Up The Line

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 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’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 — ourparlor 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.