Corrupting Dr. Nice by John Kessel

the entrance.
    Outside a man had stopped in front of the baker's shop to pray. Several passersby stopped to join him. The baker came to his door to scowl at this impediment to his business, but did nothing to chase the man away. Simon watched, a sober expression on his face. The praying man wore a blue and tan shawl, a brown robe. On his left arm he wore a leather strap wound seven times around his biceps, from which dangled a leather cube. Another cube hung from a band around his forehead.
    "Coming with us must have disrupted your schedule," Gen said. "Will you have extra work to do when you return?"
    Simon turned his attention from the praying man. "There are more people who need work than jobs to do."
    "When does your shift normally end?"
    He only stared at her. He was shorter than she, and his dark brown eyes worked with powerful emotion. Despite herself, Gen stopped thinking of him as a source of information and saw him as a man. "You don't like to deal with us," she said.
    "I am a poor man. I do what I must."
    "What did you do before the people came from the future?"
    "Like my father, I was a weaver."
    "That is a difficult work, as I understand it."
    He looked at her as if trying to detect some insult. "Men call it women's work. Yet they would be without a cloak in the cold of winter were it not for weavers."
    "An injustice. Doesn't the change that we have brought offer you some hope?"
    He looked away.
    A band of teenaged boys came dashing up the street, shouting and hurling sticks. While one of them decoyed the owner's attention by throwing a fistful of pebbles onto the awning over the shop front, another of them snatched a loaf of bread from the baker's table. Simon stepped forward. "Samuel!" he shouted.
    One of the boys turned to them, while his companion ran off with the loaf. He saw Simon and Gen, hesitated, then dashed off down an alley. Simon took another step toward him. The baker glared. When Simon retreated, the baker turned on the Pharisee, and yelled at the man to move along. An argument started.
    "Who was that boy?" Gen asked.
    "That was my son. Running with thieves."
    "Why did he look at us like that?"
    Simon paused. "You carry yourself like his mother."
    Gen tried to think of something to say. "You must wish that she could keep him out of trouble."
    "His mother is dead. So while I spend my day working for foreigners, he slips away from me."
    Gen stood there in the shadow of Honest Abednego's sign, at a loss for words. Simon still would not look at her. In order to live Gen and August often had to impersonate historicals. But it was a small step from impersonating to sympathizing. Over the years Gen had perfected a double-think that made it possible for her to use historicals without compunction. But in the scant hour she'd known him Simon had slipped from a being prop in their con game to a man with a dead wife and a troubled son.
    "Genevieve?" It was August.
    "Come, help us," she said to Simon, and re-entered the shop.
    August held a slender silky-haired dog by a leash while the shopkeeper prepared the carrier. Gen knelt down next to the dog and scratched behind its long and delicately formed ears; it whipped its tail and sniffed her hand. "This is Pharaoh," August said.
    The Saluki slipped readily into the carrier and they sealed the door. While August paid the proprietor, Gen made Simon haul the carrier to the front. She could not estimate the degree of his resentment, and she tried not to think of it. The baker had given up trying to get the praying Pharisee to move, but now the life of the street went on around him, oblivious.

SEVEN: A NIGHT AT THE HIPPODROME

    In the evening three trumpet calls from the heralds at the Temple summoned the faithful to prayer, while the magic light of sunset turned the narrow streets soft gold. Serge Halam could understand how, to the Jews, Jerusalem seemed the center of God's universe. It was little wonder that they hated the futurians who so casually told them this