Pyramids

by Fred Saberhagen

They were halfway there when Ptah-hotep clutched his companion by the arm. From around one end of the strange ship, as if it might have emerged on the for side, a figure moved. It looked quite human.

  "It is a god!"

  "It may well be. What did you expect?" Although, Ptah-hotep told himself, it looked very much like a man. Soon it was followed by another like it. And then a third.

  The next thing that happened was even more astonishing; Thothmes and Ptah-hotep beheld a small group of people who appeared to be nothing more than simple Egyptian peasants, coming out of the desert near the tail of the gigantic craft. In a matter of moments the humble newcomers were mingling with the deities on what appeared to be terms almost of familiarity.

  Thothmes was almost outraged; in a way embarrassed, and certainly emboldened. "If peasants can approach the gods so casually, and talk to them, then we must also. It is our duty to go forward, my friend."

  Ptah-hotep, staring at the distant group, jumped to his feet suddenly. "Is that the stonemason that I see? The man we were to meet? If he can stand there talking to these gods, then all is well!"

  The two officials stood erect and marched forward. Only when it was too late to turn back did they realize that there were also other gods on the scene, these smaller than grown men, swathed in strange clothing, with glassy heads, and obviously inhuman in their shape. But misshapenness in such beings was really no surprise.

  The middle-sized one of the man-shaped gods at last caught sight of the two officials of Pharaoh where they were hiding, and beckoned vigorously for them to approach. But when the god spoke, its language was incomprehensible: "Willis! Look here! We've got a couple of" important gentlemen come to talk, things over!'

  "Important?"

  "Wearing a sizable fortune in pectoral collars. Look at them!"

  Montgomery Chapel, exulting aloud to his elder brother, approached the two elegantly dressed but obviously frightened Egyptians and tried to start to talk to them.

  Sihathor and his family had managed to get but little sleep. Toward morning the patriarch himself had deliberately stretched out in the sand for a nap—if the gods wanted him they would come and get him, and he was not going to stay awake indefinitely for anyone else.

  There had been moments during the night in which even Sihathor himself had been about two-thirds convinced that he and all his family were dead. Still, Osiris, Lord of Eternity and Weigher of Hearts, had never appeared, and the stonemason had taken that as reassurance that he could not yet have truly entered the Underworld.

  Exposed under the cold stars tonight there might well be ten thousand unguarded tombs, ready to be robbed. But for the time being thoughts of robbery had been put aside.

  One of the young people in his family had argued that this was a punishment, from those gods who did not like tomb-robbing.

  Sihathor put down that notion haughtily. His clandestine profession was an ancient one, honorable in its way even if its practitioners were forced to be secretive. Did not Set, like other gods, deserve honor and worship?

  Even as they were considering that point, his youngest son and his daughter set up a clamor, announcing that they had observed several additional strange signs in the heavens. Sihathor listened to the details, but he was no wiser when he had heard them.

  Another one of the young people, argumentative and pessimistic, put forward another explanation. They were indeed all dead, but had been eaten by crocodiles, or killed in some other way that resulted in the destruction of their bodies. Therefore, instead of appearing immediately before the Weigher of Hearts, they must make their way through this peculiar world.

  "That is ridiculous!" But Sihathor was not quite as certain of any of his answers as he made himself sound. It was the business of a leader to appear to be certain, no matter what.

  In the darkness just before dawn, when all of them had awakened, Sihathor and his family witnessed a very strange sight indeed, the descent of a great spiritual boat or bird out of the heavens.

  Creeping closer to the pyramid, they saw the strange visitor land and remain motionless upon the sand. Perhaps it was the solar Barque of Ra himself�though that could hardly be, for now the sun was coming as usual over the horizon to the east, reflecting glory in the Nile.

  Two of the three strange, man-like gods from the Barque were making unmistakable signs for the stonemason and his family to approach.

  When they knelt before the first man-god, he indicated with gestures that they should get to their feet. With smiles he and his fellow indicated that they were pleased with Sihathor and his family.

  Then the three gods drew apart, and conversed for a long time among themselves.

  Sihathor's people took advantage of this interlude to resume their own debate. One suggestion raised by a member of the party was that all these were only indications of the turmoil afflicting the whole universe as a result of the death of Pharaoh.

  Others of the group continued to argue among themselves as to whether, in the face of such marvels, they should even consider going on with the robbery of Pharaoh's tomb.

  Pilgrim stood beside his ship, telling Monty and Willis that he would have to leave almost immediately. He had already set up the timelock and demonstrated its operation.

  The agreement among the three of them was quickly solemnized. And then, almost at once, Pilgrim and his ship and crew were gone.

  Young Montgomery Chapel, his eyes ecstatic, looked at his brother. "Easy as falling off a log, Will."

  "You're right." Willis shook his head dazedly and looked about him. "This is incredible,' he said, not for the first time. "Are we sure that timelock thing is going to work?"

  "We saw it work, didn't we? I know, I know. I don't suppose we're sure of any of it. But I'll take it, as opposed to being an assistant instructor at fifteen hundred a year. It's a damned great shock, but it's the real thing, all right. What kind of world this fellow is from, and what he'll do when he has his hands on the gold, is more than I can say. But when a chance like this presents itself we've got to take it."

  "Of course. Only…"

  "Only nothing. Of course there may be risks."

  "Such as what?"

  Montgomery sobered. "Well. I don't say we shouldn't keep our eyes open. What do we know about this man? I mean besides the fact that he has the power to do incredible things—such as bringing us here—and that he was apparently telling us the truth when he said he came from a different world. We've agreed we don't even know his real name."

  Willis nodded. "It strikes me that all the indications are he's hiding out, on the run, from something or someone. I think the signs are pretty conclusive along that line. If we help him—" The elder Chapel shrugged.

  "We might be making some enemies who are equally powerful, or perhaps more so."

  "That's what I'm getting at, yes."

  "Did you ever ask him if he's on the run?"

  "Did you? Not quite the kind of question I'd like to pop to that fellow. Anyway, what good would it have done? Would he have told the truth?"

  That really didn't seem likely.

  But the Chapel brothers couldn't spend much time thinking about the risks. Not now. Because now, waiting for them a few yards away, stood the Great Pyramid.

  All theirs.

  TWELVE

  All his life, first in the old world ruled by Pharaoh, and then during the two years he had lived in this new world in which gods walked the earth, Sihathor had been a light sleeper. He was a naturally early riser, too—except when circumstances required him to work late at night. Therefore it was not surprising that strange voices coming shortly before dawn, even distant voices, should awaken him now.

  He had been dreaming of his old life, in the years before the never-to-be-forgotten day of Pharaoh Khufu's funeral. In those years the land of Khem had been filled with people, and gods had neither walked the land routinely, nor drawn their signs and wonders through the sky. In his dream Sihathor had been able to return for a time to his old hous
e, in his old village, where his wife of more than twenty years had been sleeping as always at his side.

  Now, awakening from dreams, he found himself in his new, uncertain life again. He was lying in the mudbrick hut of modest size which he had built with his own hands, close under the walls of Khufu's funerary temple. In that temple two years ago a few of the visiting gods and two high officials of the Court had taken up their residence. Once it would have been blasphemous for anyone, even high officials, to live in a temple, or for peasants to build a hut against a temple wall. But a new world, as these descended gods were fond of explaining, was bound to be governed by new rules.

  The woman now stirring toward wakefulness at Sihathor's side was much younger than the wife of his youth. This one, who had wandered here alone from her own depopulated village far downstream, had already borne Sihathor a child; but still he would have given much of his accumulated wealth to have his true wife back.

  But no one wanted his wealth, for that or any other purpose. Of what use was it to have treasure in this transformed world?

  Still the stonemason considered himself far more fortunate than most. Most of his family, at least, had survived the coming of the gods to earth. Life went on, and a man had to cope with it as best he could.

  Stirred by curiosity about the unfamiliar voices that were still drifting across the wasteland, Sihathor got to his feet, stooping to keep his head below the low reed-bundle roof, and moved to the doorway where he could stand upright.

  He could tell from the appearance of the sky that Ra in his eternal progress was now traversing the last hour of the night, only minutes below the eastern horizon. In the same direction were the marshes, and the small, new fields in which most of the handful of workers toiled daily. And just south of the temple, as always, towered the mighty and overshadowing tomb of Pharaoh Khufu. But this morning something new was happening. The unfamiliar voices that had awakened Sihathor were approaching the pyramid and temple from the west and north, the direction of the path leading to the Gate to Heaven, that the gods called their timelock.

  For the past two years and more, ever since the marvelous day and evening of Pharaoh's burial, Sihathor and his extended family had been working here, near Pharaoh's temple and pyramid, serving the gods who had come in human shape. Sihathor himself had grown to be almost on familiar terms with these particular gods. That he had never been able to identify them with any members of the known pantheon was no great concern to him. The deities named and enumerated ran into hundreds if not thousands. He had never tried to count them. Only a few priests could hope to know them all.

  Moving forward a little now, out of the doorway of the hut, he caught sight of the file of beings who were approaching along the path. Among the newcomers Sihathor recognized the god called Pilgrim—he had not visited here for two years, nor had the small, deformed ones who served him. And three of the arriving party, two women and a man, were beings Sihathor had never seen before. Those three appeared to be under guard, but he presumed that they too were divinities of some kind.

  That there should be conflict among the gods was no great surprise to Sihathor. It was certainly not unheard of for the deities in songs and stories to quarrel violently among themselves. He drew himself up—these visiting gods did not particularly enjoy obeisances—and waited standing outside his hut, as ready as he could be for whatever the world might bring him next.

  Scheffler and Becky Haggerty, one of the small aliens following close behind them, walked in the pre-dawn darkness across rock and sand. During the moments when they did not have to concentrate to find their footing, they could look up at what Scheffler realized must be the night sky of ancient Egypt.

  The other two aliens, escorting Olivia between them, were ahead of Becky and Scheffler. And up in the very front of the small procession walked Pilgrim and the man who had identified himself as Willis Chapel. Willis—if this youthful man could really, possibly, be Montgomery Chapel's older brother�was moving like one who knew the landscape well. He stayed away from the canal, taking a more direct route across the sandy waste toward the pyramid. Walking beside him, Pilgrim had pulled out a flashlight, and those two at least were having no trouble finding their footing. They were talking together, but Scheffler could not hear what they were saying.

  But already it was becoming easier for everyone to walk. Once they had gone beyond the area of hard rock that surrounded the fissure, a small trail became apparent in the gradually perceptible daylight.

  "Where are we?" Becky whispered. At the moment she sounded more enthralled than terrified.

  "Ancient Egypt."

  "That's not funny, Tom."

  "I know that. I know that very well. Look at that thing ahead of us."

  Becky looked at the pyramid, and moaned, and mumbled something to herself.

  And Scheffler, with an outdoorsman's compulsion to orient himself, looked up into the sky from which the fainter stars had already faded. He was suddenly more shaken even than Becky. He could not find Polaris, or the Big Dipper and its pointers that ought to have guided him to the pole star.

  The stars were wrong. And that, more than anything else that had happened to him yet, made the strangeness of it all sink in.

  Unbelieving, he tried to read the sky again. Hopeless. It was not that there were clouds. Rarely if ever before in his life had he seen such a clear sky, or so many stars, flung prodigally from one horizon to the other. The Milky Way was staggering, or it had been a few minutes ago before the dawn began to wipe it out. But of the few constellations he knew, there was not one that he could recognize.

  And now even the brighter stars in the east were starting to disappear.

  Their steady, trudging pace was bringing the Great Pyramid closer. And with it came a surprise that distracted Scheffler from the sky. This time he was approaching the pyramid from the northwest, a different direction than on his solo trip. The trail Pilgrim and Willis were following led around the pyramid to the middle-sized low building Scheffler had glimpsed on his earlier trip, that huddled within a hundred paces of the pyramid's northwestern corner. He supposed it must be a temple of some kind.

  As the small group, with Pilgrim and Willis in the lead, drew near the building, people were gathering tentatively in front of it to meet them, coming out of huts built inconspicuously against the temple's flank. These were Egyptian people, Scheffler thought. Builders of the pyramid? There were ten or twelve of them, dark of hair and skin, mostly young adults. A few of both sexes were entirely naked, and none was wearing more than a loincloth in the endless warmth. One teen-aged mother nursed an infant. Some of the people were coming out of the huts with primitive stick-handled tools in hand, as if they were about ready to go out to the fields.

  Pilgrim, as he approached this assembly, waved to one of its members, a wiry man of middle age, in the manner of a man greeting an old friend. In return the man bowed and smiled and spoke to Pilgrim in accented English. Still more people, and a few more, as if someone were calling them to see the visitors, were coming out of the huts, until Scheffler thought there might be twenty altogether. Probably he would have seen them during his explorations if he'd gotten to this side of the pyramid at ground level.

  Pilgrim had halted his group now, captors and prisoners mingling irregularly. Here were two more Egyptian men, coming down an open stairway from the temple's roof, wearing wigs, fine short linen skirts and jeweled pectoral collars. Willis introduced them to his fellow Americans as Thothmes and Ptah-hotep. The pair bowed, deeply and gracefully, and offered greetings in strangely accented English. Scheffler gathered from something they said to Pilgrim that they had just concluded their daily morning ritual greeting to Ra and his royal barque.

  Pilgrim looked uncomfortable with people bowing to him. "I had thought you might have trained them out of that," he said to Willis. "You've had two years."

  Willis shrugged. "It's not that easy. They seem to prefer to do us honor. Can't see that it does any harm." Eyeing the
three newcomers from Chicago uncertainly, he explained: "There were only a small handful of natives here at the start, less than a dozen. But over the past two years others have been drifting in from up and down the Nile.

  "Now I suppose there are between twenty-five and thirty, counting the newest generation. Nicky's been running a regular child care clinic."

  "Where's everyone else?" Scheffler asked. "The rest of the population?"

  Willis looked at him. "I'd say they've evacuated this entire area," he replied at last. Scheffler couldn't tell if Willis thought there was more to it than that or not.

  Scheffler met Olivia's eyes, and thought that he could read a bleak helpless warning in them. He knew what genocide meant, even if Willis had never heard the word before.

  In this case it could mean that Pilgrim, in gaining or defending his access to this time and place, had somehow wiped out almost the whole native population.

  "Tom Scheffler," Scheffler said, sticking out his hand. "And you're Willis Chapel? Doctor Montgomery's older brother?"

  "That's right," said the young man casually. Willis was certainly under thirty, about as tall as Scheffler if not as strongly built. "And you must be one of his students. Nicky was saying something about having met you." Willis shook hands firmly. "Are you having some kind of trouble with Pilgrim?"

  Pilgrim was approaching. When he spoke he sounded affable. "Look, Scheffler, we don't want to spend our lives pointing weapons at you. If I tell my people to relax their vigilance, you won't do anything stupid, will you? Like trying to use the timelock? One of my people is going to be keeping an eye on it. If I can't count on your reasonable cooperation, the next best alternative is to lock you away somewhere. I don't want to think about the other alternatives beyond that. Will you at least agree to a temporary truce, until we can discuss making it permanent?"

  Willis was frowning, listening to this. Scheffler looked at the helpless Olivia, and at Becky, who looked back at him appealingly. "All right," he said. "A wise decision." Pilgrim signed to his diminutive crew members to put their weapons away. Then one of them beckoned to the newly paroled prisoners, and Scheffler and Becky and Olivia followed him—or her—or it—into the temple. Pilgrim, following, was saying something about assigning them living quarters. But inside the temple the wiry, middle-aged Egyptian, Sihathor, took over as their guide.