by Paula Guran
“The pink underwear story, yes.” Petrie gave a slight smile. “Yes, it sometimes pays very well if people think you’re a harmless fool. They’ll let you in anywhere.”
As Lewis prepared to say something suitably naïve in response, children came streaming from the mouth of the shaft like chattering swallows. A moment later an Egyptian followed them and walked swiftly to Petrie, before whom he bowed and said: “Sir, you will want to come see now.”
Petrie nodded once, giving Lewis a sidelong glance.
“What did I tell you?” said Lewis, beaming.
“What indeed?” said Petrie. “Come along then, boy, and let’s see if your instincts are as good as you think they are.”
The mouth of the shaft had been blocked, as all the others there had been blocked, with centuries of mud and debris from flood run-off, and it was hard as red cement and had taken days of labor to clear in tiny increments. But the way was now clear to the entrance of the tomb chamber itself, where a mere window had been chiseled through into stifling darkness. A Qufti waiting with a lantern held it up and through the hole, flattening himself against the wall as Petrie rushed forward to peer inside.
“Good God!” cried Petrie, and his voice cracked in excitement. “Is the lid intact? Look at the thing, it hasn’t been touched! But how can that be?” He thrust himself through, head and shoulders, in his effort to see better, and the Qufti holding the lamp attempted to make himself even flatter, without success, as Petrie’s body wedged his arm firmly into the remaining four inches of window space and caused him to utter a faint involuntary cry of pain.
“Sorry. Oh, bugger all—” Petrie pulled backward and stripped off his shirt. Then he kicked off his slippers, tossed his cap down on top of them, and yanked open his trousers. The sole remaining fly button hit the wall with the force of a bullet, but was ignored as he dropped his pants and jumped free, naked as Adam.
“Your trowel, sir,” said the Qufti, offering it with his good arm as he drew back.
“Thank you, Ali.” Petrie took the trowel, draped his shirt over the window ledge, and vaulted up and through with amazing energy for a man of his years, so that Lewis and Ali endured no more than a few seconds of averting their eyes as his bottom and then legs and feet vanished into stygian blackness.
“Er—what a remarkable man,” observed Lewis.
The Qufti just nodded, rubbing his arm.
“GIVE ME THE LAMP!” ordered Petrie, appearing in the hole for a moment. “And keep the others out of here for the present, do you understand? I want a clear field.” He turned on Lewis a glare keen enough to cut through limestone. “Well? Don’t you want to see your astonishing discovery, Mr Kensington? I’d have thought you’d have been beside yourself to be the first in!”
“Well—ah—I’m certain I couldn’t hope to learn as much from it as you would, Professor,” said Lewis.
Petrie laughed grimly. “I wonder. Never mind, boy, grab a trowel and crawl through. And don’t be an old maid! It’s a sweat bath in here.”
“Yes, sir,” said Lewis, racing for the mouth of the shaft, and for all his embarrassment and reluctance there was still a little gleeful voice at the back of his mind singing: I’m on a real Egyptian archaeological dig with Flinders Petrie! The Father of Archaeology! Gosh!
In the end he compromised by stripping down to his drawers, and though Petrie set him to the inglorious task of whittling away at the window to enlarge the chamber’s access while he himself worked at clearing the granite sarcophagus, Lewis spent a wonderful afternoon.
His sense of rapport with the Master in his Element kept him diverted from the fact that he was an undersized cyborg wearing nothing but a pair of striped drawers, chipping fecklessly at fossilized mud while sweat dripped from the end of his nose, one drop precisely every 43.3 seconds, or that he was trapped in a small hot enclosed space with an elderly mortal who had certain intestinal problems.
The great man’s vocal utterances were limited to grunts of effort and growls of surprise, with the occasional “Hold the damned light over here a moment, can’t you?” But Lewis, in all the luxury of close proximity and uninterrupted except for having to pass the debris-basket out the hole on a regular basis, was learning a great deal by scanning Petrie as he worked.
He was not learning the sort of things he had expected to learn, however.
For example, his visual recordings of Petrie were not going to be as edifying as he’d hoped: the Master in his Element appeared nothing like a stately cross between Moses and Indiana Jones, as depicted in the twenty-fourth century. He resembled a naked lunatic trying to tunnel out of an asylum. That didn’t matter, though, in light of the fascinating data Lewis was picking up as he scanned Petrie’s brain activity.
It looked like a lightning storm, especially through the frontal lobes.
There were connections being made that were not ordinarily made in a mortal mind. Patterns in data were instantly grasped and analyzed, fundamental organizational relationships perceived that mortals did not, as a rule, perceive, and jumps of logic of dazzling clarity followed. Lewis was enchanted. He watched the cerebral fireworks display, noted the slight depression in one temple and pondered the possibility of early brain trauma rerouting Petrie’s neural connections in some marvelous inexplicable way . . .
“I must say, sir, this is a great honor for me,” said Lewis hesitantly. “Meeting and actually working with a man of your extraordinary ability.”
“Nothing to do with ability, boy,” replied Petrie, giving him a stare over the edge of the sarcophagus. “It’s simply a matter of paying attention to details. That’s all it is. Most of the people out here in the old days were nothing more than damned looters. Go at it with a pick and blasting powder! Find the gold! Didn’t care tuppence for the fact that they were crumbling history under their bloody boots.”
“Like the library of Mendes,” said Lewis, with bitter feeling.
“You remember that, do you?” Petrie cocked a shaggy eyebrow at him. “Remarkable; that was back in ’92. You can’t have been more than an infant at the time.”
“Well, er, yes, but my father read about it in The Times, you see,” temporized Lewis. “And he talked about it for years, and he shared your indignation, if I may say so. That would have been Naville, wouldn’t it, who found all those rooms filled with ancient papyri, and was so ham-fisted he destroyed most of them in the excavation!” His vengeful trowel stabbed clay and sent a chip whizzing into the darkness.
“So he did,” said Petrie, picking up the chip and squinting at it briefly before setting it in the debris basket. “I called him a vandal and he very nearly called me out. Said it was ridiculous to expect an archaeologist to note the placement of items uncovered in a dig, as though one were to note where the raisins were in a plum pudding! Mark that metaphor, you see, that’s all an excavation meant to him: Dig your spoon in and gobble away! Never a thought for learning anything about what he was digging up.”
“And meanwhile who knew what was being lost?” Lewis mourned.
“Plays. Poetry. Textbooks. Histories.”
Petrie considered him a long moment before speaking again, and Lewis was once more aware of the bright storm in the old man’s head.
“We can never know,” Petrie said. “Damn him and everyone like him. How can we ever know the truth about the past? Historians lie; time wrecks everything. But if you’re careful, boy, if you’re methodical, if you measure and record and look for the bloody boring little details, like potsherds, and learn what they mean—you can get the dead to speak again, out of their ashes. That’s worth more than all the gold and amulets in the world, that’s the work of my life. That’s what I was born for. Nothing matters except my work.”
“I know exactly what you mean!” said Lewis.
“Do you?” said Petrie quietly.
They worked on in silence for a while after that.
At some point in the long afternoon the auroral splendor of Petrie’s mind grew particu
larly bright, and he cried out, “What the deuce?”
“Oh, have you found something, Professor?” Lewis stood and peered at the area of the sarcophagus that had just been cleared. There were hieroglyphs deep-cut in the pink granite. “The Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet? Oh, my, surely that’s a very good sign.”
And then he almost exclaimed aloud, because Petrie’s mind became like a glowing sun, such a magnificence of cerebration that Lewis felt humbled. But Petrie merely looked at him, and said flatly:
“Perhaps it is. It’s damned unusual, anyway. Never seen a seal quite like that on the outer sarcophagus before.”
“Really?” Lewis felt a little shiver of warning. “Do you think it’s significant?”
“Yes,” said Petrie. “I’m sure it is.”
“How exciting,” said Lewis cautiously, and turned back to chipping away at the wall.
By twilight, when the first blessed coolness rose in salt mist from the canals, it was still hot and stinking in the tomb. Lewis wiped his face with the back of his hand, leaving a streak of red mud above one eye, and said casually, “I suppose we’d better stop for today.”
“Absolutely not,” said Petrie. “I’ve very nearly cleared the lid. Another forty-five minutes’ work ought to do it. Don’t you want to see Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet, boy?” He grinned ferociously at Lewis.
“More than anything, sir,” said Lewis, truthfully. “But do you really want to rush a discovery of this importance? I’d much rather get a good night’s sleep, wouldn’t you, and start fresh tomorrow?”
Petrie was silent a moment, eyeing him. “I suppose so,” he said at last. “Very well. Though, of course, someone ought to sleep in here tonight. Standing guard, you know.”
“Allow me to volunteer!” said Lewis, doing his best to look frightfully keen. “Please, sir, it would be an honor.”
“As you like.” Petrie stroked his beard. “I’ll have supper and your bedroll sent out to you. Will that suit?”
It suited Lewis very well indeed, and two hours later he was stretched out in his blankets on the lid of the sarcophagus, listening to the sounds of the camp in its rituals as it gradually retired for the night.
He found it comforting, because it was much more like the sound of mortals retiring for the night the way they had over the centuries when he had been getting used to them: the low murmur of a story being told, the cry of a dreaming child, the scrape of a campfire being banked.
Modern rooms were sealed against sound, and nights had become less human. In London, you might hear distant waterworks or steam pipes, or the finny clamor of a radio or a phonograph, or the creak of furniture.
You might hear electricity, if it had been laid on, humming through the walls. Humanity was sealing itself away in tidy boxes.
“But,” he said to himself aloud, looking up at the ceiling of the tomb, “they used to do that, too, didn’t they? Though not while they were still alive.” He sat up cautiously and groped for his lantern. “At least not intentionally.”
He lit the lantern and set to work at once, chiseling away at the last layer of mud sealing the lid of the sarcophagus. It went much more quickly when you didn’t have to carefully collect every single chip and pass it out through the entrance in a basket, and Lewis felt certain qualms about the debris he was scattering everywhere.
“But we’ll leave the professor a treat to make up for it, won’t we, Princess?” he muttered. “And, after all, history can’t be changed.” Five minutes later he had freed enough of the lid to be able to toss the trowel aside and prise an edge up, and he yanked the granite slab free as though it were so much balsa wood.
“Wow!” he said, although he had known what he would see.
There was a mummy case reposing there, smiling up through a layer of grime as though it had been expecting him, and in a manner of speaking it had been. It represented a lady bound all in golden cerements, and painted about her shoulders was a feathered cape in every shade of lemon and amber, set here and there with painted representations of topazes and citrines. Her features closely resembled Lady Kiu’s, save that there was a warmth and life in her eyes missing from the living eyes of Lady Kiu.
Under the dust, the whole case gleamed with a thick coat of varnish of glasslike smoothness and transparency. An analysis of its chemical structure would have startled scientists, if there had been any with electron microscopes or spectrographs in 1914. Lewis couldn’t resist reaching down to stroke along the side where the case was sealed, and could feel no seam or join at all. It would take a diamond-edged saw to get the box open, but that was all right; it had served its purpose.
The chest at the top of the tomb had had no such treatment, and it had fallen to pieces where it stood, splitting open under the sheer mass of the treasure it contained: a crown of burnished gold, two golden pectorals inlaid with precious stones, coiled necklaces, armlets, collars, boudoir items, beadwork in amethyst, in carnelian, turquoise, lapis lazuli, obsidian, ivory.
“Let’s get this mess out of the way, shall we?” said Lewis, and, reaching in, he picked up as much of the treasure as he could in one grab and dumped it unceremoniously into a recess in the wall at one side. Beads scattered and rolled here and there, but he ignored them. It was just so much jewelry, after all, and he was fixed and focused on his objective as only a cyborg can be.
“Now, Princess,” he said, giggling slightly as he leaned down to lift the mummy case from its dais, “shall we dance? You and I? I’m quite a good dancer. I can two-step like nobody’s business. Oh, you’ll like it out in the world again! I’ll take you on a railway ride, though not first-class accommodations I’m afraid—” He set the case, which was as big as he was, down while he considered how best to get it through the opening.
“But that’ll be all right, because then we’ll go for a sail down the Nile, and that will be much nicer. Quite like old times, eh?” Deciding the time for neatness had passed, he simply aimed a series of kicks and punches at certain spots on the wall. He did not seem to exert much force, but the wall cracked in a dozen places and toppled outward into the tomb shaft.
“Literature Preservationist Lewis, super-cyborg!” he gloated, striking an attitude, and then froze with an expression of dismay on his face.
Flinders Petrie stood in the shaft without, just at the edge of the lamplight. He was surveying the wreckage of the wall with leonine fury, and the fact that he was wearing a pink singlet, pink ballet tutu and pink-ribboned slippers did nothing to detract from the terror of his anger.
Nor did the rifle he was aiming at Lewis’s head.
“Come out of there, you little bastard,” he said. “Look at the mess you’ve made!”
“I’m sorry!” said Lewis.
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be,” the old mortal told him. “I knew you were a damned marauder from the moment I laid eyes on you.” He settled the rifle more securely on his shoulder. “Though I couldn’t fathom the rest of it. What’s a super-cyborg? What the hell are you, eh?”
Lewis raced mentally through possible believable answers, and decided on: “I’m afraid you’re right. I’m a thief. I was paid a lot of money by a certain French count to bring back antiquities for his collection. The Comte de la, er, Cyborg. He ordered me to infiltrate your expedition, because everyone knows you’re the best—”
“Bollocks,” said Petrie. “I mean what are you?”
Lewis blinked at him. “What?” he repeated.
“What kind of thing are you? You’re no human creature, that much is obvious,” said Petrie.
“It is?” In spite of his horror, Lewis was fascinated. He scanned Petrie’s brain activity and found it a roiling wasps’ nest of sparks.
“It is to me, boy,” said Petrie. “Mosquitoes won’t bite you, for one thing. You speak like an actor on the stage, for another. You move like a machine, mathematically exact. I’ve timed the things you do.”
“What kinds of things?” Lewis asked, delighted.
“Blinki
ng once every thirty seconds precisely, for example,” said Flinders Petrie. “Except in moments when you’re pretending to be surprised, as you were just now. But there’s not much that surprises you, is there? You knew about this shaft, you very nearly dragged Ali to this spot and showed him where to dig. It was so we’d do all the work for you, wasn’t it? And then you’d make off with whatever was inside.”
“Well, I’m afraid I—”
“You’re not afraid. Your pupils aren’t dilating as a man’s would,” said Petrie relentlessly. “You haven’t changed color, and you’re breathing in perfect mechanical rhythm.” But his own hand shook slightly as he pulled back the hammer on the rifle. “You’re some kind of brilliantly complicated automaton, though I’m damned if I can think who made you.”
“That’s an insane idea, you know,” said Lewis, gauging how much space there was between Petrie and the side of the shaft. “People will think you’re mad as a hatter if you tell anyone.”
Petrie actually chuckled. “Do I look like a man who cares if people think I’m mad?” he said. He cut a bizarre little jeté, pink slippers flashing. “It’s bloody useful, in fact, to be taken for a lunatic. Why d’you think I keep this ensemble in my kit? If I blew your head off this minute, dressed as I happen to be, I should certainly be acquitted of murder on grounds of insanity. Wouldn’t you think so?”
“You are absolutely the most astonishing mortal I have ever met,” said Lewis sincerely.
“And you’re not mortal, obviously. What would I see if I fired this gun, Mr Kensington? Bits of clockwork flying apart? Magnetic ichor? Who made you? Why? I want to know! What are you for?”
“Please don’t shoot!” cried Lewis. “I was born as mortal as you are! If a bullet hit me I’d bleed and feel an awful lot of pain, but I wouldn’t die. I can never die.” Inspiration struck him. “Think about The Book of the Dead. All the mummies you’ve unearthed, Professor, think of all the priests and embalmers who worked over them, trying to follow instructions they barely understood. What were they trying to do?”
