Two in Time

by Wilson Tucker

  11

  THE SHIP was a trimaran, and huge. From the flying bridge, Havig looked across a sweep of deck, beautifully grained hard­wood whereon hatches, cargo booms, donkey engines, sun-power screens, and superstructure made a harmonious whole. There was no brightwork; Maurai civilization, poor in metals, must reserve them for the most basic uses. The cabins were shingled. Bougainvillea and trumpet flower vines rioted over them. At each forepeak stood a carven figure representing one of the Trinity-Tanaroa Creator in the middle, a column of ab­stract symbols; Lesu Haristi holding his cross to starboard; to port, shark-toothed Nan, for death and the dark side of life.

  But they were no barbarians who built and crewed this merchantman. The triple hull was designed for ultimate hydro­dynamic efficiency. The three great A-frame masts bore sails, true, but these were of esoteric cut and accompanied by vanes which got their own uses out of the wind; the entire rig was continuously readjusted by small motors, which biological fuel cells powered and a computer directed. The personnel were four kanakas and two wahines, who were not overworked.

  Captain Rewi Lohannaso held an engineering degree from the University of Wellantoa in N’Zealann. He spoke several languages, and his Ingliss was not the debased dialect of some Merican tribe, but as rich and precise as Havig’s native tongue.

  A stocky brown man in sarong and bare feet, he said, slowly for the benefit of his passenger who was trying to master the modern speech: “We kept science after technology’s world­machine broke down. Our problem was to find new ways to ap­ply that science, on a planet gutted and poisoned. We’ve not wholly solved it. But we have come far, and I do believe we will go further.”

  The ocean rolled indigo, turquoise, aquamarine, and aglit­ter. Waves rushed, wavelets chuckled. Sunlight fell dazzling on sails and on the wings of an albatross. A pod of whales passed majestically across vision. The wind did not pipe in the ears, at the speed of the ship before it, but lulled, brought salty odors, stroked coolness across bare sun-warmed skins. Down on deck, a young man, off duty, drew icy-sweet notes from a bamboo flute, and a girl danced. Their nude bodies were as goodly to see as a cat or a blooded horse.

  “That’s why you’ve done a grand thing, Brother Thomas,” Lohannaso said. “They’ll jubilate when you arrive.” He hesi­tated. “I did not radio for an aircraft to bring you and your goods to the Federation because the Admiralty might have obliged. And . . . frankly, dirigibles are faster, but less reliable than ships. Their engines are feeble; the fireproofing anticata­lyst for the hydrogen is experimental.”

  (“I think that brought home to me as much as anything did, the truth about Maurai society in its best days,” Havig said to me. “They were-will not be back-to-nature cranks. On the con­trary, beneath the easygoing affability, they may well be more development-minded than the U.S.A. today. But they won’t have the fuel for heavier-than-air craft, anyhow not in their earlier stages; and they won’t have the helium for blimps like ours. We squandered so much of everything.”)

  “Your discovery waited quite a few centuries,” Lohannaso went on. “Won’t hurt if it waits some extra weeks to get to Wellantoa.”

  (“If I wanted to study the Maurai in depth, to learn what percentage of what Wallis said about them was true and what was lies or blind prejudice, I needed an entrée. Beginning when they first started becoming an important factor in the world, I could follow their history onward. But I had to make that be­ginning, from scratch. I could pose as a Merican easily enough--among the countless dialects English had split into, mine would pass--but why should they be interested in one more barbarian? And I’d no hope of pretending to be from a semi­-civilized community which they had trade relations with …

  Well, I hit on an answer.” Havig grinned. “Can you guess, Doc? No? Okay. Through a twentieth-century dummy I ac­quired a mess of radioisotopes, like Carbon 14. I left them where they’d be safe-their decay must be real-and moved up­time. There I became Brother Thomas, from an inland strong­hold which had preserved a modicum of learning. I’d discov­ered this trove and decided the Maurai should have it, so carted it myself to the coast ... You see? The main thrust of their research was biological. It must be, both because Earth’s ecol­ogy was in bad need of help, and because life is the sunpower converter. But they had no nuclear reactors to manufacture tracer isotopes wholesale. To them, my ‘find’ was a godsend.”)

  “Do you think I’ll be accepted as a student?” Havig asked anxiously. “It would mean a lot to my people as well as me. But I’m such an outsider--”

  Lohannaso laid an arm around his shoulder in the Maurai manner. “Never you sweat, friend. First, we’re a trader folk. We pay for value received, and this value is beyond my guess­ing. Second, we want to spread knowledge, civilization, as wide as we can. We want allies ourselves, trained hands and brains.”

  “Do you actually hope to convert the whole of mankind?”

  “Belay that! Anyhow, if you mean, Do we hope to make everybody into copies of us? The answer is, No. Mind, I’m not in Parliament or Admiralty, but I follow debates and I read the philosophers. One trouble with the old machine culture was that, by its nature, it did force people to become more and more alike. Not only did this fall in the end--disastrously--but to the extent it succeeded, it was a worse disaster.” Lohannaso smote the rail with a mighty fist. “Damnation, Thomas! We need all the diversity, all the assorted ways of living and look­ing and thinking, we can get!”

  He laughed and finished: “Inside of limits, true. The pirates have to be cleaned up, that sort of job. But otherwise--Well, this’s getting too bloody solemn. Almost noon now. Let me shoot the sun and do my arithmetic, then Terai comes on duty and you and I’ll go have lunch. You haven’t lived till you’ve sampled my beer.”

  (“I spent more than a year among the early Maurai,” Havig told me. “Being eager to spread the gospel, they gave me ex­actly the sort of education I needed for my purposes. They were dear, merry people--oh, yes, they had their share of bad guys, and human failings and miseries, but on the whole, the Federa­tion in that century was a happy place to be.

  (“That wasn’t true of the rest of the world, of course. Nor of the past. I’d keep time-skipping to twentieth-century Wel­lington or Honolulu, and catching planes to Istanbul, and go­ing back to see how Xenia was getting on.

  (“When at last I felt I’d reached the point of diminishing re­turns, as far as that particular future milieu was concerned, I came once more to Latin Constantinople. Xenia was eighteen. Shortly afterward, we married.”)

  Of their life together, in the five years of hers which were granted them, he told me little. Well, I haven’t much I care to tell either, of what really mattered between Kate and me.

  He did mention some practical problems. They were tripar­tite: supporting her decently, getting along in the environment to which she was confined, and staying hidden from the Eyrie.

  As for the first, his undertaking wasn’t quite simple. He couldn’t start a business, in a world of guilds, monopolies, com­plicated regulations, and folk who even in a metropolis--before the printing press, regular mail service, electronic communica­tions--were as gossipy as villagers. It took him considerable research and effort to establish the persona of an agent for a newly formed association of Danish merchant adventurers, more observer and contact man than factor and thus not in competition with the Franks. Finance was the least of his wor­ries; a little gold, carried downtime, went a long way. But he must have a plausible explanation for his money.

  As for the second, he thought about moving a good, safe distance off, perhaps to Russia or Western Europe, perhaps to Nicaea where a Byzantine monarchy held out and would, at last, regain Constantinople. But no, there was little good and no safety. The Tartars were coming, and the Holy Inquisition. Sacked and conquered, this great city nevertheless offered as much as any place outside a hopelessly alien Orient; and here Xenia was among familiar scenes, in touch with friends and her mother. Besides, wherever they mi
ght go, they would be marked, she a Levantine who called herself a Roman, he some­thing else. Because of his masquerade, they more or less had to buy a house in Pera, where foreigners customarily lived. But that town lay directly across the Golden Horn, with frequent ferries.

  As for the third, he kept a low profile, neither conspicuously active nor conspicuously reclusive. He found a new pseudonym, Jon Andersen, and trained Xenia to use it and to be vague about her own origin. Helpfully, his Catholic acquaintances had no interest in her, beyond wondering why Ser Jon had handicapped himself by marrying a heretical Greek. If he must have her, why not as a concubine?

  “How much of the truth did you tell Xenia?” I inquired.

  “None.” His brows bent. “That hurt, not keeping secrets but lying to her. It wouldn’t have been safe for her to know, how­ever, supposing she could’ve grasped the idea ... would it? She was always so open-hearted. Hard enough for her to main­tain the deceptions I insisted on, like the new identity I claimed I needed if I was to work for a new outfit. No, she accepted me for what I said I was, and didn’t ask about my affairs once she realized that when I was with her I didn’t want to think about them. That was true.”

  “But how did you explain her rescue?”

  “I said I’d prayed to my patron saint, who’d evidently re­sponded in striking fashion. Her memory of the episode was blurred by horror and bewilderment; she had no trouble be­lieving.” He winced. “It hurt me also, to see her light candies and plead like a well-behaved child for the baby of her own that I knew we could never have.”

  “Hm, apropos religion, did she turn Catholic, or you go through the motions of conversion to Orthodoxy?”

  “No. I’d not ask her to change. There has not been a soul less hypocritical than Xenia. To me, it’d have been a minor fib, but I had to stay halfway respectable in the eyes of the Ital­ians, Normans, and French; otherwise we could never have maintained ourselves at a reasonable standard. No, we found us an Eastern priest who’d perform the rite, and a Western bishop who’d grant me dispensation, for, hm, an honorarium. Xenia didn’t care. She had principles, but she was tolerant and didn’t expect I’d burn in hell, especially if a saint had once aided me. Besides, she was deliriously happy.” He smiled. “I was the same, at first and most of the time afterward.”

  Their house was modest, but piece by piece she furnished and ornamented it with the taste which had been her father’s. From its roof you looked across crowded Pera and ships upon the Golden Horn, until Constantinople rose in walls and towers and domes, seeming at this distance nearly untouched. Inland reached countryside where she loved being taken on excursions.

  They kept three servants, not many in an age when labor to do was abundant and labor to hire came cheap. Havig got along well with his groom, a raffish Cappadocian married to the cook, and Xenia spoiled their children. Housemaids came and went, themselves taking considerable of the young wife’s attention; our machinery today spares us more than physical toil. Xenia did her own gardening, till the patio and a small yard behind the house became a fairyland. Otherwise she occupied herself with needlework, for which she had unusual talent, and the books he kept bringing her, and her devotions, and her superstitions.

  “From my viewpoint, the Byzantines were as superstitious as a horse,” Havig said. “Magic, divining, guardianship against everything from the Evil Eye to the plague, omens, quack medi­cines, love philters, you name it, somebody swore by it. Xenia’s shibboleth is astrology. Well, what the deuce, that’s done no harm--she has the basic common sense to interpret her hor­oscopes in a reasonable fashion--and we’d go out at night and observe the stars together. You could do that in a city as well as anywhere else, before street lamps and everlasting smog. She is more beautiful by starlight even than daylight. O God, how I must fight myself not to bring her a telescope, just a small one! But it would have been too risky, of course.”

  “You did a remarkable job of, well, bridging the intellectual gap,” I said.

  “Nothing remarkable, Doc.” His voice, muted, caressed a memory. “She was-is-younger than me, I’d guess by a decade and a half. She’s ignorant of a lot that I know. But this works vice versa, remember. She’s familiar with the ins and outs of one of the most glorious cosmopolises history will ever see. The people, the folkways, the lore, the buildings, the art, the songs, the books--why, she’d read Greek classics my age never did, that perished in the sack. She’d tell me about them, she’d sit chanting those tremendous lines from Aeschylus or Sophocles, till lightnings ran up and down my backbone; she’d get us both drunk on Sappho, or howling with laughter out of Aristopha­nes. Knowing what to look for, I often ‘happened’ to find books in a bazaar ... downtime.”

  He stopped for breath. I waited. “The everyday, too,” he concluded. “When you finished up in the office, weren’t you in­terested in what Kate had been doing? And then”--he looked away--”there was us. We were always in love.”

  She used to sing while she went about her household tasks. Riding past the walls to the stable, he would hear those little minor-key melodies, floating out of a window, suddenly sound very happy.

  On the whole, he and she were comparatively asocial. Now and then, to keep up his façade, it was necessary to entertain a Western merchant, or for Havig alone to attend a party given by one. He didn’t mind. Most of them weren’t bad men for their era, and what they told was interesting. But Xenia had all she could do to conceal her terrified loathing. Fortunately, no one expected her to be a twentieth century-style gracious hostess.

  When she stepped from the background and welled and sparkled with life was when Eastern friends came to dinner. Havig got away with that because Jon Andersen, advance man for an extremely distant company, must gather information where he could, hunting crumbs from the tables of Venice and Genoa. He liked those persons himself: scholars, tradesmen, artists, artisans, Xenia’s priest, a retired sea captain, and more exotic types, come on diplomacy or business, whom he sought out--Russians, Jews of several origins, an occasional Arab or Turk.

  When he must go away, he both welcomed the change and hated the loss of lifespan which might have been shared with Xenia. Fairly frequent absences were needed for him to stay in character. To be sure, a man’s office was normally in his house, but Jon Andersen’s business would require him not only to go see other men in town, but irregularly to make short journeys by land or sea to various areas.

  “Some of that was unavoidable, like accepting an invitation,” he told me. “And once in a while, like every man regardless of how thoroughly married, I wanted to drift around on my own for part of a day. But mainly, you realize, I’d go uptime. I didn’t--I don’t know what good it might do, but I’ve got this feeling of obligation to uncover the truth. So first I’d project myself to Istanbul, where I kept a false identity with a fat bank account. There/then I’d fly to whatever part of the world was indicated, and head futureward, and continue my study of the Maurai Federation and civilization, its rise, glory, decline, fail, and aftermath.”

  Twilight stole slow across the island. Beneath its highest hill, land lay darkling save where firefly lanterns glowed among the homes of sea ranchers; but the waters still glimmered. White against a royal blue which arched westward toward Asia, seen through the boughs of a pine which a hundred years of weather had made into a bonsai, Venus gleamed. On the verandah of Carelo Keajimu’s house, smoke drifted fragrant from a censer. A bird sat its perch and sang that intricate, haunting repertoire of melodies for which men had created it; yet this bird was no cageling, it had a place in the woods.

  The old man murmured: “Aye, we draw to an end. Dying hurts. Nonetheless the forefathers were wise who in their myths made Nan coequal with Lesu. A thing which endured forever would become unendurable. Death opens a way, for peoples as well as for people.”

  He fell silent where he knelt beside his friend, until at last he said: “What you relate makes me wonder if we did not stamp our sigil too deeply.”

 
(“I’d followed his life,” Havig told me. “He began as a bril­liant young philosopher who went into statecraft. He finished as an elder statesman who withdrew to become a philosopher. Then I decided he could join you, as one of the two normal-time human beings I dared trust with my secret.

  (“You see, I’m not wise. I can skim the surface of destiny for information; but can I interpret, can I understand? How am I to know what should be done, or what can be done? I’ve scuttled around through a lot of years; but Carelo Keajimu lived, worked, thought to the depths of ninety unbroken ones. I needed his help.”)

  “That is,” Havig said, “you feel that, well, one element of your culture is too strong, at the expense of too much else, in the next society?”

  “From what you have told me, yes.” His host spent some minutes in rumination. They did not seem overly long. “Or, rather, do you not have the feeling of a strange dichotomy uptime, as you say ... between two concepts which our Maurai ideal was to keep in balance?”

  Science, rationality, planning, control. Myth, the liberated psyche, man an organic part of a nature whose rightness tran­scends knowledge and wisdom.

  “It seems to me, from what you tell, that the present over-valuation of machine technology is a passing rage,” Keajimu said. “A reaction, not unjustified. We Maurai grew overbear­ing. Worse, we grew self-righteous. We made that which had once been good into an idol, and thereby allowed what good was left to rot out of it. In the name of preserving cultural di­versity, we tried to freeze whole races into shapes which were at best merely quaint, at worst grotesque and dangerous anach­ronisms. In the name of preserving ecology, we tried to ban work which could lay a course for the stars. No wonder the Ruwenzorya openly order research on a thermonuclear power­plant! No wonder disaffection at home makes us impotent to stop that!”