The Third Gate

25

At nine thirty the following morning, the internal phone in Logan’s office rang.

He picked it up on the third ring. “Jeremy Logan here.”

“Jeremy? It’s Porter Stone. Am I interrupting anything?”

Logan sat up. “Nothing that can’t wait.”

“Then come to the Operations Center, if you would. There’s something here I think you ought to see.”

Logan saved the file he’d been working on-a write-up of his conversation with Hirshveldt the evening before-then stood up and stepped out of his office.

He had to stop and ask directions twice before he found his way. The people on the Station seemed jumpy this morning-and it was hardly surprising. The previous evening, a communications worker named Perlmutter had been badly, almost fatally, electrocuted. Logan had pieced together the story from various mutterings he’d overheard during breakfast: how the worker had stepped into a puddle of water in which a live electrical wire had been lying. “It was Fontaine, his boss, who found him,” Logan had heard someone say. “Horrible. Like he was covered in soot, almost, blackened from the electrical burns.”

Logan had been irresistibly reminded of the curse of Narmer. His limbs will turn to ash. Rather than mentioning this to anyone, he mentally shelved it for later consideration.

Unlike the previous tragedy at the generator, there had been no follow-up meeting to analyze this accident, to try to determine cause. Logan assumed that one had not yet been scheduled-or, perhaps, it had been confined to the very highest levels of management. He did know that Perlmutter was in serious condition and was being closely monitored by Ethan Rush.

The Operations Center, located deep within White, turned out to be the large, monitor-stuffed space he’d visited before. Once again, Cory Landau-the cherub with the Zapata mustache-was manning the futuristic central cockpit. On a nearby screen, Logan noticed the wireframe CAD image representing the extent of the dig mapping. Its extent had advanced dramatically since the first time he’d seen it.

Ranged around Landau were Porter Stone, Tina Romero, and Dr. March, all of whom were staring at one of the larger monitors that displayed what looked to Logan like a kind of greenish soup, punctuated by lines of static.

As he entered, Stone looked over. “Ah, Jeremy. Come take a look at this.”

Logan joined them at the central cockpit. “What is it?”

“Skeletons,” said Stone. He said the word with almost hushed reverence.

Logan peered at the screen with increased interest. “Where is this, exactly?”

“Grid square H five,” murmured Stone. “Forty-five feet below the surface.”

Logan glanced at Tina Romero, who was staring at the screen and playing idly with her yellow fountain pen. “And how far is this from the first skeleton?”

“Approximately sixty feet. In exactly the direction I suggested the divers concentrate on.” She glanced over at March with a smug I told you so smile.

“Here’s another,” came a squawky voice over a microphone. Logan realized it was one of the divers, speaking from the muddy depths of the Sudd. On the monitor, the figure of a diver in a black wet suit suddenly emerged out of the green soup. He was holding a bone in one hand.

Stone leaned toward a microphone. “How many is that so far?”

“Nine,” the distant voice replied.

Now Stone turned toward Romero. “Ethan told me what you said during his examination of the initial skeleton. That you knew the death was a suicide and that you knew where the next cache of bones would be found. Care to enlighten us?”

If Romero had felt like remaining coy, this request from the boss dispelled it. “Sure,” she said, pushing back a stray hair from her forehead with a finger. “First, we found one body. Now we’ve found several-I’d guess twelve in all. Next, we will find a huge cache of bones. It’s because of the way Narmer would have been buried and the way his tomb was concealed. Recall this was before the days of pyramids-the earliest pharaohs were buried in shaft tombs and mastabas. We have to assume that Narmer’s tomb, whatever it looks like, is unique in prefiguring later tombs to come. But unlike many kings who followed him, Narmer didn’t want even the location of his tomb to be remembered. At the site of its construction, there would have been hundreds of workers doing the building, as well as members of Narmer’s bodyguard. Once the work was done, all those workers-every last one-would have been killed. Their bodies would be left at the periphery of the tomb. Later, when Narmer himself was placed in the tomb, the priests and lesser guards who attended the ceremony would have been killed at a ritual distance from the tomb by Narmer’s personal bodyguard. The bodyguard himself would then have moved out another respectful distance-and killed himself. All this to maintain the sanctity of Narmer’s earthly remains. An army of the dead was to stand guard around the tomb for all eternity. Only one person, the god-king’s personal scribe, walked out of the desert with these secrets in his hand. And once he had committed them to the ostracon, he would have instructed his personal guards to kill him, as well.”

Stone nodded. “Hence the decreasing number of bodies found moving outward from the site of the tomb.” He looked from Romero to the screen. “And the direction you instructed our divers to look-was it due north?”

“It was.”

“And that’s because the entrances to the king’s chambers in the pyramids and other burial sites historically faced north?” Logan interjected.

Stone smiled. “Very good, Jeremy. My deduction as well.” He glanced back at Romero. “And the large cache of skeletons, the builders-it will be due north of this point, as well?”

“I believe so,” she replied. “Approximately sixty feet.”

“And the tomb entrance… another sixty feet north of that?”

Romero did not answer. She did not need to. Stone turned toward the door. “I’ve got to see Valentino. We need to put triple dive crews on this right away.”

The radio crackled. “And here’s another skeleton. Completely buried in mud. Sir, what are we to do with them?”

March spoke up for the first time. “You know what to do. Get the evidence lockers and bring them back to the Station.”

The smile quickly left Romero’s face, replaced with a frown. “Wait a minute. We needed to bring up that first skeleton so we could analyze it, be sure of our direction. But these priests and retainers-we should leave them in peace.”

Logan looked at her, noting the sudden urgency in her voice. He remembered what he’d heard about her ambivalence regarding grave goods.

“That’s rubbish,” March retorted. “If these really are the priests of the first Egyptian pharaoh, their remains are historically invaluable.”

“We’re here to learn the tomb’s secrets,” Romero snapped, “not to plunder the-”

“One moment,” Stone interrupted. He was clearly eager to give new orders to Valentino and had no patience for an ideological argument. “We shall bring up six skeletons. One will go to Ethan Rush for his examination-although at the moment he is rather busy with another matter. Fenwick, you may analyze the other five. The surrounding matrix should be gridded and sieved for jewelry or the remains of clothing-although I doubt you’ll find much. Once you have completed your examination, five of the six must be returned. We shall retain only one skeleton. Acceptable?”

After a moment, Romero nodded. March grudgingly followed suit.

“Very good. Landau, you’ll convey the instructions?”

“Yes, Dr. Stone,” Landau said.

“Thank you.” And-after a glance at each of them in turn-Stone ducked out of the Operations Center.

F our hours later, when Logan peered in, the archaeology labs in Red were a scene of controlled chaos. A half-dozen gowned figures were standing over sinks and metal examination tables, gingerly probing and examining delicate brown bones with latex-gloved hands. A half-dozen others were tapping at keyboards, tagging artifacts with plastic labels, and taking evidence bins down from shelves and putting others back up in their place. Voices spoke over one another, competing with the sound of running water and the whine of microsaws. Fenwick March walked among them, the lord of the manor, now pausing to pluck an artifact from the hands of a worker, now peering into a microscope or speaking into the digital recorder he carried in one hand. The room smelled powerfully of the rotting vegetal muck of the Sudd-and something else even less pleasant.

“Don’t wash it!” March barked at one of the gowned figures, who jumped at the sound. “You rinse it, rinse it, dribble by dribble!” He turned to another. “Dry that section, quickly, we have to stabilize it before there’s any more flaking. Hurry, man, hurry!”

Another worker looked up from a scattered pile of hips and long bones. “Dr. March, these were brought up from the dive interface in no order at all, there’s no way we can attempt a formal articulation-”

“We’ll scan them later!” March said, rounding on her. “The important thing is to get them cleaned, tagged, and in the database. Now, not yesterday. We’ll worry about the articulation later.”

Maybe, Logan thought as he stepped forward, March believes that-if he gets them all nicely cleaned and classified-Stone will let him keep them, after all. It was at moments like this that a person’s true interests came to the fore. March was an archaeologist, not an Egyptologist-to him, the bones came first and foremost.

March turned and noticed him for the first time. He frowned, as if disapproving of this violation of his domain. “Yes?” he said. “What do you want?”

Logan put on his most ingratiating smile. “I wonder,” he said, nodding at a skull that was being carefully cleaned of mud in a nearby sink: “Could I borrow one of those?”