Pirates of the Timestream

by Steve White

  Nesbit looked slightly deflated. Jason had a feeling that his disappointment, and his fantasies, would vanish once he saw the seventeenth-century Caribbean at first hand. At least he devoutly hoped they would.

  * * *

  “I wish I could have been more help,” said Chantal Frey as they walked toward the displacer stage. “But Franco never said anything about any scheme resembling this one—and certainly nothing about temporally displacing a spacecraft!”

  “Which, given his propensity for boasting, suggests that this Transhumanist operation originates in his future . . . and perhaps our own,” said Rutherford, who was also accompanying them. His brow was furrowed with worry as he mulled over the implications.

  “You’ve been a lot of help,” Jason assured Chantal, “with general background information about Transhumanist organization and procedures and ways of thinking. You never know when that kind of thing is going is going to come in handy.”

  “I hope so.” She hesitated. “There was just one thing. It probably has nothing to do with this. But one time Franco said, while we were . . . well . . .”

  “Yes?” Jason prompted, helping her past her embarrassment.

  “He mentioned that he had left a message drop—they use the same technique as we do—letting his superiors uptime know about something he had learned from his Teloi allies. He didn’t say anything specific, you realize; he never did really trust me. But he was even more self-satisfied than usual about it. He bragged that it would cause the Transhumanist underground to make their biggest investment in time travel yet, and that he would be remembered as the Transhuman Movement’s greatest hero. He went on like that a lot, you know.” All at once, her face took on an expression not at all like its usual shy diffidence. “Give them one in the eye for me, will you?”

  “At every opportunity,” Jason promised her.

  The six members of the expedition received the traditional handshake from Rutherford and stepped up onto the stage. Nesbit spoiled the solemnity of the moment by tripping over his musket and almost falling on his face. Jason gave Mondrago and Da Cunha a stern look, and they kept their features expressionless. Then Rutherford and Chantal turned away, and the displacer began to power up.

  “Hey, Chantal,” Jason called out, remembering his last retrieval, “do you think I look ‘dashing’ in this getup?”

  She turned and gave him a cool once-over. “I think the word I’d use is ‘piratical.’”

  “Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum!” he intoned.

  Her smile was the last thing he saw before the indescribable dissolution of reality that was temporal displacement took him.

  CHAPTER SIX

  For an experienced hand like Jason, the disorientation of temporal displacement only lasted a few moments. But not even he had ever entirely gotten over it. No one ever did.

  An instant before, they had been standing on the displacer stage. Then the brightly lit dome, with its concentric tiers of instrument consoles and its overhanging glassed-in control center, was no longer there. It had vanished like a dream, with no recollection of it having vanished and no sensation of time having passed. Sweat popped out on them, for the dry, conditioned air of the dome had abruptly been replaced by the moist warmth of a tropical dawn.

  They were standing on a narrow beach where the town of Harbour View would one day arise, and the rising sun was just peeking over the jungle close behind them, sending multitudes of land crabs scuttling away into the forest after their nighttime feeding. Before them to the west stretched one of the most magnificent natural harbors in the world, the sun just beginning to glisten on its wavelets.

  To their right, the beach curved away, stretching into the semi-darkness, with mountains dimly outlined in the far distance. On that northern shore, Grenfell had explained, a camp would be established in 1692 for refugees from Port Royal after that town’s destruction by an earthquake—or by the hand of God, according to contemporary clergymen, as a punishment for its wickedness. From that camp would grow the city of Kingston. Now only thick jungle fringed the shore, although Grenfell had mentioned that there were ever-growing sugar plantations further inland on the alluvial plains. Those hellish plantations acted as breeding grounds for pirates, as indentured servants and slaves, surfeited with the brutality of their lives, ran away to Port Royal.

  To the left, the curving beach merged with the base of the long, narrow peninsula known as the Palisadoes, which enclosed the harbor to the south. At its far western end was Port Royal.

  “All right,” said Jason after all of them—even Nesbit—had recovered their equilibrium. “Let’s get going. It’s about eight miles along the Palisadoes, and we’ll want to cover as much of that as possible before it gets too hot. Even in late December it can get into the upper eighties.”

  As they walked, they all began to understand his impatience. The temperature rose rapidly, and even the sea-breeze that sprung up around ten o’clock did little to relieve the discomfort. With the heat came the insects. The clouds of malarial mosquitoes grew less as they proceeded along the Palisadoes and left the jungle behind, but the sandflies increased. Jason had tried, without success, to talk Rutherford into letting them bring insect repellant in containers disguised as in-period canteens.

  “Was it really necessary for us to arrive so far from Port Royal, Commander?” whined Nesbit as he trudged along, wiping sweat from his brow and attempting to shoo away insects. He sounded as though romantic high adventure was already starting to pall.

  “It’s because of the paramount importance of not having any of the locals see us pop into existence out of thin air, Irving,” said Jason with a painstaking care that would have been insulting had Nesbit been discerning enough to recognize it as such. “That’s why we always pick an out-of-the-way location, and time it for dawn. Actually, that timing is a compromise; we’d prefer the middle of the night, but for some reason transition in complete darkness has proven to have undesirable psychological effects.”

  Mondrago, who had never ceased to marvel at past ages’ rudimentary notions of security, seemed to have a sudden thought. “I understand why we couldn’t simply materialize in Port Royal. But are we really going to be able to just walk into it?”

  Grenfell answered that one. “I think you’ll find that no one pays much attention to the landward approach. All of Port Royal’s connections with the rest of the island are by boat.” He gestured at the cactus-fringed path—there was nothing really describable as a “trail”—they had been following along the Palisadoes, with the water visible on both sides. “No one comes this way.”

  “They’ve got better sense,” grumbled Da Cunha in the steadily rising heat.

  More people were in evidence as they approached the town, but it was obvious that all the fortifications—most notably the massive Fort Charles at the entrance to the harbor—were oriented toward the sea. Mingling inconspicuously with the crowds, they entered the sweaty bustle of what would have been instantly recognizable in any era as a boom town.

  It was only early afternoon, but as they passed through the packed, raucous streets it was clear that the drinking establishments were already doing a healthy business, and had been for a while. And there were a lot of them. Jason commented on it to Grenfell, who chuckled.

  “By actual count, there was one grog shop for every ten residents—although it was hard to keep track of the residents, as more and more of them were coming in all the time. Right now, the population is probably between sixty-five hundred and eight thousand, depending on which estimate you accept. This had become the largest English-speaking city in the Western Hemisphere, as well as the richest—by far the richest and, by general consensus, the wickedest.” Grenfell seemed about to say more, but three men came staggering out of a tavern in front of them, dressed much as themselves but even dirtier and—Jason felt he could claim without fear of successful contradiction—uglier. The one who seemed to be the leader glared about him with his one eye—a patch covered the other eye
-hole—out of a face that was largely a pattern of scars. The trio did not exactly look like convivial drunks, and Jason led his followers carefully around them. The detour took them past an alley between the tavern and what seemed to be an inn. Another tavern patron had taken a woman dressed in a style of scanty and filthy gaudiness halfway down that alley before overcoming her patently bogus resistance and lifting her skirts. Jason had to drag Nesbit away lest he stand and stare, goggle-eyed, at what the two were doing. No one else on the street seemed to paying any particular attention. As they hastened past the inn, Jason had to do a quick sidestep to avoid a warm spatter as one of the inn’s guests urinated out his second-story window into the street. Nesbit wasn’t quite quick enough.

  They entered the dockside area, lined with huge warehouses and bristling with wharves, and walked along a cobblestoned street under the jutting bowsprits of dozens of ships. Here ship chandlers’ offices, sail lofts, carpentry stalls and other such establishments alternated with the ubiquitous grog shops, gaming houses and brothels. There were also meat markets where the slaughtering took place on the spot so that the customer could watch and be sure his purchase hadn’t spoiled in the tropical heat. The Bear Garden wasn’t in use yet, as it was too early in the day for the “sport” of bear baiting—which was just as well, as far as Jason was concerned. Outside it, some fun-loving types whose typical pirate garb was bedizened with soiled tatters of looted Spanish finery had smashed a hole in a wine cask, and laughing whores were dancing through the spraying gusher before putting their mouths to it.

  Further back from the waterfront could be heard the clip-clop of hooves, as six-horse teams pulled the carriages of the wealthy, well-dressed merchants. In that direction were houses, some as much as three or four stories high and many of them still under construction, interspersed with the remaining huts of the colony’s earlier years. Here also were the grocers and bakers, the goldsmiths and blacksmiths, and the few reputable inns, as was the stone cathedral that was the pride and joy of Port Royal’s respectable element. What was striking about it all was its English look. The houses were gambrel-roofed, and both they and the warehouses were stone and brick. Jason commented to Grenfell on it.

  Grenfell shook his head sadly. “The Spanish colonists had, by this time, evolved a relatively earthquake-proof style of low-slung architecture anchored to the Earth with thick, deeply-driven wooden posts. The English wouldn’t hear of it. They wanted to recreate England here in the tropics. All this massive construction is standing on a thirty- to sixty-foot layer of loose sand resting on coralline limestone and loose gravel. The great earthquake of June 7, 1692 and its accompanying tsunami will result in liquefaction of the sand and cause the entire northern part of the town—that’s where we’re standing now—to simply sink into the sea. Nearly half the population will be killed outright, and another two thousand of the homeless survivors will subsequently die of disease among the thousands of decomposing bodies.”

  Jason looked around him with new eyes. The solidity of Port Royal suddenly seemed an illusion. He had forgotten that only twenty-four years from now all of this was going to vanish into the sea with Atlantis-like thoroughness, providing clergymen as far away as Cotton Mather in Boston with material for sermons on the wages of sin.

  “For now, though, Port Royal seems to be going full bore,” he observed.

  It certainly was. They continued past warehouses stuffed with the island’s exports: animal skins, logwood, tortoiseshell, spices, dyes and the up-and-coming product: sugar. Other warehouses were receiving ironwork, clothing and assorted luxuries from England. Still others took in goods from elsewhere in the Caribbean for transshipment. All of the great buildings were beehives of activity, with slaves and indentured servants hauling on ropes to hoist the cargo up to large windows where other laborers grappled and pulled it inside. They passed merchants’ establishments where gold and jewelry brought back by buccaneers was being weighed on scales, which archaeologists centuries later would find to have been discreetly weighted in the merchants’ favor. Everywhere, money was changing hands—all sorts of money, from the floods of pirate plunder that flowed through Port Royal, including doubloons, piastres, golden moidores and especially Spanish pieces of eight.

  “They’ve recently declared pieces of eight to be legal tender here in Jamaica,” Grenfell remarked. “They practically had to, after Morgan’s sack of Portobello earlier this year, which brought in a haul of seventy-five thousand pounds, as compared to a total annual value of ten thousand pounds for the entire island’s sugar exports. Ordinary seamen each had sixty pounds or more to squander on rum and whores. That was what an average worker earned in three years!”

  “I’m beginning to see why this town is the way it is,” said Jason.

  “For now. But the sugar industry—including the production of rum—is the wave of the future. Henry Morgan himself understood this. In the end, he plowed his loot into his vast plantations and made far more money that way than he had ever pillaged. A remarkable man all around. At present, though, sugar cultivation is still getting started. The first shipment to England was only eight years ago, in 1660. But exports are now in the hundreds of tons. In a few years, they’ll outstrip plundering as a source of wealth.”

  “Which,” Boyer said tonelessly, “accounts for that.” He pointed ahead at a wharf where a line of bound blacks were being led down a gangplank under the watchful eyes of guards with short, vicious-looking whips. They had all thought they had adjusted to the aromas of a seventeenth-century port city. But the ship from which the blacks were emerging gave off a stench that almost bowled Jason over, accustomed though he was to the smells of earlier and less delicate ages. Nesbit scurried into concealment behind a large packing crate and was violently sick.

  Grenfell nodded. “Yes. Sugar is a crop that requires backbreaking work, especially when the plantations are just getting started and need to be cleared, degrubbed and dewormed even before the planting. At first, most of that work was done by white indentured servants or ‘buckras.’ These men lived a hellish life—packed into tiny shacks, subject to beatings and floggings for any reason or no reason—which between a third and a half of them did not survive. But at least in their case there was light at the end of the tunnel. Indentured servitude was for a fixed term, typically seven years. Slavery was forever. And by this time, the indentured servants are starting to be replaced by the African slaves who will form the basis of the future population. In just a few years, Jamaica will be importing fifteen hundred of them annually.”

  As they watched, one of the slaves stumbled and fell, dragging down the nearby ones to whom he was roped. One of the guards sprang forward and brought his whip down across a back already crisscrossed with welts and running with pus. The slave gasped with pain and staggered desperately to his feet to avoid more blows. The line resumed shuffling forward.

  Jason watched Boyer closely. They had all been warned to expect this, and cautioned that they must react—or appear to react—with the same indifference any other seventeenth-century pirates would have displayed. But such instructions were sometimes very difficult to follow. A mission leader always had to be alert to the possibility that emotions might grow too intense for some people when they came face to face with the various horrors of the human past, and stand ready to take whatever preventative action was necessary. But Boyer’s dark face remained carefully expressionless.

  “It’s easy to understand why slaves and indentured servants often ran away and became pirates,” Mondrago commented. “The planters must have just loved that!”

  “They were always complaining about it,” Grenfell nodded. “But not very loudly, even though they technically had the law on their side. They could never forget that the buccaneers were the only defense they had against the Spaniards. And besides, any slave-catcher who came aboard a pirate ship demanding the return of a runaway would have been pitched over the side to feed the sharks.”

  “Good enough for him,” Da Cunha o
pined coldly.

  “But a rotten thing to do to the sharks,” Mondrago added. Boyer continued to maintain a silence that Jason thought might be a little too tightly controlled.

  Nesbit rejoined them, wiping his chin, his complexion pale green. Jason motioned them onward, past the slave ship and its cargo of misery. They had gone a short way before a commotion—noisy even by the raucous standards of Port Royal—erupted from an alley to the left, a short distance ahead of them.

  A figure came running from the alley into the dockside area, with four men in pursuit.

  She was female but clearly no whore, and black but clearly no slave, for she wore garments similar to their own and had a brace of pistols thrust through her rope belt. Jason barely took all this in, so stunning was her appearance.

  She was tall even for Jason’s era, which made her towering for this one, and her body was that of a warrior goddess: slim-waisted, full-breasted and leanly muscular. She was ebon-dark, but her features suggested mixed race, for her lips were full without being thick and her nose had a narrow and slightly curved bridge, although the nostrils flared. It was a striking face, and one of the most beautiful Jason had ever seen.

  One of her pursuers sprinted ahead of the other three and was almost within reach of her. With a motion of almost invisible quickness she turned toward him, whipped off the broad-brimmed, feather-plumed hat that crowned her tightly curled black hair, and sent it spinning into the man’s face. It threw him off his stride, and as he tried to regain his balance her booted left foot shot out in a powerful kick that caught him between the legs. With a whistling shriek, he doubled over.

  “What a woman!” Mondrago gasped admiringly. Equally admiring, in its own way, was the laughter from the crowd that had already begun gathering to watch the fun. Evidently this sort of thing was considered a form of free public entertainment in the Port Royal waterfront district.