Living in Threes

by Judith Tarr

  “Do you need me to go over to the hospice?” Cat asked. “Not to commit any violence. Just to, you know, find out for sure?”

  I felt tension running out of me that I hadn’t even known was there. “I would like that,” I said. Then it all came rushing back. “But will they let you in?”

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said. “You go dig up mummies. I’ll get the truth about your mom.”

  She didn’t even know how close she was to the rest of what was wrong with me. I almost broke down again, but I managed to hold on. “Thanks, Cat.”

  “You’d do the same for me,” she said. “Don’t worry, okay? Or not any more than you absolutely have to.”

  Weird how a three-minute Skype can change the whole way you look at the world. I didn’t feel all that much better, and the tears still came and went, but my mind was working again.

  Being my mind, what it was doing was figuring out how to get at the princess’ tomb. Not necessarily because I wanted to help Meru. Just because I wanted to know.

  If I was going to do it, I’d figure out a way to get Aunt Jessie down into the tunnel in the morning. Then I’d get creative and convince her not to take days opening the door.

  If I’d been in an adventure story as well as a time-travel story, I’d have sneaked out, stolen a boat, and done my own excavating that night. But that was stupid. It was also gawdawful archaeology.

  I couldn’t sleep. I kept jumping awake, thinking I’d heard a ping from the tablet, and Cat was calling and she was with Mom and Mom was back home and it was all just a false alarm.

  There wasn’t any ping. Cat didn’t call. Neither did Mom.

  When the cat scratched and mewped at the door, I let her in. She jumped up on the bed and purred next to me until I fell into a twitchy doze.

  After all that, I almost missed the alarm. The cat took care of it for me. She laid a paw against my face and ever so gently flexed it.

  That woke me up. She butted her head against my chin and purred so loud it made my head rattle. I staggered into the shower, then down to breakfast.

  I almost didn’t go to the site. I could say I hadn’t slept, which was true, and I was sick, which was close enough to true. I could go on hiding. Maybe I could hide so long and well, I completely disappeared.

  I wasn’t that smart, or that lucky. I went through the motions I went through every morning, as if the world was still the same place it had been yesterday and the day before.

  By the time we lurched onto the ferry, I was most of the way awake. Dad and Kelly weren’t with us today. I hadn’t said a word to Aunt Jessie. I was afraid that if I did, I’d start screaming; or worse, I’d start crying again.

  My half-crazy plans to find the tomb had evaporated with the daylight. What did I need it for, anyway? It wouldn’t do Mom any good.

  If I’d been thinking, I would have buried myself in the tent with the latest box of potsherds. I followed Aunt Jessie instead. Apart from a glance I couldn’t read, she didn’t say anything.

  She always checked on the tunnel crew first before she went to whichever part of the site she felt needed her most. The crew was down there already. I’d thought they were supposed to stop where they left off yesterday, but either someone didn’t get the memo or they’d decided to give it one last try.

  Maybe Aunt Jessie had a feeling. What I had was ’way more than that, even without the other two riding inside my head.

  The sound of chipping and scraping came up from below. They must have found the clues I’d left.

  When we got there, there were just three men working, including Sayyid the foreman. They’d opened up a bit more from where I’d been with the trowel last night, then started in higher, right about face height. Sayyid was working away at the bricks.

  He looked back when he heard us. Aunt Jessie raised her eyebrows at him. “Anything?”

  “Maybe,” he said. “Maybe not. Have a look.”

  She moved in beside him, took his hammer and chisel and started chipping. She wasn’t in any hurry. Her hands weren’t shaking. But she was working fast.

  One of the workmen brought a face mask for her, and one for me, too. The whole thing about the curse of the pharaohs—that’s just crap. But there are things that live in tombs and other places that have been closed in for thousands of years, molds and bacteria—viruses, too, maybe—that can kill anybody who plows in without protection.

  The mask was hot and confining, but I made myself put up with it. I wanted to go on breathing after we got done here.

  I wasn’t coherent enough to be excited. I had to see, that was all. I had to know.

  While Aunt Jessie worked away at the bricks, the foreman fiddled with a metal case. The others were watching. Nobody was talking. You know how they say you can feel tension in the air? This was thick enough to cut like butter.

  Aunt Jessie worked a brick free. Sayyid finally got the case open and took out what was inside.

  It was a camera. It had a long snaky coil that could go down drains or into rubble after an earthquake or a building collapse—or into a tomb.

  Nobody ripped walls out any more until they knew what was inside. They couldn’t officially do that anyway without permission from the Board of Antiquities—and for this, I would bet pretty much anything that the Director would insist on being here when it happened.

  What we were doing now was just this side of legal. We had to look, right? We had to be sure this wasn’t another blind alley.

  Aunt Jessie looked over her shoulder at me. “Come here.”

  I could hardly breathe, and not just because of the mask. This was the moment every Egyptologist prayed for. And she was sharing it with me.

  I suppose it was an apology. I didn’t know about accepting it—some things you can’t just pay off with the discovery of the century. But I wasn’t turning it down, either.

  Aunt Jessie’s hand gripped my arm. It held me together.

  “Don’t get your hopes up,” she said. “There could be nothing on the other side but empty space.”

  “If that’s what’s there, at least we’ll know.”

  She nodded. She was wound tight, but she was keeping it under control.

  While Aunt Jessie set up the camera, I stood on tiptoe and peered through the hole. I didn’t expect to see anything. It would be pitch black in there.

  The way the lights were hung, one shone right past me. I looked straight into a pair of heavily painted Egyptian eyes.

  I’m not a screamer or a fainter. I freeze. By the time my heart stopped hammering so hard I was afraid it would shake itself right out of my chest, I realized what it had to be. I was looking into the niche where the ka statue stood.

  It was doll-sized—maybe two feet high. It looked exactly the way it had when Meritre was alive, yesterday, four thousand years ago.

  I stepped back carefully. I wanted to say something, but there weren’t any words.

  I shivered. The tunnel had been hot and close with all of us in it, but now it was cool again. It felt almost cold.

  Maybe it’s true what I’ve heard, that when ghosts are walking through, they take the heat out of the air. Though if there was a ghost here now, who was it? The princess? Or Meritre?

  Maybe it was me. I was dead, too, in Meru’s time.

  Aunt Jessie got the camera working. I had to move over so she could thread it through the hole.

  There was enough space for me to stand next to her and see the screen. I had a flash, a memory of standing with Bonnie, watching Dr. Kay do the ultrasound. It felt pretty much the same. Breathless. Hoping. Not hoping. Praying, maybe.

  At first there was just a blur: a wall, a fuzz of color that was the statue, another wall—that one was painted all over, everywhere. Then there was brightness.

  Gold. It didn’t matter what shape it took. It was there.

  Robbers didn’t leave that much gold in a tomb. This was what Tut’s tomb was like—why it was so incredible. It hadn’t been robbed.

  Th
e camera caught on something and stopped moving. Pure luck, if there is any such thing, put it at just the right angle to see the length of the tomb.

  It was a vault with painted walls and a ceiling covered with stars. The sarcophagus filled most of the middle. It was hard to tell how big it was.

  Big. That much we had to figure. But the amazing thing, the incredible thing, even more than the golden treasure that lay everywhere, was the flowers.

  The place was full of them, piled on the floor around the hoard and heaped up around the sarcophagus. A carpet of them lay over the top of it.

  They’d withered—in four thousand years, that was hardly a surprise. Deep inside, cut off from the air, they’d kept their color. They looked as if they’d been picked yesterday.

  As soon as the tomb opened, they’d puff to dust. We were the only ones who would see them the way they’d been left.

  “Organic material.”

  I started. My eyes darted everywhere. Then I realized. It was Meru’s voice. She was back inside my head.

  So was Meritre. “Oh!” she said. “Oh! We don’t need the scarab. I was so afraid—I thought—”

  “Maybe at first,” Meru said, “but not any more. We know what we are. That’s all we need.”

  That, and me in the middle. With the tomb in front of me, and all those beautiful, impossible flowers, I’d forgotten to keep blocking the others out.

  “Beautiful, deadly flowers,” Meru said. “Masses of them. A body underneath, riddled with infection. But how could it survive eight thousand years? In ice, maybe, but in dry heat and after seventy days of embalming?”

  “That would have to be one determined virus,” I said in my head. I was glad I had a mask on—though if this was as bad as Meru thought it was, a full hazmat suit wouldn’t be enough.

  I stopped that thought before I ran off screaming.

  “Even supposing this is where the plague came from,” Meru said, “it must have had to mutate, probably a lot more than once, after it got loose. That mutation couldn’t have happened in your time, or Consensus would know about it and be able to stop it. You should be safe.”

  “You hope,” I said.

  While I carried on the conversation with the voices in my head,

  Sayyid and the two workmen took turns looking at the camera image. Their eyes were huge, and I could hear how fast they were breathing, but nobody said a word. It was like a pact—literal silence.

  Finally Aunt Jessie reeled the camera back in. She put the brick back, too. She wasn’t hiding anything. Just keeping the air out—or in.

  “You know we can’t talk about this.” She said it to me. She must figure no one else needed to be told.

  I didn’t either, but I didn’t try to argue. I stood there and let her finish her speech. “We have to keep this a secret for now. We’ll call the Director of Antiquities and let him know what we’ve found. He gets to decide when and how the tomb is opened. It could be a media circus—or he might keep it quiet for a while. It’s up to him.”

  I nodded. We were all holding ourselves in tight, including the Triple: Meritre because this was tomb robbery no matter what we called it, and Meru because the answers were here, and she was starting to understand what they were.

  My time was important for archaeologists—transitional, Meru’s sources on the web said. We still opened tombs, but we’d stopped shoving mummies in boxes and hauling them off to foreign museums. Once a tomb was investigated and catalogued, the mummy went back in, along with most of the things it had been buried with. Which meant that in Meru’s time, it might be still there, and still all or mostly intact.

  Meanwhile, in my time, we tried to act as if nothing had happened. Sayyid left the men down there on guard. Aunt Jessie went to supervise the other half of the dig, around the porch where Meritre had seen the sculptors working.

  I had potsherds to label and a life to try not to think about. Mom’s life. Mine, because my relatives were arguing over what to do with me, and I didn’t seem to have a say in it.

  I’d rather think about the tomb that we’d found. The incredible, amazing, wonderful discovery that when it finally got out, would make the world fall in love with Egypt all over again.

  The discovery that, four thousand years from now, would be killing people—somehow. Meru was hunting down the cause now, then, whatever. In my head, she was doing it at the same time as I was pasting numbers on beads and amulets and pieces of pottery.

  I hoped she found it. After all the drama I’d put us through, I wanted to know. This was our project, cause, fate, destiny—pick a word, it probably applied. We were all in it together.

  Chapter 23

  “I’ve got it,” Meru said. “I know where we’re going. Or,” she added, “mostly.”

  “Let me see,” Yoshi said.

  She sent him what she had, which was a map of Egypt as Meredith remembered it. While he pondered that, she skimmed along the newsfeed—and stopped.

  Sixteen deaths in the past Earthday in SudAfrique. Forty-three in Eurasia. And in NorthAm—

  “Seventy-nine,” Meru said, “that Consensus will admit to. But the real numbers—”

  “People aren’t stupid,” Yoshi said. “They can count. They share links. Consensus can’t keep hiding this.”

  The toll was rising. No one dared use the word yet, but it hung above them all. Pandemic.

  Meru shut off the feed before it shut down her courage. She closed her eyes, the better to see what Meredith had given her. With that to draw on, she could map the world. She traced the rise and fall of seas and the shifting of land masses until she found what she was looking for.

  “That’s it?” Yoshi said, far out on the edge of the web. “That’s where it is?”

  “That’s it,” Meru said.

  It was still a fiercely hot place, and the river still ran through it, though its course had changed and changed again in all those thousands of years. The desert had turned to jungle and then back to desert, but the ancient monuments were still there, preserved for eternity. That pleased Meritre.

  For the second time in her life, Meru packed what she needed for an escape. It was not so easy this time. The house was under lockdown, and she was under surveillance.

  That would not matter so much if it had not been for Yoshi. “I don’t suppose I can possibly convince you to stay here after all?” she said.

  He set his mouth in a line. “No.”

  “Not even as a diversion? To cover for me? To—”

  “No.”

  “You can’t help,” she said. “You’ll only hinder.”

  “You don’t know that,” he said. “If you try to web-tie me and run away, I’ll hack myself out and go after you. You can’t do this alone. You need backup.”

  “I have—” Meru broke off. If she had to explain the Triple, she would be there all night.

  “All right,” she said, and she was not happy about it at all. “Stay close. Stay quiet. And no questions.”

  He opened his mouth. She glared. He shut it. “Let’s go,” he said.

  The house was on lockdown. As free as Meru was of the web, she was confined physically as everyone else was, until Consensus lifted the ban.

  Consensus had not factored in the starwing. Meru was not entirely sure of it, either; she could only ask.

  It had been basking in starlight, purring to itself. When she called, it ignored her.

  She thrust down the stab of fear and the crippling disappointment, and willed herself to be calm. It was not her tool or her slave, after all. It was a living being.

  “Please,” she said to it. “Will you help?”

  It spread its wings and trilled. Its focus was not on her; it was on the field that surrounded the house, the beautiful, delicious, intoxicating energy that fed it until it was crackling all over.

  She turned away. She would not let herself be hurt, or feel betrayed.

  There was another thing she could do, which might fail terribly. Or it might succeed. Ei
ther way, it was better than giving up; than doing nothing.

  Vekaa was in the common room with the family. They were all there, from the eldest to the youngest, and they were in the middle of an argument.

  “We have no objection to confining ourselves to the house,” Grandmother Ramotswe said, “or to observing proper precautions during this, as you put it, situation. But we want our daughter’s body back.”

  “You will get it back,” Vekaa said, “when the situation has calmed down.”

  “We understand that,” said Grandmother Ramotswe. “We also understand that it will have to be thoroughly and conclusively decontaminated. But what you propose to do with it—”

  “Those were her wishes,” Vekaa said. “She asked that once her genetic material was taken and recorded, her ashes be scattered among the stars.”

  “I’m sure,” said Grandmother Ramotswe, “but she was a member of this family. And members of this family rest in the vault beneath the house. She belongs here. Not out there, drifting with the interstellar dust.”

  “We are all made of interstellar dust,” Meru said. She had meant to be quiet, but she could not help herself. “The stars are in every one of us. Does it matter where she is? Her genetic code is here. Her memory lives in all of us. Why can’t what’s left of her go where she wanted it to go?”

  “It’s not done,” Uncle Goro said. “It’s never been done.”

  “Then maybe it’s time it was,” said Vekaa.

  He walked out on them. Meru stood with the rest, staring at the door through which he had vanished.

  Almost too late she remembered how to think, and then to move. Yoshi was already in motion. Meru stretched her stride to pass him.

  Vekaa had not gone far. He was in the room he liked to sleep in; Yoshi caught and held the door before he could seal it.

  He regarded them wearily. “Yes,” he said to Meru, “I should have called you down for that.”

  “You should,” she said. “But it doesn’t matter. Not for now.” She drew a breath and let it out, all at once. “I know where to find the key to the plague. Will you help me get there?”