Up the Line

by Robert Silverberg

  My conscience let me alone after that, and the girl and I gasped our way to completion. And then she rose, and went from the room, and as she passed the window a sliver of moonlight illuminated her white buttocks and her pale thighs and her long blonde hair, and I realized what I should have known all along, which is that the Markezinis girls would not come like Eskimo wenches to sleep with guests, but that someone had thoughtfully sent in a slavegirl for my amusement. So much for the prickings of conscience. Absolved even of the most tenuous incest, I slept soundly.

  In the morning, over a breakfast of cold lamb and rice, Gregory Markezinis said, “Word reaches me that the Spaniards have found a new world beyond the Ocean Sea. Do you think there’s truth in it?”

  This was the year A.D. 1556.

  I said, “Beyond all doubt it’s true. I saw the proof in Spain, at the court of King Charles. It’s a world of gold and jade and spices—of red-skinned men—”

  “Red-skinned men? Oh, no, cousin Ducas, no, no, I can never believe that!” Markezinis roared in delight, and summoned his daughters. “The new world of the Spaniards—its men have red skins! Cousin Ducas tells us so!”

  “Well, copper-colored, really,” I murmured, but Markezinis scarcely heard.

  “Red skins! Red skins! And no heads, but eyes and mouths in their chests! And men with a single leg, which they raise above their heads at midday to shield themselves from the sun! Yes! Yes! Oh, wonderful new world! Cousin, you amuse me!”

  I told him I was glad to bring him such pleasure. I thanked him for his gracious hospitality, and chastely embraced each of his daughters, and prepared to take my leave. And suddenly it struck me that if my ancestors’ name had been Markezinis from the fourteenth century through the twentieth, then none of these girls could possibly be ancestral to me. My priggish pangs of conscience had been pointless, except insofar as they taught me where my inhibitions lay. “Do you have sons?” I asked my host.

  “Oh, yes,” he said, “six sons!”

  “May your line increase and prosper,” I said, and departed, and rode my donkey a dozen kilometers out into the countryside, and tethered it to an olive tree, and shunted down the line.

  31.

  At the end of my layoff I reported for duty, and set out for the first time solo as a Time Courier.

  I had six people to take on the one-week tour. They didn’t know it was my first solo. Protopopolos didn’t see any point in telling them, and I agreed. But I didn’t feel as though it were my first solo. I was full of Metaxian chutzpah. I emanated charisma. I feared nothing except fear itself.

  At the preliminary meeting I told my six the rules of time-touring in crisp, staccato phrases. I invoked the dread menace of the Time Patrol as I warned against changing the past either carelessly or by design. I explained how they could best keep out of trouble. Then I handed out timers and set them.

  “Here we go,” I said. “Up the line.”

  Charisma. Chutzpah.

  Jud Elliott, Time Courier, on his own!

  Up the line!

  “We have arrived,” I said, “in 1659 B.P., better known to you as the year 400. I’ve picked it as a typical early Byzantine time. The ruling emperor is Arcadius. You remember from now-time Istanbul that Haghia Sophia should be back there, and the mosque of Sultan Ahmed should be there. Well, of course, Sultan Ahmed and his mosque are currently a dozen centuries in the future, and the church behind us is the original Haghia Sophia, constructed forty years ago when the city was still very young. Four years from now it’ll burn down during a rebellion caused by the exiling of Bishop John Chrysostomos by Emperor Arcadius after he had criticized Arcadius’ wife Eudoxia. Let’s go inside. You see that the walls are of stone but the roof is wooden—”

  My six tourists included a real-estate developer from Ohio, his wife, their gawky daughter and her husband, plus a Sicilian shrink and his bowlegged temporary wife: a typical assortment of prosperous citizens. They didn’t know a nave from a narthex, but I gave them a good look at the church, and then marched them through Arcadius’ Constantinople to set the background for what they’d see later. After two hours of this I jumped down the line to 408 to watch the baptism of little Theodosius again.

  I caught sight of myself on the far side of the street, standing close to Capistrano. I didn’t wave. My other self did not appear to see me. I wondered if this present self of mine had been standing here that other time, when I was here with Capistrano. The intricacies of the Cumulative Paradox oppressed me. I banished them from mind.

  “You see the ruins of the old Haghia Sophia,” I said. “It will be rebuilt under the auspices of this infant, the future Theodosius II, and opened to prayer on October, 10, 445—”

  We shunted down the line to 445 and watched the ceremony of dedication.

  There are two schools of thought about the proper way to conduct a time-tour. The Capistrano method is to take the tourists to four or five high spots a week, letting them spend plenty of time in taverns, inns, back alleys, and marketplaces, and moving in such a leisurely way that the flavor of each period soaks in deeply. The Metaxas method is to construct an elaborate mosaic of events, hitting the same high spots but also twenty or thirty or forty lesser events, spending half an hour here and two hours there. I had experienced both methods and I preferred Metaxas’ approach. The serious student of Byzantium wants depth, not breadth; but these folk were not serious students. Better to make a pageant of Byzantium for them, hurry them breathless through the eras, show them riots and coronations, chariot races, the rise and fall of monuments and kings.

  And so I took my people from time to time in imitation of my idol Metaxas. I gave them a full day in early Byzantium, as Capistrano would have done, but I split it into six shunts. We ended our day’s work in 537, in the city Justinian had built on the charred ruin of the one destroyed by the rioting Blues and Greens.

  “We’ve come to December 27,” I said. “Justinian will inaugurate the new Haghia Sophia today. You see how much larger the cathedral is than the ones that preceded it—a gigantic building, one of the wonders of the world. Justinian has poured the equivalent of hundreds of millions of dollars into it.”

  “Is this the one they have in Istanbul now?” asked Mr. Real Estate’s son-in-law doubtfully.

  “Basically, yes. Except that you don’t see any minarets here—the Moslems tacked those on, of course, after they turned the place into a mosque—and the gothic buttresses haven’t been built yet, either. Also the great dome here is not the one you’re familiar with. This one is slightly flatter and wider than the present one. It turned out that the architect’s calculations of thrust were wrong, and half the dome will collapse in 558 after weakening of the arches by earthquakes. You’ll see that tomorrow. Look, here comes Justinian.”

  A little earlier that day I had shown them the harried Justinian of 532 attempting to cope with the Nika riots. The emperor who now appeared, riding in a chariot drawn by four immense black horses, looked a good deal more than five years older, far more plump and florid of face, but he also seemed vastly more sure of himself, a figure of total command. As well he should be, having surmounted the tremendous challenge to his power that the riots presented, and having rebuilt the city into something uniquely glorious.

  Senators and dukes lined the approach; we remained respectfully to one side, amid the commoners. Priests, deacons, deaconesses, subdeacons, and cantors awaited the imperial procession, all in costly robes. Hymns in the ancient mode rose to heaven. The Patriarch Menos appeared at the colossal imperial door of the cathedral; Justinian dismounted; the patriarch and the emperor, hand in hand, entered the building, followed by the high officials of state.

  “According to a tenth-century chronicle,” I said, “Justinian was overcome by emotion when he entered his new Haghia Sophia. Rushing to the apse, he gave thanks to God who had allowed him to achieve such a building, and cried out, ‘O Solomon, I have surpassed thee.’ The Time Service thought it might be interesting for visit
ors to this era to hear this famous line, and so some years back we planted an Ear just beside the altar.” I reached into my robes. “I’ve brought along a pickup speaker which will transmit Justinian’s words to us as he nears the apse. Listen.”

  I switched on the speaker. At this moment, any number of other Couriers in the crowd were doing the same thing. A time will come when so many of us are clustered in this moment that Justinian’s voice, amplified by a thousand tiny speakers, will boom majestically across the whole city.

  From the speaker in my palm came the sound of footsteps.

  “The emperor is walking down the aisle,” I said.

  The footsteps halted abruptly. Justinian’s words came to us—his first exclamation upon entering the architectural masterpiece of the ages.

  Thick-voiced with rage, the emperor bellowed, “Look up there, you sodomitic simpleton! Find me the motherhumper who left that scaffold hanging in the dome! I want his balls in an alabaster vase before mass begins!” Then he sneezed in imperial wrath.

  I said to my six tourists, “The development of time-travel has made it necessary for us to revise many of our most inspiring anecdotes in the light of new evidence.”

  32.

  That night as my tired tourists slept, I slipped away from them to carry out some private research.

  This was strictly against regulations. A Courier is supposed to remain with the clients at all times, in case an emergency occurs. The clients, after all, don’t know how to operate their timers, so only the Courier can help them make a quick escape from trouble.

  Despite this I jumped six centuries down the line, while my tourists slept, and I visited the era of my prosperous ancestor Nicephorus Ducas.

  Which took chutzpah, of course, considering that this was my first solo trip. But actually I wasn’t running any serious risks.

  The safe way to carry out such side trips, as Metaxas had explained to me, is to set your timer carefully and make sure that your net absence from your tourists is one minute or less. I was departing from December 27, 537, at 2345 hours. I could go up or down the line from there and spend hours, days, weeks, or months elsewhere. When I had finished with my business, all I had to do was set my timer to bring me back to December 27, 537, at 2346 hours. From the point of view of my sleeping tourists I’d have been gone only sixty seconds.

  Of course, it wouldn’t be proper to land at 2344 hours on the return trip, which is to say to come back a minute before I had left. There would then be two of me in the same room, which produces the Paradox of Duplication, a sub-species of the Cumulative Paradox, and is certain to bring a reprimand or worse if the Time Patrol hears of it. No: precise coordination is necessary.

  Another problem is the difficulty of making an exact point-to-point shunt. The inn where my group was lodged in 537 would almost certainly no longer exist by 1175, the year of my immediate destination. I couldn’t blindly shunt forward from the room, because I might find myself materializing in some awkward place later constructed on the site—a dungeon, say.

  The only safe way would be to go out in the street and shunt from there, both coming and going. This, though, requires you to be away from your tourists more than sixty seconds, just figuring the time necessary to go downstairs, find a safe and quiet place for your shunt, etc. And if a Time Patrolman comes along on a routine checkup and recognizes you in the street and asks you why the hell you aren’t with the clients, you’re in trouble.

  Nevertheless I shunted down the line and got away with it.

  I hadn’t been in 1175 before. It was probably the last really good year Byzantium had.

  It seemed to me that an atmosphere of gathering trouble hung over Constantinople. Even the clouds looked ominous. The air had the tang of impending calamity.

  Subjective garbage. Being able to move freely along the line distorts your perspective and colors your interpretation. I knew what lay ahead for these people; they didn’t. Byzantium in 1175 was cocky and optimistic; I was imagining all the omens.

  Manuel I Comnenus was on the throne, a good man, coming to the end of a long, brilliant career. Disaster was closing in on him. The Comnenus emperors had spent the whole twelfth century recapturing Asia Minor from the Turks, who had grabbed it the century before. I knew that one year down the line, in 1176, Manuel was going to lose his entire Asian empire in a single day, at the battle of Myriocephalon. After that it would be downhill all the way for Byzantium. But Manuel didn’t know that yet. Nobody here did. Except me.

  I headed up toward the Golden Horn. The upper end of town was the most important in this period; the center of things had shifted from the Haghia Sophia/Hippodrome/Augusteum section to the Blachernae quarter, in the northernmost corner of the city at the angle where the city walls met. Here, for some reason, Emperor Alexius I had moved the court at the end of the eleventh century, abandoning the jumbled old Great Palace. Now his grandson Manuel reigned here in splendor, and the big feudal families had built new palaces nearby, all along the Golden Horn.

  One of the finest of these marble edifices belonged to Nicephorus Ducas, my many-times-removed-great-grandfather.

  I spent half the morning prowling around the palace grounds, getting drunk on the magnificence of it all. Toward midday the palace gate opened and I saw Nicephorus himself emerge in his chariot for his noontime drive: a stately figure with a long, ornately braided black beard and elaborate gold-trimmed robes. On his breast he wore a pendant cross, gilded and studded with huge jewels; his fingers glistened with rings. A crowd had gathered to watch the noble Nicephorus leave his palace.

  Gracefully he scattered coins to the multitude as he rode forth. I caught one: a thin, shabby bezant of Alexius I, nicked and filed at the edges. The Comnenus family had debased the currency badly. Still, it’s no small thing to be able to toss even debased gold coins to a mob of miscellaneous onlookers.

  I have that worn and oily-looking bezant to this day. I think of it as my inheritance from my Byzantine multi-great-grandfather.

  Nicephorus’ chariot vanished in the direction of the imperial palace. A filthy old man standing beside me sighed, crossed himself many times, and murmured, “May the Savior bless the blessed Nicephorus! Such a wonderful person!”

  The old man’s nose had been lopped off at the base. He had also lost his left hand. The kindly Byzantines of this latter-day era had made mutilation the penalty for many minor crimes. A step forward; the Code of Justinian called for death in such cases. Better to lose eye or tongue or nose than life.

  “Twenty years I spent in the service of Nicephorus Ducas!” the old man went on. “The finest years of my life, they were.”

  “Why did you leave?” I asked.

  He held forth the stump of his arm. “They caught me stealing books. I was a scribe, and I hungered to keep some of the books I copied. Nicephorus has so many! He would not have missed five or six! But they caught me and I lost my hand and also my employment, ten years ago.”

  “And your nose?”

  “In that very harsh winter six years back I stole a barrel of fish. I am a very poor thief, always getting caught.”

  “How do you support yourself?”

  He smiled. “By public charity. And by begging. Can you spare a silver nomisma for an unhappy old man?”

  I inspected the coins I carried. By ill luck all my silver pieces were early ones, of the fifth and sixth centuries, long out of circulation; if the old man tried to pass one, he’d be arrested on charges of robbing some aristocratic collector, and probably would lose his other hand. So I pressed a fine gold bezant of the early eleventh century into his palm. He stared at it in amazement. “I am yours, noble sir!” he cried. “I am wholly yours!”

  “Come with me to the nearest tavern, then, and answer a few questions,” I said.

  “Gladly! Gladly!”

  I bought us wine and pumped him on the Ducas genealogy. It was hard for me to look at his mutilated face, and so as we talked I kept my eyes trained on his shoulder; but he
seemed accustomed to that. He had all the information I was seeking, for one of his duties while in the service of the Ducases had been to copy out the family records.

  Nicephorus, he said, was then forty-five years old, having been born in 1130. The wife of Nicephorus was the former Zoe Catacalon, and they had seven children: Simeon, John, Leo, Basil, Helena, Theodosia, and Zoe. Nicephorus was the eldest son of Nicetas Ducas, born in 1106; the wife of Nicetas was the former Irene Cerularius, whom he had married in 1129. Nicetas and Irene had had five other children: Michael, Isaac, John, Romanos, and Anna. Nicetas’ father had been Leo Ducas, born in 1070; Leo had married the former Pulcheria Botaniates, in 1100, and their children, other than Nicetas, included Simeon, John, Alexander—

  The recitation went on and on, carrying the Ducases back through the generations of Byzantium, into the tenth century, the ninth, the eighth, names growing cloudy now, gaps appearing in the record, the old man frowning, fumbling, apologizing for scanty data. I tried a couple of times to stop him, but he would not be stopped, until finally he sputtered out with a Tiberius Ducas of the seventh century whose existence, he said, was possibly apocryphal.

  “This, you understand, is merely the lineage of Nicephorus Ducas,” he said. “The imperial family is a distinct branch, which I can trace back for you through the Comneni to Emperor Constantine X and his ancestors, who—”

  Those Ducases didn’t interest me, even though they were distantly related to me in some way. If I wanted to know the lineage of the imperial Ducases, I could find it in Gibbon. I cared only for my own humbler branch of the family, the collateral offshoot from the imperial line. Thanks to this hideous outcast scribe I was able to secure the path of those Ducases through three Byzantine centuries, down to Nicephorus. And I already knew the rest of the line, from Nicephorus’s son Simeon of Albania to Simeon’s several-times-grandson Manuel Ducas of Argyrokastro, whose eldest daughter married Nicholas Markezinis, and through the Markezinis line until a Markezinis daughter married a Passilidis son and produced my estimable grandfather Konstantin, whose daughter Diana wed Judson Daniel Elliott II and brought forth into the world my own ultimate self.