“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 93 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 electro-magnetic 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. Yiiiiiik.
“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 St. 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. Tshhhhhh.
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 Khan on this fucking telephone of yours.”