Thebes of the Hundred Gates

Seven

Lehman said, “Where is he now?”

“In one of the temple storerooms. Under guard.”

“I still can’t understand why you told him. After chewing me out the way you did last week when I was the one talking about doing it. You made a complete hundred-eighty-degree reversal in a single week. Why? Why?”

Sandburg glowered at him. She was furious—with herself, with Lehman, with the hapless boy that the Service had sent. But mainly she was furious with herself. And yet, even in her fury, she realized that she was beginning to forgive herself.

“Originally we thought he was simply here on an independent research mission, remember? But when he told me that in fact he had come here looking for us—that he had come to rescue us—”

“Even so. Especially so. You recall what you said last week? You just want to be left alone to live your life. Your life in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. And therefore we can’t let him know a thing, you said. But then you did, anyway.”

“It was an impulse that I couldn’t overcome,” she said. “Have you ever had an impulse like that, Roger? Have you?”

“Don’t call me Roger. Not here. My name is Senmut-Ptah. And speak Egyptian.”

“Stop being such an asshole, will you?”

“I’m being an Egyptian. That’s what we are now: Egyptians.”

They were in his astronomical chamber, a small domed outbuilding behind the oldest shrine of the main Karnak temple. Cool bright sprinklings of starlight penetrated the openings in the roof and sketched patterns on the brick floor. Across the blue-black vault of the ceiling the fantastically attenuated naked figure of the goddess Nut, the deity of the sky, stretched from one side of the room to the other, great spidery arms and legs yards and yards long spanning the starry cosmos, with the Earth-god Shu supporting her arched nude form from below and complacently smiling figures of ram-headed Khnum standing beside him. Dense rows of hieroglyphs filled every adjacent inch of free space, offering intense assertions of arcane cosmological truths.

Sandburg said, “I was being just as Egyptian as I could be. But there he was solemnly telling me all about the Service, really sweating at it, trying to explain to a priestess of Isis where America was and where Rome was and how two people from this Service of his had overshot their mark and disappeared somewhere in the depths of time—no, wait, he didn’t try to tell me it was time-travel, he just used geographical analogies—and suddenly I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I couldn’t just go on standing there in front of him pretending to be a fucking ancient priestess of Isis, looking lofty and esoteric and mystical, when this kid, this kid who had come three and a half thousand years to find us, who I had sent over to the City of the Dead to work as a pickler of mummy-guts because we wanted to get him out of our hair, was begging for my help so that he could find you and me. Our rescuer, and I was treating him like shit. Playing games with his head, making him reel off yard after yard of completely needless explanation. I couldn’t keep the pretense up another minute. So I blurted out the truth, just like that.”

“An impulse.”

“An impulse, yes. A simple irrational impulse. You’ve never had one of those, have you? No—no, of course not. Who am I asking? Roger Lehman, the human computer. Of course you haven’t.”

“That isn’t true and you damned well know it. You like to think of me as some sort of android, some kind of mechanical man, but in fact I’m every bit as human as you are, and maybe a little more so.” In his agitation he snatched up one of his astronomical instruments, a little gleaming armillary disk from whose center a hippopotamus image yawned, and ran his long tapering fingers around its edges. “Remember, I was the one who originally wanted to have a little talk with him, to find out, at least, what might be going on down the line. You said you shouldn’t do it, and you were right. And then you did it. An impulse. Christ, an impulse! Well, I have impulses too, whatever you may think. But even so I still have enough sense not to jump out of a third-floor window simply because I happen to be on the third floor. And enough sense not to say the one thing I shouldn’t be saying to the one person I shouldn’t be saying it to.”

“If I seriously thought that it could have done any harm—”

“You don’t think it can?”

“He’s here alone. I’ve got him in custody. He can’t make us do anything we don’t want to do. We’ve got complete control of the situation. Really we do.”

“I suppose,” Lehman said grudgingly. He wandered around the room, fingering his charts and instruments. He rubbed his hands over the bits of gold and lapis-lazuli embedded in the wall. He picked up three long tight rolls of sacred papyri that he used in his divinations and set them fussily down again in slightly different places. “How do you think they were able to trace us?” he asked.

“How would I know? Something with their computers, I guess. Calculating probable trajectories. Maybe they took a guess. Or a bunch of guesses. You know they sweat a lot whenever any mission goes astray. So they sweated the computers until they came up with a hypothetical location where we might have landed. And sent this kid to check it out.”

“And what happens now?”

“We go to talk to him. You and me both.”

“Why?”

“Because I think we owe it to him. There’s no sense pretending any longer, is there? He’s here, and he knows I’m here, and he’s probably guessed that you’re here too. He’s Service, Roger. We can’t simply leave him in the dark, now. We’ve got to make him understand the way this has to be handled.”

“I don’t agree. I think the best thing for us is just to keep away from him. I wish you hadn’t said anything to him in the first place.”

“It’s too late for that. I have. Anyway, he’s probably got news from people we knew in Home Era. Carrying messages, even.”

“That’s exactly what worries me.”

“Don’t you want to hear anything about—”

Lehman gave her a wild-eyed stare. “Elaine, those people are thirty-five centuries in the future. I want to keep them there.” He sounded almost desperate about it.

“Last week you were hot to hear the gossip,” she said.

“That was last week. I’ve had a week to think about things. I don’t want to stir all that old stuff up again. Let it stay where it is. And let us stay where we are. I’m not going to go near him.”

His lower lip was quivering. He seemed actually afraid, she thought. Where had granite-faced Senmut-Ptah gone?

She said, “We can’t simply stonewall him. We can’t. We owe him at least the opportunity to talk to us.”

“Why? We don’t owe him anything.”

“For Christ’s sake, Roger. He’s a human being. He came here with the intention of helping us.”

“I’m aware of that. But—”

“No buts. Come on with me. Right now. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. I can guarantee that.”

“You’re a terrible woman.”

“Yes. I know that. —Listen, do you remember how it was for us when we first landed here? Helpless, bewildered, hopelessly lost in time, dressed like a couple of Romans fifteen centuries out of place, unable to read or write Egyptian, not speaking a word of the language, not the first inkling of it, hardly knowing anything about this civilization except what we learned in high school? Wondering how the hell we were going to survive? You remember how frightening that was?”

“We survived, though. We did more than survive.”

“Because we were good. We were adaptable, we were versatile, we were clever. Even so, we went through two years of hell before we started to make things happen for us. You remember? I certainly do. Life as a temple whore? You didn’t have to do that, at least, but you had your bad times too, plenty of them.”

“So? What does that have to do with—”

“This kid is here now, up against some of the same things we were. And the only two people in the world that he has anything in common with choose to turn their backs on him. I hate that.”

“What are you, in love with him?”

“I feel sorry for him.”

“We didn’t ask him to come here.”

“It was lousy of me just to dump him out on the streets to shift for himself in the City of the Dead. It’s going to be lousy of us to tell him that he’s wasted his time coming here, that we don’t want to be rescued, thank you very much but no deal. How would you feel if you came charging in to be somebody’s savior and got told something like that?” She shook her head firmly. “We have to go to see him.”

“You’re suddenly so soft-hearted. You surprise me.”

“Do I?” she said. “And here I was thinking you were the soft-hearted one. Secretly, behind the grim facade.”

“How discerning you are. But I still don’t want to see him.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

She moved closer to him.

“We have to. That’s all there is to it.”

“Well—”

“Do you think he’s a magician? A hypnotist? He’s just a kid, and we’ve got him locked safely away besides. He can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. Come with me.”

“No.”

“Come on, Roger.”

“Well—”

“Come. Now.”

She led him, still grumbling, out of the building, past the temple of Amenhotep II and the pylons of Tuthmosis I and Tuthmosis III, down the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes and into the Precinct of Mut. The storeroom where she had parked Davis for safe-keeping was partly below-ground, a cool, clammy-walled crypt not very different from a dungeon. When they entered it, Davis was sitting huddled on the straw-covered floor next to a shattered statue in pink granite of some forgotten king that had been tossed into the room for storage two or three or five hundred years earlier. The Egyptians never threw anything away.

He looked up and glared balefully at her.

“This is Roger Lehman,” she said. “Roger, I want you to meet Edward Davis.”

“It’s about fucking time,” Davis said.

Lehman extended his hand in a tentative, uncertain way. Davis ignored it.

“You look a whole lot older than I expected,” Davis said. “I would never have recognized you. Especially in that cockeyed costume.”

“Thank you.”

“You expect me to be polite?” Davis asked bitterly. “Why? What the hell kind of fucking reception did you people give me? You think it was fun, falling across three and a half thousand years? Have you forgotten what that feels like? And then what happens to me when I get here? First she ships me across the river to be an embalmer’s apprentice. After which she throws me in this hole in the ground when I come back over. What am I, your enemy? Don’t you two stupid monkeys realize that I’m here to goddamn rescue you?”

“There’s a lot you don’t understand,” Sandburg said.

“Damn right there is. I’d like you to tell me—”

“Wait,” Lehman said. Sandburg shot him an irritated look and started to speak, but he held up his hand to silence her. To Davis he said, “Talk to us about this rescue plan of yours, first. What’s the arrangement?”

“I’m on a thirty-day mission. We don’t need the full thirty, now that I’ve found you so fast, but we’ve got to wait it out anyway, right? On the thirtieth day they’ll drop the jump field into an alleyway just north of Luxor Temple. It’s the one I landed in, with a graffito on the wall pronouncing a curse on some wine-merchant who screwed one of his customers. The field arrives at noon sharp, but of course we’re there waiting for it a couple of hours before that. The rainbow lights up, the three of us step inside, away we go. Back home in a flash. You don’t know how hard they’ve been working, trying to locate you two.”

“They couldn’t have been in much of a hurry,” Lehman said. “Did Elaine tell you we’ve been here fifteen years?”

“In the Home Era time-line you’ve only been missing for a year and a half. And they’ve been running calculations non-stop most of that time. I’m sorry we couldn’t match up the displacement factors any better, but you’ve got to understand it was really just a stab in the dark sending me to the year they did. We had a twenty-year probability window to deal with.”

“I’m sure they did their best,” Sandburg said. “And you too. We appreciate your coming here.”

“Then why did you send me to—”

She held up her hand. “You don’t understand the situation, Edward.”

“Damned right I don’t.”

“There are certain factors that we have to explain. You see, we don’t actually—”

“Wait a second, Elaine,” Lehman said sharply.

“Roger, I—”

“Wait a second.”

It was his priest-voice again, his stony Senmut-Ptah voice. Sandburg peered at him in astonishment. His face was flushed, his eyes were strangely glossy.

He said, “Before you tell him anything, we need to have a discussion, Elaine. You and I.”

She looked at him blankly. “What’s to discuss?”

“Come outside and I’ll tell you.”

“What the hell is this all about?”

“Outside,” Lehman said. “I have to insist.”

She gave him a glance of cool appraisal. But he was unreadable.

“Whatever you say, O Senmut-Ptah.”