He was a capable Courier, besides. He slipped us cunningly into 1803 New Orleans in the guise of a party of Dutch traders making a market tour; as long as we didn’t meet a real Hollander we were safe, and our “Dutch” label covered the oddities of our futuristic accents. We strode around town uncomfortably garbed in early nineteenth-century clothing, feeling like refugees from a costume drama, and Sid showed us the sights in fine fashion.
On the side, I quickly discovered, he was carrying on a flourishing trade in gold doubloons and Spanish eight-real pieces. He didn’t bother to conceal what he was doing from me, but he didn’t talk about it, either, and I never really figured out all the intricate details. It had something to do—maybe—with taking advantage of variable exchange rates. All I know is that he swapped United States silver dollars for British gold guineas, used the guineas to buy French silver currency at a big discount, and met with Caribbean buccaneers by night on the banks of the Mississippi to trade the French coins for Spanish gold and silver. What he did with his doubloons and eight-real pieces I never knew. Nor could I see where the profit in the deal was coming from. My best theory was that he simply was trying to switch as many currencies around as possible, in order to build up a stock of coins for sale to collectors down the line; but somehow that seemed too simple-minded an operation for someone of his style. He didn’t offer explanations and I was too shy to ask.
He was also a busy sexman. That isn’t unusual for a Courier. (“The lady tourists are fair game,” Sam said. “They fall all over themselves to submit to us. It’s like the white-hunter thing in Africa.”) But Sid Buonocore didn’t just confine himself to plugging romance-hungry tourists, I discovered.
Late one night in our 1803 trip I was bothered with some procedural point and went to the Courier’s bedroom to ask him about it. I knocked and he said, “Come in,” so I went in, but he wasn’t alone. A tawny maiden with long black hair was sprawled on the bed, naked, sweat-shiny, rumpled. Her breasts were hard and heavy and her nipples were chocolate-colored. “Excuse me,” I said. “I didn’t mean to intrude.” Sid Buonocore laughed. “Crap,” he said. “We’re finished for now. You aren’t interrupting things. This is Maria.”
“Hello, Maria,” I said tentatively.
She giggled drunkenly. Sid spoke to her in the Creole patois and she giggled again. Rising from the bed, she performed an elegant nude curtsy before me and murmured, “Bon soir, m’sieu.” Then she fell on her face with a gentle swooning fall.
“She’s lovely, isn’t she?” Sid asked proudly. “Half Indian, half Spanish, half French. Have some rum.”
I took a gulp from the flask he proffered. “That’s too many halves,” I said.
“Maria doesn’t do anything in a petty way.”
“So I see.”
“I met her on my last trip through here. I’m timing things very carefully so that I can have her for a little while each night, and still not deprive my other selves of her. I mean, I can’t predict how often I’ll be doing this goddam run, Jud, but I might as well set myself up nicely each time I go up the line.”
“Should you be saying such things in front of—”
“Doesn’t speak a word of English. Absolutely safe.”
Maria stirred and moaned. Sid took the rum flask from me and let some splash down onto her chest. She giggled again, and sleepily began to rub it into her breasts like a magic growth ointment. She didn’t need any ointment.
Sid said, “She’s quite passionate.”
“I’m sure.”
He said something to her and she lurched to her feet and came toward me. Her breasts swayed like bells. Fumes of rum and fumes of lust rose from her. Unsteadily she reached her hands toward me, but she lost her balance and slipped once again to the planked floor. She lay there chuckling.
“Want to try her?” Sid asked. “Let her sober up a little, and take her back to your room and have some fun.”
I said something about the interesting diseases she might be carrying. Sometimes I break out all over with fastidiousness at funny moments.
Buonocore spat scornfully. “You’ve had your shots. What are you worrying about?”
“They immunized us against typhoid and diphtheria and yellow fever and all that,” I said. “But syphilis?”
“She’s clean. Believe me. Anyway, if you’re nervous, you can take a thermobath the minute you go down the line.” He shrugged. “If something like that scares you, maybe you better not be a Courier.”
“I didn’t—”
“You saw that I was willing to ball her, didn’t you? Jud, do you think I’m an ordinary fool or a goddam fool? Would I go to bed with a syphilitic? And then offer her to you?”
“Well—”
“There’s only one thing you do have to worry about,” he said. “Have you had your pill?”
“My pill?”
“Your pill, stupid! Your monthly pill!”
“Oh. Yes. Yes, of course.”
“That’s vital, if you’re going to go up the line. You don’t want to run around fertilizing other people’s ancestors. The Time Patrol will really scrape you for a thing like that. You can get away with a little fraternization with up-the-line people—you can do some business with them, you can go to bed with them—but you damned well better not plant any babies in them. Got it?”
“Sure, Sid.”
“Remember, just because I fool around a little, that doesn’t mean I’m willing to risk changing the past in a big way. Like fouling up the genetic flow by making babies up the line. Go you and do likewise, kid. Don’t forget your pills. Now take Maria and clear out.”
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.
17.
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 o
r 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’s 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 buttocks 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 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. Emily wore a cloak of copper mesh strips interlaced at her throat. I searched patiently beneath it for her breasts. 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 spread-eagled 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?” Her thighs were tightly clasped around my left hand.
“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.”
“I guess it depends on what you mean by improvements,” I said.
“Well, there are certain norms of appearance. We assume that it’s better to have thick, lustrous hair than none at all. Better for a man to be two meters tall than one meter tall. Better to have straight teeth than crooked ones. But what would you say if a woman comes in and tells you to design a son with undescended testicles?”
“Why would anybody want a child like that?”
“She doesn’t like the idea of his fooling around with girls,” Emily said.
“Did you do it?”
“The request was two full points below the mark on the genetic deviation index. We have to refer all such requests to the Board of Genetic Review.”
“Would they approve it?” I asked.
“Oh, no, never. They don’t authorize counterproductive mutations of that sort.”
“I guess the poor woman is just going to have a baby with balls, then.”
Emily smiled. “She can go to bootleg helixers, if she likes. 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, and slipped her eager hand into my pants.
18.
I reached Istanbul on a murky summer afternoon and caught an express pod across the Bosphorus to the Time Service headquarters, 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 mêlée, 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 honey-cakes 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?”