Part 4 (1/2)
”Neither do I, really. Not seriously. I'm just putting forth one possible hypothesis that might explain -- ”
”I don't mean your f.u.c.king 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned nonsensical one -- you, good old sensible steady Mike, telling me some s.h.i.+t about tyrannosaurs amok in Los Angeles -- ”
”It was only an example of -- ”
”Oh, f.u.c.k your example,” Hedley said. His face darkened with exasperation bordering on fury. He looked ready to cry. ”Your example is absolute c.r.a.p. Your example is garbage. You know, man, if I wanted someone to feed me a lot of New Age c.r.a.p I didn't have to go all the way to Seattle to find one. Alternate 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 G.o.dd.a.m.ned tired, Mike.”
”I know.”
”I didn't mean to yell at you like that.”
”No offense taken, Joe.”
”But I have trouble with this alternate-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 f.u.c.king 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. ”h.e.l.l, 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 -- G.o.d'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 unfl.u.s.tered. 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.
I beckoned for notepaper. _Need printout of world historical background late twelfth century_, I scrawled, without interrupting my conversation with Temujin. _Esp. Byzantine history, Crusades, etc._ The kings of England and France, said Temujin, were talking about launching a new Crusade. But at the moment they happened to be at war with each other, which made cooperation difficult. The powerful Emperor Frederick Barbarossa of Germany was also supposed to be getting up a Crusade, but that, he said, might mean more trouble for Byzantium than for the Saracens, because Frederick was the friend of Byzantium's enemies in the rebellious provinces, and he'd have to march through those provinces on the way to the Holy Land.
”It is a perilous time,” I agreed.
Then suddenly I was feeling the strain. Temujin's rapid-fire delivery was exhausting to follow, he spoke Mongolian with what I took to be a Byzantine accent, and he sprinkled his statements with the names of emperors, princes, and even nations that meant nothing to me. Also there was that powerful force of him to contend with -- it hit you like an avalanche -- and beyond that his anger: the whipcrack inflection that seemed the thinnest of bulwarks against some unstated inner rage, fury, frustration. It's hard to feel at ease with anyone who seethes that way. Suddenly I just wanted to go somewhere and lie down.
But someone put printout sheets in front of me, closely packed columns of stuff from the _Britannica_. Names swam before my eyes: Henry II, Barbarossa, Stephan Nemanya, Isaac II Angelos, Guy of Jerusalem, Richard the Lion-Hearted. Antioch, Tripoli, Thessalonica, Venice. I nodded my thanks and pushed the sheets aside.
Cautiously I asked Temujin about Mongolia. It turned out that he knew almost nothing about Mongolia. He'd had no contact at all with his native land since his abduction at the age of eleven by Byzantine traders who carried him off to Constantinople. His country, his father, his brothers, the girl to whom he had been betrothed when he was still a child -- they were all just phantoms to him now, far away, forgotten. But in the privacy of his own soul he still spoke Khalkha. That was all that was left.
By 1187, I knew, the Temujin who would become Genghis Khan had already made himself the ruler of half of Mongolia. His fame would surely have spread to cosmopolitan Byzantium. How could this Temujin be unaware of him? Well, I saw one way. But Joe had already shot it down. And it sounded pretty nutty even to me.
”Do you want a drink?” Hedley asked. ”Tranks? Aspirin?”
I shook my head. ”I'm okay,” I murmured.
To Temujin I said, ”Do you have a wife? Children?”
”I have vowed not to marry until Jesus rules again in His own land.”
”So you're going to go on the next Crusade?” I asked.
Whatever answer Temujin made was smothered by static.
Awkkk. Skrrkkk. Tsssshhhhhhh.
Then silence, lengthening into endlessness.
”Signal's gone,” someone said.
”I could use that drink now,” I said. ”Scotch.”
The lab clock said it was ten in the morning. To me it felt like the middle of the night.
An hour had pa.s.sed. The signal hadn't returned.
Hedley said, ”You really think he's Genghis Khan?”
”I really think he _could_ have been.”
”In some other probability world.”
Carefully I said, ”I don't want to get you all upset again, Joe.”
”You won't. Why the h.e.l.l _not_ believe we're tuned into an alternate reality? It's no more goofy than any of the rest of this. But tell me this: is what he says consistent with being Genghis Khan?”
”His name's the same. His age. His childhood, up to the point when he wandered into some Byzantine trading caravan and they took him away to Constantinople with them. I can imagine the sort of fight he put up, too. But his life-line must have diverged completely from that point on. A whole new world-line split off from ours. And in that world, instead of turning into Genghis Khan, ruler of all Mongolia, he grew up to be Petros Alexios of Prince Theodore Lascaris' private guards.”
”And he has no idea of who he could have been?” Joe asked.
”How could he? It isn't even a dream to him. He was born into another world that wasn't ever destined to have a Genghis Khan. You know the poem: _ 'Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting.