Time Travel Omnibus Volume 2

by Anthology

  “I may not have your knowledge of the calculus and other arcane matters, Mr. Terry,” Bonfors said, “but I know that the quantity of roast beef and claret a man can consume is directly related to the mass of his purse.”

  Harrington raised his head. His eyes ranged over the rigging as if he was inspecting every knot. It would take them two hours—perhaps two and a half—to close with the slave ship. Sparrow was small and lightly armed but he could at least be thankful she was faster than her opposition. Most of the ships the Admiralty assigned to the West African antislavery squadron were two-masted brigs that wallowed through the water like sick whales.

  How would they behave when the shooting started? Should he be glad they were still bantering? This would be the first time any of them had actually faced an armed enemy. Mr. Whitjoy was a forty-year-old veteran of the struggle against the Corsican tyrant but his seagoing service had been limited to blockade duty in the last three years of the Napoleonic wars. For the rest of them—including their captain and all the hands—“active service” had been a placid round of uneventful cruises punctuated by interludes in the seamier quarters of foreign ports.

  “We’ll keep flying the Portuguese flag until we come into range,” Harrington said. “We still have a bit of ship handling ahead of us. We may sail a touch faster than an overloaded slaver but let’s not forget they have four guns on each side. Let’s make sure we’re positioned straight across their bow when we bring them to, Mr. Whitjoy.”

  Giva had leaped on the prize money issue during their first planning session. She hadn’t known the British sailors received special financial bonuses when she had applied for the job. She had circled around the topic, once she became aware of it, as if she had been tethered to it with a leash.

  The scholar assigned to oversee the project, Dr. Peter LeGrundy, was a specialist in the cultural and social history of the Victorian British Empire. Peter claimed he normally avoided the details of Victorian military history—a subject his colleagues associated with excessive popular appeal— but in this case he had obviously had to master the relevant complexities. The ships assigned to the West African antislavery patrol had received five pounds for every slave they liberated, as a substitute for the prize money they would have received if they had been fighting in a conventional nation-state war. Prize money had been a traditional wartime incentive. The wages the Crown paid its seaborne warriors had not, after all, been princely. The arbitrary five-pound figure had actually been a rather modest compensation, in Peter’s opinion, compared to the sums the Sparrow‘s crew would have received in wartime, from a cargo the government could actually sell.

  Peter had explained all that to Giva—several times. And received the same reaction each time.

  “There were five hundred captives on that ship,” Giva said. “Twenty-five hundred pounds would be what—two or three million today? Audiences aren’t totally stupid, Peter. I think most of them will manage to see that the great antislavery crusade could be a very profitable little business.”

  John Harrington had been reading about the Napoleonic Wars ever since his youngest uncle had given him a biography of Lord Nelson for his ninth birthday. None of the books he had read had captured the stately tempo of naval warfare. He knew the British had spent three hours advancing toward the Franco-Spanish fleet at Trafalgar but most authors covered that phase of the battle in a handful of paragraphs and hurried straight to the thunder that followed. Lieutenant Bonfors and Lieutenant Terry both made two trips to their quarters while Sparrow plodded across the gentle African waves toward their quarry. They were probably visiting their chamber pots, Harrington presumed. Mr. Whitjoy, on the other hand, directed the handling of the ship with his usual stolid competence. Harrington thought he caught Whitjoy praying at one point, but the master could have been frowning at a patch of deck that needed a touch of the holystone.

  Harrington had stifled his own urge to visit the chamber pot. He had caught two of the hands smiling the second time Bonfors had trudged off the deck.

  It had been Midshipmen Montgomery who had spotted the sharks. The other midshipman, Davey Clarke, had replaced Montgomery in the lookout. Montgomery could have gone below but he was circling the deck instead. He stopped at the gun every few minutes and gave it a thorough inspection. Montgomery would be assisting Mr. Terry when the time came to open fire.

  Giva had started defending her artistic integrity at the very beginning of her pre-hiring interview. “I get the final edit,” Giva had advised the oversight committee. “I won’t work under any other conditions. If it’s got my name on it, it represents my take on the subject.”

  Giva had been in Moscow, working on a historical drama. Emory had been staring at seven head-and-shoulder images on his living room imaging stage and Giva had been the only participant in the montage who had chosen a setting that accented her status. All the other participants had selected neutral backdrops. Giva had arranged herself so the committee could see, just beyond her shoulder, two actors who were dressed in flat, twenty-first century brain-link hats.

  “There’s one thing I absolutely have to say, Mr. FitzGordon,” Giva said. “I appreciate your generosity. I will try to repay you by turning out the best possible product I can. But please don’t think you can expect to have any influence on the way I do it. I’m not interested in creating public relations fog jobs for wealthy families.”

  Emory had listened to Giva’s tirade with the thin, polite smile a tolerant parent might bestow on a child. “I wouldn’t expect you to produce a fog job,” Emory responded. “I believe the facts in this case will speak for themselves. I can’t deny that I specified this particular incident when I offered the agency this grant partly because my ancestor was involved in it. I wouldn’t have known the Royal Navy had engaged in an antislavery campaign if it hadn’t been part of our family chronicles. But I also feel this episode is a typical example of the courage and devotion of a group of men who deserve to be remembered and honored. The crews of the West African antislavery patrol saved a hundred thousand human beings from slavery. They deserve a memorial that has been created by an honest, first-class artist.”

  The committee had already let Emory know Giva Lombardo was the candidate they wanted to hire. Giva had friends in the Agency for Chronautical Studies, it seemed.

  She also had ability and the kind of name recognition that would attract an audience. Emory had been impressed with both the docs that had catapulted Giva out of the would-be class. The first doc had been a one-hour essay on women who bought sexually enhancing personality modifications. The second had been a rhapsodic portrait of a cruise on a fully automated sailing ship. The cruise doc was essentially an advertisement funded by the cruise company but it had aroused the enthusiasm of the super-aesthete audience.

  Emory’s family had been dealing with artists for a hundred and fifty years. His great-grandfather’s encounter with the architect who designed his primary residence was a standard item in popular accounts of the history of architecture. It had become a family legend encrusted with advice and observations. All interactions between artists and the rich hinge on one basic fact, Emory’s great-grandfather had said. You need the creatives. The creatives need your money.

  Harrington placed his hands behind his back. The approach was coming to an end. Mr. Whitjoy had placed Sparrow on a course that would cross the slaver’s bow in just four or five minutes.

  He took a deep breath and forced the tension out of his neck muscles. He was the captain of a ship of war. He must offer his crew a voice that sounded confident and unperturbed.

  “Let’s show them our true colors, Mr. Whitjoy. You may advise them of our request as soon as we start to raise our ensign, Mr. Terry.”

  Lieutenant Bonfors led the boarding party. The slaver hove to in response to Lieutenant Terry’s shot across its bow and Lieutenant Bonfors settled his bulk in the stern of a longboat and assumed a rigid, upright dignity that reminded Emory of the recordings of his great-grandfather h
e had viewed when he had been a child. Harrison FitzGordon had been an ideal role model, in the opinion of Emory’s father. He was courteous to everyone he encountered, according to the family catechism, but he never forgot his position in society. He always behaved like someone who assumed the people around him would treat him with deference—just as Lieutenant Bonfors obviously took it for granted that others would row and he would be rowed.

  Bonfors maintained the same air of haughty indifference when he hauled himself aboard the slaver and ran his eyes down its guns. Two or three crewmen were lounging near the rear of each gun. Most of them had flintlock pistols stuck in their belts.

  A tall man in a loose blue coat hurried across the deck. He held out his hand and Bonfors put his own hands behind his back.

  “I am Sub-lieutenant Barry Richard Bonfors of Her Majesty’s Ship Sparrow. I am here to inspect your ship and your papers in accordance with the treaties currently in effect between my government and the government of the nation whose flag is flying from your masthead.”

  “I am William Zachary,” the officer in the blue coat said, “and I am the commander of this ship. If you will do me the honor of stepping into my cabin, I will be happy to present you with our papers.”

  “I would prefer to start with an inspection of your hold.”

  “I’m afraid that won’t be possible, sub-lieutenant. I assure you our papers will give you all the information you need.”

  “The treaties in effect between our countries require the inspection of your entire ship, sir. I would be neglecting my duties if I failed to visit your hold.”

  Captain Zachary gestured at the guns. “I have two twelve-pound guns and two eighteen-pounders on each side of my ship, sub-lieutenant. You have, as far as I can tell, one six-pounder. I have almost fifty hands. What do you have? Twenty-five? And some of them boys? I’m certain a visit to my cabin and an inspection of my papers will provide you with a satisfactory report to your superiors. As you will see from our papers, our hold is stuffed with jute and bananas.”

  Zachary was speaking with an accent that sounded, to Emory’s ear, a lot like some of the varieties of English emitted by the crew on the Sparrow. Giva’s microphone arrangement had picked up some of the cries coming from the slaver’s crew as Bonfors had made his progress across the waters and Emory had heard several examples of the best-known English nouns and verbs. The ship was flying a Brazilian flag, Emory assumed, because it offered the crew legal advantages they would have missed if they had sailed under their true colors. British citizens who engaged in the slave trade could be hanged as pirates.

  The legal complexities of the antislavery crusade had been one of the subjects that had amused Emory when he had been a boy. The officers of the West African Squadron had operated under legal restrictions that were so complicated the Admiralty had issued them an instruction manual they could carry in their uniforms. The Royal Navy could stop the ships of some nations and not others and it could do some things on one country’s ships and other things on others.

  Emory had been five when he had first heard about John Harrington’s exploits off the African coast. Normally the FitzGordon adults just mentioned it now and then. You were reminded you had an ancestor who had liberated slaves when your elders felt you were spending too much time thinking about some of the other things your ancestors had done, such as their contributions to the coal mining and timber cutting industries. In Emory’s case, it had become a schoolboy enthusiasm. He had scoured the databanks for information on Lieutenant John Harrington and the great fifty-year struggle in which Harrington had participated. Almost no one outside of his family had heard about the Royal Navy’s antislavery campaign, but the historians who had studied it had all concluded it was one of the great epics of the sea. Young officers in small ships had fought the slavers for over half a century. They had engaged in hotly contested ship-to-ship actions. They had ventured up the rivers that communicated with the interior and attacked fortified slaveholding pens. Thousands of British seamen had died from the diseases that infested the African coast. The African slave markets north of the equator had been shut down. One hundred thousand men, women, and children had been rescued from the horrors of the slave ships.

  The campaign had been promoted by a British politician, Lord Palmerston, who had tried to negotiate a general international treaty outlawing the slave trade. Palmerston had failed to achieve his goal and British diplomats had been forced to negotiate special agreements country by country. The officers on the spot were supposed to keep all the agreements straight and remember they could be fined, or sued, if they looked in the wrong cupboard or detained the wrong ship.

  In this case, the situation was relatively straightforward. The ship was flying the flag of Brazil and the Sparrow therefore had the right to examine its papers and search its hull. If the searchers found any evidence the ship was engaging in the slave trade—such as the presence of several hundred chained Africans—the Sparrow could seize the slaver and bring the ship, its crew, and all its contents before the courts the navy had established in Freetown, Sierra Leone.

  “Look at that,” Emory said. “Look at the way he’s handling himself.”

  Bonfors had turned his back on Captain Zachary. He was walking toward the ladder on the side of the ship with the same unhurried serenity he had exhibited when he came aboard.

  Did Bonfor’s back itch? Was he counting the number of steps that stretched between his present position and the minimal safety he would enjoy when he reached the boat? For Emory it was a thrilling moment—a display of the values and attitudes that had shaped his own conduct since he had been a child. Most of the officers on the Sparrow shared a common heritage. Their family lines had been molded, generation after generation, by the demands of the position they occupied in their society.

  “You are now provisionally cleared for six hours total,” the hal said. “All coordinates register satisfactory and stable.”

  The slaver was turning. Harrington noted the hands in the rigging making minor adjustments to the sails and realized the slaver’s bow was shifting to the right—so it could bring its four starboard guns to bear on Sparrow. Mr. Whitjoy had seen the movement, too. His voice was already bellowing orders. He had been told to hold Sparrow lined up across the slaver’s bows. He didn’t need further instructions.

  Conflicting courses churned across Harrington’s brain. Bonfors had reboarded his boat and he was still crossing the gap between the ships. The slave ship couldn’t hit the boat with the side guns but it had a small chaser on the bow—a four-pounder that could shatter the boat with a single lucky shot. The wind favored the slaver, too. The two ships had hove to with the wind behind the slaver, hitting its sails at a twenty-degree angle . . .

  He hurried down the narrow deck toward the bow. Terry and Montgomery both looked at him expectantly. The swivel gun was loaded with chain shot. The slow match smoldered in a bucket.

  “Let’s give our good friend Mr. Bonfors time to get aboard,” Harrington said.

  “Aren’t you afraid they’ll fire on the boat with their chaser?” Montgomery said. “Sir.”

  Terry started to say something and Harrington stopped him with his hand. Montgomery should have kept his thoughts to himself but this wasn’t the time to rebuke him.

  “It’s obvious Mr. Bonfors didn’t finish the inspection,” Harrington said. “But we won’t be certain they refused to let him go below until he makes his report. We don’t want to give the lawyers any unnecessary grounds for complaint.”

  He glanced around the men standing near the gun. “Besides, everybody says these slavers tend to be poor shots. They’re businessmen. They go to sea to make money.”

  He paused for what he hoped would be an effect. “We go to sea to make war.”

  Montgomery straightened. Harrington thought he saw a light flash in the eyes of one of the seamen in the gun crew. He turned away from the gun and made his way toward the stern with his hands behind his back, in exactly t
he same pose his second commanding officer, Captain Ferris, would have assumed. A good commander had to be an actor. Good actors never ruined an exit line with too much talk.

  Emory had started campaigning for Giva’s removal a week after he had audited the first planning meeting. Giva had nagged at the prize money issue for a tiresome fifteen minutes at the end of the fourth meeting and Emory had maintained his link to Peter LeGrundy after she had exited. Giva had still been in Russia at that state of their association. Emory was staying at his New York residence, where he was sampling the opening premieres of the entertainment season. Peter had based himself in London, so he could take a first hand look at the Royal Navy archives.

  “Are you really sure we can’t do anything about her supporters in the chronautical bureaucracy?” Emory said. “It seems to me there should be some small possibility we can overcome their personal predilections and convince them she has a bias that is obviously incompatible with scholarship. A ten minute conversation with her would probably be sufficient.”

  “She’s peppery, Emory. She feels she has to assert herself. She’s young and she’s an artist.”

  “And what’s she going to be like when she’s actually recording? We’ll only have one opportunity, Peter—the only opportunity anybody will ever have. Whatever she records, that’s it.”

  Under the rules laid down by the chrono bureaucrats, the Sparrow‘s encounter with the slaver was surrounded by a restricted zone that encompassed hundreds of square miles of ocean and twenty hours of time. No one knew what would happen if a bubble entered a space/time volume occupied by another bubble— and the bureaucrats had decided they would avoid the smallest risk they would ever find out. The academics and fundraisers who had written the preamble to the agency’s charter had decreed that its chrononauts would “dispel the mists of time with disciplined onsite observations,” and the careerists and political appointees who ran the agency had decreed each site would receive only one dispelling. Once their bubble left the restricted zone, no one else would ever return to it.