The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve

by Robert Silverberg

Sarajevo was lovely on that early summer day. The air sparkled, the breeze off the mountains was strong and pungent, the whitewashed villas glittered in the morning sunlight. Reichenbach, enchanted by the beauty of the place and spurred by a sense of impending excitement, stepped buoyantly out of a dark cobbled alley and made his way in quick virile strides toward the river’s right embankment. It was nearly 10:30.

A crowd of silent, sullen Bosnian burghers lined the embankment. The black-and-gold Hapsburg banners fluttered from every lamppost and balcony. In a little while the archduke Franz Ferdinand, the emperor’s nephew and heir, would come this way with his duchess in their open-topped car. Venturing into dangerous territory, they were, into a province of disaffected and reluctant citizens.

The townsfolk stirred faintly. The townsfolk muttered. Like puddings, Reichenbach thought, they awaited in a dull, dutiful way their future monarch. But he knew they must be seething with revolutionary fervor inside.

Reichenbach looked about him for dark taut youths with the peculiar bright-eyed look of assassins. No one nearby seemed to fit the pattern. He let his gaze wander up the hills to the dense cypress groves, the ancient wooden houses, the old Turkish mosques topped by slender, splendid minarets and back down toward the river to the crowd again. And—

Who is she?

He noticed her for the first time, no more than a dozen meters to his left, in front of the Bank of Austria-Hungary building: a tall auburn-haired woman of striking presence and aura, who in this mob of coarse, rough folk radiated such supreme alertness and force that Reichenbach knew at once she must be of his sort. Yes! He had come here alone, certain he would find an appropriate companion, and that confidence now was affirmed.

He began to move toward her.

His eyes met hers and she nodded and smiled in recognition and acknowledgment.

“Have you just arrived?” Reichenbach asked in German.

She answered in Serbian. “Three days ago.”

Smoothly he shifted languages. “How did I fail to see you?”

“You were looking everywhere else. I saw you at once. You came this morning?”

“Fifteen minutes ago.”

“Does it please you so far?”

“Very much,” he said. “Such a picturesque place. Like a medieval fantasy. Time stands still here.”

Her eyes were mischievous. “Time stands still everywhere,” she said, moving on into English.

Reichenbach smiled. Again he matched her change of language. “I take your meaning. And I think you take mine. This charming architecture, the little river, the ethnic costumes—it’s hard to believe, that a vast and hideous war is going to spring from so quaint a place.”

“A nice irony, yes. And it’s for ironies that we make these journeys, n’est ce pas?”

“Vraiment.”

They were standing quite close now. He felt a current flowing between them, a pulsating, almost tangible force.

“Join me later for a drink?” he said.

“Certainly. I am Ilsabet.”

“Reichenbach.”

He longed to ask her when she had come from. But of course that was taboo.

“Look,” she said. “The archduke and duchess.”

The royal car, inching forward, had reached them. Franz Ferdinand, red-faced and tense in preposterous comic-opera uniform, waved halfheartedly to the bleakly staring crowd. Drab, plump Sophie beside him, absurdly overdressed, forced a smile. They were meaty-looking, florid people, rigid and nervous, all but clinging to each other in their nervousness.

“Now it starts,” he said.

“Yes. The foreplay.” She slipped her arm through his.

Not far away a tall, young, sallow-faced man appeared as if he had sprung from the pavement—wild hyperthyroid eyes, bobbing Adam’s-apple, a sure desperado—and hurled something. It landed just behind the royal car. An odd popping sound—the detonator—and then Reichenbach heard a loud bang. There was a blurt of black smoke and the car behind the archduke’s lurched and crumpled, dumping aides-de-camp into the street. The cortege halted abruptly. The imperial couple, unharmed, sat weirdly upright as if their survival depended on keeping their spines straight. A functionary riding with them said in a clear voice, “A bomb has gone off, your highness.” And Franz Ferdinand, calm, disgusted: “I rather expected something like that. Look after the injured, will you?”

Ilsabet’s hand tightened on Reichenbach’s forearm as the bizarre comedy unfolded: the cars motionless, archduke and duchess still in plain view, the assassin wildly vaulting a parapet and plunging into the shallow river, police pursuing, pouncing, beating him with the flats of their swords, the crowd milling in confusion. At last the damaged car was pushed to the side of the road and the remaining vehicles rapidly drove off.

“End of act one,” Ilsabet said, laughing.

“And forty minutes until act two. That drink, now?”

“I know a sidewalk café near here.”

Under a broad turquoise umbrella Reichenbach had a slivovitz, Ilsabet a mug of dark beer. The stolid citizens at the surrounding tables talked more of hunting and fishing than of the bungled assassination. Reichenbach, pretending to be casual, studied Ilsabet hungrily. A cool, keen intelligence gleamed in her penetrating green eyes. Everything about her was sleek, self-possessed, sure. She was so much like him that he almost feared her, and that was a new feeling for him. What he feared most of all was that he would blunder here at the outset and lose her; but he knew, deep beneath all doubts, that he would not. They were meant for each other. He liked to believe that she came from his moment, and that there would be a chance to continue in realtime, when they had returned from displacement, whatever they began on this jaunt. Of course, one did not speak of such things.

Instead he said, “Where do you go next?”

“The burning of Rome. And you?”

“A drink with Shakespeare at the Mermaid Tavern.”

“How splendid. I never thought of doing that.”

He drew a deep breath and said, “We could do it together,” and hesitated, watching her expression. She did not look displeased. “After we’ve heard Nero play his concerto. Eh?”

She seemed amused. “I like that idea.”

He raised his glass. “Prosit.”

“Zdravlje.”

They snaked wrists, clinked glasses.

For a few minutes more they talked—lightly, playfully. He studied her gestures, her sentence structure, her use of idiom, seeking in the subtlest turns of her style some clue that might tell him that they were co-temporals, but she gave him nothing: a shrewd game player, this one. At length he said, “It’s nearly time for the rest of the show.”

Ilsabet nodded. He scattered some coins on the table and they returned to the embankment, walked up to the Latin Bridge, turned right into Franz Joseph Street. Shortly the royal motorcade, returning from a city-hall reception, came rolling along. There appeared to be some disagreement over the route: chauffeurs and aides-de-camp engaged in a noisy dispute and suddenly the royal car stopped. The chauffeur seemed to be trying to put the car into reverse. There was a clashing of gears. A gaunt boy emerged from a coffeehouse not three meters from the car, less than ten from Reichenbach and Ilsabet. He looked dazed, like a sleepwalker, as if astounded to find himself so close to the imperial heir. This is Gavrilo Princip, Reichenbach thought, the second and true assassin; but he felt little interest in what was about to happen. The gun was out, the boy was taking aim. But Reichenbach watched Ilsabet, more concerned with the quality of her reactions than with the deaths of two trivial people in fancy costumes. Thus he missed seeing the fatal shot through Franz Ferdinand’s pouter-pigeon chest, though he observed Ilsabet’s quick, frosty smile of satisfaction. When he glanced back at the royal car he saw the archduke sitting upright, stunned, tunic and lips stained with red, and the boy firing at the duchess. There was consternation among the aides-de-camp. The car sped away. It was 11:15.

“So,” said Ilsabet. “Now the war begins, the dynasties topple, a civilization crumbles. Did you enjoy it?”

“Not as much as I enjoyed the way you smiled when the archduke was shot.”

“Silly.”

“The slaughter of a pair of overstuffed simpletons is ultimately less important to me than your smile.”

It was risky: too strong too soon, maybe? But it got through to her the right way, producing a faint quirking of her lip that told him she was pleased.

“Come,” she said, and took him by the hand.

Her hotel was an old gray stone building on the other side of the river. She had an elegant balconied room on the third floor, river view, ornate gas chandeliers, heavy damask draperies, capacious canopied bed. This era’s style was certainly admirable, Reichenbach thought—lavish, slow, rich; even in a little provincial town like this, everything was deluxe. He shed his tight and heavy clothing with relief. She wore her timer high, a pale taut band just beneath her breasts. Her eyes glittered as she reached for him and drew him down beneath the canopy. At this moment at the other end of town, Franz Ferdinand and Sophie were dying. Soon there would be exchanges of stiff diplomatic notes, declarations of war by Austria-Hungary against Serbia, Germany against Russia and France, Europe engulfed in flames, the battle of the Marne, Ypres, Verdun, the Somme, the flight of the kaiser, the armistice, the transformation of the monarchies—he had studied it all with such keen intensity, and now, having seen the celebrated assassinations that triggered everything, he was unmoved. Ilsabet had eclipsed the Great War for him.

No matter. There would be other epochal events to savor. They had all history to wander.

“To Rome, now,” he said huskily.

They rose, bathed, embraced, winked conspiratorially. They were off to a good start. Hastily they gathered their 1914 gear, waistcoats and petticoats and boots and all that, within the prescribed two-meter radius. They synchronized their timers and embraced again, naked, laughing, bodies pressed tight together, and went soaring across the centuries.

At the halfway house outside imperial Rome, they underwent their preparations, receiving their Roman hairstyles and clothing, their hypnocourses in Latin, their purses of denarii and sestertii, their plague inoculations, their new temporary names. He was Quintus Junius Veranius, she was Flavia Julia Lepida.

Nero’s Rome was smaller and far less grand than he expected—the Colosseum was still in the future, there was no Arch of Titus, even the Forum seemed sparsely built. But the city was scarcely mean. The first day, they strolled vast gardens and dense, crowded markets, stared in awe at crazy Caligula’s bridge from the Palatine to the Capitoline, went to the baths, gorged themselves at their inn on capon and truffled boar. On the next, they attended the gladiatorial games and afterward made love with frantic energy in a chamber they had hired near the Campus Martius. There was a wonderful frenzy about the city that Reichenbach found intoxicating, and Ilsabet, he knew, shared his fervor: her eyes were aglow, her face gleamed. They could hardly bear to sleep, but explored the narrow winding streets from dark to dawn.

They knew, of course, that the fire would break out in the Circus Maximus where it adjoined the Palatine and Caelian hills, and took care to situate themselves safely atop the Aventine, where they had a fine view. There they watched the fierce blaze sweeping through the Circus, climbing the hills, dipping to ravage the lower ground. No one seemed to be fighting the fire; indeed, Reichenbach thought he could detect subsidiary fires flaring up in the outlying districts, as though arson were the sport of the hour, and soon those fires joined with the main one. They sky rained black soot; the stifling summer air was thick and almost impossible to breathe. For the first two days the destruction had a kind of fascinating beauty, as temples and mansions and arcades melted away, the Rome of centuries being unbuilt before their eyes. But then the discomfort, the danger, the monotony, began to pall on him. “Shall we go?” he said.

“Wait,” Ilsabet replied. The conflagration seemed to have an almost sexual impact on her: she glistened with sweat, she trembled with some strange joy as the flames leaped from district to district. She could not get enough. And she clung to him in tight feverish embrace. “Not yet,” she murmured, “not so soon. I want to see the emperor.”

Yes. And here was Nero now, returning to town from holiday. In grand procession he crossed the charred city, descending from his litter now and then to inspect some ruined shrine or palace. They caught a glimpse of him as he entered the Gardens of Maecenas—thick-necked, paunchy, spindle-shanked, foul of complexion. “Oh, look,” Ilsabet whispered. “He’s beautiful! But where’s the fiddle?” The emperor carried no fiddle, but he was grotesquely garbed in some kind of theatrical costume and his cheeks were daubed with paint. He waved and flung coins to the crowd and ascended the garden tower. For a better view, no doubt. Ilsabet pressed herself close to Reichenbach. “My throat is on fire,” she said. “My lungs are choked with ashes. Take me to London. Show me Shakespeare.”

There was smoke in the dark Cheapside alehouse too, thick sweet smoke curling up from sputtering logs on a dank February day. They sat in a cobwebbed corner playing word games while waiting for the actors to arrive. She was quick and clever, just as clever as he. Reichenbach took joy in that. He loved her for her agility and strength of soul. “Not many could be carrying off this tour,” he told her. “Only special ones like us.”

She grinned. “We who occupy the far side of the bell-shaped curve.”

“Yes. Yes. It’s horrible of us to have such good opinions of ourselves, isn’t it?”

“Probably. But they’re well earned, my dear.”

He covered her hand with his, and squeezed, and she squeezed back. Reichenbach had never known anyone like her. Deeper and deeper was she drawing him, and his delight was tempered only by the knowledge that when they returned to realtime, to that iron world beyond the terminator where all paradoxes canceled out and the delicious freedoms of the jaunter did not apply, he must of necessity lose her. But there was no hurry about returning.

Voices, now: laughter, shouts, a company of men entering the tavern, actors, poets perhaps, Burbage, maybe, Heminges, Allen, Condell, Kemp, Ben Jonson possibly, and who was that, slender, high forehead, those eyes like lamps in the dark? Who else could it be? Plainly Shagspere, Chaxper, Shackspire, however they spelled it, surely Sweet Will here among these men calling for sack and malmsey, and behind that broad forehead Hamlet and Mercutio must be teeming, Othello, Hotspur, Prospero, Macbeth. The sight of him excited Reichenbach as Nero had Ilsabet. He inclined his head, hoping to hear scraps of dazzling table-talk, some bit of newborn verse, some talk of a play taking form; but at this distance everything blurred. “I have to go to him,” Reichenbach muttered.

“The regulations?”

“Je m’en fous the regulations. I’ll be quick. People of our kind don’t need to worry about the regulations. I promise you, I’ll be quick.”

She winked and blew him a kiss. She looked gorgeously sluttish in her low-fronted gown.

Reichenbach felt a strange quivering in his calves as he crossed the straw-strewn floor to the far-off crowded table.

“Master Shakespeare!” he cried.

Heads turned. Cold eyes glared out of silent faces. Reichenbach forced himself to be bold. From his purse he took two slender, crude shilling-pieces and put them in front of Shakespeare. “I would stand you a flagon or two of the best sack,” he said loudly, “in the name of good Sir John.”

“Sir John?” said Shakespeare, blank-faced. He frowned and shook his head. “Sir John Woodcocke, d’ye mean? Sir John Holcombe? I know not your Sir John, fellow.”

Reichenbach’s cheeks blazed. He felt like a fool.

A burly man beside Shakespeare said, with a rough nudge, “Me-thinks he speaks of Falstaff, Will. Eh? You recall your Falstaff?”

“Yes,” Reichenbach said. “In truth I mean no other.”

“Falstaff,” Shakespeare said in a distant way. He looked displeased, uncomfortable. “I recall the name, yes. Friend, I thank you, but take back your shillings. It is bad custom for me to drink of strangers’ sack.”

Reichenbach protested, but only fitfully, and quickly he withdrew lest the moment grow ugly: plainly these folk had no use for his wine or for him, and to be wounded in a tavern brawl here in A.D. 1604 would bring monstrous consequences in realtime. He made a courtly bow and retreated. Ilsabet, watching, wore a cat-grin. He went slinking back to her, upset, bitterly aware he had bungled his cherished meeting with Shakespeare and, worse, had looked bumptious in front of her.

“We should go,” he said. “We’re unwelcome here.”

“Poor dear one. You look so miserable.”

“The contempt in his eyes—”

“No,” she said. “The man is probably bothered by strangers all the time. And he was, you know, with his friends in the sanctuary of his own tavern. He meant no personal rebuke.”

“I expected him to be different—to be one of us, to reach out toward me and draw me to him, to—to—”

“No,” said Ilsabet gently. “He has his life, his wife, his pains, his problems. Don’t confuse him with your fantasy of him. Come, now. You look so glum, my dear. Find yourself again!”

“Somewhen else.”

“Yes. Somewhen else.”

Under her deft consolations the sting of his oafishness at the Mermaid Tavern eased, and his mood brightened as they went onward. Few words passed between them: a look, a smile, the merest of contacts, and they communicated. Attending the trial of Socrates, they touched fingertips lightly, secretly, and it was the deepest of communions. Afterward they made love under the clear, bright winter sky of Athens on a gray-green hillside rich with lavender and myrtle, and emerged from shivering ecstasies to find themselves with an audience of mournful scruffy goats—a perfect leap of context and metaphor, and for days thereafter they made one another laugh with only the most delicate pantomimed reminder of the scene. Onward they went to see grim, limping, austere old Magellan sail off around the world with his five little ships from the mouth of the Guadalquivir, and at a whim they leaped to India, staining their skins and playing at Hindus as they viewed the expedition of Vasco da Gama come sailing into harbor at Calicut, and then it seemed proper to go on to Spain in dry, hot summer to drink sour white wine and watch ruddy freckled-faced Columbus get his pitiful little fleet out to sea.

Of course, they took other lovers from time to time. That was part of the game, too tasty a treat to forswear. In Byzantium, on the eve of the Frankish conquest, he passed a night with a dark-eyed voluptuous Greek who oiled her breasts with musky mysterious unguents, and Ilsabet with a towering garlicky Swede of the imperial guard, and when they found each other the next day, just as the Venetian armada burst into the Bosporus, they described to one another in the most flamboyant of detail the strangenesses of their night’s sport—the tireless Norseman’s toneless bellowing of sagas in his hottest moments: the Byzantine’s startling, convulsive, climactic fit, almost epileptic in style, and, as she had admitted playfully at dawn, mostly a counterfeit. In Cleopatra’s Egypt, while waiting for glimpses of the queen and Antony, they diverted themselves with a dark-eyed Coptic pair, brother and sister, no more than children and blithely interchangeable in bed. At the crowning of Charlemagne she found herself a Frankish merchant who offered her an estate along the Rhine, and he a mysteriously elliptical dusky woman who claimed to be a Catalonian Moor, but who—Reichenbach suddenly realized a few days later—must almost certainly have been a jaunter like himself, playing elegant games with him.

All this lent spice to their love and did no harm. These separate but shared adventures only enhanced the intensity of the relationship they were welding. He prayed the jaunt would never end, for Ilsabet was the perfect companion, his utter match, and so long as they sprinted together through the aeons, she was his, though he knew that would end when realtime reclaimed him. Nevertheless, that sad moment still was far away, and he hoped before then to find some way around the inexorable rules, some scheme for locating her and continuing with her in his own true time. Small chance of that, he knew. In the world beyond the terminator there was no time-jaunting; jaunting could be done only in the fluid realm of “history,” and history was arbitrarily defined as everything that had happened before the terminator year of 2187. The rest was realtime, rigid and immutable, and what if her realtime were fifty years ahead of his, or fifty behind? There was no bridging that by jaunting. He did not know her realtime locus, and he did not dare ask. Deep as the love between them had come to be, Reichenbach still feared offending her through some unpardonable breach of their special etiquette.

With all the world to choose from, they sometimes took brief solo jaunts. That was Ilsabet’s idea, holidays within their holiday, so that they would not grow stale with one another. It made sense to him. Thereupon he vaulted to the Paris of the 1920s to sip Pernod on the Boulevard Saint-Germain and peer at Picasso and Hemingway and Joyce, she in epicanthic mask of old Cathay to see Kublai Khan ride in triumph through the Great Wall, he to Cape Kennedy to watch the great Apollo rocket roaring moonward, she to London for King Charles’s beheading. But these were brief adventures, and they reunited quickly, gladly, and went on hand in hand to their next together, to the fall of Troy and the diamond jubilee of Queen Victoria and the assassination of Lincoln and the sack of Carthage. Always when they returned from separate exploits, they regaled each other with extensive narratives of what had befallen them, the sights, the tastes, the ironies and perceptions, and, of course, the amorous interludes. By now Reichenbach and Ilsabet had accumulated an elaborate fabric of shared experience, a richness of joint history that gave them virtually a private language of evocative recollection, so that the slightest of cues—a goat on a hill, the taste of burned toast, the sight of a lop-eared beggar—sprang them into an intimate realm that no one else could ever penetrate: their unique place, furnished with their own things, the artifacts of love, the treasures of memory. And even that which they did separately became interwoven in that fabric, as of the telling of events as they lay in each other’s arms had transformed those events into communal possessions.

Yet gradually Reichenbach realized that something was beginning to go wrong.

From a solo jaunt to Paris in 1794, where she toured the Reign of Terror, Ilsabet returned strangely evasive. She spoke in brilliant detail of the death of Robespierre and the sad despoliation of Notre Dame, but what she reported was mere journalism, with no inner meaning. He had to fish for information. Where had she lodged? Had she feared for her safety? Had she had interesting conversations with the Parisians? Shrugs, deflections. Had she taken a lover? Yes, yes, a fleeting liaison, nothing worth talking about; and then it was back to an account of the mobs, the tumbrels, the sound of the guillotine. At first Reichenbach accepted that without demur, though her vaguenesses violated their custom. But she remained moody and oblique while they were visiting the Crucifixion, and as they were about to depart for the Black Death she begged off, saying she needed another day to herself, and would go to Prague for the premiere of Don Giovanni. That too failed to trouble him—he was not musical—and he spent the day observing Waterloo from the hills behind Wellington’s troops. When Ilsabet rejoined him in the late spring of 1349 for the Black Death in London, though, she seemed even more preoccupied and remote, and told him little of her night at the opera. He began to feel dismay, for they had been marvelously close and now she was obviously voyaging on some other plane. The plague-smitten city seemed to bore her. Her only flicker of animation came toward evening, in a Southwark hostelry, when as they dined on gristly lamb a stranger entered, a tall, gaunt, sharp-bearded man with the obvious aura of a jaunter. Reichenbach did not fail to notice the rebirth of light in Ilsabet’s eyes, and the barely perceptible inclining-forward of her body as the stranger approached their table was amply perceptible to him. The newcomer knew them for what they were, naturally, and invited himself to join them. His name was Stavanger; he had been on his jaunt just a few days; he meant to see everything, everything, before his time was up. Not for many years had Reichenbach felt such jealousy. He was wise in these things, and it was not difficult to detect the current flowing from Ilsabet to Stavanger even as he sat there between them. Now he understood why she had no casual amours to report of her jaunts to Paris and Prague. This one was far from casual and would bear no retelling.

In the morning she said, “I still feel operatic. I’ll go to Bayreuth tonight—the premiere of Götterdämmerung.”

Despising himself, he said, “A capital idea. I’ll accompany you.”

She looked disconcerted. “But music bores you!”

“A flaw in my character. Time I began to remedy it.”

The fitful panic in Ilsabet’s eyes gave way to cool and chilling calmness. “Another time, dear love. I prize my solitude. I’ll make this little trip without you.”

It was all plain to him. Gone now the open sharing; now there were secret rendezvous and an unwanted third player of their game. He could not bear it. In anguish he made his own arrangements and jaunted to Bayreuth in thick red wig and curling beard, and there she was, seated beside Stavanger in the Festspielhaus as the subterranean orchestra launched into the first notes. Reichenbach did not remain for the performance.

Stavanger now crossed their path openly and with great frequency. They met him at the siege of Constantinople, at the San Francisco earthquake, and at a fete at Versailles. This was more than coincidence, and Reichenbach said so to Ilsabet. “I suggested he follow some of our itinerary,” she admitted. “He’s a lonely man, jaunting alone. And quite charming. But of course if you dislike him, we can simply vanish without telling him where we’re going, and he’ll never find us again.”

A disarming tactic, Reichenbach thought. It was impossible for her to admit to him that she and Stavanger were lovers, for there was too much substance to their affair; so instead she pretended he was a pitiful forlorn wanderer in need of company. Reichenbach was outraged. Fidelity was not part of his unspoken compact with her, and she was free to slip off to any era she chose for a tryst with Stavanger. But that she chose to conceal what was going on was deplorable, and that she was finding pretexts to drag Stavanger along on their travels, puncturing the privacy of their own rapport for the sake of a few smug stolen glances, was impermissible. Reichenbach was convinced now that Ilsabet and Stavanger were co-temporals, though he knew he had no rational basis for that idea; it simply seemed right to him, a final torment, the two of them now laying the groundwork for a realtime relationship that excluded him. Whether or not that was true, it was unbearable. Reichenbach was astounded by the intensity of his jealous fury. Yet it was a true emotion and one he would not attempt to repress. The joy he had known with Ilsabet had been unique, and Stavanger had tainted it.

He found himself searching for ways to dispose of his rival.

Merely whirling Ilsabet off elsewhen would achieve nothing. She would find ways of catching up with her paramour somewhen along the line. And if Ilsabet and Stavanger were co-temporal, and she and Reichenbach were not—no, no, Stavanger had to be expunged. Reichenbach, a stable and temperate man, had never imagined himself capable of such criminality; a bit of elitist regulation-bending was all he had ever allowed himself. But he had never been faced with the loss of an Ilsabet before, either.

In Borgia, Italy, Reichenbach hired a Florentine prisoner to do Stavanger in with a dram of nightshade. But the villain pocketed Reichenbach’s down payment and disappeared without a care for the ducats due him on completion of the job. In the chaotic aftermath of the Ides of March, Reichenbach attempted to finger Stavanger as one of Caesar’s murderers, but no one paid attention. Nor did he have luck denouncing him to the Inquisition one afternoon in 1485 in Torquemada’s Castile, though even the most perfunctory questioning would have given sufficient proof of Stavanger’s alliance with diabolical powers. Perhaps it would be necessary, Reichenbach concluded morosely, to deal with Stavanger with his own hands, repellent though that alternative was.

Not only was it repellent, it could be dangerous. He was without experience at serious crime, and Stavanger, cold-eyed and suave, promised to be a formidable adversary: Reichenbach needed an ally, an adviser, a collaborator. But who? While he and Ilsabet were making the circuit of the Seven Wonders, he puzzled over it, from Ephesus to Halicarnassus, to Gizeh, and as they stood in the shadow of the Colossus of Rhodes, the answer came to him. There was only one person he could trust sufficiently, and that person was himself.

To Ilsabet he said, “Do you know where I want to go next?”

“We still have the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, the Lighthouse of Alexandria, the Statue of Zeus at—”

“No, I’m not talking about the Seven Wonders tour. I want to go back to Sarajevo, Ilsabet.”

“Sarajevo? Whatever for?”

“A sentimental pilgrimage, love, to the place of our first meeting.”

“But Sarajevo was a bore. And—”

“We could make it exciting. Consider: our earlier selves would already be there. We would watch them meet, find each other well matched, become lovers. Here for months we’ve been touring the great events of history, when we’re neglecting a chance to witness our own personal greatest event.” He smiled wickedly. “And there are other possibilities. We could introduce ourselves to them. Hint at the joys that lie ahead of them. Perhaps even seduce them, eh? A nice kinky quirky business that would be. And—”

“No,” she said. “I don’t like it.”

“You find the idea improper? Morally offensive?”

“Don’t be an idiot. I find it dangerous.”

“How so?”

“We aren’t supposed to reenter a time-span where we’re already present. There must be some good reason for that. The rules—”

“The rules,” he said, “are made by timid old sods who’ve never moved beyond the terminator in their lives. The rules are meant to guide us, not to control us. The rules are meant to be broken by those who are smart enough to avoid the consequences.”

She stared somberly at him a long while. “And are you?”

“I think I am.”

“Yes. A shrewd man, a superior man, a member of the elite corps that lives on the far side of society’s bell-shaped curve. Eh? Doing as you please throughout life. Holding yourself above all restraints. Rich enough and lucky enough to be able to jaunt anywhen you like and behave like a little god.”

“You live the same way, I believe.”

“In general, yes. But I still won’t go with you to Sarajevo.”

“Why not?”

“Because I don’t know what will happen to me if I do. Kinky and quirky it may be to pile into bed with our other selves, but something about the idea troubles me, and I dislike needless risk. Do you believe you understand paradox theory fully?”

“Does anybody?”

“Exactly. It isn’t smart to—”

“Paradoxes are much overrated, don’t you think? We’re in the fluid zone, Ilsabet. Anything goes, this side of the terminator. If I were you I wouldn’t worry about—”

“I am me. I worry. If I were you, I’d worry more. Take your Sarajevo trip without me.”

He saw she was adamant, and dropped the issue. Indeed, he saw it would be much simpler to make the journey alone. They went on from Rhodes to the Babylon of Nebuchadnezzar, where they spent four happy days untroubled by the shadow of Stavanger; it was the finest time they had had together since Carthage. Then Ilsabet announced she felt the need for another brief solo musicological jaunt—to Mantua in 1607 for Monteverdi’s Orfeo. Reichenbach offered no objection. The instant she was gone, he set his timer for the twenty-eighth of June, 1914, Sarajevo in Bosnia, 10:27 A.M.

In his Babylonian costume he knew he looked ridiculous or even insane, but it was too chancy to have gone to the halfway house for proper preparation, and he planned to stay here only a few minutes. Moments after he materialized in the narrow cobble-paved alleyway, his younger self appeared, decked out elegantly in natty Edwardian finery. He registered only the most brief quiver of amazement at the sight of another Reichenbach already there.

Reichenbach said, “I have to speak quickly. You will go out there and near the Bank of Austria-Hungary you’ll meet the most wonderful woman you’ve ever known, and you’ll share with her the greatest joy you’ve ever tasted. And just as your love for her reaches its deepest strength, you’ll lose her to a rival—unless you cooperate with me to rid us of him before they can ever meet.”

The eyes of the other Reichenbach narrowed. “Murder?”

“Removal. We’ll put him in the way of harm, and harm will come to him.”

“Is the woman such a marvel that the risks are worth it?”

“I swear it. I tell you, you’ll suffer pain beyond belief if he isn’t eliminated. Trust me. My welfare is your welfare, is this not so?”

“Of course.” But the other Reichenbach looked unconvinced. “Still, why must there be two of us in this? It’s not yet my affair, after all.”

“It will be. He’s too slippery to tackle without help. I need you. And ultimately you’ll be grateful to me for this. Take it on faith.”

“And what if this is some elaborate game, and I the victim?”

“Damn it, this is no game! Our happiness is at stake—Yours, mine. We’re both in this together. We’re closer than any twins could ever be, don’t you realize? You and me, different phases of the same person’s time-line, following the same path? Our destinies are linked. Help me now or live forever with the torment of the consequences. Please help. Please.”

The other was wavering. “You ask a great deal.”

“I offer a great deal,” Reichenbach said. “Look, there’s no more time for talking now. You have to get out there and meet Ilsabet before the archduke’s assassination. Meet me in Paris, noon on the twenty-fifth of June, 1794, in the rue de Rivoli outside the Hôtel de Ville.” He grasped the other’s arm and stared at him with all the intensity and conviction at his command. “Agreed?”

A last moment of hesitation.

“Agreed.”

Reichenbach touched his timer and disappeared.

In Babylon again he gathered his possessions and jaunted to the halfway house for the French Revolution. Momentarily he dreaded running into his other self there, a malfeasance that would be hard to justify, but the place was too big for that; the Revolution and Terror spanned five years and an immense service facility was needed to handle the tourist demand. Outfitted in the simple countryfolk clothes appropriate to the revolutionary period, equipped with freshly implanted linguistic skills and proper revolutionary rhetoric, altogether disguised to blend with the citizenry, Reichenbach descended into the terrible heat of that bloody Parisian summer and quickly effected his rendezvous with himself.

The face he beheld was clearly his, and yet unfamiliar, for he was accustomed to his mirror image; but a mirror image is a reversed one, and now he saw himself as others saw him and nothing looked quite right. This is what it must be like to have a twin, he thought. In a low, hoarse voice he said, “She’s coming tomorrow to hear Robespierre’s final speech and then to see his execution. Our enemy is in Paris already, with rooms at the Hôtel Brittanique in the rue Guénégaud. I’ll track him down while your make contact with the Committee of Public Safety. I’ll bring him here; you arrange the trap and the denunciation; with any luck he’ll be hauled away in the same tumbrel that takes Robespierre to the guillotine. D’accord?”

“D’accord.” A radiance came into the other’s eyes. Softly he said, “You were right about Ilsabet. For such a woman even this is justifiable.”

Reichenbach felt an unexpected pang. But to be jealous of himself was an absurdity. “Where have you been with her?”

“After Sarajevo, Nero’s Rome. She’s asleep there now, our third night: I intend to be gone only an instant. We go next to Shakespeare’s time, and then—”

“Yes, I know. Socrates, Magellan, Vasco da Gama. All the best still lies ahead for you. But first there’s work to do.”

Without great difficulty he found his way to the Hôtel Brittanique, a modest place not far from the Pont Neuf. The concierge, a palsied woman with a thin-lipped mouth fixed in an unchanging scowl, offered little aid until Reichenbach spoke of the committee, the Law of Suspects, the dangers of refusing to cooperate with the revolutionary tribunal; then she was quick enough to admit that a dark man of great height with a beard of just the sort that M’sieu described was living on the fifth floor, a certain M. Stavanger. Reichenbach rented the adjoining room. He waited there an hour, until he heard the footsteps in the hallway, sounds next door.

He went out and knocked.

Stavanger peered blankly at him. “Yes?”

He has not yet met her, Reichenbach thought. He has not yet spoken with her, he has not yet touched her body, they have not yet gone to their damned operas together. And never will.

He said, “This is a wonderful place for a jaunt, isn’t it.”

“Who are you?”

“Reichenbach is my name. My friend and I saw you in the street and she sent me up to speak with you.” He made a little self-deprecating gesture. “I often act as her—ah—go-between. She wishes to know if you’ll meet her this afternoon and perhaps enjoy a day or two of French history with her. Her name is Ilsabet, and I can testify that you’ll find her charming. Her particular interests are assassinations, architecture, and the first performances of great operas.”

Stavanger showed sudden alertness. “Opera is a great passion of mine,” he said. “Ordinarily I keep to myself when jaunting, but in this case—the possibilities—is she downstairs? Can you bring her to me?”

“Ah, no. She’s waiting in front of the Hôtel de Ville.”

“And wants me to come to her?”

Reichenbach nodded. “Certain protocols are important to her.”

Stavanger, after a moment’s consideration, said, “Take me to your Ilsabet, then. But I make no promises. Is that understood?”

“Of course,” said Reichenbach.

The streets were almost empty at this hour. The miasma of the atmosphere in this heavy heat must be a factor in that, Reichenbach thought, and also that it was midday and the Parisians were at their déjeuner; but beyond that it seemed that the city was suffering a desolation of the spirit, a paralysis of energy under the impact of the monstrous bloodletting of recent months.

He walked quickly, struggling to keep up with Stavanger’s long strides. As they approached the Hôtel de Ville, Reichenbach caught sight of his other self, and with him two or three men in revolutionary costume. Good. Good. The other Reichenbach nodded. Everything was arranged. The challenge now was to keep Stavanger from going for his timer the moment he sensed he was in jeopardy.

“Where as she?” Stavanger asked.

“I left her speaking with that group of men,” said Reichenbach. The other Reichenbach stood with his face turned aside—a wise move. Now, though they had not rehearsed it, they moved as if parts of a single organism, the other Reichenbach pivoting, pointing, crying out, “I accuse that man of crimes against liberty,” while in the same instant Reichenbach stepped behind Stavanger, thrust his arms up past those of the taller man, reached into Stavanger’s loose tunic to wrench his timer into ruin with one quick twist, and held him firmly. Stavanger bellowed and tried to break free, but in a moment the street was full of men who seized and overpowered him and dragged him away. Reichenbach, panting, sweating, looked in triumph toward his other self.

“That one, too,” said the other Reichenbach.

Reichenbach blinked. “What?”

Too late. They had his arms; the other Reichenbach was groping for his timer, seizing, tearing. Reichenbach fought ferociously, but they bore him to the ground and knelt on his chest.

Through a haze of fear and pain he heard the other saying, “This man is the proscribed aristocrat Charles Evremonde, called Darnay, enemy of the Republic, member of a family of tyrants. I denounce him for having used his privileges in the oppression of the people.”

“He will face the tribunal tonight,” said the one kneeling on Reichenbach.

Reichenbach said in a shocked voice, “What are you doing?”

The other crouched close to him and replied in English. “We have been duplicated, you see. Why do you think there are rules against entering a time where one is already present? There’s room for only one of us back in realtime, is that not so? So, then, how can we both return?”

Reichenbach said, with a gasp, “But that isn’t true!”

“Isn’t it? Are you sure? Do you really comprehend all the paradoxes?”

“Do you? How can you do this to me, when I—when I’m—”

“You disappoint me, not seeing these intricacies. I would have expected more from one of us. But you must have been too muddled by jealousy to think straight. Do you imagine I dare run the risk of letting you jaunt around on the loose? Which of us is to have Ilsabet, after all?”

Already Reichenbach felt the blade hurtling toward his neck.

“Wait—wait—” he cried. “Look at him! His face is mine! We are brothers, twins! If I’m an aristocrat, what is he? I denounce him too! Seize him and try him with me!”

“There is indeed a strange resemblance between you two,” said one of those holding Reichenbach.

The other smiled. “We have often been taken for brothers. But there is no kinship between us. He is the aristocrat Evrémonde, citizens. And I, I am only poor Sydney Carton, a person of no consequence or significance whatever, happy to have been of service to the people.” He bowed and walked away, and in a moment was gone.

Safe beside Ilsabet in Nero’s Rome, Reichenbach thought bitterly.

“Come. Up with him and bring him to trial,” someone called. “The tribunal has no time to waste these days.”

Content

The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve
by Robert Silverberg