Collected Short Fiction, page 705
I took Maria and cleared out.
She sobered up fast in my room. She couldn’t speak a word of any language I understood. I couldn’t speak a word of any language she understood. But we made out all right anyway.
Even though she was 250 years older than me, there was nothing wrong with any aspect of her performance. Some things don’t change much.
XVII
After I qualified as a Time Courier, and just before I departed to go on the Byzantium run, Sam gave a farewell party for me. Just about everyone I had known in Under New Orleans was invited, and we all crammed into Sam’s two rooms. The girls from the sniffer palace were there, and an unemployed oral poet named Shigemitsu who spoke only in iambic pentameter, and five or six Time Service people, and a peddler of floaters, and a wild green-haired girl who worked as a splitter in a helix parlor, and others. Sam even invited Flora Chambers, but she had shipped out the day before to fill in on the Sack of Rome run.
Everyone was given a floater as he arrived. So things turned on fast. Instants after the buzz of the floater’s snout against my arm I felt my consciousness expanding like a balloon, stretching until my body could no longer contain it, bursting the confines of my skin. With a pop! I broke free and floated. The others were going through the same experience. Liberated from our chains of flesh, we drifted around the ceiling in an ectoplasmic haze, enjoying the slinkiness of the sensation. I sent foggy tentacles off to curl around the floating forms of Betsy and Helen, and we enjoyed a tranquil triple conjugation of the psychedelic sort. Meanwhile music came seeping from a thousand outputs in the wall paint, and the ceiling screen was tuned to the abstraction channel to enhance the effects. It was a very sweet scene.
“We grieve that you must take your leave of us,” said Shigemitsu tenderly. “Your absence here creates an aching void. Though all the world now opens to your knock—”
He went on like that for at least five minutes. The poetry got really erotic toward the end. I wish I could remember that part of it.
We floated higher and higher. Sam, hosting it to the full, saw to it that nobody wore off even for a minute. His huge black body gleamed with oil. One young couple from the Time Service had brought their own coffin along; it was a lovely job, silk-lined, with all the sanitary attachments. They climbed in and let us monitor them on the telemetry line. Afterward, the rest of us tried it, in twos or threes, and there was a great deal of laughter over some of the couplings. My partner was the floater peddler, and right in the middle of things we turned on all over again.
The sniffer palace girls danced for us, and three of the Time Couriers—two men and a fragile-looking young woman in an ermine loincloth—put on an exhibition of biological acrobatics, very charming. They had learned the steps in Knossos, where they watched Minos’ dancers perform, and had simply adapted the movements to modern tastes by grafting in the copulations at the right moments. During the performance Sam distributed input scramblers to everybody. We plugged them in and beautiful synesthesia took hold. For me this time touch became smell; I caressed Betsy’s cool skin and the fragrance of April lilacs came to me; I squeezed a cube of ice and smelled the sea at high tide; I stroked the ribbed wall fabric and my lungs filled with the dizzying flavor of a pine forest on fire. Then we did the pivot and for me sound became texture; Helen made passion-sounds in my ear and they became furry moss; music roared from the speakers as a torrent of thick cream; Shigemitsu began to moan in blank verse and the stabbing rhythms of his voice reached me as pyramids of ice. We went on to do things with color, taste, and duration. Of all the kinds of sensory pleasures invented in the last hundred years, I think scrambling is by far my favorite.
Later Emily, the helix parlor girl, came over. She was starvation-slim, with painfully sharp cheekbones, a scraggly mop of tangled green hair, and the most beautiful piercing green eyes I have ever seen. Though she was high on everything at once simultaneously, she seemed cool and self-possessed—an illusion, I quickly discovered. She was floating. “Listen carefully to what she says,” Sam advised me. “She goes clairvoyant under the influence of floaters. I mean it: she’s the real thing.”
She toppled into my arms. I supported her uncertainly a moment while her mouth sought mine. Her teeth nipped lightly into my lips. Delicately we toppled to the carpet, which emitted little thrumming sounds when we landed. She said in a hollow, prophetic voice, “You will soon begin a long journey.”
“Yes.”
“You will go up the line.”
“That’s right.”
“In—Byzantium.”
“Byzantium, yes.”
“That is no country for old men!” cried a voice from the far side of the room. “The young in one another’s arms, birds in the trees—”
“Byzantium,” murmured an exhausted dancer spreadeagled near my feet.
“The golden smithies of the Emperor!” Shigemitsu screamed. “Spirit after spirit! The smithies break the flood! Flames that no faggot feeds, nor steel has lit!”
“The Emperor’s drunken soldiery are abed,” I said.
Emily, quivering, bit my ear and said, “You will find your heart’s desire in Byzantium.”
“Sam said the same thing to me.”
“And lose it there. And you will suffer, and regret, and repent, and you will not be the same as you were before.”
“That sounds serious,” I said.
“Beware love in Byzantium!” the prophetess shrilled. “Beware! Beware!”
“—the jaws that bite, the claws that catch!” sang Shigemitsu.
I promised Emily that I would be careful.
But the light of prophecy was gone from her eyes. She sat up, blinked several times, smiled uncertainly, and said, “Who are you?”
“I’m the guest of honor. Jud Elliott.”
“I don’t know you. What do you do?”
“Time Courier. Will be. I’m leaving to start service tomorrow.”
“I think I remember now. I’m Emily.”
“Yes, I know. You’re with a helix parlor?”
“Someone’s been talking about me!”
“Not much. What do you do there?”
“I’m a splitter,” she said. “I separate genes. You see, when somebody is carrying the gene for red hair, and wants to transmit that to his children, but the gene is linked to, let’s say, the gene for hemophilia, I split off the unwanted gene and edit it out.”
“It sounds like very difficult work,” I ventured.
“Not if you know what you’re doing. There’s a six-month training course.”
“I see.”
“It’s interesting work. It tells you a lot about human nature, seeing how people want their children to come out. You know, not everybody wants improvements edited in. We get some amazing requests. We turn them down, of course. But then people go to bootleg helixers. They’ll do anything for anybody. Don’t you know about them?”
“Not really.”
“They produce the far-out mutations for the avant-garde set. The children with gills and scales, the children with twenty fingers, the ones with zebra-striped skin. The bootleggers will notch any gene at all—for the right price. They’re terribly expensive. But they’re the wave of the future.”
“They are?”
“Cosmetic mutations are on the way in,” Emily declared. “Don’t misunderstand—our parlor won’t touch the things. But this is the last generation of uniformity the human race is going to have. Variety of genotype and phenotype—that’s what’s ahead!” Her eyes sparkled with sudden lunacy, and I realized that a slow-acting floater must have exploded in her veins in the last few minutes. Drawing close to me, she whispered, “What do you think of this idea? Let’s make a baby right now, and I’ll redesign it after hours at the parlor! We’ll keep up with the trends!”
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’ve had my pill this month.”
“Let’s try anyway,” she said.
XVIII
I reached Istanbul on a murky summer afternoon and caught an express pod across the Bosphorus to the Time Service headquarters, which were on the Asian side. The city hadn’t changed much since my last visit a year before. That was no surprise. Istanbul hasn’t really changed since Kemal Ataturk’s time, and that was 150 years ago. The same gray buildings, the same archaic clutter of unlabeled streets, the same overlay of grit and grime. And the same heavenly mosques floating above the dilapidation.
I admire the mosques tremendously. They show that the Turks were good for something. But to me, Istanbul is a black joke of a city that someone has painted over the wounded stump of my beloved Constantinople. The little pieces of the Byzantine city that remain hold more magic for me than Sultan Ahmed’s mosque, the Suleimaniye, and the mosque of Beyazit, all taken together.
The thought that I would soon be seeing Constantinople as a living city, with all the Turkish excrescences swept away, almost made me stain my pants with glee.
The Time Service had set up shop in a squat, formidable building of the late twentieth century, far up the Bosphorus, practically facing the Turkish fortress of Rumeli Hisari, from which the Conqueror strangled Byzantium in 1453. I was expected; even so, I had to spend fifteen minutes milling in an anteroom, surrounded by angry tourists complaining about some foulup in scheduling. One red-faced man kept shouting, “Where’s the computer input? I want all this on record in the computer!” And a tired, angelic-looking secretary kept telling him wearily that everything he was saying was going on record, down to the ultimate bleat. Two swaggering giants in Time Patrol uniforms cut coolly through the melee, their faces grimly set, their minds no doubt riveted to duty. I could almost hear them thinking, “Aha! Aha!” A thin woman with a wedge-shaped face rushed up to them, waved papers at their deep-cleft chins, and yelled, “Seven months ago I confirmed these reservations, yet! Right after Christmas it was! And now they tell me—” The Time Patrolmen kept walking. A robot vendor entered the waiting room and started to sell lottery tickets. Behind it came a haggard, unshaven Turk in a rumpled black jacket, peddling honeycakes from a greasy tray.
I admired the quality of the confusion. It showed genius.
Still, I wasn’t unhappy to be rescued. A Levantine type who might have been a cousin of my fondly remembered instructor Najeeb Dajani appeared, introduced himself to me as Spiros Protopopolos, and led me hastily through a sphincter-door I had not noticed. “You should have come through the side way,” he said. “I apologize for this delay. We didn’t realize you were here.”
He was about thirty, plump, sleek, with sunglasses and a great many white teeth. As we shot upshaft to the Couriers’ lounge he said, “You have never worked as a Courier before, yes?”
“Yes,” I said. “Never. My first time.”
“You will love it! The Byzantium run especially. Byzantium, it is so—how shall I express it?” He pressed his pudgy palms rapturously together. “Surely you must feel some of it. But only a Greek like myself can respond fully. Byzantium! Ah, Byzantium!”
“I’m Greek also,” I said.
He halted the shaft and raised his glasses. “You are not Judson Daniel Elliott III?”
“I am.”
“This is Greek?”
“My mother’s name was originally Passalidis. She was born in Athens. My maternal grandfather was mayor of Sparta. On his mother’s side he was descended from the Markezinis family.”
“You are my brother!” cried Spiros Protopopolos.
It turned out that six of the nine other Time Couriers assigned to the Byzantium run were Greeks by nationality or descent; there were two Germans, Herschel and Melamed, and the tenth man was a slick, darkhaired Spaniard named Capistrano who later on, when deep in his cups, confided to me that his great-grandmother had been a Turk. He may have invented that so I’d despise him; Capistrano had a distinct streak of masochism.
Five of my nine colleagues were currently up the line and four were here in now-time Istanbul, thanks to the scheduling mishap that was causing so much dismay in the anteroom. Protopopolos made the introductions: Malamed, Capistrano, Pappas, meet Elliott. Melamed was fair-haired and hid behind a dense sandy beard; Pappas had hollow cheeks, sad eyes, and a drooping mustache. They were both about forty. Capistrano looked a little younger.
An illuminated board monitored the doorings of the other members of the team: Herschel, Kolettis, Plastiras, Metaxas, and Gompers. “Gompers?” I said. Protopopolos replied, “His grandmother was pure Hellene.” The five of them were scattered over ten centuries, according to the board, with Kolettis in 1651 B.P. and Metaxas in 606 B.P.—that is, in A.D. 408 and 1453—and the others in between. As I stared at the board Kolettis moved down the line by more than a century. “They have gone to see the riots,” Melamed said softly, and Capistrano nodded, sighing.
Pappas brewed strong coffee for me. Capistrano uncorked a bottle of Turkish brandy, which I found a little hard to ingest. He prodded me encouragingly, saying, “Drink, drink, it’s the best you’ll taste in the last fifteen centuries!” I remembered Sam’s advice that I should learn how to drink, and forced the stuff down, longing for a weed, a floater, a fume, anything decent.
While I relaxed with my new comrades, a Time Patrolman came into the room. He didn’t use the scanner to get entry permission, or even knock; he just barged in. “Can’t you ever be polite?” Pappas growled.
“Up yours,” said the Time Patrolman. He sank down into a web and unbuttoned his uniform shirt. He was a chunky Aryan-looking sort with a hairy chest; what looked like golden wire curled toward his clavicles. “New man?” he said, jerking his head at me.
“Jud Elliott,” I said. “Courier.”
“Dave Van Dam,” he said. “Patrol.” His huge hand enfolded mine. “Don’t let me catch you screwing around up the line. Nothing personal, but I’m a tough bastard. It’s so easy to hate us: we’re incorruptible. Try me and see.”
“This is the lounge for Couriers,” said Capistrano thinly.
“You don’t need to tell me that,” said Van Dam. “Believe it or not, I can read.”
“Are you now a Courier, then?”
“Do you mind if I relax a little with the opposition?” The Patrolman grinned, scratched his chest, and put the brandy bottle to his lips. He drank copiously and belched resonantly. “Christ, what a killer of a day! You know where I was today?”
Nobody seemed to care.
He continued anyway, “I spent the whole day in 1962! Nineteen goddam sixty-two! Checking out every floor of the Istanbul Goddam Hilton for two alleged timecrimers running an alleged artifact siphon. What we heard was they were bringing gold coins and Roman glass down from 1400 B.P. and selling them to American tourists in the Hilton, then investing the proceeds on the stock market and hiding the stash in a Swiss bank for pickup in now-time. Christ! You know, you can make billions that way? You buy in a bear-market year and stick it away for a century and you end up owning the world. Well, maybe so, but we didn’t see a thing in the whole goddam Hilton except plenty of legitimate free enterprise based in thentime. Crap on it!” He took another pull on the brandy bottle. “Let them run a recheck upstairs. Find their own goddam timecrimers.”
“This is the lounge for Couriers,” Capistrano said once more.
The Patrolman took no notice. When he finally left, five minutes later, I said, “Are they all like that?”
Protopopolos said, “This was one of the refined ones. Most of the others are boors.”
XIX
They put me to bed with a hypno-sleep course in Byzantine Greek, and when I woke up I not only could order a meal, buy a tunic, or seduce a virgin in Byzantine argot, but I knew some phrases that could make the mosaics of Haghia Sophia peel from the walls in shame. I hadn’t known about those phrases when I was a graduate student at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. Good stuff, hypnosleep.
I still wasn’t ready to go out solo as a Courier. Protopopolos, who was serving as staff router this month, arranged to team me with Capistrano for my first time out. If everything went smoothly, I’d be put on my own in a few weeks.
The Byzantium run, which is one of the most popular that the Time Service offers, is pretty standard stuff. Every tour is taken to see the coronation of an Emperor, a chariot race in the Hippodrome, the dedication of Haghia Sophia, the sack of the city by the Fourth Crusade, and the Turkish conquest. A tour like that stays up the line for seven days. The fourteen-day tour covers all that plus the arrival of the First Crusade in Constantinople, the riots of 532, an imperial wedding, and a couple of lesser events. The Courier has his options about which coronations, Emperors, or chariot races to go to; the idea is to avoid contributing to the Cumulative Paradox by cluttering any one event with too many tourists. Just about every major period between Justinian and the Turks gets visited, although we’re cautioned to avoid the years of bad earthquakes and absolutely prohibited, under penalty of obliteration by the Time Patrol, from entering the bubonic plague years of 745-47.
On my last night in now-time I was so excited I couldn’t sleep. Partly I was keyed up over the fear of blundering somehow on my first assignment as a Courier; for it’s a big responsibility to be a Courier, even with a colleague along, and I was afraid of committing some terrible mistake. The thought of having to be rescued by the Time Patrol upset me. What a humiliation!
But mainly I was worried about Constantinople. Would it live up to my dream of it? Or would it let me down? All my life I had cherished an image of that golden, glittering city of the past; now, on the verge of going up the line to it, I trembled.
I got up and stumbled around the little room they had given me, feeling drawn and tense. I was off all drugs and wasn’t allowed to smoke—Couriers have to taper off such things ahead of time, since it’s obviously an illegal anachronism to light up a weed in a tenth-century street. Capistrano had given me the dregs of his brandy, but that was small consolation. He heard me walking into furniture, though, and came to see what the trouble was.
