Up The Line

35.

The villa was classical in style, atrium-and-peristyle, with a huge central courtyard, colonnaded walkways, mosaic floors, frescoed walls, a great apsed reception room, a pond in the courtyard, a library bulging with scrolls, a dining room whose round gold-inlaid ivory table could have seated three dozen, a statuary hall, and a marble bathroom. Metaxas’ slaves hustled me toward the bathroom, and Metaxas called out that he’d see me later.

I got the royal treatment.

Three dark-haired slave wenches — Persians, Metaxas said later — ministered to me in the bath. All they wore were loinstrings, and in a moment I was wearing less than that, for in a giggling jiggle of breasts they stripped me and went to work buffing and soaping me until I gleamed. Steam bath, hot bath, cold bath — my pores got the full workout. When I emerged they dried me most detailedly and robed me in the most elegant tunic I ever expect to wear. Then they vanished, with a saucy wigwag of bare bottoms as they disappeared through some subterranean passageway. A middle-aged butler appeared and conveyed me to the atrium, where Metaxas awaited me with beakers of wine.

“You like it?” he asked.

“I feel I’m in a dream.”

“You are. And I’m the dreamer. You saw the farms? Wheat, olives, cattle, figs, everything. I own. My tenants farm. Each year I acquire new land on the profits of last year’s work.”

“It’s incredible,” I said. “And what’s even more incredible is that you get away with it.”

“I have earned my invulnerability,” said Metaxas simply. “The Time Patrol knows I must not be persecuted.”

“They realize you’re here?”

“I believe they do,” he said. “They stay away, though. I take care to make no significant changes in the fabric of history. I’m no villain. I’m merely self-indulgent.”

“But you are changing history just by being here! Some other landowner must have held these lands in the real 1105.”

“This is the real 1105.”

“I mean the original, before Benchley Effect visitors began coming here. You’ve interpolated yourself into the landowner rolls, and — my God, the chariot driver spoke of you as Metaxas! Is that the name you use here?”

“Themistoklis Metaxas. Why not? It is a good Greek name.”

“Yes, but — look, it must be in all the documents, the tax records, everything! You’ve certainly changed the Byzantine archives that have come down to us, putting yourself in where you weren’t in before. What—”

“There is no danger,” Metaxas said. “So long as I take no life and create no life here, so long as I cause no one to change a previously decided course of action, all is well. You know, making a real alteration in the time flow is a difficult thing. You have to do something big, like killing a monarch. Simply being here, I introduce tiny changes, but they are damped out by ten centuries of time, and no real change results down the line. Do you follow?”

I shrugged. “Just tell me one thing, at least. How did you know I was coming?”

Laughing, he said, “I looked two days down the line and you were here. Therefore I checked for your time of arrival and arranged to have Nicholas meet you. It saved you a long walk, yes?”

Of course. I just hadn’t been thinking four-dimensionally. It stood to reason that Metaxas would habitually scan his immediate future here, so he’d never be the victim of some unpleasant surprise in this sometimes unpredictable era.

“Come,” Metaxas said. “Join the others.”

They were lounging on divans by the courtyard pool, nibbling bits of roasted meat that slavegirls in diaphanous robes popped into their mouths. Two of my fellow Couriers were there, Kolettis and Pappas, both enjoying layoffs. Pappas, of the drooping mustache, managed to look sad even while pinching a firm Persian buttock, but Kolettis, plump and boisterous, was in high form, singing and laughing. A third man, whom I didn’t know, was peering at the fish in the pool. Though dressed in twelfth-century robes, he had a face that was instantly recognizable as modern, I thought. And I was right.

“This is Scholar Magistrate Paul Speer,” said Metaxas to me in English. “A visiting academic. Meet Time Courier Jud Elliott, Dr. Speer.”

We touched hands formally. Speer was about fifty, somewhat desiccated, a pale little man with an angular face and quick, nervous eyes. “Pleased,” he said.

“And this,” said Metaxas, “is Eudocia.”

I had noticed her the instant I entered the courtyard, of course. She was a slim, auburn-haired girl, fair-skinned but with dark eyes, nineteen or twenty years old. She was heavily laden with jewelry, and so obviously was not just one of the slavegirls; yet her costume was daring by Byzantine standards, consisting only of a light double winding of translucent silk. As the fabric pulled taut against her, it displayed small high breasts, boyish buttocks, a shallow navel, even a hint of the triangular tuft at her loins. I prefer my women dark of hair and complexion and voluptuous of figure, but even so this Eudocia was enormously attractive to me. She seemed tense, coiled, full of pent-up fury and fervor.

She studied me in cool boldness and indicated her approval by placing her hands at her thighs and arching her back. The movement pulled her robes closer and showed me her nakedness in greater detail. She smiled. Her eyes sparkled wantonly.

In English, Metaxas said to me, “I’ve told you of her. She’s my great-great-multi-great-grandmother. Try her in your bed tonight. The hip action is incredible!”

Eudocia smiled more warmly. She didn’t know what Metaxas was saying, but she must have known he was talking about her. I tried not to stare too intently at the exposed beauties of the fair Eudocia. Is a man supposed to ogle his host’s great-great-multi-great-grandmother?

A bare and beautiful slave offered me lamb and olives en brochette. I swallowed without tasting. My nostrils were filled with the perfume of Eudocia.

Metaxas gave me wine and led me away from her. “Dr. Speer,” he said, “is here on a collecting trip. He’s a student of classical Greek drama, in search of lost plays.”

Dr. Speer clicked his heels. He was the sort of Teutonic pedant who, you automatically know, would use his full academic title on all occasions. Achtung! Herr Scholar Magistrate Speer! Scholar Magistrate Speer said, “It has been most successful for me so far. Of course, my search is just beginning, yet already from Byzantine libraries I have obtained the Nausicaa and Triptolemus of Sophocles, and of Euripides the Andromeda, the Peliades, the Phaethon, and the Oedipus, and also of Aeschylus a nearly complete manuscript of The Women of Aetna. So you see I have done well.” He clicked heels again.

I knew better than to remind him that the Time Patrol frowns on the recovery of lost masterpieces. Here in Metaxas’ villa we were all ipso facto breakers of Patrol regulations, and accessories before and after the fact to any number of timecrimes.

I said, “Do you plan to bring these manuscripts down to now-time?”

“Yes, of course.”

“But you can’t publish them! What will you do with them?”

“Study them,” said Scholar Magistrate Speer. “Increase the depth of my understanding of the Greek drama. And in time I will plant each manuscript in some place where archaeologists are likely to discover it, and so these plays will be restored to the world. It is a minor crime, is it not? Can I be called evil for wishing to enlarge our scanty stock of Sophocles?”

It seemed quite all right to me.

To me it has always seemed like numbnoggin uptightness to have made it illegal to go up the line to discover lost manuscripts or paintings. I can see where it wouldn’t be desirable to let somebody go back to 1600 and make off with Michelangelo’s Pieta or Leonardo’s Leda. That would be timechange and timecrime, since the Pieta and the Leda must make their way year by year toward our now-time, and not leapfrog over four and a half centuries. But why not allow us to obtain works of art that we don’t already have? Who’s injured by it?

Kolettis said, “Doc Speer, you’re absolutely right! Hell, they let historians inspect the past to make corrections in the historical record, don’t they? And when they bring out their revisionist books, it goddam well alters the state of knowledge!”

“Yes,” said Pappas. “As for example when it was noticed that Lady Macbeth was in fact a tender woman who struggled in vain to limit the insane ambitions of her blood-thirsty husband. Or we could consider the case of the Moses story. Or what we know now about Richard III. Or the truth about Joan of Arc. We’ve patched up standard history in a million places since Benchley Effect travel began, and—”

“—and so why not patch up some of the holes in literary history?” Kolettis asked. “Here’s to Doc Speer! Steal every goddam play there is, Doc!”

“The risks are great,” said Speer. “If I am caught I will be severely punished, perhaps stripped of my academic standing.” He said it as though he’d prefer to be parted from his genitals. “The law is so foolish — they are such frightened men, these Time Patrol, worried about changes even that are virtuous.”

To the Time Patrol no change is virtuous. They accept historical revisions because they can’t help themselves; the enabling legislation specifically permits that kind of research. But the same law prohibits the transportation of any tangible object from up the line, except as required for the functions of the Time Service itself, and the Patrol sticks to the letter of it.

I said, “If you’re looking for Greek plays, why don’t you check out the Alexandria Library? You’re bound to find a dozen there for every one that’s survived into the Byzantine period.”

Scholar Magistrate Speer gave me the smile one gives to clever but naive children.

“The Library of Alexandria,” he explained ponderously, “is of course a prime target for scholars such as myself. Therefore it is guarded perpetually by a man of the Time Patrol in the guise of a scribe. He makes several arrests a month, I hear. I take no risk such as that. Here in Byzantium my goal is more hard but my exposure is not so much. I will look more. I still hope to find some ninety plays of Sophocles, and at least so many of Aeschylus, and—”