Robert Silverberg - A Sleep and a Forgetting

“Channeling?” I said. “For Christ’s sake, Joe! You brought me all the way down here for dumb bullshit like that?”

“This isn’t channeling,” Joe said.

“The kid who drove me from the airport said you’ve got a machine that can talk with dead people.”

A slow, angry flush spread across Joe’s face. He’s a small, compact man with very glossy skin and very sharp features, and when he’s annoyed he inflates like a puff-adder.

“He shouldn’t have said that.”

“Is that what you’re doing here?” I asked. “Some sort of channeling experiments?”

“Forget that shithead word, will you, Mike?” Joe sounded impatient and irritable. But there was an odd fluttery look in his eye, conveying—what? Uncertainty? Vulnerability? Those were traits I hadn’t ever associated with Joe Hedley, not in the thirty years we’d known each other. “We aren’t sure what the fuck we’re doing here,” he said. “We thought maybe you could tell us.”

“Me?”

“You, yes. Here, put the helmet on. Come on, put it on, Mike. Put it on. Please.”

I stared. Nothing ever changes. Ever since we were kids Joe’s been using me for one cockeyed thing or another, because he knows he can count on me to give him a sober-minded common-sense opinion. Always bouncing this bizarre scheme or that off me, so he can measure the caroms.

The helmet was a golden strip of wire mesh studded with a row of microwave pickups the size of a dime and flanked by a pair of suction electrodes that fit over the temples. It looked like some vagrant piece of death-house equipment.

I ran my fingers over it. “How much current is this thing capable of sending through my head?”

He looked even angrier. “Oh, fuck you, you hypercautious bastard! Would I ever ask you to do anything that could harm you?”

With a patient little sigh I said, “Okay. How do I do this?”

“Ear to ear, over the top of your head. I’ll adjust the electrodes for you.”

“You won’t tell me what any of this is all about?”

“I want an uncontaminated response. That’s science talk, Mike. I’m a scientist. You know that, don’t you?”

“So that’s what you are. I wondered.”

Joe bustled about above me, moving the helmet around, pressing the electrodes against my skull.

“How does it fit?”

“Like a glove.”

“You always wear your gloves on your head?” he asked.

“You must be goddamn nervous if you think that’s funny.”

“I am,” he said “You must be too, if you take a line like that seriously. But I tell you that you won’t get hurt. I promise you that, Mike.”

“All right.”

“Just sit down here. We need to check the impedances, and then we can get going.”

“I wish I understood at least a little bit about—”

“Please,” he said. He gestured through a glass partition at a technician in the adjoining room, and she began to do things with dials and switches. This was turning into a movie, a very silly one, full of mad doctors in white jackets and sputtering electrical gadgets. The tinkering went on and on, and I felt myself passing beyond apprehension and annoyance into a kind of gray realm of Zen serenity, the way I sometimes do while sitting in the dentist’s chair waiting for the scraping and poking to begin.

On the hillside visible from the laboratory window yellow hibiscus was blooming against a background of billowing scarlet bougainvillea in brilliant California sunshine. It had been cold and raining, this February morning, when I drove to Sea-Tac Airport thirteen hundred miles to the north. Hedley’s lab is just outside La Jolla, on a sandy bluff high up over the blue Pacific. When Joe and I were kids growing up in Santa Monica we took this kind of luminous winter day for granted, but I had lived in the Northwest for twenty years now, and I couldn’t help thinking I’d gone on a day-trip to Eden. I studied the colors on the hillside until my eyes began to get blurry.

“Here we go, now,” Joe said, from a point somewhere far away behind my left shoulder.

It was like stepping into a big cage full of parakeets and mynahs and crazed macaws. I heard scratchy screeching sounds, and a harsh loony almost-laughter that soared through three or four octaves, and a low ominous burbling noise, as if some hydraulic device was about to blow a gasket. I heard weird wire-edged shrieks that went tumbling away as though the sound was falling through an infinite abyss. I heard queeblings. I heard hissings.

Then came a sudden burst of clearly enunciated syllables, floating in isolation above the noise:

— Onoodor —

That startled me.

A nonsense word? No, no, a real one, one that had meaning for me, a word in an obscure language that I just happen to understand.

“Today,” that’s what it means. In Khalkha. My specialty. But it was crazy that this machine would be speaking Khalkha to me. This had to be some sort of coincidence. What I’d heard was a random clumping of sounds that I must automatically have arranged into a meaningful pattern. I was kidding myself. Or else Joe was playing an elaborate practical joke. Only he seemed very serious.

I strained to hear more. But everything was babble again.

Then, out of the chaos:

— Usan deer — Khalkha, again: “On the water.” It couldn’t be a coincidence.

More noise. Skwkaark skreek yubble gobble.

— Aawa namaig yawuulawa — “Father sent me.”

Skwkaark. Yabble. Eeeeesh.

“Go on,” I said. I felt sweat rolling down my back. “Your father sent you where? Where? Khaana . Tell me where.”

— Usan deer —

“On the water, yes.”

Yarkhh. Skreek. Tshhhhhhh.

— Akhanartan — “To his elder brother. Yes.”

I closed my eyes and let my mind rove out into the darkness. It drifted on a sea of scratchy noise. Now and again I caught an actual syllable, half a syllable, a slice of a word, a clipped fragment of meaning. The voice was brusque, forceful, a drill-sergeant voice, carrying an undertone of barely suppressed rage.

Somebody very angry was speaking to me across a great distance, over a channel clotted with interference, in a language that hardly anyone in the United States knew anything about: Khalkha. Spoken a little oddly, with an unfamiliar intonation, but plainly recognizable.

I said, speaking very slowly and carefully and trying to match the odd intonation of the voice at the other end, “I can hear you and I can understand you. But there’s a lot of interference. Say everything three times and I’ll try to follow.”

I waited. But now there was only a roaring silence in my ears. Not even the shrieking, not even the babble.

I looked up at Hedley like someone coming out of a trance.

“It’s gone dead.”

“You sure?”

“I don’t hear anything, Joe.”

He snatched the helmet from me and put it on, fiddling with the electrodes in that edgy, compulsively precise way of his. He listened for a moment, scowled, nodded. “The relay satellite must have passed around the far side of the sun. We won’t get anything more for hours if it has.”

“The relay satellite? Where the hell was that broadcast coming from?”

“In a minute,” he said. He reached around and took the helmet off. His eyes had a brassy gleam and his mouth was twisted off to the corner of his face, almost as if he’d had a stroke. “You were actually able to understand what he was saying, weren’t you?”

I nodded.

“I knew you would. And was he speaking Mongolian?”

“Khalkha, yes. The main Mongolian dialect.”

The tension left his face. He gave me a warm, loving grin. “I was sure you’d know. We had a man in from the university here, the comparative linguistics department—you probably know him, Malmstrom’s his name—and he said it sounded to him like an Altaic language, maybe Turkic—is that right, Turkic?—but more likely one of the Mongolian languages, and the moment he said Mongolian I thought, That’s it, get Mike down here right away—” He paused. “So it’s the language that they speak in Mongolia right this very day, would you say?”