Sailing to Byzantium

by Robert Silverberg

Strong presences assailed his senses: the hot heavy sky, the stinging scent of the red lowland sand borne on the breeze, the sullen swampy aroma of the nearby sea. Everything trembled and glimmered in the early light.

They could just summon it forth whole out of time, the Emperor on his throne and the Emperor’s drunken soldiery roistering in the streets, the brazen clangor of the cathedral gong rolling

He knew very little about himself, but he knew that he was not one of them. That he knew.

They did not seem to comprehend that the Alexandria of the Lighthouse and the Library was long lost and legendary by the time his twentieth century had been. To them, he suspected, all the places they had brought back into existence were more or less contemporary. Rome of the Caesars, Alexandria of the Ptolemies, Venice of the Doges, Chang-an of the T’angs, Asgard of the Aesir, none any less real than the next nor any less unreal, each one simply a facet of the distant past, the fantastic immemorial past, a plum plucked from that dark backward abysm of time. They had no contexts for separating one era from another. To them all the past was one borderless timeless realm.

It felt real. It was real.

She looked enough like Gioia to be her sister. But, then, all the citizens looked more or less alike to him.

Belilala—beautiful, gentle, tranquil, patient—was too perfect for him. She seemed unreal in her gleaming impeccability, much like one of those Sung celadon vases that appear too flawless to have been thrown and glazed by human hands. There was something a little soulless about her:

Belilala would never be any older than she was at this moment; nor could Belilala ever have been any younger. Perfection does not move along an axis of time.

“Just like all short-timers,” Belilala said. “She rushes here, she rushes there.

“Why, Ned Willoughby’s son Francis am I, of Plymouth. Late of the service of Her Most Protestant Majesty, but most foully abducted by the powers of darkness and cast away among these blackamoor Hindus, or whatever they be.

That paradox left him aswirl with impossible confusions and tensions.

We are not actual time travelers: not you, not I, not any of the visitors. I thought you were aware of that. But perhaps your era is too early for a proper understanding of these things. We are very cleverly done, my friend. We are ingenious constructs, marvelously stuffed with the thoughts and attitudes and events of our own times. We are their finest achievement, you know: far more complex even than one of these cities. We are a step beyond the temporaries—more than a step, a great deal more. They do only what they are instructed to do, and their range is very narrow. They are nothing but machines, really. Whereas we are autonomous. We move about by our own will; we think, we talk, we even, so it seems, fall in love. But we will not age. How could we age? We are not real. We are mere artificial webworks of mental responses. We are mere illusions, done so well that we deceive even ourselves. You did not know that? Indeed, you did not know?”

above the shining breast of the Arabian Sea the deeper implications of something that Belilala had said to him started to sink in, and he felt his bitterness, his rage, his despair, all suddenly beginning to leave him. You exist. How can you doubt that you exist? Would Gioia love what is not real? Of course. Of course. Y’ang-Yeovil had been wrong: visitors were something more than mere illusions. Indeed, Y’ang-Yeovil had voiced the truth of their condition without understanding what he was really saying: We think, we talk, we fall in love. Yes. That was the heart of the situation. The visitors might be artificial, but they were not unreal. Belilala had been trying to tell him that just the other night. You suffer. You love. You love Gioia. Would Gioia love what is not real? Surely he was real, or at any rate real enough. What

feel frightened, Charles,” she said in that same distant way. “Of me? Of the things I’m saying?” “No, not of you. Don’t you see what has happened to me?” “I see you. There are changes.”

“Then I have another idea,” he said quietly. “If you won’t go to the planners, I will. Reprogram me, I’ll say. Fix things so that I start to age at the same rate you do. It’ll be more authentic, anyway, if I’m supposed to be playing the part of a twentieth-century man. Over the years I’ll very gradually get some lines in my face, my hair will turn gray, I’ll walk a little more slowly—we’ll grow old together, Gioia. To hell with your lovely immortal friends. We’ll have each other. We won’t need them.”

“Once out of nature I shall never take My bodily form from any natural thing, But such a form as Grecian goldsmiths make Of hammered gold and gold enamelling To keep a drowsy Emperor awake—” “Is that the same poem?” she asked. “The same poem, yes. The ancient poem that isn’t quite forgotten yet.” “Finish it, Charles.” “—Or set upon a golden bough to sing To lords and ladies of Byzantium Of what is past, or passing, or to come.” “How beautiful. What does it mean?” “That it isn’t necessary to be mortal. That we can allow ourselves to be gathered into the artifice of eternity, that we can be transformed, that we can move on beyond the flesh.