Departures (31 page)

“Mongol?” Kahn was too far out of his depth not to come back with the automatic truth. “This is English.”

“English?” The stranger’s eyebrows rose. “I’ve heard of it, I think. Then this is not the imperial yurt at Karakorum?”

“It’s Los Angeles.”

“Where?”

They stared at one another, each plainly convinced the other was crazy. At last the stranger said in a small voice, “Tell me the date, please.”

“Huh? It’s July 16th.”

“The year?”

Now positive he was humoring a madman, Kahn gave it to him. The next question confused him for a moment: “In what era is that?”

He finally figured out the meaning. “Christian.
A.D
.
Anno domini
. The Common Era—
C.E
.—if you don’t care for Christian dating of any flavor.”

One of those terms must have been familiar to the stranger. He screwed up his face and began to swear in a style that was bizarre but effective just the same. Kahn filed a couple of the choicer epithets to use himself. “Lizard piss” could come in handy almost any time, but he decided to save “sucker at the tit of a syphilitic sow” for when he really needed it—say, when a Mercedes cut him off on the freeway.

When the stranger finally ran out of oaths, he turned a face full of storm clouds on Kahn. “You are certain this is not central Asia in what you would call—let me think—the early thirteenth century?”

“Not the last time I looked,” Kahn said solemnly. He wished he could remember the security guard’s extension.

But instead of turning violent, the man in the Mongol clothes burst into tears. Kahn watched, amazed, as he unashamedly wept until he had cried himself out.

At last the stranger pulled himself together. He smacked fist into palm in frustration. “Oh, to have come so close and still missed! What are seven hundred miserable little years against fifty or sixty thousand?”

Kahn’s head was aching badly by now. He had had as much of this exchange as he could stand. “I’m so sorry,” he said with exquisite, ironic politeness. “You must be a time traveler, sir, and all this time I took you for a nut.”

The stranger waved it aside. “A natural error. However, if I were a nut, I would not be able to do this, for instance.” Afterward, Kahn would have sworn the fellow only pointed his finger at the office window, the window he had schemed so long and
hard to get. A ray of blue light shot from the stranger’s fingernail. The next moment, the glass wasn’t there any more.

July smog immediately started competing with the bland but breathable product the air conditioner turned out. Kahn coughed.

The stranger’s eyes went ecstatic (they also began filling with tears that had nothing to do with emotions). “The scent of burning hydrocarbons!” he exclaimed, breathing deeply, at least until he choked. “Undoubtedly from buildings torched in the search for loot.”

“No, from dinosaurs torched in the search for a parking space.” Kahn’s tongue led its own life, wild and free, while he tried to figure out whether he believed what he had just seen. He decided he did. His eyes might fool him, but he trusted his lungs. No way they could hurt so much unless the window glass really had disappeared.

“To have come so close!” the stranger said again. Now that he was no longer abasing himself, Kahn saw that the motions of his lips did not match the words the tech writer was hearing. The fellow shook his head in chagrin. “There goes my academic career, all because the scrofulous temporal phase link dropped me into the Late Middle First Primitive instead of the Mid-Middle.” He started to cry again.

He seemed to be talking more to himself than to Kahn, but his—what had he called it?—his pangloss kept working. “I can’t understand it. I was supposed to home on the mental vibrations of Temujin, Genghis Khan—”

He and Kahn realized at the same time what must have happened. Fury replaced the tears. Kahn waited for that finger to blast him to wherever the window had gone. The look on the fellow’s face said that might not be good enough—the sword might come out instead.

Then the stranger tried to master himself. It was a visible process, and audible. “Because I observe savages,” Kahn heard, “must I behave as one?”

His earlier wild mood swings made
yes
an all too likely answer to that. Kahn said quickly, “Can’t you just go on to the Temujin you really wanted to see?”

“It doesn’t work that way,” the stranger answered bleakly. “Once I am out of the temporal flow, returning only snaps me back to my own time, and then what am I? A graduate student in ancientest history without fieldwork, without a dissertation—and a laughingstock for the entire collegium.”

For the first time, he seemed a real person to Kahn, because
the tech writer understood what he was feeling. His own education had ground to an ignominious halt a few months after he’d got his bachelor’s degree, when he had to admit his brain simply was not up to graduate work in physics—that being a subject as remote from Mongol history as possible.

He said, “Maybe you could do your work on twentieth-century America instead of the Mongols.”

“I don’t know anything about the Late Middle First Primitive,” the time traveler said petulantly—narrow specialization looked to be a universal constant,

“Maybe if you had a guide.” Anything, Kahn thought, to get the fellow’s mind off his anger, and off his ferocious finger. “I could do it, if you like. We’ve come a long way since the thirteenth century, you know.”

“I doubt it.”

Stung by the morose dismissal, Kahn snapped, “I’m going home in a few minutes. Come along if you want, or else don’t.”

“I’ll come,” the stranger said, sighing. “I may as well. It won’t help, though. Nothing will help.”

He was so woebegone that Kahn’s sympathy revived. “It won’t be so bad. You’ll get to see just about all of Los Angeles during the ride.” As far as he could remember, that was the first time he had ever had anything good to say about his daily commute. He lived in Reseda, in the western part of the San Fernando Valley, about forty-five miles northwest of where he worked. Some days it felt as if he spent more time in his car than on the job.

After saving the document he had been working on when the time traveler had arrived, Kahn undid his tie, slung his sport coat over his shoulder, and said, “Well, let’s go, uh—what do I call you, anyhow?”

“My name is Lasoporp Rof. My friends would call me Rof. You call me Lasoporp.”

So there
, Kahn thought as they walked out of the building. The security guard gave Lasoporp Rof an odd look, but only a brief one. Clothes did not make the man, not in L.A.

The time traveler showed a small revival of interest in the parking lot. “This is your trusty Mongol steed, Temujin Genghis Kahn, able to travel long distances without tiring?”

“You can call me T.G.,” Kahn said, pleased to get a little of his own back. “And this is my trusty Japanese Toyota, Lasoporp, able to travel long distances without running out of gas.”

Lasoporp Rof grunted and got in. “How far must we fare to your yurt?” he asked when the tech writer had joined him.

“My condo,” Kahn corrected absently. “How is it you know all this Mongol history without knowing anything else?”

“Some records of the Mongols survived the First Great Lacuna to be translated into Snoit.”

“That’s your language?”

“Gods and goddesses, no! But it was a liturgical language all through the First Intermediate and the Second Primitive, up to about nineteen thousand years before my time.”

“Oh.”

“How long will the journey to your yurt take, T.G.?” Lasoporp Rof asked as Kahn got on I-605 going north.

The tech writer ignored the slip; he was concentrating on his driving. “An hour if there were no traffic, an hour and a half on a regular sort of day, two hours if things jam up bad,” Close to a dozen different combinations of freeways would get him home. None was much faster than any of the others.

The first choke point was on the Santa Ana Freeway, where it narrowed from four lanes to three a little south of the junction with the Long Beach Freeway. Traffic crawled along, but by moving from lane to lane Kahn was able to stay right at sixty. He blinked; he couldn’t remember holes opening up so conveniently. He was not about to complain, though.

“We are passing cattle?” Lasoporp Rof asked.

“We’re passing trucks,” Kahn said. He glanced over at his passenger. “Don’t you know the difference between animals and machines?”

“What is a machine?”

Defeated, Kahn gave his attention back to the road. The Santa Monica and Hollywood freeways branched off the Santa Ana a little east of downtown. He took the Hollywood. That was the shortest route, even if it always did knot up just north of the civic center.

And it was knotted, except that, as before, spaces kept appearing like magic for Kahn. Other drivers looked at him with envious disbelief as he slid from one to the next. He had never seen anything like it. The second time he had that thought, his head snapped around toward Lasoporp Rof. He’d never ridden with a time traveler before, either. “Do you have anything to do with this?” he demanded.

“With what?” Lasoporp Rof asked. “Oh, do you mean am I helping us get through the herd? I find this nomadic excursion
grows boring after a while, so I’m exerting a slight probability distortion to help us along. I can take it off if you like.”

“That’s all right,” Kahn said hastily. He did not even bother correcting Lasoporp Rof about the right name for the traffic jam; plenty of times he’d felt like one wandering sheep in a million. “I wish I could do it, that’s all.”

“Can’t you?” Lasoporp Rof said, surprised yet again. “Here, let me induce you. It will help pass the time.”

He put his hand on the back of Kahn’s head. As the tech writer drove, he began to have a feel for where a hole in traffic might be, could be, would be,
was
. Guiding the car into that hole was as easy as breathing. They were nearly at the junction of the Hollywood and Ventura freeways when Lasoporp Rof said, “Now you’re doing it all yourself.”

“Am I? By God, I am!” Maneuvering the Toyota as if it were a halfback dodging clumsy tacklers, Kahn felt grateful enough to do anything this side of human sacrifice for Lasoporp Rof. He even thought about putting the time traveler on a plane to North Carolina to meet his father. To him, though, anything to do with his dad was not this side of human sacrifice.

He had an idea. Instead of staying on the westbound Ventura, he went north on the San Diego Freeway several miles to Devonshire, got off, went up to Chatsworth Boulevard, then headed west. He was whistling when he pulled into the parking lot.

“This is your yurt? No, your condo, you called it?” Lasoporp Rof asked.

“No, this is a Mongolian barbecue place, a restaurant that serves Mongolian-style food,” Kahn said. When Lasoporp Rof looked blank, Kahn went on. “When you go back to whenever your own time is, won’t you want to be able to tell everyone about the authentic”—well, sort of authentic, he amended mentally—“Mongol feast you had back in the First Primitive? You wouldn’t even be lying.”

For the first time since Lasoporp Rof had discovered Kahn was not a world conqueror and mass murderer, the time traveler actually looked happy. “Thank you, T.G.; perhaps I may yet bring some valuable knowledge with me, after all. Yes, let us go in.”

A bored Oriental woman seated them and handed them menus. “She does not even recognize my costume,” Lasoporp Rof said plaintively. “How can she be a real Mongol?”

“She probably isn’t. Mongolia and the United States—this country—aren’t friendly with each other.”

“Ah, still you live in fear of the savage Mongol horsemen!”

“Not quite,” Kahn said, and was saved from disappointing Lasoporp Rof with further explanations when the waitress came back. He ordered tea for both of them and steamed rice, then pointed to the trays of meats and vegetables lined up in front of the barbecue, saying, “We’ll build our own.” That was what most people did; she nodded and left.

Kahn led Lasoporp Rof up to the food. After they had taken bowls, the tech writer said, “There’s lamb, beef, pork, and turkey. Help yourself.” He wielded the set of aluminum tongs in each tray.

Imitating him, Lasoporp Rof said, “These are sliced thin so as to cook quickly?”

“That’s right.” Kahn grinned; it was the first question the time traveler had asked that actually made sense. Kahn added sliced onions, bean sprouts, celery, and cilantro to his bowl, then splashed hot barbecue sauce and curry sauce over the contents. “Spicy,” he warned, but Lasoporp Rof again followed suit.

Then Kahn handed his full bowl to the cook behind the round barbecue griddle that was the most nearly genuine part of the whole operation. The cook grinned, displaying gold teeth. He upended the bowl. Meat and vegetables snarled as they hit the hot iron. The cook stirred them with a long-handled wooden spoon, chivvied them three-fourths of the way around the griddle, and deftly put them back in the bowl. Kahn returned to his seat while the cook barbecued Lasoporp Rof’s dinner. The time traveler watched, fascinated.

When he rejoined Kahn, the tech writer had to show him how to use a fork; he held it as if it were a dagger. His eyes watered at the first mouthful, but he bravely emptied his bowl, exclaiming, “I feel as if I’m tasting history!”

Having no atmosphere, the place was not expensive. Kahn peeled off a ten, a five, and a couple of singles and left them on the table as he and Lasoporp Rof walked out. The time traveler said, “Though you are enemies of the Mongols, I see your people has adopted their custom of paper money.”

“Uh, yes.”

Lasoporp Rof looked around as they were getting back into Kahn’s car. The landscape was typical Valley urban sprawl: a couple of gas stations, a 7-Eleven, a donut shop, streetlights, and cars, cars, cars. The time traveler sighed. “This is not the steppe, I suppose?”

“Does it look like the steppe?” Kahn asked. He had meant it as a rhetorical question, but realized it wasn’t: how would Lasoporp Rof know what the steppe looked like?

“I really wish I could see the steppe.” Lasoporp Rof sounded so sad that Kahn wished he had kept some of the books his father had pushed on him instead of unloading them because they reminded him of his godawful name. They would have given the time traveler some picture of Mongol life.