Up the Line

by Robert Silverberg

  That night we did little sleeping. There was too much noise, for one thing, since the celebration of the imperial baptism went on raucously throughout the city until almost dawn. But who could sleep, anyway, knowing that the world of the early fifth century lay just beyond the door?

  One night before and sixteen centuries down the line, Capistrano had kindly seen me through a siege of sleeplessness. Now he did it again. I rose and stood by the little slit of a window, peering at the bonfires in the city, and when he noticed me he came over and said, “I understand. Sleeping is hard at first.”

  “Yes.”

  “Shall I get a woman for you?”

  “No.”

  “We’ll take a walk, then?”

  “Can we leave them?” I asked, looking at our eight tourists.

  “We won’t go far. We’ll stay just outside, within reach if some trouble starts.”

  The air was heavy and mild. Snatches of obscene song floated up from the tavern district. We walked toward it; the taverns were still open and full of drunken soldiers. Swarthy prostitutes offered their wares. One girl, hardly sixteen, had a coin on a string between her bare breasts. Capistrano nudged me to notice it, and we laughed. “The same coin, maybe?” he asked. “But different breasts?” I shrugged. “Perhaps the same breasts, too,” I said, thinking of the unborn girl who had been for sale at the Yedikule a night ago. Capistrano bought two flasks of oily Greek wine and we returned to the inn, to sit quietly downstairs and drink the darkness away.

  He did most of the talking. Like many Time Couriers, his life had been a complex, jagged one full of detours, and he let his autobiography dribble out between gulps of wine. Noble Spanish ancestors, he said (he didn’t tell me about the Turkish great-grandmother until months later, when he was far more thoroughly drunk); early marriage to a virgin of high family; education at the best universities of Europe. Then inexplicable decline, loss of ambition, loss of fortune, loss of wife. “My life,” said Capistrano, “broke in half when I was twenty-seven years of age. I required total reintegration of personality. As you see, the effort was not a true success.” He spoke of a series of temporary marriages, adventures in criminality, experiments with hallucinatory drugs that made weeds and floaters look innocent. When he enrolled as a Time Courier, it was only as an alternative to suicide. “I keyed to an output and asked for a bit at random,” he said. “Positive, and I become a Courier. Negative, and I drink poison. The bit came up positive. Here I am.” He drained his wine.

  To me that night he seemed a wonderful mixture of the desperate, tragic romantic and the self-dramatizing charlatan. Of course, I was drunk myself, and very young. But I told him how much I admired his quest for identity, and secretly wished that I could learn the knack of seeming so appealingly destroyed, so interestingly lost.

  “Come,” he said, when the last of the wine was gone. “To dispose of the corpses.”

  We hurled our flasks into the Golden Horn. Streaks of dawn were emerging. As we walked slowly back to the inn, Capistrano said, “I have made a little hobby of tracing my ancestors, do you know? It is my own private research. Here—look at these names.” He produced a small, thick notebook. “In each era I visit,” he said, “I seek out my ancestors and list them here. Already I know several hundred of them, going back to the fourteenth century. Do you realize how immense the number of one’s ancestors is? We have two parents, and each of them has two parents, and each of them two parents—go back only four generations and you have already thirty ancestors!”

  “An interesting hobby,” I said.

  Capistrano’s eyes blazed. “More than a hobby! More than a hobby! A matter of death and life! Look, my friend, whenever I grow more tired than usual of existence, all I must do is find one of these people, one, and destroy him! Take his life when he is still a child, perhaps. Then return to now-time. And in that moment, swiftly, without pain, my own tiresome life ceases ever to have been!”

  “But the Time Patrol—”

  “Helpless,” said Capistrano. “What can the Patrol do? If my crime is discovered, I am seized and erased from history for timecrime, right? If my crime is not discovered—and why should it be?—then I have erased myself. Either way I am gone. Is this not the most charming way of suicide?”

  “In eliminating your own ancestor,” I said, “you might be changing now-time to a greater degree. You’d also eliminate your own brothers and sisters—uncles—grandparents and all of their brothers and sisters—all by removing one prop from the past!”

  He nodded solemnly. “I am aware of this. And so I compile these genealogies, you see, in order to determine how best to effect my own erasure. I am not Samson; I have no wish to bring the temple crashing down with myself. I will look for the strategic person to eliminate—one who is himself sinful, incidentally, for I will not slay the truly innocent—and I will remove that person and thus myself, and perhaps the changes in now-time will not be terribly great. If they are, the Patrol will discover and undo them, and still give me the exit I crave.”

  I wondered if he was crazy or just drunk. A little of both, I decided.

  I felt like telling him that if he really wanted to kill himself that badly, it would be a whole lot less trouble for everybody else if he’d just go jump in the Bosphorus.

  I felt a twinge of terror at the thought that the whole Time Service might be permeated by Capistranos, all shopping around for the most interestingly self-destructive way of changing the past.

  Upstairs, the early light revealed eight sleepers, huddled two by two. Our elderly married folks slept peacefully; the two pretty boys from London looked sweaty and tousled after some busy buggery; Clotilde, smiling, slept with her hand tucked between Lise’s pale thighs, and Lise’s left hand was cupped cozily about Clotilde’s maidenly but firm right breast. I lay down on my lonely bed and slipped quickly into sleep. Soon Capistrano woke me, and we woke the others. I felt ten thousand years old.

  We had a breakfast of cold lamb and went out for a quick daylight walking tour of the city. Most of the interesting things had not yet been built, or else were still in early forms; we didn’t stay long. At noon we went to the Augusteum to shunt. “Our next stop,” Capistrano announced, “will be A.D. 532, where we will see the city of Justinian’s time and witness the riots which destroyed it, making possible the construction of the finer and more grand city that won such eternal fame.” We backed into the shadows of the ruined original Haghia Sophia, so that no passersby would be startled by the sight of ten people vanishing. I set all the timers. Capistrano produced his pitchpipe and gave the master signal. We shunted.

  22.

  Two weeks later we all returned down the line to 2059. I was dizzied, intoxicated, my soul full of Byzantium.

  I had seen the highlights of a thousand years of greatness. The city of my dreams had come to life for me. The meat and wine of Byzantium had passed through my bowels.

  From a Courier’s professional point of view, the trip had been a good one, that is, uneventful. Our tourists had not entangled themselves in trouble, nor had any paradoxes been created, as far as we could tell. There had been a little friction only one night, when Capistrano, very drunk, tried to seduce Clotilde; he wasn’t subtle about it, letting seduction shade into rape when she resisted, but I managed to separate them before her nails got into his eyes. In the morning he wouldn’t believe it. “The blonde lesbian?” he asked. “I would stoop so low? You must dream it!” And then he insisted on going eight hours up the line to see if it had really happened. I had visions of a sober Capistrano taking his earlier sozzled self to task, and it scared me. I had to argue him out of it in a blunt and direct way, reminding him of the Time Patrol’s regulation prohibiting anyone from engaging in conversation with himself of a different now-time basis, and threatening to report him if he tried it. Capistrano looked wounded, but he let the matter drop. And when we came down the line and he filed a report of his own, upon request, concerning my behavior as a Courier, he gave me the hi
ghest rating. Protopopolos told me that afterward.

  “Your next trip,” said Protopopolos, “will be as assistant to Metaxas, on the one-week tour.”

  “When do I leave?”

  “In two weeks,” he said. “Your layoff comes first, remember? And after you return from the trip with Metaxas, you begin soloing. Where will you spend your layoff?”

  “I think I’ll go down to Crete or Mykonos,” I said, “and get a little rest on the beach.”

  The Time Service insists that Couriers take two-week vacations between trips. The Time Service doesn’t believe in pushing its Couriers too hard. During layoffs, Couriers are completely at liberty. They can spend the whole time relaxing in now-time, as I proposed to do, or they can sign up with a time tour, or they can simply go hopping by themselves to any era that may interest them.

  There’s no charge for timer use when a Courier makes jumps up the line in his layoff periods. The Time Service wants to encourage its employees to feel at home in all periods of the past, and what better way than to allow unlimited free shunting?

  Protopopolos looked a little disappointed when I said I’d spend my vacation sunning myself in the islands. “Don’t you want to do some jumping?” he asked.

  The idea of making time-jumps on my own at this stage of my career scared me, frankly. But I couldn’t tell Protopopolos that. I also considered the point that in another month he’d be handing me the responsibility for the lives of an entire tour group. Maybe this conversation was part of the test of my qualifications. Were they trying to see if I had the guts to go jumping on my own?

  Protopopolos seemed to be fishing for an answer.

  I said, “On second thought, why waste a chance to do some jumping? I’ll have a peek at post-Byzantine Istanbul.”

  “With a tour group?”

  “On my own,” I said.

  23.

  So I went jumping, smack into the Paradox of Discontinuity.

  My first stop was the wardrobe department. I needed costumes suited for Istanbul of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Instead of giving me a whole sequence of clothes to fit the changing fashions, they decked me out in an all-purpose Moslem rig, simple white robes of no particular era, nondescript sandals, long hair, and a straggly youthful beard. By way of pocket money they supplied me with a nice assortment of gold and silver pieces of the right eras, a little of everything that might have been circulating in medieval Turkey, including some bezants of Greek-ruled times, miscellaneous coinage of the sultans, and a good deal of Venetian gold. All this was installed in a currency belt that I wore just above my timer, the coins segregated from left to right according to centuries, so that I wouldn’t get into trouble by offering an eighteenth-century dinar in a sixteenth-century market place. There was no charge for the money; the Time Service runs a continuous siphon of its own, circulating coinage between now-time and then-time for the benefit of its personnel, and a Courier going on holiday can sign out any reasonable amount to cover his expenses. To the Service it’s only play money, anyway, infinitely replenishable at will. I like the system.

  I took hypnosleep courses in Turkish and Arabic before I left. The Special Requests department fabricated a quick cover identity for me that would work well in any era of my intended visit: if questioned, I was supposed to identify myself as a Portuguese national who had been kidnapped on the high seas by Algerian pirates when ten years old, and raised as a Moslem in Algiers. That would account for flaws in my accent and for my vagueness about my background; if I had the misfortune to be interrogated by a real Portuguese, which wasn’t likely, I could simply say that I couldn’t remember much about my life in Lisbon and had forgotten the names of my forebears. So long as I kept my mouth shut, prayed toward Mecca five times a day, and watched my step, I wasn’t likely to get into trouble. (Of course, if I landed in a really serious mess, I could escape by using my timer, but in the Time Service that’s considered a coward’s route, and also undesirable because of the implications of witchcraft that you leave behind when you vanish.)

  All these preparations took a day and a half. Then they told me I was ready to jump. I set my timer for 500 B.P., picking the era at random, and jumped.

  I arrived on August 14, 1559, at nine-thirty in the evening. The reigning sultan was the great Suleiman I, nearing the close of his epoch. Turkish armies threatened the peace of Europe; Istanbul was bursting with the wealth of conquest. I couldn’t respond to this city as I had to the sparkling Constantinople of Justinian or Alexius, but that was a personal matter having to do with ancestry, chemistry, and historical affinity. Taken on its own merits, Suleiman’s Istanbul was a city among cities.

  I spent half the day roaming it. For an hour I watched a lovely mosque under construction, hoping it was the Suleimaniye, but later in the day I found the Suleimaniye, brand-new and glistening in the noon light. I made a special pilgrimage, covertly consulting a map I had smuggled with me, to find the mosque of Mehmet the Conqueror, which an earthquake would bring down in 1766. It was worth the walk. Toward midafternoon, after an inspection of the mosquified Haghia Sophia and the sad ruins of the Great Palace of Byzantium across the plaza (Sultan Ahmed’s mosque would be rising there fifty years down the line), I made my way to the Covered Bazaar, thinking to buy a few small trinkets as souvenirs, and when I was no more than ten paces past the entrance I caught sight of my beloved guru Sam.

  Consider the odds against that: with thousands of years in which to roam, the two of us coming on holiday to the same year and the same day and the same city, and meeting under the same roof!

  He was clad in Moorish costume, straight out of Othello. There was no mistaking him; he was by far the tallest man in sight, and his coal-black skin glistened brilliantly against his white robes. I rushed up to him.

  “Sam!” I cried. “Sam, you old black bastard, what luck to meet you here.”

  He whirled in surprise, frowned at me, looked puzzled. “I know you not,” he said coldly.

  “Don’t let the beard fool you. It’s me, Sam. Jud Elliott.”

  He glared. He growled. A crowd began to gather. I wondered if I had been wrong. Maybe this wasn’t Sam, but Sam’s multi-great-grandfather, made to look like his twin by a genetic fluke. No, I told myself, this is the authentic Sambo.

  But then why is he pulling out that scimitar?

  We had been talking in Turkish. I switched to English and said, “Listen, Sam, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m willing to ride along with your act. Suppose we meet in half an hour outside Haghia Sophia, and we can—”

  “Infidel dog!” he roared. “Beggar’s spawn! Masturbator of pigs! Away from me! Away, cutpurse!”

  He swished the scimitar menacingly above my head and continued to rave in Turkish. Suddenly in a lower voice he muttered, “I don’t know who the hell you are, pal, but if you don’t clear out of here fast I’m going to have to slice you in half.” That much was in English. In Turkish again he cried, “Molester of infants! Drinker of toad’s milk! Devourer of cameldung!”

  This was no act. He genuinely didn’t recognize me, and he genuinely didn’t want anything to do with me. Baffled, I backed away from him, hustled down one of the subsidiary corridors of the bazaar, stepped out into the open, and hastily shunted myself ten years down the line. A couple of people saw me go, but faex on them; to a Turk of 1559 the world must have been full of efreets and jinni, and I was just one more phantom.

  I didn’t stay in 1569 more than five minutes. Sam’s wild reaction to my greeting had me so mystified that I couldn’t relax and see the sights. I had to have an explanation. So I hurried on down the line to 2059, materializing a block from the Covered Bazaar and nearly getting smeared by a taxi. A few latter-day Turks grinned and pointed at my medieval Turkish robes. The unsophisticated apes hadn’t yet learned to take returning time-travelers for granted, I guess.

  I went quickly to the nearest public communications booth, thumbed the plate, and put through a call to Sam.

>   “He is not at his home number,” the master information output told me. “Should we trace him?”

  “Yes, please,” I said automatically.

  A moment later I slapped myself for stupidity. Of course he won’t be home, you idiot! He’s up the line in 1559!

  But the master communications network had already begun tracing him. Instead of doing the sensible thing and hanging up, I stood there like a moron, waiting for the inevitable news that the master communications network couldn’t find him anywhere.

  About three minutes went by. Then the bland voice said, “We have traced your party to Nairobi and he is standing by for your call. Please notify if you wish to proceed.”

  “Go ahead,” I said, and Sam’s ebony features blossomed on the screen.

  “Is there trouble, child?” he asked.

  “What are you doing in Nairobi?” I screamed.

  “A little holiday among my own people. Should I not be here?”

  “Look,” I said, “I’m on my layoff between Courier jobs, and I’ve just been up the line to 1559 Istanbul, and I met you there.”

  “So?”

  “How can you be there if you’re in Nairobi?”

  “The same way that there can be twenty-two specimens of your Arab instructor back there watching the Romans nail up Jesus,” Sam said. “Sheet, man, when will you learn to think four-dimensionally?”

  “So that’s a different you up the line in 1559?”