Up The Line
by Robert Silverberg
1.
Sam the guru was a black man, and his people up the line had been slaves — and before that, kings. I wondered about mine. Generations of sweaty peasants, dying weary? Or conspirators, rebels, great seducers, swordsmen, thieves, traitors, pimps, dukes, scholars, failed priests, translators from the Gheg and the Tosk, courtesans, dealers in used ivories, short-order cooks, butlers, stockbrokers, coin-trimmers? All those people I had never known and would never be, whose blood and lymph and genes I carry — I wanted to know them. I couldn’t bear the thought of being separated from my own past. I hungered to drag my past about with me like a hump on my back, dipping into it when the dry seasons came.
“Ride the time-winds, then,” said Sam the guru.
I listened to him. That was how I got into the time-traveling business.
Now I have been up the line. I have seen those who wait for me in the millennia gone by. My past hugs me as a hump.
Pulcheria!
Great-great-multi-great-grandmother!
If we had never met—
If I had stayed out of the shop of sweets and spices—
If dark eyes and olive skin and high breasts had meant nothing to me, Pulcheria—
My love. My lustful ancestress. You ache me in my dreams. You sing to me from up the line.
2.
He was really black. The family had been working at it for five or six generations now, since the Afro Revival period. The idea was to purge the gonads of the hated slave-master genes, which of course had become liberally entangled in Sam’s lineage over the years. There was plenty of time for Massa to dip the wick between centuries seventeen and nineteen. Starting about 1960, though, Sam’s people had begun to undo the work of the white devils by mating only with the ebony of hue and woolly of hair. Judging by the family portraits Sam showed me, the starting point was a cafe-au-lait great-great-grandmother. But she married an ace-of-spades exchange student from Zambia or one of those funny little temporary countries, and their eldest son picked himself a Nubian princess, whose daughter married an elegant ebony buck from Mississippi, who—
“Well, my grandfather looked decently brown as a result of all this,” Sam said, “but you could see the strain of the mongrel all over him. We had darkened the family hue by three shades, but we couldn’t pass for pure. Then my father was born and his genes reverted. In spite of everything. Light skin and a high-bridged nose and thin lips — a mingler, a monster. Genetics must play its little joke on an earnest family of displaced Africans. So Daddo went to a helix parlor and had the caucasoid genes edited, accomplishing in four hours what the ancestors hadn’t managed to do in eighty years, and here I be. Black and beautiful.”
Sam was about thirty-five years old. I was twenty-four. In the spring of ’59 we shared a two-room suite in Under New Orleans. It was Sam’s suite, really, but he invited me to split it with him when he found out I had no place to stay. He was working then part time as an attendant in a sniffer palace.
I was fresh off the pod out of Newer York, where I was supposed to have been third assistant statutory law clerk to Judge Mattachine of the Manhattan County More Supreme Court, Upper. Political patronage got me the job, of course, not brains. Statutory law clerks aren’t supposed to have brains; it gets the computers upset. After eight days with Judge Mattachine my patience eroded and I hopped the first pod southbound, taking with me all my earthly possessions, consisting of my toothflash and blackhead remover, my key to the master information output, my most recent thumb-account statement, two changes of clothing, and my lucky piece, a Byzantine gold coin, a nomisma of Alexius I. When I reached New Orleans I got out and wandered down through the underlevels until my feet took me into the sniffer palace on Under Bourbon Street, Level Three. I confess that what attracted me inside were the two jiggly girls who swam fully submerged in a tank of what looked like and turned out to be cognac. Their names were Helen and Betsy and for a while I got to know them quite well. They were the sniffer palace’s lead-in vectors, what they used to call come-ons in the atomic days. Wearing gillmasks, they displayed their pretty nudities to the bypassers, promising but never quite delivering orgiastic frenzies. I watched them paddling in slow circles, each gripping the other’s left breast, and now and then a smooth thigh slid between the thighs of Helen or Betsy as the case may have been, and they smiled beckoningly at me and finally I went in.
Sam came up to greet me. He was maybe three meters tall in his build-ups, and wore a jock and a lot of oil. Judge Mattachine would have loved him. Sam said, “Evening, white folks, want to buy a dream?”
“What do you have going?”
“Sado, maso, homo, lesbo, inter, outer, upper, downer and all the variants and deviants.” He indicated the charge plate. “Take your pick and put your thumb right here.”
“Can I try samples first?”
He looked closely. “What’s a nice Jewish boy like you doing in a place like this?”
“Funny. I was just going to ask you the same thing.”
“I’m hiding out from the Gestapo,” Sam said. “In black-face. Yisgadal v’yiskadash—”
“—adonai elohainu,” I said. “I’m a Revised Episcopalian, really.”
“I’m First Church of Christ Voudoun. Shall I sing a nigger hymn?”
“Spare me,” I told him. “Can you introduce me to the girls in the tank?”
“We don’t sell flesh here, white folks, only dreams.”
“I don’t buy flesh, I just borrow it a little while.”
“The one with the bosom is Betsy. The one with the backside is Helen. Quite frequently they’re virgins, and then the price is higher. Try a dream instead. Look at those lovely masks. You sure you don’t want a sniff?”
“Sure I’m sure.”
“Where’d you get that Newer York accent?”
I said, “In Vermont, on summer vacation. Where’d you get that shiny black skin?”
“My daddy bought it for me in a helix parlor. What’s your name?”
“Jud Elliott. What’s yours?”
“Sambo Sambo.”
“Sounds repetitious. Mind if I call you Sam?”
“Many people do. You live in Under New Orleans now?”
“Just off the pod. Haven’t found a place.”
“I get off work at 0400. So do Helen and Betsy. Let’s all go home with me,” said Sam.
3.
I found out a lot later that he also worked part time in the Time Service. That was a real shocker, because I always thought of Time Servicemen as stuffy, upright, hopelessly virtuous types, square-jawed and clean-cut — overgrown Boy Scouts. And my black guru was and is anything but that. Of course, I had a lot to learn about the Time Service, as well as about Sam.
Since I had a few hours to kill in the sniffer palace he let me have a mask, free, and piped cheery hallucinations to me. When I came up and out, Sam and Helen and Betsy were dressed and ready to go. I had trouble recognizing the girls with their clothes on. Betsy for bosoms, was my mnemonic, but in their Missionary sheaths they were indistinguishable. We all went down three levels to Sam’s place and plugged in. As the good fumes rose and clothes dropped away, I found Betsy again and we did what you might have expected us to do, and I discovered that eight nightly hours of total immersion in a tank of cognac gave her skin a certain burnished glow and did not affect her sensory responses in any negative way.
Then we sat in a droopy circle and smoked weed and the guru drew me out.
“I am a graduate student in Byzantine history,” I declared.
“Fine, fine. Been there?”
“To Istanbul? Five trips.”
“Not Istanbul. Constantinople.”
“Same place,” I said.
“Is it?”
“Oh,” I said. “Constantinople. Very expensive.”
“Not always,” said black Sam. He touched his thumb to the ignition of a new weed, leaned forward tenderly, put it between my lips. “Have you come to Under New Orleans to study Byzantine history?”
“I came to run away from my job.”
“Tired of Byzantium so soon?”
“Tired of being third assistant statutory law clerk to Judge Mattachine of the Manhattan County More Supreme Court, Upper.”
“You said you were—”
“I know. Byzantine is what I study. Law clerk is what I do. Did.”
“Why?”
“My uncle is Justice Elliott of the U.S. Higher Supreme Court. He thought I ought to get into a decent line of work.”
“You don’t have to go to law school to be a law clerk?”
“Not any more,” I explained. “The machines do all the data retrieval, anyway. The clerks are just courtiers. They congratulate the judge on his brilliance, procure for him, submit to him, and so forth. I stuck it for eight days and podded out.”
“You have troubles,” Sam said sagely.
“Yes. I’ve got a simultaneous attack of restlessness, Weltschmerz, tax liens, and unfocused ambition.”
“Want to try for tertiary syphilis?” Helen asked.
“Not just now.”
“If you had a chance to attain your heart’s desire,” said Sam, “would you take it?”
“I don’t know what my heart’s desire is.”
“Is that what you mean when you say you’re suffering from unfocused ambitions?”
“Part of it.”
“If you knew what your heart’s desire was, would you lift a finger to seize it?”
“I would,” I said.
“I hope you mean that,” Sam told me, “because if you don’t, you’ll have your bluff called. Just stick around here.”
He said it very aggressively. He was going to force happiness on me whether I liked it or not.
We switched partners and I made it with Helen, who had a firm white tight backside and was a virtuoso of the interior muscles. Nevertheless she was not my heart’s desire. Sam gave me a three-hour sleepo and took the girls home. In the morning, after a scrub, I inspected the suite and observed that it was decorated with artifacts of many times and places: a Sumerian clay tablet, a stirrup cup from Peru, a goblet of Roman glass, a string of Egyptian faience beads, a medieval mace and suit of chain mail, several copies of The New-York Times from 1852 and 1853, a shelf of books bound in blind-stamped calf, two Iroquois false-face masks, an immense array of Africana, and a good deal else, cluttering every available alcove, aperture, and orifice. In my fuddled way I assumed that Sam had antiquarian leanings and drew no deeper conclusions. A week later I noticed that everything in his collection seemed newly made. He is a forger of antiquities, I told myself. “I am a part-time employee of the Time Service,” black Sam insisted.