by Paula Guran
“Allons, enfants de la patrie—eee—eee!” it sang. “La la la!”
The parrot looked across the gulf of space at Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet, but she presented no opportunities or anything it might get hold of. It contented itself with worrying at an upholstered chair-button. Snip! That was the way to do it. The parrot noticed there were several other buttons within reach on the chair’s back, and crying “Ooooh! Ha ha ha,” it carefully removed every one in sight.
Biting neat triangular holes in the upholstery with which to pull itself up, it scaled the chair’s arm and stepped out on the lamp table.
“You’re a naughty boy and you don’t get a treat,” it declared, looking speculatively up at the lamp, which had a number of jet beads pendent from its green glass shade. Straining on tiptoe, it caught one and gave it a good pull. The lamp tilted, tottered and fell to the floor, where it broke and rolled, pouring forth a long curved spill of kerosene.
It came to rest in the hearth.
“Oh, my,” said the parrot. It looked at the broken lamp with one eye and then with the other. “Oh, what have you done now? Bad! Too bad!” With a soft whoosh flames bloomed in the hearth. They leaped high as the lamp tinkled and shattered further, throwing bits out into the room. The parrot ducked and drew back, then stared again as the inevitable tongue of blue flame advanced over its kerosene road across the floor, right to M. Heurtebise’s scattered correspondence and the cane chairs whereon reposed Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet.
“Oooh!” said the parrot brightly. “Oooh, la la la!”
Lewis had been carefully sliding the stable bolt out of its recess in tiny increments, nudging it along with an old putty knife he had slipped between the planking. He had only another inch to go when he heard the breaking glass, the roar of flames.
“Yikes!” he said, and gave up on any effort to be polite. He punched his fist through the door, opened the bolt, dragged the door to one side and scrambled out. In horror he saw the flames dancing within the office, heard the mortals upstairs begin to shout.
He was across the courtyard in less than the blink of an eye, and yanked the office door off its hinges.
“Good evening,” said the parrot as it walked out and past him, its little claws going tick tick tick on the flagstones. Lewis gaped down at it before looking up to see the first flames rising around Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet.
He was never certain afterward just what he did next, but what he was doing immediately after that was running down the street with the mummy case once again balanced on his head, in some pain as his hair smoldered. He heard the rattle of a motorcar overtaking him, and Lady Kiu slammed on the brakes.
“You’re late,” she said. Lewis tossed Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet into the back seat of the Vauxhall and dove in headfirst after her, not quite getting all the way in before Lady Kiu let out the clutch, downshifted, stepped on the gas again and they sped away.
“I’m sorry!” Lewis said, when he was right side up again. “All sorts of things went wrong—most unexpectedly—and—”
“You idiot, you’ve gotten grease on the seats,” snarled Lady Kiu.
“Well, I’m sorry it isn’t attar of roses, but I’ve had a slightly challenging time!” Lewis replied indignantly, clenching his fists.
“Don’t you dare to address an Executive Facilitator in that manner, you miserable little drone—”
“Oh, yeah? I’ve got pretty good programming for a drone, your Ladyship. I can perform all kinds of tasks a Facilitator is supposed to do herself!”
“Really? I can tell you one thing you won’t be doing—”
“Oh, as though I was ever going to get to do that anyway—”
They careened around a corner and pulled up at the waterfront, where Lady Kiu’s yacht was even now on the point of casting off. The Vauxhall’s headlights caught in long beams three burly security techs, waiting by the gangway. They ran forward and two of them seized the mummy case to muscle it aboard. The third, in the uniform of a chauffeur, came to attention and saluted. Lady Kiu flung open the door and stepped out on the running board, as the motor idled.
“Take that to the laboratory cabin immediately! We’re leaving at once. You, Galba, take the Vauxhall. Meet us in Alexandria. I want the slime cleaned off the upholstery by the time I see it again. That includes you, Lewis. Move!”
“Oh, bugger o—” said Lewis as he climbed from the back seat, his words interrupted as he found himself staring down a rifle barrel.
“Where’s the damned mummy case?” said Flinders Petrie.
“How’d you get here?” asked Lewis, too astonished to say anything else.
“Railway handcar,” said Flinders Petrie, grinning unpleasantly. “The fellaheen found one hidden away the other day and I thought to myself, I’ll just bet somebody’s planning to use this to get to the Nile with stolen loot. So I confiscated the thing. Threw a spanner into your plans, did it?” He had apparently traveled in his pink ballet ensemble, though he’d sensibly put on boots for the journey; his slippers hung around his neck by their ribbons, like a dancer in a painting by Degas. Nor had he come alone; behind him stood Ali and several of the other fellaheen, and they were carrying clubs.
“Look, I’m sorry, but you must have realized by now the sarcophagus was a fake!” said Lewis. “What in Jove’s name do you want?”
“It may be a fake, but it’s a three-thousand-year-old fake, and I want to know how it was done,” said Petrie imperturbably. “I’m still wearing my insanity defense; so you’d best start talking.”
“What is this?” Lady Kiu strode around the motorcar and stopped, looking at the scene in some amusement and much contempt. “Lewis, don’t tell me you’ve broken the heart of an elderly transvestite.” Petrie lifted his head to glare at her, and then his eyes widened.
“You’re the woman on the mummy case!” he said.
Lewis groaned.
“And it’s a smart monkey, too,” said Kiu coolly. She began to walk forward again, but slowly. “Too bad for it.”
Lewis scrambled to get in front of her.
“Now—let’s be civilized about this, can’t we?” he begged. “Professor, please, go home!”
Even Petrie had backed up a step at the look on Kiu’s face, and Ali and the others were murmuring prayers and making signs to ward off evil. Then Petrie dug in his heels.
“No!” he said. “No, by God! I won’t stand for this! My life’s work has been deciphering the truth about the past. I’ve had to dig through layers of trash for it, I’ve had to fight the whole time against damned thieves; but if creatures like you have been meddling in history, planting lies—then how am I to know what the truth really is? How can I know that any of it means anything?”
“None of it means anything at all, mortal,” said Kiu. “Your life’s work is pointless. There’s not a wall you can uncover that hasn’t got a lie inscribed on it somewhere.”
“Stop it, Kiu! Why should we be at odds, Professor?” Lewis said. “My masters could do a lot for you, you know, if you worked for them. Money. Hints about the best places to dig. All you’ll have to do is keep your mouth shut about this embarrassing little incident, you see? The Company could use a genius like you!”
“You’re trying to bribe the monkeys? That’s so foolish, Lewis,” said Kiu. “They’re never satisfied with the morsel they’re given. Better to silence them at the outset. Galba, kill the servants first.”
Galba, watching in shock from the other side of the motorcar, licked his lips. “Lady, I—”
“It’s forbidden, Galba. Kiu, you can’t kill them!” Lewis protested. “You know history can’t be changed!”
“It can’t be changed, but it can be forgotten,” said Kiu. “Fact effacement, we Facilitators call it.” She looked critically at Petrie. “Mortal brains are so fragile, Lewis. Especially all those tiny blood vessels . . . especially in an old man. If I were to provoke just the right hemorrhage in a critical spot, he might become . . . quite confused.”
/> She reached out her hand toward Petrie, smiling.
“No! Stop! God Apollo, Kiu, please don’t damage his mind!” Lewis cried. “Haven’t you scanned him yet? Can’t you see? He’s unique, he’s irreplaceable, you mustn’t do this!”
Lady Kiu rolled her eyes.
“Lewis, darling,” she said in tones of barely controlled exasperation, “how many ages will it take you to learn that not one of the wretched little creatures is irreplaceable? Or unique? Nothing is.”
“That’s a damned lie,” said Flinders Petrie, from the bottom of his soul, and took aim at her throat with the rifle, though his hands were trembling so badly it was doubtful he’d have hit her.
“OH!” cried Lewis suddenly, in a theatrical voice. “Oh, Lady, look out, he’ll damage you!” He launched himself at Kiu and bore her backward. Before she had recovered from her shock and begun to claw at him they were both teetering on the edge of the pier, and then they had gone over into the Nile with a splash. Galba ran to see what was happening in the water. He glanced over his shoulder at the mortals, and then made a conscious choice not to notice what they did. Killing wasn’t in his job description, nor was taking the blame for a bad field decision.
Petrie looked at the Vauxhall, still idling.
“Khaled, you know how to work these machines, don’t you?”
“Yes, sir.” Needing no other hint, Khaled vaulted into the driver’s seat. Ali and another Qufti lifted Petrie between them, as gently as though he were made of eggshell, and set him beside Khaled in the front. The rest of them piled into the back or jumped on to the running boards. Khaled swung the motorcar around and sped off into the ancient night, under the ancient moon, while behind them crocodiles scrambled hastily on to the banks of the ancient Nile. Like Galba, they knew when to stay out of a fight.
But as he rode along Petrie stiffened in his seat, for he heard a voice—or perhaps it would be more correct to say that he felt a voice, drifting into his mind from the ether, hanging before his internal eye like a smoke signal.
. . . we’ll be in touch, mortal . . .
He looked over his shoulder, and shivered.
“Khaled, drive faster.”
The stars were fading and the yacht was well downriver by the time Lewis was sitting in the laboratory cabin, completing the last pass along Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet’s case with a whirring saw. On the floor by his chair, a silver bucket of melted ice slopped gently to and fro with the motion of the river, and the champagne bottle in it rolled and floated.
Lady Kiu stood watching him. Both of them wore bathrobes. Lady Kiu merely looked damp and furious, but Lewis looked damp and battered. There were red lines healing on his arms where claw marks had recently been, and one of his eyes was still a little puffy and discolored, suggesting that an hour or two ago he had had a remarkable shiner. Some of his hair seemed to have gone missing, as well. But he was smiling as he heard a crack and then the faint hiss of decompression. The mummy case’s inner seal gave way.
“Perfect,” he said, and set down the saw, and with quick skilled hands lifted the lid of the case.
“Look! It’s a remarkable body of work!” he chortled. Lady Kiu merely cuffed her lip, but there was a certain satisfaction in her gaze as she regarded the occupant of the mummy case.
On first glance it appeared to be a mummy, neatly wrapped in linen strips white as cream. It was, however, a great deal of rolled papyrus, cunningly laid out to approximate a human form.
Lewis reached in with a tiny, sharp pair of scissors and snipped here and there. He lifted out a single scroll, sealed in wax, and looked at the inscription.
“The complete text of the Story of Sinuhe,” he murmured. “Oh, my. And what’s this one? The Book of the Sea People, gosh! And here’s The Great Lament for Tammuz, and . . . this is The True Story of Enkiddu, and this one appears to be—wait—ah! This is your prize. The Book of the Forces that Repel Matter.”
He held up a thick scroll bound twice with a golden band, and Lady Kiu snatched it from him. She looked at it hungrily.
“You’ll do the stabilization on this one first,” she ordered, handing it back to him. “It’s the most important. The rest is nothing but rubbish.”
“My predecessor doesn’t seem to have thought so,” remarked Lewis. “What a lovely haul! Hymns to the God Osiris, the Hot Fish Book (racy stuff, that), The Story the Silk Merchants Told Menes. And look here! Opinions of all Peoples on the Creation of the World!”
“Manetho was a pointless little drone, too,” said Kiu. “It doesn’t matter; we’ll find private buyers for that stuff. But you’ll have the scroll on antigravity ready to go by the time we reach Alexandria, do you hear me? Averill will be waiting there and it’s got to go straight to Philadelphia with him.”
“Yes, Great Queen,” said Lewis, looking dreamily over the scrolls. “Care for a glass of champagne to celebrate?”
“Go to hell,” she told him, and stalked to the doorway. There she paused, and turned; all the witchery of charm she had learned in eleven millennia was in her smile, if not in her dead and implacable eyes.
“But don’t worry about the mission report, Lewis darling. There won’t be a word of criticism about your performance,” she said silkily. “You’re still such a juvenile, it wouldn’t be fair. There was a time when the mortals impressed me, too. There will come a time when you’re older, and wiser, and you’ll be just as bored with them as I am now. Trust me on this.”
She took two paces back and leaned from the waist, bending over him, and ran a negligent hand through his hair. She put her lips close to his ear and whispered: “And when you’re dead inside, like me, Lewis dear, and not until then—you’ll be free. But you won’t care any more.”
She kissed him and, rising, made her exit.
Alone, Lewis sat staring after her a moment before shrugging resolutely.
He opened the champagne and poured his solitary glass. His hair was already beginning to grow back, and the retina of his left eye had almost completely reattached. And, look! There was the rising sun streaming in through the blinds, and green papyrus waved on the riverbank, and pyramids and crocodiles were all over the place. The ancient Nile! The romance of Egypt!
He had even been shot at by Flinders Petrie.
Lewis sipped his champagne and selected a scroll from the cache.
Not The Book of the Forces that Repel Matter, that was all very fascinating in its way, and would in time guarantee that Americans would rediscover antigravity (once they got around to deciphering a certain scroll, long forgotten in a museum basement), but it wasn’t his idea of treasure.
He took out the Story of Sinuhe and opened it, marveling at its state of preservation. Settling back in his chair, he drank more champagne and gradually lost himself in the first known novel. He savored the words of mortal men; the Nile bore him away.
Both the mysterious military/political and supernatural goings-on here are products of John Langan’s rich imagination. So is Skua Island. (There is an island of that name, but it lies between Argentina and Antarctica.) Skua birds do breed in the North Atlantic area of the story; mummies somewhat similar to the one in this story have been found in Northern European bogs; and, of course, people have gathered together and told scary stories since the invention of language . . .
On Skua Island
John Langan
I
The story had held us, round the dinner table, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark that it was weird, as, on a February night in an old house with a strong storm howling off the ocean, a story should essentially be, I remember no comment uttered till the eight of us adjourned to the living room with our drinks. There Fiona, my fiancée, noted it as the first time she had heard anyone number a tale that could be classified under the rubric of the zombie story among his own experiences. Whereupon Griffin, the story’s narrator, hastened to repeat, for the third or possibly the fourth time, that much of the substance of what he had related was as it
had been related to him on the beach by old Anthony, the fisherman, when everything was over, and although he, Griffin, indeed had seen what he was sure was DeBoer’s white body through the green trees, the local doctor had been unable or unwilling to fix DeBoer’s time of death with any certainty, so that the glimpse of him might have been a last look at a doomed, but still living, man.
“But do you believe that?” Kappa, our hostess, asked Griffin, who shrugged and looked sheepishly at his port.
Jennifer, curled on one of the large wicker chairs, said, “You have to admit, most of the stories you hear in a setting like this—” She waved her hand for emphasis and, as if in response, the wind gusted to a shriek, rattling the windows and provoking a round of laughter from the rest of us. “Very nice,” she said, “you see: I told you I had powers. You have to admit, the kind of story you tend to hear, which I guess means the kind of story people tend to know, is the ghost story. Isn’t that true? Get my mother started, and she’ll tell you about her Uncle Richard, who saw the woman next door two days after she died, when he was out behind the house, chopping wood. She was floating three feet off the ground; his hair turned completely white on the spot.”
“What happened to her?” Fiona asked.
“The woman? Who knows? She floated away. The point is, it’s a ghost story.” She turned to me. “Come on, Mr Horror-story-writer, back me up on this.”
“Ghost stories are popular,” I said. “It does seem as if everyone knows one. Certainly you find more so-called serious writers trying their hands at ghost stories than you do stories about vampires, or mummies, or—” with a nod to Griffin, who returned it “—zombies.”
“I don’t know,” Fiona said. “I just spent the past semester teaching Henry James—a lot of Henry James—and, let me tell you, there’s a pretty fair amount of vampiric activity going on in old Henry’s works, especially a book like The Sacred Fount.”
“Granted,” I said, “but he never wrote about mummies.”
Bob, our host, said, “I wonder why that was,” looking at Fiona, who answered, “It wasn’t flexible enough: he couldn’t adapt the idea of the mummy (mummyism?) to his type of story the way he could adapt the idea of the vampire, vampirism.”