Robert Silverberg: A Sleep and a Forgetting

Hedley seemed to have slept at the lab. He was rumpled and red-eyed but somehow he was at normal functioning level, scurrying around the place like a yappy little dog. “Here’s a printout of last night’s contact,” he said, the moment I came in. “I’m sorry if the transcript looks cockeyed. The computer doesn’t know how to spell in Mongolian.” He shoved it into my hands. “Take a squint at it and see if you really heard all the things you thought you heard.”

I peered at the single long sheet. It seemed to be full of jabberwocky, but once I figured out the computer’s system of phonetic equivalents I could read it readily enough. I looked up after a moment, feeling very badly shaken.

“I was hoping I dreamed all this. I didn’t.”

“You want to explain it to me?”

“I can’t.”

Joe scowled. “I’m not asking for fundamental existential analysis. Just give me a goddamned translation, all right?”

“Sure,” I said.

He listened with a kind of taut, explosive attention that seemed to me to be masking a mixture of uneasiness and bubbling excitement. When I was done he said, “Okay. What’s this Genghis Khan stuff?”

“Temujin was Genghis Khan’s real name. He was born around 1167 and his father Yesugei was a minor chief somewhere in northeastern Mongolia. When Temujin was still a boy, his father was poisoned by enemies, and he became a fugitive, but by the time he was fifteen he started putting together a confederacy of Mongol tribes, hundreds of them, and eventually he conquered everything in sight. Genghis Khan means ‘Ruler of the Universe.’”

“So? Our Mongol lives in Constantinople, you say. He’s a Christian and he uses a Greek name.”

“He’s Temujin, son of Yesugei. He’s twenty years old in the year when Genghis Khan was twenty years old.”

Hedley looked belligerent. “Some other Temujin. Some other Yesugei.”

“Listen to the way he speaks. He’s scary. Even if you can’t understand a word of what he’s saying, can’t you feel the power in him? The coiled-up anger? That’s the voice of somebody capable of conquering whole continents.”

“Genghis Khan wasn’t a Christian. Genghis Khan wasn’t kidnapped by strangers and taken to live in Constantinople.”

“I know,” I said. To my own amazement I added, “But maybe this one was.”

“Jesus God Almighty. What’s that supposed to mean?”

“I’m not certain.”

Hedley’s eyes took on a glaze. “I hoped you were going to be part of the solution, Mike. Not part of the problem.”

“Just let me think this through,” I said, waving my hands above his face as if trying to conjure some patience into him. Joe was peering at me in a stunned, astounded way. My eyeballs throbbed. Things were jangling up and down along my spinal column. Lack of sleep had coated my brain with a hard crust of adrenaline. Bewilderingly strange ideas were rising like sewer gases in my mind and making weird bubbles. “All right, try this,” I said at last. “Say that there are all sorts of possible worlds. A world in which you’re King of England, a world in which I played third base for the Yankees, a world in which the dinosaurs never died out and Los Angeles gets invaded every summer by hungry tyrannosaurs. And one world where Yesugei’s son Temujin wound up in twelfth-century Byzantium as a Christian instead of founding the Mongol Empire. And that’s the Temujin I’ve been talking to. This cockeyed beam of yours not only crosses time-lines, somehow it crosses probability-lines too, and we’ve fished up some alternative reality that—”

“I don’t believe this,” Hedley said.

“Neither do I, really. Not seriously. I’m just putting forth one possible hypothesis that might explain—”

“I don’t mean your fucking hypothesis. I mean I find it hard to believe that you of all people, my old pal Mike Michaelson, can be standing here running off at the mouth this way, working hard at turning a mystifying event into a goddamned nonsensical one—you, good old sensible steady Mike, telling me some shit about tyrannosaurs amok in Los Angeles—”

“It was only an example of—”

“Oh, fuck your example,” Hedley said. His face darkened with exasperation bordering on fury. He looked ready to cry. “Your example is absolute crap. Your example is garbage. You know, man, if I wanted someone to feed me a lot of New Age crap I didn’t have to go all the way to Seattle to find one. Alternative realities! Third base for the Yankees!”

A girl in a lab coat appeared out of nowhere and said, “We have signal acquisition, Dr. Hedley.”

I said, “I’ll catch the next plane north, okay?”

Joe’s face was red and starting to do its puff-adder trick and his adam’s-apple bobbed as if trying to find the way out.

“I wasn’t trying to mess up your head,” I said. “I’m sorry if I did. Forget everything I was just saying. I hope I was at least of some help, anyway.”

Something softened in Joe’s eyes.

“I’m so goddamned tired, Mike.”

“I know.”

“I didn’t mean to yell at you like that.”

“No offense taken, Joe.”

“But I have trouble with this alternative-reality thing of yours. You think it was easy for me to believe that what we were doing here was talking to people in the past? But I brought myself around to it, weird though it was. Now you give it an even weirder twist, and it’s too much. It’s too fucking much. It violates my sense of what’s right and proper and fitting. You know what Occam’s Razor is, Mike? The old medieval axiom, Never multiply hypotheses needlessly ? Take the simplest one. Here even the simplest one is crazy. You push it too far.”

“Listen,” I said, “if you’ll just have someone drive me over to the hotel—”

“No.”

“No?”

“Let me think a minute,” he said. “Just because it doesn’t make sense doesn’t mean that it’s impossible, right? And if we get one impossible thing, we can have two, or six, or sixteen. Right? Right?” His eyes were like two black holes with cold stars blazing at their bottoms. “Hell, we aren’t at the point where we need to worry about explanations. We have to find out the basic stuff first. Mike, I don’t want you to leave. I want you to stay here.”

“What?”

“Don’t go. Please. I still need somebody to talk to the Mongol for me. Don’t go. Please, Mike? Please?”

The times, Temujin said, were very bad. The infidels under Saladin had smashed the Crusader forces in the Holy Land and Jerusalem itself had fallen to the Moslems. Christians everywhere mourn the loss, said Temujin. In Byzantium—where Temujin was captain of the guards in the private army of a prince named Theodore Lascaris—God’s grace seemed also to have been withdrawn. The great empire was in heavy weather. Insurrections had brought down two emperors in the past four years and the current man was weak and timid. The provinces of Hungary, Cyprus, Serbia, and Bulgaria were all in revolt. The Normans of Sicily were chopping up Byzantine Greece and on the other side of the empire the Seljuk Turks were chewing their way through Asia Minor. “It is the time of the wolf,” said Temujin. “But the sword of the Lord will prevail.”

The sheer force of him was astounding. It lay not so much in what he said, although that was sharp and fierce, as in the way he said it. I could feel the strength of the man in the velocity and impact of each syllable. Temujin hurled his words as if from a catapult. They arrived carrying a crackling electrical charge. Talking with him was like holding live cables in my hands.

Hedley, jigging and fidgeting around the lab, paused now and then to stare at me with what looked like awe and wonder in his eyes, as if to say, You really can make sense of this stuff? I smiled at him. I felt bizarrely cool and unflustered. Sitting there with some electronic thing on my head, letting that terrific force go hurtling through my brain. Discussing twelfth-century politics with an invisible Byzantine Mongol. Making small talk with Genghis Khan. All right. I could handle it.