Ghosts of Time

by Steve White

  Rutherford contracted the map to Richmond again. “You will proceed into the city via the easternmost bridge—the other two are railroad bridges. You shouldn’t attract any particular attention, as there were undoubtedly no end of men in Confederate uniforms entering the city for one reason or other.” He glanced at Dabney, who nodded in confirmation. “Once over the river, you should proceed to the vicinity of the ‘Confederate White House’ where Mary Bowser was employed but did not reside. Beyond this point, Jason, you must use your justly renowned genius for improvisation. All I can offer you is the one authentic image of her from life.” The map vanished from the viewscreen, replaced by a full-length black-and-white photograph, stiffly posed (as was unavoidable given the limitations of that era’s cameras), of a woman wearing the era’s floor-length dress with the full-sleeved “Garibaldi shirt”. She seemed on the slender side, although the narrowness of her waist probably owed something to one of the period’s corsets. She was looking directly at the camera, but the broad-brimmed hat she was wearing caused her face to be partly shadowed. What could be seen of her features revealed nothing except her obvious African descent, although the longer Jason looked the more he thought to detect a certain quiet determination.

  “Not exactly very much help,” he grumbled.

  “No, but I repeat that it is all you have. Incidentally, one place you will not want to go is Belle Isle.” Rutherford caused the cursor to flash over the largest of the islands in the river. “It is, after all, where you found and destroyed the nanobots and apparently where the subsequent ones were also placed … and your earlier remarks about the Observer Effect were well taken.”

  “Also,” Dabney added, “when you were there in April, 1865 it was pretty much abandoned. But for a good part of the war it served as a POW camp for captured Union enlisted men, while the officers went to Libby Prison in the city. At its height there had been a large tent city there with thousands of prisoners packed into it, although they were periodically shipped out. But by December 1864 the last of them had been gone for a couple of months.”

  “Very well, then. Your displacement will occur tomorrow morning. I suggest you all get a good night’s sleep.”

  “First, though,” said Jason, “according to my unvarying practice, I’m going to go to the lounge for a last drink or two or three. Everyone’s welcome to join me.”

  “Mint juleps?” queried Mondrago.

  “We’re going to Virginia, not South Carolina,” Dabney chided. “I suggest bourbon.”

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  “I still think that uniform suits you, somehow,” said Chantal Frey, who had pronounced Jason “dashing” looking on his last return from the past in Confederate garb.

  “It must be the hat,” said Jason with a grin, as they entered the vast displacer dome. He had stuck an ostrich plume in his cream-colored stag hat, which Dabney had told him was a typical touch of vanity on the part of Confederate cavalry officers. He accompanied the grin with what he hoped was a properly raffish stroking of his new goatee. None of them had had time to grow anything like the truly astounding beards to be seen in some Confederate photographs, but Dabney had pronounced their facial hair adequately in-period.

  They descended the steps that led down through the terraced concentric circles of control panels and assorted instrumentation to the displacer stage at the dome’s exact center, a featureless circular platform thirty feet in diameter. Another expedition had just returned. Jason recognized the fellow Service member who was their mission leader and called out a greeting. “How did it go, Huan?”

  “Very well!” enthused the man dressed as an early seventh century Chinese court official with wide-sleeved knee-length turquoise robe and a purely ornamental soft fabric simulation of old-fashioned liang-tang armor. “Doctor Shuo, here, was able to conclusively establish the real facts about the founding of the T’ang dynasty—and, in particular, how Li Shih-min went about becoming the Emperor T’ai-tsung. And unless I miss my guess it’s going to set a cat among the academic pigeons.”

  Jason lacked any large interest in whether the received story of how Li Shih-min had sent his father into retirement and assumed the throne was true or just an exercise in Confucian hypocrisy. But he made a politely affirmative-sounding response. He and the others continued on down to the stage, where Rutherford was waiting to dispense the traditional pre-displacement handshakes. Chantal also added her farewells.

  “As usual,” she said ruefully, “I wish I could have been more help.”

  “You’ve been a great help with general background,” Jason assured her. “Nobody expected you to have any specific information about this Transhumanist expedition, which seems to have originated from a date long after that of the one you spent time with.”

  “I suppose not.” But she didn’t appear notably cheered.

  “It seems unusually cold in here,” Nesbit remarked, rubbing his hands together.

  “I ordered them to lower the temperature setting in the dome,” Rutherford explained. “I didn’t want the instantaneous transition to December in the northern hemisphere to be too much of a shock to your systems.”

  Dabney nodded. “December weather in Virginia is unpredictable. The previous winter had been a brutally severe one, and the one we’re going into is believed to have been not much better. And we’re arriving just after dawn.” Nesbit looked alarmed and hastily put on his gloves. They all mounted the stage, while Rutherford and Chantal turned and walked toward the transparent-walled mezzanine that overlooked the control center. Then they waited, as the countdown crept toward zero and a harshly buzzing rumble of power transmission could be heard as the great antimatter reactor prepared to provide a prodigious energy surge.

  But when it came, temporal displacement provided no spectacular “special effects” from the standpoint of the time travelers. It wasn’t even a matter of the interior of the dome being instantly replaced by a new setting. Instead, in a timeless instant, the dome was gone without them having any recollection of it going, as though it was a dream from which they had awakened, rapidly receding from memory, leaving them with the usual bewildering adjustment that accompanies awakening from a very believable dream.

  In this case, though, the transition was sharper than most, for the first thing of which they were clearly aware was the chill that abruptly bit into them through their heavy uniforms and the long underwear beneath. That, and the fact that they were all experienced—even Dabney and Nesbit had been through this once before—enabled them to recover their equilibrium more quickly than usual. After only a few moments of disorientation, they were able to look about them at the scene revealed by the sun that was only just clearing the eastern horizon and laying a molten trail on the James River as it flowed toward Hampton Roads and the sea.

  The young day was actually a mild one, even for these latitudes; Jason estimated that it was in the upper thirties (although it seemed colder after their transition), and there was only a light frost on the ground, melting almost as fast as the sun’s rays touched it. But of course the leaves were long since off the deciduous trees; there were none of the glorious autumn colors that had clothed this land a couple of months before. As hoped, there was no one in sight, and they stood on a dirt road south of the James with the roofs of the suburb of Manchester visible to their left as they looked northward in the direction of the city.

  “Let’s go,” said Jason as soon as he was sure everyone had recovered. “Before people start to get up and about.”

  People were in fact stirring by the time they skirted the northern edge of Manchester, but no one paid them any attention; as Rutherford and Dabney had foreseen, Confederate uniforms were no novelty here. This was especially true around the field fortifications that guarded the Richmond & Danville Railroad. They passed a detail of gray and butternut clad infantry whose lieutenant saluted Jason. They drew a few quizzical-seeming glances from the men which caused Jason to worry if something unforeseen had gone wrong. Then he heard Dabney
mutter something under his breath.

  “We’re all simply too well-fed-looking,” the historian explained in an undertone. “By this point in the war, the South was starving. Malnutrition was becoming common in the army.”

  “They do look like scarecrows, don’t they,” said Jason, glancing back at the men who had passed. “Well, there’s no help for it. If anybody asks, our regiment captured a Yankee supply train or something.”

  Then they passed through a cut in the bluffs s and set out across the Mayo Bridge. To the north, across the river, the city stood spread out before them.

  Rutherford sometimes took prospective time travelers on tours of their target locales in the twenty-fourth century. In this case there would have been no point. Richmond, after first being burned in 1865 and later swamped by urban bloat in the Great Crowding of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, had been one of the urban areas practically destroyed during the convulsions attending the extirpation of the Transhuman Dispensation in the mid-to-late twenty-third century. There was a city of the same name here on this river in Jason’s time—quite a large city, and a crucial node of the conurbation that was the center of gravity of the twenty-fourth-century North American continent—but it bore essentially no resemblance to its historical ancestor. Thus it was that Dabney had been so motivated to secure a place in Pauline Da Cunha’s expedition, and so eager for a second look at what had been lost.

  But Jason had studied the historical reconstructions embodied in the virtual tours they had taken, and in the map his computer implant could provide. Now he compared those abstractions to the real thing.

  Richmond covered a series of hills rising from the curving bank of the river. To the left was a string of wooded islands and two railroad bridges, beyond which whitewater rapids could be glimpsed. Overlooking them on the northern shore was Gamble’s Hill, with its large cemetery. At its foot alongside the river was a series of large brick buildings from whose stacks smoke was already rising—the Tredegar Iron Works, whose output of artillery was one of the things that had enabled the Confederate States of America to keep up an unequal fight as long as it had. To its right, the riverfront was crowded with warehouses, tobacco factories, flour mills and other establishments. Behind them rose the slope of Council Chamber Hill, holding the better commercial and residential districts along Main Street and Franklin Street and crowned by the classical Capitol building designed by Thomas Jefferson in imitation of a Roman temple, currently the seat of the Confederate Congress as well as the state legislature. To the right the land fell away into a valley where Shockoe Creek flowed into the James. More modest residential areas covered the slopes of Church and Union hills beyond that, getting modest indeed near the mouth of Shockoe Creek. Visible to the extreme right was the suburb of Rocketts, location of the principal navy yard of a government that barely had a navy. Behind that, a hill was covered with scores of barracks-like buildings. Dabney pointed toward it.

  “Chimborazo Hospital,” he explained. “The largest military hospital in the world at this time. In fact, it’s quite an enterprise, growing food for the patients and selling the surplus, so successfully that at the end of the war the Confederate government will actually owe the hospital $300,000 in repayment of a loan.”

  “The hospital might have a little trouble collecting,” Mondrago remarked drily.

  As was Jason’s unvarying experience in past eras, a mélange of subtle, unfamiliar odors pervaded the air. Particularly unidentifiable—but far from unpleasant—was the one which he would later learn was leaf tobacco. A more prosaic one was the smoke of burning coal, some of which wafted eastward from the Tredegar foundries. Another source of it became visible as a train chugged very slowly across the bridge of the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad to their left.

  “It’s not moving much faster than we are,” Aiken commented, watching the train.

  Dabney chuckled. “It can’t. By this point in the war, these bridges had become so rickety from constant use and inadequate repairs that the trains had to crawl across them and trust to luck.” His voice took on what Jason thought was an unmistakable note of sadness. “It’s symptomatic. We’re going to be seeing a lot more symptoms of the Confederacy’s terminal illness.”

  They proceeded on across the bridge, passing over an island (“Mayo’s Island,” said Jason’s map) and encountering more and more military and civilian traffic. Mule-drawn wagons rumbled, and a file of black men in rough undyed homespun shuffled along under guard as they went south to work on entrenchments. Jason was glad this was an all-veteran group, without any first-time academics. Slavery was a grim constant of the human condition for most of history; time travelers simply had to deal with it.

  Beyond the island the bridge continued on its stone piers over a relatively narrow stretch of river to the city side, then passed over a canal. There had been little waterborne traffic on the river, just a few small steam-or sail-driven craft. Here a procession of barges were being raised or lowered from one level to another in locks.

  “The James River and Kanawha Canal,” Dabney explained. “It was built to bypass the rapids and waterfalls. This city got started as a transshipment point in the eighteenth century, when oceangoing ships could get this far upriver but no farther.”

  Then they were in the city, walking north along Fourteenth Street. Passing through the cluttered establishments of the canal-front and Exchange Alley, they turned left on Main Street and entered more genteel surroundings, passing various substantial banks, newspaper offices and other businesses as well as the prestigious Spotswood and American hotels. At Ninth Street they turned right and walked north with the well-landscaped Capitol Grounds rising to their right and various government offices on their left. But even in these precincts, there was no escaping the miasma of a city under siege and a failing polity. It went beyond the underfed look of everyone they saw, and the shabbiness of the clothing—little better than that of the slaves, in most cases. No, it was a psychic miasma, as though the Confederate capital was dimly aware that no further sacrifices on its part could be availing. An unspoken realization that, after four years of defeating or stymieing armies twice the size of his own, Robert E. Lee was finally out of miracles. Jason remarked on it to Dabney. The historian nodded again with evident sadness.

  “Perhaps these people understand that the Confederacy lost its last hope a month ago.”

  “In November?” Jason was puzzled. “But I thought the armies were still deadlocked in the trenches before Petersburg, and will be until—”

  “I’m not talking about a loss on the battlefield. I mean Lincoln’s victory in the United States presidential election. George McClellan, a dismissed general, was running against him on a platform of negotiating a peace settlement on the basis of Southern independence. If he had been elected, and carried through on his promise, the South would have won the war politically after having already effectively lost it militarily.”

  “Sort of like North Vietnam, a little over a century from now,” Mondrago commented.

  They crossed Broad Street, pausing for a train that clanged and clattered by on the tracks running along the center of the street. They took care not to flinch at the smoke and cinders it belched, for no one else did. Then, two blocks further north in an area of handsome homes, they turned right onto Clay Street, which, after three short blocks, ended in a cul-de-sac. Here, to the right, was the White House of the Confederacy.

  It was a handsome three-story mansion in the “Italianate” style, overlooking the valley of Shockoe Creek to the east, although the terraced gardens in that direction were partially concealed by a carriage house and other outbuildings behind a wall. Smoke rising from one brick outbuilding suggested that it was the kitchen.

  “So the Confederate president is in there?” asked Nesbit, gazing at the mansion.

  “Probably not, at this time of day,” said Dabney. “Jefferson Davis has his working office in the Treasury building, which is on the far side of Capitol Square. But
he sometimes works in his private office here when he is ill, as he frequently is.”

  Jason’s intention had been to reconnoiter. Now he began to think about organizing a system of watches by which they could keep the mansion under constant observation while seeking food and lodgings. “Alexandre,” he began … and then paused, for a slim, youngish Black woman had emerged from the kitchen and was walking briskly along Clay Street in their direction carrying a shopping basket. She was dressed in the long-skirted style of the era, obviously cheap but seemingly adequately warm, especially now that the late morning sun had brought the temperature up into what felt like the high forties. That sun was behind her, which made it hard to see her face very clearly. So did the fact that her face was somewhat downcast under a broad-brimmed hat. But what he could see of that face reminded Jason of one he had seen in a photograph, and as she walked past she raised her head slightly to look at the group of soldiers beside the street.

  “Carlos,” murmured Jason after she had passed, “is it possible that—?”

  “Yes!” said Dabney eagerly. “I think that just might be Mary Elizabeth Bowser!”

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Without pausing for thought or waiting for the others, Jason turned and hurried after the slender female figure that was walking briskly west along Clay Street. “Miss?” he called out to her retreating back. She didn’t slow, and showed no indication of having heard. It belatedly occurred to him that she assumed someone else was being addressed—someone white. He put a different tone into his voice. “Girl!”