Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  “Well, er, no. But he clearly indicated that the matter was urgent. And the courier ship that brought me here is required to return to Earth within a very tight schedule. If you do not come with me at once, you will miss the chance—”

  —To spend ten days in close quarters with Nesbit, Jason thought with a shudder.

  “Don’t worry about a thing, Nesbit,” he cut in with what certain late-twentieth-century acquaintances of his had called a shit-eating grin. “Go on back and assure Rutherford that I’ll arrange my own transportation, as I did last time.” And, as I did last time, I’ll do it by the most luxurious, expensive spaceline I can find, he mentally added. And the Authority will have to reimburse me. It was one of his few ways of exacting revenge.

  “But,” Nesbit expostulated, “it’s urgent—!”

  “Urgent? Hey, Nesbit, I’ve got all the time in the world. Don’t you know? I’m a time traveler!”

  He strode off toward the terminal building, leaving Nesbit spluttering. It undoubtedly added months to his life.

  CHAPTER THREE

  People stayed out of Jason’s way as he stalked through the corridors of the displacer facility toward Rutherford’s office. The look on his face was sufficient to convince even the most insensitive that now was not the time for banter. This, despite the fact that he had forgotten to change into his Hesperian Colonial Rangers uniform, as he usually did when he wanted to be assured of irritating Rutherford.

  His expression was even enough to intimidate Rutherford’s famously formidable secretary. She waved him through an outer office full of visibly resentful supplicants, and he entered the inner sanctum, surprisingly austere save for a display case containing items from the past, notably a certain medieval hand-and-a-half sword.

  “Kyle,” he began in ominous tones . . . then halted as he saw Rutherford already had another visitor: an early-middle-aged man, predominantly African by ancestry, with strong features and short hair turning gray at the temples. The old bastard probably brought somebody else in here just to throw me off my stride, he thought peevishly.

  “Commander Thanou,” said Rutherford with smiling urbanity, “allow me to introduce Dr. Henri Boyer.” His use of Jason’s rank-title in the Hesperian Colonial Rangers was scrupulously correct. Since it had become obvious that the Special Operations Section was going to have to function on at least a paramilitary basis, the council had grudgingly accepted the need for the kind of formalized rank structure the Temporal Service had never possessed. Casting about for an appropriate one, while continuing to shrink from anything with an overtly military sound to it, they had seized on something similar to the Rangers’ very simplified version of the centuries-old British police system. (Jason had been amused to learn that the rank-titles had been adopted back in the days of Sir Robert Peel, founder of the London Metropolitan Police, for precisely the same reason: to quiet fears of a paramilitary force.) The Section was still so small that it only needed to go as high as “Commander” for its head man, working downward from there through “Superintendent,” “Inspector,” “Sergeant” and “Constable.” As it grew, it would doubtless have to add “Commissioner” at the top.

  “Commander Thanou,” said the dark man in a deep, cultured voice, extending his hand.

  With no other alternative but to appear churlish, Jason shook hands and made a vaguely courteous-sounding grunting noise.

  “It is a pleasure to meet you, Commander,” Boyer continued. “Director Rutherford and I were just discussing you.”

  “Oh?” Jason turned toward Rutherford with a suspicious look rooted in long experience. This was all wrong. Rutherford should have been exuding supercilious disapproval of his tardiness in returning to Earth.

  “Yes, Jason,” Rutherford acknowledged smoothly. “You see, Dr. Boyer is also concerned with the same problem which occasioned your recall.”

  “Ah, yes: my recall,” said Jason with a glare that had given pause to medieval men-at-arms and twentieth-century gangsters. “That’s precisely what I’m here to talk to you about. As a matter of fact—”

  “We’ve received a message drop from the expedition Asamoa has led to Haiti in 1791,” Rutherford cut in.

  “What?” said Jason, momentarily distracted from his own wrongs. “Is he all right?” Sam Asamoa was a veteran of the Temporal Service and an old friend of Jason’s. And the message drop system had many limitations. The need for obtaining imperishable material for a message locally was the first. The location of the drop was the second; without being too inconvenient for the time travelers to reach, it had to be so out-of-the-way as to escape all notice for all of subsequent history, so as to avoid running afoul of the “Observer Effect.” Even so, the fact that the technique could be used at all—and that the message was not there before the moment in the linear present when the time travelers left it there—had caused profound philosophical shock waves, for it had been the first incontrovertible proof that the past could be changed, with all the mind-destroying implications thereof. Even more disturbing was the way something had always seemed to prevent any attempt to observe the message drop location at that precise moment in the linear present. All such attempts had long since been abandoned, and Temporal Service personnel preferred not to dwell on it.

  “Yes, he and the rest of his expedition are fine, as far as we know,” Rutherford soothed. “As you are aware, their objective was to verify our received ideas about the origins of the Haitian revolution against the French, which resulted in the founding of the second independent nation in the Americas.”

  “I remember Sam Asamoa telling me about it before I left, but I was never entirely clear on it. Something about Voodoo, as I recall.” Out of the corner of his eye, Jason saw Boyer wince.

  “No doubt Dr. Boyer can clarify matters for you, as this involves his field of expertise. Indeed, he is of Haitian ancestry, and he was barely edged out for a position on Asamoa’s expedition. Dr. Boyer, if you would be so kind?”

  “The word voodoo,” Boyer began, “has become a generic term for the Afro-Caribbean syncretic religions—and I can’t deny that such an awkward name cries out for a convenience label, so we may as well go on using it. But it’s an unfortunate one. For one thing, it has, over the centuries, acquired some unsavory connotations due to misconceptions and sensationalism. At the same time, it is too narrow and specific, being an Anglicized version of the Haitian manifestation of this religious impulse: Vodou.” The difference in pronunciation was subtle but definite. “In fact, there are numerous manifestations, including Shango in Trinidad, Santería in Cuba and Puerto Rico, and others, wherever large numbers of African slaves were brought into Catholic colonial societies in the sixteenth through eighteenth centuries. You see, all those slaves came from Western and Central Africa—the Fon, Ewe and Yoruba peoples. They all shared the worship of a supreme creator-god named Damballah or Nana Buluku who did not intervene directly in human affairs but left the running of the world to a vast and complex pantheon of lesser spirits called vodun. In the New world, these religions blended with Roman Catholicism. In fact, Damballah is often called Bondye, a Creole form of the French Bon Dieu.”

  “I imagine the Catholic belief in intercession by saints and angels lent itself to that kind of syncretism,” Jason opined.

  “Very astute, Commander. There was also an element of sheer practicality: the only religious imagery the slaves could obtain was Catholic, so they tended to use the closest matches they could find. For example, Damballah was associated with the snake, so images of St. Patrick banishing the snakes from Ireland were used for him simply because those images had snakes in them—even though I assure you he was not in any degree Irish!” Boyer chuckled. “But as time went on, the syncretism went further. Biblical characters, historical figures and even popular-culture icons were incorporated as loa, spirits which can temporarily possess and speak through a worshiper—the ‘horse’—who is deprived of free will. And unlike Catholic saints, the loa are morally neutral, with complex p
ersonalities that are neither entirely good nor entirely evil. A worshiper goes to a priest—called a houngan if male or a mambo if female—to obtain a spirit’s help, whether for beneficent or malign ends. The spirit is appealed to by offerings of food or liquor or, sometimes, a ritually sacrificed animal. This latter aspect contributed to the negative reputation I mentioned earlier, as did the exploitation of Voodoo practices by various dictators in Haiti’s depressing political history to intimidate and control the uneducated populace.”

  “I had the impression,” said Jason carefully, “that it was believed that there was sometimes sacrifice not just of animals but of humans—especially in connection with turning people into zombies.”

  Boyer looked acutely uncomfortable. “There was, at one time, a secret society, the Secte Rouge, sometimes called the Cochon Gris, or ‘Gray Pig,’ that did indeed practice ritual murder—and possibly cannibalism, although this was never proved. As for zombies, I am sorry to say that they did indeed exist.”

  “I beg your pardon?” Jason was sure he must have misunderstood.

  “Oh, not in the sense you’re thinking. Of course people weren’t actually brought back from the grave in an undead state and forced to do a houngan’s bidding, which was usually brutish manual labor. That was the terrifying illusion—even more terrifying for educated, upper-class Haitians, if you think about it. In reality, zombies were living people controlled by the use of drugs that robbed them of their will. The dictators I spoke of earlier were known to have corrupt houngans zombify political dissidents. But,” he stated firmly, “these were aberrations. True Voodoo is simply a group of religions, eccentrically pagan in modern times but not devoid of ethical content, valuing virtues like generosity and social solidarity and condemning greed and dishonor. And these religions are still practiced today. Their very eclecticism has, I believe, given them a certain resilience.”

  “Yes,” Jason nodded. “Sam Asamoa mentioned something of the sort.” The mainstream religions had not fared well in the early centuries of the scientific revolution, either fraying out into bloodless “social gospel” or curdling up into the doomed rear-guard known as “fundamentalism.” And then the Transhumanist regime had done its fanatical best to stamp out all religion. This, in turn, had sparked a counter-reaction. On today’s Earth, literal belief in religion was virtually nonexistent, but there was more and more formal religious practice as part of the post-Transhumanist rediscovery of human cultural roots. “But I still don’t quite understand the historical connection to the Haitian Revolution.”

  “After the French Revolution in 1789, the Haitians sent representatives to Paris to demand their rights from the National Assembly. But this meant rights only for the free gens de couleur or mulattoes, who included many large landowners who held scores of thousands of black slaves. The real revolution is traditionally held to have been sparked by a Voodoo—specifically Vodou—ceremony in August of 1791 at Bwa Kayiman, in which the loa Ezili Dantor was believed to have possessed a priestess and commanded the blacks to rise up. The situation was complex. The mulattoes had been scornfully rejected by the French, which drove them into the camp of the blacks, but after destroying the plantation system and massacring the whites, they both continued to recognize the nominal authority of France. Indeed, they joined with the French to repel—with the help of yellow fever—a British invasion from Jamaica in 1797. But then Napoleon, who had taken control of France, decided it was beneath him to bargain with black generals. He sent an army to reestablish absolute French rule and restore slavery. That army was decimated by yellow fever just as the British had been, and in 1804 a general named Dessalines declared Haiti independent and himself its ‘Emperor.’”

  “Thank you, Dr. Boyer,” said Rutherford. “So you see, Jason, the confused nature of these events has left many unanswered questions—in particular, whether the Bwa Kayiman ceremony really marked the start of the revolution, or if the story was only a later embellishment of patriotic mythology representing the uprising as a kind of ‘holy war.’ Asamoa departed shortly after you left on your, ah, jaunt to your homeworld, leading an expedition which, of necessity, consisted entirely of persons of obviously African ancestry.”

  “Of necessity,” Jason echoed with a nod. It was harder and harder, in today’s cosmopolitan world, to find time travelers who could pass unnoticed among the less racially mixed peoples of the past. And in the wake of the Transhumanist madness it was unacceptable to use genetic manipulation to tailor appearances to order. Jason’s variegated genes had happened to sort themselves out so that he could pass for a member of any of the Mediterranean ethnicities or their offshoots.

  “They arrived in 1791 long enough before August to establish contacts among the communities of escaped slaves. In the course of their researches, they began to turn up disquieting hints of a dark, perverted cult that even the houngans feared.”

  “Like the Secte Rouge that Dr. Boyer mentioned?” Jason queried.

  “No. For one thing, it had certain features which were foreign to Voodoo in any form but suggested Transhumaist involvement—notably, a seemingly unaging supernatural figure who appeared from time to time at long intervals, each time uttering prophecies of the future that turned out to be accurate.”

  A tingling ran along Jason’s spine.

  “Furthermore,” Rutherford continued, “there was a persistent tradition which traced the cult as far back as the 1660s and linked it with the pirates who operated out of Jamaica at that time. This, despite the fact that Voodoo, however defined, never became established in Jamaica.” He looked for confirmation to Boyer, who nodded.

  “That is correct. For one thing, the Catholic linkage Commander Thanou mentioned was absent there, and the Protestant denominations solidified their hold on the population by taking the lead in the abolition of slavery. But the pirate connection makes perfect sense. You must understand that this was at the same time that the French colony of St. Domingue, which was later to become Haiti, was first getting started. The entire island of Hispaniola was then nominally under Spanish control, although bands of buccaneers infested its coasts. In particular, the small island of Tortuga, off Hispaniola’s northwestern tip, was a haven for French pirates, and became the nucleus of St. Domingue after the French crown took control of the island in 1660. The Spanish didn’t officially cede the western half of Hispaniola to the French until 1697.”

  “I can see why Sam Asamoa used the message drop to inform us of this at once, instead of waiting until his expedition is scheduled to return. But,” Jason continued, addressing Rutherford, “why the urgency? Admittedly, any evidence of Transhumanist activity is cause for concern. Still, you seem to be treating this like some kind of unique emergency.”

  “There’s one other matter.” Rutherford seemed to gather himself to repeat something he wished he had never heard. “In the course of following up the hints he had gotten, Asamoa stumbled onto wreckage on a mountainside in the Massif de la Selle in the southern peninsula of the island of Hispaniola where Haiti is located. Its condition, according to the expedition’s archaeologist, suggested that it had been there for about a century and a quarter. And it had no business in that era.” Rutherford paused again. “You’ll recall, from your last expedition, that the Transhumanists used their superior technology to temporally displace an aircar.”

  “Vividly. What are you saying? Have they done it again? The seventeenth century would certainly be no problem for them, considering that they could take one back to the fifth century B.C.”

  “Not exactly. This was a good deal larger.” Rutherford drew a deep breath. His gaze went to the sword in his display case—the sword that a French peasant girl had found behind the altar of the Church of Saint Catherine of Fierbois in 1429—as it often did when he needed to fortify himself with strength from sources beyond his own. “Now, you realize that neither Asamoa nor anyone on his team is an expert in such matters, which are irrelevant to their expedition’s original purpose. But he thinks the w
reckage is that of a small spaceship originating in our era.”

  “What?” Jason half shot up out of his chair before forcing his legs to lower him back down and his brain to stop swirling. “But that would have to be a colossal effort even for them. And what would be the point?”

  “We have no idea,” said Rutherford sadly. “We don’t even have a theory. It seems to have no relevance to the creation of one of their secret societies or cults—certainly none that would justify the staggering expense it must have entailed.”

  “All right. Now I see what the excitement is about. But I still don’t understand what you want me for. It doesn’t sound like you have the kind of precise target date we require for Special Ops missions.”

  “No, we don’t. And we need to ascertain one. I therefore want you to lead a research expedition, including Dr. Boyer, back to the late 1660s.”

  “Wait a minute, Kyle—!”

  “This, of course, will be subject to the standard conditions under which such expeditions have always operated, such as the use of TRDs with an automatic, preset activation time, so that you can remain long enough for a thorough investigation. And the usual prohibitions on out-of-period articles, including weapons, will naturally—”

  “Wait a minute! I thought we had an understanding, damn it! I don’t do this kind of thing anymore, now that I’m heading Special Ops. It’s no longer my job to—no offense, Dr. Boyer—try to keep parties of academics alive while they nose around in some of the most violent periods of Earth’s history.”

  “This will hardly be one of your typical academic expeditions, Jason. It will be specifically targeted on detecting Transhumanist activity. Indeed, you may find that you have an opportunity to abort the problem yourself before your return. You will have full discretion in this matter.”

  “But,” argued Jason, recalling the Observer Effect, “if we already know that this cult or secret society or whatever still existed in 1791—”