by Judith Tarr
But more wonderful, too. There were three of her. All so different, all so strange to one another. But all the way down at the root, they were the same.
The bubble left the mainland and sped over the sea. Meru could see the family’s house now, a cluster of walls and domes that seemed to grow out of the cliff. Others rose up in towers or grew like crystals, scattered across the island.
The strangers inside Meru shared visions of their own cities. Meredith showed her a complex mixture of glass and stone and steel, tall towers and low squat houses and everything between. Through Meritre’s eyes she saw a city of enormous stone halls and lower, darker mud-brick structures that used to be full of people, but less so now, since the plague.
Meru went very, very still. “Plague?”
The word struck her with the force of memory, but it was nothing she had known in this life. She heard the coughing, smelled the stink of blood and death, and saw the bodies piled in boats, waiting to be ferried across to the desert.
It was not the same disease that she had seen in the old city. No one had been coughing there. Their lungs filled first, and their organs melted inside the skin.
Still, it was a connection, which was better than anything Consensus had. Maybe it would lead to an answer.
Chapter 19
It had happened. We’d broken through. It took Meru with her interstellar web, and the scarab for all of us to focus on, but we’d done it; we were aware of each other. We could communicate.
The reason for that was still too much for me to get my mind around. I wasn’t ready to face not just reincarnation but—this. Whatever it was.
My first impulse, as usual, was to reach for my phone. But who could I call? Who would believe it? I could barely manage that myself, and I was living it.
“Magical objects do concentrate the mind,” Meritre said inside my head, heart, wherever she was—Meru’s web made as much sense as anything else. “And words can connect a mind to the actual thing.”
You’d think, as far back as she was, with technology that hadn’t even got to the wheel yet, that she’d be the most confused, but she understood all this at least as well as the rest of us. If I was going to be honest, she understood it best of all.
“I set out to work a spell to save my family,” she said. “I’m still going to do that, if I possibly can. But this goes much further. What I thought I was seeing, what I wanted to do, was too small. My eyes looked too low. Now I’ve lifted them, and I can see across thousands of years.”
She thought in patterns—in stories. I did, too. I had a few thousand more years of them to draw on, and when I looked at them, really looked, I saw something that might be a complete coincidence. Or it might be the answer Meru was looking for.
“Look,” I said. “Meru, your mother left a clue: the scarab we’ve all got, and flower that’s as old, maybe, as Meritre. Something preserved that flower for an impossibly long time.”
Meritre’s eyes lit up with understanding, all the way down the river of time. “A tomb,” she said. “Where we preserve the dead for everlasting, with all that they wanted or needed in life, and as many of their belongings as they could wish to have with them. And flowers, for the sweetness, and for remembrance.”
“My mother is—was—always digging in tombs,” Meru said. I heard the catch of her voice when she changed from present to past. I felt the rush of grief, so strong it choked me.
It nearly threw me out of whatever this was. I’d just heard that my mom was going to be dead, if she wasn’t already. Meru knew for a fact that her mother was dead.
I had to wrench my mind away from that and focus on the questions we needed to ask, if we were going to get answers. Maybe it was all imaginary and I was going completely crazy. I didn’t care. It was something to think about besides the unthinkable.
“We have a plague here,” Meritre said. “It’s nearly past. The gods have taken their final sacrifice. Our princess is with the embalmers. When their work is done, she’ll go into her tomb.”
“The tomb we’re looking for,” I said. “The one somewhere around the mortuary temple. Do you think—”
Meru went on for me. “Can that be where it came from? That ancient plague survived somehow, and found its way to the stars, then spread so far and so long that no one even remembers where it started? But it started on Earth—and my mother found it. She tracked it to its source.”
“Earth,” I said. “Egypt. But how could a virus survive for thousands of years?”
Meritre heard virus as demon, which made sense to her. “Demons might scatter to the winds, but they never really die. Some part of them can last forever. Maybe if people can find them and get control of them, they can be forced to work spells that cure the plague.”
What’s a virus, when you think about it, but a really small and really dangerous demon? And what’s a vaccine but a kind of spell that uses the demon’s own power to destroy it?
Meru saw it, too. She nodded, away on the far end of time. “It must have been in the tomb the flower came from.”
“The scarab wasn’t in the tomb,” I said. “They found it in a tunnel that they thought didn’t lead anywhere. Except—”
I stopped. I’d found a door. What if—
“Meritre,” I said. “Do you know where the tomb is?”
“Oh, no,” she said. “That’s always a secret. Nobody knows, except the few who work in it.”
Of course she wouldn’t know. That would be too easy. It would all fit together so nicely then. Meru would have her answer, and she could give it to her uncle, and her world would be safe.
Neat. Tidy. Nothing like the world I found myself in.
I couldn’t stand it any more. I let them slip away, sliding out of sight down Meritre’s river of time.
I hadn’t said a word to anyone in my world about the door at the end of the tunnel. I’d probably blow up the universe if I kept quiet, but I didn’t care.
I sat in my room in Luxor House with the door locked and the laptop on, clicking through screen after screen of silly and stupid. The sillier and stupider, the better. I answered all my e-mail with chirpy variations on “Hi! I’m having a great time! I’ve posted on my blog! Go see!”
The blog was all about digging and labeling and what we had for lunch and how Jonathan liked to play Abba songs that his crew sang along with in Arabic, and if you haven’t heard “Dancing Queen” sung to a belly-dance beat, you haven’t been living the crazy life. I didn’t mention Dad or Kelly. I didn’t mention Mom. Above all, I didn’t mention Meru and Meritre.
While I was noodling uselessly and wasting time because doing anything real was too bloody terrifying, the new-email alert went off. It was from Cat, and it was a picture of Bonnie from a few seconds ago. She was all white and shimmery from a bath, and she was eating—of course. The look in her eye said she knew she was getting her picture taken, and she knew why, and she knew everything I’d been thinking and doing.
Every. Crazy. Thing.
My throat locked up. I missed her so much.
I shut my eyes. I could smell her, and feel her smooth satiny coat under my hand.
She blew on my palm, and nipped it just enough to sting. But when I opened my eyes, there wasn’t anything there. Just the picture on the screen, and complete craziness inside my head.
Meru was chasing data across a web that made my Internet look like smudges on a cave wall. Meritre sat on the roof with the cat in her lap, watching the stars come out over the temple. People were talking nearby, speaking ancient Egyptian, but I knew what they were saying.
I knew because I was Meritre. Those voices in the dark, all warm and comfortable with each other, belonged to my people, too. I knew them.
The rioting had stopped. The city was calm again. People had picked up and carried on, and some were doing better than they had before.
Meritre had worked her spell with Djehuti’s assistance. He’d agreed at the time that it wouldn’t hurt anything, and would probab
ly help.
Tonight she was sure of it. Meritre’s father was talking to Uncle Amonmose about his wonderful new promotion. “The king herself spoke to me,” he said, “and asked me to carve the most important statue I may ever carve: the ka statue of the princess, may she live for everlasting.”
Uncle Amonmose hissed in awe. “Oh! That is indeed wonderful. But well deserved. You have the best eye among the sculptors, and the best hand, too.”
“That’s as may be,” said Meritre’s father. “It was my turn. I’ll do my best, and that’s as good as it will get.”
From Meritre, and from things Aunt Jessie had told me, too, I understood what they were saying. A ka statue was a mighty magic, an exact image of the person who had died. It represented the part of her soul that would stay in the tomb.
When he finished it, it would stand in its own special room, with a narrow slit of a door that let it come and go. It could eat the food that another artist painted on the walls, and it could also eat whatever the family left for it.
It was a huge honor. Meritre was so proud she almost cried. She was also glad, because it meant her father could work in a smaller shop, carving in wood, and not breathe the stone dust that made him cough up blood in the evenings.
She sat and stroked the cat into a purring puddle, and listened to the voices going back and forth. Her eyes weren’t on either of them. They were on the shadow beside Amonmose that was Djehuti.
She liked Djehuti. A lot.
I could see it. Horse nerds like me are more apt to get squealy over somebody’s new horse than somebody’s new boyfriend, but dress Djehuti in shorts and a tank and put him on the beach at Vero and he’d have every girl within range fighting over who got to ask him out first.
Meritre wasn’t squealy. She was quiet. She liked looking at Djehuti. She liked talking to him.
He liked it, too. He slid away from Amonmose, all casual, as if it didn’t matter nearly as much as it did. With one thing and another, by the time he’d finished wandering around the roof and smelling the flowers, I could tell he’d be sitting beside Meritre.
She was my age, but most of her friends were married or about to be, if they were still alive. Life was shorter here; people grew up faster.
It was still life. She was alive and breathing and she wanted to keep on doing it, along with her parents and her friends and even her brothers. She cared about the things I cared about.
This Triple thing didn’t seem to bother her. She was used to thinking of everybody as having at least four souls. Why shouldn’t one of them live different lives on its way to eternity?
I’d been mocking Meru for not being able to deal. But now I’d had time to think about it. “I can’t take it,” I said. “I don’t want to do this any more.”
Meritre stopped petting the cat, which rolled onto its back and wrapped paws around her arm and made her start again. “It’s not a game,” she said. “It’s a gift we’ve all been given. The gods want something of us in return. My plague has ended; Meru’s just beginning. We can help save a world.”
“Look,” I said, “not that I don’t respect your religion, but we don’t believe in it any more. There aren’t any gods. There’s no magic. All we have is what we are.”
“Yes,” she said, and she didn’t even blink. “Look at what we are. Isn’t it proof that the gods exist?”
Here I was, sitting with my laptop in my lap instead of the tortie cat that I’d locked out with the rest of the world, arguing about religion with someone who lived four thousand years ago. That was just crazy. But, God—not that I believed in the cranky old guy with the beard and the lightning bolt—it felt real.
I could feel the cat’s fur under my fingers. I could smell the smoke from the cooking fires, and hear a hollow booming sound that Meritre knew was a crocodile in the river. Something would die tonight, and the crocodile would have its dinner.
“That’s just sick,” I said.
She looked through my eyes at a room that made sense to her because it was four walls and a floor, but the laptop didn’t mean anything, and I didn’t know what she’d make of a Land Rover or a telephone or an airplane.
“The shining bird,” she said: “the hawk of Horus. You rode inside it. What a wonder, to be able to fly!”
I felt that wonder. I felt how amazing it all was. So much magic, so much power, and I hardly even noticed it.
My world, to me, was just ordinary. To her, it was the wildest of all wild stories.
She loved this. I hated it. “What difference does it make if we save someone else’s world? What if we do cure Ebola or whatever it is her people are getting? It doesn’t save anything here. It doesn’t cure cancer.”
“I am sorry about your mother,” she said. I could feel how much she meant it. “Maybe there’s a spell that can help her. Maybe the other one, the one who flies through the stars, would know—”
“I’m sure she does,” I said, “but the science—the magic spell—would be too advanced. Whatever it takes, we don’t have now. We aren’t that far along.”
“Maybe you are meant to be. Because of what you know.”
I would love to believe that. Really and truly I would. But I know what’s real and what isn’t. “Things like that—magic, whatever—have to grow. They don’t just happen. There are steps that lead to them. We aren’t anywhere near there yet.”
She nodded. It was weird, because I could feel as well as see her doing it. “The great magics are the work of years. You have days.”
I wanted to smack her. Cold-hearted little bitch. What did she know about what I was feeling? Her mother was alive and well and sitting in the dark with her hands resting over her swelling middle, listening to the men go on about temples and tombs.
That wasn’t fair. I knew it wasn’t. I didn’t care.
I shut it off. I pulled the plug on the whole thing. I dived into the stupidest, crappiest, sparkly-unicorn-iest website I could possibly find, and drowned in pink curly paragraphs and oceans of exclamation points.
The unicorn flapping its wings and batting its eyelashes around the pages made me think of Meru’s starwing. How amazing it was. How totally alien. How I just wanted to swat it.
“I quit,” I said. “I’m out. Save your own damned world.”
Chapter 20
Meru lay alone in the dark. For the first time since she could remember, she had blacked out the stars.
Waves of grief for her mother came and went. Down below in the family’s house, everyone else was meeting, discussing the news and coming to agreement as to what to do about it.
She should have been there. No one forced her, and no one particularly wanted her there. She was in disgrace and worse. She had committed a crime; she had disgraced the family.
That mattered much less than it might have once. The passion to know and understand, to find an answer that led to a cure for the disease that her mother had tracked to Earth and then died of, was still there. So was the conviction that no matter what happened, she had to get offworld. She had to become a starpilot.
It had all tangled up together when Meredith-in-the-middle shut herself out. Without her, nothing Meru did could reach down eight thousand years to Meritre, who might, who just might, know where to find the answer. She was out of range of whatever it was that made the connection possible.
They both needed the middle in order to find each other. And the middle had disappeared.
The starwing stirred in the dark, trilling to itself. Usually when it moved it was silent, but she heard its wings rustle. It came and curled up against her side.
The lift door whispered open. Yoshi stepped through: a shadow against the dazzle of light from inside.
The light winked out. Yoshi inched cautiously toward her. “Is this where you always go? To lie in the dark?”
“No,” she said.
“Ah,” said Yoshi.
Suddenly there were stars. Not only the stars of Earth, far out on its galactic arm, but stars upon st
ars upon stars.
He had found the feed from the center, from the galaxy’s heart. The light fell like rain; it blazed, it blinded, it emptied her of everything but itself.
“Better?” Yoshi asked.
“Better,” she admitted. “Am I cast out of the family yet?”
“Not that I can tell,” he said. “They’re arguing about Ulani now. Did you know she wants to join Family Cordere-Marais? She’s in love, she says. She wants to live in the sea, she says. She’s already applied for the body modifications.”
Meru sat up straight. “She has not!”
“She has,” Yoshi said.
“But she wouldn’t,” Meru said. “Not without telling me first. I knew about Aracele Marais, she’s been talking about her for—oh, ever. But to move there? To turn into a fish?”
“Maybe you weren’t there to talk to,” he said. “You’ve been a little preoccupied.”
Guilt stabbed, sudden and sharp. That night when Meru left to find her mother—Ulani’s pauses and shufflings had meant something. She had been trying to tell Meru about her decision. And Meru had not even noticed.
“I’ve only been trying to save the world,” Meru said to that memory as much as to the boy in front of her.
As soon as she had said it, she realized how nasty it sounded. And arrogant.
She was arrogant. She expected everything to be about her. Ulani had changed her life without asking Meru first. And the family had been discussing her all this time down below, instead of Meru.
Meru had done something terrible, and probably criminal. Consensus would demand a price for that. But that was done; there was no changing it.
Ulani was about to do something that would change her life, and the family’s life. She could change her course, if they all came to consensus. That was at least as important to the family.
Life did not stop because the world was trying to end. Or because Meru was trying to save it.
