A Sleep and a Forgetting

by Robert Silverberg

Release: July 1989
Format: Short Story
Genre: Science Fiction
Audience: Adults
Content: Definite Time Travel
Original Language: English

Mike is pulled out of his quiet tenured life as a professor in the Department of Sinological Studies at the University of Washington because his lifelong friend Joe Hedley seems to be receiving transmissions in Mongolian. When Mike arrives, he not only understands the transmission, but can talk back as well.

Time travel and alternate histories often overlap, usually when some incident of time travel to the past creates the alternate timeline. This story is an intriguing alternative where a supposedly alternate past history is discovered through the two-way transmission through time, but the origin of the alternate timeline remains a mystery.

Weirder and weirder, I thought. A Christian Mongol? Living in Byzantium? Talking to me on the space telephone out of the twelfth century?

DEBUT

“A Sleep and a Forgetting,” Playboy,July 1989.

VARIANTS

1 English variant

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