Up The Line

63.

I’ve been here for three and a half months now. By the calendar I keep, the date is March 15, 3060 B.P. I’m living a thousand years before Christ, more or less.

It’s not a bad life. The people here are subsistence farmers, maybe remnants of the old Hittite empire; the Greek colonists won’t be getting here for another three centuries. I’m starting to learn the language; it’s Indo-European and I pick it up fast. As Sam predicted, I’m a god. They wanted to kill me when I showed up, but I did a few tricks with my timer, shunting right before their eyes, and now they don’t dare offend me. I try to be a kindly god, though. Right now I’m helping spring to arrive. I went down to the shore of what will someday be called the Bosphorus and delivered a long prayer, in English, for good weather. The locals loved it.

They give me all the women I want. The first night they gave me the chief’s daughter, and since then I’ve rotated pretty well through the whole nubile population of the village. I imagine they’ll want me to marry someone eventually, but I want to complete the inspection first. The women don’t smell too good, but some of them are impressively passionate.

I’m terribly lonely.

Sam has been here three times, Metaxas twice. The others don’t come. I don’t blame them; the risks are great. My two loyal friends have brought me floaters, books, a laser, a big box of music cubes, and plenty of other things that are going to perplex the tails off some archaeologists eventually.

I said to Sam, “Bring me Pulcheria, just for a visit.”

“I can’t,” he said. And he’s right. It would have to be a kidnapping, and there might be repercussions, leading to Time Patrol troubles for Sam and obliteration for me.

I miss Pulcheria ferociously. You know, I had sex with her only that one night, though it seems as if I knew her much better than that. I wish now that I’d had her in the tavern, while she was Pulcheria Photis, too.

My beloved. My wicked great-great-multi-great-grandmother. Never to see you again! Never to touch your smooth skin, your — no, I won’t torture myself. I’ll try to forget you. Hah!

I console myself, when not busy in my duties as a deity, by dictating my memoirs. Everything now is recorded, all the details of how I maneuvered myself into this terrible fix. A cautionary tale: from promising young man to absolute nonperson in sixty-two brief chapters. I’ll keep on writing too, now and then. I’ll tell what it’s like to be a Hittite god. Let’s see, tomorrow we’ll have the spring fertility festival, and the ten fairest maidens of the village will come to the god’s house so that we—

Pulcheria!

Why am I here so far from you, Pulcheria?

I have too much time to think about you, here.

I also have too much time to think unpleasant thoughts about my ultimate fate. I doubt that the Time Patrol will find me here. But there’s another possibility.

The Patrol knows that I’m hiding somewhere up the line, protected by displacement.

The Patrol wants to smoke me out and abolish me, because I’m a filthy spawn of paradox.

And it’s in the power of the Patrol to do it. Suppose they retroactively discharge Jud Elliott from the Time Service prior to the time he set out on his ill-starred last trip? If Jud Elliott never ever got to Byzantium that time at all, the probability of my existence reaches the zero point, and I no longer am protected by the Paradox of Transit Displacement. The Law of Lesser Paradoxes prevails. Out I go — poof!

I know why they haven’t done that to me yet. It’s because that other Jud, God bless him, is standing trial for timecrime down the line, and they can’t retroactively pluck him until they’ve found him guilty. They have to complete the trial. If he’s found guilty, I guess they’ll take some action of that sort. But court procedures are slow. Jud will stall. Sam’s told him I’m here and have to be protected. It might be months, years, who knows? He’s on his now-time basis, I’m on mine, and we move forward into our futures together, day by day, and so far I’m still here.

Lonely. Heartsick.

Dreaming of my forever lost Pulcheria.

Maybe they’ll never take action against me.

Or maybe they’ll end me tomorrow.

Who knows? There are moments when I don’t even care. There’s one comforting thing, at least. It’ll be the most painless of deaths. Not even a flicker of pain. I’ll simply go wherever the flame of the candle goes when it’s snuffed. It could happen at any time, and meanwhile I live from hour to hour, playing god, listening to Bach, indulging in floaters, dictating my memoirs, and waiting for the end. Why, it could even come right in the middle of a sentence, and I’d