Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  “Where I come from is none of your damned business!” she flared. She seemed to feel she had somehow lost ground by letting her hostility slip momentarily. “Now get out of here! We’ve got preparations to make. One of our crew has died of dysentery, and before we leave for Cow Island there are certain things we must do, and do ashore.”

  “Of course there are,” said Boyer, glimpsing an opening. “His duppy must be appeased lest it do harm to the living. But must you drive me away? After all, is it not a rule that all bad feelings must be suspended so that all can sing together with the dead?”

  It was a shot in the dark. Boyer’s knowledge of the Jamaican ceremony known as “The Nine Night” was based on accounts going back no further than the early twentieth century, when anthropologists and folklorists had first begun to record such things. But he knew the ceremony was one of great antiquity, with roots reaching back to Africa, and he dared hope that his knowledge might not be entirely irrelevant even in 1668. From the look on Zenobia’s face, he knew he had guessed right.

  “You have spent some time in Jamaica,” she said slowly. “Yes. This man was a hot-headed man, and his duppy could do a lot of mischief. Of course, since we’re about to leave for Cow Island we’re not going to have time to do all that is needful. But we’ll do as much of a Koo-min-ah as we can in the time we have tonight. The preparations are made.”

  “May I be of help?”

  “You’re not one of us,” she said suspiciously.

  “No. But we’re going to be part of the same fleet, and the duppy could work ill on all of us.”

  “Maybe.” She cocked her head and gave him a challenging smile. “Are you sure you want to? This isn’t going to be exactly like what you may have seen before. You see . . . those stories you say you’ve heard about me . . .”

  “I don’t believe everything I hear.”

  “Maybe sometimes you should.” She held his eyes with hers for a moment. “All right. Be here just after dark . . . if you dare.”

  * * *

  “Er . . . a ‘duppy’?” Jason Thanou wore a blank look.

  “Sometimes equated with a ‘ghost,’ but that’s not really correct,” Boyer explained. They sat in Jason’s room in the inn, which was barely large enough for the two of them, in the stifling late afternoon heat.

  “What’s the difference?” Jason asked.

  “The belief goes more or less like this, although there are many local variations: the duppy is that which gives a body the power to function as a living body. It is the most powerful part of a person, and it can work much evil. When a person is alive, the heart and the brain control him and he won’t abandon himself to this evil—or,” Boyer added with a grimace, “at least that’s the way it’s supposed to work. But some people have more powerful duppies than others. And when a person dies, the duppy no longer has anything to restrain it. It can do much harm if it is let loose among the living. So there are rituals—the Koo-min-ah—to force the duppy to stay in the grave.”

  “Hmm. And you’ve been invited to join in. At least you know what to expect.”

  “Not necessarily. I do know something of the ‘Nine Night’ ceremonies that were later common in Jamaica. But my information dates from centuries in this period’s future. And Zenobia admitted that our impending departure for Cow Island is forcing her to settle for an abbreviated version. And besides . . . she dropped some hints about those ‘stories’ concerning her, as though warning me to expect something out of the ordinary.”

  “So maybe you’ll get to see the basis of those stories.”

  “Maybe. But I couldn’t get anything out of her about her origin. She’s very reticent about that.”

  “Understandable.” Jason reflected a moment. “Has she given any indication that she knows you’re a time traveler?”

  “None. I’m not sure exactly what she thinks of me, or why she consented to let me participate in whatever is planned for tonight. I get the impression that she thinks of me as a kind of . . . potential convert.”

  “Why fight it?” Jason grinned. “She likes you.”

  * * *

  “You’re almost late,” snapped Zenobia irritably as Boyer came aboard.

  The tropical night had fallen with its usual suddenness, and the shapes of the crew were only dimly visible around him. There didn’t seem to be many of them. And . . . “I don’t see the body.”

  “Of course not. It’s already been taken ashore so the rest of us can meet it halfway.”

  Boyer mentally kicked himself for not recalling this aspect of the ritual. “But where are we going to meet it?”

  “We have a place west of the harbor-mouth, where nobody ever goes. Now come on! We’ve got almost a two-mile row.”

  They clambered over the side into a small boat which rocked alarmingly under the weight of a chest that had already been lowered into it. Boyer manned an oar, and with Zenobia sitting in the stern and steering they pushed off and rowed west by northwest. The dim lights and raucous sounds of Port Royal’s nocturnal revelry dwindled astern. Ahead was only blackness, although overhead were the myriad stars of Earth’s pre-electric-lighting night sky.

  Boyer wondered how Zenobia was going to locate a particular point on the shore in the dark. But after a long while, she began making purposeful course corrections. He glanced over his shoulder toward their destination and saw the tiny light of a torch dead ahead.

  They pulled up onto a narrow beach—not far, Boyer calculated, from the future site of the town of Portmore—where the torch was embedded in the sand, revealing the scuttling crabs emerging from the water. Another boat like theirs was already there, unattended. They tied up beside it and, with one man bearing the torch ahead of them and two others carrying the chest, they silently set out along a very rudimentary trail into the jungle. They soon came to a clearing and simply stopped. No one spoke.

  Boyer was aching in various places, and his hands were blistered from the unaccustomed labor of rowing. But he hardly noticed, for it was as though he had entered a dreamlike realm of unreality. He was a child of twenty-fourth-century Earth, where ancient ethnic and cultural identities were rapidly dissolving despite all self-conscious efforts to preserve them. Doubtless as a result of those efforts, he had been drawn to the study of his own Haitian origins. But realistically speaking, he had never felt any particular identification with them. He had, in fact, consciously resisted any such identification, which would almost have seemed a betrayal of the ideal of academic objectivity to which he had always subscribed. And still less had he felt any identification with the folkways of the Jamaicans, with whom he had nothing in common save remote African roots. But here, in this jungle clearing in the firefly-flashing darkness with the Blue Mountains to the northeast rearing up darkly against the blazing star-fields and these people around him awaiting the body in soundless stillness—or what somehow seemed that way despite the din of birdcalls and monkey-jabbering—he felt something within him he had never known was there.

  They had not long to wait. Soon—and afterwards Boyer suspected it was sooner than it seemed—a distant whisper of sound was heard, and the flicker of approaching torches could be seen. Someone had brought out additional torches from the chest, and now these were ignited.

  The sound became a hum, and then became singing, rising to a keening harmony. With Zenobia in the lead, they joined in the singing, to welcome the dead. And a line of men brought the dead man into the circle of torchlight, borne on a kind of hammock.

  Now, in the light of the torches, Boyer could see that a grave had already been dug, and that a very crude coffin lay beside it. He tried to follow along in the singing, whose words he could not comprehend.

  They laid the dead man down. He was wearing a shirt, and—unusually for a seaman of this era—a pair of crude socks. Boyer refrained asking Zenobia about that shirt, for there were no nanas, or old women of the village, available here to make it as was proper. But that, like so much else, might well be an accretion of la
ter times. And besides, this was no time to speak to Zenobia. By some silent transformation, she had ceased to be a she-pirate and become a high priestess.

  Some of the precautions for keeping the duppy in the grave were already more or less as he knew them, even this far back in time. This became apparent as various items were removed from the chest and used. The dead man’s nose, mouth, underarms and crotch area were rubbed with lime and nutmeg. After he was lowered into the coffin, a pillow stuffed with parched peas and corn—but not coffee beans, which were doubtless unavailable—was placed under his head. Then the socks and the cuffs of the shirt were nailed down. Zenobia stepped forward and spoke to the dead.

  “We nail you down hand and foot. You must stay there. If we want you we come and wake you.”

  A low chanting began in response. Boyer joined in. He suddenly felt more relaxed, and agreeable to whatever Zenobia might say. . . .

  With a sudden shock, he remembered reading of an implant the Transhumanists had used, causing the voice to emit a subsonic wave that reduced its hearers to docile acceptance. This, he was coldly certain, was what he was now experiencing. But it was only effective with those who were not aware it was being used on them. He grimly concentrated on retaining control of his own will.

  Now the coffin was closed and nailed shut. Bottles of rum were handed out. As they were opened, the first drink out of each was poured into the grave for the dead. Then more parched corn and peas were thrown in. Finally, the coffin was lowered in. As the rum was drunk, some of the men began to recount Anansi stories from Africa—the germ of the later “Uncle Remus” tales of the North American plantation states, although with somewhat different animals—because duppies were believed to find them entertaining.

  Zenobia turned to face her crew . . . and a low moan went up. Boyer could see why. In the dim light of the torches, her eyes now glowed with a fluorescent yellow-white light that was clearly supernatural.

  Clearly, at least, to anyone who doesn’t know about bionic eyes, and some of the features that can be built into them, thought Boyer, who now knew that Zenobia’s large, finely shaped black eyes were not her own. He wondered what other special capabilities, besides that of lighting up, they might possess. Infrared vision, perhaps, or microscopic or telescopic focusing . . . ?

  First the vocal implant, and now this. What else, I wonder? Clearly, this woman was a cyborg designed for one purpose: the founding of a cult of the sort the Transhumanist underground used to subvert history.

  So we keep coming back to the question of why they were chasing her, and why she was so desperate to keep away from them.

  Boyer had no chance for further reflection, because Zenobia began singing and he had to concentrate on resisting that which vibrated below the level of sound in her voice. The men also sang, in response to her, and as they did their bodies began to sway in a kind of dance in the flickering torchlight.

  “Ah Minnie wah oh, Ah Minnie wah oh!” crooned Zenobia.

  “Saykay ah brah ay,” responded the men.

  “Yekko tekko, yekko tekko, Yahm pahn sah ay!” Zenobia cried.

  “Ah yah yee-ai, Ah yah yee-ai, ah say oh,” the men replied.

  Zenobia put her splendid body through a violent dance movement and cried out again:

  “Yekko tekko, ah pah ahah ai!”

  And then the whole thing was repeated, the dance movements growing more furious with each repetition.

  Boyer did his best to follow along, with more success than he would have dreamed possible. Maybe it was that which underlay Zenobia’s voice. More likely, it was the fact that he knew much of this already, for the traditions of the Koo-min-ah evidently were very persistent across the centuries.

  But then, abruptly, Zenobia halted and fell down into a crouch, and as she did all motion and all sound instantly ceased. Then she raised her head, and the light in her artificial eyes was extinguished. When she stood up and spoke, her words were relatively matter-of-fact.

  “We have not been able to do everything we should for the duppy. We cannot remain here for the Nine Night. And we have no goat to sacrifice and drink its blood.” (Boyer was just as glad for that omission.) “But we have done all we could, and the duppy must go on to his rest and do the living no harm.” An affirmative-sounding murmur arose from the men. “And most of all, the duppy knows he must stay away from the demons. We all know this. And we all know that the living must avoid them as well.”

  The murmur of agreement rose a notch, almost to the level of frantic affirmation, and a shudder of fear and revulsion ran through the group.

  What’s this? thought Boyer, suddenly jolted out of his comfortable feeling of familiarity. There’s not supposed to be anything about “demons” in this kind of ritual.

  “Yes,” Zenobia continued, her words reinforced by the subsonic siren song of her vocal implant. “You all know that demons can do only ill. And I have taught you how to recognize them. They wear flesh—paler flesh than that of the white men—and they walk on two legs like men. But they are not men. Their flesh is a different flesh, not that of men, for they are of star-stuff. They are taller than men by two heads. Their hair is pale, and gleams of silver and gold. Their faces are long and thin and sharp and cruel—worse than those of the white men. And their ears are not as those of men. And their huge eyes are blue . . . but not like the blue eyes of some of the white men. No, they are blue throughout, with no whites, as though the blue has seeped out into the whites. All of this you know, for I have told you many times so you will recognize them for what they are if you ever see them—and know them for the enemies of man.”

  “We know, we know,” came a general murmur, like distant surf.

  This isn’t right, thought Boyer. What’s she talking about?

  But then the murmuring gradually subsided, and there was silence. The African magic had departed from the clearing. There were only ragged men in torchlight, and a fresh grave.

  “Let’s be going,” said Zenobia, her vocal implant no longer activated. “It’s a long row back.”

  * * *

  “Well,” breathed Jason after hearing Boyer’s description of Zenobia’s bionics. “Now we know how she dominates her crew.”

  “That, and the fact that she’s obviously a product of genetic upgrade,” added Mondrago. “She can probably beat most of them at arm wrestling!”

  Boyer struggled to stay awake. It had been well into the small hours by the time the boats had returned to Zenobia’s ship, after another row that had given him no opportunities to sound her out, and still later when he had made his way back to the inn and awakened Jason and Mondrago. Now it was almost dawn, and he was fending off the enveloping dark arms of exhaustion. But a thought shook loose.

  “There’s just one more thing. Almost everything about the ceremony was recognizably part of the origins of Jamaican folklore. But when it was over, Zenobia said some things that simply didn’t fit in. She started talking about some kind of demons that duppies have to be persuaded to have nothing to do with, and that the living should avoid and oppose at every turn. She even launched into a physical description of them so they’ll be easy to recognize. It was obvious that they had heard it from her many times before. She was just reinforcing it.”

  “A physical description?”

  “Yes. And it was like nothing I’ve ever heard of in any Jamaican legends.” Boyer repeated what Zenobia had said, as nearly as his fatigue-deadened brain could recall it. By the end, he was almost dozing off. “As I say, this really doesn’t mesh with . . .” His voice trailed off and he snapped back to alertness as he saw the haunted looks in his listeners’ faces.

  “Henri,” said Jason slowly, “you have just described a Teloi.”

  CHAPTER TEN

  “But the Teloi are all supposed to be dead!” bleated Irving Nesbit. “You said—”

  “I never said anything of the kind, Irving,” sighed Jason. Out of the corner of his eye he saw Mondrago glance first at Nesbit’s back, then over Ox
ford’s rail and down at the Caribbean waters, and finally at Jason with an urging, almost pleading look. He gave the Corsican a quelling glare and then turned back to Nesbit.

  “Let me explain it one more time, Irving. I said I was as sure that all the Teloi on Earth have died out a long time ago as I could be of anything that can’t be proved. I gave no guarantees.”

  “But I’ve heard the stories of your last two expeditions!”

  “Then you must have misconstrued them. Let me go over it again. In 1628 B.C. we discovered the truth behind the Greek myths and other similar bodies of legend: that a group of Teloi had established themselves on Earth a hundred thousand years ago, setting up shop as gods. They genetically engineered homo erectus into homo sapiens in the northeast African and southwest Asian region, to be their slaves and worshippers. We were able to permanently strand most of them—their older generation, the ones known then as the ‘Old Gods’ and remembered in the Greek legends as the Titans—in their private extradimensional ‘pocket universe’ by arranging for its only interface portal to be obliterated by the volcanic explosion of Santorini.” A shadow crossed Jason’s mind as he recalled the sacrifices that outcome had required. A human, Sidney Nagel, had given his life. So had Oannes, the last of the Nagommo, the amphibious race that had been the Teloi’s inveterate enemies. “We did it with the tacit cooperation of the Teloi’s own younger generation—the ones known at the time as the ‘New Gods.’ They were not trapped. They are remembered as the Olympian gods and also as various other pantheons across the Indo-European zone. But they had lost most of their self-repairing high-tech paraphernalia, and they belonged to the last Earth-born generation, whose life expectancy had declined greatly from the near-immortality of the earliest arrivals. In addition, they had become infertile. Essentially, they were running a bluff after that.