“The pattern is. Our occasional attempts to break it, and our failures, are part of it.”
“Then we’re nothing except puppets?”
“I didn’t say that, Doc. In fact, I can’t believe we are. Seems to me, our free wills must be a part of the grand design too. But we’d better take care to stay within the area of unknownness, which is where our freedom lies.”
“Could this be analogous to, well, drugs?” I wondered. “A man might deliberately, freely take a chemical which grabbed hold of his mind. But then, while its effects lasted, he would not be free.”
“Maybe, maybe.” Havig stirred in his chair, peered out into night, took another small swallow of whiskey. “Look, we may not have time for these philosophical musings. Wallis’s hounds are after me. If not in full cry, surely at any rate alert for any spoor of me. They know something of my biography. They can find out more, and make spot checks if nothing else.”
“Is that why you avoided me, these past years of my life?” I asked.
“Yes.” Now he laid a comforting hand on me. “While Kate lived--You understand?”
I nodded dumbly.
“What I did,” he said, hastening on to dry detail, “was return to that selfsame date of 1965, in New York, the last one I could be reasonably sure of. From there I backtracked, laying a groundwork. It took a while. I had to make sure that what I did would be so hard to trace that Wallis wouldn’t assign the necessary man-years to the task. I worked through Swiss banks, several series of dummies, et cetera. The upshot was that John Havig’s fortune got widely distributed, in the names of a number of people and corporations who in effect are me. John Havig himself, publicity-shy playboy, explained to his hired financiers that this was because--never mind. A song and dance which sounded enough like a tax-fraud scheme, though actually it wasn’t, that they were glad to wash their hands of me and to know nothing important.
“John Havig, you recall, thereupon quietly dropped out of circulation. Since he had no intimates in the twentieth century, apart from his mother and his old hometown doctor, only these would ever miss him or wonder much; and it was easy to drop them an occasional reassuring letter.”
“Postcards to me, mainly,” I said. “You had me wondering, all right.” After a pause: “Where were you?”
“Having covered my tracks as well as might be,” he answered, “I went back to Constantinople.”
In the burnt-out husk of New Rome, order was presently restored. At first, if nothing else, troops needed water and food, for which labor and some kind of civil government were needed, which meant that the dwellers could no longer be harried like vermin. Later, Baldwin of Flanders, lord over that fragment of the Empire which became his portion and included the city, desired to get more use than that out of his subjects. He was soon captured in war against the Bulgarians and died a prisoner, but the attitude of his brother and successor Henry I was the same. A Latin king could oppress the Greeks, squeeze them, humiliate them, tax them to poverty, dragoon them into his corvées or his armies. But for this he must allow them a measure of security in their work and their lives.
Though Xenia was a guest, the nunnery was strict. She met Havig in a chilly brick-walled gloom, under the disapproving gaze of a sister. Robed in rough brown wool, coifed, veiled, she was forbidden to touch her male visitor, let alone seek his arms, no matter how generous a benefaction he had brought along. But he saw her Ravenna eyes; and the garments could not hide how she had begun to grow and fill out; nor could every tone in her voice be flattened, which brought back to him the birds on countryside days with her and her father--“Oh, Hauk, darling Hauk!” Shrinking back, drawing the cross, starting to genuflect and hesitating a-tremble: “I ... I beg your pardon, your forgiveness, B-b-blessed One.”
The old nun frowned and took a step toward them. Havig waved wildly. “No, no, Xenia!” he exclaimed. “I’m as mortal as you are. I swear it. Strange things did happen, that day last year. Maybe I can explain them to you later. Believe me, though, my dear, I’ve never been anything more than a man.”
She wept awhile at that, not in disappointment. “I, I, I’m so g-glad. I mean, you ... you’ll go to Heaven when you die, but--” But today he was not among her stiff stern Byzantine saints.
“How is your mother?” Havig asked.
He could barely hear: “She ... has taken the veil. She begs me to do l-l-likewise.” The thin fingers twisted together till nails stood white; the look raised to him was terrified. “Should I? I waited for you-to tell me--”
“Don’t get me wrong, Doc,” Havig said. “The sisters meant well. Their rule was severe, however, especially considering the unsureness when overlords both temporal and spiritual were Catholic. You can imagine, can’t you? She loved her God, and books had always been a main part of her life. But hers was the spirit of classical antiquity, as she dreamed that age had been--I never found the heart to disillusion her. And her upbringing--my influence too, no doubt--had turned her early toward the living world. Even lacking that background, a round of prayer and obedience inside the same cloisters, nothing else till death opened the door--was never for her. The ghastly thing which had struck her did not take away her birthright, which was to be a sun-child.”
“What’d you do?” I asked.
“I found an elderly couple who’d take her in. They were poor, but I could help them financially; they were childless, which made them extra glad, extra kind to her; and he, a scribe, was a scholar of sorts. It worked out well.”
“You made periodic checkups, of course.”
Havig nodded. Gentleness touched his mouth. “I had my own projects going,” he said. “Still, during the next year or so of my lifespan, the next three of Xenia’s, I went back from time to time to visit her. The times got to be oftener and oftener.”
11
THE SHIP was a trimaran, and huge. From the flying bridge, Havig looked across a sweep of deck, beautifully grained hardwood whereon hatches, cargo booms, donkey engines, sun-power screens, and superstructure made a harmonious whole. There was no brightwork; Maurai civilization, poor in metals, must reserve them for the most basic uses. The cabins were shingled. Bougainvillea and trumpet flower vines rioted over them. At each forepeak stood a carven figure representing one of the Trinity-Tanaroa Creator in the middle, a column of abstract symbols; Lesu Haristi holding his cross to starboard; to port, shark-toothed Nan, for death and the dark side of life.
But they were no barbarians who built and crewed this merchantman. The triple hull was designed for ultimate hydrodynamic efficiency. The three great A-frame masts bore sails, true, but these were of esoteric cut and accompanied by vanes which got their own uses out of the wind; the entire rig was continuously readjusted by small motors, which biological fuel cells powered and a computer directed. The personnel were four kanakas and two wahines, who were not overworked.
Captain Rewi Lohannaso held an engineering degree from the University of Wellantoa in N’Zealann. He spoke several languages, and his Ingliss was not the debased dialect of some Merican tribe, but as rich and precise as Havig’s native tongue.
A stocky brown man in sarong and bare feet, he said, slowly for the benefit of his passenger who was trying to master the modern speech: “We kept science after technology’s worldmachine broke down. Our problem was to find new ways to apply that science, on a planet gutted and poisoned. We’ve not wholly solved it. But we have come far, and I do believe we will go further.”
The ocean rolled indigo, turquoise, aquamarine, and aglitter. Waves rushed, wavelets chuckled. Sunlight fell dazzling on sails and on the wings of an albatross. A pod of whales passed majestically across vision. The wind did not pipe in the ears, at the speed of the ship before it, but lulled, brought salty odors, stroked coolness across bare sun-warmed skins. Down on deck, a young man, off duty, drew icy-sweet notes from a bamboo flute, and a girl danced. Their nude bodies were as goodly to see as a cat or a blooded horse.
“That’s why
you’ve done a grand thing, Brother Thomas,” Lohannaso said. “They’ll jubilate when you arrive.” He hesitated. “I did not radio for an aircraft to bring you and your goods to the Federation because the Admiralty might have obliged. And . . . frankly, dirigibles are faster, but less reliable than ships. Their engines are feeble; the fireproofing anticatalyst for the hydrogen is experimental.”
(“I think that brought home to me as much as anything did, the truth about Maurai society in its best days,” Havig said to me. “They were-will not be back-to-nature cranks. On the contrary, beneath the easygoing affability, they may well be more development-minded than the U.S.A. today. But they won’t have the fuel for heavier-than-air craft, anyhow not in their earlier stages; and they won’t have the helium for blimps like ours. We squandered so much of everything.”)
“Your discovery waited quite a few centuries,” Lohannaso went on. “Won’t hurt if it waits some extra weeks to get to Wellantoa.”
(“If I wanted to study the Maurai in depth, to learn what percentage of what Wallis said about them was true and what was lies or blind prejudice, I needed an entrée. Beginning when they first started becoming an important factor in the world, I could follow their history onward. But I had to make that beginning, from scratch. I could pose as a Merican easily enough--among the countless dialects English had split into, mine would pass--but why should they be interested in one more barbarian? And I’d no hope of pretending to be from a semi-civilized community which they had trade relations with …
Well, I hit on an answer.” Havig grinned. “Can you guess, Doc? No? Okay. Through a twentieth-century dummy I acquired a mess of radioisotopes, like Carbon 14. I left them where they’d be safe-their decay must be real-and moved uptime. There I became Brother Thomas, from an inland stronghold which had preserved a modicum of learning. I’d discovered this trove and decided the Maurai should have it, so carted it myself to the coast ... You see? The main thrust of their research was biological. It must be, both because Earth’s ecology was in bad need of help, and because life is the sunpower converter. But they had no nuclear reactors to manufacture tracer isotopes wholesale. To them, my ‘find’ was a godsend.”)
“Do you think I’ll be accepted as a student?” Havig asked anxiously. “It would mean a lot to my people as well as me. But I’m such an outsider--”
Lohannaso laid an arm around his shoulder in the Maurai manner. “Never you sweat, friend. First, we’re a trader folk. We pay for value received, and this value is beyond my guessing. Second, we want to spread knowledge, civilization, as wide as we can. We want allies ourselves, trained hands and brains.”
“Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?”
“Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fall in the end--disastrously--but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and looking and thinking, we can get!”
He laughed and finished: “Inside of limits, true. The pirates have to be cleaned up, that sort of job. But otherwise--Well, this’s getting too bloody solemn. Almost noon now. Let me shoot the sun and do my arithmetic, then Terai comes on duty and you and I’ll go have lunch. You haven’t lived till you’ve sampled my beer.”
(“I spent more than a year among the early Maurai,” Havig told me. “Being eager to spread the gospel, they gave me exactly the sort of education I needed for my purposes. They were dear, merry people--oh, yes, they had their share of bad guys, and human failings and miseries, but on the whole, the Federation in that century was a happy place to be.
(“That wasn’t true of the rest of the world, of course. Nor of the past. I’d keep time-skipping to twentieth-century Wellington or Honolulu, and catching planes to Istanbul, and going back to see how Xenia was getting on.
(“When at last I felt I’d reached the point of diminishing returns, as far as that particular future milieu was concerned, I came once more to Latin Constantinople. Xenia was eighteen. Shortly afterward, we married.”)
Of their life together, in the five years of hers which were granted them, he told me little. Well, I haven’t much I care to tell either, of what really mattered between Kate and me.
He did mention some practical problems. They were tripartite: supporting her decently, getting along in the environment to which she was confined, and staying hidden from the Eyrie.
As for the first, his undertaking wasn’t quite simple. He couldn’t start a business, in a world of guilds, monopolies, complicated regulations, and folk who even in a metropolis--before the printing press, regular mail service, electronic communications--were as gossipy as villagers. It took him considerable research and effort to establish the persona of an agent for a newly formed association of Danish merchant adventurers, more observer and contact man than factor and thus not in competition with the Franks. Finance was the least of his worries; a little gold, carried downtime, went a long way. But he must have a plausible explanation for his money.
As for the second, he thought about moving a good, safe distance off, perhaps to Russia or Western Europe, perhaps to Nicaea where a Byzantine monarchy held out and would, at last, regain Constantinople. But no, there was little good and no safety. The Tartars were coming, and the Holy Inquisition. Sacked and conquered, this great city nevertheless offered as much as any place outside a hopelessly alien Orient; and here Xenia was among familiar scenes, in touch with friends and her mother. Besides, wherever they might go, they would be marked, she a Levantine who called herself a Roman, he something else. Because of his masquerade, they more or less had to buy a house in Pera, where foreigners customarily lived. But that town lay directly across the Golden Horn, with frequent ferries.
As for the third, he kept a low profile, neither conspicuously active nor conspicuously reclusive. He found a new pseudonym, Jon Andersen, and trained Xenia to use it and to be vague about her own origin. Helpfully, his Catholic acquaintances had no interest in her, beyond wondering why Ser Jon had handicapped himself by marrying a heretical Greek. If he must have her, why not as a concubine?
“How much of the truth did you tell Xenia?” I inquired.
“None.” His brows bent. “That hurt, not keeping secrets but lying to her. It wouldn’t have been safe for her to know, however, supposing she could’ve grasped the idea ... would it? She was always so open-hearted. Hard enough for her to maintain the deceptions I insisted on, like the new identity I claimed I needed if I was to work for a new outfit. No, she accepted me for what I said I was, and didn’t ask about my affairs once she realized that when I was with her I didn’t want to think about them. That was true.”
“But how did you explain her rescue?”
“I said I’d prayed to my patron saint, who’d evidently responded in striking fashion. Her memory of the episode was blurred by horror and bewilderment; she had no trouble believing.” He winced. “It hurt me also, to see her light candies and plead like a well-behaved child for the baby of her own that I knew we could never have.”
“Hm, apropos religion, did she turn Catholic, or you go through the motions of conversion to Orthodoxy?”
“No. I’d not ask her to change. There has not been a soul less hypocritical than Xenia. To me, it’d have been a minor fib, but I had to stay halfway respectable in the eyes of the Italians, Normans, and French; otherwise we could never have maintained ourselves at a reasonable standard. No, we found us an Eastern priest who’d perform the rite, and a Western bishop who’d grant me dispensation, for, hm, an honorarium. Xenia didn’t care. She had principles, but she was tolerant and didn’t expect I’d burn in hell, especially if a saint ha
d once aided me. Besides, she was deliriously happy.” He smiled. “I was the same, at first and most of the time afterward.”
Their house was modest, but piece by piece she furnished and ornamented it with the taste which had been her father’s. From its roof you looked across crowded Pera and ships upon the Golden Horn, until Constantinople rose in walls and towers and domes, seeming at this distance nearly untouched. Inland reached countryside where she loved being taken on excursions.
They kept three servants, not many in an age when labor to do was abundant and labor to hire came cheap. Havig got along well with his groom, a raffish Cappadocian married to the cook, and Xenia spoiled their children. Housemaids came and went, themselves taking considerable of the young wife’s attention; our machinery today spares us more than physical toil. Xenia did her own gardening, till the patio and a small yard behind the house became a fairyland. Otherwise she occupied herself with needlework, for which she had unusual talent, and the books he kept bringing her, and her devotions, and her superstitions.
“From my viewpoint, the Byzantines were as superstitious as a horse,” Havig said. “Magic, divining, guardianship against everything from the Evil Eye to the plague, omens, quack medicines, love philters, you name it, somebody swore by it. Xenia’s shibboleth is astrology. Well, what the deuce, that’s done no harm--she has the basic common sense to interpret her horoscopes in a reasonable fashion--and we’d go out at night and observe the stars together. You could do that in a city as well as anywhere else, before street lamps and everlasting smog. She is more beautiful by starlight even than daylight. O God, how I must fight myself not to bring her a telescope, just a small one! But it would have been too risky, of course.”
“You did a remarkable job of, well, bridging the intellectual gap,” I said.
“Nothing remarkable, Doc.” His voice, muted, caressed a memory. “She was-is-younger than me, I’d guess by a decade and a half. She’s ignorant of a lot that I know. But this works vice versa, remember. She’s familiar with the ins and outs of one of the most glorious cosmopolises history will ever see. The people, the folkways, the lore, the buildings, the art, the songs, the books--why, she’d read Greek classics my age never did, that perished in the sack. She’d tell me about them, she’d sit chanting those tremendous lines from Aeschylus or Sophocles, till lightnings ran up and down my backbone; she’d get us both drunk on Sappho, or howling with laughter out of Aristophanes. Knowing what to look for, I often ‘happened’ to find books in a bazaar ... downtime.”
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