Ghosts of Time

by Steve White

  He wore what Jason remembered as the jumpsuit uniform of the Tuova’Zhonglu, in surprisingly good shape after all these years—doubtless some self-repairing nano-fabric. But his hair had grown to wild length, and across the gulf of species and worlds anyone could see the flicker of insanity behind those eyes. Even by the standards of his own race, this Teloi was mad.

  The strange eyes darted around, and fixed on Zenobia. The alien throat, in the deep, strangely timbred voice Jason remembered, shouted a series of sounds that Jason’s imperfect command of Teloi could not precisely interpret. He knew only that the Teloi was vomiting hate.

  The obviously supernatural apparition was enough for the two surviving drunks, who screamed and fled. They’re not supposed to have seen a Teloi in Port Royal, flashed through Jason’s mind. But he had no time to worry about it, because the alien was lunging at Zenobia, who was still trying to wrench her cutlass free of the body it transfixed.

  Jason stood paralyzed by indecision, for he couldn’t risk a shot at the charging Teloi’s back for fear of hitting Zenobia, beyond him.

  The black Maroon stepped in front of Zenobia and leveled his musket. With a sweep of his arm, the Teloi knocked the musket aside just as it fired and sent the Maroon staggering. But it had given Zenobia time to release the cutlass hilt, step back, and scoop up the dead Taino’s still-unfired musket.

  The Teloi’s insanity was evidently less than total—or at least he was having a lucid interval—for he halted his rush, turned and ran up the alley in Jason’s direction. The abrupt reversal of direction threw Zenobia’s aim off, and her shot went wide. Mondrago, who had dropped his musket and was drawing his cutlass, was buffeted aside by the alien’s rush. Before Jason could get off a shot at an unmissable range of a few feet, he was bowled over, falling across the prone Chantal into the mud and filth of the alley. Then the Teloi was past, fleeing with Donnez into the street beyond.

  Immediately, screams erupted at the alien apparition that had burst onto the crowded street.

  This isn’t right, thought Jason again as he examined Chantal. He had barely had time to see that her wound, though bleeding freely, was shallow, when Zenobia and the maroon came running past, cutlasses in hand.

  “Come on!” she cried. “They’re getting away!” With a curse, Jason sprang to his feet, drew his cutlass and ran after her into the street, leaving Mondrago to haul Chantal to her feet and follow.

  They emerged into a scene of confusion. Terrified sailors, whores and other pedestrians scattered, howling their panic, as the Teloi ran past. This definitely isn’t right! Jason couldn’t let himself dwell on it as they pursued the alien “god” and his priest. He summoned up his map. They were going more or less in the direction of Morgan’s fort, but working their way toward the waterfront. To the right, soaring above the irregular rooftops, the steeple of St. Paul’s cathedral, the pride of this notoriously godless town’s respectable element, was visible. Up ahead, Jason glimpsed the two very different figures darting northward into a side-street.

  “That way!” he called out. But Zenobia, just ahead, had already seen. They all turned right, with Mondrago bringing up the rear, grasping Chantal’s hand and urging her on as fast as she was able.

  Then Zenobia stopped short and glared, perplexed, into the empty side-street. “Where—?”

  It at once became obvious that the Teloi’s lapse into rationality had passed, or perhaps had merely been overborne by his fanatical hatred of the killer of his colleague and lover. With a nonverbal sound that was flesh-crawlingly different from a human scream, he dove from the second-story balcony onto which he had climbed and landed atop Zenobia, smashing her to the ground beneath his not inconsiderable weight, sending her cutlass spinning away. His hands groped for her throat. Writhing like a wildcat, she grappled with him, matching his size with her gene-engineered strength.

  The Maroon, after a fractional second of stunned immobility, surged forward with a roar, cutlass raised. But Donnez stepped from the recessed doorway in whose shadows he had been lurking, stepped behind the Maroon, and drove his dagger into the broad, lash-scarred back.

  Jason sprang forward and brought his cutlass down in a whistling arc. But Donnez, with almost superhuman quickness, withdrew his dagger from the dying Maroon, spun around, and caught the descending cutlass on its blade. For an instant the two men strained together, close enough to smell each other’s breath. Then Jason brought a knee up into the houngan’s crotch. As Donnez doubled over with a grunt, Jason gave a twist of his right wrist that forced him to drop the dagger, then brought the cutlass’s handguard up like a knuckle-duster into the contorted black face. Donnez went sprawling, and Jason raised his cutlass again …

  Before he could bring it down, the ground under his feet began to tremble and roll. There was a sound like a booming of thunder, except that it came from beneath the ground.

  With a cold shock, Jason realized how long it had been since he had consulted his clock display. He gave a mental command.

  It was 11:43.

  Well, he thought, oddly calm, I can stop worrying about the fact that nobody in this time and place is supposed to have seen a Teloi in the streets.

  All the people who’ve seen him are going to die.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  Donnez didn’t look horrified. He didn’t know what was coming, and people in Port Royal were so long accustomed to minor earth tremors that they hardly noticed them anymore. This was unusually severe, and more of an oceanlike rolling than the typical shocks, but no real cause for alarm.

  But, looking up from his supine position, the houngan could see the expression on Jason’s face, and the lapse of attention that went with it. His cut, bleeding lips formed a hyena-like grin of triumph, and with a convulsive motion he sprang to his feet and rushed Jason, getting in under the cutlass and grasping Jason’s wrists. The two of them toppled and rolled over and over into the main street.

  Jason, locked in combat with Donnez, fleetingly noticed Mondrago standing over the two writhing, struggling figures, trying for a cutlass stroke that would spit Donnez alone. He could not see Zenobia and the Teloi.

  It was at that moment that the ground swelled and then dipped, like the deck of a ship in heavy seas, and the subterranean thunder rose to a rumbling that could be heard—or, more accurately, felt—by the entire body, not just the eardrums. And then even that was drowned out by the repeated thudding roar as multistory brick buildings, built to the architectural precepts of earthquake-free England, began to implode. And then, above everything, rose a crash from the north as St. Paul’s collapsed. Jason happened to be facing in the right direction to see the towering steeple topple over, just before his ears were assaulted by a plangent metallic clang as the great tower bell hit the pavement,

  Now panic awoke on Donnez’ face. In fact, he and all the running, screaming people in the street were even more panicked than they would have been had they known the true facts of what was happening. But of course they had no knowledge that this was an active tectonic region where the Caribbean Plate atop which they lived had been moving slowly east for ages, while the North American Plate just to the north of Jamaica had been pushing west, resulting in a fault: a “slip-strike” zone where the two plates ground against each other.

  Roderick Grenfell had told them all of this. He had also told them about the Modified Mercalli Intensity Scale of “shaking severity” that seismologists had used since the twentieth century. Earthquakes of Mercalli Value I through VII wreaked steadily rising levels of destruction. Values VIII through X were devastating. Value XI was apocalyptic. What was now beginning under this cloudless blue sky would, in places, reach Value XII.

  But none of that would have meant anything to these people. They knew that this was the Day of Judgment, and that the seven seals were about to be broken.

  Donnez, eyes bugging out with terror, released Jason and bounded to his feet. Mondrago, already off balance, was thrust aside by the suddenness of the move. The hou
ngan fled, rushing out into the street … but not far.

  For the earthen street was liquefying, and chasms were opening.

  Grenfell had explained it to them. With the earth’s oceanlike heaves, the rising water instantly saturated many areas of the sandy soil. The seismic waves changed the soil structure, sending sand molecules downward to meet water rushing up to fill empty space. Under these conditions, sand simply ceased to act as a solid.

  As Jason watched, Donnez, along with various other fleeing people, was pulled down into the viscous sand. And then cemented there, for with the next upward heave of the earth the briny water that had surged up into the sand was sucked out just as quickly, leaving the fugitives trapped in the ground. Some only had a leg caught; others were in up to the waist; still others were trapped entirely, with only their heads showing above ground. One such was Donnez, from whose screams all vestiges of sanity had now fled.

  From Grenfell’s account, Jason knew there was no point in finishing the houngan off. Nor could he be saved, even had Jason felt so inclined. If he was lucky, the hardening ground would squeeze the life out of him, suffocating him before the wild dogs came to eat his head.

  As Jason watched, a third and still greater tremor came with a deafening roar, sending him and Mondrago sprawling. Chantal, eyes wide with horror and pain, clung to the windowsill of a building. Zenobia and the Teloi were thrown apart and the latter staggered away, struggling to keep upright. Zenobia got unsteadily to her feet and started to pursue him.

  “No!” Jason, with an unsteady lunge, grabbed her arm. “Let him go! We’ve got to get to higher ground, south of here, or we’ll die.” Or, more accurately, you’ll die, he gibed at himself.

  She stared at him. “Jason … what …?”

  “It’s what I tried to tell you. The northern two-thirds of Port Royal is going to be obliterated. Now let’s go!” He pulled her along. Mondrago went to Chantal’s side and, as gently as possible, disengaged her arm from the window frame to which she was clinging with desperate strength.

  “Come on!” shouted the Corsican over the din. “You’ve got to get away from this building.” Chantal seemed to understand, and let him half-guide and half-carry her. They were barely clear when the building collapsed in an avalanche of debris. She turned to Jason and yelled to make herself heard.

  “For God’s sake, Jason, get us out of here! Activate our TRDs!”

  For a moment, Jason’s impulse was to do just that. He started to form the mental command … but then he met Zenobia’s eyes.

  “Not yet!” he barked.“Follow me!”

  Before anyone could protest, he took Zenobia’s hand and led the way southward, in the general direction of Morgan’s Fort. In the other direction, as he knew from Grenfell’s account, the wharves had sunk almost at once, buildings were flowing into the sea as the loose sand of the waterfront area liquefied, and ships were capsizing. A backward glance assured him that Mondrago and Chantal were following, hand in hand, through the landscape of Hell.

  They pressed on, managing to keep their footing despite the nauseating rise and fall of the earth, with Jason’s map display guiding them toward the relatively safe areas. They carefully avoided the gleaming, rippling areas where earth had turned to water and people were being swept along, bobbing like corks, frantically clutching at passing wreckage. They dodged showers of falling brick and timbers. They grimly tried to ignore the sights they saw, of people who were less lucky. Some, running from toppling buildings, fell into chasms, tumbling into a hellish sunken world, a whirling maelstrom of water, sand, and flotsam. But others were shot into the air as much as a hundred feet by high-pressure waterspouts before falling to the ground and into it, vanishing again. Grenfell mentioned these “sand volcanoes,” thought Jason, hard though it was to hear oneself think above the ear-bruising roar.

  Then they turned a corner … and saw the Teloi, covered in filth but still unmistakable.

  Zenobia and the alien locked eyes for an instant. Then they sprung for each other, Zenobia breaking out of Jason’s grip.

  But then one of the sinkholes opened under the Teloi. With an unhuman bellow, he dropped away and vanished into the ooze.

  “He’s gone,” shouted Jason, grabbing her around the waist. “Now come on! I can see what looks like a safe area ahead.”

  They went on, with more and more of the scene of devastation visible above lower roofs. They entered a relatively stable area which must, Jason thought, have a stable base of gravel or limestone. They passed a man in clerical garb, standing resolutely and praying with a circle of wailing people, two or three of whom looked suspiciously like they belonged to Port Royal’s small Sephardic Jewish community.

  “And so, brethren” the pastor shouted over the din to his flock, “let us kneel down and await the breaking of the Seventh Seal, as foretold in the Revelation of St. John the Divine.” The devout looked about them as though expecting to see the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse come riding. But Jason’s eyes were turned toward the harbor.

  “Look,” he said as quietly as possible. His companions turned, and saw the water had receded, leaving a stretch of wet sand littered with wreckage and capsized ships. But only momentarily, for beyond that a wall of water was rushing shoreward at sixty miles per hour.

  “Tsunami!” gasped Chantal.

  “Maremoto, as the Spanish call it,” said Jason, who had once, in 1628 B.C., ridden one from exploded Santorini to the coast of Crete. This three-story wave was, he knew, not nearly as high as that one. In fact, it might not have been a classic tidal wave caused by tectonic buckling at all, but merely the ocean rushing in to fill the vacuum left by the plunging sand. But this time he was ashore on the receiving end of it, not atop its deceptively gentle deep-water swell.

  As Jason watched, the foamy top of that surge of water crested over the battlements of Morgan’s Fort.

  Mesmerized as he was by that oncoming monster of destruction, he was taken completely by surprise when a “sand volcano” erupted in front of them and the Teloi appeared, emerging from the saturated earth, drenched and gasping.

  Chantal screamed at the apparition. But Jason recalled something else from Grenfell’s lectures. Some of those sucked into chasms in the liquefying soil encountered horizontal subterranean rivers of high-speed water which carried them underground for as much as a half mile until they hit one of the geysers and were expelled back to the surface. He wondered if the Teloi could hold their breath longer than humans.

  But Zenobia lacked any such intellectual curiosity. With a shout, she whipped out a knife and lunged for her enemy before Jason could even attempt to restrain her.

  The alien and the renegade Transhumanist grappled, but only briefly. Zenobia brought her knife up into the pit of the Teloi’s stomach and pulled it upward with savage strength.

  Teloi guts were different from human ones.

  At that moment, the waters of the tsunami, tunneled by a side street, surged over both of them, stopping just short of Jason and his two companions. At the same moment, Jason watched a ship carried over the lower rooftops on the crest. But then, abruptly, the waters flowed backwards, bearing a tide of flotsam that included Zenobia and her dying victim.

  “NO!” bellowed Jason, as he sprang forward, splashing into the torrent that irresistibly sucked Zenobia toward the harbor, reaching desperately for her.

  He fell prone in the liquid sand as Mondrago tackled his legs from behind. The outrush almost drew both of them with it, but Chantal, on firmer ground, grasped Mondrago. Her inconsiderable added weight was just barely enough.

  “You can’t save her, sir,” said Mondrago.

  “And getting killed yourself won’t help her,” Chantal added.

  And Jason knew it was true, as he watched Zenobia vanish under the foam, to be seen no more. He ceased his struggles, and Mondrago released him. He stood up slowly. The tremors and the last echoes of the great booms had faded away. Mechanically, he consulted his clock display. 11:49. Yes, Grenfe
ll said the destruction of Port Royal took six minutes. He looked out across a vista of desolation, in which the roofs of half-sunken houses stood amid a sparse forest of masts, where ships had been swept into the city. The ship they had seen crest the high-water mark was still floating outward.

  “Sir, we’ve got to get out of here,” said Mondrago urgently. “Remember what Dr. Grenfell told us about the aftermath.”

  Jason nodded dully. Down below, the looting had already begun. Two thousand of Port Royal’s sixty-five hundred inhabitants had been killed outright in six minutes of hell. But the real hell was just beginning, in the absence of food, drinking water, and even the rudimentary law and order Port Royal had previously enjoyed. Three thousand more would die in the next few days from starvation, disease and human-on-human violence.

  But for a space he could do nothing but stare at the spot where he had last seen Zenobia’s dark head bobbing above the foam.

  He became aware of Chantal’s hand resting on his arm. She was leaning against Mondrago, who was supporting her with an arm around her shoulders, carefully avoiding her wound. When she spoke, all trace of the acerbity her voice had held earlier was gone. “There was nothing you could have done, Jason.”

  “Oh, I’d say I’ve done quite a lot,” said Jason without looking at her. “And all of my actions conspired to put her in precisely the position to get killed. Otherwise, she might not have been.”

  “In which case, your actions and their consequences have always been part of the past, if you know what I mean,” said Chantal, attempting to console him.

  “Maybe that’s why Gracchus’ letter-writer said you had to be here,” speculated Mondrago. “And we still haven’t learned who that letter-writer was.”

  Jason drew a deep breath. “Well, at least I’ve learned one thing: the Observer Effect cannot be fought.” He gave a laugh that held absolutely no humor. “No. On second thought I haven’t even learned that. I knew it already. I just chose to forget it.”