by Paula Guran
“Guarantee that men would live forever,” said Petrie, with perhaps just an edge of the fury taken off his voice.
“Exactly! They were trying to approximate something they knew about, but couldn’t ever really achieve, because they didn’t have the complete instructions. My masters, on the other hand, truly can make a man immortal.”
“Your masters?” Petrie narrowed his eyes. “So you’re a slave. And who are your masters, boy?”
“I’m not a slave!” said Lewis heatedly. “I’m more of an—an employee on long-term contract. And my masters are a terribly wise and powerful lot of scientists and businessmen.”
“Freemasons, by any chance? Rosicrucians?”
“Certainly not.” Lewis sniffed.
“Well, they’re not so clever as they think they are,” said Petrie. “I saw through you easily enough. ‘Sit-Hathor-Yunet,’ you said when you saw that cartouche, without a moment’s hesitation. And you’d said you couldn’t read hieroglyphs!”
Lewis winced. “I did slip there, didn’t I? Oh, dear. I wasn’t really designed for this kind of mission.”
“You weren’t, eh?”
“I’m just a literature preservationist. Scrolls and codices are more my line of work,” Lewis admitted. “I was only going to handle the restoration job. But my Facilitator—Facilitators are the clever ones, you see, they’re designed to be really good at passing themselves off as mortal, one of them would never make the mistakes I did—my Facilitator pointed out that a woman would be out of place in a camp like this, doing all sorts of dirty and dangerous work, and that I’d arouse much less suspicion than she would. She said she was sure I could handle a job like this.” He looked up at Petrie in a certain amount of embarrassment.
Petrie laughed. “Then you’ve been rather a fool, haven’t you? You’re that much of a man, at least.”
Lewis edged slightly forward and the barrel of the rifle swung to cover him.
“Stop there!” said Petrie. “And you can just put Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet down too, clever dick.”
“Er—I’m afraid I can’t do that,” said Lewis. “She was the whole point of my mission, you see. Can’t I have her? You wouldn’t learn anything useful from her, I can promise you.”
“There’s something odd about her, too, isn’t there?” demanded Petrie. “I knew it! Everything about the bloody burial was queer from the first.”
“Suppose, a long time ago, you had something valuable that you needed to put away for the benefit of generations to come, Professor. You’d want to hide it somewhere safe, wouldn’t you?” Lewis said. “And where better than sealed in a tomb you knew wouldn’t be opened until a certain day in the year 1914?”
“So you’ve got one of Mr Wells’s time machines, have you?” Petrie speculated. “Is that how you know the future? What’s the princess, then? Is she another of your kind?”
“No! You can’t really make an immortal like this,” said Lewis in disgust, waving a hand at the mummy case.
“Then how is it done? I want to know!”
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that, Professor.”
“You will, by God.” Petrie cocked the rifle again.
“Oh, sir, does it have to come to this?” Lewis pleaded. “Just let me go. I’ve left you the nicest little cache of loot in payment, really a remarkable find—”
He gestured at the jewelry he had dumped into the recess behind the sarcophagus. Petrie glanced at it, and his gaze stayed on the gold in spite of his intention, only a second longer than he had planned; but that was enough time for Lewis, who fled past him like a wraith in the night.
He was a hundred meters away by the time the bullet whizzed past his ear, bowling over Ali and the other fellaheen in his passage. He’d have been farther if not for the aerodynamic drag that the mummy case exerted. Gasping, he lifted it over his head like an ant with a particularly valuable grain of barley and ran, making for the railway line.
“Damn!” he groaned, as he sprinted on, hearing the shots and outcry in his wake. “My clothes!”
They were still sitting in a tidily folded heap in the shaft, where he’d meant to put them on prior to exiting stealthily. Can’t be helped, he thought to himself. Perhaps I won’t be too conspicuous?
Lewis had a stitch in his side by the time he reached the railway line, and set the mummy case down while he cast about for the hut in which he’d hidden his handcar. Ah! There it was. He flung open the makeshift door and stared blankly into the darkness for a moment before the sound of approaching gunfire rammed the fact home: someone had stolen the handcar. He tried looking by infrared, but the result was the same. No handcar.
He lost another few seconds biting his knuckles as the pursuit grew nearer, until he distinguished Petrie’s voice, louder than the others and titanic in its wrath. Dismayed, Lewis grabbed up the mummy case again and ran for his immortal life, through the lurid scarlet night of Egypt by infrared.
A frightened cyborg can go pretty far and pretty fast before running out of breath, so Lewis had got well out of the sound of pursuit before he had to stop and set down the mummy case again. Wheezing, he collapsed on it and regarded the flat open field in which he found himself.
“I hope you won’t mind, Princess,” he said. “There’s been a slight change in plan. In fact, the plan has gone completely out the window. You probably wouldn’t have enjoyed the railway ride anyway. Don’t worry; I’ll get you to the Nile somehow. What am I going to do, though?”
He peered across a distance of several miles to a pinprick of light a mortal couldn’t have seen.
“There’s a campfire over there,” he said. “Do you suppose they have camels, Princess? Do you suppose I could persuade them to loan me a camel? Not that I’m particularly good at persuading mortals to do things. That’s in a Facilitator’s programming. Not something a lowly little Preserver drone is expected to be any good at.”
A certain shade of resentment came into his voice.
“Do you suppose the professor was right, Princess? Did Lady Kiu take advantage of me? Did she send me in on a job for which I wasn’t programmed simply because she didn’t want to bother with it herself ?” He sat there a moment in silence on the mummy case, fuming.
“You know, Princess, I think she did. Mrs Petrie did plenty of crawling about in the shafts. So did Winifred Brunton. Granted, they were English. All the same . . . ” Lewis looked up at the infinite stars. “Can it be I’ve been played for a fool?”
The infinite stars looked down on him and pursed their lips.
“I’ll bet she weasels out of sleeping with me, too,” he sighed. “Darn it. Well, Princess, you wait here. I’m going to see if I can borrow a camel.”
He rose to his feet, hitched up his drawers and strode away through the darkness with a purposeful air.
Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet smiled up at the sky and waited. It was all she knew how to do. She didn’t mind.
After a while a darkness detached itself from the greater darkness and loomed up against the stars, to become the silhouette of Lewis, proudly mounted on the back of a camel.
“Here we are!” he cried cheerily. “Can you believe it, Princess, there was a runaway camel wandering loose through the fields? What a stroke of luck for us! I hate stealing things from mortals.”
He reined it in, bade it sit, and jumped down.
“Because, you see, the professor was wrong about me. I steal things for mortals. Actually it isn’t even stealing. I’m a Preserver. It’s what I do and I’m proud of it. It really is the best work in the world, Princess. Travel to exotic lands, meetings with famous people . . . ” He scooped her up and vaulted back on the camel’s hump. “Dodging bullets when they decide you’re a tomb-robber . . . oh, well. Hut-hut! Up and at ’em, boy!” The camel unfolded upward with a bellow of protest. It had been content to carry Lewis, who if he did not smell quite right had at least a proper human shape; but something about the princess spooked it badly, and it decided to run away.
/> It set off at a dead run. The little creature on its back yelled and yanked on its reins, but the great black thwartwise oblong thing back up there was still following it no matter how fast it ran, and so the camel just kept running. It ran toward the smell of water, as being the only possible attraction in the fathomless night. It galloped over packed and arid hardpan, through fields of cotton, through groves of apricot trees. Lewis experienced every change in terrain intimately, and was vainly trying to spit out a mouthful of apricot leaves when the camel found water, and stopped abruptly at the edge of a canal. Lewis, and Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet, did not stop.
The black earth and the bright stars reversed, not once but several times, and then it was all darkness as Lewis landed with a splash in the canal, though with great presence of mind kept his grip on the mummy case. Down they went, and then the buoyancy of the sealed case pulled them upward again, and Lewis gulped in a lungful of air and scanned frantically for crocodiles.
“Whew!” he said, finding none. He noted also that the tidal flow was taking them Nileward at a leisurely pace, and, settling himself firmly atop Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet, he began to paddle energetically.
“Well, call me Ishmael! My apologies, Princess, but needs must and all that sort of thing. We’ll be out of this in no time, you’ll see. In the meantime, enjoy the new experience. I take it you’ve never been bodysurfing before?” He began to giggle at the idea of bodysurfing and couldn’t control himself, laughing so hard that he nearly fell off. “Whoops! No, no, you headstrong girl! This way!”
Leeches floated up eagerly from the black depths, sensing a meal; just as the mosquitoes had, they came into contact with the minute electromagnetic field surrounding Lewis’s skin and changed their minds in a hurry.
About the time that Lewis spotted the lights of Bani Suwayf in the distance, he also identified a pair of crocodiles a kilometer off. Crocodiles take rather more than an electromagnetic field to discourage and so, splashing hastily to the side of the canal, Lewis pushed the mummy case out and scrambled after it. He paused only a moment to let the water stream from his ballooning drawers before picking up the case and resuming his journey by land.
“We’re almost there, Princess, and we’re not even late!” he said happily, as he trudged along. “I’ll have a thing or two to say to Lady Kiu, though, won’t I? Let’s see . . . Ahem! Madam, I feel I have no choice but to protest your . . . mmm. Lady Kiu, this is a painful thing for me to say, but . . . no. Kiu, old girl, I don’t think you quite . . . that is, I . . . I mean, you . . . right.”
He sighed, and marched on.
Bani Suwayf was a small town in 1914, but it had a railway station and a resident population of Europeans. One of them, M. Heurtebise, was a minor functionary in a minor bureau having to do with granting minor permits of various kinds to other Europeans, and he deeply resented the smallness of his place in the order of things. He took it out on his wife, his servants, his pets, and once a week he also took it out on a person whom he paid for the trouble and who was therefore philosophical about his nocturnal visits.
He was returning from one of these visits—it had not lasted long—in his motorcar, and was just rounding the corner of the main street as Lewis entered it from the little track leading from the canal. He looked up, aghast, when the bug-eyed lights caught and displayed him: a muddy and sweating figure wearing only striped drawers, balancing a mummy case on his head.
“Stop!” cried M. Heurtebise on impulse, hitting his chauffeur on the shoulder with his cane. “Thief!” he added, because it seemed like a good bet, and he pulled out a revolver and brandished it at Lewis.
Lewis, who had used up a lot of energy on his flit from Professor Petrie, decided the hell with it and stopped. He set down the mummy case very carefully, held up his hands in a classic don’t-shoot gesture, and vanished.
“Where did he go?” exclaimed M. Heurtebise. When no answer was forthcoming from the night, he struck his chauffeur again and ordered, “Get out and look for him, Ahmed, you fool!”
Ahmed gritted his teeth, but got out of the car and looked around.
He looked up the street; he looked down the street. He looked everywhere but under the motorcar, where Lewis had insinuated himself into the undercarriage as cunningly as an alien monster.
“He is not to be found, sir,” Ahmed told M. Heurtebise.
“I can see that, you imbecile. But he has left an antiquity in the roadway!”
Ahmed prodded Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet with his foot. “So he has, sir.”
Muttering to himself, M. Heurtebise got out of the motorcar. He strode over to the mummy case and his eyes widened as he noted the excellence of its condition and its obvious value.
“This has clearly been stolen,” he said. “It is our duty to confiscate it. We will notify the proper authorities in the morning. Put it into the car, Ahmed.”
Ahmed bent and attempted to lift it.
“It is too heavy, sir,” he said. “We must do it together.”
Mr. Heurtebise considered striking him for his insolence, but then reflected that if the mummy case was heavy, it was possibly full of treasure, and therefore the issue of prime importance was to get it out of the street and into his possession. So between them, he and Ahmed lifted the case and set it on end in the back seat. They got back in the motorcar and drove on the short distance to M. Heurtebise’s villa.
When they pulled into the courtyard and got out, Ahmed opened the door to the ground-floor office and they carried the mummy case inside.
M. Heurtebise opened the venetian blinds to admit light from the courtyard lantern, and he directed Ahmed to set Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet on two cane chairs.
The office was a comfortable room in the European style, with a banked fire in the hearth, leather overstuffed chairs with a small table and lamp between them, and a formidable desk with a row of pigeonholes above it. There was also a large cage in one corner, covered with canvas sacking. As Ahmed pushed the two chairs closer together, a hoarse metallic voice began to exclaim from beneath the cover. It said something very rude and then repeated it eighteen times.
“Silence!” hissed M. Heurtebise. “Bad parrot! BAD PARROT!” He took his cane and hammered on the side of the cage, creating such a racket Ahmed winced and put his hands over his ears. A stunned silence followed. M. Heurtebise nodded in satisfaction. “That’s the only way to teach him, by the devil.”
“May I go now, sir?”
“Go.” M. Heurtebise waved him away. They left the study, and Ahmed drove the motorcar into what had formerly been the stables. Here he got out, closed the great door and locked it, and went off to the servants’ quarters. M. Heurtebise paused only long enough to lock the office door, and then climbed the outer stair to his apartments on the second floor.
Alone in the darkness, Lewis uninsinuated himself from the under-chassis and fell groaning to the floor. He was now smeared with black grease in addition to being muddy and wet. He lay there a moment and finally crawled out from under the motorcar. He got to his feet, staggered to the door and rattled it.
He was locked in. He shrugged and looked around for a suitable tool.
In the office, however, something else was just discovering that it was not locked in.
In his enthusiasm, M. Heurtebise had beaten on the bars of the cage with such force that he had shaken the cage’s latch hook loose, though with the cover being in place he had not noticed this. However, the cage’s inhabitant noticed, once its little ears had stopped ringing. It cocked a bright eye and then slid down the bars to the cage door.
Thrusting its beak through the bars, it levered the latch the rest of the way open. It pushed its head against the bars and the door opened partway. There was a rustle, a thump, and then a parrot dropped between the cage cover and the bars to the floor. It ruffled its feathers and looked around.
It was an African Grey, all silver-and-ashes except for its scarlet tail.
“Oh, my,” it said. “You bad boy,
what do you think you’re doing?” It waddled across the tile floor like a clockwork toy, looking up at the long slanting bars of light coming in from the courtyard.
“Oh, la la! You bad boy bad boy!” it said, and beat its wings and flew to the top of the window-frame rail. Laughing evilly to itself, it reached down with its powerful little beak and snipped the topmost venetian blind in half with one bite. The slat having parted with a pleasing crunch, the parrot then made its way along the rail to the cord and rappelled down it, stopping at each blind and methodically biting through, until the whole assembly hung in ruins.
The parrot swung from the end of the cord by its feet a moment, twirling happily, and then launched itself at the desk.
“Whee! Oh, stop that at once, you wicked creature! Stop that now! Do you hear? Do you hear?”
It made straight for the neat stack of pencils and bit them each in half too; then pulled out the pens and did the same. As though tidying its work area, it threw the pieces over the edge of the desk, one after another, and for good measure plucked the inkwell out of its recess and pitched that over too. The inkwell hit the floor with a crash and the ink fountained out, spattering the tiles. The parrot watched this appreciatively, tilting its head.
“As God is my witness,” it commented, “if you don’t be quiet NOW I will wring your neck! I mean it! Stop that this instant!”
It turned and eyed the pigeonholes. Reaching into the nearest it pulled out M. Heurtebise’s morning correspondence, dragged it to the edge and, with a decisive toss of its head, chucked it over the side too.
The envelopes smacked into the mess already there, and spread and drifted. The parrot peered into the other pigeonholes and poked through them, murmuring, “Wicked, wicked, wicked, wicked . . . tra la la.” Finding nothing else of interest on the desk, it backed out of the last pigeonhole, gave a little fluttering hop and landed on the nearest of the armchairs. It strutted to and fro on the smooth leather surface a moment before lifting its tail grandly and liquidly.