Hi, I'm Lavar Burton and this is Lavar Burton Reads, where in every episode I hand-pick

a different piece of short fiction and I read it to you.

The only thing these stories have in common is that I love them and I hope you will too.

And I know that you all in one way or another have heard of the author of this two-part

episode, Ted Chang wrote an amazing story called Story of Your Life that became the movie

arrival.

He's released several acclaimed collections of stories.

Today's story is The Merchant and The Alchemist's Gate and it's from Exolation, a collection

by Ted Chang, published by Penguin Random House Audio and Imprint of Penguin Publishing Group.

Ted's work grapples with the nature of humanity and the universe, you know, small little subjects

like that.

He carefully constructs stories that build and bring us to an epiphany.

And this is a story about time travel, told in an Arabian night's style and set in a

mythical ancient Baghdad.

Mr. Chang has said that he was inspired to write this story after hearing a talk by the

physicist, Kip Thorn, on applying time dilation to wormholes.

Now, you know, I spend a lot of my time sitting around thinking about how to apply time dilation

to wormholes because that's just my thing.

Uh-huh.

Anyway, Dr. Thorn proposed that in theory, one could create a time machine that obeyed

Einstein's theory of relativity.

And that if one created or obtained a small wormhole, you could connect two points in space

...