Up The Line

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.

That night we did little sleeping. There was too much noise, for one thing, since the celebration of the imperial baptism went on raucously throughout the city until almost dawn. But who could sleep, anyway, knowing that the world of the early fifth century lay just beyond the door?

One night before and sixteen centuries down the line, Capistrano had kindly seen me through a siege of sleeplessness. Now he did it again. I rose and stood by the little slit of a window, peering at the bonfires in the city, and when he noticed me he came over and said, “I understand. Sleeping is hard at first.”

“Yes.”

“Shall I get a woman for you?”

“No.”

“We’ll take a walk, then?”

“Can we leave them?” I asked, looking at our eight tourists.

“We won’t go far. We’ll stay just outside, within reach if some trouble starts.”

The air was heavy and mild. Snatches of obscene song floated up from the tavern district. We walked toward it; the taverns were still open and full of drunken soldiers. Swarthy prostitutes offered their wares. One girl, hardly sixteen, had a coin on a string between her bare breasts. Capistrano nudged me to notice it, and we laughed. “The same coin, maybe?” he asked. “But different breasts?” I shrugged. “Perhaps the same breasts, too,” I said, thinking of the unborn girl who had been for sale at the Yedikule a night ago. Capistrano bought two flasks of oily Greek wine and we returned to the inn, to sit quietly downstairs and drink the darkness away.

He did most of the talking. Like many Time Couriers, his life had been a complex, jagged one full of detours, and he let his autobiography dribble out between gulps of wine. Noble Spanish ancestors, he said (he didn’t tell me about the Turkish great-grandmother until months later, when he was far more thoroughly drunk); early marriage to a virgin of high family; education at the best universities of Europe. Then inexplicable decline, loss of ambition, loss of fortune, loss of wife. “My life,” said Capistrano, “broke in half when I was twenty-seven years of age. I required total reintegration of personality. As you see, the effort was not a true success.” He spoke of a series of temporary marriages, adventures in criminality, experiments with hallucinatory drugs that made weeds and floaters look innocent. When he enrolled as a Time Courier, it was only as an alternative to suicide. “I keyed to an output and asked for a bit at random,” he said. “Positive, and I become a Courier. Negative, and I drink poison. The bit came up positive. Here I am.” He drained his wine.

To me that night he seemed a wonderful mixture of the desperate, tragic romantic and the self-dramatizing charlatan. Of course, I was drunk myself, and very young. But I told him how much I admired his quest for identity, and secretly wished that I could learn the knack of seeming so appealingly destroyed, so interestingly lost.

“Come,” he said, when the last of the wine was gone. “To dispose of the corpses.”

We hurled our flasks into the Golden Horn. Streaks of dawn were emerging. As we walked slowly back to the inn, Capistrano said, “I have made a little hobby of tracing my ancestors, do you know? It is my own private research. Here — look at these names.” He produced a small, thick notebook. “In each era I visit,” he said, “I seek out my ancestors and list them here. Already I know several hundred of them, going back to the fourteenth century. Do you realize how immense the number of one’s ancestors is? We have two parents, and each of them has two parents, and each of them two parents — go back only four generations and you have already thirty ancestors!”

“An interesting hobby,” I said.

Capistrano’s eyes blazed. “More than a hobby! More than a hobby! A matter of death and life! Look, my friend, whenever I grow more tired than usual of existence, all I must do is find one of these people, one, and destroy him! Take his life when he is still a child, perhaps. Then return to now-time. And in that moment, swiftly, without pain, my own tiresome life ceases ever to have been!”

“But the Time Patrol—”

“Helpless,” said Capistrano. “What can the Patrol do? If my crime is discovered, I am seized and erased from history for timecrime, right? If my crime is not discovered — and why should it be? — then I have erased myself. Either way I am gone. Is this not the most charming way of suicide?”

“In eliminating your own ancestor,” I said, “you might be changing now-time to a greater degree. You’d also eliminate your own brothers and sisters — uncles — grandparents and all of their brothers and sisters — all by removing one prop from the past!”

He nodded solemnly. “I am aware of this. And so I compile these genealogies, you see, in order to determine how best to effect my own erasure. I am not Samson; I have no wish to bring the temple crashing down with myself. I will look for the strategic person to eliminate — one who is himself sinful, incidentally, for I will not slay the truly innocent — and I will remove that person and thus myself, and perhaps the changes in now-time will not be terribly great. If they are, the Patrol will discover and undo them, and still give me the exit I crave.”

I wondered if he was crazy or just drunk. A little of both, I decided.

I felt like telling him that if he really wanted to kill himself that badly, it would be a whole lot less trouble for everybody else if he’d just go jump in the Bosphorus.

I felt a twinge of terror at the thought that the whole Time Service might be permeated by Capistranos, all shopping around for the most interestingly self-destructive way of changing the past.

Upstairs, the early light revealed eight sleepers, huddled two by two. Our elderly married folks slept peacefully; the two pretty boys from London looked sweaty and tousled after some busy buggery; Clotilde, smiling, slept with her hand tucked between Lise’s pale thighs, and Lise’s left hand was cupped cozily about Clotilde’s maidenly but firm right breast. I lay down on my lonely bed and slipped quickly into sleep. Soon Capistrano woke me, and we woke the others. I felt ten thousand years old.

We had a breakfast of cold lamb and went out for a quick daylight walking tour of the city. Most of the interesting things had not yet been built, or else were still in early forms; we didn’t stay long. At noon we went to the Augusteum to shunt. “Our next stop,” Capistrano announced, “will beA.D. 532, where we will see the city of Justinian’s time and witness the riots which destroyed it, making possible the construction of the finer and more grand city that won such eternal fame.” We backed into the shadows of the ruined original Haghia Sophia, so that no passersby would be startled by the sight of ten people vanishing. I set all the timers. Capistrano produced his pitchpipe and gave the master signal. We shunted.