Up the Line

  “I am.”

  “This is Greek?”

  “My mother’s name was originally Passilidis. 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; while the tenth man was a slick, dark-haired 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: Melamed, 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 doings 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 that 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 then-time. 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.”

  19.

  They put me to bed with a hypnosleep course in Byzantine Greek, and when I woke up I not only could order a meal, buy a tunic, and 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; 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.

  “Restless?” he asked.

  “Very.”

  “I always am, before a jump. It never wears off.”

  He talked me into going out with him to soothe our nerves. We crossed to the European side and wandered at random through the silent streets of the new city, up from Dolmabahce Palace at the shore to the old Hilton, and down past Taksim to the Galata Bridge and into Istanbul proper. We walked tirelessly. We seemed to be the only ones awake in the city. Through the winding maze of a market we wound, emerging on one of those streets leading to Haghia Sophia, where we stood a while in front of the majestic old building. I imprinted its features on my brain—the extraneous minarets, the late buttresses—and tried to make myself believe that in the morning I’d see it in its true form, serene mistress of the city, no longer compelled to share its grand plaza with the alien loveliness of the Blue Mosque across the way.

  On and on we went, scrambling over the fragments of the Hippodrome, circling Topkapi, making our way to the sea and the old sea wall. Dawn found us outside the Yedikule fortress, in the shadow of the crumbling Byzantine rampart. We were half asleep. A Turkish boy of about fifteen approached us politely
and asked, first in French and then in English, if we were in the market for anything—old coins, his sister, hashish, Israeli currency, gold jewelry, his brother, a carpet. We thanked him and said we weren’t. Undaunted, he summoned his sister, who may have been fourteen but looked four or five years older. “Virgin,” he said. “You like her? Nice figure, eh? What are you, American, English, German? Here, you look, eh?” She unsnapped her blouse at a harsh command from him, and displayed attractive taut round breasts. Dangling on a string between them was a heavy Byzantine bronze coin, possibly a follis. I peered close for a better look. The boy, breathing garlic at me, realized suddenly that it was the coin and not the breasts that I was studying, and made a smooth switch, saying, “You like old coins, eh? We find plenty under wall in a pot. You wait here, I show you, yes?” He ran off. The sister sullenly closed her blouse. Capistrano and I walked away. The girl followed us, calling out to us to stay, but by the time we had gone twenty meters she lost interest. We were back at the Time Service building in an hour, by pod.

  After breakfast we got into costume: long silk tunics, Roman sandals, light cloaks. Capistrano solemnly handed me my timer. By now I had been well trained in its use. I slipped it in place against my skin and felt a dazzling surge of power, knowing that now I was free to transport myself to any era, and was accountable to no one so long as I kept in mind the preservation of the sanctity of now time. Capistrano winked at me.

  “Up the line,” he said.

  “Up the line,” I said.

  We went downstairs to meet our eight tourists.

  20.

  The jumping-off place for the Byzantium run is almost always the same: the plaza in front of Haghia Sophia. The ten of us, feeling faintly foolish in our robes, were taken there by bus, arriving about ten that morning. More conventional tourists, merely there to see Istanbul, flocked back and forth between the great cathedral and nearby Sultan Ahmed. Capistrano and I made sure that everybody’s timer was in place and that the rules of time-travel had been thoroughly nagged into everyone’s skull.

  Our group included a pair of pretty young men from London, a couple of maidenly German schoolteachers, and two elderly American husband-and-wife outfits. Everybody had had the hypnocourse in Byzantine Greek, and for the next sixty days or so would be as fluent in that as in their native languages, but Capistrano and I had to keep reminding the Americans and one of the German girls to speak it.

  We jumped.

  I felt the momentary disorientation that always comes when you go up the line. Then I got my bearings and discovered that I had departed from Istanbul and had reached Constantinople.

  Constantinople did not let me down.

  The grime was gone. The minarets were gone. The mosques were gone. The Turks were gone.

  The air was blue and sweet and clear. We stood in the great plaza, the Augusteum, in front of Haghia Sophia. To my right, where there should have been bleak gray office buildings, I saw open fields. Ahead of me, where the blue fantasy of Sultan Ahmed’s mosque should have been, I saw a rambling conglomeration of low marble palaces. To the side rose the flank of the Hippodrome. Figures in colorful robes, looking like fugitives from Byzantine mosaics, sauntered through the spacious square.

  I swung around for my first view of Haghia Sophia without her minarets.

  Haghia Sophia was not there.

  On the familiar site I saw the charred and tumbled ruins of an unfamiliar rectangular basilica. The stone walls stood but precariously; the roof was gone. Three soldiers drowsed in the shadow of its facade. I was lost.

  Capistrano said droningly, “We have journeyed sixteen centuries up the line. The year is 408; we have come to behold the baptismal procession of Emperor Arcadius’ son, who will one day rule as Theodosius II. To our rear, on the site of the well-known cathedral of Haghia Sophia, we may see the ruins of the original basilica, built during the reign of the Emperor Constantius, son of Constantine the Great, and opened for prayer on the 15th of December, 360. This building was burned on the 20th of June, 404, during a rebellion, and as you can see, reconstruction has not yet begun. The church will be rebuilt about thirty years down the line by Emperor Theodosius II, and you will view it on our next stop. Come this way.”

  As though in a dream I followed, as much a tourist as our eight charges. Capistrano did all the work. He lectured us in a perfunctory but comprehensive way about the marble buildings ahead, which were the beginning of the Great Palace. I couldn’t reconcile what I saw with the ground plans I had memorized at Harvard; but of course the Constantinople I had studied was the later, greater, post-Justinian city, and now I stood in the city at its dawn. We turned inland, away from the palace district, into a residential district where the houses of the rich, blank-fronted and courtyarded, mixed helter-skelter with the rush-roofed hovels of the poor. And then we emerged on the Mese, the grand processional street, lined by arcaded shops, and on this day, in honor of the baptism of the prince, decked with silk hangings adorned with gold.

  All the citizens of Byzantium were here, packing the street elbow to elbow in anticipation of the grand parade. Food shops were busy; we smelled grilled ham and baked lamb, and eyed stalls laden with cheeses, nuts, unfamiliar fruits. One of the German girls said she was hungry and Capistrano laughed and bought spitted lamb for us all, paying for it with bright copper coins worth a fortune to a numismatist. A one-eyed man sold us wine out of a huge cool amphora, letting us drink right from the ladle. Once it became obvious to the other peddlers in the vicinity that we were susceptible customers, they crowded around by the dozens, offering us souvenirs, candied sweets, elderly-looking hard-boiled eggs, pans of salted nuts, trays of miscellaneous animal organs, eyeballs and other balls. This was the real thing, the genuinely archaic past; that array of vended oddities and the reek of sweat and garlic coming from the mob of vendors told us that we were a long way from 2059.

  “Foreigners?” asked a bearded man who was selling little clay oil lamps. “Where from? Cyprus? Egypt?”

  “Spain,” said Capistrano.

  The oil-lamp man eyed us in awe, as though we had claimed to come from Mars. “Spain,” he repeated. “Spain! Wonderful! To travel so far, to see our city—” He gave our whole group a detailed survey, taking a quick inventory and fastening on blonde and breasty Clotilde, the more voluptuous of our two German school-teachers. “Your slavegirl is a Saxon?” he asked me, feeling the merchandise through Clotilde’s loose robes. “Ah, very nice! You are a man of taste!” Clotilde gasped and pried his fingers from her thigh. Coldly Capistrano seized the man, pushing him up against the wall of a shop so roughly that a dozen of his clay lamps tumbled to the pavement and shattered. The vendor winked, but Capistrano said something chilly under his breath and gave the man a terrible glare. “I meant no harm,” the vendor protested. “I thought she was a slave!” He muttered a curt apology and limped away. Clotilde was trembling—whether from outrage or excitement, it was hard to tell. Her companion, Lise, looked a little envious. No Byzantine street peddler had ever fondled her bare flesh!

  Capistrano spat. “That could have been troublesome. We must always be on our guard; innocent pinching can turn quickly to complications and catastrophe.”

  The peddlers edged away from us. We found places near the front of the mob, facing the street. It seemed to me that many of the faces in the crowd were un-Byzantine, and I wondered if they were the faces of time-travelers. A time is coming, I thought, when we from down the line will throng the past to the choking point. We will fill all our yesterdays with ourselves and crowd out our own ancestors.

  “Here they come!” a thousand voices shouted.

  Trumpets blared in several different keys. In the distance there appeared a procession of nobles, clean-cut and close-cropped in the Roman fashion, for this was still as much a Roman city as it was a Greek one. Everyone wore white silk—imported at great cost by caravan from China, Capistrano murmured; the Byzantines had not yet stolen the secret of silk manufacture—and the late af
ternoon sun, striking the splendid robes at a steep angle, gave the procession such a glow of beauty that even Capistrano, who had seen it all before, was moved. Slowly, slowly, the high dignitaries advanced.

  “They look like snowflakes,” whispered a man behind me. “Dancing snowflakes!”

  It took nearly an hour for these high ones to pass us. Twilight came. Following the priests and dukes of Byzantium were the imperial troops, carrying lighted candles that flickered in the deepening dusk like an infinity of stars. Then came more priests, bearing medallions and icons; and then a prince of the royal blood, carrying the gurgling, plump infant who would be the mighty Emperor Theodosius II; and then the reigning emperor himself, Arcadius, clad in imperial purple. The Emperor of Byzantium! I repeated that to myself a thousand times. I, Judson Daniel Elliott III, stood bareheaded under the Byzantine sky, here in A.D. 408, while the Emperor of Byzantium, robes aswish, walked past me! Even though the monarch was merely the trifling Arcadius, the insignificant interpolation between the two Theodosii, I trembled. I swayed. The pavement heaved and bucked beneath me. “Are you ill?” whispered Clotilde anxiously. I sucked breath and begged the universe to stand still. I was overwhelmed, and by Arcadius. What if this had been Justinian? Constantine? Alexius?

  You know how it is. Eventually I got to see even those great ones. But by then I had seen too much up the line, and though I was impressed, I wasn’t engulfed with awe. Of Justinian my clearest memory is that he sneezed; but when I think of Arcadius, I hear trumpets and see stars whirling in the sky.

  21.

  We stayed that night in an inn overlooking the Golden Horn; on the other side of the water, where Hiltons and countinghouses one day would rise, was only an impenetrable darkness. The inn was a substantial wooden building with a dining hall on the ground floor and huge, rough, dormitory-style rooms above. Somehow I expected to be asked to sleep on the floor in a strew of rushes, but no, there were beds of a recognizable sort, and mattresses stuffed with rags. Sanitary facilities were outside, behind the building. There were no baths; we were expected to use the public bathhouses if we craved cleanliness. The ten of us shared one room, but fortunately none of us minded that. Clotilde, when she undressed, indignantly went around showing us the purpling bruises left by the vendor’s grip on her soft white thigh; her angular friend Lise looked gloomy again, for having nothing to show.