Look upon the act and you know it’s preposterous. The buttocks humping up and down, the thrashing legs, the muffled groans, the speedings up and slowing down — can anything be sillier, as a central act governing human emotions?

Of course not. Yet why was this sweaty transaction with Pulcheria so important to me? (And maybe to her.)

My theory is that the real significance of sex, good sex, is a symbolic one. It’s something beyond the fact that you get a tickle of “pleasure” for a short while during the ramming and butting. The same pleasure is available without the bother of finding a partner, after all, and yet it isn’t the same, is it?

No, what sex is about is more than a twitch in the loins; it’s a celebration of spiritual union, of mutual trust. We say to each other in bed, here, I give myself to you in the expectation that you’ll give me pleasure, and I will attempt to give you pleasure too. The social contract, let’s call it. And the thrill lies in the contract, not in the pleasure that is its payoff.

Also you say, here is my naked body with all its flaws, which I expose trustingly to you, knowing you will not mock it. Also you say, I accept this intimate contact with you even though I know you may transmit to me a loath-some disease. I am willing to take this risk, because you are you. And also the woman used to say — at least up until the nineteenth or early twentieth century — I will open myself to you even though there may be all sorts of biological consequences nine months from now.

All these things are much more vital than quick kickies. This is why mechanical masturbating devices have never replaced sex and never will.

This is why what happened between myself and Pulcheria Ducas on that Byzantine morning in 1105 was far more significant a transaction than what happened between myself and the Empress Theodora half a millennium earlier, and more significant than what had happened between myself and any number of girls a full millennium later. Into Theodora, into Pulcheria, and into those many girls down the line I poured roughly the same number of cubic centimeters of salty fluid; but with Pulcheria it was different. With Pulcheria, our orgasm was only the symbolic sealing of something greater. For me, Pulcheria was the embodiment of beauty and grace, and her easy surrender to me made me an emperor more mighty than Alexius, and neither the spurting of my jet nor her quiver of response mattered a tenth as much as the fact that she and I had come together in trust, in faith, in shared desire, in — love. There you have the heart of my philosophy. I stand revealed as a naked romantic. This is the profundity I’ve distilled from all my experience: sex with love is better than sex without love. Q.E.D. I can also show, if you like, that to be healthy is better than to be ill, and that having money is superior to being poor. My capacity for abstract thought is limitless.

Nevertheless, even though we had proven the philosophical point quite adequately, we went on to prove it all over again half an hour later. Redundancy is the soul of understanding.

Afterward we lay side by side, glowing sweetly. It was the moment to offer my partner a weed and share a different sort of communion, but of course that was impossible here. I felt the lack.

“Is it very different where you come from?” Pulcheria asked. “I mean, the people, how they dress, how they talk.”

“Very different.”

“I sense a great strangeness about you, George. Even the way you held me in bed. Not that I am an expert on such things, you must understand. You and Leo are the only men I have ever had.”

“Can this be true?”

Her eyes blazed. “You take me for a whore?”

“Well, of course not, but—” I floundered. “In my country,” I said desperately, “a girl takes many men before she marries. No one objects to it. It’s the custom.”

“Not here. We are well sheltered. I was married at twelve; that gave me little time for liberties.” She frowned, sat up, leaned across me to look in my eyes. Her breasts dangled enticingly over my face. “Are women really so loose in your country?”

“Truth, Pulcheria, they are.”

“But you are Byzantines! You are not barbarians from the north! How can it be allowed, this taking of so many men?”

“It’s our custom.” Lamely.

“Perhaps you are not truly from Epirus,” she suggested. “Perhaps you come from some more distant place. I tell you again, you are very strange to me, George.”

“Don’t call me George. Call me Jud,” I said boldly.

“Jud?”

“Jud.”

“Why should I call you this?”

“It’s my inner name. My real name, the one I feel. George is just — well, a name I use.”

“Jud. Jud. Such a name I have never heard. You are from a strange land! You are!”

I gave her a sphinxy smile. “I love you,” I said, and nibbled her nipples to change the subject.

“So strange,” she murmured. “So different. And yet I felt drawn to you from the first moment. You know, I’ve long dreamed of being as wicked as this, but I never dared. Oh, I’ve had offers, dozens of offers, but it never seemed worth the trouble. And then I saw you, and I felt this fire in me, this — this hunger. Why? Tell me why? You are neither more nor less attractive than many of the men I might have given myself to, and yet you were the one. Why?”

“It was destiny,” I told her. “As I said before. An irresistible force, pulling us together, across the—”

— centuries—

“—sea,” I finished lamely.

“You will come to me again?” she said.

“Again and again and again.”

“I’ll find ways for us to meet. Leo will never know. He spends so much of his time at the bank — you know, he’s one of the directors — and in his other businesses, and with the emperor — he hardly pays attention to me. I’m one of his many pretty toys. We’ll meet, Jud, and we’ll know pleasure together often, and—” her dark eyes flashed “—and perhaps you’ll give me a child.”

I felt the heavens open and rain thunderbolts upon me.

“Five years of marriage and I have no child,” she went on. “I don’t understand. Perhaps I was too young, at first — I was so young — but now, nothing. Nothing. Give me a child, Jud. Leo will thank you for it — I mean, he’ll be happy, he’ll think it’s his — you even have a Ducas look about you, in the eyes, perhaps, there’d be no trouble. Do you think we made a child tonight?”

“No,” I said.

“No? How can you be sure?”

“I have ways,” I said. I stroked her silkiness. Let me go twenty more days without my pill, though, and I could plant babies aplenty in you, Pulcheria! And knot the fabric of time beyond all unraveling. My own great-great-multi-great-grandfather? Am I seed of my own seed? Did time recurve on itself to produce me? No. I’d never get away with it. I’d give Pulcheria passion, but not parturition. “Dawn’s here,” I whispered.

“You’d better leave. Where can I send messages to you?”

“At Metaxas’.”

“Good. We’ll meet again two days hence, yes? I’ll arrange everything.”

“I’m yours, whenever you say it, Pulcheria.”

“Two days. But now, go. I’ll show you out.”

“Too risky. Servants will be stirring. Go to your room, Pulcheria. I can get out by myself.”

“But — impossible—”

“I know the way.”

“Do you?”

“I swear it,” I said.

She needed some convincing, but at length I persuaded her to spare herself the risk of getting me out of the palace. We kissed once more, and she donned her wrap, and I caught her by the arm and pulled her to me, and released her, and she went out of the room. I counted sixty seconds off. Then I set my timer and jumped six hours up the line. The party was going full blast. Casually I walked through the building, avoiding the room where my slightly earlier self, not yet admitted to Pulcheria’s joyous body, was chatting with Emperor Alexius. I left the Ducas palace unnoticed. In the darkness outside, beside the sea wall along the Golden Horn, I set my timer again and shunted down the line to 1204. Now I hurried to the inn where I had left my sleeping tourists. I reached it less than three minutes after my departure — seemingly so many days ago — for Pulcheria’s era.