"You obviously have no conception of its intrinsic value. Or, if you do…"
"On the contrary, I know exactly what it's worth."
"… And those unfortunate creatures you have working down there"-his voice rose as he studied the scene-"under the hot rays of your ugly sun-they're laboring under the most primitive conditions! Haven't you ever heard of moving machinery?"
"Of course. It's expensive."
"And your foremen are carrying whips! How can you treat your own people that way? It's perverse!"
"All those men volunteered for the job, at token salaries-and Actors' Equity won't let us use the whips, even though the men argued in favor of it. All we're allowed to do is crack them in the air near them."
"Actors' Equity?"
"Their union.-Want to see some machinery?" I gestured. "Look up on that hill."
He did.
"What's going on there?"
"We're recording it on viewtape."
"To what end?"
"When we're finished we're going to edit it down to viewable length and run it backwards. 'The Building of the Great Pyramid,' we're going to call it. Should be good for some laughs-also money. Your historians have been conjecturing as to exactly how we put it together ever since the day they heard about it. This may make them somewhat happier. I decided a B.F.M.I. operation would go over best."
"B.F.M.I.?"
"Brute Force and Massive Ignorance. Look at them hamming it up, will you?-following the camera, lying down and standing up quickly when it swings in their direction. They'll be collapsing all over the place in the finished product. But then, this is the first Earthfilm in years. They're real excited."
Dos Santos regarded Red Wig's bared teeth and the bunched muscles beneath her eyes. He glared at the pyramid.
"You are a madman!" he announced.
"No," I replied. "The absence of a monument can, in its own way, be something of a monument also."
"A monument to Conrad Nomikos," he stated.
"No," said Red Wig then. "There is destructive art as surely as there is creative art. I think he may be attempting such a thing. He is playing Caligula. Perhaps I can even see why."
"Thank you."
"You are not welcome. I said 'perhaps.'-An artist does it with love."
"Love is a negative form of hatred."
"'I am dying, Egypt, dying,'" said Ellen.
Myshtigo laughed.
"You are tougher than I thought, Nomikos," he observed. "But you are not indispensable."
"Try having a civil servant fired-especially me."
"It might be easier than you think."
"We’ll see."
"We may."
We turned again toward the great 90 percent pyramid of Cheops/Khufu. Myshtigo began taking notes once more.
"I'd rather you viewed it from here, for now," I said. "Our presence would waste valuable footage. We're anachronisms. We can go down during coffee break."
"I agree," said Myshtigo, "and I am certain I know an anachronism when I see one. But I have seen all that I care to here. Let us go back to the inn. I wish to talk with the locals."
After a moment, "I'll see Sakkara ahead of schedule, then," he mused. "You haven't begun dismantling all the monuments of Luxor, Karnak, and the Valley of Kings yet, have you?"
"Not yet, no."
"Good. Then we'll visit them ahead of time."
"Then let's not stand here," said Ellen. "This heat is beastly."
So we returned.
"Do you really mean everything you say?" asked Diane as we walked back.
"In my fashion."
"How do you think of such things?"
"In Greek, of course. Then I translate them into English. I'm real good at it."
"Who are you?"
"Ozymandias. Look on my works ye mighty and despair."
"I'm not mighty."
"I wonder…" I said, and I left the part of her face that I could see wearing a rather funny expression as we walked along.
"Let me tell you of the boadile," said I.
Our felucca moved slowly along that dazzling waterpath that burns its way before the great gray colonnades of Luxor. Myshtigo's back was to me. He was staring at those columns, dictating an occasional impression.
"Where will we put ashore?" he asked me.
"About a mile further up ahead. Perhaps I had better tell you about the boadile."
"I know what a boadile is. I told you that I had studied your world."
"Uh-huh. Reading about them is one thing…"
"I have also seen boadiles. There are four in the Earth-garden on Taler."
"… and seeing them in a tank is another thing."
"Between yourself and Hasan we are a veritable floating arsenal. I count three grenades on your belt, four on his."
"You can't use a grenade if one is on top of you-not without defeating the purpose of self-defense, that is. If it's any further away you can't hit it with one. They move too fast."
He finally turned.
"What do you use?"
I reached inside my galabieh (having gone native) and withdrew the weapon I always try to have on hand when I come this way.
He examined it.
"Name it."
"It's a machine-pistol. Fires meta-cyanide slugs-one ton impact when a round strikes. Not real accurate, but that's not necessary. It's patterned after a twentieth century handgun called a Schmeisser."
"It's rather unwieldy. Will it stop a boadile?"
"If you're lucky. I have a couple more in one of the cases. Want one?"
"No, thank you." He paused. "But you can tell me more about the boadile. I really only glanced at them that day, and they were pretty well submerged."
"Well… Head something like a croc's, only bigger. Around forty feet long. Able to roll itself into a big beach-ball with teeth. Fast on land or in water-and a hell of a lot of little legs on each side-"
"How many legs?" he interrupted.
"Hm." I stopped. "To tell you the absolute truth, I've never counted. Just a second.
"Hey, George," I called out, to where Earth's eminent chief biologist lay dozing in the shade of the sail. "How many legs on a boadile?"
"Huh?" His head turned.
"I said, 'How many legs on a boadile?'"
He rose to his feet, stretched slightly and came up beside us.
"Boadiles," he mused, poking a finger into his ear and leafing through the files inside. "They're definitely of the class reptilia-of that much we're certain. Whether they're of the order crocodilia, suborder of their own, or whether they're of the order squamata, suborder lacertilia, family neopoda-as a colleague of mine on Taler half-seriously insists-we are not certain. To me they are somewhat reminiscent of pre-Three Day photo-reproductions of artists' conceptions of the Mesozoic phytosaurus with, of course, the supernumerary legs and the constrictive ability. So I favor the order crocodilia myself."
He leaned on the rail and stared out across the shimmering water.
I saw then that he wasn't about to say anything else, so, "So how many legs on one?" I asked again.
"Eh? Legs? I never counted them. If we're lucky we might get a chance to, though. There are lots around here.-The young one I had didn't last too long."
"What happened to it?" asked Myshtigo.
"My megadonaplaty ate it."
"Megadonaplaty?"
"Sort of like a duck-billed platypus with teeth," I explained, "and about ten feet high. Picture that. So far as we know, they've only been seen about three or four times. Australian. We got ours through a fortunate accident. Probably won't last, as a species-the way boadiles will, I mean. They're oviparous mammals, and their eggs are too large for a hungry world to permit the continuance of the species-if it is a true species. Maybe they're just isolated sports."
"Perhaps," said George, nodding wisely; "and then again perhaps not."
Myshtigo turned away, shaking his head.
Hasan had partly unpacked his robot g
olem-rolem-and was fooling with its controls. Ellen had finally given up on simicoloring and was lying in the sun getting burnt all over. Red Wig and Dos Santos were plotting something at the other end of the vessel. Those two never just meet; they always have assignations. Our felucca moved slowly along the dazzling waterpath that burns its way before the great gray colonnades of Luxor, and I decided it was time to head it in toward the shore and see what was new among the tombs and ruined temples.
The next six days were rather eventful and somewhat unforgettable, extremely active, and sort of ugly-beautiful-in the way that a flower can be, with its petals all intact and a dark and runny rot-spot in the center. Here's how…
Myshtigo must have interviewed every stone ram along the four miles of the Way to Karnak. Both in the blaze of day and by torchlight we navigated the ruins, disturbing bats, rats, snakes and insects, listening to the Vegan's monotonous note-taking in his monotonous language. At night we camped on the sands, setting up a two hundred meter electrical warning perimeter and posting two guards. The boadile is cold-blooded; the nights were chill. So there was relatively little danger from without.
Huge campfires lighted the nights, all about the areas we chose, because the Vegan wanted things primitive-for purposes of atmosphere, I guessed. Our Skimmers were further south. We had flown them to a place I knew of and left them there under Office guard, renting the felucca for our trip-which paralleled the King-God's journey from Karnak to Luxor. Myshtigo had wanted it that way. Nights, Hasan would either practice with the assagai he had bartered from a big Nubian, or he would strip to the waist and wrestle for hours with his tireless rolem.
A worthy opponent was the rolem. Hasan had it programmed at twice the statistically-averaged strength of a man and had upped its reflex-time by fifty percent. Its "memory" contained hundreds of wrestling holds, and its governor theoretically prevented it from killing or maiming its opponent-all through a series of chemelectrical afferent nerve-analogues which permitted it to gauge to an ounce the amount of pressure necessary to snap a bone or tear a tendon. Rolem was about five feet, six inches in height and weighed around two hundred fifty pounds; manufactured on Bakab, he was quite expensive, was dough-colored and caricature-featured, and his brains were located somewhere below where his navel would be-if golems had navels-to protect his thinkstuff from Greco-Roman shocks. Even as it is, accidents can happen. People have been killed by the things, when something goes amok in the brains or some afferents, or just because the people themselves slipped or tried to jerk away, supplying the necessary extra ounces. I'd had one once, for almost a year, programmed for boxing. I used to spend fifteen minutes or so with it every afternoon. Got to thinking of it as a person, almost. Then one day it fouled me and I pounded it for over an hour and finally knocked its head off. The thing kept right on boxing, and I stopped thinking of it as a friendly sparring partner right then. It's a weird feeling, boxing with a headless golem, you know? Sort of like waking from a pleasant dream and finding a nightmare crouched at the foot of your bed. It doesn't really "see" its opponent with those eye-things it has; it's all sheathed about with piezoelectric radar mesentery, and it "watches" from all its surfaces. Still, the death of an illusion tends to disconcert, I turned mine off and never turned it back on again. Sold it to a camel trader for a pretty good price. Don't know if he ever got the head back on. But he was a Turk, so who cares?
Anyway-Hasan would tangle with rolem, both of them gleaming in the firelight, and we'd all sit on blankets and watch, and bats would swoop low occasionally, like big, fast ashes, and emaciated clouds would cover the moon, veil-like, and then move on again. It was that way on the third night, when I went mad.
I remember it only in the way you remember a passing countryside you might have seen through a late summer evening storm-as a series of isolated, lightning-filled still-shots…
Having spoken with Cassandra for the better part of an hour, I concluded the transmission with a promise to cop a Skimmer the following afternoon and spend the next night on Kos. I recall our last words.
"Take care, Konstantin. I have been dreaming bad dreams."
"Bosh, Cassandra. Good night."
And who knows but that her dreams might have been the result of a temporal shockwave moving backwards from a 9.6 Richter reading?
A certain cruel gleam filling his eyes, Dos Santos applauded as Hasan hurled golem to the ground with a thunderous crash. That particular earthshaker continued, however, long after the golem had climbed back to his feet and gotten into another crouch, his arms doing serpent-things in the Arab's direction. The ground shook and shook.
"What power! Still do I feel it!" cried Dos Santos. "Ole!"
"It is a seismic disturbance," said George. "Even though I'm not a geologist-"
"Earthquake!" yelled his wife, dropping an unpasteurized date she had been feeding Myshtigo.
There was no reason to run, no place to run to. There was nothing nearby that could fall on us. The ground was level and pretty barren. So we just sat there and were thrown about, even knocked flat a few times. The fires did amazing things.
Rolem's time was up and he went stiff then, and Hasan came and sat with George and me. The tremors lasted the better part of an hour, and they came again, more weakly, many times during that night. After the first bad shock had run its course, we got in touch with the Port. The instruments there showed that the center of the thing lay a good distance to the north of us.
A bad distance, really.
… In the Mediterranean.
The Aegean, to be more specific.
I felt sick, and suddenly I was.
I tried to put through a call to Kos.
Nothing.
My Cassandra, my lovely lady, my princess… Where was she? For two hours I tried to find out. Then the Port called me.
It was Lorel's voice, not just some lob watch operator's.
"Uh-Conrad, I don't know how to tell you, exactly, what happened…"
"Just talk," I said, "and stop when you're finished."
"An observe-satellite passed your way about twelve minutes ago," he crackled across the bands. "Several of the Aegean islands were no longer present in the pictures it transmitted…"
"No," I said.
"I'm afraid that Kos was one of them."
"No," I said.
"I'm sorry," he told me, "but that is the way it shows. I don't know what else to say…"
"That's enough," I said. "That's all. That's it. Goodbye. We'll talk more later. No! I guess-No!"
"Wait! Conrad!"
I went mad.
Bats, shaken loose from the night, were swooping about me. I struck out with my right hand and killed one as it flashed in my direction. I waited a few seconds and killed another. Then I picked up a big rock with both hands and was about to smash the radio when George laid a hand on my shoulder, and I dropped the rock and knocked his hand away and backhanded him across the mouth. I don't know what became of him then, but as I stooped to raise the rock once more I heard the sound of footfalls behind me. I dropped to one knee and pivoted on it, scooping up a handful of sand to throw in someone's eyes. They were all of them there: Myshtigo and Red Wig and Dos Santos, Rameses, Ellen, three local civil servants, and Hasan-approaching in a group. Someone yelled "Scatter!" when they saw my face, and they fanned out.
Then they were everyone I'd ever hated-I could feel it. I saw other faces, heard other voices. Everyone I'd ever known, hated, wanted to smash, had smashed, stood there resurrected before the fire, and only the whites of their teeth were showing through the shadows that crossed over their faces as they smiled and came toward me, bearing various dooms in their hands, and soft, persuasive words on their lips-so I threw the sand at the foremost and rushed him.
My uppercut knocked him over backward, then two Egyptians were on me from both sides.
I shook them loose, and in the corner of my colder eye saw a great Arab with something like a black avocado in his hand. He was swinging it toward m
y head, so I dropped down. He had been coming in my direction and I managed to give his stomach more than just a shove, so he sat down suddenly. Then the two men I had thrown away were back on me again. A woman was screaming, somewhere in the distance, but I couldn't see any women.
I tore my right arm free and batted someone with it, and the man went down and another took his place. From straight ahead a blue man threw a rock which struck me on the shoulder and only made me madder. I raised a kicking body into the air and threw it against another, then I hit someone with my fist. I shook myself. My galabieh was torn and dirty, so I tore it the rest of the way off and threw it away.
I looked around. They had stopped coming at me, and it wasn't fair-it wasn't fair that they should stop then when I wanted so badly to see things breaking. So I raised up the man at my feet and slapped him down again. Then I raised him up again and someone yelled "Eh! Karaghiosis!" and began calling me names in broken Greek. I let the man fall back to the ground and turned.
There, before the fire-there were two of them: one tall and bearded, the other squat and heavy and hairless and molded out of a mixture of putty and earth.
"My friend says he will break you, Greek!" called out the tall one, as he did something to the other's back.
I moved toward them and the man of putty and mud sprang at me.
He tripped me, but I came up again fast and caught him beneath the armpits and threw him off to the side. But he recovered his footing as rapidly as I had, and he came back again and caught me behind the neck with one hand. I did the same to him, also seizing his elbow-and we locked together there, and he was strong.
Because he was strong, I kept changing holds, testing his strength. He was also fast, accommodating every move I made almost as soon as I thought of it.
I threw my arms up between his, hard, and stepped back on my reinforced leg. Freed for a moment, we orbited each other, seeking another opening.
I kept my arms low and I was bent well forward because of his shortness. For a moment my arms were too near my sides, and he moved in faster than I had seen anyone move before, ever, and he caught me in a body lock that squeezed the big flat flowers of moisture out of my pores and caused a great pain in my sides.
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