Collected Short Fiction, page 1284
“There’s a lot you don’t understand,” Sandburg said.
“Damn right there is. I’d like you to tell me—”
“Wait,” Lehman said. Sandburg shot him an irritated look and started to speak, but he held up his hand to silence her. To Davis he said, “Talk to us about this rescue plan of yours, first. What’s the arrangement?”
“I’m on a thirty-day mission. We don’t need the full thirty, now that I’ve found you so fast, but we’ve got to wait it out anyway, right? On the thirtieth day they’ll drop the jump field into an alleyway just north of Luxor Temple. It’s the one I landed in, with a graffito on the wall pronouncing a curse on some wine-merchant who screwed one of his customers. The field arrives at noon sharp, but of course we’re there waiting for it a couple of hours before that. The rainbow lights up, the three of us step inside, away we go. Back home in a flash. You don’t know how hard they’ve been working, trying to locate you two.”
“They couldn’t have been in much of a hurry,” Lehman said. “Did Elaine tell you we’ve been here fifteen years?”
“In the Home Era time-line you’ve only been missing for a year and a half. And they’ve been running calculations non-stop most of that time. I’m sorry we couldn’t match up the displacement factors any better, but you’ve got to understand it was really just a stab in the dark sending me to the year they did. We had a twenty-year probability window to deal with.”
“I’m sure they did their best,” Sandburg said. “And you too. We appreciate your coming here.”
“Then why did you send me to—”
She held up her hand. “You don’t understand the situation, Edward.”
“Damned right I don’t.”
“There are certain factors that we have to explain. You see, we don’t actually—”
“Wait a second, Elaine,” Lehman said sharply.
“Roger, I—”
“Wait a second.”
It was his priest-voice again, his stony Senmut-Ptah voice. Sandburg peered at him in astonishment. His face was flushed, his eyes were strangely glossy.
He said, “Before you tell him anything, we need to have a discussion, Elaine. You and I.”
She looked at him blankly. “What’s to discuss?”
“Come outside and I’ll tell you.”
“What the hell is this all about?”
“Outside,” Lehman said. “I have to insist.”
She gave him a glance of cool appraisal. But he was unreadable.
“Whatever you say, O Senmut-Ptah.”
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.
NINE
This part of the Karnak complex that they had brought him to was new to him, a round two-story domed building behind the main temple. Since Roger Lehman’s priestly specialty was supposed to be astronomy, the building was surely his observatory, Davis thought. So far as he could recall there had been no trace of any such structure in the modern-day Karnak ruins that he had visited on the orientation trip. Perhaps it had been demolished during the tremendous religious upheavals that were due to hit Egypt after Amenhotep III died.
“How about a little wine?” Lehman asked, with unconvincing geniality. “This is good stuff, from the royal vineyards in the Delta. The very best.”
“You must have good connections at the court,” Davis said.
“The very best,” said Lehman.
From a cupboard in the wall he drew forth three alabaster drinking-cups embellished elaborately with hieroglyphics and a tall graceful terra-cotta amphora with two small handles and a pointed base. A clay stopper plugged its narrow mouth. As he broke it he said, “Elaine? Wine?”
“Please.”
Davis took a sip, and then a deeper draught. The wine was sweet and thick, with a raisiny underflavor. Not bad, really. And the cup he was drinking out of was a little masterpiece, museum quality. The room itself, Lehman’s private priestly chamber, was splendidly furnished, the walls magnificently covered with dark, vividly realistic murals of gods and demons and stars. It had a look of quiet luxury. Sandburg and Lehman had done all right for themselves in Egypt, especially considering that they had started with absolutely nothing only fifteen years ago, worse off than slaves, having no identities, not even knowing how to speak the language. Lehman seemed to have made himself into an important figure in the scientific establishment, such as it was. And she a high priestess and the mistress of the heir to the throne, no less. Both of them obviously wealthy, powerful, well connected. He had felt sorry for them a year ago when he first had heard the story of their being lost in time, far from the Imperial Rome that had been their intended destination, marooned in some alien hostile place where they were doubtlessly eking out miserable, difficult lives. He couldn’t have been more wrong about that. They had proved to be paragons of adaptability. But of course they were Service personnel, trained to handle themselves satisfactorily under all sorts of unfamiliar and bewildering conditions.
Lehman turned to the cupboard again. This time he took from it a lovely little game-board, ebony inlaid with golden hieroglyphic inscriptions. Thirty gleaming squares of ivory veneer were set into it, arranged in three rows of ten, each square separated from its neighbors by ebony strips. From a box at its base he withdrew a pair of odd curving dice and a handful of pawn-shaped gaming-pieces made of some polished blue stone.
“You know what this is?” he asked.
“A senet-board?” Davis said at once.
“They really gave you a good briefing.”
“The works. But I’ve always been interested in Egypt. I made special studies on my own.”
“You don’t know how to play, though, do you?”
“Senet? No. The rules are lost.”
“Not here they aren’t. Everyone plays it. Soldiers, slaves, construction workers, whores. The king plays it very well. So does the royal astronomer.”
From a corner of the room Sandburg said, “Roger, why don’t you get down to business?”
“Please, Elaine,” Lehman said.
Calmly he arranged the pieces on the game-board.
“It even figures in the Book of the Dead, you know. Spell 17: the dead man plays senet with an invisible adversary, and has to win the game in order to continue his passage safely through the Netherworld.”
“I know,” said Davis. “But I’m not dead, and this isn’t the Netherworld. Ms. Sandburg is right. If there’s business for us to get down to, let’s get down to it.”
“Let me show you the rules of the game first, at least. We arrange the pieces like this. And then—a roll of the dice to determine who the challenger is and who’s the defender—”
“Roger,” Sandburg said.
“There. You challenge. I defend. Now, we start at this end of the board—”
“Roger.”
Lehman smiled. “Well then. Senet afterward, perhaps.”
He poured more wine into Davis’ cup and his own and leaned forward across the table, bringing his face uncomfortably close. Davis saw what fifteen years of the Egyptian sun had done to Lehman’s skin: he was as dry as a mummy, his skin drumhead-tight over his bones.
He said, “About this rescue proposal of yours, Davis. It was very kind of you to take the leap all the way back here for the sake of locating us. And marvelous luck that you found us at all. But I have to tell you: it’s no go.”
“What?”
“We’re staying here, Elaine and I.”
Staying?
Davis stared. Yes, yes, of course. It all fit together now, their odd fidgety elusiveness; her failure to disclose herself to him the first day, when she had heard him babbling deliriously in English; her side-tracking of him to the City of the Dead; her clapping him in that dungeon-like storeroom once she finally had blurted out the truth about herself. They were renegades. They were deserters. So dumb of him to have failed to see it.
He could hear Charlie Farhad’s words echoing in his mind.
The past’s a weird place. It can make you pretty weird yourself if you stay in it long enough.
Farhad hadn’t been willing to go looking for them.
I’m not so sure I want to find out what they’ve turned into, Farhad had said.
Yes.
“You like it here that much?” Davis asked, after a bit.
“We’ve settled in,” Elaine Sandburg said from across the room. “We have our niches here.”
“We’re Egyptians now,” said Lehman. “Very highly placed court figures leading very pleasant lives.”
“So I see. But still, to turn your back forever on your own era, your own world—”
“We’ve been here a long time,” Lehman said. “To you we’ve only been missing a year or so. But we’ve lived a third of our lives here. Egypt’s a real place to us. It’s fantastic, it’s bizarre, it’s full of magic and mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to modern-day people. But it’s beginning to make sense to us.”
