“You’re a mid-list author?” Gallatin grabbed at a passing tray, lifting a brimming tankard of ale and hastily drinking the bitter, warm fluid. “They won’t publish play folios for you because they wouldn’t sell enough copies?”
“Mid-list? More outlandish words, sir? But as for the rest, yea, even in my finest poems I am no Edmund Spenser nor Philip Sidney, men blest far more than I by those who claim to weigh artistic merit. So the gentlemen and their ladies make purpose to purchase their works, and so those authors prosper in relation.”
“I didn’t understand anything,” Gallatin noted bleakly. “Only a few centuries past, in a similar society which even spoke basically the same language, and I didn’t understand what happened, or why, or what it was like. I depended on secondary sources, popular accounts and my own preconceptions.”
“In like manner I understand nothing of your speech,” the playwright noted archly. “Have done, or tell in what wise thy words claim interest.”
“Because I write about the future. I imagine what may happen in years to come. I’m wondering, though, if I didn’t really know about the past, just how good were my speculations on the future?”
“A man need not know from whence he came to see whence he goes, but he hath no knowledge of the meanings of his travels if he sees not the whole.”
“Damn.” Paul Gallatin stood, shaking his head. “You do say things better than I do. Thank you, William Shakespeare. My old English teacher was right; you do have a lot to teach a writer. Of course, I don’t think she ever expected me to get a personal lesson.”
Shakespeare smiled as if amused. “If so, such is the last lesson for any soul from my tongue. As I have told thee, my poet’s life is done, my foul papers left to whatever fate time may grant.”
“Because you don’t think of your plays as art, and don’t consider them your property? And because you’ve sold the drafts of your poems and sonnets? So of course you won’t mention any of it in your will. Thank you for your time and your words, sir.”
“Words I have in plenty, though hence they’ll bring me no more profit than any other man, nor more aggravation.” Shakespeare laughed again as if sharing a joke with Gallatin. “Mayhap in some far future such as thou dreamest the fate of an artist will differ. How sayest thou?”
“I sayest thou shouldn’t bet on it.”
#
Ivan’s grin didn’t seem to have shifted during whatever time the journey had required. “Did you get what we need?”
“I’m afraid not.” Paul Gallatin shook some foul-smelling London mud from his shoes, still wet with centuries-old damp. “Shakespeare’s not a fake.”
“The hell you say. Is there a best-seller in that?”
“There ought to be, but probably not.”
The physicist smiled in commiseration. “Sorry it was a waste of time.”
“Not at all.” Gallatin smiled back. “Very inspiring, truth to tell, not to mention instructive. I’ve got a lot of reading and a lot of work to do.”
“Reading? You’re going to read Shakespeare?”
“Him and a lot of other old stuff I hadn’t thought worth the trouble. I just learned they may have something to tell me after all.”
“Ah, well.” Ivanovich patted his machine. “I’m sure we can think up some other subject that’ll generate a wildly popular book. Have you ever been to the Middle East?”
“The Middle East?” Gallatin questioned suspiciously. “Let me see those coins in your hand. They look . . . hell, they are Roman. That’s Augustus. Augustus?” He fixed Ivanovich with a hard look. “You want one of us to visit the Middle East during the reign of Emperor Augustus?”
“Religious books are popular, aren’t they?”
“Ivan?”
“Yes?”
“Don’t go there.”
Jack Campbell, Borrowed Time
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