Rovert Silverberg - Up The Line

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

Up the Line is a time travel novel from the 1960s, and now it is also time travel back to the 1960s, for it is very much a book of its time. John Clute once claimed that he could date any unknown science fiction novel to within a year or two of its writing date, by means of stylistic and content analysis; this particular novel would be no difficult test for anyone. The psychedelic drugs, the free love, the racial integration, the early New Age spiritualism, even the spectacularly colorful clothing, all speak the late Sixties with no possibility of error. The “New Orleans of 2059” depicted in this novel is very obviously the 1967 of New York, of California, and of the traveling circus that is the science fiction community. It’s interesting and funny, painful and nostalgic, thus to revisit the feeling of innocent unbridled fresh freedom that was one component of those years.

This is not to say that Silverberg has not done his usual fine job of extrapolation in establishing an sf setting, creating a fully fleshed-out and believable future. Indeed it is very impressive to see his almost offhand inclusion of elements that even now are timely and cutting edge, including extremely powerful computers — not personal computers, the famous blind spot of sf — but widely available computers, doing many of the things we use computers to do now. This alone is an impressive feat of “prediction,” given the primitive state of computers, and of science fiction’s thinking about computers, in the late Sixties. Then also there is the inclusion of “helix booths,” where people’s genomes can be read and their genes chopped and spliced to order; this could be included in a science fiction novel today and have a thoroughly contemporary feel. The fact that these elements are throwaways and not really what the novel is about, that they are merely part of establishing the “futurity” of the novel’s setting, make them all the more impressive. It is as if Silverberg at that time was so filled by both science fiction and the world that he could speak prophetically even when concerned with something else; as here, where he is concerned with the past, and history, and his own life.

But here again, in his treatment of history, his attitude has a thoroughly modern, or rather postmodern, feel to it. It is now a commonplace of contemporary thought that a significant difference between modernism and postmodernism lies in their attitudes toward the past. For modernism — that period in which modernization was incomplete, and parts of the world existed in radically different periods of historical development, there for all to see — the past was a real thing, a repository of truth, and for many modernist artists, the location of a deep nostalgia. In postmodernism, on the other hand, the whole world has become modernized (globalized), and the past has therefore become merely a storehouse of glossy images, to be raided and appreciated for their surfaces, appropriated as one of many interchangeable and essentially meaningless styles.

Up the Line straddles the border of this change, and indeed discusses it in its plot and situation: one crowd treasuring the past and trying to keep it solid and whole, the other zipping around like hummingbirds, looking for the biggest thrills they can find. Thus the introduction of time travel tourism to the older science fiction situation of a “Time Patrol,” policing the past in order to keep things consistent and the way they had always been. Science fiction in the 1950s was filled with stories of these various Time Patrols and their fights to keep history — or, as the sub-genre developed, various concurrent histories — consistent and the same. This is the delightfully confusing and complicated world of the time-paradox story, a growth industry during the 1950s, perhaps precisely because the sense of what history consisted of was beginning to fall apart. Writers such as Poul Anderson in his “Time Patrol” series, Asimov in The End of Eternity , Fritz Leiber’s “Change War” series, and many others, played with all the paradoxes and plot conundrums offered by the logical contradictions inherent in the idea of time travel, in much the same manner as chess players or crossword puzzle makers play with the possibilities offered by their games. On that relatively simple crossword puzzle level, Silverberg’s novel is as complicated and ingenious as any of them. But with the addition of tourism to the mix, the book also offers an image of, and discusses, the emergence of the postmodern view of the past as sheer spectacle and entertainment, with nothing substantial to teach us. The Time Patrol therefore becomes a very un-hip police force, the tourist guides the coming new thing, conforming to the Patrol’s consistency laws only insofar as they are convenient, with the attitude that “anything goes as long as you don’t get caught.” A very Sixties kind of mind-set, perhaps.