Robert Silverberg - Up the Line

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Up The Line
Robert Silverberg
ibooks
new york
www.ibooksinc.com
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, trans-lators 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.
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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 peo-ple 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 café-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 el-dest 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 snif-fer 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
dis-played 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?”
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“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 nig-ger 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.
Ifound 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.
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I had trouble recognizing the girls with their clothes on. Betsy for bosoms, was my mnemonic, but in their
Missionary sheaths they were indis-tinguishable. 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 Istudy . Law clerk is what Ido . 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.”
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“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 hap-piness 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 ofThe 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 collec-tion seemed newly made. He
is a forger of antiquities, I told myself. “I am a part-time employee of the Time Ser-vice,” black Sam
insisted.
4.
The Time Service,” I said, “is populated by square-jawed Boy Scouts. Your jaw is round.”
“And my nose is flat, yes. And I am no Boy Scout. However, I am a part-time employee of the Time
Service.”
“I don’t believe it. The Time Service is staffed entirely by nice boys from Indiana and Texas. Nice white
boys of all races, creeds, and colors.”
“That’s the Time Patrol,” said Sam. “I’m a Time Courier.”
“There’s a difference?”
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“There’s a difference.”
“Pardon my ignorance.”
“Ignorance can’t be pardoned. Only cured.”
“Tell me about the Time Service.”
“There are two divisions,” Sam said. “The Time Patrol and the Time Couriers. The people who tell
ethnic jokes end up in the Time Patrol. The people who invent ethnic jokes end up as Time Couriers.
Capisce? ”
“Not really.”
“Man, if you’re so dumb, why ain’t you black?” Sam asked gently. “Time Patrolmen do the policing of
paradoxes. Time Couriers take the tourists up the line. Couriers hate the Patrol, Patrol hates Couriers.
I’m a Courier. I do the Mali-Ghana-Gao-Kush-Aksum-Kongo route in January and Feb-ruary, and in
October and November I do Sumer, Pharaonic Egypt, and sometimes the Nazca-Mochica-Inca run.
When they’re shorthanded I fill in on Crusades, Magna Carta, 1066, and Agincourt. Three times now
I’ve done the Fourth Crusade taking Constantinople, and twice the Turks in 1453. Eat your heart out,
white folks.”
“You’re making this up, Sam!”
“Sure I am, sure. You see all this stuff here? Smuggled right down the line by yours truly, out past the
Time Patrol, not a thing they suspected except once. Time Patrol tried to arrest me in Istanbul, 1563, I
cut his balls off and sold him to the Sultan for ten bezants. Threw his timer in the Bosphorus and left him
to rot as a eunuch.”
“You didn’t!”
“No, I didn’t,” Sam said. “Would have, though.”
My eyes glistened. I sensed my unknown heart’s desire vibrating just beyond my grasp. “Smuggle me up
the line to Byzantium, Sam!”
“Go smuggle yourself. Sign on as a Courier.”
“Could I?”
“They’re always hiring. Boy, where’s yoursense? A graduate student in history, you call yourself, and
you’ve never even thought of a Time Service job?”
“I’ve thought of it,” I said indignantly. “It’s just that I never thought of it seriously. It seems—well, too
easy . To strap on a timer and visit any era that ever was—that’s cheating, Sam, do you know what I
mean?”
“I know what you mean, but you don’t know what you mean. I’ll tell you your trouble, Jud. You’re a
compulsive loser.”
I knew that. How did he know it so soon?
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He said, “What you want most of all is to go up the line, like any other kid with two synapses and a
healthy honker. So you turn your back on that, and instead of signing up you let them nail you with a fake
job, which you run away from at the earliest possible opportunity. Where are you now? What’s ahead.
You’re, what, twenty-two years old—”
“—twenty-four—”
“—and you’ve just unmade one career, and you haven’t made move one on the other, and when I get
tired of you I’ll toss you out on your thumb, and what happens when the money runs dry?”
I didn’t answer.
He went on, “I figure you’ll run out of stash in six months, Jud. At that point you can sign up as stoker
for a rich widow, pick a good one out of the Throbbing Crotch Registry—”
“Yigg.”
“Or you can join the Hallucination Police and help to preserve objective reality—”
“Yech.”
“Or you can return to the More Supreme Court and sur-render your lily-white to Judge Mattachine—”
“Blugh.”
“Or you can do what you should have done all along, which is to enroll as a Time Courier. Of course,
you won’t do that, because you’re a loser, and losers infallibly choose the least desirable alternative.
Right?”
“Wrong, Sam.”
“Balls.”
“Are you trying to make me angry?”
“No, love.” He lit a weed for me. “I go on duty at the sniffer palace in half an hour. Would you mind
oiling me?”
“Oil yourself, you anthropoid. I’m not laying a hand on your lovely black flesh.”
“Ah! Aggressive heterosexuality rears its ugly head!”
He stripped to his jock and poured oil into his bath machine. The machine’s arms moved in spidery
circles and started to polish him to a high gloss.
“Sam,” I said, “I want to join the Time Service.”
5.
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PLEASE ANSWER ALL QUESTIONS
Name:Judson Daniel Elliott III
Place of Birth:Newer York
Date of Birth:11 October 2035
Sex (M or F):M
Citizen Registry Number:070-28-3479-xx5-100089891
Academic Degrees—
Bachelor:Columbia ’55
Master:Columbia ’56
Doctor:Harvard, Yale,
Princeton, incomplete
Scholar Magistrate: ——
Other: ——
Height:1 meter (s) 88 centimeters
4 Weight:78 kg.
Hair Color:black
Eye Color:black
Racial Index:8.5 C+
Blood Group:BB 132
Marriages (List Temporary and Permanent Liaisons, in order of registration, and duration of each):
none
Acknowledged Offspring: none
Reason for Entering Time Service (limit: 100 words):
To improve my knowledge of Byzantine culture,
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which is my special study area; to enlarge my
acquaintance with human customs and behavior;
to deepen my relationship to other individuals
through constructive service; to offer the bene?ts
of my education thus far to those in need of
information; to satisfy certain romantic longings
common to young men.
Names of Blood Relatives Currently Employed by Time
Service:
none
6.
Very little of the foregoing really mattered. I was supposed to keep the application on my person, like a
talisman, in case anybody in the Time Service bureaucracy really wanted to see it as I moved through the
stages of enrolling; but all that was actually necessary was my Citizen Registry Number, which gave the
Time Service folk full access to everything else I had put on the form except my Reason for Entering
Time Service, and much more besides. At the push of a node the master data center would disgorge not
only my height, weight, date of birth, hair color, eye color, racial index, blood group, and academic
background, but also a full list of all illnesses I had suffered, vaccinations, my medical and psychological
checkups, sperm count, mean body temperature by seasons, size of all bodily organs including penis both
flaccid and erect, all my places of residence, my kin to the fifth degree and the fourth generation, current
bank balance, pattern of financial behavior, tax status, voting perfor-mance, record of arrests if any,
preference in pets, shoe size, et cetera. Privacy is out of fashion, they tell me.
Sam waited in the waiting room, molesting the hired help, while I was filling out my application. When I
had fin-ished my paperwork he rose and conducted me down a spi-raling ramp into the depths of the
Time Service building. Squat hammerheaded robots laden with equipment and documents rolled beside
us on the ramp. A door in the wall opened and a secretary emerged; as she crossed our path Sam gave
her a lusty tweaking of the nipples and she ran away shrieking. He goosed one of the robots, too. They
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call it appetite for life. “Abandon all hope, ye who enter here,” Sam said. “I play the part well, don’t I?”
“What part? Satan?”
“Virgil,” he said. “Your friendly spade guide to the nether regions. Turn left here.”
We stepped onto a dropshaft and went down a long way.
We appeared in a large steamy room at least fifty meters high and crossed a swaying rope bridge far
above the floor. “How,” I asked, “is a new man who doesn’t have a guide supposed to find his way
around in this building?”
“With difficulty,” said Sam.
The bridge led us into a glossy corridor lined with gaudy doors. One door had SAMUEL
HERSHKOWITZ let-tered on it in cutesy psychedelic lettering, real antiquarian stuff. Sam jammed his
face into the scanner slot and the door instantly opened. We peered into a long narrow room, furnished in
archaic fashion with blowup plastic couches, a spindly desk, even a typewriter, for God’s sake. Samuel
Hersh-kowitz was a long, long, lean individual with a deeply tanned face, curling mustachios, sideburns,
and a yard of chin. At the sight of Sam he came capering across the desk and they embraced furiously.
“Soul brother!” cried Samuel Hershkowitz.
“Landsmann!”yelled Sam the guru.
They kissed cheekwise. They hugged. They pounded shoulders. Then they split and Hershkowitz looked
at me and said, “Who?”
“New recruit. Jud Elliott. Naive, but he’ll do for the Byzantium run. Knows his stuff.”
“You have an application, Elliott?” Hershkowitz asked.
I produced it. He scanned it briefly and said, “Never married, eh? You a pervo-deviant?”
“No, sir.”
“Just an ordinary queer?”
“No, sir.”
“Scared of girls?”
“Hardly, sir. I’m just not interested in taking on the per-manent responsibilities of marriage.”
“But youare hetero?”
“Mainly, sir,” I said, wondering if I had said the wrong thing.
Samuel Hershkowitz tugged at his sideburns. “Our Byzantium Couriers have to be above reproach, you
understand. The prevailing climate up that particular line is, well, steamy. You can futz around all you
want in the year 2059, but when you’re a Courier you need to maintain a sense of perspective. Amen.
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摘要：

UpTheLineRobertSilverbergibooksnewyorkwww.ibooksinc.com1.Samtheguruwasablackman,andhispeopleupthelinehadbeenslaves—andbeforethat,kings.Iwonderedaboutmine.Generationsofsweatypeasants,dyingweary?Orconspirators,rebels,greatseducers,swordsmen,thieves,traitors,pimps,dukes,scholars,failedpriests,trans­lat...

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