Up the Line

  Pulcheria was my heart’s desire; I knew that now.

  I remembered Sam Spade telling me, “You’re a compulsive loser. Losers infallibly choose the least desirable alternative.”

  Go ahead, great-great-multi-great-grandson. Skip out of here before the luscious primordial ancestress can offer her dark musky loins to you.

  I remembered Emily, the helix-parlor girl with the gift of prophecy, crying shrilly, “Beware love in Byzantium! Beware! Beware!”

  I loved. In Byzantium.

  Rising, I paced the room a thousand times, and stood at the door listening to the faint laughter and the far-off songs, and then I removed all of my clothing, carefully folding each garment and placing it on the floor beside my bed. I stood naked except for my timer, and I debated removing that too. What would Pulcheria say when she saw that tawny plastic band at my waist? How could I explain it?

  I unfastened the timer too, separating myself from it for the first time in my career up the line. Waves of real terror burst over me. I felt more naked than naked, without it; I felt stripped down to my bones. Without my timer around my hips I was the slave of time, like all these others. I had no means of quick escape. If Pulcheria planned some cruel joke and I was caught without my timer in easy reach, I was doomed.

  Hastily I put the timer back on.

  Then I washed myself, meticulously, everywhere, cleansing myself for Pulcheria. And stood naked beside the bed, waiting another billion years. And thought longingly of the dark swollen tips of Pulcheria’s full breasts, and the softness of the skin inside her thighs. And my manhood came to life, rising to such extravagant proportions that I was both proud and embarrassed.

  I didn’t want Pulcheria to walk in and find me like this, beside the bed with this tree of flesh sprouting between my legs. I looked like a tipped tripod; to greet her this way was too blunt, too direct. Quickly I dressed again, feeling foolish. And waited a billion years more. And saw dawnlight beginning to blend with moonlight in my slit of a window.

  And the door opened, and Pulcheria came into the room, and bolted the door behind her.

  She had wiped away her heavy makeup and had taken off all her jewelry except a single gold pectoral, and she had changed from her party clothes into a light silken wrap. Even by the dim light I saw she was nude beneath it, and the soft curves of her body inflamed me almost to insanity. She glided toward me.

  I took her in my arms and tried to kiss her. She didn’t understand kissing. The posture one must adopt for mouth-to-mouth contact was alien to her. I had to arrange her. I tilted her head gently. She smiled, puzzled but willing.

  Our lips touched. My tongue wiggled forth.

  She quivered and flattened her body tight against mine. She picked up the theory of kissing in a hurry.

  My hands slid down her shoulders. I drew off her wrap; she trembled a little as I bared her.

  I counted her breasts. Two. Rosy pink nipples. I measured her hind cheeks with my outspread hands. A good size. I ran fingertips over her thighs. Excellent thighs. I admired the two deep dimples in the small of her back.

  She was at once shy and wanton, a superb combination.

  When I undressed, she saw the timer and touched it, plucked at it, but asked for no explanation, and her hands slipped lower. We tumbled down together on the bed.

  You know, sex is really a ridiculous thing. The physical act of it, I mean. What they call “making love” in twentieth-century novels; what they call “sleeping together.” I mean, consider all the literary effort that has gone into writing rhapsodies to screwing. And what does it all amount to, anyway?

  You take this short rigid fleshy rod and you put it into this lubricated groove, and you rub it back and forth until enough of a charge is built up so that discharge is possible. Like making a fire by twirling a stick against a plank. Really, there’s nothing to it; Stick Tenon A into Mortise B. Vibrate until finished.

  Look upon the act and you know it’s preposterous. The buttocks humping up and down, the thrashing legs, the muffled groans, the speedings up and slowing down—can anything be sillier, as a central act governing human emotions?

  Of course not. Yet why was this sweaty transaction with Pulcheria so important to me? (And maybe to her.)

  My theory is that the real significance of sex, good sex, is a symbolic one. It’s something beyond the fact that you get a tickle of “pleasure” for a short while during the ramming and butting. The same pleasure is available without the bother of finding a partner, after all, and yet it isn’t the same, is it?

  No, what sex is about is more than a twitch in the loins; it’s a celebration of spiritual union, of mutual trust. We say to each other in bed, here, I give myself to you in the expectation that you’ll give me pleasure, and I will attempt to give you pleasure too. The social contract, let’s call it. And the thrill lies in the contract, not in the pleasure that is its payoff.

  Also you say, here is my naked body with all its flaws, which I expose trustingly to you, knowing you will not mock it. Also you say, I accept this intimate contact with you even though I know you may transmit to me a loathsome disease. I am willing to take this risk, because you are you. And also the woman used to say—at least up until the nineteenth or early twentieth century—I will open myself to you even though there may be all sorts of biological consequences nine months from now.

  All these things are much more vital than quick kickies. This is why mechanical masturbating devices have never replaced sex and never will.

  This is why what happened between myself and Pulcheria Ducas on that Byzantine morning in 1105 was far more significant a transaction than what happened between myself and the Empress Theodora half a millennium earlier, and more significant than what had happened between myself and any number of girls a full millennium later. Into Theodora, into Pulcheria, and into those many girls down the line I poured roughly the same number of cubic centimeters of salty fluid; but with Pulcheria it was different. With Pulcheria, our orgasm was only the symbolic sealing of something greater. For me, Pulcheria was the embodiment of beauty and grace, and her easy surrender to me made me an emperor more mighty than Alexius, and neither the spurting of my jet nor her quiver of response mattered a tenth as much as the fact that she and I had come together in trust, in faith, in shared desire, in—love. There you have the heart of my philosophy. I stand revealed as a naked romantic. This is the profundity I’ve distilled from all my experience: sex with love is better than sex without love. Q.E.D. I can also show, if you like, that to be healthy is better than to be ill, and that having money is superior to being poor. My capacity for abstract thought is limitless.

  48.

  Nevertheless, even though we had proven the philosophical point quite adequately, we went on to prove it all over again half an hour later. Redundancy is the soul of understanding.

  Afterward we lay side by side, glowing sweetly. It was the moment to offer my partner a weed and share a different sort of communion, but of course that was impossible here. I felt the lack.

  “Is it very different where you come from?” Pulcheria asked. “I mean, the people, how they dress, how they talk.”

  “Very different.”

  “I sense a great strangeness about you, George. Even the way you held me in bed. Not that I am an expert on such things, you must understand. You and Leo are the only men I have ever had.”

  “Can this be true?”

  Her eyes blazed. “You take me for a whore?”

  “Well, of course not, but—” I floundered. “In my country,” I said desperately, “a girl takes many men before she marries. No one objects to it. It’s the custom.”

  “Not here. We are well sheltered. I was married at twelve; that gave me little time for liberties.” She frowned, sat up, leaned across me to look in my eyes. Her breasts dangled enticingly over my face. “Are women really so loose in your country?”

  “Truth, Pulcheria, they are.”

  “But you are Byzantines! You are not b
arbarians from the north! How can it be allowed, this taking of so many men?”

  “It’s our custom.” Lamely.

  “Perhaps you are not truly from Epirus,” she suggested. “Perhaps you come from some more distant place. I tell you again, you are very strange to me, George.”

  “Don’t call me George. Call me Jud,” I said boldly.

  “Jud?”

  “Jud.”

  “Why should I call you this?”

  “It’s my inner name. My real name, the one I feel. George is just—well, a name I use.”

  “Jud. Jud. Such a name I have never heard. You are from a strange land! You are!”

  I gave her a sphinxy smile. “I love you,” I said, and nibbled her nipples to change the subject.

  “So strange,” she murmured. “So different. And yet I felt drawn to you from the first moment. You know, I’ve long dreamed of being as wicked as this, but I never dared. Oh, I’ve had offers, dozens of offers, but it never seemed worth the trouble. And then I saw you, and I felt this fire in me, this—this hunger. Why? Tell me why? You are neither more nor less attractive than many of the men I might have given myself to, and yet you were the one. Why?”

  “It was destiny,” I told her. “As I said before. An irresistible force, pulling us together, across the—”

  —centuries—

  “—sea,” I finished lamely.

  “You will come to me again?” she said.

  “Again and again and again.”

  “I’ll find ways for us to meet. Leo will never know. He spends so much of his time at the bank—you know, he’s one of the directors—and in his other businesses, and with the emperor—he hardly pays attention to me. I’m one of his many pretty toys. We’ll meet, Jud, and we’ll know pleasure together often, and—” her dark eyes flashed “—and perhaps you’ll give me a child.”

  I felt the heavens open and rain thunderbolts upon me.

  “Five years of marriage and I have no child,” she went on. “I don’t understand. Perhaps I was too young, at first—I was so young—but now, nothing. Nothing. Give me a child, Jud. Leo will thank you for it—I mean, he’ll be happy, he’ll think it’s his—you even have a Ducas look about you, in the eyes, perhaps, there’d be no trouble. Do you think we made a child tonight?”

  “No,” I said.

  “No? How can you be sure?”

  “I have ways,” I said. I stroked her silkiness. Let me go twenty more days without my pill, though, and I could plant babies aplenty in you, Pulcheria! And knot the fabric of time beyond all unraveling. My own great-great-multi-great-grandfather? Am I seed of my own seed? Did time recurve on itself to produce me? No. I’d never get away with it. I’d give Pulcheria passion, but not parturition. “Dawn’s here,” I whispered.

  “You’d better leave. Where can I send messages to you?”

  “At Metaxas’.”

  “Good. We’ll meet again two days hence, yes? I’ll arrange everything.”

  “I’m yours, whenever you say it, Pulcheria.”

  “Two days. But now, go. I’ll show you out.”

  “Too risky. Servants will be stirring. Go to your room, Pulcheria. I can get out by myself.”

  “But—impossible—”

  “I know the way.”

  “Do you?”

  “I swear it,” I said.

  She needed some convincing, but at length I persuaded her to spare herself the risk of getting me out of the palace. We kissed once more, and she donned her wrap, and I caught her by the arm and pulled her to me, and released her, and she went out of the room. I counted sixty seconds off. Then I set my timer and jumped six hours up the line. The party was going full blast. Casually I walked through the building, avoiding the room where my slightly earlier self, not yet admitted to Pulcheria’s joyous body, was chatting with Emperor Alexius. I left the Ducas palace unnoticed. In the darkness outside, beside the sea wall along the Golden Horn, I set my timer again and shunted down the line to 1204. Now I hurried to the inn where I had left my sleeping tourists. I reached it less than three minutes after my departure—seemingly so many days ago—for Pulcheria’s era.

  All well. I had had my incandescent night of passion, my soul was purged of longings, and here I was, back at my trade once more, and no one the wiser. I checked the beds.

  Mr. and Mrs. Haggins, yes.

  Mr. and Mrs. Gostaman, yes.

  Miss Pistil and Bilbo, yes.

  Palmyra Gostaman, yes.

  Conrad Sauerabend, yes? No.

  Conrad Sauerabend—

  No Sauerabend. Sauerabend was missing. His bed was empty. In those three minutes of my absence, Sauerabend had slipped away.

  Where?

  I felt the early pricklings of panic.

  49.

  Calm. Calm. Stay calm. He went out to the pissoir, is all. He’ll be right back.

  Item One, a Courier must remain aware of the location of all of the tourists in his care at all times. The penalty—

  I kindled a torch at the smoldering hearth and rushed out into the hall.

  Sauerabend? Sauerabend?

  Not pissing. Not downstairs rummaging in the kitchen. Not prowling in the wine cellar.

  Sauerabend?

  Where the devil are you, you pig?

  The taste of Pulcheria’s lips was still on my own. Her sweat mingled with mine. Her juices still crisped my short hairs. All the delicious forbidden joys of transtemporal incest continued to tingle in my soul.

  The Time Patrol will make a nonperson out of me for this, I thought. I’ll say, “I’ve lost a tourist,” and they’ll say, “How did it happen?” and I’ll say, “I stepped out of the room for three minutes and he vanished,” and they’ll say, “Three minutes, eh? You aren’t supposed to—” and I’ll say, “It was only three minutes. Christ, you can’t expect me to watch them twenty-four hours a day!” And they’ll be sympathetic, but nevertheless they’ll have to check the scene, and in the replay they’ll discover me wantonly shunting out for some other point on the line, and they’ll track me to 1105 and find me with Pulcheria, and see that not only am I guilty of negligence as a Courier, but also that I’ve committed incest with my great-great-multi-great—

  Calm. Calm.

  Into the street now. Flash the torch around. Sauerabend? Sauerabend? No Sauerabend.

  If I were a Sauerabend, where would I sneak off to?

  To the home of some twelve-year-old Byzantine girl? How would he know where to find one? How to get in? No. No. He couldn’t have done that. Where is he, though? Strolling through the town? Out for fresh air? He should be asleep. Snoring. No. I realized that when I left he hadn’t been asleep, hadn’t been snoring; he’d been bothering Palmyra Gostaman. I hurried back to the inn. There wasn’t any point in roaming Constantinople at random for him.

  In mounting panic I woke up Palmyra. She rubbed her eyes, complained a little, blinked. Torchlight glittered off her flat bare chest.

  “Where did Sauerabend go?” I whispered harshly.

  “I told him to leave me alone. I told him if he didn’t stop bothering me I’d bite his thing off. He had his hand right here, and he—”

  “Yes, but where did he go?”

  “I don’t know. He just got up and went away. It was dark in here. I fell asleep maybe two minutes ago. Why’d you have to wake me up?”

  “Some help you are,” I muttered. “Go back to sleep.”

  Calm, Judson, calm. There’s an easy solution to this. If you weren’t in such a flutter, you’d have thought about it long ago. All you have to do is edit Sauerabend back into the room, the way you edited Marge Hefferin back to life.

  It’s illegal, of course. Couriers are not supposed to engage in time corrections. That’s for the Patrol to do. But this will be such a small correction. You can handle it quickly and no one will be the wiser. You got away with the Hefferin revision, didn’t you? Yes. Yes. It’s your only chance, Jud.

  I sat down on the edge of my bed and tried to plan my
actions properly. My night with Pulcheria had dulled the edge of my intellect. Think, Jud. Think as you never thought before.

  I put great effort into my thinking.

  What time was it when you shunted up to 1105?

  Fourteen minutes to midnight.

  What time was it when you came back down the line to 1204?

  Eleven minutes to midnight.

  What time is it now?

  One minute to midnight.

  When did Sauerabend slip out of the room, then?

  Somewhere between fourteen to and eleven to.

  Therefore, how far up the line must you shunt to intercept him?

  About thirteen minutes.

  You realize that if you jump back more than thirteen minutes, you’ll encounter your prior self, who will be getting ready to depart for 1105? That’s the Paradox of Duplication.

  I’ve got to risk it. I’m in worse trouble than that already.

  You’d better shunt, then, and get things fixed up.

  Here I go.

  I timed my shunt perfectly, going up the line thirteen minutes less a few seconds. I noticed with satisfaction that my earlier self had already departed, and that Sauerabend had not. The ugly fat bastard was still in the room, sitting up in his bed with his back to me.

  It would be simplicity itself to stop him now. I simply forbid him to leave the room, and keep him here for the next three minutes, thus canceling his departure. The instant my prior self gets back—at eleven minutes to midnight—I shunt ten minutes down the line, resuming my proper place in the stream of time. Sauerabend thus will have been continuously guarded by his Courier (in one incarnation or another) throughout the whole dangerous period from fourteen minutes to midnight onward. There will be a very slight moment of duplication for me when I overlap my returning self, but I’ll clear out of his time level so fast that he probably won’t notice. And all will be as it should have been.

  Yes. Very good.

  I started across the room toward Sauerabend, meaning to block his path when he tried to leave. He pivoted, still sitting on his bed, and saw me.