Independence Day Page 7

  “Clear.”

  A member of the flight crew came back, leaned over then yelled something into Avi’s ear. Avi nodded, staggered to his feet and looked at the rest of the team. He raised both hands, fingers extended, and stomped his boot. “Twenty minutes!”

  Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, 4 July 1776 A.D.

  Doc wasn’t there, and then he was there, but he’d sort of always been there. It was the best way to explain how he arrived, becoming part of his current time and place without fanfare or excitement among those around him; if there had been anyone around. He was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully he wouldn’t be here afterward, because it was hot, the city smelled of raw sewage, and he was standing right next to a steaming pile of horse manure.

  Welcome to the late eighteenth century.

  It was dark and abnormally quiet for the center of a major city, but Doc had to adjust that definition because this Philadelphia boasted only a little more than thirty thousand people. It’s entire population could fit in his current Philadelphia’s football stadium with plenty of room to spare. Surprisingly, that made it the most populous city in the country in 1776, bigger than number-two New York City, followed by third-place Boston. New York would pass Philadelphia in population in just a few years and never look back.

  Doc shook his head, as if the physical action could stop Edith’s download from consuming his thoughts. It was like the Internet, sucking him in and keeping him from the here and now and what needed to be done. A distraction full of information, some useful, much of it not, but always easier for him to divert to than reality.

  Doc looked about. He was in an alley between two buildings. He checked in either direction, trying to decide which way to go. There was a map of 1776 Philadelphia in the download, of course, but first he had to figure out where he was. One way looked as promising as the other.

  It is 1776 A.D. Edward Gibbons publishes The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (which several members of the Time Patrol have experienced first-hand); the British evacuate Boston; a Committee of Five is appointed to draft something called a Declaration of Independence (John Adams, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, Robert Livingston, and last, but not least, Roger Sherman, who would be the only person to sign all four state papers: the Continental Association, the Declaration, the Articles of Confederation, and the Constitution); the Liberty Bell rings (and it isn’t cracked); near the end of the year, King George makes a speech to Parliament and says all isn’t going as well as one would like in the war with the United States; the ‘far west’ frontier, where Native Americans and settlers are killing each other with unbridled savagery over land, is only a few hundred miles to the west, in exotic lands called Ohio and Kentucky; Lewis and Clark won’t traverse the continent for another three decades; Washington crosses the Delaware on Christmas with a gift for some Hessians.

  There were, of course, no street signs. No street lights. There were a few glimmers of light from windows here and there, but otherwise it was still, except for a dog barking in the distance. The download wasn’t very helpful in allowing Doc to locate himself, because all it gave was a scanned image of an old, original map that featured only the streets, the waterfront and notable buildings. Everything else was a blank, but at least the blank spots weren’t marked with ‘here there be monsters’ like those mostly-empty maps from the times Roland always seemed to go back to.

  Some things change; some don’t.

  Doc’s ruminations on maps and monsters was rudely interrupted as an arrow whizzed by, so close he swore he felt the feathers on the end of the shaft tickle his cheek. Doc dove forward, hit dirt, then rolled, automatically reaching for a pistol, which he didn’t have.

  He stayed low and looked left, then right. A figure was silhouetted by the slanted moonlight at one end, a short bow in hand, another arrow being nocked. Cloaked, hooded, walking forward, less than twenty meters from Doc and closing the distance.

  He realized the figure was a woman, by the contour and the way she walked. That was irrelevant because Doc knew he was a dead man. She might barely have missed at the longer distance, but at this range . . .

  “Wait!” Doc begged.

  But the woman kept coming, her face hidden by the overhang of the hood and the darkness. She drew the arrow. The bow arched.

  Doc scrambled to his feet, turning sideways to present a smaller target, Edith’s download courteously informed him it was a sign of weakness in dueling when someone who’d fired the first shot turned sideways, but at least they’d fired a shot and Doc had no weapon and—

  She walked right past Doc as if he weren’t there, to the other end of the alley, turned left, her bow and arrow at the ready and then was gone.

  She was hunting, Doc realized.

  And he wasn’t the prey.

  So who was?

  Monticello, VA, 4 July 1826

  Moms wasn’t there, and then she was there, but she’d sort of always been there. It was the best way to explain how she arrived, becoming part of her current time and place without fanfare or excitement among those around her. She was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully she wouldn’t be here afterward, although it was the most civilized place she’d time-traveled to.

  The fly in the ointment was the dying man.

  Moms wasn’t too surprised that Monticello looked much better in her time as a museum than now, while Thomas Jefferson was still here. In the room she was in, the South Piazza, there were papers scattered about, and clothes strewn on the floor. Boxes lay here and there, some covered, others overflowing with papers, and there were a wide variety of other objects from plants to unrecognizable implements. She saw a strange device with two pens attached together on a standing table and the download informed her it was a ‘polygraph’, a device by which Jefferson could write a letter and make a copy at the same time. The windows were streaked and it was difficult to see through into his cabinet-slash-bedroom.

  Peering in, she couldn’t imagine why he chose to sleep in that cubby between the cabinet and bedroom with a wall at the foot and head of the bed, and his body propped up, although Edith’s download informed her that sleeping half-sitting was common in this time. Still, it seemed like such a big man could afford a bigger bed. He lived in a house with a dome on it, for Pete’s sake.

  His ‘bed’ was actually part of the wall between the cabinet room and the bedroom on the far side. A strange arrangement, but the entire house was full of strange arrangements. Monticello was a hobby on which Jefferson had spent most of his life. It wasn’t done, and even if he lived longer, it would never be done. His mind was always moving, evolving, and thus his abode reflected that.

  Moms tugged at the corset into which she’d been forced. The heat was making her dizzy. The clothes of this age were too heavy and too tight, especially for July in Virginia.

  She could see only one other person in the bedroom with Jefferson and Moms didn’t need the download to know who it was: Sally Hemings. Technically, she was a seamstress, a slave, responsible for Jefferson’s wardrobe and the room in which he was currently dying.

  Hemings appeared Caucasian to Moms, with long, straight brown hair and light skin. A very attractive woman. The download let Moms know that wasn’t all there was to the physical qualities: she was also very likely his late wife’s half-sister, sharing a father in their bloodline and thus sharing a resemblance. Hemings was three-quarters European but that mattered nothing in this society.

  In 1772, Jefferson had married his third cousin, who was already a widow at the tender age of twenty-three. She bore him six children in ten years, although only one survived into adulthood.

  Moms shook her head. Six children in ten years. No wonder Jefferson’s wife died at the young age, even for this era, of thirty-three, in 1782. She’d left Jefferson with more than grief. She’d previously inherited her father’s holdings: 135 slaves, 11,000 acres and a lot of debt. The latter Jefferson carried all his life.

 
He also kept the slaves.

  While he was at his wife’s deathbed in 1782, just as Hemings was now at his, his wife made him promise that he would never marry again, as she could not bear having another woman raising her children (three were still alive). It was a promise he stuck to, even after two more died, and only their one daughter Martha remained.

  Jefferson didn’t look far to find someone to replace his wife in all other ways but the title, since Sally Hemings was one of the slaves he inherited.

  Collateral. Property. Slaves were as much property as Monticello.

  It made Moms queasy. The moral issue of slavery’s horror was such a given in her time that many failed to understand how people could easily tolerate terrible things when it was about money. Their value as human chattel made the people of this time forget that slaves were equal humans. That, and an elitism that would make a billionaire in the now blush. Then again, maybe not, as Moms considered those factories in China that had to install suicide nets while the workers churned out iPhones for pennies on the hour and companies raked in billions.

  Hemings stood with her back to Moms, so it was hard to tell what she was doing. Moms leaned forward, listening via the open transom above the door, as Jefferson spoke, his voice a ragged whisper.

  “Is it the Fourth?”

  “Yes, it is, sir,” Hemings said. She leaned over and tenderly wiped his brow with a folded cloth. Not like a nurse, or a slave, but a lover, a partner. Moms figured that suppressed under those emotions was the paradoxical hope that with her lover’s passing she would gain her freedom.

  Hemings put the cloth back in a bowl.

  “Is she here?” Jefferson asked.

  “No, sir.”

  Jefferson sighed. “Is he here?”

  “He is,” Hemings said. “He came up from the University earlier this morning. You had me send a rider, remember?”

  Jefferson’s hand twitched, dismissing her reminder. “Then it’s time.”

  Hemings’s head dipped for just a moment. “Are you certain?”

  Jefferson’s head was slumped back on a fluffed-up pillow, part of several on which his upper body reclined. He nodded.

  Still, Hemings hesitated. “He’s drunk.”

  A single finger movement by Jefferson dismissed her concern.

  It is 1826 A.D. The American Temperance Society is founded (an uphill battle they win a century later, and then lose again); the internal combustion engine is patented; the Greek town of Missiolonghi falls to the Ottomans, who massacre the inhabitants and display 3,000 severed heads on the walls; later that year, the Ottoman Sultan abolishes his Janissary Infantry Corps, decapitating those who surrender; American settlers in Texas make their first bid for independence from Mexico (it fails, and it will be ten more years until the Alamo); the HMS Beagle sets out on its first voyage of discovery; Julia Dent, future wife of U.S. Grant, is born.

  Hemmings stepped to the side, out of sight for a moment. Peeking around, Moms saw the slave had left the room. Jefferson was alone. His chest was rising and falling very slowly. What could be so important? A deathbed confession? Who had he sent for from the University? Who was the ‘she’ before the ‘he’?

  Moms took a deep breath, which was hard to do tied into the corset. The things women put up with in the name of fashion never failed to amaze her.

  Some things change; some don’t.

  Hemings came back into the bedroom. She gestured at someone following her. A slight, young man with black hair and deep-set dark eyes entered behind nervously her. Something about him was vaguely familiar.

  Jefferson turned his head, looking at the young man in his bedroom. “Did you read my letter?”

  The man nodded. “Yes, sir.”

  Moms was on her toes, trying to hear the words.

  “Will you do as I ask?”

  The man glanced at Hemings, then back at Jefferson. “Sir, I—” He paused, then regrouped. “I don’t understand what you are asking of me. I understand the words, but not the intent.”

  “You don’t need to understand the intent,” Jefferson said. “You are just to do as instructed.” His gaze shifted to Sally Hemings. “Get it.”

  She reached behind his pillow then pulled out a leather bag. She handed it to Jefferson. With shaking hands, he untied the strings, revealing an iron rod a quarter inch in diameter and eight inches long. There were brass knobs on both ends. The rod went through a number of thin wooden disks, two inches in diameter and a sixth of an inch thick. They slid along the rod as Jefferson cradled it in his hands.

  “There are twenty-six disks,” Jefferson said. “I have thirteen here. John Adams has the rest. Take this to him. He is the one who must complete the Cipher.”

  The young man reached out and took the incomplete Cipher. “What does the Cipher do?”

  “It leads to a document. One we all signed along with the Declaration.”

  “What does the document do?”

  “Everything, Mister Poe. It will change everything.”

  Poe? The download answered in the affirmative as soon as Moms considered it: in 1826, Edgar Allan Poe was a student at Jefferson’s newly-founded University of Virginia; its dome could be see from Monticello.

  Poe put the partial Cipher back in the leather bag. The download also quickly updated Moms on what it was: an invention of Thomas Jefferson, of course. He’d come up with it while serving as Washington’s Secretary of State. A complete Jefferson Cipher had twenty-six disks, with all the letters of the alphabet inscribed in a random order on the outer edge of each disc. One dialed up a message, a short one, of course, and then went one letter up and wrote down the message, which was then incomprehensible except for someone with the exact same cipher, who dialed up the message, then read the message one letter down on each disk. Someone might also have a key of twenty-six letters that unlocked the cipher.

  Ingenious.

  According to Edith’s download, Jefferson had never used it, which didn’t make much sense, but might now. Perhaps he’d been saving it all his life for one last message?

  Poe apparently, understood how the Cipher worked as he asked: “What is the key, sir?”

  “That is not for you, Mister Poe. Not for you,” Jefferson repeated, looking at Hemings.

  Neither Moms nor Poe missed the look.

  Hemings extended a hand toward the bedroom door through which they’d entered. “Time to go, sir.”

  Poe left the room.

  Moms didn’t like this at all. There was nothing in the download about Poe being here on Jefferson’s last day. Poe’s future was in the download: he would give up at the University of Virginia within the year, travel to Boston, then enlist in the Army. He’d serve as an enlisted man for two years, then enter West Point in 1830, where he wouldn’t last a year before being kicked out. Ivar had mentioned the Benny Havens-Poe connection he’d discovered in his mission to West Point during D-Day.

  It seemed there was more to Poe than history had recorded.

  Moms knew without consulting the download, that Thomas Jefferson established the United States Military Academy in 1802, a place which also happened to be Moms’s alma mater. How and why did Poe end up at the Academy?

  More importantly, there was nothing in the download about the Jefferson Cipher having any importance and certainly no connection between it and John Adams.

  What secret did Jefferson and Adams share? What secret document had also been signed by the signees of the Declaration? A document so secret, there wasn’t a hint of it in the download?

  Moms watched Hemings lean over, wiping Jefferson’s brow once more and made a decision. Moms exited the South Piazza then headed after Edgar Allan Poe.

  Gettysburg, 4 July 1863

  Roland wasn’t there, and then he was there, but he’d sort of always been there. Which was true in more ways than time travel, because he was on a battlefield, and it seemed to Roland he’d spent most of his life on a battlefield.

  It was the best way to explain how h
e arrived, becoming part of his current time and place without fanfare or excitement among those around him. Beyond the perplexing physics of traveling into a time bubble created by the Shadow without upsetting those in the immediate vicinity. The men littering the ground around him had more important things with which to concern themselves.

  Like dying.

  Roland was in the bubble of this day, not before, and hopefully he wouldn’t be here afterward, because if he was, it would mean there was a good chance he’d joined these men on their horrible journey into permanent darkness.

  There were, of course, given the nature of war in 1863, more dead than wounded, and Roland lay between two corpses, which he viewed as fortunate because they were field-expedient cover and concealment.

  Warriors made do with whatever was available.

  The night sky was overcast and as gray as the uniforms of the dead Confederate soldiers flanking him. The Third of July had just passed into the Fourth and these two bodies were a small part of the debris left behind from the ‘High Water Mark of the Confederacy’. It was downhill from here for the South strategically, but it would take another two years and hundreds of thousands of additional deaths before it was finally finished.

  I can make this march, and I will make Georgia howl!

  Roland blinked, the quote popping up unbidden, a footnote from Edith Frobish. But Roland had heard it before: William Tecumseh Sherman, before setting out toward the sea from Atlanta and introducing the South to total war; and that was still over a year away. Right now, this war was being fought on Union soil.

  But this field was the end of that.

  Lee would retreat south in less than a day and the noose from north and west would tighten around the Confederacy to end at a small place called Appomattox. That was how his timeline’s history had been recorded, and Roland had to protect the timeline above all else.