The Seed Time: Chapter One

The muffled oars whispered secrets to the river as the boat slipped downstream at dawn, returning Major John André to the safety of the Vulture.

Rinaldo’s back and arms ached. They’d already done the long pull to and from the British sloop once; yes, it had been hours earlier, and he’d killed some of the boring and uncomfortable wait with a nap while André and Benedict Arnold had their chat, but the shoulder muscles he’d strained fighting the current were screaming at him now. He tried imagining just how good it was going to feel when Pasha had him facedown and naked in their bed, kneading at every sore bit of him with enormous and clever hands, but it was a dream, another world, the imaginary future it should have been to the man rowing the boat. The muscle strain was pretty much real; the boat wasn’t, and neither was the Hudson, even though he could taste its spray on the wind and feel it splashing on board when George’s oar cut into the water at the wrong angle.

They must have put the chilly splashes into the program on purpose, along with the tedium and the uncooperative current, just to weed out those rookies who expected time travel to be a nonstop adventure, instead of painful, cold, and mostly dull. No wonder the Colquhoun brothers, who’d done the first leg of this horrible trip in real history, had balked at repeating it; no wonder it had been so easy to talk them (or their computerized avatars) out of the honor of influencing the outcome of the American Revolution. And here, provided with the bona fides required to pass as slightly more enthusiastic but equally gullible patriots, were George Merrill and Rinaldo Dickinson in their places.

Rinaldo stole a glance at his companion in misery and simulation. The stolid silence wasn’t really atypical, just good acting, but the unease underlying it was more worrying. George had enjoyed last summer’s time jump to observe Arnold and André planning the capture of West Point, even the long, silent, and perilous wait crouched in the frigid woods. He’d agreed readily enough to working on a sim, with only token growls about the concept of undertaking jumps outside of reality, and had even perked up a little when asked to create a script in which the participants took the Colquhouns’ place. And then the Time Travel Institute bigwigs had dragged the Frog into it, and George had shut down, drained of energy like a solar cell in a rainstorm. He’d argued a bit, unpersuaded by the reassurances of policy firmness, and then he’d put on a mask of passive indifference and cooperated, sort of. Rinaldo had ended up doing most of the work on the revised script himself, wondering whether he imagined George’s quiet scorn, and whether he would have preferred it to be loud and obvious.

They’d both trained as time jumpers (mostly on the job) with a sword-like precept hanging over their heads: don’t go changing history, or you’ll never leave it. Those who managed to divert the stream of time sufficiently to alter its course—which luckily turned out to be harder than it looked—were doomed never to come home again, or only if their side-current of chronology rejoined the main branch. And that was a big if. Time breaches were a jumper’s biggest fear.

Then came the Saut de Soi, a.k.a. the Frog, a device that not only allowed for jumps directly between points in the past without the intervention of a lab, but also was immune to time breaches. You could do whatever you wanted to history, and if you weren’t unlucky or stupid enough to actually die as a result, and no one stole your Frog, you were free to come home again and brag about your misuse. Of course if you did, you’d be prosecuted by the TTI, pay a substantial fine, and never jump legally again. But apparently there was nothing wrong with altering predestined events within a sim. In fact, the TTI seemed to be encouraging just that; it was research. It was also, Rinaldo speculated, a bone thrown to all the academic historians who’d been denied access to time travel devices over the years. They’d be breaking down the TTI’s doors to act out bits of grunt work and drudgery like this one. Oh, and probably more glamorous and less exhausting gigs as well, but if he liked to think of all these pretended-Frog time-tampering sims as fitness programs in disguise, no one had a better right. Stroke. Stroke. Ow.

Boom!

He ducked and swore at the cannon fire ahead of them: instinctive reaction, though he’d known it was coming. George, admirably in character, hissed out something eighteenth-century about the devil, and let his oars clatter against the gunwales. Joshua Hett Smith, their ostensible employer, had a second to reprimand him in a high-pitched voice before being cut short by another set of explosions: the shore battery at Teller’s Point firing on the Vulture, and then the ship responding. In real history, Arnold and André had watched this mini-battle at a distance from the window of Smith’s house, the Colquhouns’ sloth having kept André from returning to the ship and being caught in the crossfire. If this were an actual time jump, George and Rinaldo would have another agent on shore, interfering with the spirited defense of the American post by its commander, Colonel Livingston, who regarded the Vulture’s presence as a personal insult. Rinaldo had tried to provoke some discussion on the matter, but George had merely shrugged. It wasn’t as if they’d get hurt if the boat took a direct hit; the sim would just fail, and George didn’t care either way, or preferred failure. Rinaldo had decided to take his chances. He’d been under fire plenty of times before, and not with make-believe guns either.

There was no sense being too gung-ho, though; he let his oars still, and glanced up for orders. Smith urged them onwards with a quick gesture, looking terrified. Rinaldo nodded, but couldn’t help turning his eyes toward the other man in the boat for confirmation.

John André’s mouth quirked, and Rinaldo began to row again as if in direct response. André turned away, looking back over his shoulder up-river, toward the dark meeting place and the American traitor they’d left behind in safety. In this manufactured reality, the British might take West Point; might capture General Washington himself. Of course a hundred things could still get in the way of that triumph. Rinaldo had met Benedict Arnold on that jump last summer, and didn’t think much of his powers of dissimulation. His wife, Peggy, was the cool one in a crisis, acting hysteria without feeling it, distracting and wily. And John André was chillier yet. With the hiss and crash of battle just ahead, he was gazing at the river as though composing poetry in his head. He would have made a good time jumper; he made a pretty decent spy, too. But if he were caught now, he wouldn’t die for it. The incriminating papers that had doomed him in real history were still at Smith’s house, he was wearing his uniform under the cloak, and he wasn’t tramping behind American lines seeking sanctuary and not finding it.

No me pongan en lo oscuro a morir como un traidor,Rinaldo’s brain quoted at him: José Marti’s poetry, a Christmas gift from Pasha. But André—the real André—wasn’t a traitor, nor destined for death in the shadows. Yo soy bueno, y como bueno
moriré de cara al sol.He haddied like a good thing; if not facing the sun (Rinaldo hadn’t been there to observe its angle) then full in its light, talking himself into being brave, his hands steady and his voice calm. An easy man to admire, to regret, or to lust after, if not Rinaldo’s type physically. They’d done a good job with the sim, anyway. The mouth-twitch repeated itself as sim-André turned back: pretty much identical to the last, but characteristic and circumstantially appropriate. How dull is this warfare in which I am immersed; how ridiculous and yet strangely glorious my part in it.He might get to seize that glory now: a tempting new world.

A time display appeared in the corner of Rinaldo’s vision: countdown clock, showing forty-five minutes left to finish the mission. They’d trimmed the system inputs down as low as they could; this sort of distracting reminder was one of the reasons George hated sims. He speeded the rhythm of his rowing, and Rinaldo kept pace. The Vulturewould pull its anchor up soon and retreat; they’d need to hurry or else face even more rowing. In fact…

Rinaldo blinked in a coded series, allowed to designers, that let them skip parts of the sim, and at the next stroke of the oars he checked over his shoulder and found the sloop twenty meters ahead, relatively intact and preparing to make sail. George scowled at him; Smith and André had naturally noticed nothing. Teller’s Point had stopped firing. The clock showed five minutes remaining.

They skimmed up to the side of the Vultureforty seconds later, and André shook hands all around, grasped the rope lowered to him and, booted feet assisting, let himself be hauled onboard.

That was it; they’d done it. Whatever changes to American history theoretically resulted were up to the scholars now; situational analysis and modeling were not Rinaldo’s specialties. Just thank God he didn’t have to row all the way back.

Waiting for the sim to end, he pushed off with an oar from the Vulture’s planks, gaining a view of activities on the deck: some muscular sailors doing seamanlike things, an officer giving orders, and André disappearing down a hatch. Rinaldo turned to George to say something conclusive if inane, but George wasn’t looking at him. He was staring at the sloop, frozen in apparent shock; then he mouthed “What the hell?” and dug his oars into the water. They hit the side with a bang, and George grabbed the rope and pulled himself up, Smith’s loud objections and Rinaldo’s silent ones echoing in his wake.

Rinaldo froze for a moment, and then followed; there was really nothing else he could do. He spotted George amidships, engaging two sailors in urgent conversation, grasping them both by the arms and generally acting as though they were long-lost brothers. They clearly weren’t; both of them had dark skin and African features, the antithesis of George’s paleness. Both seemed taken aback by his friendly overtures, but they didn’t shrug them off, and were answering whatever wild inquiries he was making.

Curiosity lost out to technology; as Rinaldo escaped a naval lieutenant’s challenge and strode across the deck, the sim wavered and fled. He almost expected to plunge into the cold Hudson, but instead he woke strapped into a molded chair inside the familiar humming walls of the time machine they all knew familiarly as Tim.

He turned to George. “What the fuck was that?” he demanded.

* * * * *

9 April 2176

He didn’t get an answer to the question until they’d finished the paperwork, vacated the TTI, and adjourned to Rinaldo’s apartment. Pasha was still at the office, leaving a space void of large affectionate Russian.

“So tell me what that was about,” Rinaldo said, plunking down a Manhattan in front of George. The referent was way downriver, but it was a drink he could mix without thinking much, thanks to the extensive research for Pasha’s 1950s jump last year. And it was after four in the afternoon, even if you didn’t count all the hours they’d spent in revolutionary pretense.

George seemed to consider playing innocent, and then sighed, took a swig of the cocktail, and said, “Didn’t you recognize him?”

“Which him? And no, I haven’t paid thatmuch attention to the sim files.” Presumably the two sailors George had accosted were actual members of the Vulture’s crew; the program did the best job it could with authenticity. “Though of course you don’t usually find portraits of ordinary seamen, especially ones who are ex-slaves or whatever—”

George put up a hand. “Wait. Okay. We saw different people.”

“Which isn’t supposed to happen.” Rinaldo waited till George had braced himself with another gulp of bourbon and vermouth. “You planning to tell me who you did see?”

“A couple of old friends,” George said in the dry tone that meant ha, not really.Which was at odds with his behavior aboard the sloop. Friends, but not friends. Or friends he’d been happy to see, but wasn’t so happy to think about afterwards.

“You can be as cryptic as you want, but I’m not going to guess,” Rinaldo began, but his brain had other ideas. “Oh, fuck,” he added as realization hit.

“Wilfrid Dijkman,” George confirmed—an interesting choice from among the man’s many names—“in the flesh. Except not.”

“Not in a sim, no. Besides, isn’t he dead?”

“Insofar as that means anything with him, yes. So, for that matter, is Lord Richard Halsey.”

“Your other friend.” George nodded. “Though at least he was born in the eighteenth century,” Rinaldo noted. Halsey had been an antagonist and then a deeply admired colleague to George over the course of two jumps, both of which he’d related to Rinaldo in sketchy but telling narrative. It was Rinaldo’s private opinion that George had a huge crush on Halsey, but he knew better than to express that out loud even as a joke.

“I’ve never met Halsey,” he said; it came out a little wistful. “I mean,” he went on as George lifted an eyebrow, “unlike… Wilfrid, I wouldn’t have recognized him. And yet the program still disguised him.”

“I’m not sure it was the program.”

“Mm. Especially since the two of them weren’t aboard the Vulturein real history. I did lookat the crew lists; the names would have jumped out. They could have been more secret emissaries, I guess. Friends of André?”

“They weren’t really there,” George said. “I was probably hallucinating.” He swallowed down the rest of his drink, scowled at Rinaldo, and added, “You think I was.”

Rinaldo didn’t contradict him, just got up and fixed a drink for himself, not bothering with the vermouth. He splashed bourbon in George’s glass too, and sat down again.

“So what did the hallucinations say to you?” he asked. George scowled again. “I’m on your side, okay?” Rinaldo said. “And something weird was going on there. Something the program—or Tim—was cooperating with. If you’d rushed up to a couple of African-descended sailors in what passes for real life in a sim, they’d have been more likely to pretend subservience than look… not exactly welcoming, but—”

“ ‘Welcoming’ really wasn’t the word, no. Nor was ‘surprised.’ ”

“So you were expected?”

“Which makes it more likely to be a hallucination.”

Rinaldo shrugged. “It’s more fun if it’s your superpowers coming out to play.”

George had stopped arguing with the phraseology, but the flippancy still bothered him, which was why Rinaldo kept it up. They told the clients George had “extensive experience” and referred to it in meetings as “an excellent rapport with the Frog,” but it was really a lot creepier than that. The late Wilfrid Dijkman—or Will Makepeace, or Emmanuel Friedman, or the Captain Mirich whom Rinaldo had met very briefly, or a dozen other pseudonyms having to do with peace—hadn’t left much behind, but one legacy was the miniaturized technology that, absorbed into his body, had allowed him to time-jump without Frogs or machines like Tim. Well, the little “tadpoles” themselves were gone—should never have existed in the first place, since their creation was part of a headache-inducing paradox—but George had been given an infusion of Wilfrid’s blood, later flushed out of his veins when his immune system rejected it. Something of it lingered, however. He couldn’t make unassisted jumps, but he retained an ability to sense objects in time and an instinct for getting safely to the place in which he needed to be.

Except for the place where he accepted that, inadvertently or not, he was kind of special. Mostly because he insisted on believing that having superpowers meant deservingsuperpowers.

“A long time ago,” George said finally, after staring at his glass for a while, “I asked Olivia to define ‘real’ for me. How she knew I was real. She said it had to do with responses that were unpredictable but had… a human logic to them.”

“You asked her if she thought you were real?And she married you anyway?”

George brushed this aside. “What Will said to me was predictable. Mostly. Cold splashes out of my own river of guilt about the stupid sim.”

“Irony, thy name is Hudson. You mean the ‘we’re making too many channels’ routine?”

“That, times about twenty, because now we’re teaching people how to map out new streams of time, instead of them happening by accident. I realize you didn’t really know him, but imagine Will’s reaction to saving John André from the gallows. If we’d tried it in real life, he would have managed to intervene somehow. He would have felt he had to.”

“We wouldn’t have done it in real life. Bad enough rowing a sim-boat that long.”

“But somebody else would. Somebody else will. You know that. And I think this is what Will meant when he said we were at flood tide.”

“Okay. Setting aside… anti-estuarial crusades for the moment—what did Halsey say?”

“We didn’t have much time for conversation, after Will was done thrashing me… well, he wasn’t done, but Halsey took advantage of a drawn breath and blustered in, full supercilious mode, the way he gets when he’s nervous and doesn’t want to show it”—yes, definitely a serious crush—“and said, ‘How long has it been, George?’ Impossible question to answer, of course. And then he said, ‘Now is the seed time.’ I already looked it up,” George added as Rinaldo made ready to consult the net. “Either it’s the first line of a hymn by John Greenleaf Whittier, which sounds unlikely as well as anachronistic, or it’s Thomas Paine, from Common Sense. ‘Now is the seed time of continental union, faith and honor.’ ”

“Is that any more likely?”

“Well, Halsey could have read it. I could have read it, too, though I don’t think I ever did with a dose of Anamnex in my system.”

George’s memory was pretty good even without enhancement drugs, but Rinaldo agreed that he’d be unlikely to recall one line out of a long essay. “Was that all?”

“After that he whistled ‘Yankee Doodle,’ and then Will… said something else, and then the sim ended.”

“And the something else was less predictable than the rest? You did say ‘mostly’,” he added when George frowned.

“Yeah, you could call it that.”

“So what—”

“It was a message,” George said, then drained his glass and stood up. “So I need to deliver it. Let’s go see Beatrice.”

* * * * *

The Constantine and Associates offices were still humming when they arrived. It felt like a literal hum, or else tinnitus resulting from aftereffects of bourbon. Rinaldo imagined he could distinguish, somewhere in the multi-throated harmony, Pasha’s rumbly bass, even though his lover was undoubtedly down in the jumpers’ room mapping out a mission to reestablish heirloom vegetable varieties. The company had been more or less following the unspoken policy of sending married jumpers on separate missions, not that he and Pasha were married, despite a few bass rumblings on the topic in recent months. But it did make for more lively dinner-table conversation, having different research projects.

Beatrice Rivas-Constantine, their CEO, had an office close to the lobby, and an open-door policy. The previous year, when she’d taken over leadership of the company from her husband, Charles Constantine, she’d hoped to leave open some more metaphorical doors as well, but the secrets seemed to persist. Rinaldo was in on some of them, more thanks to George than to Beatrice directly. There were still plenty of little pockets of festering mystery he didn’t have access to, and he didn’t want to probe them any more than he had wanted to assist in a frontline appendectomy in 1915. Sometimes these things just happened.

Open access, Beatrice-style, was a bit scary. She’d track your progress into the office and activate the door as you approached. Rinaldo sympathized with the urge to prepare for invasion, though he did occasionally imagine putting on an enormous wig or a uniform or a dress, some symbol of theatrical entrance. Hand it to Beatrice, though; she usually made you feel that she was applauding, even if sarcastically.

“Congratulations,” she said as they came in, making it a question. “I didn’t think we were scheduled to meet when you were finished.” What went wrong? Did the TTI fire you? Is the building in flames?

“Everything went fine for me,” Rinaldo said, handing the conversation over to George. “Hello, Janet,” he added. “Sorry to interrupt.”

Janet Lapinski gave him a little sideways smirk, but her attention was on George. Her presence was clearly making him uncomfortable; this was far from unprecedented, but the two of them had been a lot more chummy over the last year or so. She wasn’t exactly softer around the edges now that she had a caring partner and a son, but she’d been keeping the snapping and jabbing at George to a minimum, and was even known to describe his work positively, not to mention his cocktails.

George seemed to consider asking Beatrice to give them some privacy, and then to conclude that it wouldn’t do any good. He did gesture at the door, which Beatrice closed with an echoing wave; then she folded her hands and waited.

“I think I may be going crazy,” George said, apparently having decided to forego preliminaries or stage-setting, “but if I’m not… Wilfrid sends his greetings.”

Beatrice didn’t move; her hands tightened on each other just fractionally. “I take it you didn’t purposefully include him in the programming of your sim,” she said after a moment. George shook his head. “And yet…?”

“Well, it is kind of typical, you have to admit,” George said, “which is why… I mean, probably I didn’t—”

“You saw something,” Rinaldo interrupted before George could retreat into the hallucination theory, “you spoke to someone, and you need to explain to Beatrice what and who. In some semblance of organized narrative.”

He glanced at Janet, expecting to see an André-like raised eyebrow or a “took the words out of my mouth” grimace. She looked just as still and shocked as Beatrice. Of course she’d also spent time with Wilfrid. And George, and Olivia—all Rinaldo had been told was they’d been in Malaysia. Definitely one of the inflamed appendixes. But she’d be interested in this “message” as well.

And George was coming to it; Halsey was whistling, and Wilfrid was speaking again.

“ ‘My best to Beatrice,’ he said,” George stated with what was likely supposed to be disbelieving detachment. “ ‘Tell her I am successfully reporting back, and that she says Well done, thou good and faithful servant.’ I don’t think he meant you by she,but it was unclear.”

“No,” said Beatrice, with the same eerie quiet in her voice. “A different Her.” The capital letter was obvious. “Not my favorite parable, but that’s probably on purpose. And then?”

“That was it. The sim ended.”

She sat still and thoughtful for another moment, and then added, “Well. Interesting.”

This seemed to be all she intended to say. Rinaldo decided to prod. “So you don’t think George is crazy?”

Beatrice smiled. “No, just… talented, as the parable might have it. You’re asking whether I think it’s a genuine message from beyond the grave.”

“If anyone could manage it—” George began.

“I don’t think you’ve become a medium, dear. Or, God forbid, a priest. Just a technological conduit. You didn’t have the Frog with you?”

“Only in spirit,” George said, with a caustic edge.

“Well, Wilfrid did make a journey in Tim once. Long before he knew he’d be trying to get my attention in that particular way, but time is unconventional where he’s concerned. As are the pathways of information. And witticism. I wish I could believe he was sending an I-told-you-so from heaven, because for one thing it would be theologically fascinating, but it certainly wouldn’t be our main concern even so. Janet? Anything to add?”

Janet looked up, startled. “From the perspective of the Coordinator for North America East?” she said.

“If you like,” said Beatrice.

“Then let’s put Wilfrid aside for the moment, and ask two other questions. What was Captain Halsey doing there, and why were the two of them disguised by the program? Because even if Rinaldo was inclined toward hysterical overreaction, it wouldn’t have mattered in a sim that was successful and nearly completed. So why did he see different people? And is there any reason he saw those particular people?”

George sighed heavily. “Aside from the obvious—”

Beatrice broke in. “I don’t believe your family situation is relevant… no,” she went on, holding up a hand against George’s protest, “listen. Wilfrid is unlikely to have predicted your brother’s difficulties, and would hardly remind you if he had. The two sailors may simply have been conveniently unoccupied at that moment.”

“Accidents like that don’t happen in a sim,” George insisted. “I think this is a case where skin color matters.”

“I have to agree,” Janet said. “Not, however, because it allows George to bask in associative guilt. It’s possible that Will was trying to draw your attention to those men on purpose. Who were they?”

“I don’t know, but we can find out,” Rinaldo said, and lifted his hand for net access. He sorted through files. “Just as I thought, there aren’t any portraits, but… here’s the crew list. It does have notes on race. Two able seamen from the West Indies, both named Smith, with the Royal Navy since well before the war, and then Cuffee Doyle and Achilles Obara, ordinary seamen, came aboard a different vessel in Norfolk in late seventeen seventy-five as landsmen, later transferred to the Vulture. Obara is described as having a scar from a whip across his left cheek and forehead. I’m afraid I saw that.” He turned to George. “The one standing on your right, if you need to know.”

George sighed. “That would be Will. So Doyle was Halsey. Not that it matters, except he’d be annoyed to be disguised as less than an able seaman. Is there some significance to Norfolk in seventy-five?”

“Well, the British held it temporarily,” Janet said, “and Virginia’s governor, Lord Dunmore, invited slaves of rebel owners to escape and join them. But you know who could do the research easily—”

“Is it really that important?” George interrupted. “Specifically who they were and how they got there, I mean. To answer Janet’s other question,” he went on without allowing anyone to reply, “I wonder if Halsey really was present. Not on the Vulturenecessarily, but in America. He was about to go back into the Navy last I saw him, to fight us rebels. And Beatrice, you told me something last year that Will said, about being in the Atlantic with Halsey—”

“He said it gave him rheumatism.”

“And I was surprised, because all we knew about was his involvement in Halsey’s spying in Holland, but what if he tagged along on the American voyage too? I haven’t tried researching that part of Halsey’s life, but I could, keeping an eye out for a supernumerary with a peace-related surname.”

“Um,” Rinaldo said, and they all turned to him. “I got curious,” he went on. “I wasn’t going to tell George, because… but I was interested, so I looked him up. And I’m afraid to say that in September of seventeen eighty, when André met with Arnold, Richard Halsey had been dead for eight months. He was a casualty of the battle of Cape St. Vincent, between British and Spanish squadrons.” He swallowed. “I really am sorry, George.”

* * * * *

“He looked like he’d been hit amidships,” Rinaldo said, and then, pleased with his nautical metaphor, went on: “Hulled below the waterline. On a lee shore. Or off one. Whichever it is.”

Pasha frowned at him. “He did not expect Halsey to have died?”

“Well, yeah, eventually. We all get used to that. It’s always preferable to think they succumb at the age of ninety to a heart attack brought on by vigorous sex, but we all know better than that too. But Halsey was only in his forties. And… you know.”

“George was fond of him.”

“And inordinately pleased to have caught sight of him again, even as part of some unholy trickery courtesy of Tim and the more Frog-like part of George’s brain. Not to mention Wilfrid.”

“But you did not see either of them. You saw these black men.”

“Yes.” Rinaldo mused for a moment, then slid over on Pasha’s desk till he was close enough to kiss his forehead in a casual changing-the-subject way. “So how are the vegetables going?”

“I have found a good source for the Chernomor tomato seed. And the pretty fish peppers, but I believe I told you that. When you arrived I was digging for potatoes.” A charming grin, then: “Is this what you wish to know?”

Rinaldo gave him a shove. “You see right through me.”

“The parts of you that are transparent, yes.”

“Do you have any meetings with Andy coming up?”

“He is coordinator for scientific projects, and my project is scientific, so yes. Tomorrow morning, in fact. Do you wish me to ask him about these two sailors?”

“Beatrice didn’t exactly say no.” Pasha gave him a suspicious look. “We didn’t finish the discussion,” Rinaldo went on. “She said ‘I’ll think about it.’ And I’d guess she’s mostly going to think about Wilfrid. But it doesn’t do any harm to know who Doyle and Obara were, right? Could you maybe pretend that you came across them in your research?”

“Seeds are from nineteenth century. And American farmers. Not British Navy.”

“Then just ask him. He likes you.”

“Yes. Because I have removed from him your attention that was unwanted. Of an entirety.”

It didn’t take the question in Pasha’s voice or the furrowing of his black brows to tell Rinaldo he was upset. The mangled English syntax alone would have done. We do know each other well. Maybe too well.

“Sí,completamente.Whether you mean he didn’t want me or I no longer want him. But he’s… convenient, for this. All that genealogy.”

Whether it was related to Andy’s trip to South Carolina last year, or his on-again off-again romance with President yes-of-the-United-States-holy-shit Rose Franklin, Rinaldo didn’t know, but Andy had become fascinated with tracing his own ancestry, or in particular the African-descended branch of it. Rinaldo thought that was pretty restrictive, considering that Andy was descended from lots of people, some of them presumably just as gorgeous and personable as he was even if melanin-deprived, but he did kind of understand the impulse. Rose (Rinaldo could call her that, since he’d been introduced) was also gorgeous, if considerably older than Andy, and just as brown, though she counted Thomas Jefferson among her ancestors. But at least until she left office at the beginning of next year, she couldn’t really join organizations that advocated for African-American ascendancy. Especially not with the vehemence of some of Andy’s genealogy buddies.

And Pasha knew too much about politics to want to venture near people like that. Nor did he like going behind Beatrice’s back, after having raised the anger of the TTI’s Russian counterpart for doing the same in his homeland. But he was persuadable.

“I was in the Royal Navy once,” Rinaldo said. “Early nineteenth, a jump for my previous employer. It was supposed to be a short cruise before I deserted to Captain Tim, but there was this unexpected fifty-gun French ship… anyway, I’ve spent enough time before the mast to know it’s not pleasant. There’s vermin and tight quarters and nasty food and corporal punishment, not to mention climbing ridiculous heights in the freezing wind, or the chance of getting blasted apart by random cannonballs. Or worse, having to undergo what they called surgery.”

Pasha, who’d lived through several months of the siege of Leningrad among other horrors, nodded in empathy. Rinaldo continued: “And newbies aren’t always welcomed by the crew, plus I’m just swarthy enough to earn a lot of commentary on my mother’s sexual habits. Imagine what Doyle and Obara had to listen to. The British might have outlawed slavery aboard their ships, but you couldn’t say they weren’t racist. So add that to the general risk and discomfort—and I bet those two men still found it preferable to what their American masters had put them through. Royal Navy bosuns whipped everybody more or less equally, and on the back. Not across the face. And at least in name blacks were free men.” Rinaldo took a breath. “They hadnames. Janet said those surnames would have been chosen when they came on board. Slave owners wouldn’t have let them possess any.”

“This makes difficulties in tracing their journey,” Pasha noted.

“Difficulties, but not impossibilities. And Andy will know how. Or know someone who does.” Pasha was silent, so Rinaldo added, “No, I’ll ask him. It’s not fair to get you involved. Of course it’ll be too much like all those times I popped into his office for no important reason, back in the day—”

“Once again I am seeing through you,” Pasha interrupted. “But my complete failure of jealousy is not seen by you in return.”

“I wasn’t trying—”

“Were you not? Better to know you have woken my curiosity. I wish also to discover who were these men. I will ask Andy. But if he finds an answer, he will tell all of us, Beatrice and George and Janet as well.”

“That’s fair,” Rinaldo said, poking Pasha in the nose, “and what a good boy you are, too.”

“Careful boy. Dull. Not exciting.”

The ability to make self-deprecation arousing was one of Pasha’s many unfair gifts. It was past quitting time; Rinaldo had been to the eighteenth century and back today, at least in pretense. He’d almost been shot at, had nearly made George cry, and had found a new mystery to obsess over for a while. It should be time to go home and have some more cocktails and go to bed. His neck and shoulders ached; he remembered, back on the sim-Hudson, wanting nothing more than Pasha’s hands making him feel better. Distance equaled simplicity, and closeness complication; that didn’t make the yearning less true.

He nuzzled closer. “I should write up the official report,” he said. This was a routine disclaimer. Pasha waited for him to change his mind. “So I’ll do that, and you keep digging those potatoes,” Rinaldo finished. “Home in an hour?”

A little frown. “If that is what you wish.”

He wished to snap his fingers and close them off from the world behind screens, kissing madly, letting his lover bend him over the desk. They’d never done that, nor had they needed to. It wasn’t like they’d had an office romance. Instead, the whole Inner Circle had conspired to smuggle Pasha out of Russia; he’d been hired at Constantine and Associates because he was amply qualified and otherwise completely at sea; he’d moved into Rinaldo’s apartment because they were already in love and it was inevitable.

There hadn’t been much in the way of choice. Nor, of course, had there been the least disappointment. Pasha was easy to live with, easy to work with, easy to love.

“I’ve taken advantage of you enough already today,” Rinaldo said, trying for sexy promise and, he was afraid, succeeding only at moral judgment. He slid off the desk and bowed, kissing Pasha’s hand. “But I am, as always, grateful.”