by Steve White
“We go by many names from time to time—or no name at all, when we can manage it—in the interests of secrecy. A name, you see, is a kind of target which can be aimed at. But our real name is the Order of the Three-Legged Horse.”
“Three-Legged Horse?” Nesbit echoed faintly.
“It’s an apparition which Jamaicans believe manifests itself around Christmas.” Gracchus took on a whimsical smile. “It’s considered beneficent—by men. Women have always regarded it with a certain apprehension. So I’ve often wondered about its origin, since our founder was a woman. But … she was a very exceptional woman.”
“Speaking of Jamaicans,” Mondrago interjected, “you talk like—”
“Yes, I’m from Jamaica. Some of us have come here from time to time, to establish the Order in this country. I’m the most recent, brought in by a blockade runner.”
“A Confederate blockade runner?” Mondrago looked perplexed. “But …” He gave a gesture that vaguely indicated the color of Gracchus’s skin.
“The blockade runners are businessmen. They’ll carry anything if they’re paid.” From somewhere in the back of Jason’s mind came the recollection of a fictional character named Rhett Butler. “They’ll even carry free blacks—not that any want to get into this country, least of all now, with this war on.”
“But you did,” Jason pointed out.
“I had to,” said Gracchus simply. “I knew it was necessary for me to be here tonight.”
“You and your people seem to know a great many things.”
“Yes. We also know about the Transhumanists.”
Jason took a deep, unsteady breath. “Do you know where I and my men come from?”
“I know when you come from,” said Gracchus with a smile. “You come from the future. I don’t understand how a man who won’t be born for hundreds of years can be here talking to me. But I know it’s true.”
Nesbit spoke like a man staring the unthinkable in the face. “Do all the members of your Order know about time travel?”
“No. That’s why I sent Marcus away. Only one of us in each generation is allowed to know. The knowledge had been passed down from one to another, through the successors of our founder, for two hundred years.”
“You mean to say,” said Jason, unable to keep incredulity out of his voice, “that details like the precise night I’d show up here at Rectortown, and the name I’d be using, have been accurately transmitted orally over two hundred years?”
“Oh, no. Most of our Order’s knowledge is, indeed, handed down that way—as it has to be, given that most of our members are illiterate. Thus they learn of the Demons who long ago tricked men into believing they were gods—all dead now, although we are warned that more of them, even more evil than the first ones, may come again.”
Demons seven and a half or eight feet tall, with long narrow faces and sharp, cruel features, and paler flesh than that of the whitest white man, and hair gleaming of silver and gold, and huge eyes that are all opaque blue …
Demons who call themselves the Teloi.
“Gracchus,” Jason heard himself saying, as though from a great distance, “who was this ‘founder’ you mentioned?”
“She was a woman. Her name was Zenobia.”
A door in Jason’s memory swung open and the seventeenth-century Caribbean sun came flooding in, to reveal a tall, stunningly beautiful black woman in seaman’s garb, with the pistols and cutlass she could use with such deadly effect thrust through her rope belt.
“Then,” he said slowly, “it is from her that you know about the Transhumanists.” But do you know that she was one herself? Probably not. I doubt if she handed down that bit of knowledge.
“Well, well!” said Mondrago softly, with a grin. “So she did it after all!” Then the Corsican’s features went blank and he clamped his mouth shut, lest he reveal information Gracchus might not possess.
Such as the fact that his Order’s founder was a Transhumanist who went renegade, revolted by the foul cult she had been sent back in time to establish among the slaves and runaways of what was to become Haiti, Jason thought. And to undo what she had done, she had cut her own TRD out of her flesh so she could remain and establish a counter-cult. And thus we left her when we returned to our own time.
“Yes, she left us with that knowledge.” said Gracchus to Jason, showing no sign of having heard Mondrago. “Again, it is only those of us who are her direct successors who know the evil ones as ‘Transhumanists.’ The others know only that they must ever be on their guard against unnatural men, who cannot be told from true men, who will try to seduce them into unholy rites, even including the eating of human flesh, and promise their worshipers foreknowledge of the future in exchange for serving them. But now we have moved beyond combatting evil cults. We exist to protect the human race, of any and all colors, from the plots of the Transhumanists.”
“But let’s get back to your detailed knowledge of my arrival. You’ve already said this was not an oral tradition created by Zen … by your founder.”
“No.” Gracchus’s face went expressionless. “This was not handed down by her. Our knowledge of it comes from a letter that was written just after her lifetime, we know not by whom.” He reached inside his coat and brought out a waterproof oilskin envelope, from which he withdrew a sheet of paper. “This is not the original, of course. That exists now only as a tattered scrap of sixteenth-century paper, kept as a holy relic in Jamaica. But it has been painstakingly copied over and over. Its full contents are known only to Zenobia’s successors, for they concern time travel. Others, such as Marcus and the boy Daniel Strother, have been told only the barest facts they need to know. I brought this copy that you might see it.”
Jason kept his hand steady as he took the paper.
“I’ll tell Marcus and his family they can come back in,” said Gracchus. “It doesn’t matter what they see. They can’t read.”
Jason nodded without really hearing him. He sat down on a stool and examined the letter. It had the look of having been copied and recopied by people who were determined to preserve every detail, however meaningless—and much of it must have been meaningless even to those copyists who had been literate. It was in a typical seventeenth-century hand, and equally typical seventeenth-century English. But with practiced ease, he mentally edited out the peculiarities of spelling and grammar, and read it as twenty-fourth century Standard International English.
“This concerns the events of December 21st, Anno Domini 1864, as dates shall be reckoned then,” it began. Jason was puzzled at the last six words, but then he remembered that in the seventeenth-century England and its colonies had still been clinging to the Julian calendar, and would not go Gregorian until 1752. He read on. “In the colony of Virginia, which shall no longer be a colony then, a great war will be raging. A captain of horse in that war, who shall go by the name of Captain Landrieu, shall… .” Jason read a detailed description of this night, starting with the removal of the wounded Mosby from “Lakeland” and the presence of the slave boy who would send Captain Landrieu and his men to the hamlet of Rectortown, where the members of the Order must succor them. But then, abruptly, Jason knew he had entered into that part of the narrative that had always been restricted to Zenobia’s successors.
“But in truth, Captain Landrieu will be Commander Jason Thanou, a man from the future, as your founder has explained to you is possible, not by sorcery but merely by mechanic arts yet unknown. And lest all that the Order seeks be in vain, he must be told—”
Jason read the next four sentences—the last in the letter—then blinked, assumed that fatigue had caught up with him, and read them over again. But, stubbornly and perversely, they still said the same incredible thing.
“—he must be told that it is necessary that he journey into his own past again. This time he must return to Port Royal on the third of June, Anno Domini 1692. And there he must seek out Zenobia, the founder, who he already knows well, and who will not have long to live. T
hese things he must do to preserve the right order of creation.”
Jason looked up, dazed, and met Gracchus’s eyes. “’Not have long to live’?” he queried.
The dark man nodded, and spoke with great seriousness. “Yes. We know that she died soon after that date. Now all your questions have been answered. And yes, we will help you against the Transhumanists. But in return you must pledge to do as the letter calls on you to do … and which, in any case, I believe your own duty binds you to do.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
“Sir! Wake up!”
Jason shook loose from a sleep filled with troubled dreams. He blinked and looked up into Mondrago’s face. A pale early-morning winter sun was lightening the windows.
There had been little discussion before exhaustion had finally caught up with them, for they were all struggling to come to terms with the night’s revelations. Logan had been even more taciturn than usual, and Nesbit had been speechless in the face of the staggering last few sentences of Gracchus’s letter. So they had finally allowed sleep to overtake them for a few hours, sprawled on the wood floor and wrapped in malodorous blankets against the chill.
“What is it?” said Jason, sitting up and stretching against agonizing stiffness.
“Angus has just ridden in from ‘Rosenix.’ And he’s wounded.”
“What?” Discomfort forgotten, Jason looked around and saw the redheaded young Service man sitting slumped in a corner. Marcus’s daughter, as Jason assumed her to be, was giving him a steaming cup of the blockaded South’s ersatz coffee, brewed from parched or roasted chicory, beans, acorns, seeds and various other substances. Aiken looked in no mood to complain. He accepted the cup with a shaky right hand as Nesbit wrapped a hopefully clean bandage around his bare, bloodstained left arm. He looked too exhausted to feel pain.
“Angus!” Jason demanded. “What happened? Where’s Dabney?”
“Captured, sir.” Aiken took a gulp of the brew that must have scalded the inside of his mouth.
With a curse, Jason mentally activated his map display. Four of the tiny red dots were clustered at Rectortown. The other was to the northwest. The map didn’t show the farmhouses, of course, but Jason recalled the location of “Rosenix” well enough to know that the dot was on the far side of it.
“When I got to ‘Rosenix’,” Aiken continued, “Chapman and Richards were still in the process of sending our riders to summon the Rangers for a morning attack here at Rectortown, as Mosby had ordered. When I told them about what had happened to him, and where he was being taken, they started out eastward, toward ‘Rockburn.’ I told them you had ordered Dabney and me to rejoin you here in Rectortown, and they gave their permission, so we separated from them. We’d only gone about half a mile when about half a dozen cavalrymen came at us from behind some trees. We tried to run for it, but they came after us shooting. I got this—” he indicated his left arm “—and Carlos’ horse went down. I know he lived—he was struggling to his feet—but they were all around him. Three dismounted and took him, the others came after me. I got away.” The last three words were said in a voice of dull dead self-reproach.
“You did the right thing by getting back here to report to me,” Jason assured him. He understood what Aiken was feeling: as a Temporal Service member, he was sworn to protect time-traveling civilians, and he had failed. Being a novice who still had to prove himself surely didn’t help. “You wouldn’t have done anybody any good by getting killed or captured. Now at least we know what happened, and of course I know exactly where Carlos is now.”
“You what?” It was Gracchus’s deep voice, rising almost to a kind of basso squeak.
“Remember, the letter said that in our future time we have … arts that you don’t. Never mind how, but at any given time I can tell where any of my men are. And this man is being taken in the opposite direction from here.” Jason noted that the dot had moved very slightly since he had looked before, in a northwesterly direction. He expanded the map’s scale to take in most of Mosby’s Confederacy. “These Union cavalrymen seem to be moving toward the town of Paris, and Ashby’s Gap.”
“Except,” said Gracchus somberly, “that I don’t think that’s what they are.”
“What do you mean?” demanded Jason, who was afraid he knew precisely what Gracchus meant.
“Before I tell you, Commander, you must give me the pledge I spoke of last night.”
“All right.” Jason took a deep breath. “I am not a free agent—I can’t simply travel in time at my pleasure. But if I can possibly arrange to do so, I will return to seventeenth century Jamaica as you—or whoever wrote that letter—requested. That is all I can promise. Now tell me what you know … however you happen to know it.”
“I have my sources of information, Commander. The Yankee cavalry have moved eastward, to Middleburg.” Jason saw the name at the right-hand edge of his expanded map, on the Little River Turnpike just west of the Bull Run Mountains. “There shouldn’t be any of them around here anymore—and if there were, they wouldn’t be riding west.”
Aiken, who had been slipping into the beckoning arms of exhausted unconsciousness, stirred into renewed awareness of what was being said. “Wait a minute. I never said they were Union cavalrymen. Even in the dark, I could tell they were wearing uniforms like ours.”
“That proves it,” said Gracchus grimly. “The only real Rebel cavalry in this area are Mosby’s men, and they wouldn’t attack fellow Confederates.”
“I thought they were shooting awfully accurately in the dark,” Aiken mumbled. “Superior night vision through bionic eyes or genetic upgrade would account for it, especially in conjunction with laser target designators.”
Gracchus blinked with incomprehension, but he restrained his curiosity and turned at once to practicalities. “Commander, this way you have of keeping track of your men … can the Transhumanists do something like that? I mean, can they recognize you for what you are?”
“They can recognize me, and by the same means I can recognize them.” Jason made no attempt to explain the sensor in the handgrip of his pistol by which he could detect bionically enhanced Transhumanists, who naturally had similar devices, often longer-ranged. “But they can’t recognize my men in this way.”
“I don’t understand why they attacked your men, then. It’s a mystery to me,” Gracchus frowned. “I also don’t understand why they’re headed for Ashby’s Gap, wearing gray uniforms. That’s going into the lion’s mouth; Sheridan’s army pretty much owns the Valley now.”
“Well,” said Jason firmly, “solving those mysteries can wait. For now, our first priority is to get Carlos Dabney back. If in the process we can learn what these Transhumanists are up to, so much the better. Angus, you’re in no shape to travel—”
“I can keep up, sir.”
“Like hell you can! We’re going to be riding hard. You stay here. Gracchus, sit on him if you have to.” Jason softened his tone. “I know you want to help, Angus, but you’d just slow us up. When Gracchus thinks you’re up to it, follow us in the direction of Paris, almost exactly due northwest. I’ll be able to keep track of you, of course, so if you can’t find us we’ll find you.”
Not for the first time, Jason mentally cursed the legalistic conservatism of the Authority’s governing council. He had repeatedly urged—practically begged—that Special Operations personnel be given simple implant communicators by which they could subvocalize to each other at fairly long ranges. But even a passive implant involving no direct neural interfacing arguably constituted a technical violation of the Human Integrity Act, and the council had no stomach to fight for yet another special exemption. So they continued to restrict their agents to whatever tedious forms of communications the locals used, while expecting them to combat Transhumanists who were not thus limited.
They ate as much of the South’s verminous cornbread as they could stomach, and washed it down with the by-courtesy-so-called coffee. Then, very cautiously lest they be observed by any early rise
rs, they slipped out the door and around to the back of the shack, where Marcus had tied up and blanketed their horses. Once out in the open and away from the shed, they rode openly along the street, acknowledging friendly greetings from the few people abroad, who assumed them to be Mosby’s men. Then they set out on a very secondary road—which, in this time and place was saying a great deal—toward the northwest.
They were all suffering from inadequate sleep and even more inadequate food, but the knowledge of Dabney’s plight drove them onward. And at least the weather had turned dry, although still chilly. Half a mile short of ‘Rosenix,’ Jason thought they must be passing near the site of Dabney’s capture. They continued on past the site of yesterday’s wedding and pressed on, trying to overcome their quarry’s long head start. But Jason’s map showed that they were not going to catch up short of Paris. He wondered if they would have to press on over the Blue Ridge Mountains into the Shenandoah Valley.
After they had ridden about seven miles, with the crest of the Blue Ridge looming up ahead, they turned north toward Paris, nestled at the foot of Ashby’s Gap. They rode past estates with names like ‘Belle Grove,’ ‘Mount Bleak’ and ‘Hill-and-Dale,’ whose stately houses undoubtedly served as safe-houses for Mosby’s men. In fact, on a couple of occasions they encountered Rangers heading for the assembly that had been called, and had to pause to explain that they were not doing the same because they weren’t part of Mosby’s command. It wasn’t difficult—most of the Rangers knew each other by sight—but it meant delay.