During a visit to the icon-smashings of Leo the Isaurian, when Byzantium’s finest works of art were being destroyed as idols, he interrupted an earnest iconoclastic fanatic and said, “Don’t be such a dumb prick. You know that you’re hurting this city’s tourist trade?”
Sauerabend was also a molester of little girls, and proud of it. “I can’t help it,” he explained. “It’s my particular personal clutchup. The shrink calls it the Lolita complex. I like ’em twelve, thirteen years old. You know, old enough to bleed, maybe to have a little hair on it, but still kind of unripe. Get ’em before the tits grow, that’s my ideal. I can’t stand all that swinging meat on a woman. Pretty sick, huh?”
Pretty sick, yes. And also pretty annoying, because we had Palmyra Gostaman with us; Sauerabend couldn’t stop staring at her. The lodgings provided on a time-tour don’t always give the tourists much privacy, and Sauerabend ogled the poor girl into despair. He drooled over her constantly, forcing her to dress and undress under a blanket as if this was the nineteenth or twentieth century; and when her father wasn’t looking, he’d get his fat paws on her behind or the little bumps of her breasts and whisper lewd propositions in her ear. Finally I had to tell him that if he didn’t stop bothering her, I’d bounce him from the tour. That settled him down for a few days. The girl’s father, incidentally, thought the whole incident was very funny. “Maybe what that girl needs is a good banging,” he said to me. “Get the body juices flowing, huh?” Papa Gostaman also approved of his son Bilbo’s affair with Miss Pistil, which also became a nuisance, since we wasted a terrific amount of time waiting for them to finish their current copulations. I’d be giving a preliminary talk on what we were to see this morning, get me, and Bilbo would be standing behind Miss Pistil, and suddenly she’d get this transfigured look on her face and I’d know he’d done it again, up with her skirt in back, wham! Bilbo looked pleased as hell all the time, which I suppose was reasonable enough for a fourteen-year-old-boy having an affair with a woman ten years his senior. Miss Pistil looked guilty. Her sore conscience, though, didn’t keep her from opening the gate for Bilbo three or four times a day.
I didn’t find all this conducive to creative Couriering.
Then there were minor annoyances, such as the ineffectual lecheries of old Mr. Haggins, who persecuted the dim Mrs. Gostaman mercilessly. Or the insistence of Sauerabend on fiddling around with his timer. “You know,” he said several times, “I bet I could ungimmick this thing so I could run it myself. Used to be an engineer, you know, before I took up stockbroking.” I told him to leave his timer alone. Behind my back, he went on tinkering with it.
Still another headache was Capistrano, whom I met by chance in 1097 while Bohemond’s Crusaders were entering Constantinople. He showed up while I was concentrating on the replay of the Marge Hefferin scene. I wanted to see how permanent my correction of the past had been.
This time I lined my people up on the opposite side of the street. Yes, there I was; and there was Marge, eager and impatient and hot for Bohemond; and there was the rest of the group. As the Crusaders paraded toward us, I felt almost dizzy with suspense. Would I see myself save Marge? Or would I see Marge leap toward Bohemond and be cut down? Or would some third alternative unreel? The fluidity, the mutability, of the time stream, that was what terrified me now.
Bohemond neared. Marge was undoing her tunic. Heavy creamy breasts were visible. She tensed and readied herself for the dash into the street. And a second Jud Elliott materialized out of nowhere across the way, right behind her. I saw the look of shock on Marge’s face as my alter ego’s steely fingers clamped tight to her ass. I saw his hand splay wide to seize her breast. I saw her whirl, struggle, sag; and as Bohemond went by, I saw myself vanish, leaving only the two of me, one on each side of the processional avenue.
I was awash with relief. Yet I was also troubled, because I knew now that my editing of this scene was embedded in the time-flow for anyone to see. Including some passing Time Patrolman, perhaps, who might happen to observe the brief presence of a doubled Courier and wonder what was going on. At any time in the next million millennia the Patrol might monitor that scene — and then, no matter if it went undiscovered until the year 8,000,000,000,008, I would be called to account for my unauthorized correction of the record. I could expect to feel the hand on my shoulder, the voice calling my name—
I felt a hand on my shoulder. A voice called my name.
I spun around. “Capistrano!”
“Sure, Capistrano. Did you expect someone else?”
“I— I— you surprised me, that’s all.” I was shaking. My knees were watery.
I was so upset that it took me a few seconds to realize how awful Capistrano looked.
He was frayed and haggard; his glossy dark hair was graying and stringy; he had lost weight and looked twenty years older than the Capistrano I knew. I sensed discontinuity and felt the fear that I always felt when confronted with someone out of my own future.
“What’s the trouble?” I asked.
“I’m coming apart. Breaking up. Look, there’s my tour over there.” He indicated a clump of time-travelers who peered intently at the Crusaders. “I can’t stay with them any more. They sicken me. Everything sickens me. It’s the end for me, Elliott, absolutely the end.”
“Why? What’s wrong?”
“I can’t talk about it here. When are you staying tonight?”
“Right here in 1097. The inn by the Golden Horn.”
“I’ll see you at midnight,” Capistrano said. He clutched my arm for a moment. “It’s the end, Elliott. Really the end. God have mercy on my soul!”
43.
Capistrano appeared at the inn just before midnight. Under his cloak he carried a lopsided bottle, which he uncorked and handed to me. “Cognac,” he said. “From 1825, bottled in 1775. I just brought it up the line.”
I tasted it. He slumped down in front of me. He looked worse than ever: old, drained, hollow. He took the cognac from me and gulped it greedily.
“Before you say anything,” I told him, “I want to know what your now-time basis is. Discontinuities scare me.”
“There’s no discontinuity.”
“There isn’t?”
“My basis is December, 2059. The same as yours.”
“Impossible!”
“Impossible?” he repeated. “How can you say that?”
“Last time I saw you, you weren’t even forty. Now you’re easily past fifty. Don’t fool me, Capistrano. Your basis is somewhere in 2070, isn’t it? And if it is, for God’s sake don’t tell me anything about the years still ahead for me!”
“My basis is 2059,” said Capistrano in a ragged voice. I realized from the thickness of his tone that this bottle of cognac was not the first for him tonight. “I am no older now than I ought to be, for you,” he said. “The trouble is that I’m a dead man.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Last month I told you of my great-grandmother, the Turk?”
“Yes.”
“This morning I went down the line to Istanbul of 1955. My great-grandmother was then seventeen years old and unmarried. In a moment of wild despair I choked her and threw her into the Bosphorus. It was at night, in the rain; no one saw us. I am dead, Elliott. Dead.”
“No, Capistrano!”
“I told you, long ago, that when the time came, I would make my exit that way. A Turkish slut — she who beguiled my great-grandfather into a shameful marriage — gone now. And so am I. Once I return to now-time, I have never existed. What shall I do, Elliott? You decide. Shall I jump down the line now and end the comedy?”