| Author: | Robert Silverberg |
| Copyright: | 1969 |
| Date Reviewed: | 12/28/86 |
| Rating: | 7.5 |
Synopsis: Judson Daniel Elliott III is 24 years old and bored with his life and his eight day old job when he runs away to New Orleans and meets Sambo Sambo, a very large and very black black man. Sam introduces Jud to the Time Services. Sam is a Time Service Courier. His job is to act as a tour guide for wealthy tourists who want to visit past historical events. Sam also introduces Jud to many women. The other branch of the Time Service is the Time Patrol. Their job is to see to it that time travelers do not significantly change history. With his degree in Byzantine history, Jed would make a fine courier. Sam initiates Jed with a few quick trips to his recent past where he sees different versions of himself. Many time couriers wash out at seeing themselves. Jed has the awkward experience of seeing himself screw a girl that works with Sam. Jed passes these initial tests and joins the Service.
Jed is enrolled in a Time Service course taught by Najeeb Dajani, a strange looking Arab who is teaching the course as punishment for trading goods through time. Here Jed learns a lot about time paradoxes and how to avoid them. Some historical events are naturally very popular and at these times there are a growing number of tourists and their couriers. For example, there are about 20 versions of Dajani at the crucifixion which is his run. For some reason not entirely clear, people see past versions of themselves but generally not future ones. Dajani drives home the point that in addition to not changing history or allowing his patrons to do so, the Time Courier must never attempt to meet himself or another Time Courier up the line unless the other person is from the same base reference time in now time. While sex with up the line persons is frowned upon but not necessarily policed, the men must be very careful not to impregnate women they've entered. A random birth in the time flux can be just as dangerous as a random death. Another rule imposed by physics is that a time traveler can not jump forward in time. If he's spent two weeks up the line he can return to two weeks past the time he departed but no further. Its all very confusing.
After class, Jed is sent on his first assignment to accompany Jeff Monroe to 1935 New Orleans and witness the assassination of Huey Long. Jed goes on four more local missions before qualifying as a Courier. He's then shipped out to Istanbul, soon to encounter the city of his dreams - Constantinople. His first run is with Capistrano, a very depressed man who is methodically making a complete list of his genealogy. His fantasy is to commit the ultimate timecrime - the death of one of his ancestors. Either it will end with his own miserable life never being started or the Time Patrol will catch him, fix the past, and then execute him. Before his next shunt, Jed goes back on a solo excursion and meets a Sam who doesn't recognize him. Sam's base time in the future is four years before he met Jed. Lesson number one in the Paradox of Discontinuity. Jed's second Byzantine tour is with the famous Themistoklis Metaxas. Metaxas is a great courier - one of the first. Where as most couriers hit five or six high spots on a week tour, Metaxas hits those and 40 more. His tour group shunts almost continually during a tour staying only an hour or even less to see some critical event before going on to the next one. After a very little while Jed decides he wants to be that kind of courier.
Metaxas is also a minor time criminal, although the patrol leaves him alone because of the valuable service he is doing. His tours are booked well in advance and he can handle four or five more tourists than other couriers. Metaxas is also making a detailed genealogy of his line but for a different reason than Capistrano. His goal is to screw all of his female ancestors from his great-grandmother on. During the tour, Metaxas offers to fix Jed up with Theodora, Justinian I's wife, who is an incredible nymphomaniac. He passes on her - for now.
During his next layoff (couriers are required two week vacation between each tour) Jed does a solo excursion to look up his own ancestors. He traces his line back to the 7th Century which is further back than Capistrano or Metaxas, although not as detailed.
Jed's first solo tour finally arrives -s ix contemporary people on a one week tour. The tour is a good one as Jed replicates Metaxas' style in a fast paced action packed series of events. He gives the tourists the times of their lives and is rewarded for it. Against regulations, Jed slips out and does some of his own exploring while his charges sleep. He intends to get back to them just minutes after he left. Jed journeys down the line to the early 13th Century to research more of his family line. At his next layoff, Jed takes up Metaxas' offer to visit him at his villa in 1204. Owning property in the past is also against regulations. The villa turns out to be a rich man's estate.
Jed's next tour is not so great. During the first crusade march of Bohemond through Constantinople, one of the tourists flings herself at the leader and is promptly slaughtered. Instead of calling in the Time Patrol, Jed goes back a few minutes and stops her from trying that stunt and then goes forward again. That night Jed again jumps to Metaxas' villa and falls in love with Pulcheria Ducas, a seventeen year old Lady who is also his great-great-multi-great-grandmother. He is moody for the rest of the tour and during his next layoff, visits the black plague years and fucks Theodora. Neither helps.
While on his third tour, Jed runs into Capistrano who is about to kill himself. He's just come back from killing his grandmother when she was a young woman and as soon as he reaches now time poof and he's gone. Jed sees him go down the line and mourns the lost. In actuality, Capistrano only went as far as 1600 where he spent seven blissful years before the Time Patrol caught up with him, erased the time he created and then had him executed. Depressed, Jed once again leaves his charges up the line and asks Metaxas to arrange for him to meet Pulcheria. He does and the sex and love are wonderful. When he returns, he finds that one of the tourists has disappeared in the last three minutes. He searches for a few minutes and then goes back to just before his previous departure to find that the tourist, Sauerabend, has modified his time belt so that he can control it himself. Jed goes back another 56 seconds in an attempt to catch Sauerabend again but instead runs into himself creating a paradox which won't be easy to fix.
One of the Jed's goes into now-time to get help from other couriers while the other sits with the tourists. Half an hour later the other Jed explains that him and his friends have spent the past week with no luck. Jed does his own searching and then goes back to Metaxas' villa to find solace in Pulcheria cunt. However, Pulcheria is no longer the Duke's wife but a tavern whore. It seems that Sauerabend eventually made it to 1199 and while trying to seduce the young Pulcheria, (he's a child molester), he is caught and forced to marry her. Jed and his friends right the wrongs but now there are still two Jeds. They decide to share their lives but when the other Jed returns to the future he disappears. It seems the Time Patrol caught on to what was happening and fixed it so that the real Jed, who is not the Jed telling the story, would be put on trial and the other Jed would obliterate. Jed finds all this out when Sam comes back to Metaxas' villa just as he is planning to see Pulcheria again. Sam convinces him to go back to ancient Greece and stay there before the Time Patrol catches up with up him and ....
Review: "Up The Line" is probably going to be one of those books that I will enjoy remembering more than I enjoyed reading. There are many interesting concepts here which by now can be difficult for a time travel story since this theme has been done time and time again. "Up The Line" borrows the concept of time travel as a tourist function from the novella "The Vintage Season" by Henry Kuttner and C. L. Moore. There are certain paradoxes that are dealt with better here than in other time travel novels. The best is the creation of two or more people when someone goes back in time to meet himself. I particularly liked the 20 or 50 versions of a tour guide being present at a certain events and the possibility of the tourists at that event eventually crowding out the real people as time go by. The ending was one of the best I've ever read. Some of the best parts of the book were reliving the history of the Byzantine empire which I knew relatively little about. While reading the book, I took the opportunity of brushing up on that period with the encyclopedia.
For my part, the book suffered from all of the sexual escapades of the hero. I realize the author was trying to show how much the mores of the 21st century have changed but this fails to explain the easy time the couriers had in the past. For all its attempts to be enlightened, the book in incredibly sexist in the way it portrays women through the ages.