The Best of Michael Moorcock

by Michael Moorcock

  “I knew her slightly before it all changed for her. Afterwards, I knew her better. She seemed very delicate. She came back to Aswan, then went out to the dig a couple more times, then back here. She was possessed of a terrible restlessness she would allow nobody here to address and which she consistently denied. She carried a burden, Dr. Pappenheim.” He echoed the words of Inspector el-Bayoumi. “But perhaps we, even we, shall never know what it was.”

  14 On Every Hand—The Red Collusive Stain

  She arrived at the Osiris only a minute or two late. She wore a one-piece work-suit and a kind of bush-hat with a veil. She also carried a briefcase which she displayed in some embarrassment. “Habit, I suppose. I don’t need the maps or the notes. I’m taking you into the desert, Paul. Is that okay?”

  “We’re not going to your place?’

  “Not now.”

  I changed into more suitable clothes and followed her down to the street. She had a calash waiting which carried us to the edge of town, to a camel camp where, much to my dismay, we transferred to grumbling dromedaries. I had not ridden a camel for ten years, but mine proved fairly tractable once we were moving out over the sand.

  I had forgotten the peace and the wonderful smell of the desert and it was not long before I had ceased to pay attention to the heat or the motion and had begun to enjoy a mesmeric panorama of dunes and old rock. My sister occasionally used a compass to keep course but sat her high saddle with the confidence of a seasoned drover. We picked up speed until the heat became too intense and we rested under an outcrop of red stone which offered the only shade. It was almost impossible to predict where one would find shade in the desert. A year ago this rock might have been completely invisible beneath the sand; in a few months it might be invisible again.

  “The silence is seductive,” I said after a while.

  My sister smiled. “Well, it whispers to me, these days. But it is wonderful, isn’t it? Here you have nothing but yourself, a chance to discover how much of your identity is your own and how much is actually society’s. And the ego drifts away. One becomes a virgin beast.”

  “Indeed!” I found this a little too fanciful for me. “I’m just glad to be away from all that . . .”

  “You’re not nervous?”

  “Of the desert?”

  “Of getting lost. Nothing comes out here, ever, now. Nomads don’t pass by and it’s been years since a motor vehicle or plane was allowed to waste its E.R. on mere curiosity. If we died, we’d probably never be found.”

  “This is a bit morbid, isn’t it, Bea? It’s only a few hours from Aswan, and the camels are healthy.”

  “Yes.” She rose to put our food and water back into their saddlebags, causing a murmuring and an irritable shifting of the camels. We slept for a couple of hours. Bea wanted to be able to travel at night, when we would make better time under the full moon.

  The desert at night will usually fill with the noises of the creatures who waken as soon as the sun is down, but the region we next entered seemed as lifeless as the Bical flats, though without their aching mood of desolation. The sand still rose around our camels’ feet in silvery gasps and I wrapped myself in the other heavy woollen gelabea Beatrice had brought. We slept again, for two or three hours, before continuing on until it was almost dawn and the moon faint and fading in the sky.

  “We used to have a gramophone and everything,” she said. “We played those French songs mainly. The old ones. And a lot of classic Rai. It was a local collection someone had brought with the machine. You wouldn’t believe the mood of camaraderie that was here, Paul. Like Woodstock must have been. We had quite a few young people with us—Egyptian and European mostly—and they all said the same. We felt privileged.”

  “When did you start treating the sick?” I asked her.

  “Treating? Scarcely that! I just helped out with my First Aid kit and whatever I could scrounge from a pharmacy. Most of the problems were easily treated, but not priorities as far as the hospitals are concerned. I did what I could whenever I was in Aswan. But the kits gradually got used and nothing more was sent. After the quake, things began to run down. The Burbank Foundation needed its resources for rebuilding at home.”

  “But you still do it. Sometimes. You’re a legend back there. Ben Achmet told me.”

  “When I can, I help those nomads cure themselves, that’s all. I was coming out here a lot. Then there was some trouble with the police.”

  “They stopped you? Because of the Somali woman?”

  “That didn’t stop me.” She raised herself in her saddle suddenly. “Look. Can you see the roof there? And the pillars?”

  They lay in a shallow valley between two rocky cliffs and they looked in the half-light as if they had been built that very morning. The decorated columns and the massive flat roof were touched a pinkish gold by the rising sun and I could make out hieroglyphics, the blues and ochres of the Egyptian artist. The building, or series of buildings, covered a vast area. “It’s a city,” I said. I was still disbelieving. “Or a huge temple. My God, Bea! No wonder you were knocked out by this!”

  “It’s not a city or a temple, in any sense we mean.” Though she must have seen it a hundred times, she was still admiring of the beautiful stones. “There’s nothing like it surviving anywhere else. No record of another. Even this is only briefly mentioned and, as always with Egyptians, dismissively as the work of earlier, less exalted leaders, in this case a monotheistic cult which attempted to set up its own god-king and, in failing, was thoroughly destroyed. Pragmatically, the winners in that contest re-dedicated the place to Sekhmet and then, for whatever reasons—probably economic—abandoned it altogether. There are none of the usual signs of later uses. By the end of Nyusere’s reign no more was heard of it at all. Indeed, not much more was heard of Nubia for a long time. This region was never exactly the centre of Egyptian life.”

  “It was a temple to Ra?”

  “Ra, or a sun deity very much like him. The priest here was represented as a servant of the sun. We call the place Onu’us, after him.”

  “Four thousand years ago? Are you sure this isn’t one of those new Dutch repros?” My joke sounded flat, even to me.

  “Now you can see why we kept it dark, Paul. It was an observatory, a scientific centre, alaboratory, a library. A sort of university, really. Even the hieroglyphics are different. They tell all kinds of things about the people and the place. And, it had a couple of other functions.” Her enthusiasm died and she stopped, dismounting from her camel and shaking sand from her hat. Together we watched the dawn come up over the glittering roof. The pillars, shadowed now, stood only a few feet out of the sand, yet the brilliance of the colour was almost unbelievable. Here was the classic language of the fifth dynasty, spare, accurate, clean. And it was obvious that the whole place had only recently been refilled. Elsewhere churned, powdery earth and overturned rock spoke of vigorous activity by the discovering team; there was also, on the plain which stretched away from the southern ridge, a considerable area of fused sand. But even this was now covered by that desert tide which would soon bury again and preserve this uncanny relic.

  “You tried to put the sand back?” I felt stupid and smiled at myself.

  “It’s all we could think of in the circumstances. Now it’s far less visible than it was a month ago.”

  “You sound very proprietorial.” I was amused that the mystery should prove to have so obvious a solution. My sister had simply become absorbed in her work. It was understandable that she should.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “I must admit . . .”

  For a moment, lost in the profound beauty of the vision, I did not realise she was crying. Just as I had as a little boy, I moved to comfort her, having no notion at all of the cause of her grief, but assuming, I suppose, that she was mourning the death of an important piece of research, the loss of her colleagues, the sheer disappointment at this unlucky end to a wonderful adventure. It was plain, too, that she was completely exhausted. />
  She drew towards me, smiling an apology. “I want to tell you everything, Paul. And only you. When I have, that’ll be it. I’ll never mention it again. I’ll get on with some sort of life. I’m sick of myself at the moment.”

  “Bea. You’re very tired. Let’s go home to Europe where I can coddle you for a bit.”

  “Perhaps,” she said. She paused as the swiftly risen sun outlined sunken buildings and revealed more of a structure lying just below the surface, some dormant juggernaut.

  “It’s monstrous,” I said. “It’s the size of the large complex at Luxor. But this is different. All the curved walls, all the circles. Is that to do with sun worship?”

  “Astronomy, anyway. We speculated, of course. When we first mapped it on the sonavids. This is the discovery to launch a thousand theories, most of them crackpot. You have to be careful. But it felt to us to be almost a contrary development to what was happening at roughly the same time around Abu Ghurab, although of course there were sun-cults there, too. But in Lower Egypt the gratification and celebration of the Self had reached terrible proportions. All those grandiose pyramids. This place had a mood to it. The more we sifted it out the more we felt it. Wandering amongst those light columns, those open courtyards, was marvellous. All the turquoises and reds and bright yellows. This had to be the centre of some ancient Enlightenment. Far better preserved than Philae, too. And no graffiti carved anywhere, no Christian or Moslem disfigurement. We all worked like maniacs. Chamber after chamber was opened. Gradually, of course, it dawned on us! You could have filled this place with academic people and it would have been a functioning settlement again, just as it was before some petty Pharaoh or local governor decided to destroy it. We felt we were taking over from them after a gap of millennia. It gave some of us a weird sense of responsibility. We talked about it. They knew so much, Paul.”

  “And so little,” I murmured. “They only had limited information to work with, Bea . . .”

  “Oh, I think we’d be grateful for their knowledge today.” Her manner was controlled, as if she desperately tried to remember how she had once talked and behaved. “Anyway, this is where it all happened. We thought at first we had an advantage. Nobody was bothering to come out to what was considered a very minor find and everyone involved was anxious not to let any government start interfering. It was a sort of sacred trust, if you like. We kept clearing. We weren’t likely to be found. Unless we used the emergency radio nobody would waste an energy unit on coming out. Oddly, we found no monumental statuary at all, though the engineering was on a scale with anything from the nineteenth dynasty—not quite as sophisticated, maybe, but again far in advance of its own time.”

  “How long did it take you to uncover it all?”

  “We never did. We all swore to reveal nothing until a proper international preservation order could be obtained. This government is as desperate for cruise-schoomer dollars as anyone . . .”

  I found myself interrupting her. “This was all covered by hand, Bea?”

  “No, no.” Again she was amused. “No, the ship did that, mostly. When it brought me back.”

  A sudden depression filled me. “You mean a spaceship, do you?”

  “Yes,” she said. “A lot of people here know about them. And I told Di Roper, as well as some of the kids, and the Sufi. But nobody ever believes us—nobody from the real world, I mean. And that’s why I wanted to tell you. You’re still a real person, aren’t you?”

  “Bea—you could let me know everything in London. Once we’re back in a more familiar environment. Can’t we just enjoy this place for what it is? Enjoy the world for what it is?”

  “It’s not enjoyable for me, Paul.”

  I moved away from her. “I don’t believe in spaceships.”

  “You don’t believe in much, do you?” Her tone was unusually cool.

  I regretted offending her, yet I could not help but respond. “The nuts and bolts of keeping this ramshackle planet running somehow. That’s what I believe in, Bea. I’m like that chap in the first version of The African Queen, only all he had to worry about was a World War and a little beam-engine. Bea, you were here alone and horribly overtired. Surely . . . ?”

  “Let me talk, Paul.” There was a note of aching despair in her voice which immediately silenced me and made me lower my head in assent.

  We stood there, looking at the sunrise pouring light over that dusty red-andbrown landscape with its drowned architecture, and I listened to her recount the most disturbing and unlikely story I was ever to hear.

  The remains of the team had gone into Aswan for various reasons and Bea was left alone with only a young Arab boy for company. Ali worked as a general servant and was as much part of the team as anyone else, with as much enthusiasm. “He, too, understood the reasons for saying little about our work. Phil Springfield had already left to speak to some people in Washington and Professor al-Bayumi, no close relative of the Inspector, was doing what he could in Cairo, though you can imagine the delicacy of his position. Well, one morning, when I was cleaning the dishes and Ali had put a record on the gramophone, this freak storm blew up. It caused a bit of panic, of course, though it was over in a minute or two. And when the sand settled again there was the ship—there, on that bluff. You can see where it came and went.”

  The spaceship, she said, had been a bit like a flying saucer in that it was circular, with deep sides and glowing horizontal bands at regular intervals. “It was more drum-shaped, though there were discs—I don’t know, they weren’t metal, but seemed like visible electricity, sort of protruding from it, half on the inside, half on the outside. Much of that moved from a kind of hazy gold into a kind of silver. There were other colours, too. And, I think, sounds. It looked a bit like a kid’s tambourine—opaque, sparkling surfaces top and bottom—like the vellum on a drum. And the sides went dark sometimes. Polished oak. The discs, the flange things, went scarlet. They were its main information sensors.”

  “It was organic?”

  “It was a bit. You’d really have to see it for yourself. Anyway, it stood there for a few minutes and then these figures came out. I thought they were test-pilots from that experimental field in Libya and they’d made an emergency landing. I was going to offer them a cup of tea when I realised they weren’t human. They had dark bodies that weren’t suits exactly but an extra body you wear over your own. Well, you’ve seen something like it. We all have. It’s Akhenoton and Nefertiti. Those strange abdomens and elongated heads, their hermaphroditic quality. They spoke a form of very old-fashioned English. They apologised. They said they had had an instrument malfunction and had not expected to find anyone here. They were prepared to take us with them, if we wished to go. I gathered that these were standard procedures for them. We were both completely captivated by their beauty and the wonder of the event. I don’t think Ali hesitated any more than I. I left a note for whoever returned, saying I’d had to leave in a hurry and didn’t know when I’d be back. Then we went with them.”

  “You didn’t wonder about their motives?”

  “Motives? Yes, Paul, I suppose hallucinations have motives. We weren’t the only Earth-people ever to go. Anyway, I never regretted the decision. On the dark side of the moon the main ship was waiting. That’s shaped like a gigantic dung-beetle. You’ll laugh when I tell you why. I still find it funny. They’re furious because their bosses won’t pay for less antiquated vessels. Earth’s not a very important project. The ship was designed after one of the first organisms they brought back from Earth, to fit in with what they thought was a familiar form. Apparently their own planet has fewer species but many more different sizes of the same creature. They haven’t used the main ship to visit Earth since we began to develop sensitive detection equipment. Their time is different, anyway, and they still find our ways of measuring and recording it very hard to understand.”

  “They took you to their planet?” I wanted her story to be over. I had heard enough to convince me that she was in need of immedia
te psychiatric help.

  “Oh, no. They’ve never been there. Not the people I know. Others have been back, but we never communicated with them. They have an artificial environment on Mercury.” She paused, noticing my distress. “Paul, you know me. I hated that von Däniken stuff. It was patently rubbish. Yet this was, well, horribly like it. Don’t think I wasn’t seriously considering I might have gone barmy. When people go mad, you know, they get such ordinary delusions. I suppose they reflect our current myths and apocrypha. I felt foolish at first. Then, of course, the reality grew so vivid, so absorbing, I forgot everything. I could not have run away, Paul. I just walked into it all and they let me. I’m not sure why, except they know things—even circumstances, if you follow me—and must have felt it was better to let me. They hadn’t wanted to go underwater and they’d returned to an old location in the Sahara. They’d hoped to find some spares, I think. I know it sounds ridiculously prosaic.