Thebes of the Hundred Gates

Eight

They stood in the darkness of the garden of the Precinct of Mut. Torches flickered in the distance. Somewhere, far away, the priests of Amon were chanting the evening prayer. From another direction came a more raucous sound: sailors singing down by the riverfront.

Lehman’s long, gaunt figure towered above her. Lines of strain were evident in his face. It had taken on the same strange expression that had come over him the week before, the night when she had first told him of the arrival of a member of the Service in Thebes.

“Well?” she said, perhaps a little too harshly.

“Let me think how to put this, Elaine.”

“Put what?”

He made a despairing gesture. “Wait, will you? Let me think.”

“Think, then.”

She paced in a fretful circle around him. A dim figure appeared on the pylon of a distant temple and unhurriedly began to take in the pennants for the night. Some dark-winged nocturnal bird fluttered by just overhead, stirring faint currents in the warm air.

Lehman said finally, speaking as though every word were very expensive, “What I need to tell you, Elaine, is that I’m half inclined to go back with him. More than half.”

“You son of a bitch!”

He looked abashed, uncomfortable. “Now do you see why I told you I didn’t want to see him? You yourself pointed out last week that there were risks in talking to him, that it could stir up troublesome old memories. Well, it has.” Lehman touched his hand to his forehead. “If you only knew how I’ve been churning inside since he got here. Every day it’s gotten a little worse. We should have simply kept clear of him, the way we had always planned to do if anyone came. But no. No. Bad enough that he stumbled right into you first thing. You still had the option of keeping your mouth shut. No, you had to spill everything, didn’t you? And now—now—” He scowled at her. “I was wavering even then, last week.”

“I know you were. I saw it. We talked about it.”

“I was able to put the idea away then. But now—”

“Just seeing him, that was enough to make you want to go back down the line? Why, Roger? Why?”

Lehman was silent again for a time. He scuffed at the ground with his sandaled foot. A young priest appeared from somewhere, staggering under the jeweled and gilded image of a cobra taller than he was, and came stumbling toward Lehman as though wanting to ask him some question about it. Lehman waved the boy away with a curt, furious gesture.

Then in a remote voice he said, “Because I’m starting to think that maybe we should. We’ve done all right for ourselves here, sure, but how long can our luck hold out? For one thing, consider the health angle. I don’t mean the exotic diseases they have here: I assume our immunizations will continue to hold out. I’m just talking about the normal aging process. We have to keep in mind that this is a primitive country in many ways, especially where it comes to medicine, and we’re starting to get older. It won’t be easy for us here when the medical problems begin—the big ones, the little ones, the medium ones. You want someone to help you get through your menopause with powdered scarab and a tincture of goose turds and a prayer to Thoth?”

“I’m doing all right so far.”

“And if you develop a lump in one of your breasts?”

“They have surgeons here. It isn’t all goose turds and powdered beetles. Why this sudden burst of hypochondria, Roger?”

“I’m just being realistic.”

“Well, so am I. I don’t know what you’re worrying about. This is a clean, healthy place, if you happen to belong to the privileged classes, and we do. We’ve kept ourselves in good condition the whole time we’ve been here and we’re in terrific shape right now with no sign of problems ahead and we’re going to have really beautiful mummies. What other reasons do you have for going home?”

“I don’t know. Homesickness? Curiosity about what’s been happening back there? Maybe I’ve just had enough of Egypt, that’s all.”

“I’m sorry to hear that. I haven’t.”

“So you want to stay?”

“Of course I do. That hasn’t changed. This is where I want to be, Roger. This is the time and the place that I prefer. I have a good life in a tremendously fascinating period of history and I’m waited on hand and foot and I don’t have to put up with any of the shit of the modern world. I like it here. I thought you did too.”

“I did,” he said. “I do. For so many reasons. But—”

“But now you want to go home.”

“Maybe.”

“Then go,” she said disgustedly. “If that’s what you think you want.”

“Without you?”

“Yes.”

He looked startled. “Do you mean that, Elaine?”

“If they ask where I am, just don’t say anything. Tell them you simply don’t know what happened to me when we overshot Rome. You came out of the jump field and discovered that you weren’t in Rome at all, that you were stranded on your own in Thebes, and there you stayed, shifting for yourself, until this Davis came and got you.”

“I can’t do that. You know what their debriefings are like. Anyway, he’d tell them.”

“Even if I asked him not to?”

“Why would he want to lie for you, Elaine?”

“Maybe he would, if I asked him very nicely. Or maybe he wouldn’t. But in any case, you’ve just said that you’d tell them where I am.”

“I’d have to. Whether or not I wanted to.”

“Then I don’t want you going back, Roger.” Her tone was cold and quiet.

“But—”

“I don’t. I won’t let you do it.”

“Won’t let me?” he repeated.

“That’s right. Not if you’d give me away. And I see now that that’s exactly what you’d do. So I’m not going to let you leave here.”

“How could you stop me?”

She reached out. Her hand rested lightly on his bony wrist. She rubbed her fingertips back and forth over his skin.

Softly she said, “Maybe I’m putting it too strongly. You know I couldn’t stop you if you were really determined to go. But I don’t want you to go. Please. Please, Roger? What I want is for you to stay here with me. I don’t want to be left by myself here.”

“Then come with me.”

“No. No, I won’t do that.” She leaned close to him. “Don’t go, Roger.”

He stared at her, mesmerized.

“We can be wonderful together,” she said, smiling up at him. “We were. We can be again. I’ll see to that, I promise you. It’ll be the way it was for us in the beginning.”

He looked skeptical. “Will it, now?”

“I promise. But stay. There’s nothing for you back there. You’re homesick? For what? You want to rejoin the Service? Hop when they tell you to? Let them ship you around to a lot of strange places? The glory of the Time Service! What glory? It’s just a job, and a damned hard one. You don’t want that any more, do you, Roger? Or maybe they’d give you a desk job. And a nice little one-room apartment with a view of the Potomac, and in ten years you can have your pension and move to Arizona and sit on your porch and watch the cactus grow until you get old. No, listen to me: You want to stay here. This is the right place for us. You’ve said it a million times. You have a life here, a damned good one. Your estate, your slaves, your chariot, your observatory, your—all of it. You don’t want to go back there and be Roger Lehman again. There’s nothing for you in that. You very much prefer being Senmut-Ptah. Don’t you? Don’t you, Roger? Tell me the truth.”

Now he was plainly wavering again, back the other way.

“Well—”

“I know it’s a temptation, wanting to see your own time again. Don’t you think I’ve felt it too, now and then? But it’s not worth it. Giving up all this.”

“Well—”

“Think about it.”

He looked into the distance. The faint warm breeze brought the sound of a harp, some temple slave playing to amuse the elder priests in the Amon temple.

“Think.”

“Yes.”

She watched him. She saw the knots come and go in his craggy face. He was adding up the columns in that precise mathematical way of his, tallying the profits and the losses.

“Well?” she said.

“All right,” he told her. He sounded almost relieved. “Forget what I’ve been saying. We stay in Egypt. Both of us.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“Yes. Yes.”

“Good,” she said. She grinned at him and winked. “And now we ought to go back in there and finish talking to him.”

He nodded. “Yes. We do.”

“Do we understand each other completely now, Roger?”

“Yes. Yes.”

She gave him a long cool look. “Let’s go back inside, then, and get it over with.”

“Not there,” Lehman said. “Not in that miserable musty storeroom. It’s too depressing down in a hole like that. Let’s take him over to my chambers in the observatory, at least. It’ll be a little more civilized, talking to him over there.”

“If you want to.”

“I think we should,” Lehman said.