MacRoscope (40 page)

Live and learn! So it was all a variant of the seasonal mythology he had heard in other guises. “But you couldn’t bring your lover back to life?”

“No. I tried, but the gods didn’t help. He just rotted. That’s one reason I don’t appreciate Melqart.”

“I sympathize. He really should have done more for you.”

“These things do pass,” she said philosophically. “I was denied my lover, and you are denied yours. Why don’t you pretend I am she, and I’ll pretend you are he whom I once loved. We shall have joy in one another, while both being true to our memories.”

The suggestion, phrased this way, caught him by surprise, and he started to make an angry refusal — but changed his mind. He was not sure what Aia’s true motives were, or how cynical might be her intent, but her body was decidedly conducive and the notion had its peculiar appeal. He had faith that somehow he would return to Afra, for this was not his world — but it was not time or distance that separated him from her. Afra would never be his — not so long as she loved a dead man. Not so long as their joint mission required that he give up his identity to the ruthlessly clever Schön.

Was he to torture himself by perpetual abstinence, knowing that his aspiration had no reasonable fulfillment? Why not settle for the unreasonable fulfillment, in that case? For what he could get?

Why not?

“All right,” he said.

Aia helped him to remove his tunic, touching him with exciting intimacy in the process, and they came together amidst the furry upholstery, shock of flesh against flesh. His left arm gave one twinge and anesthetized itself.

“Speak to me words of love,” she murmured, not yet quite acceding to the ultimate. “Tell me what you feel.”

Oh, no!
“I can’t, I never spoke love before.”

“No wonder you never impressed her! Don’t you know that the whispered word moves a woman as no caress does? Hurry — I’m getting sleepy.”

He considered the request, distracted somewhat by her breathing. She was, by touch, as well-endowed as the goddess Astarte, but much younger. “The only words I know that would not be stupid are not my own. They’re from a poem,
Evening Song
, by—” But what would she know of Sidney Lanier, unborn these many centuries?

She was silent, so he went ahead with the poem. “Look off, dear love, across the sallow sands, / And mark yon meeting of the sun and sea. / How long they kiss in sight of all the lands. / Ah! longer, longer we.”

He recited the two remaining stanzas, frustrated because they had neither rhyme nor meter in Phoenician, and waited for her reaction. There was none.

She was asleep.

She was up before him in the morning, trying on finery from the domicile’s stock. “None of these will do,” she said sadly, shaking her head. “Too obvious.”

“Obvious?”

“If I go into the street in one of these, every person in sight will stare.”

She was not unduly pessimistic. She was, by daylight as by night, an extraordinarily lovely girl.

“Did you have suitable pleasure in me last night?” she asked next, with what irony he could not be certain.

“Well, I must admit I expected something else.”

“Oh?”

“You fell asleep.”

“Oh, yes. I always do. That’s why I like a man to hold me.”

Ivo tried to make something of this and failed. “While it certainly was stimulating holding you, I did find it a bit frustrating.”

“How could that be?”

“I had somehow thought we were going to make love.”

She turned to face him, resplendent in a purple skirt that stopped at the waist, and nothing else. Hold a bowl to her midriff… he thought. “
Didn’t
you?”

“I said you were asleep.”

“Of course.”

Ivo looked at her, disgruntled. “You mean you expected me to — to go ahead anyway?”

“Certainly. As many times as you desired.”

“Maybe next time,” he said, not clear whether he should feel angry or foolish.

They spent the day feasting and resting, since there was no predicting how much of either exercise they would get for some time to come. Aia acquainted him, in snatches, with her own history: Brought to one of the violent Aramean states from her home in the Kingdom of Urartu — Urartu being the most civilized nation of the world, by her definition — because she was the daughter of a traveling trader. Upon maturity, she had undertaken a marriage to a prince of Sidon. “He was the one I loved,” she confided. “If Baal will not succor a prince, what good is he?” But she had never seen Sidon; his merchant ship had been waylaid by a galley from Tyre and taken captive, her betrothed killed resisting. Thus, a year ago, she had found herself here, hostage, in daily peril of being added to the temple staff as a ritual prostitute. Only the suggestion of wealthy family connections had saved her from that; a hostage used by Melqart lost value. But the truth was that her family had suffered reverses and was not wealthy, and momentarily the temple accountant would verify this and dissipate her subterfuge. “So you see, I have been waiting for a chance to escape — and now, with you, I have it.”

Ivo perceived holes in her story, but did not challenge it. Undoubtedly her past was more mundane than she cared to admit. “How far is Urartu from here?”

“Very far. But I don’t want to go there. The politics will have changed, and my family could not afford me now. I will go with you.”

Ivo shrugged, appreciating her help but having no idea where to journey. First, however, they had to get off the island that was Tyre, hardly a mile in circumference; then he could make longer-range plans.

They packed as much as could be concealed under heavy cloaks: breads, dried fish, small crocks of wine. The host-merchant had been too canny to leave anything really valuable in his house during his absence; there was no gold or jewelry. Ivo inquired about coins, and learned by her reaction that they had not yet been invented. Trade was largely by barter, with weighed metals increasing as a medium of exchange, but no standardization had occurred.

At dusk Aia took him to the edge of the city, where the high wall balked their escape. Guards paced along the top of it, carrying dim lanterns. Ivo wondered how the open-dish lamps had been adapted for windy wet outdoor use, but they did not get close enough for him to observe. He would be satisfied just to know how they could get past the wall.

The girl knew what she was doing, however. “The factories go through,” she whispered. “And no one watches inside at night.”

Factories?

She led him into a dark building. He had to hold on to her hand to keep from getting lost, as he could not see at all inside. But that was not his major concern of the moment. His nose was.

The smell was appalling — a suffocating redolence of corruption unlike any he had encountered before. He tried to seal off his nostrils, but the thought of taking such putrefaction unfiltered into his lungs repelled him even more. “What — what?” he whispered.

She laughed. “They can’t hear us here. Speak up.”

“What died here? A flatulent whale?”

“Oh, you mean the murex. It
is
a little strong, but that’s the price of industry.”

So industry polluted the atmosphere in ancient days too! “What
is
it?”

“The murex. The shellfish. Don’t you know how they process it?”

“No.” He hoped they would soon be through the building and into clean air again.

“That’s right. I forgot it’s a trade secret. Well, they gather the murex, break the shells, extract the fish and dump it in big vats. They let it rot there for some time, until the yellow forms. For the darker shades they have to put it in the sun. Then they filter it down and market it. It’s a big industry here; no one outside of the Seven Cities knows the secret. Here, I’ll find a shell for you.”

She banged about in the dark, and in due course pressed an object into his hand. It was a shell resembling that of a spiny conch.

“Market
what
?” he demanded, perplexed about the point of all this.

“The dyes, of course. Yellow, rose, purple—”

“From decomposing shellfish?” But now he understood. The great mystery of the purple dye of the Phoenicians! He was thankful he hadn’t chosen to wear a purple outfit.

At length they emerged, and he took in refreshing lungfuls of partially oxygenated air. They were outside the wall, walking along a narrow starlit beach strewn with crushed shell, hunching in the fortification’s shadow in order to avoid the gaze of the patrolling guards.

They arrived circuitously at a docking area where the lesser ships were tied. This was a shallow harbor facing toward the mainland, evidently limited to local shuttling. There were also several coracles: doughnut-shaped little boats or rafts (depending on viewpoint) with calked boards across the inside where the hole might have been. Ivo remembered the macroscope station, and wondered whether the stations of the future —
his
future — would be as far beyond the torus as atomic liners were beyond the coracle.

The tiny boats did not look seaworthy, but Aia assured him that they were the best to be had for a crew of two on the sneak. She climbed into one about six feet in diameter, and he followed her and experimented with the paddles. There were V-notched sticks braced at either side, fulcrums for the long oars; he had to take up one while she managed the other.

He stood within the precarious structure and looked across the water at the mainland. Suddenly it seemed very far away, and the calm, shallow water intervening seemed ominously deep and rough. “Somebody should build a causeway,” he muttered.

“We must pull together,” she said, “or the craft will simply spin about. Not too hard — I am not as strong as you.” Privately, he wondered. She was careful to flatter him regularly, but she was a well-conditioned female. She was uncommonly knowledgeable about nonfeminine affairs, from temple politics to coracle paddling.

After some initial unsteadiness, much of it stemming from his early flinching as he tried to put too much weight on his left arm, they managed to stroke the clumsy craft out of the harbor. The water was gentle, yet even little swells rolled the party about alarmingly, and progress was hard work. It was the coracle’s natural ambition to rotate, and only continuous and well-synchronized paddling kept it on course.

In that period of silence and painful effort — why did sword-swinging superheroes never feel their wounds the following day? — Ivo reviewed his recent experience mentally. How had it all come about? It was obviously impossible for him to be where he seemed to be. Could he in some fashion have traversed three thousand or more light-years without benefit of galactic machinery, he still could not have landed in Earth’s
past
. The future, yes; the present, possibly; the past, never. The past was forever gone, and anything like time travel brought calamitous paradox. He could not physically participate in past events without altering history, which in turn meant that it was
not
the past; that was the fact that made it unapproachable.

Yet he certainly was
somewhere
. The adventures were too real, the pains too persistent, the series too cohesive, for any idle nightmare. It was becoming evident that he was not going to get out of this by himself. He knew too little, and had such slender resources that he had to depend on a mysterious woman.

Was it time to confess his own inadequacy and summon Schön? He had been shying away from this notion, but he knew that Schön would place the historical perspective instantly, and pinpoint not only the year but the exact degree by which this reality differed from Earth’s true history. Schön would know how to reverse whatever circumstances had brought him here, and thus how to bring back Afra and Groton and Beatryx and the Neptune base.

But Schön might very well have his personality destroyed by the ambushing destroyer in Ivo’s memory, before any of the rest of it came to pass. Then he would be gone, not merely buried, and with him that fragment, that waking dream that was Ivo.

Better not to chance it. The pawn was still pinned. This was a problem he had to handle by himself.

As though that decision were catalytic, another notion came to him. He realized what had bothered him about Aia, the first time they had spoken together. “Who are you?” he had demanded, and she had replied immediately, “I am Aia. I don’t worship Melqart or like human sacrifice.” Something like that.

How had she known that he was fleeing the temple, or why?

Certainly it could have been a guess — but she had not been asking him. She had known. She had said the one thing calculated to assuage his suspicions, and had followed it up with enough blandishment and personal motivation to keep them lulled. She had said that she wanted to escape, but it seemed that her real intention was to stick with him, wherever he might go.

He thought back to his interview with Mattan. The man obviously had not been satisfied, yet he had not pursued the matter of Ivo’s origins. Instead he had forwarded his guest to the temple for further interrogation — and the guards had conveniently staged a giveaway dialogue.

Mattan was clever; there could be no questioning that. Suppose he had had firm suspicions that Ivo was a spy who refused to talk, spinning any fantasy to avoid the truth? Would torture be effective? Perhaps — but there was also the risk of reprisals, especially in the event the visitor turned out to be innocent after all, or of powerful connection. Perhaps, even, he had been infiltrated to provoke an embarrassing incident. Why not, then, prompt the spy to bolt for home, and follow him there? What surer method to fathom the truth?

A skilled spy would know many dialects, naturally. A spy would comprehend the dialogue of the mercenaries, and react accordingly. Ivo remembered how handy that sword had been — virtually proffered to his hand, as the guard turned to him at the foot of the temple steps. How slow those men had been to react, though they were obviously long-time professionals, so that even his clumsy efforts had availed.

Of course, the priest had tried to trick him — but perhaps the man hadn’t had the word yet, or was merely cowardly. Then the chase through the city — with all avenues of escape closed off but one, and attractive Aia waiting at the end of that one.