Robert Silverberg: Crossing Into the Empire

Mulreany is still asleep when the Empire makes its mid-year reappearance, a bit ahead of schedule. It was due to show up in Chicago on the afternoon of June 24, somewhere between five and six o’clock, and here it is only eight goddamned o’clock in the morning on the 23rd and the phone is squalling and it’s Anderson on the line to say, “Well, I can’t exactly tell you why, boss, but it’s back here already, over on the Near West Side. The eastern border runs along Blue Island Avenue, and up as far north as the Eisenhower Expressway, practically. Duplessis says that this time it’s going to be a 52-hour visitation, plus or minus 90 minutes.”

Dazzling summer sunlight floods Mulreany’s bedroom, high up above the lake. He hates being awake at this hour. Blinking, grimacing, he says, “If Duplessis missed the time of arrival by a day and a half, how the hell can he be so sure about the visitation length? Sometimes I think Duplessis is full of shit. —Which Empire is it, anyway? What are the towers in the Forum like?”

“The big square pointy-topped pink one is there, with two slender ones flanking it, dark stone, golden domes,” Anderson says.

“Basil III, most likely.”

“You’re the man who’d know, boss. How soon do we go across?”

“It’s eight in the morning, Stu.”

“Jesus, we’ve only got the 52 hours, and then there won’t be another chance until Christmas. Fifty-one and a half, by now. Everything’s packed and ready to go whenever you are.”

“Come get me at half past nine.”

“What about nine sharp?” Anderson says hopefully.

“I need some time to shower and get my costume on, if that’s all right with you,” Mulreany says. “Half past nine.”

It’s the Empire of Basil III this time, no question about that. What has arrived is the capital city from the waterfront all the way back to the Walls of Artabanus and even a little strip of the Byzantine Quarter beyond—the entire magnificent metropolis, that great antique city of a hundred palaces and five hundred temples and mosques, green parks and leafy promenades, shining stone obelisks and eye-dazzling colonnades. The Caspian Sea side of the city lines up precisely along South Blue Island Avenue, with the wharves and piers of the city harbor high and dry, jutting from the eastern side of the street. The longest piers reach a couple of blocks beyond Blue Island where it crosses Polk, stretching almost to the southbound lanes of the Dan Ryan Expressway, which seems to be the absolute boundary of the materialization zone. A bunch of fishing boats and what looks like an imperial barge have been taken along for the ride this time, and sit forlornly beached right at the zone’s flickering edge, cut neatly in half, their sterns visible here in Chicago but their bows still back in the twelfth century. The whole interface line is bright with the customary shimmering glow. You could walk around the outside edge of the interface and find yourself in the Near West Side, which has been intruded upon but not harmed. Or you could go straight ahead into that glowing field of light and step across the boundary into the capital of the Empire.

One glance and Mulreany has no doubt that the version of the capital that has arrived on this trip is the twelfth-century one. The two golden-domed towers of black basalt that Basil III erected to mark the twentieth anniversary of his accession are visible high above the Forum on either side of the pink marble Tower of Nicholas IX, but there’s no sign of the gigantic hexagonal Cathedral of All the Gods that Basil’s nephew and successor, Simeon II, will eventually build on what is presently the site of the camel market. So Mulreany can date the manifestation of the Empire that he is looking at now very precisely to the period between 1150 and 1185. Which is good news, not only because that was one of the richest periods of the Empire’s long history, making today’s trading possibilities especially promising, but also because the Empire of the time of Basil III turns up here more often than that of any other era, and Mulreany knows his way around Basil’s capital almost like a native. Considering the risks involved, he prefers to be in familiar territory when he’s doing business over there.

The usual enormous crowd is lined up along the interface, gawking goggle-eyed at the medieval city across the way. “You’d think the dopey bastards had never seen the Empire get here before,” Mulreany mutters, as he and Anderson clamber out of the limo and head for the police barricade. The usual murmuring goes up from the onlookers at the sight of them in their working clothes.

Mulreany, as the front man in this enterprise, has outfitted himself elegantly in a tight-sleeved, close-fitting knee-length tunic of green silk piped with scarlet brocade, turquoise hose, and soft leather boots in the Persian style. On his head he wears a stiff and lofty pyramid-shaped hat of Turkish design, on his left hip a long curving dagger in an elaborately chased silver sheath. Anderson, as befits his lesser status, is more simply garbed in an old-fashioned flowing tunic of pale muslin, baggy blue trousers, and sandals; his headgear is a white bonnet tied by a red ribbon. These are the clothes of a merchant of late imperial times and his amanuensis, nothing unusual over there, but pretty gaudy stuff to see on a Chicago street, and they draw plenty of attention.

Duplessis, Schmidt, and Kulikowski wait by the barricade, gabbing with a couple of the cops. Schmidt has a short woollen tunic on, like the porter he is supposed to be; he is toting the trading merchandise, two bulging burlap bags. Neither Duplessis nor Kulikowski is in costume. They won’t be going across. They’re antiquities dealers; what they do is peddle the goodies that Mulreany and his two assistants bring back from their ventures into the Empire. They don’t ever put their own necks on the line over there.

Duplessis is fidgeting around, the way he always does, looking at his watch every ten seconds or so. “About time you got here, Mike,” he tells Mulreany. “The clock is ticking-ticking-ticking.”

“Ticking so fast the Empire showed up a day and a half early, didn’t it?” Mulreany says sourly. “You screwed up the calculation a little, eh?”

“Christ, man! It’s never all that precise and you know it. We’ve got a lot of complicated factors to take into account. The equinoctial precession—the whole sidereal element—the problem of topological displacement—listen, Mike, I do my best. It gets here every six months, give or take a couple of days, that’s all we can figure. There’s no way I can tell you to the split second when it’s going to—”

“What about the calculation of when it leaves again? Suppose you miss that one by a factor of a couple of days too?”

“No,” Duplessis says. “No chance. The math’s perfectly clear: this is a two-day visitation. Look, stop worrying, Mike. You sneak across, you do your business, you come back late tomorrow afternoon. You’re just grouchy because you don’t like getting up this early.”

“And you ought to start moving,” Kulikowski tells him. “Waxman and Gross went across an hour ago. There’s Davidson about to cross over down by Roosevelt, and here comes McNeill.”

Mulreany nods. Competitors, yes, moving in on all sides. The Empire’s already been in for a couple of hours; most of the licensed crossers are probably there by now. But what the hell: there’s plenty for everybody. “You got the coins?” he asks.

Kulikowski hands Mulreany a jingling velvet purse: some walking-around money. He shakes a few of the coins out into his palm. The Emperor Basil’s broad big-nosed face looks up at him from the shiny obverse of a gold nomisma. There are a couple of little silver argentei from the time of Casimir and a few thick, impressive copper sesterces showing the hooded profile of Empress Juliana.