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 sprawclass="underline" 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.
“Picture!” The force of his inspiration made Kahn want to hug himself with glee. He fired up the Toyota. “Come on, Lasoporp, I’ll show you the steppe, by God.”
“It is close by?” the time traveler asked eagerly.
Kahn drove through several lights that probably should have turned red but stayed green. (He was learning.) He pulled into a small shopping center. “Wait for me here. I won’t be long- amuse yourself quietly till I come back.” He hurried into the record store across the way.
When he got back with his package, he gasped and thanked his lucky stars he hadn’t parked by the big display window. “Close your coat!” he shouted.
“You told me to amuse myself.”
“I said ‘amuse,’ not ‘abuse.’ “ Sweating, Kahn shook his head in relief that no one had happened by. “Never mind; not your fault. It’s not our custom to do that kind of thing in public, that’s all.”
Lasoporp Rof let out an audible sniff.
The drive back to Kahn’s condominium went faster than it had any right to. Lasoporp Rof was sulkily silent until they were actually inside and Kahn flicked on a light. “That is not fire. I’ve seen fire. It flickers.”
“It’s done with electrically heated wire.” When Kahn saw that meant nothing to the time traveler, he asked, “Well, what do your people use for artificial light?”
“Sun pills, of course,” was what he heard through Lasoporp Rof’s pangloss. It made no more sense to him than his explanation had to Lasoporp Rof.
He gave up. Waving the time traveler to his couch, he said, “Sit down, make yourself at home. Can I get you a beer-a cold, mildly alcoholic drink?” Kahn laughed at himself. He was starting to give definitions without even thinking about it.
“Yes, thank you.”
When the tech writer came back with two cans of Coors, he found Lasoporp Rof examining the Israeli-made menorah that decorated his coffee table. “What a strange coincidence,” the time traveler said, picking it up. “If you had one of these in my own time, I would think you were Jewish.”
“Very strange,” Kahn mumbled. With some reluctance, he let it go at that: it was either let go or spend the next three weeks asking questions.
He tamed on the television. Lasoporp Rof watched curiously as the screen lit up in bright colors and music came out of the speaker. It was a denture-adhesive commercial. Feeling his cheeks grow hot, Kahn was glad to get rid of it and turn on his VCR. The warning about unauthorized duplication at the front of the tape meant nothing to Lasoporp Rof, and this time the tech writer did not bother to explain.
Then the movie came on: a 1964 epic starring James Mason, Omar Sharif, Robert Morley, and a Telly Savalas who still had hair. Kahn realized the time traveler could not read the credits rolling across the screen. “It’s called Genghis Khan,” he said helpfully.
Lasoporp Rof almost jumped out of his furs and leathers. “This is a real record of his life?”
“No, a drama based on it. How could it be a real record, Lasoporp? We can’t travel in time.”
“First Primitive,” Lasoporp Rof said, as if reminding himself. That did not keep him from being a spellbound audience for the Far Eastern horse opera. Kahn had only seen parts of it on late-night TV. The knowledge of Mongol history his father had crammed down his unwilling throat made him wince at the inaccuracies, but Lasoporp Rof was plainly eating it up, battles, overwritten love scenes, and all.
When it was done, the time traveler said, “Let me see it again, so I am sure I have the sense impressions fixed in my memory. Together with the meal, it should give me enough material to keep my professors happy.”
Kahn blanched. Watching this two-hour turkey once had been bad; going through it twice came too close to cruel and unusual punishment. As he watched, he felt a twinge of guilt at what he was doing to far future historiography. He stifled it, but it made him wonder how much of what his father called historical fact was based on similarly trashy sources. A good bit, probably. He smiled, liking the idea.
At last the ordeal was over. Lasoporp Rof leaned over and kissed Kahn on both cheeks, then square on the mouth. “Thank you, T.G., thank you, thank you,” he said, and then he was gone, vanishing suddenly and silently as a popped soap bubble.
Kahn blinked and shook himself like a man emerging from a dream. He wondered if the evening had been just that, or an out-and-out hallucination. But his living room still reeked of rancid butter, there were beer cans on both ends of the coffee table, and never in his wildest nightmares would he have rented Genghis Khan. Besides, tomorrow morning the janitor would be asking him where his office window had gone. And there was that probability distortion stunt-He looked at his watch and saw to his surprise that it was only a little past ten. Thanks to Lasoporp Rof’s trick, he really had made good time on the road. He got out his address book, picked up the phone, and punched buttons. “Hello?”
“Jennifer? Hi, this is T.G. Feel like dinner and a movie Saturday?” He held his breath with the effort of bending the odds, then let it out in a disappointed gust as she said she was going to a party that night. That made the third time she’d told him no.
“-but I’d love to, the weekend after,” she finished. Kahn made the arrangements and hung up, feeling a bit like a world conqueror, after all.
IN THE PRESENCE OF MINE ENEMIES
In the course of research for an upcoming novel set in 1942, I read Albert Speer’s memoirs, and also some of those left behind by the Jews of the Warsaw ghetto. Combining Speer’s-and Hitler’s- grandiose vision of the Berlin that would rise after Germany won the war with the desperate reality of Jewish life under Nazi rule led to this story. Thank God it’s fiction.