Up The Line

23.

So I went jumping, smack into the Paradox of Discontinuity.

My first stop was the wardrobe department. I needed costumes suited for Istanbul of the sixteenth through nineteenth centuries. Instead of giving me a whole sequence of clothes to fit the changing fashions, they decked me out in an all-purpose Moslem rig, simple white robes of no particular era, nondescript sandals, long hair, and a straggly youthful beard. By way of pocket money they supplied me with a nice assortment of gold and silver pieces of the right eras, a little of everything that might have been circulating in medieval Turkey, including some bezants of Greek-ruled times, miscellaneous coinage of the sultans, and a good deal of Venetian gold. All this was installed in a currency belt that I wore just above my timer, the coins segregated from left to right according to centuries, so that I wouldn’t get into trouble by offering an eighteenth-century dinar in a sixteenth-century market place. There was no charge for the money; the Time Service runs a continuous siphon of its own, circulating coinage between now-time and then-time for the benefit of its personnel, and a Courier going on holiday can sign out any reasonable amount to cover his expenses. To the Service it’s only play money, anyway, infinitely replenishible at will. I like the system.

I took hypnosleep courses in Turkish and Arabic before I left. The Special Requests department fabricated a quick cover identity for me that would work well in any era of my intended visit: if questioned, I was supposed to identify myself as a Portuguese national who had been kidnapped on the high seas by Algerian pirates when ten years old, and raised as a Moslem in Algiers. That would account for flaws in my accent and for my vagueness about my background; if I had the misfortune to be interrogated by a real Portuguese, which wasn’t likely, I could simply say that I couldn’t remember much about my life in Lisbon and had forgotten the names of my forebears. So long as I kept my mouth shut, prayed toward Mecca five times a day, and watched my step, I wasn’t likely to get into trouble. (Of course, if I landed in a really serious mess, I could escape by using my timer, but in the Time Service that’s considered a coward’s route, and also undesirable because of the implications of witchcraft that you leave behind when you vanish.)

All these preparations took a day and a half. Then they told me I was ready to jump. I set my timer for 500B.P., picking the era at random, and jumped.

I arrived on August 14, 1559, at nine-thirty in the evening. The reigning sultan was the great Suleiman I, nearing the close of his epoch. Turkish armies threatened the peace of Europe; Istanbul was bursting with the wealth of conquest. I couldn’t respond to this city as I had to the sparkling Constantinople of Justinian or Alexius, but that was a personal matter having to do with ancestry, chemistry, and historical affinity. Taken on its own merits, Suleiman’s Istanbul was a city among cities.

I spent half the day roaming it. For an hour I watched a lovely mosque under construction, hoping it was the Suleimaniye, but later in the day I found the Suleimaniye, brand-new and glistening in the noon light. I made a special pilgrimage, covertly consulting a map I had smuggled with me, to find the mosque of Mehmet the Conqueror, which an earthquake would bring down in 1766. It was worth the walk. Toward midafternoon, after an inspection of the mosquified Haghia Sophia and the sad ruins of the Great Palace of Byzantium across the plaza (Sultan Ahmed’s mosque would be rising there fifty years down the line), I made my way to the Covered Bazaar, thinking to buy a few small trinkets as souvenirs, and when I was no more than ten paces past the entrance I caught sight of my beloved guru Sam.

Consider the odds against that: with thousands of years in which to roam, the two of us coming on holiday to the same year and the same day and the same city, and meeting under the same roof!

He was clad in Moorish costume, straight out of Othello. There was no mistaking him; he was by far the tallest man in sight, and his coal-black skin glistened brilliantly against his white robes. I rushed up to him.

“Sam!” I cried. “Sam, you old black bastard, what luck to meet you here.”

He whirled in surprise, frowned at me, looked puzzled. “I know you not,” he said coldly.

“Don’t let the beard fool you. It’s me, Sam. Jud Elliott.”

He glared. He growled. A crowd began to gather. I wondered if I had been wrong. Maybe this wasn’t Sam, but Sam’s multi-great-grandfather, made to look like his twin by a genetic fluke. No, I told myself, this is the authentic Sambo.

But then why is he pulling out that scimitar?

We had been talking in Turkish. I switched to English and said, “Listen, Sam, I don’t know what’s going on, but I’m willing to ride along with your act. Suppose we meet in half an hour outside Haghia Sophia, and we can—”

“Infidel dog!” he roared. “Beggar’s spawn! Masturbator of pigs! Away from me! Away, cutpurse!”

He swished the scimitar menacingly above my head and continued to rave in Turkish. Suddenly in a lower voice he muttered, “I don’t know who the hell you are, pal, but if you don’t clear out of here fast I’m going to have to slice you in half.” That much was in English. In Turkish again he cried, “Molester of infants! Drinker of toad’s milk! Devourer of cameldung!”

This was no act. He genuinely didn’t recognize me, and he genuinely didn’t want anything to do with me. Baffled, I backed away from him, hustled down one of the subsidiary corridors of the bazaar, stepped out into the open, and hastily shunted myself ten years down the line. A couple of people saw me go, but faex on them; to a Turk of 1559 the world must have been full of efreets and jinni, and I was just one more phantom.

I didn’t stay in 1569 more than five minutes. Sam’s wild reaction to my greeting had me so mystified that I couldn’t relax and see the sights. I had to have an explanation. So I hurried on down the line to 2059, materializing a block from the Covered Bazaar and nearly getting smeared by a taxi. A few latter-day Turks grinned and pointed at my medieval Turkish robes. The unsophisticated apes hadn’t yet learned to take returning time-travelers for granted, I guess.

I went quickly to the nearest public communications booth, thumbed the plate, and put through a call to Sam.

“He is not at his home number,” the master information output told me. “Should we trace him?”

“Yes, please,” I said automatically.

A moment later I slapped myself for stupidity. Of course he won’t be home, you idiot! He’s up the line in 1559!

But the master communications network had already begun tracing him. Instead of doing the sensible thing and hanging up, I stood there like a moron, waiting for the inevitable news that the master communications network couldn’t find him anywhere.

About three minutes went by. Then the bland voice said, “We have traced your party to Nairobi and he is standing by for your call. Please notify if you wish to proceed.”

“Go ahead,” I said, and Sam’s ebony features blossomed on the screen.

“Is there trouble, child?” he asked.

“What are you doing in Nairobi?” I screamed.

“A little holiday among my own people. Should I not be here?”

“Look,” I said, “I’m on my layoff between Courier jobs, and I’ve just been up the line to 1559 Istanbul, and I met you there.”

“So?”

“How can you be there if you’re in Nairobi?”

“The same way that there can be twenty-two specimens of your Arab instructor back there watching the Romans nail up Jesus,” Sam said. “Sheet, man, when will you learn to think four-dimensionally?”

“So that’s a different you up the line in 1559?”

“It better be, buster! He’s there and I’m here!” Sam laughed. “A little thing like that shouldn’t upset you, man. You’re a Courier now, remember?”

“Wait. Wait. Here’s what happened. I walked into the Covered Bazaar, see, and there you were in Moorish robes, and I let out this big whoop and ran up to you to say hello. And you didn’t know me, Sam! You started waving your scimitar, and cursing me out, and you told me in English to get the hell away from you, and—”

“Well, hey, man, you know it’s against regulations to talk to other time-travelers when you’re up the line. Unless you set out from the same now-time as the other man, you’re supposed to ignore him even if you see through his cover. Fraternization is prohibited because—”

“Yeah, sure, but it was me, Sam. I didn’t think you’d pull rules on me. You didn’t even know me, Sam!”

“That’s obvious. But why are you so upset, kid?”

“It was like you had amnesia. It scared me.”

“But I couldn’t have known you.”

“What are you talking about?”

Sam began to laugh. “The Paradox of Discontinuity! Don’t tell me they never taught you that one!”

“They said something about it, but I never paid much attention to a lot of that stuff, Sam.”

“Well, pay attention now. You know what year it was I took that Istanbul trip?”

“No.”

“It was 2056, ’55, someplace back there. And I didn’t meet you until three or four years later — this spring, it was. So the Sam you found in 1559 never saw you before. Discontinuity, see? You were working from a now-time basis of 2059, and I was working from a basis of maybe ’55, and so you were a stranger to me, but I wasn’t a stranger to you. That’s one reason why Couriers aren’t supposed to talk to friends they run into by accident up the line.”

I began to see.

“I begin to see,” I said.

“To me,” said Sam, “you were some dumb fresh kid trying to make trouble, maybe even a Time Patrol fink. I didn’t know you and I didn’t want anything to do with you. Now that I think about it a little, I remember something like that happening when I was there. Somebody from down the line bothering me in the bazaar. Funny that I never connected him with you, though!”

“I had a fake beard on, up the line.”

“That must have been it. Well, listen, are you all straightened out now?”

“The Paradox of Discontinuity, Sam. Sure.”

“You’ll remember to keep clear of old friends when you’re up the line?”

“You bet. Christ, Sam, you really terrified me with that scimitar!”

“Otherwise, how’s it going?”

“Great,” I said. “It’s really great.”

“Watch those paradoxes, kid,” Sam said, and blew me a kiss.

Much relieved, I stepped out of the booth and went up the line to 1550 to watch them build the mosque of Suleiman the Magnificent.