Macroscope

by Pierce Anthony

  “The owner is a rich merchant who is on the mainland this week negotiating a shipment of cedarwood,” she said. “And of course he is checking into the labors of his mainland slaves who make jewelry and statuettes of foreign gods.”

  “Strange — I have seen nothing like that around here.”

  “Oh, he has good craftsmen — but of course such baubles are for export only. Fine workmanship brings a better price, you see.”

  “Even for religious artifacts? I should think—”

  “Look,” she said. She got up gracefully and pulled aside a curtain. Behind was a voluptuous statuette of a female, with bulging stomach and ponderous breasts, flanked by two sphinxes. “Astarte,” she said. “I’ll show you how to milk her.”

  She fetched a cup of goat milk and poured it carefully into a hole in the goddess’s head. Then she took a brand from the main fire and touched it to the mossy kindling beneath the statue. The flame caught, warming the entire metal figure.

  Suddenly milk spouted from the nipples of the hanging breasts, to pour into a bowl held upon the goddess’s belly. Ivo stared, fascinated and a little repelled, though he realized there was nothing either magical or obscene about it.

  “The heat melts the wax plugs,” Aia explained. “The worshipers don’t know that, though. Great moneymaker, I understand.”

  “But to commercialize other people’s religion—”

  “Oh, he patronizes his own religion too, never fear. He pays graft to the temple and buys small boys for his pleasures. When he tires of one, he donates that lad to Melqart. He is considered extremely devout.”

  Ivo, his conscience eased, did not inquire into the matter further. This was as good a domicile to raid as any. “How long are we safe here?”

  “No more than a day. Tomorrow night we must leave the city, for they will surely be watching and nowhere in Tyre is there permanent security from the temple.”

  When the meal was done she took the lamp — a simple clay saucer, undecorated, with a single pinched beak for the wick — and showed him to the sleeping compartment, where soft pelts were piled upon straw. It looked delightful.

  Ivo flung himself down in the bed gratefully… but soon discovered that he had company. “Even the best of ships come into port at night,” she murmured.

  She had removed her cloak and other apparel and snuggled under the pelts beside him, close, and he learned that his original estimate of her physical properties had erred conservatively. She was scented with a heavy perfume he could not identify, apart from its effluence of sex appeal, and she was as lithe and sleek as a panther.

  Ivo was tired, but he had had a good afternoon’s sleep in the temple and was recovering nicely from his more recent wounds and exertions. Aia had taken good care of him, and the flesh injury of his left arm only hurt when he banged it. He felt, all in all, adequate to the occasion — except for one detail.

  “My ship docks elsewhere,” he said. Then, not wishing to hurt her feelings by too blunt a statement, he tried to explain: “I love another woman, and have no inclination to embrace any but her. I mean no offense to you.”

  “Your wife?” she asked alertly.

  “No.”

  “Your concubine.”

  “No.”

  “It is hard to see what she offers, then, that I do not. You have a very handsome ship, and I have a comfortable port. If we are to travel together—”

  “I love her. Don’t you understand?”

  She gazed speculatively at him, the lamplight flickering against the wall behind her head and touching her hair with reddish highlights. “What is her name?”

  What harm was there in the truth, here? “Afra,” he said, and felt a kind of relief in the confession. “Her name is Afra, and she doesn’t love me and I have no right to her, no right at all, but I love her.”

  “I loved a man once,” Aia said, “but he died. Then I saw how foolish it was to depend on such a thing. Love protects nothing, it only restricts pleasure. Take pleasure in me; she will not suffer.” A pause. “Or is she near?”

  “No. She is thousands of years away.”

  “Thousands of years!” It had been a slip, but he saw that it bothered her only momentarily, since of course she did not understand the connection. “By foot or by ship?”

  “By ship,” he said, no longer worrying about misunderstandings.

  “Then you will never possess her again.” She looked at him a moment more. “But how did you get here, so long a journey? You are still young.”

  “My gods are very powerful.”

  “Oh.” She pondered a little longer. “If the gods of the Canaanite had been stronger, I might have had my lover back.”

  “How so?” He was not particularly curious about her tragedy, but wanted to divert the conversation from both her immediately amorous intent and her queries about his travels.

  “I tried to follow the way of the gods, as Anat brought back Aliyan,” she said. “But it didn’t work.”

  “I am not familiar with those names.”

  “You must come from very far away,” she murmured. “I will tell you: El was the supreme god of the Canaanite: El the Bull, the Sun. His wife was Asherat-of-the-sea, mother-goddess. Together they begat Baal, god of the mountains, and of the storm and the rain.”

  “Very interesting,” Ivo remarked absently, wondering what he had let himself in for. “How does that relate to your—”

  “I’m telling you, lover-to-be. Baal’s son was Aliyan. The two of them entered into a struggle with Mot of the summer heat, who resides deep in the womb of the earth. They did not return, so Anat went in after them. She was Aliyan’s sister and his wife, of course.”

  “Of course.” What was a little incest, between gods? “All in the family.”

  “Yes. She found Aliyan’s body in the abode of the dead, and carried it to the height of Saphon and buried him there with many sacrifices. That’s what I did with my lover. I fixed him a very nice stone coffin—”

  “I understand.”

  She took the hint and returned to the mythological narrative. “Then Anat killed Mot, who had killed her husband. With a sickle she cut him, with a winnow she winnowed him; she scattered his flesh in the field, and he was dead.”

  “I’m sure he was.”

  “Then she brought Aliyan back to life and set him on Mot’s throne. And that was the way the seasons began again. When she killed Mot, that was the annual harvest, of course.”

  Live and learn! So it was all a variant of the seasonal mythology he had heard in other guises. “But you couldn’t bring your lover back to life?”

  “No. I tried, but the gods didn’t help. He just rotted. That’s one reason I don’t appreciate Melqart.”

  “I sympathize. He really should have done more for you.”

  “These things do pass,” she said philosophically. “I was denied my lover, and you are denied yours. Why don’t you pretend I am she, and I’ll pretend you are he whom I once loved. We shall have joy in one another, while both being true to our memories.”

  The suggestion, phrased this way, caught him by surprise, and he started to make an angry refusal — but changed his mind. He was not sure what Aia’s true motives were, or how cynical might be her intent, but her body was decidedly conducive and the notion had its peculiar appeal. He had faith that somehow he would return to Afra, for this was not his world — but it was not time or distance that separated him from her. Afra would never be his — not so long as she loved a dead man. Not so long as their joint mission required that he give up his identity to the ruthlessly clever Schön.

  Was he to torture himself by perpetual abstinence, knowing that his aspiration had no reasonable fulfillment? Why not settle for the unreasonable fulfillment, in that case? For what he could get?

  Why not?

  “All right,” he said.

  Aia helped him to remove his tunic, touching him with exciting intimacy in the process, and they came together amidst the furry upholstery, s
hock of flesh against flesh. His left arm gave one twinge and anesthetized itself.

  “Speak to me words of love,” she murmured, not yet quite acceding to the ultimate. “Tell me what you feel.”

  Oh, no! “I can’t, I never spoke love before.”

  “No wonder you never impressed her! Don’t you know that the whispered word moves a woman as no caress does? Hurry — I’m getting sleepy.”

  He considered the request, distracted somewhat by her breathing. She was, by touch, as well-endowed as the goddess Astarte, but much younger. “The only words I know that would not be stupid are not my own. They’re from a poem, Evening Song, by—” But what would she know of Sidney Lanier, unborn these many centuries?

  She was silent, so he went ahead with the poem. “Look off, dear love, across the sallow sands, / And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea. / How long they kiss in sight of all the lands. / Ah! longer, longer we.”

  He recited the two remaining stanzas, frustrated because they had neither rhyme nor meter in Phoenician, and waited for her reaction. There was none.

  She was asleep.

  She was up before him in the morning, trying on finery from the domicile’s stock. “None of these will do,” she said sadly, shaking her head. “Too obvious.”

  “Obvious?”

  “If I go into the street in one of these, every person in sight will stare.”

  She was not unduly pessimistic. She was, by daylight as by night, an extraordinarily lovely girl.

  “Did you have suitable pleasure in me last night?” she asked next, with what irony he could not be certain.

  “Well, I must admit I expected something else.”

  “Oh?”

  “You fell asleep.”

  “Oh, yes. I always do. That’s why I like a man to hold me.”

  Ivo tried to make something of this and failed. “While it certainly was stimulating holding you, I did find it a bit frustrating.”

  “How could that be?”

  “I had somehow thought we were going to make love.”

  She turned to face him, resplendent in a purple skirt that stopped at the waist, and nothing else. Hold a bowl to her midriff… he thought. “Didn’t you?”

  “I said you were asleep.”

  “Of course.”

  Ivo looked at her, disgruntled. “You mean you expected me to — to go ahead anyway?”

  “Certainly. As many times as you desired.”

  “Maybe next time,” he said, not clear whether he should feel angry or foolish.

  They spent the day feasting and resting, since there was no predicting how much of either exercise they would get for some time to come. Aia acquainted him, in snatches, with her own history: Brought to one of the violent Aramean states from her home in the Kingdom of Urartu — Urartu being the most civilized nation of the world, by her definition — because she was the daughter of a traveling trader. Upon maturity, she had undertaken a marriage to a prince of Sidon. “He was the one I loved,” she confided. “If Baal will not succor a prince, what good is he?” But she had never seen Sidon; his merchant ship had been waylaid by a galley from Tyre and taken captive, her betrothed killed resisting. Thus, a year ago, she had found herself here, hostage, in daily peril of being added to the temple staff as a ritual prostitute. Only the suggestion of wealthy family connections had saved her from that; a hostage used by Melqart lost value. But the truth was that her family had suffered reverses and was not wealthy, and momentarily the temple accountant would verify this and dissipate her subterfuge. “So you see, I have been waiting for a chance to escape — and now, with you, I have it.”

  Ivo perceived holes in her story, but did not challenge it. Undoubtedly her past was more mundane than she cared to admit. “How far is Urartu from here?”

  “Very far. But I don’t want to go there. The politics will have changed, and my family could not afford me now. I will go with you.”

  Ivo shrugged, appreciating her help but having no idea where to journey. First, however, they had to get off the island that was Tyre, hardly a mile in circumference; then he could make longer-range plans.

  They packed as much as could be concealed under heavy cloaks: breads, dried fish, small crocks of wine. The host-merchant had been too canny to leave anything really valuable in his house during his absence; there was no gold or jewelry. Ivo inquired about coins, and learned by her reaction that they had not yet been invented. Trade was largely by barter, with weighed metals increasing as a medium of exchange, but no standardization had occurred.

  At dusk Aia took him to the edge of the city, where the high wall balked their escape. Guards paced along the top of it, carrying dim lanterns. Ivo wondered how the open-dish lamps had been adapted for windy wet outdoor use, but they did not get close enough for him to observe. He would be satisfied just to know how they could get past the wall.

  The girl knew what she was doing, however. “The factories go through,” she whispered. “And no one watches inside at night.”

  Factories?

  She led him into a dark building. He had to hold on to her hand to keep from getting lost, as he could not see at all inside. But that was not his major concern of the moment. His nose was.

  The smell was appalling — a suffocating redolence of corruption unlike any he had encountered before. He tried to seal off his nostrils, but the thought of taking such putrefaction unfiltered into his lungs repelled him even more. “What — what?” he whispered.

  She laughed. “They can’t hear us here. Speak up.”

  “What died here? A flatulent whale?”

  “Oh, you mean the murex. It is a little strong, but that’s the price of industry.”

  So industry polluted the atmosphere in ancient days too! “What is it?”

  “The murex. The shellfish. Don’t you know how they process it?”

  “No.” He hoped they would soon be through the building and into clean air again.

  “That’s right. I forgot it’s a trade secret. Well, they gather the murex, break the shells, extract the fish and dump it in big vats. They let it rot there for some time, until the yellow forms. For the darker shades they have to put it in the sun. Then they filter it down and market it. It’s a big industry here; no one outside of the Seven Cities knows the secret. Here, I’ll find a shell for you.”

  She banged about in the dark, and in due course pressed an object into his hand. It was a shell resembling that of a spiny conch.

  “Market what?” he demanded, perplexed about the point of all this.

  “The dyes, of course. Yellow, rose, purple—”

  “From decomposing shellfish?” But now he understood. The great mystery of the purple dye of the Phoenicians! He was thankful he hadn’t chosen to wear a purple outfit.

  At length they emerged, and he took in refreshing lungfuls of partially oxygenated air. They were outside the wall, walking along a narrow starlit beach strewn with crushed shell, hunching in the fortification’s shadow in order to avoid the gaze of the patrolling guards.

  They arrived circuitously at a docking area where the lesser ships were tied. This was a shallow harbor facing toward the mainland, evidently limited to local shuttling. There were also several coracles: doughnut-shaped little boats or rafts (depending on viewpoint) with calked boards across the inside where the hole might have been. Ivo remembered the macroscope station, and wondered whether the stations of the future — his future — would be as far beyond the torus as atomic liners were beyond the coracle.

  The tiny boats did not look seaworthy, but Aia assured him that they were the best to be had for a crew of two on the sneak. She climbed into one about six feet in diameter, and he followed her and experimented with the paddles. There were V-notched sticks braced at either side, fulcrums for the long oars; he had to take up one while she managed the other.

  He stood within the precarious structure and looked across the water at the mainland. Suddenly it seemed very far away, and the calm, shallow water interveni
ng seemed ominously deep and rough. “Somebody should build a causeway,” he muttered.

  “We must pull together,” she said, “or the craft will simply spin about. Not too hard — I am not as strong as you.” Privately, he wondered. She was careful to flatter him regularly, but she was a well-conditioned female. She was uncommonly knowledgeable about nonfeminine affairs, from temple politics to coracle paddling.

  After some initial unsteadiness, much of it stemming from his early flinching as he tried to put too much weight on his left arm, they managed to stroke the clumsy craft out of the harbor. The water was gentle, yet even little swells rolled the party about alarmingly, and progress was hard work. It was the coracle’s natural ambition to rotate, and only continuous and well-synchronized paddling kept it on course.

  In that period of silence and painful effort — why did sword-swinging superheroes never feel their wounds the following day? — Ivo reviewed his recent experience mentally. How had it all come about? It was obviously impossible for him to be where he seemed to be. Could he in some fashion have traversed three thousand or more light-years without benefit of galactic machinery, he still could not have landed in Earth’s past. The future, yes; the present, possibly; the past, never. The past was forever gone, and anything like time travel brought calamitous paradox. He could not physically participate in past events without altering history, which in turn meant that it was not the past; that was the fact that made it unapproachable.

  Yet he certainly was somewhere. The adventures were too real, the pains too persistent, the series too cohesive, for any idle nightmare. It was becoming evident that he was not going to get out of this by himself. He knew too little, and had such slender resources that he had to depend on a mysterious woman.

  Was it time to confess his own inadequacy and summon Schön? He had been shying away from this notion, but he knew that Schön would place the historical perspective instantly, and pinpoint not only the year but the exact degree by which this reality differed from Earth’s true history. Schön would know how to reverse whatever circumstances had brought him here, and thus how to bring back Afra and Groton and Beatryx and the Neptune base.