Rovert Silverberg - Up The Line

Her clothing fell away and she stood incandescently nude before me. Her smile was a defiant one, a smile that said that she retained her inner self no matter what stains of degration others inflicted on her. Her eyes flashed with lusty zeal.

I stood dazzled before those high, heavy breasts, whose nipples were visibly hardening, and before that flat, taut belly with its dark, mounded bush, and before those firm muscular thighs and before those outstretched, beckoning arms.

She tumbled down onto the rough cot. She flexed her knees and drew her legs apart.

“Two bezants?” she suggested.

Pulcheria transformed into a tavern whore? My goddess? My adored one?

“Why do you hesitate?” she asked. “Come, climb aboard, give the fat dog Heracles another pair of horns. What’s wrong? Do I seem ugly to you?”

“Pulcheria — Pulcheria — I love you, Pulcheria—”

She giggled, shrill in her delight. She waved her heels at me.

“Come on, then!”

“You were Leo Ducas’ wife,” I murmured. “You lived in a marble palace, and wore silk robes, and went about the city escorted by a watchful duenna. And the emperor was at your party, and just before dawn you came to me, and gave yourself to me, and it was all a dream, Pulcheria, all a dream, eh?”

“You are a madman,” she said. “But a handsome madman, and I yearn to have you between my legs, and I yearn also for your bezants. Come close. Are you shy? Look, put your hand here, feel how hot Pulcheria grows, how she throbs—”

I was rigid with desire, but I knew I couldn’t touch her. Not this Pulcheria, this coarse, shameless, wanton, sluttish wench, this gorgeous creature who capered and pumped and writhed impatiently on the cot before me.

I pulled out my pouch and emptied it over her nakedness, dumping golden bezants into her navel, her loins, spilling them across her breasts. Pulcheria shrieked in astonishment. She sat up, clutching at the money, scrambling for it, her breasts heaving and swaying, her eyes bright.

I fled.

At the villa I found Metaxas and said, “What’s the name of Leo Ducas’ wife?”

“Pulcheria.”

“When did you last see her?”

“Three weeks ago, when we went to that party.”

“No,” I said. “You’re suffering from Transit Displacement, and so am I. Leo Ducas is married to someone named Euprepia, and has two children by her, and a third on the way. And Pulcheria is the wife of a tavern-keeper named Heracles Photis.”

“Have you gone spotty potty?” Metaxas asked.

“The past has been changed. I don’t know how it happened, but there’s been a change, right in my own ancestry, don’t you see, and Pulcheria’s no longer my ancestress, and God knows if I even exist any more. If I’m not descended from Leo Ducas and Pulcheria, then who am I descended from, and—”

“When did you find all this out?”

“Just now. I went to look for Pulcheria, and — Christ, Metaxas, what am I going to do?”

“Maybe there’s been a mistake,” he said calmly.

“No. No. Ask your own servants. They don’t undergo Transit Displacement. Ask them if they’ve ever heard of a Pulcheria Ducas. They haven’t. Ask them the name of Leo Ducas’ wife. Or go into town and see for yourself. There’s been a change in the past, don’t you see, and everything’s different, and — Christ, Metaxas! Christ!”

He took hold of my wrists and said in a very quiet tone, “Tell me all about this from the beginning, Jud.”

But I had no chance to. For just then big black Sam came rushing into the hall, whooping and screaming.

“We found him! God damn, but we found him!”

“Who?” Metaxas said.

“Who?” I said simultaneously.

“Who?” Sam repeated. “Who the hell do you think? Sauerabend. Conrad F. X. Sauerabend himself!”

“You found him?” I said, limp with relief. “Where? When? How?”

“Right here in 1105,” said Sam. “This morning, Melamed and I were in the marketplace, just checking around a little, and we showed the picture, and sure enough, some peddler of pig’s feet recognized him. Sauerabend’s been living in Constantinople for the past five or six years, running a tavern down near the water. He goes under the name of Heracles Photis—”

“No!” I bellowed. “No, you black nigger bastard, no, no, no, no, no! It isn’t true!”

And I launched myself at him in blind fury.

And I drove my fists into his belly, and sent him reeling backward toward the wall.

And he looked at me strangely, and caught his breath, and came toward me and picked me up and dropped me. And picked me up and dropped me. And picked me up a third time, but Metaxas made him put me down.

Sam said gently, “It’s true that I am a black nigger bastard, but was it really necessary to say so that loudly?”

Metaxas said, “Give him some wine, somebody. I think he’s going off his head.”

I said, seizing control of myself somehow, “Sam, I didn’t mean to call you names, but it absolutely cannot be the case that Conrad Sauerabend is living under the name of Heracles Photis.”

“Why not?”

“Because — because—”

“I saw him myself,” Sam said. “I had wine in his tavern no more than five hours ago. He’s big and fat and red-faced, and thinks a great deal of himself. And he’s got this little hot-ass Byzantine wife, maybe sixteen, seventeen years old, who waits on table in the place, and waves her boobies at the customers, and I bet sells her tail in the upstairs rooms—”

“All right,” I said in a dead man’s voice. “You win. The wife’s name is Pulcheria.”

Metaxas made a choking sound.

Sam said, “I didn’t ask about her name.”

“She’s seventeen years old, and she comes from the Botaniates family,” I went on, “which is one of the important Byzantine families, and only Buddha knows what she’s doing married to Heracles Photis Conrad Sauerabend. And the past has been changed, Sam, because up until a few weeks ago on my now-time basis she was the wife of Leo Ducas and lived in a palace near the imperial palace, and it happened that I was having a love affair with her, and it also happens that until the past got changed she and Leo Ducas were my great-great-multi-great-grandparents, and it seems to have happened that a very stinking coincidence has taken place, which I don’t comprehend the details of at all, except that I’m probably a nonperson now and there’s no such individual as Pulcheria Ducas. And now, if you don’t mind, I’m going to go into a quiet corner and cut my throat.”

“This isn’t happening,” said Sam. “This is all a bad dream.”

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.”