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As I mentioned, both she and the Union authorities did their best to obscure the facts about her. After the war, she simply vanishes from history. There are indications that she moved north, which certainly would have been prudent. But no one knows when or where she died.”
    Nesbit spoke up. “Nowhere in what you’ve told us is there anything about any connection between Mary Bowser and some secret organization of African-Americans in that period.”
    “No, nor is any such organization known to history. I was quite taken by surprise when we of Inspector Da Cunha’s expedition learned, if only in vague terms, of its existence.”
    “Sounds almost like the kind of things the Transhumanists are trying to fill the ‘blank spaces’ of human history with,” Logan remarked.
    “Except that, according to Rutherford, Pauline’s impression was that they were opposed to the Transhumanists.” Jason gave a dismissive gesture. “There’s no point in speculating on that until we have some hard data. For now, let’s concentrate on completing our orientation.”

    That orientation, and the rest of their preparation, was not as time-consuming as it would have been for earlier epochs, such as those Jason had recently visited. One example was the elimination from their bodies of forcibly-evolved microorganisms to which people before the twentieth and early twenty-first-century era of reckless antibiotics overuse had no immunity. It wasn’t as much of a problem as it had been when he had gone back into the Bronze and Iron Ages of ancient Greece. Since those eras, the microorganisms had had additional thousands of years of natural evolution. And as always, the subcutaneous implantation of their TRDs under the insides of their upper left arms was merely routine.
    But the orientation involved, among other things, the acquisition of mid-nineteenth-century American English—and, specifically, its Southern variant—by Nesbit, Logan and Aiken. They did so by direct neural induction, as Jason, Mondrago and Dabney already had. It was another area in which the Temporal Regulatory Authority had successfully argued for an exemption from the Human Integrity Act on the basis of sheer practicality. In this case, the language in question was sufficiently similar to twenty-fourth century Standard International English as almost to constitute a different dialect of the same tongue. This simplified the process, but was not altogether a good thing. They would have to constantly be careful not to let familiarity cause any of their own century’s neologisms and loan-words to slip into their speech.
    Of course the imposition of a language directly on the speech centers of the brain did not magically confer the ability to speak it like a native of the locality. Thus time travelers, wherever they happened to be, always claimed to be from somewhere else, so oddities and eccentricities of pronunciation were only to be expected. Fortunately, in this case they had a perfect opening, as Dabney explained to them.
    “At the time we will be arriving, there were. . . .” He trailed to a halt at the realization of the mixed tenses.
    “Everyone has problems like that when discussing time travel,” Jason assured him.
    “Thank you. At any rate, there were units from the Deep South in Lee’s army of Northern Virginia—specifically, in the cavalry.” He manipulated controls, and an organization chart appeared on the briefing room’s viewscreen.
    “As you can see, the Cavalry Corps, under the command of Major General Wade Hampton, consisted of three divisions, one of which was commanded by Brigadier General Wade Butler. Butler had two brigades, of which the one we are concerned with was led by Brigadier General Pierce Young.”
    Mondrago studied the chart. “I don’t see any numerical designations for these units.”
    “They had none; they were referred to as ‘Hampton’s Corps’ and ‘Butler’s Division’ and ‘Young’s Brigade,’” explained