That night we did little sleeping. There was too much noise, for one thing, since the celebration of the imperial baptism went on raucously throughout the city until almost dawn. But who could sleep, anyway, knowing that the world of the early fifth century lay just beyond the door?
One night before and sixteen centuries down the line, Capistrano had kindly seen me through a siege of sleeplessness. Now he did it again. I rose and stood by the little slit of a window, peering at the bonfires in the city, and when he noticed me he came over and said, “I understand. Sleeping is hard at first.”
“Yes.”
“Shall I get a woman for you?”
“No.”
“We’ll take a walk, then?”
“Can we leave them?” I asked, looking at our eight tourists.
“We won’t go far. We’ll stay just outside, within reach if some trouble starts.”
The air was heavy and mild. Snatches of obscene song floated up from the tavern district. We walked toward it; the taverns were still open and full of drunken soldiers. Swarthy prostitutes offered their wares. One girl, hardly sixteen, had a coin on a string between her bare breasts. Capistrano nudged me to notice it, and we laughed. “The same coin, maybe?” he asked. “But different breasts?” I shrugged. “Perhaps the same breasts, too,” I said, thinking of the unborn girl who had been for sale at the Yedikule a night ago. Capistrano bought two flasks of oily Greek wine and we returned to the inn, to sit quietly downstairs and drink the darkness away.
He did most of the talking. Like many Time Couriers, his life had been a complex, jagged one full of detours, and he let his autobiography dribble out between gulps of wine. Noble Spanish ancestors, he said (he didn’t tell me about the Turkish great-grandmother until months later, when he was far more thoroughly drunk); early marriage to a virgin of high family; education at the best universities of Europe. Then inexplicable decline, loss of ambition, loss of fortune, loss of wife. “My life,” said Capistrano, “broke in half when I was twenty-seven years of age. I required total reintegration of personality. As you see, the effort was not a true success.” He spoke of a series of temporary marriages, adventures in criminality, experiments with hallucinatory drugs that made weeds and floaters look innocent. When he enrolled as a Time Courier, it was only as an alternative to suicide. “I keyed to an output and asked for a bit at random,” he said. “Positive, and I become a Courier. Negative, and I drink poison. The bit came up positive. Here I am.” He drained his wine.
To me that night he seemed a wonderful mixture of the desperate, tragic romantic and the self-dramatizing charlatan. Of course, I was drunk myself, and very young. But I told him how much I admired his quest for identity, and secretly wished that I could learn the knack of seeming so appealingly destroyed, so interestingly lost.
“Come,” he said, when the last of the wine was gone. “To dispose of the corpses.”
We hurled our flasks into the Golden Horn. Streaks of dawn were emerging. As we walked slowly back to the inn, Capistrano said, “I have made a little hobby of tracing my ancestors, do you know? It is my own private research. Here — look at these names.” He produced a small, thick notebook. “In each era I visit,” he said, “I seek out my ancestors and list them here. Already I know several hundred of them, going back to the fourteenth century. Do you realize how immense the number of one’s ancestors is? We have two parents, and each of them has two parents, and each of them two parents — go back only four generations and you have already thirty ancestors!”
“An interesting hobby,” I said.
Capistrano’s eyes blazed. “More than a hobby! More than a hobby! A matter of death and life! Look, my friend, whenever I grow more tired than usual of existence, all I must do is find one of these people, one, and destroy him! Take his life when he is still a child, perhaps. Then return to now-time. And in that moment, swiftly, without pain, my own tiresome life ceases ever to have been!”
“But the Time Patrol—”
“Helpless,” said Capistrano. “What can the Patrol do? If my crime is discovered, I am seized and erased from history for timecrime, right? If my crime is not discovered — and why should it be? — then I have erased myself. Either way I am gone. Is this not the most charming way of suicide?”
“In eliminating your own ancestor,” I said, “you might be changing now-time to a greater degree. You’d also eliminate your own brothers and sisters — uncles — grandparents and all of their brothers and sisters — all by removing one prop from the past!”
He nodded solemnly. “I am aware of this. And so I compile these genealogies, you see, in order to determine how best to effect my own erasure. I am not Samson; I have no wish to bring the temple crashing down with myself. I will look for the strategic person to eliminate — one who is himself sinful, incidentally, for I will not slay the truly innocent — and I will remove that person and thus myself, and perhaps the changes in now-time will not be terribly great. If they are, the Patrol will discover and undo them, and still give me the exit I crave.”
I wondered if he was crazy or just drunk. A little of both, I decided.
I felt like telling him that if he really wanted to kill himself that badly, it would be a whole lot less trouble for everybody else if he’d just go jump in the Bosphorus.
I felt a twinge of terror at the thought that the whole Time Service might be permeated by Capistranos, all shopping around for the most interestingly self-destructive way of changing the past.
Upstairs, the early light revealed eight sleepers, huddled two by two. Our elderly married folks slept peacefully; the two pretty boys from London looked sweaty and tousled after some busy buggery; Clotilde, smiling, slept with her hand tucked between Lise’s pale thighs, and Lise’s left hand was cupped cozily about Clotilde’s maidenly but firm right breast. I lay down on my lonely bed and slipped quickly into sleep. Soon Capistrano woke me, and we woke the others. I felt ten thousand years old.
We had a breakfast of cold lamb and went out for a quick daylight walking tour of the city. Most of the interesting things had not yet been built, or else were still in early forms; we didn’t stay long. At noon we went to the Augusteum to shunt. “Our next stop,” Capistrano announced, “will beA.D. 532, where we will see the city of Justinian’s time and witness the riots which destroyed it, making possible the construction of the finer and more grand city that won such eternal fame.” We backed into the shadows of the ruined original Haghia Sophia, so that no passersby would be startled by the sight of ten people vanishing. I set all the timers. Capistrano produced his pitchpipe and gave the master signal. We shunted.
22.
Two weeks later we all returned down the line to 2059. I was dizzied, intoxicated, my soul full of Byzantium.
I had seen the highlights of a thousand years of greatness. The city of my dreams had come to life for me. The meat and wine of Byzantium had passed through my bowels.
From a Courier’s professional point of view, the trip had been a good one, that is, uneventful. Our tourists had not entangled themselves in trouble, nor had any paradoxes been created, as far as we could tell. There had been a little friction only one night, when Capistrano, very drunk, tried to seduce Clotilde; he wasn’t subtle about it, letting seduction shade into rape when she resisted, but I managed to separate them before her nails got into his eyes. In the morning he wouldn’t believe it. “The blonde lesbian?” he asked. “I would stoop so low? You must dream it!” And then he insisted on going eight hours up the line to see if it had really happened. I had visions of a sober Capistrano taking his earlier sozzled self to task, and it scared me. I had to argue him out of it in a blunt and direct way, reminding him of the Time Patrol’s regulation prohibiting anyone from engaging in conversation with himself of a different now-time basis, and threatening to report him if he tried it. Capistrano looked wounded, but he let the matter drop. And when we came down the line and he filed a report of his own, upon request, concerning my behavior as a Courier, he gave me the highest rating. Protopopolos told me that afterward.