The men I respected most in the world laughed and grinned and chuckled and spat and said, “Shucks, ’t’ain’t nothin’.”
They were frayed and grimy. They had been working hard and fruitlessly for me, and it showed. I wanted to hug all of them at once. Black Sambo, and plastic-faced Jeff Monroe, and shifty-eyed Sid Buonocore. Pappas, Kolettis, Plastiras. They had rigged a chart to mark off the places where they hadn’t found Conrad Sauerabend. The chart had a lot of marks on it.
Sam said, “Don’t worry, boy. We’ll track him down.”
“I feel so awful, making you give up free time—”
“It could have happened to any one of us,” Sam said. “It wasn’t your fault.”
“It wasn’t?”
“Sauerabend gimmicked his timer behind your back, didn’t he? How could you have prevented it?” Sam grinned. “We got to help you out. We don’t know when same’ll happen to us.”
“All for one,” said Madison Jefferson Monroe. “One for all.”
“You think you’re the first Courier to have a customer skip out?” Sid Buonocore asked. “Don’t be a craphead! Those timers can be rigged for manual use by anyone who understands Benchley Effect theory.”
“They never told me—”
“They don’t like to advertise it. But it happens. Five, six times a year, somebody takes a private time-trip behind his Courier’s back.”
I said, “What happens to the Courier?”
“If the Time Patrol finds out? They fire him,” said Buonocore bleakly. “What we try to do is cover for each other, before the Patrol moves in. It’s a bitch of a job, but we got to do it. I mean, if you don’t look after one of your own when he’s in trouble, who in hell will look after you?”
“Besides,” said Sam, “it makes us feel like heroes.”
I studied the chart. They had looked for Sauerabend pretty thoroughly in early Byzantium — Constantine through the second Theodosius — and they had checked out the final two centuries with equal care. Searching the middle had so far been a matter of random investigations. Sam, Buonocore, and Monroe were coming off search duty now and were going to rest; Kolettis, Plastiris, and Pappas were getting ready to go out, and they were planning strategy.
Everybody went on being very nice to me during the discussion of ways to catch Sauerabend. I felt a real sentimental glow of warmth for them. My comrades in adversity. My companions. My colleagues. The Time Musketeers. My heart expanded. I made a little speech telling them how grateful I was for all their help. They looked embarrassed and told me once again that it was a simple matter of good fellowship, the golden rule in action.
The door opened and a dusty figure stumbled in, wearing anachronistic sunglasses. Najeeb Dajani, my old tutor! He scowled, slumped down on a chair, and gestured impatiently to nobody in particular, hoping for wine.
Kolettis handed him wine. Dajani poured some of it into his hand and used it to wash the dust from his sunglasses. Then he gulped the rest.
“Mr. Dajani!” I cried. “I didn’t know they had called you in too! Listen, I want to thank you for helping—”
“You stupid prick,” said Dajani quietly. “How did I ever let you get your Courier license?”
52.
Dajani had just returned from a survey of the city in 630-650, with no luck at all. He was tired and irritated, and he obviously wasn’t happy about spending his layoff searching for somebody else’s runaway tourist.
He put out my sentimental glow in a hurry. I tried to foist on him my gratitude speech, and he said sourly, “Skip the grease job. I’m doing this because it’ll reflect badly on my capabilities as an instructor if the Patrol finds out what kind of anthropoid I let loose as a Courier. It’s my own hide I’m protecting.”
There was a nasty moment of silence. A lot of shuffling of feet and clearing of throats took place.
“That’s not very gratifying to hear,” I said to Dajani.
Buonocore said, “Don’t let him upset you, kid. Like I told you, any Courier’s tourist is likely to gimmick his timer, and—”
“I don’t refer to the loss of the tourist,” said Dajani testily. “I refer to the fact that this idiot managed to duplicate himself while trying to edit the mistake!” He gargled wine. “I forgive him for the one, but not for the other.”
“The duplication is pretty ugly,” Buonocore admitted.
“It’s a serious thing,” said Kolettis.
“Bad karma,” Sam said. “No telling how we’ll cover that one up.”
“I can’t remember a case to match,” declared Pappas.
“A messy miscalculation,” Plastiras commented.
“Look,” I said, “the duplication was an accident. I was so much in a sweat to find Sauerabend that I didn’t stop to calculate the implications of—”
“We understand,” Sam said.
“It’s a natural error, when you’re under pressure,” said Jeff Monroe.
“Could have happened to anyone,” Buonocore told me.
“A shame. A damned shame,” murmured Pappas.
I started to feel less like an important member of a close-knit fraternity, and more like a pitied halfwit nephew who can’t help leaving little puddles of mess wherever he goes. The halfwit’s uncles were trying to clean up a particularly messy mess for him, and trying to keep the halfwit serene so he wouldn’t make a worse mess.
When I realized what the real attitude of these men toward me was, I felt like calling in the Time Patrol, confessing my timecrimes, and requesting eradication. My soul shriveled. My manhood withered. I, the copulator with empresses, the seducer of secluded noblewomen, the maker of smalltalk with emperors, I, the last of the Ducases, I, the strider across millennia, I, the brilliant Courier in the style of Metaxas, I… I, to these veteran Couriers here, was simply an upright mass of perambulating dreck. A faex that walks like a man. Which is the singular of faeces. Which is to say, a shit.
53.
Metaxas, who had not spoken for fifteen minutes, said finally, “If those of you who are going are ready to go, I’ll get a chariot to take you into town.”
Kolettis shook his head. “We haven’t allotted eras yet. But it’ll take only a minute.”
There was a buzzing consultation over the chart. It was decided that Kolettis would cover 700-725, Plastiras 1150-1175, and I would inspect 725-745. Pappas had brought a plague suit with him and was going to make a survey of the plague years 745-747, just in case Sauerabend had looped into that proscribed period by accident.
I was surprised that they trusted me to make a time-jump all by myself, considering what they obviously thought of me. But I suppose they figured I couldn’t get into any worse trouble. Off we went to town in one of Metaxas’ chariots. Each of us carried a small but remark-ably accurate portrait of Conrad Sauerabend, painted on a varnished wooden plaque by a contemporary Byzantine artist hired by Metaxas. The artist had worked from a holophoto; I wonder what he’d made of that.
When we reached Constantinople proper, we split up and, one by one, timed off to the eras we were supposed to search. I materialized up the line in 725 and realized the little joke that had been played on me.
This was the beginning of the era of iconoclasm, when Emperor Leo III had first denounced the worship of painted images. At that time, most of the Byzantines were fervent iconodules — image-worshippers — and Leo set out to smash the cult of icons, first by speaking and preaching against them, then by destroying an image of Christ in the chapel of the Chalke, or Brazen House, in front of the Great Palace. After that things got worse; images and image-makers were persecuted, and Leo’s son issued a proclamation declaring, “There shall be rejected, removed and cursed out of the Christian Church every likeness which is made out of any material whatever by the evil art of painters.”