you have. Incidentally, one place you will not want to go is Belle Isle.” Rutherford caused the cursor to flash over the largest of the islands in the river. “It is, after all, where you found and destroyed the nanobots and apparently where the subsequent ones were also placed . . . and your earlier remarks about the Observer Effect were well taken.”
“Also,” Dabney added, “when you were there in April, 1865 it was pretty much abandoned. But for a good part of the war it served as a POW camp for captured Union enlisted men, while the officers went to Libby Prison in the city. At its height there had been a large tent city there with thousands of prisoners packed into it, although they were periodically shipped out. But by December 1864 the last of them had been gone for a couple of months.”
“Very well, then. Your displacement will occur tomorrow morning. I suggest you all get a good night’s sleep.”
“First, though,” said Jason, “according to my unvarying practice, I’m going to go to the lounge for a last drink or two or three. Everyone’s welcome to join me.”
“Mint juleps?” queried Mondrago.
“We’re going to Virginia, not South Carolina,” Dabney chided. “I suggest bourbon.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I still think that uniform suits you, somehow,” said Chantal Frey, who had pronounced Jason “dashing” looking on his last return from the past in Confederate garb.
“It must be the hat,” said Jason with a grin, as they entered the vast displacer dome. He had stuck an ostrich plume in his cream-colored stag hat, which Dabney had told him was a typical touch of vanity on the part of Confederate cavalry officers. He accompanied the grin with what he hoped was a properly raffish stroking of his new goatee. None of them had had time to grow anything like the truly astounding beards to be seen in some Confederate photographs, but Dabney had pronounced their facial hair adequately in-period.
They descended the steps that led down through the terraced concentric circles of control panels and assorted instrumentation to the displacer stage at the dome’s exact center, a featureless circular platform thirty feet in diameter. Another expedition had just returned. Jason recognized the fellow Service member who was their mission leader and called out a greeting. “How did it go, Huan?”
“Very well!” enthused the man dressed as an early seventh century Chinese court official with wide-sleeved knee-length turquoise robe and a purely ornamental soft fabric simulation of old-fashioned liang-tang armor. “Doctor Shuo, here, was able to conclusively establish the real facts about the founding of the T’ang dynasty—and, in particular, how Li Shih-min went about becoming the Emperor T’ai-tsung. And unless I miss my guess it’s going to set a cat among the academic pigeons.”
Jason lacked any large interest in whether the received story of how Li Shih-min had sent his father into retirement and assumed the throne was true or just an exercise in Confucian hypocrisy. But he made a politely affirmative-sounding response. He and the others continued on down to the stage, where Rutherford was waiting to dispense the traditional pre-displacement handshakes. Chantal also added her farewells.
“As usual,” she said ruefully, “I wish I could have been more help.”
“You’ve been a great help with general background,” Jason assured her. “Nobody expected you to have any specific information about this Transhumanist expedition, which seems to have originated from a date long after that of the one you spent time with.”
“I suppose not.” But she didn’t appear notably cheered.
“It seems unusually cold in here,” Nesbit remarked, rubbing his hands together.
“I ordered them to lower the temperature setting in the dome,” Rutherford explained. “I didn’t want the instantaneous transition to December in the northern hemisphere to be too much of a shock to your
“Also,” Dabney added, “when you were there in April, 1865 it was pretty much abandoned. But for a good part of the war it served as a POW camp for captured Union enlisted men, while the officers went to Libby Prison in the city. At its height there had been a large tent city there with thousands of prisoners packed into it, although they were periodically shipped out. But by December 1864 the last of them had been gone for a couple of months.”
“Very well, then. Your displacement will occur tomorrow morning. I suggest you all get a good night’s sleep.”
“First, though,” said Jason, “according to my unvarying practice, I’m going to go to the lounge for a last drink or two or three. Everyone’s welcome to join me.”
“Mint juleps?” queried Mondrago.
“We’re going to Virginia, not South Carolina,” Dabney chided. “I suggest bourbon.”
CHAPTER SEVEN
“I still think that uniform suits you, somehow,” said Chantal Frey, who had pronounced Jason “dashing” looking on his last return from the past in Confederate garb.
“It must be the hat,” said Jason with a grin, as they entered the vast displacer dome. He had stuck an ostrich plume in his cream-colored stag hat, which Dabney had told him was a typical touch of vanity on the part of Confederate cavalry officers. He accompanied the grin with what he hoped was a properly raffish stroking of his new goatee. None of them had had time to grow anything like the truly astounding beards to be seen in some Confederate photographs, but Dabney had pronounced their facial hair adequately in-period.
They descended the steps that led down through the terraced concentric circles of control panels and assorted instrumentation to the displacer stage at the dome’s exact center, a featureless circular platform thirty feet in diameter. Another expedition had just returned. Jason recognized the fellow Service member who was their mission leader and called out a greeting. “How did it go, Huan?”
“Very well!” enthused the man dressed as an early seventh century Chinese court official with wide-sleeved knee-length turquoise robe and a purely ornamental soft fabric simulation of old-fashioned liang-tang armor. “Doctor Shuo, here, was able to conclusively establish the real facts about the founding of the T’ang dynasty—and, in particular, how Li Shih-min went about becoming the Emperor T’ai-tsung. And unless I miss my guess it’s going to set a cat among the academic pigeons.”
Jason lacked any large interest in whether the received story of how Li Shih-min had sent his father into retirement and assumed the throne was true or just an exercise in Confucian hypocrisy. But he made a politely affirmative-sounding response. He and the others continued on down to the stage, where Rutherford was waiting to dispense the traditional pre-displacement handshakes. Chantal also added her farewells.
“As usual,” she said ruefully, “I wish I could have been more help.”
“You’ve been a great help with general background,” Jason assured her. “Nobody expected you to have any specific information about this Transhumanist expedition, which seems to have originated from a date long after that of the one you spent time with.”
“I suppose not.” But she didn’t appear notably cheered.
“It seems unusually cold in here,” Nesbit remarked, rubbing his hands together.
“I ordered them to lower the temperature setting in the dome,” Rutherford explained. “I didn’t want the instantaneous transition to December in the northern hemisphere to be too much of a shock to your
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