Hagar smiled in acknowledgment. “A large mass, the size of a planet, casts countless ripples in its wake as it travels through time, much as a ship sailing through the water of a lake. Those are reflections of what was, the wake.” She hesitated. “Think of them as afterimages of what took place on Earth. Eventually, these ripples, these reflections of the past, dissipate. We are in one of the ripples.”
Hagar turned to two girls nearby. She had to find out what reflection they were in.
She read in their eyes bewilderment. Hagar waited a few seconds until the ripple adjusted itself around their implausible emergence on the ship. It proceeded to cast Lee and Hagar as being on deck for hours, along with the others. A ripple had internal rules that governed it. For it to keep its structural integrity and survive the sudden arrival of two people who did not belong in that time and place, the reflection had to alter events and modify their appearances to make it all fit.
The reflection now re-stabilized, Hagar crawled toward the two girls and tried to strike a conversation. The younger one appeared to be seven, the older perhaps fourteen. Both were holding each other’s hands, sobbing quietly. After first glancing at Hagar, the child glanced away, uninterested. The teen was in no mood for talk, either. Hagar coaxed her and managed to learn they were from Bihe, one of the kingdoms in Angola. As much as she could ascertain, the older was sold to pay off a witchcraft debt of her aunt. The little one was traded away by her father in exchange for rum. As Hagar expected, the two girls had no idea about the ship’s destination.
“A ship with slaves,” muttered Lee when Hagar came back and reported. “Are we in the eighteenth century?”
“Hardly,” said Hagar dryly. “The reflections don’t last that long. Do you see those black cracks on the other side of the deck?”
Lee had noticed them earlier. She squinted. “I can’t see anything inside them.”
“There is nothing inside them; you are looking at the void. This reflection has begun to deteriorate.” She studied the black fractures. “By the extent of the degradation, I’d say, this is an early twentieth-century ripple.”
Lee rubbed sweaty hands on her checkered gown. Alongside her physical appearance, her attire had also undergone change. “Shouldn’t we be escaping or something?”
“I need to recuperate. In my subjective timeline, I didn’t sleep for over thirty hours. It starts to affect me,” Hagar told her. “Anyway, I can’t sideway—shift us from one ripple to another—without knowing our bearings. We will move out tomorrow morning.”
They made themselves comfortable. Hagar sat down and lounged against a wall while Lee recounted some of the recent events. When she was finished, Lee cocked her head. “So it was Aratta who put you in a timefold?”
“Yes, 1937,” said Hagar. “Most of the analysts were taken out beforehand, while the reports sent to me were fabricated. The whole thing was thought-out and deployed with care. I don’t know the ‘why’ of it, though.” She glanced quizzically at Lee.
“He told me you died two years later, 1939, in an air raid over Warsaw,” offered Lee.
“Does it even make sense?”
Lee considered. “It does. We had a big war. Aratta seemed genuinely surprised to find out you were alive, and in Haiti of all places.” She told her the rest of what transpired since the alarm went off a few days earlier.
A possible third player? This was something that hadn’t occurred to Hagar. The plot thickened.
She was fairly certain about one thing, however. Had Aratta wanted her dead, which was unthinkable, he would have shot her—not put her in a stasis box. No, he wanted her out of the way, at least temporarily. She still did not know why, though.
And then there were the other things: what had happened when Lee attempted to use the gateway on her property, and Aratta’s reported futile attempt to break out of Earth. Hagar was utterly mystified.
“I take it Aratta cannot follow us through the reflections,” said Lee.
“He might have—had I plotted it ahead of time.” Hagar smiled slyly. “As it is, I didn’t. I have no idea where we are. Which means, neither does Aratta. We’ve lost him, and he can’t track us. We are free.”
“Free? It’s a hell of a thing to say—considering where we are sitting right now.”
Hagar reached out and patted the other woman’s cheek. After a moment, she leaned back, put her hands behind her head, and closed her eyes.
The sun was setting as a rowboat brought another batch of hapless people. One woman with a young infant secured to her back fell as she climbed the ladder leading to the deck. There were shrieks of laughter from above. Startled, Lee glanced up at the first-class section. Well-dressed passengers crowded against the railing, peering down with avid interest and unmistakable pleasure at the people in the lower deck.
Next to Lee and Hagar, the two girls clutched each other and started to sob quietly again.
As darkness fell, all the slaves were herded down into a hold and the hatch closed shut. It was hotter and more humid below deck, if that was possible.
The men gathered on one side, the women and children on the other. As before, almost no one talked. “Like cows in a slaughterhouse,” murmured Lee.
Seemingly out of thin air, Hagar produced two rolled mats. She passed one to Lee.
They walked over to a little alcove in the women’s section. They stripped off their clothing and laid down on the mats, glistening with sweat.
Lee eyed the naked girl next to her. Hagar’s body was still dark in shade; however, now it was recognizably her athletic body. Hagar grinned suddenly and drew close. “I remembered something.” Her face was now but inches away. Lee felt heat racing to her cheeks.
“It must’ve been around 1630,” Hagar said in a barely audible voice. Her lips were moving right next to Lee’s ear. “I sailed the Mediterranean for a few days. I could not understand why the coastal towns of Italy and Spain were either deserted or fortified. Well, on the second or third day of my journey, vast stench greeted me as I neared one of the Spanish port towns. Ahead of me was a galley bearing a raiding party of northern African slavers. They descended on the Spaniards and abducted hundreds.”
She went on, “While the Spaniards and Portuguese were journeying to sub-Saharan Africa and acquiring slaves for their colonial holdings in the Americas, their own people were being carried off wholesale and brought to North Africa.” Her eyes shone in amusement at the irony of it. “It is said over one million coastal Europeans were captured and sold into slavery during those centuries.”
“I didn’t know about this.” Lee glanced at the nude silhouette next to her. Her gaze dipped down for a minute.
Hagar blinked, surprised. “Throughout that period, Spaniards, English, and Italians were held in bondage mixing mortar, making bricks and building a stupendous never-ending series of palaces for the sultan of Morocco, Ismail Ibn Sharif. Does it not ring a bell?”
“I am afraid not.”
Hagar reached with one hand and traced Lee’s stomach. “You know about the African slaves but not about the European ones. Odd.” Her hand worked its way up and circled one of the breasts. “If anything, I’d imagine it would be the reverse.” Her hand briefly touched the other’s woman nipples, causing them to grow taut. Lee shivered with an involuntary tremor of arousal. But then the hand moved up and was caressing her hair and ears.
“Why”—Lee’s voice came out hoarse. She cleared her throat—“why the stench?”
Hagar looked at Lee blankly for a moment. “Oh that. The galley was manned by hundreds of people manacled to the oars. It turned out many of those dejected people chose to relieve themselves at their seats, amid rats and swarms of flies. Some sat there for years.” She wrinkled her nose.
“Didn’t think slavery still existed in the first part of the twentieth century.” Lee’s breathing was heavy as Hagar touched her.
“Well, yes. The obvious case being Ethiopia. A full-blown slave country, old school.”
For a few minutes, neither wanted to say anything. Lee pressed her cheek against Hagar’s, feeling its warmth and the faint scent of her hair.
“When did—” She gave a little gasp when Hagar run her fingers along the side of her neck. Lee pulled back some. “When did things start to turn around?”
Hagar bit her lower lip and then smiled mischievously. But then she relented. “The first charter in human history that cast slavery as fundamentally immoral and hence unlawful for adults was the founding document of the independent state of Vermont, 1777. This was the turning point. A handful years later, a few of the New England states followed suit, making the region a shining city in an ocean of global callousness.
“A few decades afterwards, the United Kingdom grabbed the baton of liberty and ran with it. By 1830s, not only they abolished slavery in all their territories, they were suppressing and outlawing it elsewhere. Risking life and limb, the soldiers of the West Africa Squadron, expressly formed for that purpose, seized over one thousand vessels involved in the slave trade and freed well over one hundred thousand people through the decades. This and more. The United Kingdom twisted the arms of various nations around the world. Kicking and screaming, these nations were forced to outlaw slavery and follow suit.” She gave a little shrug. “Slavery, of course, has not been eradicated on Earth. All the same, humanity owes the Brits a profound debt of gratitude.”
Hagar’s hand fluttered about, touching fleetingly, sending little tongues of fire up and down Lee’s body and igniting a moist heat flare in between Lee’s thighs.
Hagar rolled over the sweaty nude body of Lee. Her eyes flashed with a dangerous gleam as she regarded the other woman.
“I have had my share of sex in unusual settings,” murmured Lee. “But a ship transporting slaves…it takes things to a whole new level.”
Hagar brought her face close. Their mouths met with hot desire, then parted.
Morning came. They were herded out again above deck.
Hagar nudged Lee then gestured at the sight that greeted them.
Under gray clouds and drizzling sky, they could make out an island up ahead. Now and again, they glimpsed mountains. The valleys at their base were shrouded in pale mists. Here and there, the fog drifted away, and they caught sight of white-painted houses and hills carpeted with dark-green foliage.
“São Tomé,” Hagar whispered half to herself and turned to Lee. “Now I know. These are the cacao plantations of São Tomé. We are off the coast of French Congo, Africa.”
“What is going to happen to them?” Lee gestured at the two girls.
Hagar looked suddenly angry. Then tired. “The young teenager is remarkably attractive. Once they get to shore, she is likely to become a sex slave to one of the local planters.”
“And the small one?”
“The Portuguese here get a kick watching children. They teach dogs and pigs to mount and penetrate them.” She grimaced. “This aside, much as a feral cat, she probably will be left to her own devices until she hits puberty and can do some real good on the plantation.”
Lee looked shocked, then revolted.
Hagar glowered. “I cannot imagine how it must feel for her to be betrayed thus by her parents. This is beyond comprehension or forgiveness,” she said, voice tight with anger.
“What’s the average life expectancy of the slaves here?”
“I am afraid most don’t last more than a few years.”
Lee’s mouth pressed into a hard, grim line. “Harsh conditions?”
“Not that harsh; it is, after all, an old-fashioned plantation slavery.” Hagar was going to tell her the enslaved should count themselves lucky they were not in China. Poverty-stricken Chinese parents were selling off their kids, predominantly to middle-class families. The slave-owning Chinese not only cursed and beat the young people as a matter of course, but they resorted in cases of disobedience to pouring boiling water over their hands or suspending them overnight to a wall. But then something struck Hagar. Although they suffered a harsher treatment, the enslaved Chinese youth survived to adulthood, at which point they were typically set free. “Must be homesickness and the loss of freedom without the prospect of ever regaining it,” she eventually said.
Lee pled with her eyes. “Can we save those two, somehow?”
“Don’t even think about it,” hissed Hagar. She gesticulated. “The reflections are like bubbles of soap and water. Very delicate. You start doing something out of character, let alone trying to whisk some of the people, and the whole reflection can go poof—along with us.”
“Oh,” said Lee.
“Remember, the real girls died many decades ago,” said Hagar, her voice softer. “This is just a reflection. What you see about us is but an afterimage of what was.”
Hagar meditated for a few minutes. Finally, she opened her eyes. “Okay, got it. I plotted a course back to the real Earth. Stay close to me,” Hagar ordered and broke into a dash, Lee following suit. From the first-class cabin, someone started yelling. The clamor grew as other voices joined in. The two of them bolted to the far end of the deck. Hagar yanked open a door and closed it behind them. She reached out to a closet door, opened it, and beckoned Lee to enter. Lee peered in, startled. The door led to another place. Nighttime, outdoor. She took a deep breath and stepped through. Hagar shut the door behind them, and it made a distinct, short reverberating sound.
“Where are we now?” asked Lee, unsure why she was whispering.
“It’s another ripple, on the other side of the world.” Under the night sky, Hagar was but a dark silhouette. “Somewhere on the Di Linh Plateau, Vietnam.” She gestured with her chin at the dimly lit barracks. “This is one of Michelin’s slave rubber-plantations. It’s around 1930.” Under the night sky, she started walking toward the cabins.
Lee hurried after her. “They will open the door back at the ship and find that two slaves have literally vanished into thin air. Then what?”
“The reflection has adjusted itself and the incident erased. Within a few seconds, we never happened.”
Lee looked around. “I thought you are going to transport us back to the present time, to the real world.”
“I am, but I don’t have the skill needed to do it in one jump. I found a rift, though. We just need to work our way there.” Once they popped back in the real Earth, Aratta would have no way of ascertaining their whereabouts and tracking them. At least that was the plan. This would allow Hagar to do what she set out to do back in Egypt.
“If we have to traverse through ripples to get to the rift, could you not have chosen more appealing and safe locales?” Lee gave the matter further consideration. “I wouldn’t have objected to traveling through the beaches of Bora Bora,” she told the other woman. “Or those on Seychelles.”
Hagar laughed but shook her head. “They are not on the way.”
Lee abruptly stopped and pointed at a lengthy black mass writhing on the ground in front of them. “What’s that!?”
Hagar took in a quick, sharp breath. “Army ants.”
“Shit! There must be millions of them.”
Hagar stared down. “More like tens of millions, by the sight of it.”
They cautiously skirted the black quivering stream, and quietly entered one of the barracks.
A blast of hot, pungent air assaulted them. The tiny room held five skeletal people sleeping side by side, much like sardines stacked in a can. Two of the slaves were snoring loudly enough to more than mask their footsteps as they worked their way to the far end. The next room was identical with another group of people sleeping shoulder to shoulder.
“Almost there,” mouthed Hagar and motioned at the third door. Indeed, once they opened it, daylight came flooding in. They walked through, Hagar closing the door behind.
“I am here.” Lee turned and started at the sight of a smiling, short girl. The voice was Hagar’s, but gone was the athletic, flawless body. She was now a plump young woman with long, unkempt, black hair. Body paint covered her mid-torso in various geometric shapes.
“We’re naked,” stated Lee, looking down. “No hair…anywhere. Christ.”
“Yes, well.” Hagar jiggled two arm bracelets. Lee had matching ones, one of which was her unique bracelet, disguised. “The boys have thongs. We get bracelets. Look on the bright side: you are young again.”
“Most bright indeed. Where are we now?”
“The start of the twentieth century, the Putumayo region in the Amazon rainforest—it’s a slave country. See how it works? Reflections are connected via associations. Or at least that is how I manage to traverse them. Aratta can simply concentrate on a time and place and will himself there.
“From this reflection, I can make a bridge in Abisinia outpost back to the present, back to the real Earth. It’s about half a day walk this way.” Hagar pointed. “With some luck, we will enter the outpost unheeded.”
She motioned, and the two started walking.
A few hours later, they stopped to eat. Hagar caught some catfish. Lee found a nest with dozens of arrau turtle eggs. They made a fulfilling lunch out of it, supplemented by some spices and provisions Hagar brought out from the storage unit that accompanied her, unseen.
Their meal was winding down when Hagar motioned Lee to be quiet. Now Lee could hear it too: someone was shouting far-off. This was followed by a scream. Then some more shouts.
The voices were getting closer.
Quick. To the bushes! came Hagar’s voice inside Lee’s head, transmitted through the bracelet. Earlier, Hagar had instructed her to activate the bracelet. It could not send a homing signal back to the real Earth and alert Aratta as to their whereabouts; at the same time, it allowed the two to communicate their thoughts.
The Earth Hearing Page 10