“Yes, lovely John Thunderson, there is a way to tell the real Sindbad from the false Sindbad. It is found in a book of Arabian proverbs: ‘The True Sindbad-the-Sailor has Sea-Weed growing on him at the shouka (the fork or bifurcation) region of the body. The False Sindbad does not have this green growth.’ I tell you, my darling, that if you don't have it I can implant it. Back at the novelty dealers’ warehouse, I used to transplant silken gazelle hair into some of the other manikins because I have such rapid and deft fingers for that sort of work, and manikins always love it when you make them look nicer. And if you can find an electronic voice-box here in early ninth-century Baghdad (it won't be easily found, and yet there are several electronics shops in the suburbs), I can probably install it in myself, and then I will be able to speak anything I wish. Oh, I'll scout around, Thou-Honey-From-Arcadian-Bees, and see whether the other Sindbad (Master-Spy and Master-Mariner Essindibad Copperbottom of Kentauron Mikron World) has Sea-Weed growing at his bifurcation or not. If he does have it, I'll eradicate it. Whatever you want to be, you will be, if I can bring it about.”
‘A Wife who is true is like a Brook in a Meadow’, as another Arabian proverb has it.
Then I decided to create a new past for myself. With the aid of my quick-witted wife and my open-ended analytics, it was easily done. Now I am from the world Kentauron Mikron and my alternate name is ‘Master Politicus Rory Quicksilver’. My influential friends on Kentauron Mikron are: Master-Caliph Redcrown Charnel, Master-Magus Moses Epistemon, Grand-Dame Of-the-Seven-Musics Goodlife Tumblehome, Grand-Damsel-of-the-Commonwealth Drusilla Happyghost, Master-Metropolitan Peter Sheldrake, Master-Mariner Essindibad Copperbottom. Easy, easy there, John Thunderson boy, this latter person believes that he is sometimes myself or that I am only an aspect of himself. He must be disabused of all such ideas. For this Essindibad claims to be no less than the original Sindbad the Sailor; but I doubt whether he was ever on Kentauron Mikron.
Now he is trying to claim this circle of my friends as his circle of friends. He is trying to claim my first wife, Grand-Dame Of-the-Seven-Musics Tumblehome as his first wife. Well, that part does not disturb me. My own present wife, Azraq-Qamar the Blue Moon, is ten times the woman that the Grand-Dame is. Essindibad Copperbottom does not seem to remember me from Kentauron Mikron and neither does the Grand-Dame; but I am sure they will remember me again just as soon as I do something memorable. I'm working on that.
Azraq-Qamar my Blue Moon has just gone off with this Essindibad after whispering something in his ear. How strange that is! What can she be thinking of? Soon Essindibad will be saying that Azraq-Qamar also is his wife.
Meanwhile, the Boy-Caliph Harun al-Rashid is my best friend. He is making me vizier of many entire realms. “As long as I am Caliph, you will be vizier of many lands,” he says. Has he forgotten that he is turning the Caliphate over to his son Al-Amin this very day? I may be a never, not-now-nor future either vizier.
And there is real trouble brewing. The two sons of Harun al-Rashid, both of whom because of a mathematical carelessness or anomaly are older than their father, are riding here to take control of the Caliphate. There is terrible trouble a-borning, and frightful death for many. But ‘Terrible Trouble’ is only the reverse side of the coin whose obverse is named ‘Glorious Adventure’.
My wife Azraq-Qamar the Blue Moon returned with Master-Spy and Master-Mariner Essindibad Copperbottom of Kentauron. She winked at me, and gave me a sort of victory sign. She looks fresh as a daisy (a frequent term in Arabic proverbia), but he looks tired and befuddled.
“You'd never believe it, John Thunderson my love,” she wrote on a little piece of parchment, “but Essindibad Copperbottom did have Sea-Weed growing on him. He was the real Sindbad the Sailor. I write that he did have and that he was, for he does not have now, and he is not now. I plucked him clean and left him in a state of infatuation and silliness. And now I will implant the Sea-Weed into yourself and make you to be the Genuine person. Take down your pants, John Thunderson, the Real-Sindbad-The-Sailor-To-Be-Immediately!”
“Here? In front of all these people?!” I asked. Sometimes she was almost too direct.
“Do you not know when you are covered by the cloak of invisibility?” she asked in her rapid handwriting. “You are so covered now, and so am I. Oh, of course it will hurt a little bit, but it will validate you. Oh, are not my fingers quick and deft! Did you ever see anything like them? There, it's done!”
In less then three minutes, I was the real and only Sindbad the Sailor, and the proof of it was growing on me. Blessed be all Arabian proverbs!
Now Azraq-Qamar, the Blue Moon, the new wife of my bosom, wants me to take her to Chicago to meet my mother. Or else she wants me to take her to Kentauron Mikron World to meet my alternate mother.
Enough of that! Oh, ten times enough of that!
This is myself again, the Master-Spy and Master-Mariner Essindibad Copperbottom also known as Sindbad the Sailor. Was that not a curious bunch of scribble that the boy Ali ben Raad the Son of Thunder wrote? He gave the writing to me to keep for him. I was the only one, he said, of sufficient honor to be trusted, the only one who would not read the scribble that was given me for safe-keeping. Did I become a Master-Spy by neglecting to read whatever is given to me in confidence?
And it is this unbearded whelp who has cut himself into my voyages and adventures and dreams, and into my very person. But my good wife, the Grande-Dame Tumblehome, finds him delightful. I wonder why?
This is by no means all of the silly screed of that self-named Son of Thunder. But a person can only tolerate so much of it at one time. I'll introduce further bits of it as I go along, for his silliness is somehow a key to the most puzzling of my voyages and the voyage would be incomplete if this silly key were left out.
And now it is no longer the same with me as it was before. I have been stripped of what was part of my manhood. I no longer have the sharp odor of the briny deep in my nostrils when I sit and when I stand. I no longer have that music of musics, the flopping of canvas in the wind, banging in my ears. And I no longer have Sea-Weed growing on me, so how can I prove that I am still the real Sindbad the Sailor? I am reminded of an old Arabian poem:
If this be me, as I think it be,
I have a dog at home. He will know me.
If this be not me
He will howl and wail:
But if it be me
He will wag his tail.
Well, enough of the fun. It is time to get back to the serious business of spying.
One Bright Day In The Sun
With future lightning at his beck,
With puzzlement and wonder,
He strides the deck with sunburned neck.
His name is ‘Son of Thunder’.
— Baghdad Music Hall Song, Anno 813.
In this Arabian Ocean of the mind there is flotsam of all the great shipwrecks of the past, but there is also the flotsam of the wrecks-yet-to-be.
— The Back Door of History. Arpad Arutinov.
All Paradise opens. Let me die eating ortolans to the sound of soft music.
— The Young Duke. Benjamin Disraeli.
If a man has only one slave, let him free him today. If he has two slaves, let him free one slave today and the other tomorrow. If he has more than two slaves, let him free one slave every day until all are freed. If he has more than one hundred slaves, then all of those who remain enslaved to him must be freed on the hundredth day. We desire to put an end to slavery, but we also desire that ancient custom should not have a sudden or disorienting end.
— Laws of the Caliph Al-Amin.
If there should stand only one Bright Day in the Sun of God and it be followed by no other bright day, let it still be blessed and memorialized forever.
— The Short Reign of the Caliph Al-Amin. Moisha El-Gazma.
This is Essindibad Copperbottom again, writing in his own hand in his own journal.
I can recall no government, ever, any
where, more enlightened, more progressive, more pious, more tolerant, more supportive of the arts and religion, more joyful, more a reason of pride, more fostering, more caring, more scientific, more prospering, more wise, more bountiful, more innovative, more overflowing with the joy-of-life, more mantic, more gracious, more elegant, more full of the urbane amusement-of-life, more promising of the good things yet to come, more visionary, more vital, more full of the rich sap of life, more colorful, more lively with all the lively arts, more wonderful in all ways and endeavors, more everything than was the admirable government of the Caliph Al-Amin the Bright Star of the Abbasid Dynasty.
In the time of Al-Amin, in the Great Day of his reign as Caliph, projects were set up for the dredging of canals and the draining of swamps, for the repair and expansion of the irrigation system in all the Two-River Region, for the ‘Dromedary Express’ for the rapid carrying of mail and small packages from one end of the caliphate to another, for the ‘Reanimated Department of Rivers and Harbors’ to foster easy travel from Holy Baghdad the whole two hundred miles to the Arabian Gulf and onto the Ocean itself, for the ‘Reanimated Department of Fisheries’ to foster finer table fish from both River and Ocean and to restrict the depredations of the alligators that had been eating up the choicest fish, for the ‘Reanimated Department of Armaments’ to proceed with the casting of the big brass cannon to batter down the walls of Constantinople, for the ‘Reanimated Department of Selected Plunder’ to bring slips of Mandarin-Orange trees from China, and also to bring silk worms and silk-worm-berry trees from that land despite the Chinese ban on the export of those things, for the ‘Reanimated Department of Writing Books’ to devise something handier than parchment or clay to write on and something easier to obtain than the ink of the giant sea-squid to write with, for the ‘Reanimated Department of Sewers and Disposal Pools’ to unclog the festering sewers of Baghdad and the open cesspools so that the air might be sweet again. The Caliph also recognized the Flute-Players’ Guild and the Fiddlers’ Guild and announced his support both of better music and of living wages for the musicians. A commission was set up to dispose of the grounded whale above Bassorah that for more than a month had offended the air all the way to Baghdad when the wind was from the south-east. The Caliph also expounded an enabling act to create the ‘Royal Baghdad Performing Arts Theatre, Opera, and Ballet’, and he appointed directors for the project. This and much else he did in the time allotted to him.
I can think of no more remarkable governmental achievements anywhere, in any land or world, in a shorter time, than the achievements of this ‘Whirlwind Government of the Caliph Al-Amin’. It is to be regretted that this elegant and efficacious government lasted just short of twenty-four hours.
Oh yes, here's another bit of the screed of that false and callow Sindbad Ali ben Raad the self-called Son of Thunder. Reading his nonsense is like eating salted miksarat. You know that it's silly junk food, but it's hard to leave off eating it.
My beautiful wife, the enchanting Azraq-Qamar the Blue-Moon, did find an electronic voice-box right here in early ninth century Baghdad. I didn't recognize the manufacture but it was German and from a later century than the ninth. Blue Moon was very pleased with it.
“And if you don't like the way I sound with my new voice,” she said, “this voice-box dealer will tune it for us to be either sweeter or sultrier or more mysterious or sexier, or simply more pleasant. I want you to like my new voice, you wonderful man.”
“I love it,” I said. “But if there really is a man selling electronic equipment here in early ninth century Baghdad, I'd like to know what his name is and where I can find him.”
“His name is Cut-Rate Electronics Sam,” my delicious wife said, “and he is only two squares from here and in a sort of alley. Come and see.”
I went with Blue Moon, and we came to a sort of shop three steps down from a little alley. Cut-Rate Electronics Sam looked very much like somebody I used to know a long time ago, like two days ago.
“Didn't you used to have an electronic and gadget shop on Blackwater Street in Chicago?” I asked him. “Didn't I buy some of the relays and sensors for my Almost-Anything Time-and-Space Cruiser from you?”
“No. That must have been my brother Bottom-Dollar Electronics Ham, ‘The Ham's Ham’. Ham has the most ‘grab-you’ motto I ever heard: ‘I will not be undersold’. I wish I could think of clever things like that.”
“And how did you get to Baghdad in the early ninth century, Sam?”
“The same way you did, apparently. It's very trendy to come here and now. It's the place-and-time of the week. We call it the Baghdad Express. There must be a half a dozen of us who have caught the Baghdad Fever and come to this Here and Now. I had a lot of surplus electronic junk, and I had a lot of talent. And I thought if I put them together I'd have a vehicle that would take me anywhere. I had traveled a lot before, and I’ve always been challenged by the ‘Hard Sell’, selling refrigerators to the Eskimos (I’ve done that; be careful of it; they don't keep up their payments very well), and even harder traffics. I decided that I'd set up an electronic shop somewhere in a pre-electronic age. So I set it up in this place and time.”
“Are you making any money?”
“Yes. But how did you know? How word does get around! I'm minting money, though one of my dies is cracked and must be replaced. I can make bronze that looks enough like gold to fool the people here. Well, many great men turned to counterfeiting in their youths to get by. And I am creating a market (slowly, it's true) for my electrical and electronic items.”
“And you say there are other persons from my time around here, Sam? I'd like to meet some of them.”
“There's a half a dozen or so that I know. One of them that you might like to meet is Scheherazade. She lives in the garret of this very building. Go right up the back stairs. She loves company.”
“You don't mean Scheherazade the Story-Teller? But she isn't from our century.”
“Yes she is. Go up and talk to her and she'll explain everything.”
“Do you think we could set up an electronic age here, Sam? Set up a real electronic age and get rich from it?”
“To be in Baghdad is to be rich already. And there's no need for a canned, electronic life when there's a real life to be had. Why should we can music when good live musicians and singers are to be had for almost nothing everywhere? Why should we can personal dramas when the very streets are loaded with personal dramas, comic, weird, goulouche, anything you want? Why print fiction or fact when there are professional story-tellers plying their craft on every corner, and when there are heralds howling out the news on the quarter-hour? Why should we can dancing when the gamins dance and run all the time, and the very stones dance to the flute music? Why should we can ‘talk shows’ when wherever one or more persons are gathered together in Baghdad there is a talk show superior to the canned ‘name persons’ variety? Why should we broadcast weather reports when the weather is always perfect? No, Thunderson, electronics here may sometimes serve for making better mousetraps and the analogs of them, but for little more. I can, for instance, make an electronic invisibility cloak that will be better than the locally-made traditional invisibility cloaks. In a city where every citizen has from three to thirty invisibility cloaks, there is always room for a better one. I can make good electronic voices like the one I made for your wife Blue Moon here. And in a place like this where the people like to be able to change their voices as often as they change their robes, there is business to be had in ‘voices’. I make good ‘aura modification kits’, and here every person from the Caliph on down likes to have a selection of magic auras to use. And I am pushing a line of ‘electronic practical-joke kits’. And then there are all the ‘charms’, to make one person hate another, for instance. Or to make a person look like a donkey without him knowing that there is any change in his appearance. And electronic charms are simply more efficacious than are nonelectronic charms. Well, it's a living, and living in Magic Baghdad is wort
h everything. I don't know what effect the change in Caliphs will make.”
“How long have you been here, Sam?”
“Oh, this is my third day. That makes me something of an old-timer. Though it doesn't put me in the class with Scheherazade.”
Sam had been working on my wife's voice box all this while. And after he had added various permutations and enchantments to her voice and she was more than satisfied with them, Blue Moon and myself left that interesting person and went up the back stairways to the garret of the narrow building to find Scheherazade.
The garret was really the roof itself, a sodded and grassed area grazed by seven goats. There was a canopy, but all the flaps of it had been rolled back to let in the glorious daylight. And Scheherazade, a dark and smiling and chubby young lady, was eating Syrian pastry with her left hand and writing on a parchment roll with her right. She rose and kissed both of us resoundingly and smiled with a quiet smile.
“We are enchanted to meet you, Scheherazade,” said my wife Blue Moon in her new beautifully tuned voice that made one shiver with pleasure. “We are both fans of yours. And when we come face to face with you all we can ask is ‘How come?’ Electronic Sam, three steps down from the alley, says that you are from a future century and a futuristic place, as is my husband here. How did it all happen?”
“Oh, hi, Blue Moon,” Scheherazade said. “You look so jazzy that I didn't recognize you at first, and I didn't know that you could talk real talk now. I knew you when you were only a mechanical effigy and could speak only one sentence and one variation of it. Still and all, sentences like ‘That is just what I think, you wonderful man’ and ‘That is just what I think, you wonderful woman’ are about all that a girl needs. I have heard it said of you that you were a dazzling conversationalist, that on the evidence of just those two scraps. I rented you for party gags twice, but I don't believe you have much memory of the times when you were still an effigy.
Sindbad, The Thirteenth Voyage Page 9