Up The Line

57.

But, of course, it wasn’t. It was as real as any other event in this fluid and changeable cosmos.

The three of us drank a great deal of wine, and Sam gave me some of the other details. How he had asked about in the neighborhood concerning Sauerabend/Photis, and had been told that the man had arrived mysteriously from some other part of the country, about the year 1099. How the regulars at his tavern disliked him, but came to the place just to get a view of his beautiful wife. How there was general suspicion that he was engaged in some kind of illegal activity.

“He excused himself,” Sam said, “and told us that he had to go across to Galata to do some marketing. But Kolettis followed him and found that he didn’t go marketing at all. He went into some kind of warehouse on the Galata side, and apparently he disappeared. Kolettis went in after him and couldn’t find him anywhere. He must have time-jumped, Kolettis assumed. Then this Photis reappeared, maybe half an hour later, and took the ferry back into Constantinople.”

“Timecrime,” Metaxas suggested. “He’s engaged in smuggling.”

“That’s what I think,” said Sam. “He’s using the early twelfth century as a base of operations, under this cover identity of Photis, and he’s running artifacts or gold coins or something like that down the line to now-time.”

“How did he get mixed up with the girl, though?” Metaxas asked.

Sam shrugged. “That part isn’t clear yet. But now that we’ve found him, we can trace him back up the line until we find the point of his arrival. And see exactly what he’s been up to.”

I groaned. “How are we ever going to restore the proper sequence of events?”

Metaxas said, “We’ve got to locate the precise moment to which he made his jump out of your tour. Then we station ourselves there, catch him as soon as he materializes, take away that trick timer of his, and bring him back to 1204. That extricates him from the time-flow right where he came in, and puts him back into your 1204 trip where he belongs.”

“You make it sound so simple,” I said. “But it isn’t. What about all the changes that have been made in the past? His five years of marriage to Pulcheria Botaniates—”

“Nonevents,” said Sam. “As soon as we whisk Sauerabend from 1099 or whenever back into 1204, his marriage to this Pulcheria is automatically deleted, right? The time-flow resumes its unedited shape, and she marries whoever she was supposed to marry—”

“Leo Ducas,” I said. “My ancestor.”

“Leo Ducas, yes,” Sam went on. “And for everybody in Byzantium, this whole Heracles Photis episode will never have happened. The only ones who’ll know about it are us, because we’re subject to Transit Displacement.”

“What about the artifacts Sauerabend’s been smuggling to now-time?” I asked.

Sam said, “They won’t be there. They won’t ever have been smuggled. And his fences down there won’t have any recollection of having received them, either. The fabric of time will have been restored, and the Patrol won’t be the wiser for it, and—”

“You’re overlooking one little item,” I said.

“Which is?”

“In the course of these shenanigans I generated an extra Jud Elliott. Where does he go?”

“Christ,” Sam said. “I forgot about him!”