25 Short Stories and Novellas Part 2

"You take this much too seriously," said Nicomedes the Paphlagonian, when, much later in the evening and after too many more flasks of wine, I confided my fears to him. "Perhaps you should cover your head when you go out of doors at midday, Corbulo. The sun of Arabia is very strong, and it can do great injury to the mind."

No, Horatius. I am right and he is wrong. Once they are launched, the legions of Allah will not be checked until they have marched on through Italia and Gallia and Britannia to the far sh.o.r.es of the Ocean Sea, and all the world is Mahmud's.

It shall not be.

I will save the world from him, Horatius, and perhaps in so doing I will save myself.

Mecca is, of course, a sanctuary city. No man may lift his hand against another within its precincts, under pain of the most awful penalties.

Umar the idol-maker, who served in the temple of the G.o.ddess Uzza, understood that. I came to Umar in his workshop, where he sat turning out big-breasted figurines of Uzza, who is the Venus of the Saracens, and bought from him for a handful of coppers a fine little statuette carved from black stone that I hope to show you one of these days, and then I put a gold piece of Justinian's time before him and told him what I wanted done; and his only response was to tap his finger two times against Justinian's nose. Not understanding his meaning, I merely frowned.

"This man of whom you speak is my enemy and the enemy of all who love the G.o.ds,"

said Umar the idol-maker, "and I would kill him for you for three copper coins if I did not have a family to support. But the work will involve me in travel, and that is expensive. It cannot be done in Mecca, you know." And he tapped the nose of Justinian a second time. This time I understood, and I laid a second gold piece beside the first one, and the idol-maker smiled.

Twelve days ago Mahmud left Mecca on one of his business trips into the lands to the east. He has not returned. He has met with some accident, I fear, in those sandy wastes, and by now the drifting dunes have probably hidden his body forever.

Umar the idol-maker appears to have disappeared also. The talk around town is that he went out into the desert to collect the black stone that he carves his idols from, and some fellow craftsman with whom he was feuding followed him to the quarry. I think you will agree with me, Horatius, that this was a wise thing to arrange. The disappearance of a well-known man like Mahmud will probably engender some inquiries that could ultimately have led in embarra.s.sing directions, but no one except the wife of Umar will care about the vanis.h.i.+ng of Umar the idol-maker.

All of this strikes me as highly regrettable, of course. But it was absolutely necessary.

"He's almost certainly dead by this time," Nicomedes said last night. We still dine together frequently. "How very sad, Corbulo. He was an interesting man."

"A very great one, in his way. If he had lived, I think he would have changed the world."

"I doubt that very much," said Nicomedes, in his airy, ever-skeptical Greek way.

"But we'll never know, will we?"

"We'll never know," I agreed. I raised my gla.s.s. "To Mahmud, poor devil."

"To Mahmud, yes."

And there you have the whole sad story. Go to the Emperor, Horatius. Tell him what I've done. Place it in its full context, against the grand sweep of Imperial history past and present and especially future. Speak to him of Hannibal, of Vercingetorix, of Attila, of all our great enemies of days gone by, and tell him that I have snuffed out in its earliest stages a threat to Roma far more frightening than any of those. Make him understand, if you can, the significance of my deed.

Tell him, Horatius. Tell him that I have saved all the world from conquest: that I have done for him a thing that was utterly essential to do, something which no one else at all could have achieved on his behalf, for who would have had the foresight to see the shape of things to come as I was able to see them? Tell him that.

Above all else, tell him to bring me home. I have dwelled amidst the sands of Arabia long enough. My work is done; I beg for surcease from the dreariness of the desert, the infernal heat, the loneliness of my life here. This is no place for a hero of the Empire.

A SLEEP AND A FORGETTING.

by Robert Silverberg ======================.

Copyright (c)First Published in Playboy Magazine, 1989 Fictionwise Contemporary Science Fiction and Fantasy ---------------------------------.

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"Channeling?" I said. "For Christ's sake, Joe! You brought me all the way down here for dumb bulls.h.i.+t 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 s.h.i.+thead 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 a.s.sociated with Joe Hedley, not in the thirty years we'd known each other. "We aren't sure what the f.u.c.k 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 c.o.c.keyed 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, f.u.c.k you, you hypercautious b.a.s.t.a.r.d! 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 G.o.dd.a.m.n 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 gla.s.s part.i.tion 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 pa.s.sing 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 sc.r.a.ping 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 suns.h.i.+ne. 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 s.n.a.t.c.hed 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 pa.s.sed around the far side of the sun. We won't get anything more for hours if it has."

"The relay satellite? Where the h.e.l.l was that broadcast coming from?"

"In a minute," he said. He reached around and took the helmet off. His eyes had a bra.s.sy 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?"

"Not quite. His accent was a little strange. Something stiff about it, almost archaic."

"Archaic."

"It had that feel, yes. I can't tell you why. There's just something formal and old-fas.h.i.+oned about it, something, well -- "

"Archaic," Hedley said again. Suddenly there were tears in his eyes. I couldn't remember ever having seen him crying before.

_What they have_, the kid who picked me up at the airport had said, _is a machine that lets them talk with the dead_.

"Joe?" I said. "Joe, what in G.o.d's name is this all about?"

We had dinner that night in a sleek restaurant on a sleek, quiet La Jolla street of elegant shops and glossy-leaved trees, just the two of us, the first time in a long while that we'd gone out alone like that. Lately we tended to see each other once or twice a year at most, and Joe, who is almost always between marriages, would usually bring along his latest squeeze, the one who was finally going to bring order and stability and other such things to his tempestuous private life. And since he always needs to show the new one what a remarkable human being he is, he's forever putting on a performance, for the woman, for me, for the waiters, for the people at the nearby tables. Generally the fun's at my expense, for compared with Hedley I'm very staid and proper and I'm eighteen years into my one and only marriage so far, and Joe often seems to enjoy making me feel that there's something wrong with that. I never see him with the same woman twice, except when he happens to marry one of them. But tonight it was all different. He was alone, and the conversation was subdued and gentle and rueful, mostly about the years we'd had put in knowing each other, the fun we'd had, the regret Joe felt during the occasional long periods when we didn't see much of each other. He did most of the talking. There was nothing new about that. But mostly it was just chatter. We were three quarters of the way down the bottle of silky Cabernet before Joe brought himself around to the topic of the experiment. I hadn't wanted to push.

"It was pure serendipity," he said. "You know, the art of finding what you're not looking for. We were trying to clean up some problems in radio transmission from the Icarus relay station -- that's the one that the j.a.ps and the French hung around the sun inside the orbit of Mercury -- and we were fiddling with this and fiddling with that, sending out an a.s.sortment of test signals at a lot of different frequencies, when out of nowhere we got a voice coming back at us. A man's voice. Speaking a strange language. Which turned out to be Chaucerian English."

"Some kind of academic prank?" I suggested.

He looked annoyed. "I don't think so. But let me tell it, Mike, okay? Okay?" He cracked his knuckles and rearranged the knot of his tie. "We listened to this guy and gradually we figured out a little of what he was saying and we called in a grad student from U.C.S.D. who confirmed it -- thirteenth-century English -- and it absolutely knocked us on our a.s.ses." He tugged at his earlobes and rearranged his tie again. A sort of manic sheen was coming into his eyes. "Before we could even begin to comprehend what we were dealing with, the Englishman was gone and we were picking up some woman making a speech in medieval French. Like we were getting a broadcast from Joan of Arc, do you see? Not that I'm arguing that that's who she was. We had her for half an hour, a minute here and a minute there with a s.h.i.+tload of interference, and then came a solar flare that disrupted communications, and when we had things tuned again we got a quick burst of what turned out to be Arabic, and then someone else talking in Middle English, and then, last week, this absolutely incomprehensible stuff, which Malmstrom guessed was Mongolian and you have now confirmed. The Mongol has stayed on the line longer than all the others put together."

"Give me some more wine," I said.

"I don't blame you. It's made us all crazy too. The best we can explain it to ourselves, it's that our beam pa.s.ses through the sun, which as I think you know, even though your specialty happens to be Chinese history and not physics, is a place where the extreme concentration of ma.s.s creates some unusual stresses on the fabric of the continuum, and some kind of relativistic force warps the h.e.l.l out of it, so that the solar field sends our signal kinking off into G.o.d knows where, and the effect is to give us a telephone line to the Middle Ages. If that sounds like gibberish to you, imagine how it sounds to us." Hedley spoke without raising his head, while moving his silverware around busily from one side of his plate to the other. "You see now about channeling? It's no f.u.c.king joke. s.h.i.+t, we _are_ channeling, only looks like it might actually be real, doesn't it?"

"I see," I said. "So at some point you're going to have to call up the Secretary of Defense and say, Guess what, we've been getting telephone calls on the Icarus beam from Joan of Arc. And then they'll shut down your lab here and send you off to get your heads replumbed."

He stared at me. His nostrils flickered contemptuously.