Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [123]
Jerry’s observation about Shel was probably at least equally true of himself. Dave had never really made his life count. The teaching hadn’t done anything for him. He’d never been that good at it. Students didn’t crowd into his classrooms the way they did for, say, Marian Crosby. No student had ever told him how he’d changed her life. Or inspired her to read the classics in the original.
What Dave had come to realize was that, without Shel, he lacked a sense of purpose, a reason to exist. The last year had provided a new dimension to his life. Selma had changed him. As had Aristarchus and the Library. As had Ben Franklin. He’d come to understand what it meant to live. And it was all upstairs, in recordings of conversations with Voltaire and Charles Lamb and Herbert Hoover and Aristotle and H. G. Wells. Those dialogues would make the damnedest book the world had ever seen, commentaries by the principal actors, the people on civilization’s front lines, reporting on their dreams, their frustrations, their follies. The Dryden Dialogues.
But it would never get written.
At seven minutes after six, the power failed and the lights went out.
The timing was perfect because Dave had just finished making dinner. He lit a couple of candles, and they sat in the flickering light and made jokes about how romantic it was. If the clouds had not dissipated, at least for those few hours they had receded.
Afterward, they retreated with their candles into the living room. The music had been silenced, so they sat listening to the fire and the rain. Occasionally, Dave glanced at the upstairs bedroom, half-expecting the door to open. He tried to plan what he would do if Shel suddenly appeared on the landing.
Eventually, the storm eased, and the power came back.
Helen obviously didn’t want to leave. “But tomorrow’s my day at the hospital. Have to be in early.” She got up and got her wrap out of the closet.
“You okay?”
“I will be,” she said.
DAVE tried to imagine what he would feel if he were in Shel’s place. Knowing what the future held.
Where was he now?
He wanted to find him, to talk sense to him. To make sure he didn’t do anything foolish. Like using the converter to go back to the town house and confront what waited.
Or, possibly, try to end it himself.
So where might he be? He remembered the night at Lenny Pound’s when they’d made the list of what they wanted to do with the converters. And recorded the suggestions in Shel’s notebook. Mark Twain’s steamboat. Kit Carson. Leonidas.
There’d been one, in particular, that had lit Shel up.
Michelangelo.
CHAPTER 37
Power, like a desolating pestilence,
Pollutes whate’er it touches; and obedience,
Bane of all genius, virtue, freedom, truth,
Makes slaves of men, and, of the human frame,
A mechanized automaton.
—PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY, QUEEN MAB
DURING the summer of 1496, a young and unknown Michelangelo arrived in Rome, looking for work. We could do him a favor, Shel had said, magnanimously. It would upset nothing, he’d get some money and some encouragement, and we would have the satisfaction of knowing we’d made a contribution to his career. And we could probably acquire one or two souvenirs along the way. The ultimate, Dave thought, in lawn sculpture.
They had not gotten around to it. And that meant Dave had a likely place to look for Shel.
This was the Rome of Alexander VI, a pope who brooked neither heresy nor opposition. It was a bad time for the True Faith, a few decades after the fall of Constantinople, when Europe had given sanctuary to armies of scholars from that benighted land. The scholars had repaid the good turn by unleashing the Renaissance. It was a dusty, unimposing Rome, still medieval, still brooding over lost glory. Dreary, bootstrap houses lined the narrow streets, themselves sinking into the rubble and ruins of imperial times. The hilltops were occupied by churches and palaces. More were under