Free Ghosts of Time by Steve White

twenty-first centuries, had been one of the urban areas practically destroyed during the convulsions attending the extirpation of the Transhuman Dispensation in the mid-to-late twenty-third century. There was a city of the same name here on this river in Jason’s time—quite a large city, and a crucial node of the conurbation that was the center of gravity of the twenty-fourth-century North American continent—but it bore essentially no resemblance to its historical ancestor. Thus it was that Dabney had been so motivated to secure a place in Pauline Da Cunha’s expedition, and so eager for a second look at what had been lost.
    But Jason had studied the historical reconstructions embodied in the virtual tours they had taken, and in the map his computer implant could provide. Now he compared those abstractions to the real thing.
    Richmond covered a series of hills rising from the curving bank of the river. To the left was a string of wooded islands and two railroad bridges, beyond which whitewater rapids could be glimpsed. Overlooking them on the northern shore was Gamble’s Hill, with its large cemetery. At its foot alongside the river was a series of large brick buildings from whose stacks smoke was already rising—the Tredegar Iron Works, whose output of artillery was one of the things that had enabled the Confederate States of America to keep up an unequal fight as long as it had. To its right, the riverfront was crowded with warehouses, tobacco factories, flour mills and other establishments. Behind them rose the slope of Council Chamber Hill, holding the better commercial and residential districts along Main Street and Franklin Street and crowned by the classical Capitol building designed by Thomas Jefferson in imitation of a Roman temple, currently the seat of the Confederate Congress as well as the state legislature. To the right the land fell away into a valley where Shockoe Creek flowed into the James. More modest residential areas covered the slopes of Church and Union hills beyond that, getting modest indeed near the mouth of Shockoe Creek. Visible to the extreme right was the suburb of Rocketts, location of the principal navy yard of a government that barely had a navy. Behind that, a hill was covered with scores of barracks-like buildings. Dabney pointed toward it.
    “Chimborazo Hospital,” he explained. “The largest military hospital in the world at this time. In fact, it’s quite an enterprise, growing food for the patients and selling the surplus, so successfully that at the end of the war the Confederate government will actually owe the hospital $300,000 in repayment of a loan.”
    “The hospital might have a little trouble collecting,” Mondrago remarked drily.
    As was Jason’s unvarying experience in past eras, a mélange of subtle, unfamiliar odors pervaded the air. Particularly unidentifiable—but far from unpleasant—was the one which he would later learn was leaf tobacco. A more prosaic one was the smoke of burning coal, some of which wafted eastward from the Tredegar foundries. Another source of it became visible as a train chugged very slowly across the bridge of the Richmond & Petersburg Railroad to their left.
    “It’s not moving much faster than we are,” Aiken commented, watching the train.
    Dabney chuckled. “It can’t. By this point in the war, these bridges had become so rickety from constant use and inadequate repairs that the trains had to crawl across them and trust to luck.” His voice took on what Jason thought was an unmistakable note of sadness. “It’s symptomatic. We’re going to be seeing a lot more symptoms of the Confederacy’s terminal illness.”
    They proceeded on across the bridge, passing over an island (“Mayo’s Island,” said Jason’s map) and encountering more and more military and civilian traffic. Mule-drawn wagons rumbled, and a file of black men in rough undyed homespun shuffled along under guard as they went south to work on entrenchments.