Pyramids

by Fred Saberhagen

  Pilgrim and the Asirgarh plunged into the heap and began at once to test for the gold they wanted. Treasures were thrown crashing aside, others immediately ripped apart. It was easy to see from Pilgrim's face as he plied his analyzer that his quest had at last been successful.

  Meanwhile Monty stood back, leaning against the wall, in no hurry to plunge ahead. Scheffler glanced back at him curiously.

  The old man said, as if to himself: "More than two millenia from now, Alexander the Great will stand alone in this chamber, while the generals of his conquering army wait for him outside, wondering… and more than two thousand years after that, Napoleon will do the same."

  "I suppose," said Scheffler. His words were lost amid the clatter of finely wrought valuables being flung out of Pilgrim's way. Willis and Nicky were busy rescuing prizes that were not of gold, muttering over them in awe, setting them aside in a corner of the big room.

  Pilgrim pounded a fist on the side of the sarcophagus. "Get this open. There's a lot of gold still missing. The old tyrant in here must be clasping it to his fragrant bosom."

  It took all the available manpower, applying itself to the task through steel pry-bars, and even so, the heavy stone lid was forced off only with great difficulty. It fell at last with a sullen, reverberating crash.

  "Here's more." The lid of another great box was revealed, nestled closely inside the first. Much of its decoration was fine yellow metal.

  "Break it open. Break it up."

  The vault was almost as hot at midnight as it had been at noon.

  Hours after its pillaging had begun, and long before the job was anywhere near completion, Montgomery Chapel was the only living person left in the King's Chamber. Almost everyone else was resting at this hour. Even Pilgrim had to sleep sometime; and at last, with a major portion of his treasure in hand, he felt secure.

  By now a crude inventory of the entire contents of the chamber had been taken. Even the mummy, still swathed in its last inner wrappings, had been pulled out of the sarcophagus and cast aside. Ptah-hotep had said it was certain that no gold could be hidden inside the tightness of those wrappings; and the light weight of the bundle offered proof.

  Montgomery was not altogether sure why he had not gone to his own sleeping bag—why he, the old man, had no desire to rest after the day's exertions. But he had reached a state of nervous excitement that made it so.

  Not that he wasn't exhausted. But he was beginning to feel that he might never want to rest again.

  He closed his eyes, standing beside the sarcophagus and leaning on its waist-high rim as on some giant bathtub. A wave of dizziness had passed over him. As it did so, the idea came to him that this place represented something of an eddy, perhaps even a harbor, in the flow of time. It would be no great cause for astonishment to see Alexander, or Napoleon, come crouching in through the low passage of its entrance, head bowed like that of some mere mortal man. The idea was not new to Montgomery Chapel, but now in midnight silence it returned with fresh force.

  A harbor in time. He could imagine Abraham, Moses, Caesar and Christ; Leonardo and Lincoln, Hitler and Freud and Einstein. All of them would be born and walk the earth and depart from it again before a single one of the stones in these walls was ever moved from where Ptah-hotep and his men had placed it.

  And there, in the fantastically remote twentieth century beyond Christ, a young archaeologist named Montgomery Chapel, on his first trip to Egypt, would stand alone in this room in awe. He would stand here beside this sarcophagus, which by then would be badly chipped away by tourists, and he would dream strange dreams. But never a dream so strange as this: that he had been here in the same room, touching the same stones, almost five thousand years before…

  Montgomery opened his eyes. His single lantern lit the chamber strangely.

  An impulse moved him to approach Khufu's discarded mummy. Because he wanted to look upon that face…

  It was some time later when Monty became aware than another person was approaching. Light and sound were traversing the Ascending Passage, and then the anteroom. But it was neither Napoleon nor Alexander who came bowing through the doorway to the King's Chamber; it was only Thothmes, flashlight in hand.

  On entering the chamber the Egyptian fixed his eye on the dishonored, inanimate figure on the floor amid its undone wrappings; the face had been exposed, but it was turned away from Thothmes now, and darkly shadowed from his lantern's light.

  Then Thothmes, his mouth like a line carved into granite, lifted his gaze to the face of the frightened old man who was leaning as if for support against the opened sarcophagus. Thothmes made a sound, deep in his throat, and drew a dagger from his belt.

  But something else had already frightened Montgomery Chapel, so that at this moment even a dagger came as no great shock. He made no move to draw the pistol at his side, but instead held up an open palm to warn off his attacker.

  "Thothmes—if you look you'll see that it's not Khufu. It's a ushabti figure only. I undid the wrappings—see—" And Montgomery shone the beam of his own lantern full on the face of that stiff figure on the floor.

  Thothmes made a different kind of sound this time. He turned aside, staring down at that carven wooden countenance.

  His hand with the dagger in it fell to his side. "Not Khufu," he said at last, in Old Egyptian.

  "No. It is ushabti only. But not the usual little doll. Life-sized, meant to be taken for the mummy. You see? Khufu knew that robbers were sure to get in, no matter what barriers and traps he put in their way. So he left this chamber as we found it. The first robbers would take what gold they could find here and go away—just as Pilgrim has—thinking they had got it all. The ones who came later would find evidence of robbery, be sure that they were too late, and go away. Who would bother to unwrap a mummy, and perhaps incur a curse? Look." He shoved the figure with his toe. "Lightweight wood, no heavier than a mummy. Perhaps it's hollow. There can't be any gold inside it, though. The only question is, where is Khufu really buried? And I think I know the answer to that now. I—"

  Once again light shone in from the anteroom, where once more there was motion. But this time the light came not from electricity.

  With a hop of small taloned feet and a flutter of feathered wings, its source entered the King's Chamber. The plumage was a rainbow glory, visible by its own glow.

  The bird, no bigger than a goose, had a man's head, complete with a small crown and a black beard.

  Thothmes fell prostrate in adoration.

  Montgomery clung to the edge of the false sarcophagus. By now the bird was gone, and a tall man stood before him, wearing the double crown of the Two Lands. The image glowed, and Montgomery could see through it at the edges.

  The figure of the Pharaoh said in Egyptian: "My gold is mine, intruding mortal." The words were hollow, almost without feeling.

  Montgomery bowed his head, then boldly straightened his neck again. "I do not crave your gold, great king. Help me, I pray you. My craving is for revenge."

  TWENTY

  At dawn, Montgomery, Nicky and Thothmes were discovered to be missing.

  Pilgrim, galvanized out of sleep, ran cursing to inspect his treasure, over which there had seemed to be no need to post a guard. Much of the heavy gold had already been carried out of the pyramid, and of that a considerable portion was now missing. More might have been removed from the King's Chamber, but no exact inventory had ever been taken there.

  Scheffler and Willis ran in other directions, separately, searching for Nicky everywhere in the vicinity of the pyramid. She was gone. Her pistol, spare clothing, and other personal items had been left behind. But neither of the motorboats had been taken, and one of the Asirgarh had been watching the timelock continuously—it had not been used.

  "The three of them have gone on foot, then�somewhere," Pilgrim said, and began to question Ptah-hotep. "What was Thothmes up to last night?"

  The Egyptian insisted that he did not know. But he looked worried.

&nb
sp; Willis and Scheffler clamored together for an immediate search and rescue operation. Pilgrim was willing, but refused to do anything else until he could summon his ship and incorporate into its systems all of the gold two-oh-three that was still available.

  Grimly work resumed on the job of getting heavy gold out of the pyramid. The substitution of a giant ushabti doll for Khufu's mummy was discovered at once, now that the thing had been unwrapped. But the implications of the substitution were unclear.

  Laboriously the wealth of golden artifacts still remaining in the King's Chamber were carried from the pyramid. The job was time-consuming. Moving any burden through the hundreds of feet of low passageways was a struggle, and two-way traffic in their restricted space all but impossible.

  At Pilgrim's direction the treasure was heaped unceremoniously on the flat wasteland close to the pyramid's north face. There, while others continued carrying, he resumed the process of separating his gold from the other materials with which it had been melded in the hands of Pharaohs artists and artisans. With chisel and prybar, and sometimes a touch of heat from the rod-shaped weapon worn at his belt, he attacked the various objects in which the metal had been incorporated, ripping and breaking them ruthlessly apart, melting the gold free. A finer separation of impurities could wait until later.

  Eventually the Kings Chamber had been emptied of almost everything except the fake mummy and the sarcophagus, and the heap of treasure in the sand had grown to the size of an automobile.

  As the last things were brought out to him, Pilgrim straightened up from his metal-working effort, rubbing his hands together as if to restore the circulation in his fingers.

  "Our ship is on its way here now," the little man said to Scheffler, raising his head to scan the sky.

  "Your spaceship. So, I'll finally get to see it. Everyone's told me you have one."

  "Indeed. To have completed my travels to date on foot would have been rather difficult. The ship will have used its last reserves of energy to get here. But now I have enough gold two-oh-three on hand to recharge its drive and restore the most essential of its other powers. When I have recovered what was pilfered during the night I may have all I need, though even then a considerable amount of what I lost will still be missing. I shall speak to your great-uncle on the subject when I encounter him again."

  Scheffler squinted up into the hot sky. "Where's the ship coming from?"

  "Not very far away… and now it is here."

  Turning his head, Scheffler saw it materializing in midair at low altitude, a delta-winged vessel of shimmering beauty, settling in gently controlled silence toward the ground. Big as a nineteen-eighties airliner, it landed softly, very close beside the pyramid, and even closer to Pilgrim's pile of gold.

  Pilgrim signaled to his assistants, earthly and alien. "Come. Help get the gold aboard." With a grunt, he himself picked up a basket of golden fragments that Scheffler would have thought too heavy for him, and led the way toward a door that had just opened in the vessel's twinkling side.

  Carrying their own loads of gold behind him, Scheffler and others went aboard. Stepping up from sand onto an insubstantial-looking stair, they moved from that again onto a solid-looking deck enclosed by semi-transparent walls. Walking through the exotic interior of the ship, that somehow looked bigger than the outside, Scheffler wrestled his burden of unnaturally heavy gold through a narrow corridor past a row of crystal caskets. Inside some of the caskets, shrouded in heavy interior fog, were figures that he thought might have been as human-looking as Pilgrim or himself had they been clearly visible.

  Tersely Pilgrim gave orders to Becky and some of the Egyptian women for Olivia to be brought aboard and placed in one of the caskets. She would sleep there, he said, until the medical care she needed became available.

  The women went off to the temple, but soon came back saying how fiercely Olivia had refused to come. Ptah-hotep was there too, in the temple, burning incense before a statue of Osiris and refusing to answer questions. Pilgrim, engrossed by now in the job of getting his gold reincorporated into the ship's machinery, dismissed the whole pack of them with a savage gesture.

  Nekhem the dancing girl, obviously entranced by the sudden appearance of the ship, soon appeared in the open hatch, garbed in some of Nicky's clothing and volunteering to join this new enterprise whatever it might be. Pilgrim looked up angrily at the interruption, but then smiled and winked and gestured her aboard.

  Willis muttered something about her stealing Nicky's clothes, but Nicky had been known to lend her things before; the clothing fit Nekhem well, and for searching the desert it certainly had practical advantages over the dancing girl's usual costume.

  Meanwhile Pilgrim and the Asirgarh were working steadily, tugging and switching onboard machinery into new configurations. Plain-looking counters or workbenches sprouted complexities, sections of bright opaque colors and odd-shaped openings. What had looked like a slab of solid crystal stretched and reshaped itself. It opened in one of its sides a hopper the size of a small oven. The alien members of Pilgrim's crew grabbed up the chunks of gold that had been carried aboard, and fed the machine with mind-boggling wealth.

  At this point Pilgrim ordered all the twentieth-century people to disembark.

  Once off the ship they stood in the sand waiting, not having much to say to one another. Scheffler speculated silently that there was something going on board that Pilgrim did not want them to see. Inside the ship, half-seen figures moved about.

  Presently Pilgrim came out to report that all of the recovered gold had now been accurately weighed and measured, and the Asirgarh were completing the tasks of refinement and reinstallation. But even more of the heavy isotope was still missing than Pilgrim had first thought. He looked grim.

  Willis asked: "Is your ship functional now?"

  "Not fully, but it will serve. We are going to recover the rest of the gold."

  Those boarding the ship to take part in the search were, on Pilgrims advice, collecting their modest baggage in the temple to bring it with them. The Asirgarh were the first to be ready.

  Pilgrim, seated near the front of his ship at what was obviously a center of control, began to operate some instruments—to Scheffler they looked as strange as everything else about the craft. The small man muttered: "I should soon have some indication of where they went."

  Scheffler said, "What are you going to do then? Nicky didn't steal your gold, you know."

  "The amount missing is substantial, and she must at least have helped to carry it, unless… but I have not charged her with the crime. You may set your mind at ease. I only wish my precious metal back."

  "How about Thothmes and Uncle Monty?"

  "Scheffler, Scheffler. You have such a tender heart. How will you ever survive in the great world? Why do you think I would derive any satisfaction from maltreating a pair of the world's feeble-minded? Nothing less than genocide gives me a kick, remember? By the way, did you remember to bring your rifle?" Willis and Scheffler had both carried weapons aboard the ship. It was time to lift off.

  Locating the feint trail left by the walking fugitives took longer than Scheffler had anticipated, given the impressive-looking instruments now at Pilgrim's fingertips. But Scheffler supposed this was not the kind of job they had been built for.

  The time was near sunset when Scheffler, scanning the passing desert through the transparent deck below his feet, looked up sharply at a sudden change of light. Something had just gone wrong with the sky; there were broad moving streaks in it—not ordinary clouds—that made it look as if someone were spinning the whole world unsteadily beneath them. Pilgrim was frowning at it too; he hadn't expected this.

  It wasn't only the sky. Something was wrong with the sun too. The shadows on the landscape below, including the tenuous shadow of the translucent, speeding ship itself, were dancing madly.

  The sun, low now in the western sky, had begun moving crazily in a broad figure-eight pattern. Then it came down to touch the horizon, f
ar south of its usual place of setting. It just sat there, throwing long shadows across the landscape.

  "The collective Egyptian mind, I suppose?" asked Scheffler.

  But Pilgrim had no time to talk with him. An image of the sun, dimmed drastically in radiance, swelled up on one of the instrument panels before them.

  The sun in that image was no longer a perfect disk. To Scheffler's astonished eyes it looked more like a boat. A smaller boat had come to rest beside it, and he could see small figures moving between the two. People who looked like Monty, Nicky and Thothmes, with some kind of escort, had disembarked from the strange-looking little boat—whatever it might be doing there in the distant desert—and were preparing to board that larger and more radiantly ominous conveyance. It looked like Thothmes and Montgomery Chapel were forcing the young woman forward.

  Nicky, half blinded by the glare of the—well no, of course it couldn't really be the sun, that was insane�groped her way forward. All she could really believe was that she had fallen into a nightmare, while sleeping in the temple last night, and hadn't yet been able to wake up.

  She recalled quite clearly what she had thought was an awakening. Monty, in his new, aged form, had come bending and gloating over her. Tall gray phantoms were at his back, and at his side towered the regal image of a man, wearing what Nicky had learned to recognize as the Double Crown of the Two Lands, Upper and Lower Egypt.

  Nicky had objected forcefully to being awakened in such a fashion, and forced to accompany these people, but objecting hadn't done her any good. When she refused to move, she was pulled out of her sleeping bag by Monty's shadowy, towering attendants and thrown aboard a boat, that was somehow able to progress through the halls of the temple… certainly it was all wild and unbelievable, even for a dream.

  And now she, along with baskets of broken gold, was being put aboard a larger craft, here in the middle of the desert. A vessel that glowed with almost-blinding light. While Monty in a voice of mad intensity kept whispering to her that this was in fact the Sun…