I moved into the next room, catching a glimpse of the blue and brown of the fresco, and was luckier. The earthquake had hit harder here, and one corner of the room had come crashing down, bringing with it much of the second storey. Here I could hide myself under the rubble.

  The villa had been built on the site of an older, smaller building: apparently the family was upwardly-mobile. The narrow terrace on which the villa stood had been built up and leveled by gangs of workers carrying baskets of topsoil to the terrace and dumping them here, raising the level of the ground above what it had been before. The new villa was at a higher level than the older building, with the result that the old house was used as a storage cellar.

  From the kitchen in the back I went down a winding stair into the cellar. Ducking beneath the beams—the place was only about five feet tall, just a few inches taller than the big pithoi in which wine, grain and oil were stored. I breathed a sigh of relief as I found the entrenching tool that Alpha had promised me he’d hide here.

  Good. I planned to use Alpha’s one good deed against him. He would regret leaving me the little shovel.

  It was a folding tool with a little T at the end of the handle, which made it more useful when swung as a weapon. I adjusted the blade at 90 degrees from the handle, then used the tool as a pick to chop my way through the mortared stone of the wine cellar wall. Then, reforming the tool as a shovel, I burrowed my way between the hard bedrock of the island and the looser soil of the built-up terrace, creating a one-man narrow tunnel through the soft soil of the grape arbor. When I calculated I was under the place where Scorsese’s time box would appear I headed for the surface, carefully clearing away the vines’ complicated root system. Eventually I pushed the blade of the E-tool up into the air, confirming the few inches between myself and the surface. I wasn’t planning on breaking through just yet, so I crawled back down the tunnel to the wine cellar.

  Even though my chronometer was gone, I still had a good time sense. I calculated I had a few hours before dawn, so I crawled back into the villa and found some old blankets in what I guessed were the servants’ quarters. The beds were too short, so I went to sleep on the floor.

  I did not sleep well.

  When dawn began to creep into the room, I got up and moved to the ruined room with the fresco. I rearranged the rubble a bit, giving myself space to lie down under a beam, and then I tented a blanket over it and lay rubble and pumice over the blanket.

  Making myself look like a rock. I’d seen the Apaches do it in the movies.

  By the time I’d finished the sun was shining full into the room through the ruined roof, and now I could see the fresco covering the wall. Two brown children, a girl in a pleated skirt and a naked boy, were standing hand-in-hand on the seashore. Their hair was curled into long lovelocks, and their eyes were long and Egyptian. The boy was circumcised; the girl appeared to have rouged her nipples. Behind them blue-and-gold dolphins rollicked in the waves, and the dark sand beneath their feet was sprinkled with shells and starfish. It was a joyous, exuberant painting, executed in strong, bright Mediterranean colors, a paean to the childhood of mankind. To the Kykladic peoples, the Aegean was a peaceful, private lake, and the island people, protected by the naval might of Crete, were living in a golden age. Their trade in wine and purple murex dye had made them rich, and they had avoided some of the excesses, such as human sacrifice, of their Minoan cousins. No one on the planet was as civilized, or as peaceful: even in China, the Shang were sacrificing people by the thousands.

  Soon the volcano would bring an end to the stability of the age, breaking the Minoan peace and bringing in the continuous violence, rapine, and pillage that made up the so-called Age of Heroes.

  Well. Violence was my trade, and Alpha’s. The Age of Heroes was more our style.

  But still the fresco drew me—the long dark eyes of the children, the grinning dolphins torpedoing up from the wave-crests, the carefully-delineated whorls of the seashells. A painting made solely to delight, to give and express joy. I wondered if this had been the children’s room, and whether the boy and girl were portraits of a boy and girl who had lived here. If so, I hoped they’d survived the quake that had brought the ceiling down.

  There was little else to do, so I watched the fresco for some hours. There were other frescos in other rooms, pictures of vines and flowers, but there were a lot of blank walls and nothing as good as this carefree picture of the children. The villa had a half-finished quality: perhaps the owner had yet to commission the decorations for the rest of it. Scorsese had chosen the best.

  I wanted the fresco to survive. If the Kykladic culture that had made it was doomed, I wanted at least this piece of it to come into my time, its joy and innocence intact.

  When the sun was high I wriggled into my hiding place. I spent some hours there, waiting for Scorsese, moving my limbs every so often in hopes of keeping my body as alert as possible. I didn’t want to lunge out at the time criminal and put my weight on a leg that had fallen asleep.

  And then, some time after noon, I heard the time box drop into the grape arbor, and then a man’s footsteps. I froze and tried not to breathe. I thought, very hard, about how I was only a piece of rubble.

  Scorsese came into the building and moved slowly through the rooms that still stood, and then he returned to his box for his equipment. There was something about his movement that was still alert, and I decided to wait.

  In the next few minutes he brought his equipment in, bolted the a-grav units to the wall, propped up the roof with his jacks, and then covered the wall front and back with an aerosol preservative. I heard the hum of the beam cutter that cut the wall free, and then the blows of a sledge that knocked the fresco clear. Then I heard the hiss of aerosols as he used his preservative on the edges of the wall, and careful steps as he floated the fresco out into the back of his time box .

  Outside, Alpha and I, still one, were walking through the terraced rows of grape vines, fancying a bit of wine.

  As quietly as I could, I rolled out of my hiding place and took station by the inner door. I swung the E-tool a few times for practice. It made a wicked hissing sound as it cut through the air.

  Alpha, outside, was mounting the ridge line from the other side. My earlier self, Beta, would be appearing behind the olive tree in a few seconds. The sniper, who I suppose was another incarnation of Alpha—call him Alpha Prime—was probably already in position off to the northwest.

  Scorsese’s footsteps came closer, grew louder on the flagging of the front room. He was returning to pick up his equipment. I cocked back my arm, holding the E-tool by its T-shaped handle.

  He stepped into the room, and I swung the entrenching tool.

  It damn near took his head off.

  I dragged the body farther into the room. Scorsese wore a kind of dark bush jacket, tan shorts similar to mine, soft boots, dark glasses, and an olive drab boonie hat—Standard Smugglers’ Issue, for all I knew. He also had a government-issue wrist chronometer. I wondered if he’d got it from one of the Time Corps people during the fiasco in Florence.

  Well. Four Time Corps agents were avenged. Not that I cared about that. I was in too much of a hurry to strap the chronometer to my wrist.

  And once I had done that, I felt myself breathe easier. I had a way out of here.

  I took his pistol, hat, specs, and jacket. The shorts and boots were similar enough to mine—I didn’t feel like spending any of the next few seconds hopping from one foot to another drawing on a pair of short pants.

  The chronometer showed it was 15:22:04. A second later, right on time, shots began ripping up the peace of the world, as Alpha Prime in his sniper incarnation began blasting at Beta, which is to say me.

  I scuttled down into the wine cellar, entrenching tool in hand. Then I used the chronometer to jump downStream to 15:22:01 in order to give myself a few spare seconds, and then as rock ‘n’ roll commenced overhead again I wormed my way into the tunnel, broke through the thin layer of soil I’d left overhead, and looked through a tangle of vines at Scorsese’s bright shiny time box, big and slab-sided as a delivery van.

  I did not expect Alpha would let me live through this. He’d certainly never let me get away with Scorsese’s time box, which would give me the ability to head downStream and edit him somehow. In his position as sniper, he was perfectly set to shoot anyone coming out of the villa. But although he covered the villa’s exits, the time box stood between him and my tunnel, unless he had duplicated himself more than once—and that was dangerous, hence unlikely. He might assume that the time box jumped automatically into the Stream and got away.

  And on the other hand Scorsese might be somewhere within sight, backing up himself. He, I presume, would be relieved to see someone in Scorsese’s hat and jacket rise magically from the ground, throw himself into the time box, and make a clever escape. In his relief he might not notice that his famous profile was a little altered.

  I could feel the imprint of a huge target symbol on my back as I scrambled from the narrow tunnel, kicking at the loose soil. I threw myself through the vines, jumped through the time box’s open door, and slammed it shut behind me.

  Scorsese had allowed for the possibility that he might have to make a hasty exit. The controls were already programmed for his destination, so all I had to do was press the go-button.

  The windows turned black. The box had entered the Stream.

  The little official-use-only wrist chronometers we Time Corps people wore were only good for traveling a few decades, perhaps a couple centuries if the Stream currents were with you. To travel longer distances more energy was needed, plus a self-contained environment with oxygen and, if the journey was long, food. The short jumps I’d made earlier in the day had seemed no longer than eyeblinks, but jumping up- or downStream for any longer distances subjectively took more time.

  I looked at the gauges and saw that this journey would be upStream and for only four hundred years or so. It would take about half an hour, subjectively. I readjusted my jacket and hat, brushed volcanic soil from my shorts, and looked out into the darkness as the years sped by.

  The island had blown in the interim. It had rained a lot of ash on Anatolia, Rhodes, and the eastern part of Crete, causing discomfort and a food shortage, but what had really smashed Minoan civilization were several major earthquakes, over the period of a year or so, caused by the collapse of Thera’s caldera. The quakes had shattered the physical remnants of Cretan and Kykladic civilization, brought all the buildings down, and also caused tidal waves that had destroyed coastal towns and wiped out the Cretan and Kykladic navies, galleys drawn up on the beach.

  The earthquakes spared most of mainland Greece. And without the navies of Crete to keep them down, the first of the Greek heroes began to carve their bloody paths into legend.

  In the half hour it took me to jump upStream the Trojan War was fought and lost; the Dorians had swarmed into Greece and, with their systematic but orderly butchery, put an end to the chaos of the Age of Heroes; and the refugees from these new series of wars, the Pelasgians/Philistines/Peoples of the Sea, had swept south and east to be flattened by the Egyptians and in turn to flatten the Israelites.

  Thera, its remaining treasures buried under tons of ash, remained uninhabited. It would keep a bad reputation, and there would still be eruptions and quakes. Eventually Plato would hear of it and write of the Round Isle of Atlantis—a curious rendering of Strongyli, one of the island’s names—but he’d lose a decimal point somewhere and speak of Atlantis having existed nine thousand years before, instead of nine hundred.

  Not hard to do, if you’re calculating in pre-Arabic numerals.

  I looked involuntarily into the back of the time box, seeing the fresco waiting for the light, as fresh as it had been when the Kykladic culture that produced it had been alive… The time of innocence and joy symbolized by those happy children was over. By now their descendents were a barbarized, conquered people, their artifacts buried, their light extinguished. The fresco of those two happy children playing on the beach was all that remained of what they once had been, until in three thousand years archaeologists began to recover some long-dead artifacts.

  Suddenly I could see stars through the windows. I had completed my jump upStream.

  Winds began buffeting the box and I reached for the controls to stabilize it. Below was a jagged claw of an island, all that remained of Thera now that the caldera had collapsed. Supported by the a-grav units, I was floating above dark, low, lazy rollers highlighted by a pale sheen of moonlight.

  Down on the water, a half mile distant, I saw a beacon flash. A gust of wind caught the box and spun it, but I kept the beacon in sight as I corrected, and began to head for it.

  I hovered above a small motor yacht, sixty feet long. Aft of the pilot house, the deck had been modified to take a helicopter, a-grav unit, or—not surprisingly—a home-made time box such as mine. I turned on my landing spots and brought the box down. I waited. I kept the landing lights on so that anyone inside would do so with dazzled eyes.

  A figure came strolling aft from the pilot house. I caught moonlight glinting on blonde hair. As I opened the door of the box, she said, “Did you get it?”

  I wondered who she was. Scorsese’s patron? Navigator? Lover? I’d never know.

  I shot her with Scorsese’s pistol and then moved out of the time box and into the empty pilot house. I searched the rest of the yacht and found no one else. Nor, unfortunately, did I find a stack of lost Leonardos. I discovered that Scorsese slept with a gun under his pillow, and that his companion—who had separate quarters—favored satin sheets and Chanel.

  There was also an enormously powerful time-travel rig, powered by the same heavy-duty fusion unit that provided more power than a sailing yacht would need by more than a factor of a thousand, capable of moving the entire boat back and forth thousands of years. It was a setup any major university would envy, and not a few governments.

  Stashed in convenient places I found a lot of nice weaponry. All the serial numbers were burned off with acid, which was useless now because we had techniques that could read the numbers-that-were; but I appreciated Scorsese’s classical approach to these things. It showed he cared.

  I searched Scorsese’s companion for I.D. and found none, then fingerprinted her on the off chance she was a Famous Time Criminal for whom someone might be looking. She was around thirty, dressed with elegance in casual dark clothes. She looked as if she might have been fun to be around.

  She also looked somewhat familiar. I looked down at her for a moment, wondering where I’d seen her before, and then decided that she might resemble someone I’d seen in 1453 C.E. or 312 B.C.E. or on the hilltop overlooking Tyre when I’d watched Alexander lead the Silver Shields across the mole. It didn’t matter. Faces repeated themselves through history. Traveling through the past, I’d always been seeing people I thought I’d recognized. It was pointless trying to keep track of them all.

  I didn’t want to share the yacht with a dead body, so I weighted her down and threw her overboard.

  Dawn had appeared above Thera’s craggy face while I had been searching. The view was somewhat disorienting: it was certainly no longer the Round Isle that I had been guarding, but it wasn’t quite the modern island of Santorini, either. What would become the island of Therasia had not yet split off from the main island of Thera, and the Burnt Islands of Palea Kameni and Nea Kameni—in reality new volcanic cones growing up from the bottom of the submerged caldera—had not yet risen to the surface.

  The yacht sat in the only part of the bay shallow enough for anchoring, in the inner bend of Therasia, very close to shore. I was virtually surrounded by the encircling cliffs that rose in startling majesty from the deep bay. They were striped in red, black, and pale white, and where the rising sun touched the cliffs of Therasia just to the west of me the dawn brightened and stained them so that the cliffs looked as if they were slashed and bleeding. Matching the stain on my hands, which I washed in the yacht’s galley, and matching as well the color of my thoughts, which I let stand.

  I jumped the yacht upStream forty hours, two nights hence, then locked everything down, put the keys in my pocket, and slept in a stateroom till dawn, a small arsenal sharing the neighboring bunk. I had a lot to think about, and I wanted to be rested when I did the thinking.

  I slept very well indeed.

  In the morning I took the first shower I’d had in over six months, then made myself coffee and breakfast and thought for a long moment about my good friend Alpha.

  In the months since I’d been living on Thera I’d done a lot of reading in Greek mythology, and I’d noticed the prevalence of twins. There were a lot of them: Proetus and Acrisius, Castor and Polydeukes, Helen and Clytemaestra, Herakles and Iphikles, Eteokles and Polyneikes, Bellerophon and Bellerus, to name just a few. In many cases one of the twins was immortal and the other fully human, and quite often the mortal twin had to die before the godhood of his brother was proclaimed. Castor and Polydeukes had arranged to share immortality on alternate days, but the other settlements had not seemed so equitable. Often the divine twin had a hand in the death of his brother. It was clear that battle had to be done with the mortal half of one’s own self, before the freedom that was godhood could be released.

  I began to think about my twin. He had not been nice to me, had acted in fact like so many of those bad twins of mythology. It seemed to me that he shouldn’t be allowed to get away with it. I had as great a claim to godhood as he did.

  My first idea, that of becoming a time criminal, was easily dismissed. Alpha himself had suggested it, but there were problems. I didn’t have enough contacts in the criminal world, and furthermore I didn’t relish having to go up against my own team. I knew how ruthless the Time Corps was. From a simple survival standpoint it wasn’t a good idea.

  Second thought. I could head back four hundred years minus a month or two, kill Alpha, and take his place, thus solving all my problems and satisfying the demands of mythology at the same time. I found the idea unsatisfactory.