Collected Short Fiction, page 700
Up the Line
Up the line! I was just a callow kid who couldn’t seem to find a place for myself in the mid-Twenty-First Century until I joined the Time Service as a Courier. Then all history was opened to me—
First of Two Parts
I
Sam the guru was a black man, and his people up the line had been slaves—and before that, kings. I wondered about mine. Generations of sweaty peasants, dying weary? Or conspirators, rebels, great seducers, swordsmen, thieves, traitors, pimps, dukes, scholars, failed priests, translators from the Gheg and the Tosk, courtesans, dealers in used ivories, short-order cooks, butlers, stockbrokers, coin-trimmers? All those people I had never known and would never be, whose blood and lymph and genes I carry—I wanted to know them. I couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from my own past. I hungered to drag my past about with me like a hump on my back, dipping into it when the dry seasons came.
“Ride the time-winds, then,” said Sam the guru.
I listened to him. That was how I got into the time-traveling business.
Now I have been up the line. I have seen those who wait for me in the millennia gone by. My past hugs me as a hump.
Pulcheria!
Great-great-multi-great-grandmother!
If we had never met—
If I had stayed out of the shop of sweets and spices—
If dark eyes and olive skin and high breasts meant nothing to me, Pulcheria—
My love. My lustful ancestress. You ache me in my dreams. You sing to me from up the line.
II
He was really black. The family had been working at it for five or six generations, now, since the Afro Revival period. The idea was to purge the gonads of the hated slavemaster genes, which of course had become liberally entangled in Sam’s lineage over the years. Starting about 1960, Sam’s people had begun to undo the work of the white devils by mating only with the ebony of hue and woolly of hair. Judging by the family portraits Sam showed me, the starting-point was a cafe-au-lait great-great-great-grandmother. But she married an ace-of-spades exchange student from Zambia or one of those funny little temporary countries, and their eldest son picked himself a Nubian princess, whose daughter married an elegant ebony buck from Mississippi, who—
“Well, my grandfather looked decently brown as a result of all this,” Sam said, “but you could see the stain of the mongrel all over him. We had darkened the family hue by three shades, but we couldn’t pass for pure. Then my father was born and his genes reverted. In spite of everything. Light skin and a high-bridged nose and thin lips—a mingler, a monster. Genetics must play its little joke on an earnest family of displaced Africans. So Daddo went to a helix parlor and had the caucasoid genes edited, accomplishing in four hours what his ancestors hadn’t managed to do in eighty years, and here I be. Black and beautiful.”
Sam was about 35 years old. I was 24. In the spring of ’59 we shared a two-room suite in Under New Orleans. It was Sam’s suite, really, but he invited me to split it with him when he found out I had no place to stay. He was working then part time as an attendant in a sniffer palace.
I was fresh off the pod out of Newer York, where I was supposed to have been third assistant statutory law clerk to Judge Mattachine of the Manhattan County More Supreme Court, Upper. Political patronage got me the job, of course, not brains. Statutory law clerks aren’t supposed to have brains; it gets the computers upset. After eight days with Judge Mattachine my patience eroded and I hopped the first pod southbound, taking with me all my earthly possessions, consisting of my toothflash and blackhead remover, my key to the master information output, my most recent thumb-account statement, two changes of clothing, and my lucky piece, a Byzantine gold coin, a nomisma of Alexius I. When I reached New Orleans I got out and wandered down through the underlevels until my feet took me into the sniffer palace on Under Bourbon Street, Level Three. I confess that what attracted me inside were the two jiggly girls who swam fully submerged in a tank of what looked like and turned out to be cognac. Their names were Helen and Betsy and for a while I got to know them quite well. They were the sniffer palace’s lead-in vectors, what they used to call come-ons in the atomic days. Wearing gillmasks, they displayed their pretty nudities to the bypassers, promising but never quite delivering orgiastic frenzies. I watched them paddling in slow circles, and they smiled beckoningly at me and finally I went in.
Sam came up to greet me. He was maybe three meters tall in his buildups, and wore a jock and a lot of oil. Judge Mattachine would have loved him. Sam said, “Evening, white folks, want to buy a dream?”
“What do you have going?”
“Sado, maso, homo, lesbo, inter, outer, upper, downer, and all the variants and deviants.” He indicated the charge plate. “Take your pick and put your thumb right here.”
“Can I try samples first?”
He looked closely. “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this?”
“Funny. I was just going to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m hiding out from the Gestapo,” Sam said. “In blackface. Yisgadal v’yiskadash—”
“—adonai elohainu,” I said. “I’m a Revised Episcopalian, really.”
“I’m First Church of Christ Voudoun. Shall I sing a hymn?”
“Spare me,” I told him. “Can you introduce me to the girls in the tank?”
“We don’t sell flesh here, white folks, only dreams.”
“I don’t buy flesh, I just borrow it a little while.”
“The one with the bosom is Betsy. The one with the backside is Helen. Quite frequently they’re virgins, and then the price is higher. Try a dream instead. Look at those lovely masks. You sure you don’t want a sniff?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Where’d you get that Newer York accent?”
I said, “In Vermont, on summer vacation. Where’d you get that shiny black skin?”
“My daddy bought it for me in a helix parlor. What’s your name?”
“Jud Elliott. What’s yours?”
“Sambo Sambo.”
“Sounds repetitious. Mind if I call you Sam?”
“Many people do. You live in Under New Orleans now?”
“Just off the pod. Haven’t found a place.”
“I get off work at 0400. So do Helen and Betsy. Let’s all go home with me,” said Sam.
III
I found out a lot later that he also worked part time in the Time Service. That was a real shocker, because I always thought of Time Servicemen as stuffy, upright, hopelessly virtuous types, square-jawed and clean-cut-overgrown Boy Scouts. And my black guru was and is anything but that. Of course, I had a lot to learn about the Time Service, as well as about Sam.
Since I had a few hours to kill in the sniffer palace he let me have a mask, free, and piped cheery hallucinations to me. When I came up and out, Sam and Helen and Betsy were dressed and ready to go. I had trouble recognizing the girls with their clothes on. Betsy for bosoms, was my mnemonic, but in their Missionary sheaths they were indistinguishable. We all went down three levels to Sam’s place and plugged in. As the good fumes rose and clothes dropped away, I found Betsy again and we did what you might have expected us to do, and I discovered that eight nightly hours of total immersion in a tank of cognac gave her skin a certain burnished glow and did not affect her sensory responses in any negative way.
Then we sat in a droopy circle and smoked weed and the guru drew me out.
“I am a graduate student in Byzantine history,” I declared.
“Fine, fine. Been there?”
“To Istanbul? Five trips.”
“Not Istanbul. Constantinople.”
“Same place,” I said.
“Is it?”
“Oh,” I said. “Constantinople. Very expensive.”
“Not always,” said black Sam. He touched his thumb to the ignition of a new weed, leaned forward tenderly, put it between my lips. “Have you come to Under New Orleans to study Byzantine history?”
“I came to run away from my job.”
“Tired of Byzantium so soon?”
“Tired of being third assistant statutory law clerk to Judge Mattachine of the Manhattan County More Supreme Court, Upper.”
“You said you were—”
“I know. Byzantine is what I study. Law clerk is what I do. Did.”
“Why?”
“My uncle is Justice Elliot of the U.S. Higher Supreme Court. He thought I ought to get into a decent line of work.”
“You don’t have to go to law school to be a law clerk?”
“Not any more,” I explained. “The machines do all the data retrieval, anyway. The clerks are just courtiers. They congratulate the judge on his brilliance, procure for him, submit to him, and so forth. I stuck it for eight days and podded out.”
“You have troubles,” Sam said sagely.
“Yes. I’ve got a simultaneous attack of restlessness, weltschmerz, tax liens, and unfocused ambition.”
“Want to try for tertiary syphilis?” Helen asked.
“Not just now.”
“If you had a chance to attain your heart’s desire,” said Sam, would you take it?”
“I don’t know what my heart’s desire is.”
“Is that what you mean when you say you’re suffering from unfocused ambitions?”
“Part of it.”
“If you knew what your heart’s desire was, would you lift a finger to seize it?”
“I would,” I said.
“I hope you mean that,” Sam told me, “because if you don’t, you’ll have your bluff called. Just stick around here.”
He said it very aggressively. He was going to force happiness on me whether I liked it or not.
Sam gave me a three-hour sleepo and took the girls home. In the morning, after a scrub, I inspected the suite and observed that it was decorated with artifacts of many times and places: a Sumerian clay tablet, a stirrup cup from Peru, a goblet of Roman glass, a string of Egyptian faience beeds, a medieval mace and suit of chain-mail, several copies of The New-York Times from 1852 and 1853, a shelf of books bound in blind-stamped calf, two Iroquois false-face masks, an immense array of Africana, and a good deal else, cluttering every available alcove, aperture, and orifice. In my fuddled way I assumed that Sam had antiquarian leanings and drew no deeper conclusions. A week later I noticed that everything in his collection seemed newly made. He is a forger of antiquities, I told myself. “I am a part time employee of the Time Service,” black Sam insisted.
IV
“The Time Service,” I said, “is populated by square-jawed Boy Scouts. Your jaw is round.”
“And my nose is flat, yes. And I am no Boy Scout. However, I am a part time employee of the Time Service.”
“I don’t believe it. The Time Service is staffed entirely by nice boys from Indiana and Texas. Nice white boys of all races, creeds, and colors.”
“That’s the Time Patrol,” said Sam. “I’m a Time Courier.”
“There’s a difference?”
“There’s a difference.”
“Pardon my ignorance.”
“Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.”
“Tell me about the Time Service.”
“There are two divisions,” Sam said. “The Time Patrol and the Time Couriers. The people who tell ethnic jokes end up in the Time Patrol. The people who invent ethnic jokes end up as Time Couriers. Capisce?”
“Not really.”
“Man, if you’re so dumb, why ain’t you black?” Sam asked gently. “Time Patrolmen do the policing of paradoxes. Time Couriers take the tourists up the line. Couriers hate the Patrol, Patrol hates Couriers. I’m a Courier. I do the Mali-Ghana-Gao-Kush-Aksum-Kongo route in January and February, and in October and November I do Sumer, Pharaonic Egypt, and sometimes the Nazca-Mochica-Inca run. When they’re shorthanded I fill in on Crusades, Magna Carta, 1066, and Agincourt. Three times now I’ve done the Fourth Crusade taking Constantinople, and twice the Turks in 1453. Eat your heart out, white folks.”
“You’re making this up, Sam!”
“Sure I am, sure. You see all this stuff here? Smuggled right down the line by yours truly, out past the Time Patrol, not a thing they suspected.”
My eyes glistened. I sensed my unknown heart’s desire vibrating just beyond my grasp. “Smuggle me up the line to Byzantium, Sam!”
“Go smuggle yourself. Sign on as a Courier.”
“Could I?”
“They’re always hiring. Boy, where’s your sense? A graduate student in history, you call yourself, and you’ve never even thought of a Time Service job.”
“I’ve thought of it,” I said indignantly. “It’s just that I never thought of it seriously. It seems—well, too easy. To strap on a timer and visit any era that ever was—that’s cheating, Sam, do you know what I mean?”
“I know what you mean, but you don’t know what you mean. I’ll tell you your trouble, Jud. You’re a compulsive loser.”
I knew that. How did he know it so soon?
He said, “What you want most of all is to go up the line, like any other kid with two synapses and a healthy honker. So you turn your back on that, and instead of signing up you let them nail you with a fake job, which you run away from at the earliest possible opportunity. Where are you now? What’s ahead? You’re, what, 22 years old—”
“—24—”
“—and you’ve just unmade one career, and you haven’t made move one on the other, and when I get tired of you I’ll toss you out on your thumb, and what happens when the money runs dry?”
I didn’t answer.
He went on, “I figure you’ll run out of stash in six months, Jud. At that point you can sign up as stoker for a rich widow, pick a good one out of the Throbbing Crotch Registry—”
“Yigg.”
“Or you can join the Hallucination Police and help to preserve objective reality—”
“Yech.”
“Or you can return to the More Supreme Court and surrender your lily-white to Judge Mattachine—”
“Blugh.”
“Or you can do what you should have done all along, which is to enroll as a Time Courier. Of course, you won’t do that, because you’re a loser, and losers infallibly choose the least desirable alternative. Right?”
“Wrong, Sam.”
“Crap.”
“Are you trying to make me angry?”
“No, love.” He lit a weed for me. “I go on duty at the sniffer palace in half an hour. Would you mind oiling me:
“Oil yourself, you anthropoid. I’m not laying a hand on your lovely black flesh.”
“Ah! Aggressive heterosexuality rears its ugly head!”
He stripped to his jock and poured oil into his bath machine. The machine’s arms moved in spidery circles and started to polish him to a high gloss.
“Sam,” I said, “I want to join the Time Service.”
V
PLEASE ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS
Name: Judson Daniel Elliott III
Place of Birth: Newer York
Date of Birth: 11 October 2035
Sex (M or F): M
Citizen Registry Number: 070-28-3479-xx5-100089891
Academic Degrees—
Bachelor: Columbia ’55
Master: Columbia ’56
Doctor: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, incomplete
Scholar Magistrate: _____________________________
Other: ________________________________________
Height: 1 meter (s) 88 centimeters
Weight: 78 kg
Hair Color: black
Eye Color: black
Racial Index: 8.5 C +
Blood Group: BB 132
Marriages (List Temporary and Permanent Liaisons, in order of registration, and duration of each): none
_____________________________
_____________________________
_____________________________
_____________________________
Acknowledged Offspring: none Reason for Entering Time Service (limit: 100 words):
To improve my knowledge of Byzantine culture, which is my special study area; to enlarge my acquaintance with human customs and behavior; to deepen my relationship to other individuals through constructive service; to offer the benefits of my education thus far to those in need of information; to satisfy certain romantic longings common to young men.
_____________________________
_____________________________
_____________________________
_____________________________
Names of Blood Relatives Currently Employed by Time Service: none
_____________________________
VI
Very little of the foregoing really mattered. I was supposed to keep the application on my person, like a talisman, in case anybody in the Time Service bureaucracy really wanted to see it as I moved through the stages of enrolling; but all that was actually necessary was my Citizen Registry Number, which gave the Time Service folk full access to everything else I had put on the form except my Reason for Entering Time Service, and much more besides. At the push of a node the master data center would disgorge not only my height, weight, date of birth, hair color, eye color, racial index, blood group, and academic background, but also a full list of all illnesses I had suffered, vaccinations, my medical and psychological checkups, sperm count, mean body temperature by seasons, size of all bodily organs, all my places of residence, my kin to the fifth degree and the fourth generation, current bank balance, pattern of financial behavior, tax status, voting performance, record of arrests if any, preference in pets, shoe size, et cetera. Privacy is out of fashion, they tell me.
