Up The Line

1.

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 had meant nothing to me, Pulcheria—

My love. My lustful ancestress. You ache me in my dreams. You sing to me from up the line.