She had known Theodora professionally, and had been casting about for a way to recruit her into the magistrate’s service. This kinézo afforded a perfect pretext, since the kyrie was eager to establish silk culture in the Empire.
That had been fifteen hundred years ago—and yet that selfsame man stands now grim-faced beside her.
Realization is sunlight in her mind. Tears start down her cheeks. For a long time she has believed herself condemned to live alone in a world of shadows. But now she knows there is at least one other immortal on the planet.
There is a wild fig tree at Echo Caves, near Ohrigstad in the eastern Transvaal, whose taproot in its insatiable thirst drives four hundred feet down into the sunbaked soil. Stacey Papandreou, by whatever name she has called herself over the centuries, has driven habits of thought so deeply into her psyche that she is unaware of them. A terrifying amount of her life is lived by habit.
In all those years the lives of others have drifted by her like smoke. She has bedded husbands, she has borne children, whose very names now she no longer recalls. No one else is quite real to her.
Now, when she most yearns to open the gates of her heart to someone she believes is, like her, actually alive, she finds the hinges are rusted shut. She has been too careful for too long. Only with effort can she squeak them open.
Which, as it turns out, is a good thing.
Stacey thinks Nagkmur’s time machine is an old supervisor’s office left over from when the plant was operational. Beside it lies a pair of down sleeping bags, a Coleman stove, curule folding chairs and other camping accouterments, and a portable table, and she supposes Nagkmur has been living in the ruins. The table holds a computer of unfamiliar style whose keys and toggles bear strange symbols. They are not Chinese. Stacey tries to peek inside the shed, but none of the equipment is recognizable.
Nagkmur shoos her away and sits her by the table, where he questions her closely. When he gets no joy using Chinese, he switches to a stilted and formal English, but even so his questions make no more sense. He agrees that they met in Constantinople, but they have difficulty fixing the year. He claims it was in the Year of the World 3220, but that was long before Constantinople was even built!
As for Stacey, a few dates are seared into her memory and she has only to subtract nine from one of those to secure the answer: The Year of the World 5604. At the time, the Empire was shifting from using the Diocletian Era to using the Age of the World, but Stacey does not recall off-hand how either epoch converts to the Years of the Lord.
“Impossible,” says Nagkmur. “Year of World 5604 many centuries hence. We meet many centuries past. My mission to collect data on backwater nexus for Grand Analects.”
Backwater nexus? Although not native to the City, Stacey takes offense in her name. Plenty had happened there. Art, literature, science, and philosophy had flourished, although she granted that none of it had affected China, and the bulk had been lost in the Great Sack.
After considerable debate and access to the Internet, they decide that they had met in AD 522 by the common measure.
“Whatever change world,” the man says, “happen after then but before now.”
Stacey agrees that the world has indeed changed since the sixth century. Sages from Heraclitus onward have declared change the one constant in the world. It does not occur to her that Nagkmur means something different.
“When you leave City,” he demands, “where you go?”
“Venice,” she says, which she does remember. The city in the lagoon was relatively new at the time, crammed with refugees from the Lombards, redolent with the smells of shabby huts, fresh-cut lumber, dank marshland. But the exarchate of which it was part was still a solid outpost of romanitas and travel there was still safe.
“No,” the patrolman snaps. “What year you go?”
But she does not remember the year. She does not even remember the exarch’s name.
Nagkmur grows agitated. “When you see world is different?” His voice grows shrill.
But the world is always different. The Capernaum of her childhood, Alexandria, the City, Venice, Noyes, London, all the innumerable times and places where she has lived, each milieu had differed in countless ways. She tries to explain this to Nagkmur, who of all men should need no explanation, but he only grows more irritable and accuses her of evasion.
He wags a finger at her. “I think you change history. Not survivor; instigator. You bear responsibility for billions not be.” There is something in him of an unspeakable sorrow. His anger is edged with tears.
But Stacey does not see how she could have changed anything. She has lived quietly whenever she could, and the great events of the world have generally passed beyond her ken. In only a handful of epochs has she even known anyone important.
Though Constantinople in the early 5600s had been one of them.
Stacey wonders if the long centuries have driven Nagkmur mad. She had herself nearly foundered in those shallows when, in the desolation that Syria Palæstina had become, too many identities in too many years had jostled in her mind. She had lost cohesion, lost continuity. There had been times when she had not even known who she was. A holy woman, Mary of Egypt, had helped her cast out those demons and gradually she had learned to shelve her memories, place them in jars, in time to let them go. Perhaps Nagkmur had never mastered that skill and like other sorts of hoarders had smothered under his jackstrawed recollections.
An eternal life shared with another grows less attractive if the other is off his nut. She tells him she needs more presentable clothing than a robe and sandals. He scowls and bids her wait while he fetches something. She plans to run for it once he has gone.
But he steps into his cubicle and there is a blink and a rush of air and he steps out almost immediately, with clothes draped over his arm. She had once owned slacks and a blouse exactly like those he hands her, though she had thought them lost by the dry cleaner a year ago. She wonders if this mad immortal has been stalking her, learning her tastes, her sizes. She recoils from the thought. She has spent lifetimes avoiding notice.
Yet, she must not be too hasty. Perhaps she can help him as Mary had once helped her.
Nagkmur finds a chronology on the Internet and searches out a year halfway between the present and their encounter in sixth century Constantinople. The quickest way to identify when things went awry, he tells her, is to work by halves. If AD 1300 is undisturbed, the change came later; otherwise, earlier.
At first, Nagkmur is encouraged. “Middle Kingdom apparently unperturbed,” he mutters. But as he continues reading, he grows upset. “Yet Occident much different. Too much technology. Too soon. Where Paris Caliph?”
Where indeed? Apparently, this means that “divergence” had already happened, so Nagkmur halves again and dips into the tenth century where he is astonished to discover that the Roman Empire, beleaguered but unbroken, has not fallen either to the Arab conquest or to the earlier Avar sack.
“Unbelievable! He turns to her in bewilderment. “How this change anything? Nothing important happen in Occident.”
None of this makes sense to Stacey. She had lived through it, but it was all a jumble in her memory pile. It was hard to remember what happened in which century; but she was damned sure the Avars never sacked the City. There had been a bad time once when the nomads ran the Slavs into Hellas—Greece was never quite the same country afterward—but the Avars had squatted helplessly before the Land Walls while the Fleet held off the Arab ships with Greek Fire.