didn’t need.

They remained there for a few days. The climactic ceremony of which Romain had spoken was to be held in another upland clearing, this time northeast of the Bahia de Ocoa, only about thirty-five miles as the crow or the Kestrel flew. But Romain wanted to give his adepts time to fan out ahead as “advance men,” spreading the word and gathering the believers. In the meantime, the prisoners were kept outside rather than aboard the Kestrel, bound even when eating tasteless rations twice a day under watchful guard, prey to the insects at all times.

Grenfell barely seemed to notice the endless, hellish discomfort. He had returned to awareness, but his personality had yet to reassert itself. Most of him was still sheltering in a place where what he had witnessed had never happened.

Nesbit was different. After regaining consciousness, he had gone through a brief spell of trembling reaction. But since then, the transformation Jason had noticed in the course of their trek seemed to pass to its next stage, as though horror had completed the work that mere hardship had begun. He would, Jason was increasingly certain, hold.

The other two were simply stoical in their own individual ways. Anyone who hadn’t known Mondrago as Jason did would never have guessed at what was being stored up behind the expressionless façade of a man in whose very genes slumbered the tradition of vendetta. As for Zenobia, she waited in silent inscrutability.

It was after dark of the second night when the tall figure of the Teloi entered the circle of firelight and approached them. This time, instead of a robe he was wearing a kind of form-fitting jumpsuit that looked utilitarian to an un-Teloi-like degree. His expression held in full the Teloi arrogance, but it was a kind of austere arrogance which somehow wasn’t true to type as Jason knew it. His huge, strange eyes ran over the entire huddled group of seated, bound figures before looking Jason full in the face.

“I am told that you speak our language,” he said in that tongue. His voice had the disturbing quality Jason remembered, but it formed words in a more clipped fashion than he recalled.

“Badly. You imposed it on the speech centers of my brain without proper preparation, in a brute-force way.” Privately, Jason noted that the Teloi had referred only to him, apparently unaware that Mondrago shared his imperfect knowledge of the language, having acquired it by direct neural induction on preparation for their expedition to the Athens of Themistocles. He had no intention of revealing the fact, and he knew he could count on Mondrago’s tight-lipped silence.

“‘We’ imposed it?” the Teloi queried. Then his thin lips curled with disdain. “Oh, yes. You mean the
Oratioi’Zhonglu.
”

“Er . . . the . . . ?”

“They were a
zhonglu
—that is, a . . .” The Teloi looked annoyed and seemed to decide that trying to explain the term was more trouble than it was worth—or perhaps its meaning was so obvious to him that it could hardly be put into words. “A group of individuals of my race who, a long time ago, arranged to isolate themselves on this planet so they could play at being gods among a slave-race of their own creation.”

“A very long time ago,” said Jason, nodding slowly. “About a hundred thousand local years. So you’re not one of them?”

The Teloi seemed to find the question insulting. “Do not confuse me and my comrades with those contemptible, degenerate fools! They’re all dead by now. And they were typical of our race in those days. Our ancestors had sought to turn their posterity into gods by genetic engineering. Instead, they produced useless parasites who could find no better use for their near-immortal lives than to find ever-new frivolities and depravities to hold at bay the meaninglessness of those lives. It was because of the decadence of those like the
Oratioi’Zhonglu
that we lost the war with the Nagommo.”

“Ah, yes, the Nagommo.” Jason reviewed in is mind what he knew of that amphibious race and its long war of mutual genocide against the Teloi. In 1628 B.C. he had watched the death of what he was coldly certain was the last Nagom in the universe: Oannes, a survivor of a Nagommo battlecruiser that had crash-landed in the Persian Gulf in the fourth millennium B.C. Its crew had taught the rudiments of civilization to the rebellious human slaves of the Teloi in that region. In the meantime, their race had gone on to win the war, but at too great a cost, for they had laid the groundwork for their own eventual extinction. Jason, who had looked on their graveyard homeworld, decided not to mention that, for this Teloi might not be aware of it, and Jason had no desire to give him satisfaction. “We were under the impression that they had destroyed your race.”

“Ah, no!” The Teloi knelt down and brought his face close to Jason’s. His eyes, with the deep blue irises and pale-blue “whites,” were incandescent with fanatical hate. “The war against the Nagommo was our salvation, for it gave to our hollow lives a purpose: the extermination of those nauseating, slimy vermin. Admittedly, most of our race were too far gone in degeneracy to dedicate themselves to that purpose. But some of us did. We formed the
Tuova’Zhonglu
, a . . .” Once again he seemed stymied at trying to explain what
zhonglu
meant. “A new military organization . . . no, society, with its own culture of duty and sacrifice, rejecting all the idle pleasure-seeking and aesthetic dilettantism of our fellows.

“But we were not enough—never enough. The useless, effete majority never gave us the support we needed. That was why we lost the war. No, we never really
lost
it—we were betrayed! If our race had united behind us and accepted our leadership, we would have obliterated the Nagommo!

“In the end, those who had failed us perished as they deserved, for they had proven themselves unworthy of us. But our race was not destroyed—it was purified! Its worthwhile members—the hard, incorruptible core of the military—escaped from the final cataclysm into space. Even now we cruise the star-trails, spending long periods in suspended animation to prolong our lives, gradually and inconspicuously gathering our strength for the inevitable day when the universe will know its natural masters!”

My God,
Jason thought.
We’re not just dealing with Teloi. We’re dealing with the Teloi version of fascists!

I’m beginning to appreciate Zeus.

“One question,” he ventured. “Since you had nothing to do with the, uh,
Oratioi’Zhonglu
here on Earth, how did you know that I can understand your language?”

“I told him,” said a voice from the shadows, loathsomely familiar even when speaking Teloi.

Romain stepped into the light, smiling his trademark lazy smile. Jason carefully kept his face and voice expressionless.

“And how did
you
know?”

Before replying to Jason, Romain turned to the Teloi. “I can communicate with him more readily in our own language,” he explained. The Teloi gave an imperious gesture of acquiescence, and turned to go.

“One moment,” said Jason. “What name should I call you by?”

The Teloi paused to consider. “I understand the
Oratioi’Zhonglu
adopted names remembered in your various cultures as those of gods. Appropriate, inasmuch as they created you.” For the first time, a hint of a smile flickered across that cold face. “You may call me . . . Ahriman.” He turned on his heel and was gone.

“These lunatics,” said Romain in Standard International English, “are too arrogant to have any interest in learning our language. A good thing for us, from the standpoint of security. And now, to answer your question, I know because it was one of the things we learned via a message-drop—we use the same system you do, you see—from our mission leader in fifth-century-B.C. Greece.”

“Franco, Category Five, Seventy-Sixth Degree,” Jason nodded. “I remember him well. In fact, I killed him.”

“So we surmised from the fragmentary report of the one member of that expedition who got back alive, and from the fact that Franco’s body, when it appeared at our displacer, had a laser burn in addition to its other injuries.”

“You don’t sound as resentful as I would have expected.”

“Franco was a boasting fool, and deserved what he got. But for all his incompetence, he did provide us with some extremely valuable information. You see, whatever my associate Ahriman says about his contempt for the
Oratioi’Zhonglu
—which I gather they reciprocated in a supercilious sort of way—the two factions did communicate with each other from time to time. Thus the ‘gods’ here on Earth knew a little something of the movement schedules of the surviving Teloi military—very long-term schedules, as you might expect of beings whose lifespan is measured in tens of thousands of years. So Franco was able to learn from Zeus that a Teloi battlestation is due to pass through this system in the spring of 1669.”

Jason sat up, as far as his bonds would permit. “So this is why you went to the colossal effort of temporally displacing a spacecraft!”

“Precisely.” Romain’s smile went up a notch of smugness. “As soon as we got Franco’s message drop, we knew we had a golden opportunity. We were going to send an expedition to this general period anyway, to establish our cult among the slave population of these islands—a seed to germinate for centuries inside the larger body of Voodoo. So we sent the Kestrel here, and used it to establish contact with them.”

“But you said the battlestation isn’t due until spring.”

“A small advance party was already here, led by Ahriman. We already knew their language, of course, having made contact with the ‘gods’ some time earlier than the fifth century B.C.”

“So Franco told me.”
Franco told me a lot of things,
Jason did not add.
Just as you are doing now. You may sneer at him as a braggart, but you’re a lot like him. I imagine all you leader-caste types are. It must be hell, having nobody except your gene-tailored yes-men to talk to. Having a new ear to vent to must be a hard temptation to resist.

And I’ve got to keep the flow of revelations coming, even if it means conversing with a creature like you, close enough to smell your breath.

“It turned out we were natural allies. Ahriman agreed to pose as a
loa
of the Petro family, appearing in the actual flesh. It makes quite an impression, as you’ve seen.” Romain leaned forward, and his affectation of catlike complacency slid away to reveal sheer, undignified gloating. “Furthermore, when the battlestation makes its pass of Earth, they’re going to share with us their military technology. It’s more advanced than that of our era in a number of areas. Once our underground organization has that data . . . well, who knows? Maybe it won’t
need
to be underground anymore.”

Jason did not allow himself to consider the alarming implications of what Romain was saying, lest the Transhumanist have the satisfaction of seeing his reaction. “I don’t quite understand the deal,” he said evenly. “Why should they agree to do all this for you? What can you do for them in return?”

“Well, for one thing, we allow them the use of our vessel from time to time. In fact, we’ve promised to make them a present of it. It’s not too comfortable for them, being designed for humans, but invisibility makes up for a lot of discomfort.”

Jason nodded, recalling having noted while in ancient Greece that the refraction field was an odd lacuna in Teloi technology. “Still, that doesn’t seem like enough. There must be more.”

“Oh, indeed there is!” Romain’s mocking smile was back. “We’ve told them that, a little less than five centuries from now, humans are going to begin planting extrasolar colonies. We’ve agreed to tell them the locations of those colonies, and their dates of foundation, so that Teloi warships can be on hand to destroy them in their infancy. After which we’ve assured them that the Transhuman Dispensation, having reestablished its rule over Earth, will restrict itself to the solar system and leave the galaxy to them.”

Jason could only stare, speechless.

“But the Teloi
can’t
prevent the colonies from being founded!” blurted Nesbit, speaking up for the first time. “The Observer Effect—”

“Of course they can’t. But
they
don’t know that.” Romain’s smile widened. “We haven’t been entirely candid with them about the nature of time travel.”

“Your friend Franco also tried to play the Teloi for suckers with false promises involving time travel,” Mondrago pointed out. “When they found out the truth, they were a little upset. In fact, they and Franco’s men mostly wiped each other out.”

“Franco, as you have already heard me indicate, was a fool. He made promises whose falsity quickly became apparent. I don’t. By the time these Teloi simpletons learn that they have been duped, it will be centuries too late.”

“Aren’t you worried that
I’ll
tell Ahriman?” asked Jason. “Remember, I speak his language.”

“Not particularly. In the first place, I don’t plan to allow you an opportunity to do so. In the second place, he wouldn’t believe you. As you’ve doubtless observed, these
Tuova’Zhonglu
Teloi are mad. They live in a universe of what they want to believe. And in the third place . . . I would be displeased if you did. You would be well advised to avoid displeasing me.”

“Why? What have I got to lose? I’m as good as dead anyway. You wouldn’t be telling me all this otherwise.”

“Quite true. But the
way
you die is something else.” Romain indicated Zenobia, who had continued to sit like a statue. “She, as I have said, will be the sacrifice at the great ceremony shortly, thus demonstrating the power of our pet
loa
over her. She will die as did your friend . . . your
tasty
friend. But we will have use for the rest of you later. You can go the same way—or it can be worse. Much worse. It can be made to last a very long time, by taking nonessential parts one by one and consuming them while you are still alive to watch. Considering who you are, I am leaning in that direction anyway. So don’t provoke me.”