Robert Silverberg - A Sleep and a Forgetting

“The leaders of the new Crusade are quarrelsome fools. It will end in disaster.”

“Perhaps not. Frederick Barbarossa’s Crusade will be unstoppable.”

“Barbarossa will attack Byzantium instead of the Moslems. Everyone knows that.”

“No,” I said. That inner force of Temujin was rising and rising in intensity, like a gale climbing toward being a hurricane. I was awash in sweat, now, and I was dimly aware of the others staring at me as though I had lost my senses. A strange exhilaration gripped me. I went plunging joyously ahead. “Emperor Isaac Angelos will come to terms with Barbarossa. The Germans will march through Byzantium and go on toward the Holy Land. But there Barbarossa will die and his army will scatter—unless you are there, at his right hand, taking command in his place when he falls, leading them onward to Jerusalem. You, the invincible, the Genghis Khan.”

There was silence once more, this time so prolonged that I was afraid the contact had been broken for good.

Then Temujin returned. “Will you send soldiers to fight by my side?” he asked.

“That I cannot do.”

“You have the power to send them, I know,” said Temujin. “You speak to me out of the air. I know you are an angel, or else you are a demon. If you are a demon, I invoke the name of Christos Pantokrator upon you, and begone. But if you are an angel, you can send me help. Send it, then, and I will lead your troops to victory. I will take the Holy Land from the infidel. I will create the Empire of Jesus in the world and bring all things to fulfillment. Help me. Help me.”

“I’ve done all I can,” I said. “The rest is for you to achieve.”

There was another spell of silence.

“Yes,” Temujin said finally. “I understand. Yes. Yes. The rest is for me.”

“Christ, you look peculiar,” Joe Hedley said, staring at me almost fearfully. “I’ve never seen you looking like this before. You look like a wild man.”

“Do I?” I said.

“You must be dead tired, Mike. You must be asleep on your feet. Listen, go over to the hotel and get some rest. We’ll have a late dinner, okay? You can fill me in then on whatever you’ve just been jabbering about. But relax now. The Mongol’s gone and we may not get him back till tomorrow.”

“You won’t get him back at all,” I said.

“You think?” He peered close. “Hey, are you okay? Your eyes—your face—” Something quivered in his cheek. “If I didn’t know better I’d say you were stoned.”

“I’ve been changing the world. It’s hard work.”

“Changing the world?”

“Not this world. The other one. Look,” I said hoarsely, “they never had a Genghis Khan, so they never had a Mongol Empire, and the whole history of China and Russia and the Near East and a lot of other places was very different. But I’ve got this Temujin all fired up now to be a Christian Genghis Khan. He got so Christian in Byzantium that he forgot what was really inside him, but I’ve reminded him, I’ve told him how he can still do the thing that he was designed to do, and he understands. He’s found his true self again. He’ll go out to fight in the name of Jesus and he’ll build an empire that’ll eat the Moslem powers for breakfast and then blow away Byzantium and Venice and go on from there to do God knows what. He’ll probably conquer all of Europe before he’s finished. And I did it. I set it all in motion. He was sending me all this energy, this Genghis Khan zap that he has inside him, and I figured the least I could do for him was turn some of it around and send it back to him, and say, Here, go, be what you were supposed to be.”

“Mike—”

I stood close against him, looming over him. He gave me a bewildered look.

“You really didn’t think I had it in me, did you?” I said. “You son of a bitch. You’ve always thought I’m as timid as a turtle. Your good old sober stick-in-the-mud pal Mike. What do you know? What the hell do you know?” Then I laughed. He looked so stunned that I had to soften it for him a little. Gently I touched his shoulder. “I need a shower and a drink. And then let’s think about dinner.”

Joe gawked at me. “What if it wasn’t some other world you changed, though? Suppose it was this one.”

“Suppose it was,” I said. “Let’s worry about that later. I still need that shower.”