Wheelers

by Ian Stewart

  1

  Giza. 2194

  . . . and in the fifth month of the fifth year of the reign of the child-king Anshethrat, in the city of Gyzer ... a spear of fire pierced the northern sky, harbinger of the wrath of Ysiriz the Sky Goddess. And fire and flame rose from the ocean, which became as molten brass. And the spear of flame sped like a hurled javelin toward the heart of the Sun. It became as a fiery chariot, drawn by four winged horses, with manes of burnished copper, pursued by a trail of shining dust. One horse had the face of a hawk, and one the face of a wolf and one the face of a snake. . . the face of the fourth was devoid of form . . . Ysiriz the Sky Goddess had the face of a lion and the claws of a leopard, and her tail was the tail of a lion . . .

  And Y-ra'i the gods-that-dwell-beneath-the-Sun awoke, and saw Ysiriz riding the shaft of flame. And Y-ra'i began to stir, and seethe. And they frightened the horses of Ysiriz. And dust and stones fell upon the Earth, and the ground shook with the thunder of their hooves, and the mountains cracked and the Earth shook . . . and the child-king Anshethrat called his Priests to him, and he demanded of them what could be done to appease Ysiriz the Sky Goddess. And the priests ordered the sacrifice of five thousand bulls, and five thousand rams, that their blood be shed for the appeasement of Ysiriz.

  And so it was.

  And still the chariot drew nearer, for the gods were displeased.

  And Lofchepsit the Moon Goddess awoke, and shivered with fear . . . And the Sun trembled and shook, and . . . Y-ra'i jiung a spear of flame at the heart of Ysiriz.

  And the horse with the face of a hawk stumbled, and jell, and was crushed to dust. And the horse with the jace of a wolf stumbled, and jell, and was crushed to dust. And the horse with the jace of a snake stumbled, and jell, and was crushed to dust. And the horse with no manner ojjace stumbled, and jell, and it was as ijit had never been ...

  And the jiery chariot of Ysiriz plunged into Lojchepsit the Moon Goddess, striking at her very heart, and the chariot vanished in flame . . . And Lojchepsit jell in a terrible swoon, as if dead.

  And the whole sky shone as a sheet of beaten gold, and the Sun's heart blackened and seethed. And the Priests of the child-king An-shethrat were much ajraid, and they cried out jor jorgiveness jrom their king, jor all were jearjul of the wrath of Ysiriz and the slaying of Lojchepsit. And the king in his great wisdom denounced the Priesthood, and sent them out of the city into the sands of the desert, there to build a monument to Y-ra'i.

  But now the gods-that-dwell-beneath-the-Sun arose, and their wrath was as the wrath of a raging torrent, and they spread great wings of burning flame. And their breath became a breath of jire, and they spat at Anshethrat. And the Moon was aflame, and the sky was aflame, and the Earth was aflame, and every tree in the city of Gyzer turned to blackened ashes, and every house in the city became as a pillar of flame . . .

  But the Priests of the child-king Anshethrat hid themselves, and the flames passed them by. And they proclaimed the miracle to be a sign jrom Ysiriz the Sky Goddess, who had protected them jrom the jiery wrath of Y-ra'i. And the High Priest Shephatsut-Mir ordered that the monument to Y-ra'i be torn down and built anew in the image of Ysiriz, multiplied twelvejold, to seal jorever the devotion of her people to the Sky Goddess.

  And it was so.

  * * * *

  Charlie Dunsmoore brushed sand from his rolled-up shirtsleeves, opened another can of beer, and sighed. He focused a small pocket lens on the chipped clay tablet, comparing the incised hieroglyphs with Prudence Odingos transcriptions as they floated holographically before his eyes, and nodded. Then his rubber-gloved finger slid through the air to where she had translated the text into Enghsh, and he shook his head slowly from side to side with a fleeting, wry smile.

  Prudence was eager, he had to admit. And she was intelligent. She had the kind of luck that could make an archaeologist's career . . . Sexy, too, as he had discovered to his surprise the night after her astonishing find. Not that he considered it ethical for academics to have sexual relationships with their students—he knew that just stored up potential trouble and his department head wouldn't be at all happy if she found out— but it had all happened so fast, and so spontaneously, that he'd never even thought about all that until far too late.

  Anyway, there were criteria other than ethics. That said, he wasn't sure what their relationship was anymore—or even if they still had one—because they had both been so tired after working flat out on the tablets for three solid days, snatching a few hours' sleep whenever they could no longer keep themselves awake, that there had been no opportunity for a repeat engagement, and no point in hinting at the possibility of one.

  He could hear deep breathing and the occasional snore from Prudence's partitioned-off comer of the big tent that the two of them shared. Administratively straightforward, and cheaper than two big tents, but—he now saw—asking for trouble.

  If only the funding agency had taken the ethical position into account...

  His thoughts returned to Prudence. Motivated, bright, lucky, sexy ... If only she could stop being in such a rush. Her translation was wonderful, it told a fascinating story from an unknown pre-Egyptian mythology: Y-ra'i the gods-that-dwell-heneath-the-Sun . . . Brilliant.

  The only problem was, she'd woven the tale from whole cloth. Where a more cautious scholar would have flagged a word as dubious or a sentence as conjectural, Prudence simply jumped right in with what looked like a claim of a definitive text.

  She had excellent intuition; he'd seen it in action on conventional Egyptian hieroglyphics. That was why he'd agreed to take her on as a graduate student, and why he'd put her in charge of the most significant part of the dig.

  Dig. He laughed under his breath—the term was a reflex, and not at all appropriate. "Disassembly of the Sphinx," that was closer.

  He put the notebook down on the small, rickety table, stripped off the gloves, and stepped over to the open flap of the tent. He loved the feel of the desert air, cool and dry on his skin. Fine sand dust gave the air a faint but unforgettable smell, bringing back vivid memories of previous expeditions . . . Silhouetted against the starry sky he could see the flat triangles of pyramids and the slight swell of desert dunes. To his right, less than half a mile away, was the Great Pyramid, the most famous of all the ancient monuments at Giza. He had seen it so often that he had lost count; he had climbed its crumbling stones, sat at its tip, and stared for hours across the desert, trying to visualize what life must have been like when the stones were newly quarried . . . and still it possessed the power to move him. There was something elemental about the ancient rock pile— even now, nearly five thousand years after it had been built. The Great Pyramid was a symbol of power, the awesome power of Khufu, founder of the Old Kingdom. It was awesome now; just think how effective a reminder it must have been at the peak of the fourth dynasty. And it was just one monument out of many, evidence of a vanished civilization that he would give anything to bring back to life. The three much smaller queen's pyramids were scattered almost as an afterthought along its near right flank. Ahead, diminished by the distance, was the pyramid of Khafre, in reality only marginally smaller and just as impressive. To his left, Menkaures Pyramid, its base a mere hundred yards square, dwarfed by its gigantic companions. And looming above him, still glowing like embers in the dying sunset, was the haunting, battered face of the Great Sphinx. Restored by the eighteenth dynasty in ad 1500, its nose chiseled off, but no one knew when or why. Pockmarked by windblown sand and, more recently, acid rain, it bore a face so similar to that of Khafre that there could be little doubt that it had been fashioned in his image.

  The pitted eyes stared blindly at the desert, serene and enigmatic. Carved in the stylized image of a lion, the monument was most probably a s
ymbol of the Sun—human head on a lion's body, a guarantor of cosmic order with a scarf for a mane.

  Or so the scholars believed. Charlie had his doubts.

  Whatever its original purpose, the Sphinx was in trouble. Its base was hidden by an ugly skeleton of steel scaffolding, wooden planks, ladders, and walls of yellow netting. Three large cranes were lined up along its left flank, spindly by comparison. Although he couldn't see anything from where he stood, the Sphinx's hindquarters and most of its body was gone, sliced into rough cubes of rock fifteen feet across, lifted by the massive cranes onto enormous low-loaders with huge soft tires, driven slowly away across the open desert to the higher ground of Jabal Abu Shamon, some thirty miles to the east.

  Not for the first time, Charlie shook his head in disbelief. It was a tragedy. The collapse of the Aswan Dam, some sixty years earlier, was to blame. An ecological and archaeological disaster from the moment of its conception two and a half centuries before, it had slowly crumbled under its own weight, victim of shoddy workmanship and worse planning. Its inevitable destruction was hastened by climate change, which dumped huge amounts of rainwater into the catchment area around Lake Victoria, the source of the Nile. The dam had burst under the strain and the silt that had previously been deposited on the bed of the vast artificial lake had flowed downstream like molasses; now it was clogging up the Nile delta to the north of Cairo, in Al-qalyubiyah governorate. Charlie had seen the devastation for himself while flying his tiny Deronda into the Cairo airport. He was an avid pilot, and wherever he went in Europe or Africa he took the lovingly restored propeller-engined four-seater along. From the air, it was evident that much of Cairo was slowly disappearing under the floodwaters—there had been heroic efforts to divert the river and dredge new channels, but Egypt was not a rich country. The Giza complex was slowly succumbing to rising levels of groundwater, and the best that an international rescue effort could offer—as for the fabled Temple of Abu Sim-bel two and a half centuries earlier—was a belated and rather panicky project to cut the Sphinx up into transportable chunks and re-erect it on higher ground.

  The pyramids would have to fend for themselves.

  Charlie found it all quite incredible, but the disassembly of the Sphinx created an unprecedented opportunity to try to resolve some of its mysteries, and the prospect had lured him to Giza like a glowworm to a female's seductive lantern.

  How old was the Sphinx? That was the big question. According to Egyptologists, the monument had been built in Khafre's reign, at the same time as his pyramid. Why else would it have borne his face? Charlie knew that Khafre, son of Khufu, had flourished around 2400 bc. But geologists who had studied the natural bedrock that formed the Sphinx's paws and body had found evidence of substantial weathering by rain. It could have been caused by wind, assisted by unstable minerals in the stone—but on balance, rain seemed more plausible. There hadn't been much rain in Egypt around the time of Khafre, but there had been plenty two thousand years earlier. The head could have been added later, or remodeled—it was too small in proportion to the body, suggesting that it had once been larger. Perhaps the original had been a lion in all particulars, and Khafre had stolen its face. So geology placed the Sphinx somewhere prior to 4400 bc, a date that would force a complete rethink of Egyptian and pre-Egyptian chronology, while impeccable Egyptology placed it two thousand years later.

  Thanks to Prudence's discovery, it was beginning to look as though those geologists who favored rain might be right. Before the giant diamond-toothed saws were permitted to slice into any new bit of Sphinx, Prudence had to use gravimetric equipment to test for concealed chambers. She had found several, but all were natural cavities in the bedrock—until three days ago, when she had discovered a priceless treasure. The workforce had opened up a cavity, Mtry carefully as always, and within it she had found a cache of several hundred clay tablets, inscribed with symbols that looked like hieroglyphs but seemed to be some earlier form of script out of which hieroglyphs had evolved, and some rather odd clay figurines of crouching naked women with lionlike features. A first stab at isotope distribution dating had placed them somewhere between 6600 bc and 3800 BC, with 5500 bc as the maximum-likelihood estimate.

  They covered the date from a period before the base of the Sphinx had been carved from bedrock. Both Charlie and Prudence doubted this—the figurines had a Sphinxlike quality that was distinctly unnerving. So now they were translating the tablets in the hope that the text would settle the matter once and for all. They were having to do it on the spot because the Egyptian authorities, with justification, refused to allow the tablets to be removed from the site. Charlie and Prudence were permitted to look at them in small batches, and because Charlie had made the scientihc case eloquently, they'd been given access to the actual tablets. Holograms were all very well for archiving, but a hologram wasn't accurate enough for serious archaeological study.

  Charlie yawned, walked back to the table, and sat down again. He told his wristnode to check the weather forecast, wondered whether it would be any more accurate than usual, and pulled the thin rubber gloves back over his fingers to protect the precious tablet. He put his node back into word processing mode, told it to open a new file, and began editing Prudence's efforts into something publishable.

  "... and in the fifth month of the fifth year"—that was okay, though it needed a footnote to the effect that the rudimentary hieroglyph for "month" bore no resemblance to that of the Late Predynastic period—which, however, was only to be expected since the clay tablet had been dated to a period some fifteen hundred years earlier—and its meaning was amply confirmed by other texts found in the same location and with similar dates. "Of the reign of the child-king Anshethrat"—oh, dear. The glyphs that Prudence had read as "reign" might equally well refer to "stewardship," and "child-king" was almost certainly "viceroy"— "king in place of a child," not "king who is a child." As for "Anshethrat," the clay was so flaky at that spot that there could have been a dozen readings. His eyes flicked onward and he mumbled to his wristnode sotto voce, as was his habit when dictating. He rather liked "harbinger of the urath of Ysiriz the Sky Goddess"—it was a defensible reading, though a reference to the theories of Gutzmann and Monteleone was definitely in order . . . but there was no way he could justify "fiery chariot," and as for the alleged winged horses . . .

  He mumbled on, and a tortured, laborious text, full of brackets indicating lacunae, footnotes to alternative readings, and labored arguments regarding the unorthodox grammatical structure began to assemble itself in midair in faintly glowing letters.

  He was just starting to get it into an acceptable shape when

  Prudence came in. "God, I feel like I haven't slept for a week." She saw the text a moment before Charlie told his wristnode to kill it. "What are you doing, Charlie? That looked like the text you gave me to translate!"

  Charlie looked sheepish. "Um ... yes, it was. I was—er— licking it into shape. For publication."

  "Oh, god. Are you messing up my work again?"

  Charlie considered this unfair. "Now, look here, Pru, don't forget that I'm the supervisor and you're the student." The look that she gave him was far from happy. "Damn it, you know I'm not the type to pull rank. But I do know what the journals will let us publish, okay?"

  She shrugged. Charlie was clever, Charlie was kind of cute— short blond hair, blue eyes, tall, strong without being muscle-bound—but Charlie was also an unimaginative stick-in-the-mud. He called it scholarship, she called it chickenshit.

  However, he was right, which made it all the worse.

  "Oh, come on, Charlie! Give me a break, hey? I slaved over that translation most of the night! Sure, I filled in a few gaps, but ii feels right. Better to tell a clear story, even if a few pedantic details turn out to be wrong later, than end up with unreadable trash that commits us to nothing."

  They'd had this argument before, though at that time he hadn't been sleeping with her. Assuming he still was, which was not exactly clear. "Mmm,
yeah, in a world where everyone who reads your work can intuit the intended context instead of deliberately looking for possible ways to misunderstand your intentions and label you an idiot, that's right. Unfortunately, most academics don't live in such a world—they'd all love to run the whole show, but they don't have the guts to take responsibility for their own decisions, so it's much more comforting to sit on the sidelines and carp. And Egyptologists are the worst of the lot, believe me. Which is why, in my professional role as your research supervisor, I'm telling you that we write the paper my way, even if the result lacks your journalistic flair."

  Prudence's face softened a bit ... a hint of a smile? "Okay, Charlie, you can call the shots on the paper. But you leave the press release to me."

  If he'd been less tired he might have seen the trap yawning and managed not to jump into it feet first. 'Tress release?'

  "Charlie, dear, we have just made the biggest Egyptological discovery since Snuckpot the Great stuck a small rock on top of a larger one and thought that a big version would keep the rain off his corpse after he was dead! We have got to go to the media before the story leaks."

  Typical Prudence, belying her name as always. "What story, Pru?"

  "Proof that the Sphinx is aeons older than everyone thought! Evidence of a flourishing civilization two millennia before the first dynasty! Ancient writings by the trucklo—"

  He spoke slowly and distinctly It wasn't intended to sound patronizing, but that's how it came out. "Prudence, we don't knovj any of that. The dating is only preliminary, it could be wrong. All we have is a stack of clay tablets, which for all we know record nothing more interesting than how many people turned up at the annual spitting contest. And the tablets could have been shut up in a cavity in the bedrock, and the Sphinx built around them later."

  Charlie's affectations of pedantry raised Prudence's mental temperature close to the boiling point. "Come on, Charlie! You don't believe a word of that! You know damned well that I prepared those dating specimens properly! I spent hours making absolutely sure! And what about those figurines? They're a lot earlier than first dynasty! And they look amazingly Sphinxlike, you know that. What else can it all mean?"