by Paula Guran
Perhaps even some livestock of his own. If only he can get this one last task right for the king. A deep voice from the courtyard below: “Bak? Where are you, Bak?” It is the head of the household. He is required to serve once more.
Like a virtuoso pianist concluding a concerto, Ruth performs the final keystrokes on her laptop and locks in the algorithm. Tap, tap, tap. She hammers the ENTER key and hears the hard drive click. It is much less satisfying than a meaty chord in D Major, but the exhilaration of this conclusion makes her a little dizzy. “ ’Tis done.”
At the other end of the lab, Lentini is checking his email. He grunts an acknowledgement, but Ruth doesn’t think he was actually listening to what she said. She thinks of Daniel, who was the same.
“Never mind” she says, loudly. “I don’t do it for the applause anyway.” Lentini looks up from his screen, puzzled. It would be easy to ask for another few days to double-check everything again. If Ruth asked them, Botha and Mourad would definitely give her the time. It’s not as if King Mentuhotep IV of the Eleventh Dynasty is in a hurry, he can stay warm and Reinvigorated in the tank for a few days without coming to any harm.
But Ruth knows further delay would just be wasting time. They all have to stop procrastinating and do it. She will pilot the reconnections with certainty. Lentini will shrug off his infuriating nose-picking and nail-biting and turn into a dexterous surgeon. Frans Botha is already an assertive, decision-making machine, so he doesn’t need to change. The local technicians will do as they are told, as always . . . and anyway, during the Reignition process itself, the only thing they actually need to do is handle bags of Botha’s patented, customized saline solution, and it’s very difficult to mess that up. And Mourad? Well, he will know when the time comes not to get in the way.
So, everything is completely ready for tomorrow morning. What now? Ruth contemplates checking her emails too, but she dare not in case there is a message from Daniel, and that might knock her off her stride.
It is too hot outside to leave the compound, and the vista is barren and boring. More Pyramid Solitaire? Ruth is rescued from the tedium by shouts from down the corridor. “No way. No bloody way. Out of the question!” Frans sounds very agitated indeed.
Ruth slides out of the lab and eases herself down the linoleum toward Botha’s office. She becomes aware of a presence on her shoulder: Lentini is also curious and has left his messages behind. Under the fluorescent strip lighting, they proceed in lockstep toward Botha’s lair.
When they get there, both Botha and Mourad are on their feet. A thick wooden desk separates them. It is piled high with papers, several empty cardboard coffee cups, and a plastic replica of a skull. A ballpoint pen is stuck in one of the eye sockets. There’s a portrait of the emir on the wall of this room, too.
“Have you any idea what kind of a disruption it will cause?” says Botha. Mourad is unrepentant. “It will cause no disruption. He will be here merely to observe. It is appropriate.”
“I don’t care if it’s appropriate or not. He will distract the technicians.”
Botha’s eye wanders as he spots Ruth and Stefano lurking outside the door. Mourad turns to see who is there.
“Doctor Lentini, Ruth. I have some good news!”
Botha flops sullenly into his chair. “It’s not good news, it’s a bloody disaster.”
Mourad ignores him. “I am delighted to announce that my cousin will be joining us tomorrow to observe the Reignition.”
Ruth raises her eyebrows. Beyond, Botha throws his hands in the air, as if to say, You see?
“Your cousin, as in, the emir?” She points to the portrait on the wall. Botha turns to regard it, and his shoulders flinch a little.
Mourad beams. “Exactly, Ruth. He will come to see the triumph.”
“All those bodyguards in my lab?” says Botha. “Over my dead body.”
Mourad flips back round to face Botha and slams his fist on the desk. One of the empty cups falls over. A single sheet of paper slips off the tallest pile and floats down on to the floor.
“No, Doctor Botha. Over the dead body of Pharaoh Mentuhotep the Fourth! May I remind you, he is a king. He is of royal blood.”
“Bollocks, the blood is all my saline solution.”
Mourad scoffs. “But it is not your saline. It has been bought and paid for by the emir, who has indulged your research for a good many years now.”
“Indulged? I am about to bring him immortality!”
Mourad laughs. “Immortality? An immortal zoo of chimpanzees is what you have brought us so far. That, and twenty seconds of prayer from a decapitated traitor.”
Ruth winces.
“We are nearly there,” pleads Botha, “Look what we’re doing with the Egyptian.”
Mourad stands up straight and takes a breath. “Quite. Mentuhotep. But I say again: he is royalty and, when he wakes, he must be met by royalty. That is why the emir will be here tomorrow.”
“Royalty? You’re being ridiculous. His empire has been gone for centuries. And don’t your files say he was the last of his line?”
Mourad shrugs. “That is neither here nor there. A king is a king.”
“You know what I think? I don’t think the emir gives a shit about royal protocol. I think he just wants to goggle at my mummy. And I am not bloody Mister Barnum-and-Bailey, Mourad. There aren’t any spectator seats.”
Mourad holds up his hands in mock surrender. “Let me put it this way, Frans. The emir will be here tomorrow. Decide if you wish to be.”
He turns and walks out of the office, and both Ruth and Lentini have to step back as he strides past.
At his desk, Botha puts his head in his hands and slowly deflates.
Interesting, thinks Ruth. For all his doctorates, Botha has only just realized that he is an employee.
The midday sun hammers down on the funeral procession, but it is Amenemhat’s glare that is making Bak sweat. The vizier’s presence haunts him. As the train of people, animals, and the gilt cart carrying the king’s body makes it way slowly out of the city and into the valley, Bak tries to keep his eyes firmly on the path. But every time he looks up, he finds Amenemhat lurking in the periphery of his vision. And every time he actually turns to face the vizier, Amenemhat stares right back at him. The dark eyes are monstrous, beady things.
Bak tries to find comfort in his lack of power. He never really had a choice in any of this. Mentuhotep pushed this odd embalming task on to him, for reasons that he has taken with him into the afterlife. There have been no opportunities to escape. There is every chance that Amenemhat will charge at him at some point, and it is unlikely he will be able to get out of the way when that happens. I’m basically doomed, thinks Bak.
And yet . . . the king promised freedom.
Also, I have an honored job to do, Bak reminds himself. Trudging up the hill, one foot in front of the other, avoiding the apple-sized pieces of rubble on the path, Bak runs over the options in his head. Performing this ritual may or may not mean I get to go free. But deserting means certain death, and always has. So my only option, really, is to follow the procession and hope it turns out in my favor. It is a cruel wager, but the only one available now.
And I still have the knife, he thinks. If the emblem does not save me, the blade might.
He looks back at Amenemhat, whose glare shows no sign of dimming. Bak imagines stabbing him in the throat, or maybe the eye.
The local technicians dance around the capsule like they’re at an Irish wake.
Lentini declared Reinvigoration complete some six hours ago, and dialed down the flow of chemicals in and out of the unit. Now the assistants are doing diagnostics constantly. Some are using the remote syringe system, bolted on to the underside of the box, to draw small tissue samples from the corpse inside the sealed chamber. Others catalogue the tiny vials of flesh and fluid, for their colleagues to process. They move constantly and with purpose around the room, on paths that never seem to collide. One taps another lightly on the s
houlder and the two colleagues pivot around each other.
Yes, like dancers, thinks Ruth. In the middle of the throng, she steps forwards, backwards, and forwards again, in order to keep out of their way. A do-si-do in the chaos.
Only it’s not chaos, thinks Ruth. It is actually very ordered, and merely appears messy and random to her because she is on the outside of the system. Each technician has been given very specific orders by Lentini and Botha, and they are performing the steps they have been assigned. If only she had been sat in on the Reinvigoration team briefing this morning, she would know what each of the lab assistants was doing, and this crowd, with its ever shifting center of gravity, would not seem so out of control.
Ruth reasons she could probably work out what each of the men is up to just by following one of them round for a bit. But to be honest she finds it difficult to even count how many there are. Fourteen or fifteen? Respectable hair and close-cropped beards, if they can grow them, each with a white disposable lab apron over jeans and flannel shirt—she suddenly realizes she can’t tell them apart. Are they even the same technicians who were working here when she arrived last year? How has she not noticed?
Just beyond the foot of the capsule, a group of four assistants have congealed around a triptych of computer monitors. Each screen has two graphs plotted, plus a list of numbers that blink when they change. All the charts show smooth curves that rise quickly but level off after a time. Ruth knows that they measure the chemical make-up of the various types of cells and fluids in the subject. The smooth, shallow curves mean that the process is working.
Ruth looks over to the opposite end of the room, to the top of the unit. Her space. The dedicated computer she uses to pilot the Reignition sits on a table. It is switched off. Funny, thinks Ruth. If a graph on my screens showed a nice smooth curve, that would mean something had gone very wrong indeed.
Ruth’s computer sits alongside a metal box, about two feet cubed, which is bolted to the table. Its sides are clean, brushed aluminum, but out of its back sprouts a bundle of thick black rubber wires, each about the thickness of her thumb. Her eyes follow the wires out of the box. They spill out on to the floor and slither over to the white fiberglass unit in the middle of the lab. As the wires reach the gurney they rise as one to pass through a plastic tie, and then burst away from each other, running to different sections of the capsule. Each wire finds its own customized hole in the fiberglass, and burrows into the unit.
They have taken to calling it “the sarcophagus,” an ancient name for something Botha ordered from his Chinese manufacturing team just a few weeks ago. Mentuhotep’s body is too long for the capsules they use for the chimps, and it would not do to fold him up and squeeze him in. Botha mocks Mourad’s reverence for dead royalty, but Ruth knows that he did not even consider recycling any of the monkey equipment.
Ruth peers through one of the portholes into the capsule. Her breath steams up on the glass, and she has to wipe away the condensation to see the cadaver floating within. The technicians keep the solution flowing, so there is a slight current inside the sarcophagus. Tiny shavings of wax, the remnants of the embalming aldehyde, float and dance across Mentuhotep’s dark gray arms. Wrinkled flaps of skin hang off the body, wafting in the saline solution like seaweed. And inserted into the flesh at regular intervals, the access points for Reignition. Dozens of electrode spikes, driven deep into body, seeking out major nerve bundles.
Ruth tries to access the part of her brain reserved for trivia. Didn’t she read somewhere that the Egyptians knew about acupuncture? Aren’t there old papyrus scrolls that show all the points? Or maybe she is thinking about star charts, and the acupuncture thing was the ancient Chinese. She wonders if King Mentuhotep ever had acupuncture when he was alive.
An unexpected hush descends over the lab. Ruth is suddenly very much aware of herself, and looks up, but no one looks back at her. Instead, they are all staring toward the internal window, out of the lab to the corridor beyond. They look like a herd of livestock, carefully eyeing something that has disturbed the chewing of the cud.
Ruth follows their gaze. An entourage of people are walking down the corridor. At the head of the group are Mourad and Botha. Between them, another man, clad in traditional black and white robes. His headdress is a brilliant white, clamped in place by a gold headband.
It is the man in all the portraits.
The three of them arrive at the doorway together, and there is an awkward moment when Botha tries to hold the door open for the emir, but it swings away from them, so Botha has to lean forward to keep it open, while his benefactor sidesteps into the room. Eye contact is avoided as personal space is violated. Botha follows the emir into the lab. He doesn’t hold the door for Mourad.
“This is Ruth, the one I was telling you about.”
The emir smiles with the lower half of his face. “Ah yes, the neurologist.” That’s not quite true, but no one corrects him. Ruth tries a sort of half bow, half demure nod—which doesn’t quite work. I probably look like a narcoleptic, she thinks.
The emir stares at her. His eyes are steady and confident. “Well, Doctor, what are our chances?”
Ruth was expecting small talk. She finds his directness makes her uneasy. She has not discussed anything so crass as the odds of success with Botha, and they haven’t prepared an answer. She glances at her boss for help, but he just stares at her, too.
In fact, the emir’s question means that everyone is staring at her.
“There are many factors, sir. But we have the finest team and the best equipment. No one has a better chance than we do.”
The emir nods, and immediately lets his gaze drift to the capsule.
“Ah ha! My fellow pharaoh.” He skips over to the unit and claps his hands together like a boy at the zoo. “Let’s see him! Let’s see him!”
Ruth exhales, while Botha and Mourad follow in the wake of the emir’s robe. “Good girl,” whispers Botha, as he drifts past.
The incantations are taking a long time. Three priests are leading this part of the ceremony, and they take it in turns to offer copious blessings and good wishes to the king as he begins his journey.
Bak feels himself swaying slightly, and has to will himself back into steadiness. Three of them, he thinks. That’s the real menace of this ritual. It means they can each take a rest from chanting while another one keeps up the torture on the rest of us. And all the while, my moment seems to become ever more distant.
The cave is small. “Modest” is what Amenemhat called it. Bak thinks it is shameful. It is but a single chamber, and they have not even treated the walls. True, Mentuhotep died suddenly and early, and usually the pharaohs take charge of their own funeral arrangements. But compared to the other tombs down in the valley, this interment is an insult.
Everyone in the contingent is male. Only one man is not standing, and that’s because he is dead. The king is lying stiff and snug in the sarcophagus, already settled into his final resting place. The block of stone that Amenemhat and his soldiers ripped from the quarries in the East has been hollowed out, and its walls coated in ritual markings, the same words that the priests are now reciting. At the head of the coffin, the lid stands upright, waiting to be slammed down on the king’s body at the designated moment. Bak imagines the noise it will make, the terrible slap of stone on stone. That will be the sound of his fate arriving, he thinks. The beginning of a new life as a free man . . . or the signal for Amenemhat to impale him on a spear.
There do not appear to be any weapons in the cave, Bak notices for the first time. True, there are some soldiers in the group, but they are in ceremonial dress, performing a role as a guard of honor for the dead king. No one looks like they’re about to kill anyone, thinks Bak. Maybe I’m in the clear.
His eyes catch Amenemhat, still looking at him over Mentuhotep’s corpse. The vizier has the hint of a smile on his lips. Spears or no spears, Bak shudders. He resolves not to let his concentration slip.
The rest of
the entourage flank the coffin. The priests, the handmen who pulled the cart, and the king’s pathetic brother, who hangs his head and sobs quietly as the incantations finally grind to a halt.
The priest at the end of the row concludes his prayer, annunciating the final words with a crisp confidence. Bak feels squeezed by the sudden silence, like the air is hugging him.
His moment has arrived.
The technicians have intubated the body. That’s optimistic, thinks Ruth. The Reinvigoration may be working, but that does not guarantee Reignition will even get off the ground. If the corpse decomposed too far before it was sealed in the wax, then no amount of Lentini’s chemical magic will restore the decayed connections. Her algorithms will be lost in a maze of synapses, searching frantically like a blind man who has mislaid his cane. In that situation, you might get some innate reflexes back online, where the nerves exist on a one-to-one correspondence with functionality and the signal barely has to enter the CNS. But to Reignite the cognitive functions, everything needs to be perfect. There is a very good chance that this experiment will result in nothing more than a perfectly nourished slab of dead meat. We may as well try Reigniting a sirloin steak, thinks Ruth. Or a carrot.
She has gnawed her fingernails down to their stumps, worrying about this, ever since the team received the go-ahead on this project. But at least if the worst happens she won’t have to explain what went wrong to the emir. Everyone knows that honor will fall to Frans Botha.
That was why he was arguing with Mourad yesterday evening, thinks Ruth. It was nothing to do with all that rubbish about the emir being a distraction. The problem is that Reignition might not work, and Botha would prefer not to explain that to the emir face to face.
But if Botha is worried about failure, he is doing a good job of not showing it. He stands behind her, hands on his hips, surveying the lab like it’s a battlefield. The emir has been sat in the corner, with Mourad perched by his side, murmuring explanations of the process.