Alternate Heroes

by Gregory Benford

  “Maybe we should get another bottle of wine,” I said.

  We were back in the lab by midnight. I followed Hedley through a maze of darkened rooms, ominous with mysterious equipment glowing in the night.

  A dozen or so staffers were on duty. They smiled wanly at Hedley as if there was nothing unusual about his coming back to work at this hour.

  “Doesn’t anyone sleep around here?” I asked.

  “It’s a twenty-four-hour information world,” Joe said. “We’ll be recapturing the Icarus beam in forty-three minutes. You want to hear some of the earlier tapes?”

  He touched a switch and from an unseen speaker came crackles and bleebles and then a young woman’s voice, strong and a little harsh, uttering brief blurts of something that sounded like strange singsong French, to me not at all understandable.

  “Her accent’s terrible,” I said. “What’s she saying?”

  “It’s too fragmentary to add up to anything much. She’s praying, mostly. May the king live, may God strengthen his arm, something like that. For all we know it is Joan of Arc. We haven’t gotten more than a few minutes total coherent verbal output out of any of them, usually a lot less. Except for the Mongol. He goes on and on. It’s like he doesn’t want to let go of the phone.”

  “And it really is a phone?” I asked. “What we say here, they can hear there?”

  “We don’t know that, because we haven’t been able to make much sense out of what they say, and by the time we get it deciphered we’ve lost contact. But it’s got to be a two-way contact. They must be getting something from us, because we’re able to get their attention somehow and they talk back to us.”

  “They receive your signal without a helmet?”

  “The helmet’s just for your benefit. The actual Icarus signal comes in digitally. The helmet’s the interface between our computer and your ears.”

  “Medieval people don’t have digital computers either, Joe.”

  A muscle started popping in one of his cheeks. “No, they don’t,” he said. “It must come like a voice out of the sky. Or right inside their heads. But they hear us.”

  “How?”

  “Do I know? You want this to make sense, Mike? Nothing about this makes sense. Let me give you an example. You were talking with that Mongol, weren’t you? You asked him something and he answered you?”

  “Yes. But—”

  “Let me finish. What did you ask him?”

  “He said his father sent him somewhere. I asked him where, and he said, On the water. To visit his elder brother.”

  “He answered you right away?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Well, that’s actually impossible. The Icarus is ninety-three million miles from here. There has to be something like an eight-minute time lag in radio transmission. You follow? You ask him something and it’s eight minutes before the beam reaches Icarus, and eight minutes more for his answer to come back. He sure as hell can’t hold a real-time conversation with you. But you say he was.”

  “It may only have seemed that way. It could just have been coincidence that what I asked and what he happened to say next fit together like question and response.”

  “Maybe. Or maybe whatever kink in time we’re operating across eats up the lag for us, too. I tell you, nothing makes sense about this. But one way or another the beam is reaching them and it carries coherent information. I don’t know why that is. It just is. Once you start dealing in impossible stuff, anything might be true. So why can’t our voices come out of thin air to them?” Hedley laughed nervously. Or perhaps it was a cough, I thought. “The thing is,” he went on, “this Mongol is staying on line longer than any of the others, so with you here we have a chance to have some real communication with him. You speak his language. You can validate this whole goddamn grotesque event for us, do you see? You can have an honest-to-God chat with some guy who lived six hundred years ago, and find out where he really is and what he thinks is going on, and tell us all about it.”

  I stole a glance at the wall clock. Half past twelve. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d been up this late. I lead a nice quiet tenured life, full professor thirteen years now, University of Washington Department of Sinological Studies.

  “We’re about ready to acquire signal again,” Hedley said. “Put the helmet on.”

  I slipped it into place. I thought about that little communications satellite chugging around the sun, swimming through inconceivable heat and unthinkable waves of hard radiation and somehow surviving, coming around the far side now, beaming electromagnetic improbabilities out of the distant past at my head.

  The squawking and screeching began.

  Then, emerging from the noise and murk and sonic darkness, came the Mongol’s voice, clear and steady:

  “Where are you, you voice, you? Speak to me.”

  “Here,” I said. “Can you hear me?”

  Aark. Yaaarp. Tshhhhhhh.

  The Mongol said, “Voice, what are you? Are you mortal or are you a prince of the Master?”

  I wrestled with the puzzling words. I’m fluent enough in Khalkha, though I don’t get many opportunities for speaking it. But there was a problem of context here.

  “Which master?” I asked finally. “What prince?”

  “There is only one Master,” said the Mongol. He said this with tremendous force and assurance, putting terrific spin on every syllable, and the capital letter was apparent in his tone. “I am His servant. The angeloi are his princes. Are you an angelos, voice?”

  Angeloi? That was Greek. A Mongol, asking me if I was an angel of God?

  “Not an angel, no,” I said.

  “Then how can you speak to me this way?”

  “It’s a kind of—” I paused. I couldn’t come up with the Khalka for “miracle.” After a moment I said, “It’s by the grace of heaven on high. I’m speaking to you from far away.”

  “How far?”

  “Tell me where you are.”

  Skrawwwwk. Tshhhhhh.

  “Again. Where are you?”

  “Nova Roma. Constantinopolis.”

  I blinked. “Byzantium?”

  “Byzantium, yes.”

  “I am very far from there.”

  “How far?” the Mongol said fiercely.

  “Many, many days’ ride. Many many.” I hesitated. “Tell me what year it is, where you are.”

  Vzsqkk. Blzzp.

  “What’s he saying to you?” Hedley asked. I waved at him furiously to be quiet.

  “The year,” I said again. “Tell me what year it is.”

  The Mongol said scornfully, “Everyone knows the year, voice.”

  “Tell me.”

  “It is the year 1187 of our Savior.”

  I began to shiver. Our Savior? Weirder and weirder, I thought. A Christian Mongol? Living in Byzantium? Talking to me on the space telephone out of the twelfth century? The room around me took on a smoky, insubstantial look. My elbows were aching, and something was throbbing just above my left cheekbone. This had been a long day for me. I was very tired. I was heading into that sort of weariness where walls melted and bones turned soft. Joe was dancing around in front of me like someone with tertiary Saint Vitus’.

  “And your name?” I said.

  “I am Petros Alexios.”

  “Why do you speak Khalkha if you are Greek?”

  A long silence, unbroken even by the hellish static.

  “I am not Greek,” came the reply finally. “I am by birth Khalkha Mongol, but raised Christian among the Christians from age eleven, when my father sent me on the water and I was taken. My name was Temujin. Now I am twenty and I know the Savior.”

  I gasped and put my hand to my throat as though it had been skewered out of the darkness by a spear.

  “Temujin,” I said, barely getting the word out.

  “My father was Yesugei the chieftain.”

  “Temujin,” I said again. “Son of Yesugei.” I shook my head.

  Aaark. Blzzzp. Tshhhh
hh.

  Then no static, no voice, only the hushed hiss of silence.

  “Are you okay?” Hedley asked.

  “We’ve lost contact, I think.”

  “Right. It just broke. You look like your brain has shorted out.”

  I slipped the helmet off. My hands were shaking.

  “You know,” I said, “maybe that French woman really was Joan of Arc.”

  “What?”

  I shrugged. “She really might have been,” I said wearily. “Anything’s possible, isn’t it?”

  “What the hell are you trying to tell me, Mike?”

  “Why shouldn’t she have been Joan of Arc?” I asked. “Listen, Joe. This is making me just as nutty as you are. You know what I’ve just been doing? I’ve been talking to Genghis Kahn on this fucking telephone of yours.”

  I managed to get a few hours of sleep by simply refusing to tell Hedley anything else until I’d had a chance to rest. The way I said it, I left him no options, and he seemed to grasp that right away. At the hotel, I sank from consciousness like a leaden whale, hoping I wouldn’t surface again before noon, but old habit seized me and pushed me up out of the tepid depths at seven, irreversibly awake and not a bit less depleted. I put in a quick call to Seattle to tell Elaine that I was going to stay down in La Jolla a little longer than expected. She seemed worried—not that I might be up to any funny business, not me, but only that I sounded so groggy. “You know Joe,” I said. “For him it’s a twenty-four-hour information world.” I told her nothing else. When I stepped out on the breakfast patio half an hour later, I could see the lab’s blue van already waiting in the hotel lot to pick me up.

  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 the 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 alternate 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. 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 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 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 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? P
lease?”

  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 LascarisGod’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.