I know I am going to get a lot of backlas on this, My Master sent me this and I think as many people should read it. If you don't want to do than just scroll past...a warning this is long.
Greetings Readers, Friends, and Other Visitors:
The Time Traveler appeared suddenly in my study on New Year’s Eve,
2004. He was a stolid, grizzled
man in a gray tunic and looked to be in his late-sixties or older. He
also appeared to be the
veteran of wars or of some terrible accident since he had livid scars
on his face and neck and
hands, some even visible in his scalp beneath a fuzz of gray hair
cropped short in a military cut.
One eye was covered by a black eyepatch. Before I could finish dialing
911 he announced in a husky
voice that he was a Time Traveler come back to talk to me about the
future.
Being a sometimes science-fiction writer but not a fool, I said,
“Prove it.”
“Do you remember Replay?” he said.
My finger hovered over the final “1” in my dialing. “The 1987
novel?” I said. “By Ken Grimwood?”
The stranger – Time Traveler, psychotic, home invader, whatever he
was – nodded.
I hesitated. The novel by Grimwood had won the World Fantasy Award a
year or two after my
first-novel, Song of Kali, had. Grimwood’s book was about a guy who
woke up one morning to find
himself snapped back decades in his life, from the late 1980’s to
himself as a college student in
1963, and thus getting the chance to relive – to replay – that life
again, only this time acting
upon what he’d already learned the hard way. In the book, the
character, who was to experience –
suffer – several Replays, learned that there were other people from
his time who were also
Replaying their lives in the past, their bodies younger but their
memories intact. I’d greatly
enjoyed the book, thought it deserved the award, and had been sad to
hear that Grimwood had died .
. . when? . . . in 2003.
So, I thought, I might have a grizzled nut case in my study this New
Year’s Eve, but if he was a
reader and a fan of Replay, he was probably just a sci-fi fan grizzled
nut case, and therefore
probably harmless. Possibly. Maybe.
I kept my finger poised over the final “1” in “911.”
“What does that book have to do with you illegally entering my home
and study?” I asked.
The stranger smiled … almost sadly I thought. “You asked me to
prove that I’m a Time Traveler,” he
said softly. “Do you remember how Grimwood’s character in Replay
went hunting for others in the
1960’s who had traveled back in time from the late 1980’s?”
I did remember now. I’d thought it clever at the time. The guy in
Replay, once he suspected others
were also replaying into the past, had taken out personal ads in major
city newspapers around the
country. The ads were concise. “Do you remember Three Mile Island,
Challenger, Watergate,
Reaganomics? If so, contact me at . . .”
Before I could say anything else on this New Year’s Eve of 2004, a
few hours before 2005 began,
the stranger said, “Terri Schiavo, Katrina, New Orleans under water,
Ninth Ward, Ray Nagin,
Superdome, Judge John Roberts, White Sox sweep the Astros in four to
win the World Series, Pope
Benedict XVI, Scooter Libby.”
“Wait, wait!” I said, scrambling for a pen and then scrambling even
faster to write. “Ray who?
Pope who? Scooter who?”
“You’ll recognize it all when you hear it all again,” said the
stranger. “I’ll see you in a year
and we’ll have our conversation.”
“Wait!” I repeated. “What was that middle apart . . . Ray Nugin?
Judge who? John Roberts? Who is .
. .” But when I looked up he was gone.
“White Sox win the Series?” I muttered into the silence. “Fat
chance.”
#
I was waiting for him on New Year’s Eve 2005. I didn’t see him
enter. I looked up from the book I
was fitfully reading and he was standing in the shadows again. I
didn’t dial 911 this time, nor
demand any more proof. I waved him to the leather wingchair and said,
“Would you like something to
drink?”
“Scotch,” he said. “Single malt if you have it.”
I did.
Our conversation ran over two hours, but the following is the gist of
it. I’m a novelist by trade.
I remember conversations pretty well. (Not as perfectly as Truman
Capote was said to be able to
recall long conversations word for word, but pretty well.)
The Time Traveler wouldn’t tell me what year in the future he was
from. Not even the decade or
century. But the gray cord trousers and blue-gray wool tunic top he was
wearing didn’t look very
far-future science-fictiony or military, no Star Trekky boots or
insignia, just wellworn clothes
that looked like something a guy who worked with his hands a lot would
wear. Construction maybe.
“I know you can’t tell me details about the future because of time
travel paradoxes,” I began. I
hadn’t spent a lifetime reading and then writing SF for nothing.
“Oh, bugger time travel paradoxes,” said the Time Traveler. “They
don’t exist. I could tell you
anything I want to and it won’t change anything. I just choose not to
tell you some things.”
I frowned at this. “Time travel paradoxes don’t exist? But surely
if I go back in time and kill my
grandfather before he meets my grandmother . . .”
The Time Traveler laughed and sipped his Scotch. “Would you want to
kill your grandfather?” he
said. “Or anyone else?”
“Well . . .Hitler maybe,” I said weakly.
The Traveler smiled, but more ironically this time. “Good luck,” he
said. “But don’t count on
succeeding.”
I shook my head. “But surely anything you tell me now about the
future will change the future,” I
said.
“I gave you a raft of facts about your future a year ago as my bona
fides,” said the Time
Traveler. “Did it change anything? Did you save New Orleans from
drowning?”
“I won $50 betting on the White Sox in October,” I admitted.
The Time Traveler only shook his head. “Quod erat demonstrandum,”
he said softly. “I could tell
you that the Mississippi River flows generally south. Would your
knowing about it change its
course or flow or flooding?”
I thought about this. Finally I said, “Why did you come back? Why do
you want to talk to me? What
do you want me to do?”
“I came back for my own purposes,” said the Time Traveler, looking
around my booklined study. “I
chose you to talk to because it was . . . convenient. And I don’t
want you to do a goddamned
thing. There’s nothing you can do. But relax . . . we’re not going
to be talking about personal
things. Such as, say, the year, day, and hour of your death. I don’t
even know that sort of
trivial information, although I could look it up quickly enough. You
can release that
white-knuckled grip you have on the edge of your desk.”
I tried to relax. “What do you want to talk about?” I said.
“The Century War,” said the Time Traveler.
I blinked and tried to remember some history. “You mean the Hundred
Year War? Fifteenth Century?
Fourteenth? Sometime around there. Between . . . France and England?
Henry V? Kenneth Branagh? Or
was it . . .”
“I mean the Century War with Islam,” interrupted the Time Traveler.
“Your future. Everyone’s.” He
was no longer smiling. Without asking, or offering to pour me any, he
stood, refilled his Scotch
glass, and sat again. He said, “It was important to me to come back
to this time early on in the
struggle. Even if only to remind myself of how unspeakably blind you
all were.”
“You mean the War on Terrorism,” I said.
“I mean the Long War with Islam,” he said. “The Century War. And
it’s not over yet where I come
from. Not close to being over.”
“You can’t have a war with Islam,” I said. “You can’t go to
war against a religion. Radical Islam,
maybe. Jihadism. Some extremists. But not a . . . the . . . religion
itself. The vast majority of
Muslims in the world are peaceloving people who wish us no harm. I mean
. . . I mean . . . the
very word ‘Islam’ means ‘Peace.’”
“So you kept telling yourselves,” said the Time Traveler. His voice
was very low but there was a
strange and almost frightening edge to it. “But the ‘peace’ in
‘Islam’ means ‘Submission.’ You’ll
find that out soon enough”
Great, I was thinking. Of all the time travelers in all the gin joints
in all the world, I get
this racist, xenophobic, right-wing asshole.
“After Nine-eleven, we’re fighting terrorism,” I began, “not .
. .”
He waved me into silence.
“You were a philosophy major or minor at that podunk little college
you went to long ago,” said
the Time Traveler. “Do you remember what Category Error is?”
It rang a bell. But I was too irritated at hearing my alma mater being
called a “podunk little
college” to be able to concentrate fully.
“I’ll tell you what it is,” said the Time Traveler. “In
philosophy and formal logic, and it has
its equivalents in science and business management, Category Error is
the term for having stated
or defined a problem so poorly that it becomes impossible to solve that
problem, through dialectic
or any other means.”
I waited. Finally I said firmly, “You can’t go to war with a
religion. Or, I mean . . . sure, you
could . . . the Crusades and all that . . . but it would be wrong.”
The Time Traveler sipped his Scotch and looked at me. He said, “Let
me give you an analogy . . .”
God, I hated and distrusted analogies. I said nothing.
“Let’s imagine,” said the Time Traveler, “that on December
eighth, Nineteen forty-one, President
Franklin Delano Roosevelt spoke before a joint session of Congress and
asked them to declare war
on aviation.”
“That’s absurd,” I said.
“Is it?” asked the Time Traveler. “The American battleships,
cruisers, harbor installations, Army
barracks, and airfields at Pearl Harbor and elsewhere in Hawaii were
all struck by Japanese
aircraft. Imagine if the next day Roosevelt had declared war on
aviation . . . threatening to wipe
it out wherever we found it. Committing all the resources of the United States of America to
defeating aviation, so help us God.”
“That’s just stupid,” I said. If I’d ever been afraid of this
Time Traveler, I wasn’t now. He was
obviously a mental defective.“The planes, the Japanese planes,” I
said, “were just a method of
attack . . . a means . . . it wasn’t aviation that attacked us at
Pearl Harbor, but the Empire of
Japan. We declared war on Japan and a few days later its ally, Germany,
lived up to its treaty
with the Japanese and declared war on us. If we’d declared war on
aviation, on goddamned airplanes
rather than the empire and ideology that launched them, we’d never
have . . .”
I stopped. What had he called it? Category Error. Making the problem
unsolvable through your
inability – or fear – of defining it correctly.
The Time Traveler was smiling at me from the shadows. It was a small,
thin, cold smile – holding
no humor in it, I was sure -- but still a smile of sorts. It seemed
more sad than gloating as my
sudden silence stretched on.
“What do you know about Syracuse?” he asked suddenly.
I blinked again. “Syracuse, New York?” I said at last.
He shook his head slowly. “Thucydides’ Syracuse,” he said softly.
“Syracuse circa 415 B.C. The
Syracuse Athens invaded.”
“It was . . . part of the Peloponnesian War,” I ventured.
He waited for more but I had no more to give. I loved history, but
let’s admit it . . . that was
ancient history. Still, I felt that I should have been able to tell
him,or at least remember, why
Syracuse was important in the Peloponnesian War or why they fought
there or who fought exactly or
who had won or . . . something. I hated feeling like a dull student
around this scarred old man.
“The war between Athens and its allies and Sparta and its allies –
a war for nothing less than
hegemony over the entire known world at that time – began in 431
B.C.,” said the Time Traveler.
“After seventeen years of almost constant fighting, with no clear or
permanent advantage for
either side, Athens – under the leadership of Alcibiades at the time
– decided to widen the war by
conquering Sicily, the ‘Great Greece’ they called it, an area full
of colonies and the key to
maritime commerce at the time the way the Strait of Hormuz in the
Persian Gulf is today.”
I hate being lectured to at the best of times, but something about the
tone and timber of the Time
Traveler’s voice – soft, deep, rasping, perhaps thickened a bit by
the whiskey – made this sound
more like a story being told around a campfire. Or perhaps a bit like
one of Garrison Keillor’s
Lake Wobegon stories on “Prairie Home Companion.” I settled deeper
into my chair and listened.
“Syracuse wasn’t a direct enemy of the Athenians,” continued the
Time Traveler, “but it was
quarreling with a local Athenian colony and the democracy of Athens
used that as an excuse to
launch a major expedition against it. It was a big deal – Athens sent
136 triremes, the best
fighting ships in the world then – and landed 5,000 soldiers right
under the city’s walls.
“The Athenians had enjoyed so much military success in recent years,
including their invasion of
Melos, that Thucydides wrote – So thoroughly had the present
prosperity persuaded the Athenians
that nothing could withstand them, and that they could achieve what was
possible and what was
impracticable alike, with means ample or inadequate it mattered not.
The reason for this was their
general extraordinary success, which made them confuse their strengths
with their hopes.”
“Oh, hell,” I said, “this is going to be a lecture about Iraq,
isn’t it? Look . . . I voted for
John Kerry last year and . . .”
“Listen to me,” the Time Traveler said softly. It was not a
request. There was steel in that soft,
rasping voice. “Nicias, the Athenian general who ended up leading the
invasion, warned against it
in 415 B.C. He said – ‘We must not disguise from ourselves that we
go to found a city among
strangers and enemies, and that he who undertakes such an enterprise
should be prepared to become
master of the country the first day he lands, or failing in this to
find everything hostile to
him’. Nicias, along with the Athenian poet and general Demosthenes,
would see their armies
destroyed at Syracuse and then they would both be captured and put to
death by the Syracusans.
Sparta won big in that two-year debacle for Athens. The war went on for
seven more years, but
Athens never recovered from that overreaching at Syracuse, and in the
end . . . Sparta destroyed
it. Conquered the Athenian empire and its allies, destroyed Athens’
democracy, ruined the entire
balance of power and Greek hegemony over the known world at the time .
. . ruined everything. All
because of a miscalculation about Syracuse.”
I sighed. I was sick of Iraq. Everyone was sick of Iraq on New Years
Eve, 2005, both Bush
supporters and Bush haters. It was just an ugly mess. “They just had
an election,” I said. “The
Iraqi people. They dipped their fingers in purple ink and . . .”
“Yes yes,” interrupted the Time Traveler as if recalling something
further back in time, and much
less important, than Athens versus Syracuse. “The free elections.
Purple fingers. Democracy in the
Mid-East. The Palestinians are voting as well. You will see in the
coming year what will become of
all that.”
The Time Traveler drank some Scotch, closed his eyes for a second, and
said, “Sun Tzu writes – The
side that knows when to fight and when not to will take the victory.
There are roadways not to be
traveled, armies not to be attacked, walled cities not to be
assaulted.”
“All right, goddammit,” I said irritably. “Your point’s made.
So we shouldn’t have invaded Iraq in
this . . . what did you call it? This Long War with Islam, this Century
War. We’re all beginning
to realize that here by the end of 2005.”
The Time Traveler shook his head. “You’ve understood nothing I’ve
said. Nothing. Athens failed in
Syracuse – and doomed their democracy – not because they fought in
the wrong place and at the
wrong time, but because they weren’t ruthless enough. They had grown
soft since their slaughter of
every combat-age man and boy on the island of Melos, the enslavement of
every woman and girl
there. The democratic Athenians, in regards to Syracuse, thought that
once engaged they could win
without absolute commitment to winning, claim victory without being as
ruthless and merciless as
their Spartan and Syracusan enemies. The Athenians, once defeat loomed,
turned against their own
generals and political leaders – and their official soothsayers. If
General Nicias or Demosthenes
had survived their captivity and returned home, the people who sent
them off with parades and
strewn flower petals in their path would have ripped them limb from
limb. They blamed their own
leaders like a sun-maddened dog ripping and chewing at its own
belly.”
I thought about this. I had no idea what the hell he was saying or how
it related to the future.
“You came back in time to lecture me about Thucydides?” I said.
“Athens? Syracuse? Sun-Tzu? No
offense, Mr. Time Traveler, but who gives a damn?”
The Time Traveler rose so quickly that I flinched back in my chair, but
he only refilled his
Scotch. This time he refilled my glass as well. “You probably should
give a damn” he said softly.
“ In 2006, you’ll be ripping and tearing at yourselves so fiercely
that your nation – the only one
on Earth actually fighting against resurgent caliphate Islam in this
long struggle over the very
future of civilization – will become so preoccupied with criticizing
yourselves and trying to gain
short-term political advantage, that you’ll all forget that there’s
actually a war for your
survival going on. Twenty-five years from now, every man or woman in
America who wishes to vote
will be required to read Thucydides on this matter. And others as well.
And there are tests. If
you don’t know some history, you don’t vote . . . much less run for
office. America’s vacation
from knowing history ends very soon now . . . for you, I mean. And for
those few others left alive
in the world who are allowed to vote.”
“You’re shitting me,” I said.
“I am shitting you not,” said the Time Traveler.
“Those few others left alive who are allowed to vote?” I said, the
words just now striking me like
hardthrown stones. “What the hell are you talking about? Has our
government taken away all our
civil liberties in this awful future of yours?”
He laughed then and this time it was a deep, hearty, truly amused
laugh. “Oh, yes,” he said when
the laughter abated a bit. He actually wiped away tears from his one
good eye. “I had almost
forgotten about your fears of your, our . . . civil liberties . . .
being abridged by our own
government back in these last stupidity-allowed years of 2005 and 2006
and 2007 . Where exactly do
you see this repression coming from?”
“Well . . .” I said. I hate it when I start a sentence with
‘well,’ especially in an argument.
“Well, the Patriot Act. Bush authorizing spying on Americans . . .
international phonecalls and
such. Uh . . . I think mosques in the States are under FBI
surveillance. I mean, they want to look
up what library books we’re reading, for God’s sake. Big Brother.
1984. You know.”
The Time Traveler laughed again, but with more edge this time. “Yes,
I know,” he said. “We all
know . . . up there in the future which some of you will survive to see
as free people. Civil
liberties. In 2006 you still fear yourselves and your own institutions
first, out of old habit. A
not unworthy – if fatally misguided and terminally masochistic –
paranoia. I will tell you right
now, and this is not a prediction but a history lesson, some of your
grandchildren will live in
dhimmitude.”
“Zimmi . . . what?” I said.
He spelled it out. What had sounded like a ‘z’ was the ‘dh.’
I’d never heard the word and I told
him so.
“Then get off your ass and Google it,” said the Time Traveler, his
one working eye glinting with
something like fury. “Dhimmitude. You can also look up the word
dhimmi, because that’s what two of
your three grandchildren will be called. Dhimmis. Dhimmitude is the
system of separate and
subordinate laws and rules they will live under. Look up the word
sharia while you’re Googling
dhimmi, because that is the only law they will answer to as dhimmis,
the only justice they can
hope for . . . they and tens and hundreds of millions more now who are
worried in your time about
invisible abridgements of their ‘civil liberties’ by their
‘oppressive’ American and European
democratically elected governments.”
He audibly sneered this last part. I wondered now if the fury I sensed
in him was a result of his
madness, or if the reverse were true.
“Where will my grandchildren suffer this dhimmitude?” I asked. My
mouth was suddenly so dry I
could barely speak.
“Eurabia,” said the Time Traveler.
“There’s no such place,” I said.
He gave me his one-eyed stare. My stomach suddenly lurched and I wished
I’d drunk no Scotch.
“Words,” I said.
The Time Traveler raised one scar-slashed eyebrow.
“Last year you gave me words about 2005,” I said. “The kind of
words Ken Grimwood’s replayers in
time would have put in the newspaper to find each other. Give me more
now. Or, better yet, just
fucking tell me what you’re talking about. You said it wouldn’t
matter. You said that my knowing
won’t change anything, any more than I can change the direction the
Mississippi is flowing . So
tell me, God damn it!”
He began by giving me words. Even while I was scribbling them down, I
was thinking of reading I’d
been doing recently about the joy with which the Victorian Englishmen
and 19th Century Europeans
and Americans greeted the arrival of the 20th Century. The toasts,
especially among the
intellectual elite, on New Year’s Eve 1899 had been about the coming
glories of technology
liberating them, of the imminent Second Enlightenment in human
understanding, of the certainty of
a just one-world government, of the end of war for all time.
Instead, what words would a time traveler or poor Replay victim put in
his London Times or
Berliner Zeitung or New York Times on January 1, 1900, to find his
fellow travelers displaced in
time? Auschwitz, I was sure, and Hiroshima and Trinity Site and
Holocaust and Hitler and Stalin
and . . .
The clock in my study chimed midnight.
Jesus God. Did I want to hear such words about 2006 and the rest of the
21st Century from the Time
Traveler?
“Ahmadenijad,” he said softly. “Natanz. Arak. Bushehr. Ishafan.
Bonab. Ramsar.”
“Those words don’t mean a damned thing to me,” I said as I
scribbled them down phonetically.
“Where are they? What are they?”
“You’ll know soon enough,” said the Time Traveler.
“Are you talking about . . . what? . . . the next fifteen or twenty
years?” I said.
“I’m talking about the next fifteen or twenty months from your
now,” he said softly. “Do you want
more words?”
I didn’t. But I couldn’t speak just then.
“General Seyed Reza Pardis,” intoned the Time Traveler.
“Shehab-one, Shehab-two, Shehab-three. Tel Aviv. Baghdad International Airport, Al Salem U.S. airbase in Kuwait,
Camp Dawhah U.S. Army base
in Kuwait, al Seeb U.S. airbase in Oman, al Udeid U.S. Army and Air
Force base in Qatar. Haifa.
Beir-Shiva. Dimona.”
“Oh, fuck,” I said. “Oh, Jesus.” I had no clue as to who or
what Shehab One, Two, or Three might
be, but the context and litany alone made me want to throw up.
“This is just the beginning,” said the Time Traveler.
“Wasn’t the beginning on September 11, 2001?” I managed through
numb lips.
The one-eyed scarred man shook his head. “Historians in my time know
that it began on June 5,
1968,” he said. “But it hasn’t really begun for you yet. For any
of you.”
I thought – What on earth happened on the fifth of June, 1968? I’m
old enough to remember. I was
in college then. Working that summer and . . . Kennedy. Robert F.
Kennedy’s assassination. “Now on
to Chicago and the nomination!” Sirhan Sirhan. Was the Time Traveler
trying to give me some kind
of half-assed Oliver-Stone-JFK-movie garbled up conspiracy theory?
“What . . .” I began.
“Galveston,” interrupted the Time Traveler. “The Space Needle.
Bank of America Plaza in Dallas.
Renaissance Tower in Dallas. Bank One Center in Dallas. The
Indianapolis 500 – one hour and
twenty-three minutes into the race. The Bell South Building in Atlanta.
The TransAmerica Pyramid
in San Francisco . . .”
“Stop,” I said. “Just stop.”
“The Golden Gate Bridge,” persisted the Time Traveler. “The
Guggenheim in Bilbao. The New
Reichstag in Berlin. Albert Hall. Saint Paul’s Cathedral . . .”
“Shut the fuck up!” I shouted. “All these places can’t
disappear in the rest of this century, your
goddamned Century War or not! I don’t believe it.”
“I didn’t say in the rest of your century,” said the Time
Traveler, his torn voice almost a
whisper now. “I’m talking about your next fifteen years. And I’ve
barely begun.”
“You’re nuts,” I said. “You’re not from the future. You
escaped from some asylum.”
The Time Traveler nodded. “That’s more true than you know,” he
said. “I come from a place and time
where your grandchildren and hundreds of millions of other dhimmi are
compelled to write ‘pbuh’
after the Prophet’s name. They wear gold crosses and gold Stars of
David sewn onto their clothing.
The Nazis didn’t invent the wearing of the Star of David . . . the
marking and setting apart of
the Jews in society. Muslims did that centuries ago in they lands they
conquered, European and
otherwise. They will refine it and update it, not toward the more
merciful, in the lands they
occupy through the decades ahead of you.”
“You’re crazy,” I cried, standing. My hands were balled into
fists. “Islam is a religion . . . a
religion of peace . . . not our enemy. We can’t be at war with a
religion. That’s obscene.”
“Have you read the Qur’an and learned your Sunnah?” asked the
Time Traveler. “It would behoove you
to do so. Dhimmi means ‘protection.’ And your children and
grandchildren will be protected . . .
like cattle.”
“To hell with you,” I said.
“Your dhimmi poll tax will be called jizya,” said the Time
Traveler. His voice suddenly sounded
very weary.“Your land tax for being an infidel, even for fellow
People of the Book – Christians
and Jews – will be called kharaz. Both of these taxes will be in
addition to your mandatory alms –
the zakat. The punishment for failure to pay, or for paying late, a
punishment meted out by your
local qadi, religious judge, is death by stoning or beheading.”
I folded my arms and looked away from the Time Traveler.
“Under sharia – which will be the universal law of Eurabia,”
persisted the Time Traveler, “the
value of a dhimmi’s life, the value of your grandchildren, is one
half the value of a Muslim’s
life. Jews and Christians are worth one-third of a Muslim. Indian
Parsees are worth one-fifteenth.
In a court of the Eurabian Caliphate or the Global Khalifate, if a
Muslim murders a dhimmi, any
infidel, he must pay a blood money fine not to exceed one thousand
euros. No Muslim will ever be
jailed or sentenced to death for the murder of any dhimmi or any number
of dhimmis. If the murders
were done under the auspices of Universal Compulsive Jihad, which will
be sanctioned by sharia as
of 2019 Common Era, all blood money fines are waived.”
“Go away,” I said. “Go back to wherever you came from.”
“I come from here,” said the Time Traveler. “From not so far from
here.”
“Bullshit,” I said.
“Your enemies have gathered and struck and continue to strike and
you, the innocents of 2006 and
beyond, fight among yourselves, chew and rip at your own bellies, blame
your brothers and
yourselves and your institutions of the Enlightenment – law,
tolerance, science, democracy – even
while your enemies grow stronger.”
“How are we supposed to know who our enemies are?” I turned and
growled at him. “The world is a
complex place. Morality is a complex thing.”
“Your enemy is he who will give his life to kill you,” said the
Time Traveler. “Your enemies are
they that wish you and your children and your grandchildren dead and
who are willing to sacrifice
themselves, or support those fanatics who will sacrifice themselves, to
see you and your
institutions destroyed. You haven’t figured that out yet – the
majority of you fat, sleeping,
smug, infinitely stupid Americans and Europeans.”
He stood and set the Scotch glass back in its place on my sideboard.
“How, we wonder in my time,”
he said softly, “can you ignore the better part of a billion people
who say aloud that they are
willing to kill your children . . . or condone and celebrate the
killing of them? And ignore them
as they act on what they say? We do not understand you.”
I still had not turned to face him, but was looking over my shoulder at
him.
“The world, as it turns out,” continued the Time Traveler, “is
not nearly so complex a place as
your liberal and gentle minds sought to make it.”
I did not respond.
“Thucydides taught us more than twenty-four hundred years ago –
counting back from your time –
that all men’s behavior is guided by phobos, kerdos, and doxa,”
said the Time Traveler. “Fear,
self-interest, and honor.”
I pretended I did not hear.
“Plato saw human behavior as a chariot pulled by precisely those
three powerful and headstrong
horses, first tugged this way, then pulled that way,” continued the
Time Traveler. “Phobos,
kerdos, doxa. Fear, self-interest, honor. Which of these guides the
chariot of your nation and
your allies in Europe and your surprisingly fragile civilization now, O
Man of 2006?”
I stared at the bookcase instead of the man and willed him gone,
wishing him away like a sleepy
boy willing away the boogeyman under his bed.
“Which combination of those three traits -- phobos, kerdos, doxa --
will save or doom your world?”
asked the Time Traveler. “Which might bring you back from this
vacation from history – from
history’s responsibilities and history’s burdens – that you have
all so generously gifted
yourselves with? You peaceloving Europeans. You civil-liberties loving
Americans? You Athenian
invertebrates with your love of your own exalted sensibilities and your
willingness to enter into
a global war for civilizational survival even while you are too timid,
too fearful . . . too
decent . . . to match the ruthlessness of your enemies.”
I closed my eyes but that did not stop his voice.
“At least understand that such decency goes away quickly when you are
burying your children and
your grandchildren,” rasped the Time Traveler. “Or watching them
suffer in slavery. Ruthlessness
deferred against totalitarian aggression only makes the later need for
ruthlessness more terrible.
Thousands of years of history and war should have taught you that. Did
you fools learning nothing
from living through the charnel house that was the 20th Century?”
I’d had enough. I opened my eyes, turned, reached into the top left
drawer of my desk, and pulled
out the .38 revolver that I had owned for twenty-three years and fired
only twice, at firing
ranges, shortly after it was given to me as a gift.
I aimed it at the Time Traveler. “Get out,” I said.
He showed no reaction. “Do you want more than words?” he asked
softly. “I will give you more than
words. I give you eight million Jews dead in Israel – incinerated –
and many more dead Jews in
Eurabia and around the world. I give you the continent of Europe cast
back more than five hundred
years into sad pools of warring civilizations.”
“Get out,” I repeated, aiming the revolver higher.
“I give you an Asian world in chaos, a Pacific rim ruled by China
after the vacuum of America’s
withdrawal – this nation’s full resources devoted to fighting, and
possibly losing, the Century
War – a South America and Mexico lost to corruption and appeasement,
a resurgent Russian Empire
that has reclaimed its old dominated republics and more, and a Canada
split into three hateful
nations.”
I cocked the pistol. The click sounded very loud in the small room.
“We were speaking about ruthlessness,” said the Time Traveler.
“If you fail to understand it at
first, you learn it quickly enough in a war like the one you are
allowing to come. Would you like
to hear the litany of Islamic shrines and cities that will blossom in
nuclear retaliatory fire in
the decades to come?”
“Get out,” I said for a final time. “I’m ruthless enough to
shoot you, and by God I will if you
don’t get out of here.”
The Time Traveler nodded. “As you wish. But you should hear two last
words, two last names . .
.religious judge Ubar ibn al-Khattab and rector-imam Ismail Nawahda of
New Al-Azhar University in
London, part of the 200,000-man Golden Mosque of the New Islamic
Khalifate in Eurabia.”
“What are those names to me or me to them?” I asked. My finger was
on the trigger of the cocked
.38.
“These religious officials were on the Islamic Tribunal that
sentenced two dhimmis to death by
stoning and beheading,” said the Time Traveler. “The dhimmis were
your two grandsons, Thomas and
Daniel.”
“What was . . . will be . . . their crime?” I was able to ask after
a long minute. My tongue felt
like a strip of rough cotton.
“They dated two Muslim women – Thomas while he was in London on
business, Daniel while visiting
his aging mother, your daughter, in Canada – without first converting
to Islam. That part of
sharia, Islamic law, is called hudud, and we know quite a bit about it
in my time. Your grandsons
didn’t know the young women were Muslim since they both were dressed
in modern garb - -thus
violating their own society’s ironclad rule of Hijab — modesty. The
girls, I hear, also died, but
those were not sharia sentences. Not hudud. Their brothers and fathers
murdered them. Honor
killings . . . I think you’ve already heard the phrase by 2006.”
If I were to shoot him, I had to do it now. My hand was shaking more
fiercely every second.
“Of course, the odds against one sharia court in London sentencing
both your grandsons to death
for crimes committed as far apart as London and Quebec City is too much
of a coincidence to
believe in,” continued the Time Traveler. “As is the fact that they
would both be introduced to
Muslim girls, without knowing they were Muslim, and go on a single
dinner date with them at the
same time, in cities so far apart. And Thomas was married. I know he
thought he was having a
business dinner with a client.”
“What . . .” I began, my arm holding the pistol shaking as if
palsied.
The Time Traveler laughed a final time. “All of your grandsons’
names were on lists. You wrote
something . . . will soon write something . . . that will put your
name, and all your descendents’
names, on their list. Including your only surviving grandson.”
I opened my mouth but did not speak.
“According to their own writings, which we all know well in my
day,” continued the Time Traveler,
“ ‘Hadith Malik 511:1588 The last statement that Muhammad made was:
"O Lord, perish the Jews and
Christians. They made churches of the graves of their prophets. There
shall be no two faiths in
Arabia.’ And there are not. All infidels – Christians, Jews,
secularists -- have been executed,
converted, or driven out. Israel is cinders. Eurabia and the New
Khalifate is growing, absorbing
what was left of the old, weak cultures there that once dreamt of a
European Union. The Century
War is not near over. Two of your three grandsons are now dead. Your
remaining grandson still
fights, as does one of your surviving granddaughters. Two of your three
living granddaughters now
live under sharia within the aegis of New Khalifate. They are women of
the veil.”
I lowered the pistol.
“ Enjoy these last days and months and years of your slumber,
Grandfather,” said the scarred old
man. “Your wake-up call is coming soon.”
The Time Traveler said three last words and was gone.
I put the pistol away – realizing too late that it had never been
loaded – and sat down to write
this. I could not. I waited these three months to try again.
Oh, Lord, I wish that some person on business from Porlock would wake
me from this dream.
It was not the horrors of his revelations about my grandchildren that
had shaken me the most
deeply, shaken me to the core of my core, but rather the the Time
Traveler’s last three words.
Three words that any Replayer or time traveler visiting here from a
century or more from now would
react to first and most emotionally – three words I will not share
here in this piece nor ever
plan to share, at least until everyone on Earth knows them – three
words that will keep me awake
nights for months and years to come.
Three words.
Sincerely,
(Note: Books commented on in this essay include – The Peloponnesian
War by Donald Kagan, The Book
of War: 25 Centuries of Great War Writing edited by John Keegan, While
Europe Slept: How Radical
Islam Is Destroying the West from Within by Bruce Bawer, The Clash of
Civilizations and the
Remaking of the World Order by Samuel P. Huntington, Civilization and
Its Enemies: The Next Stage
of History by Lee Harris, The Shield of Achilles: War, Peace, and the
Course of History by Philip
Bobbit, and Replay by Ken Grimwood.)
