"Shaman, the only reason I let you get this far is to inoculate him against you. Now he’ll recognize what you do." And Gypsy slapped me sharply across the face. It stung. My ears rang. The flood of awareness made me conscious all at once of another, deeper violation, and I swung my gaze toward Shaman as if I were wielding a shillelagh.
He drew back, startled. There was the slightest hint of fear, then it passed like the moon shadow of a wisp of smoke, and Shaman was his own again. He smiled a studied smile. I withered.
"I see," Shaman said to Gypsy. "You want to take away my farm."
Nora careened to the table and stood over Shaman. There was blood smeared on her neck, down her arms, and across her chest. "You’ve been at him. You said you wouldn’t."
"Shaman tried to drill him," Gypsy said, "right here in the Magellanic Stream. Mel threw him out. It was funny, Nora. You should have seen it. Mel bounced him!"
Shaman shot back, "It wasn’t the Earther. It was him, it was Gypsy using the boy like a hand puppet. The boy is mine. He has no will. He has no self. He is nothing. He is my straw, my chocolate flavor straw into the mind of Abu. This had nothing to do with you or with anyone on Sanduleak or anywhere else in the Magellanics."
"You’re wrong, Shaman," Nora said. "Abu is our father as well.
"I’m no menace to your galaxies. Why can’t you live and let live?" Shaman pushed away from the table and stormed to what used to be the glass doors leading to the pedestrian walkway. He stood there, staring out into black space. Gypsy applauded sardonically; Shaman’s was the gesture of a Shakespearean actor.
"Nora," I stuttered, "you’re covered with blood."
"It was that tattooed man," she said, "the one who gave me a flower. He must have been in the men’s room when we took off. He stayed there and hid, apparently. I heard him through the wall. I had to kill him."
21. If and Only If
"Vampires!" My mind rattled like a dryer on three legs; Gypsy’s slap had knocked to center stage the bubbles from Izzy’s quickpatch. Thoughts jostled and non sequitured inside. I ran behind the salad bar and inched back and forth along the sneeze guard, ready to fling dressings at any attacker.
(These days, when I get an audience with Izzy, he likes to give me a lot of grief about that episode. He calls it the Intergalactic Food Fight.)
There wasn’t much Russian left, but I was hoping to do some damage with the Roquefort and Italian, if I had to. I thought the vinegar in the Italian might blind them for a moment. The lumps of Roquefort cheese could slow them down. I could make for the dishwasher and fly us home, beating them back with ladles and meat cleavers and stuff that I found in the kitchen.
But the cheese was probably fake, I was thinking, or skimpy. I might be doomed in interstellar space by larcenous highway restauranteurs. "Vampires! Stay back," I said.
(Intergalactic Food Fight?IFF. It’s a pun. "IFF" is also short for IF AND ONLY IF. I had to suffer and be a maniac ignoramus so that Abu al-Hawl could get a ride home and Johnny Abilene could ascend to the throne in the Small Magellanic Cloud; once I did all those stupid little things I had to do, the big matters inevitably resolved. IFF. Izzy knew it.)
"Vampires! Stay back!"
"This should be interesting," Gypsy drawled.
Nora walked toward me slowly. "Trust me, Mel."
"No." I picked up a metal bowl of ruffle-cut beet slices and threatened her with it. "You killed that trucker. Did you eat him, Nora? Gypsy ate the cashier. Are you fighting over who’s going to eat me?"
Shaman laughed. "You shouldn’t have slapped him, Gypsy. Now he’s awake, such as he is."
"Mel…" Nora kept walking toward me, undeterred by the beet slices. "You shouldn’t distress yourself over blood. Bodies aren’t important, Mel. Don’t you remember? You were almost there with me…"
"No more love-making!" Shaman warned. "I can do an epoche too, Nora, and you might not like how you’re greeted where I would take you."
"You wouldn’t dare," she said, without taking her eyes off me. "You don’t know how, Shaman. You’d turn the world inside-out. It would be the end of you." She was more beautiful than ever. The blood somehow appealed to me now. It made me tacitly aware of her neck, her chest, her arms. I was hungry for her, starved to the marrow. She kept coming.
"What should I remember, Nora?" I said. Then she would be mine.
"Remember the Sphinx, called Abu al-Hawl!" Shaman shouted. "Remember he who made Chephren. The Sphinx is still thumbing, and in all these millennia, none of you Sanduleans has managed to pick him up. Stay put, Nora. You could wind up in some waterless place for a long time, Nora, and there’d be no WC."
Gypsy burst into flame. "I’m you, Shaman!" he said.
"The hell you are. Don’t try that on me!" Shaman pointed at him, thrusting his arm as if it were a fire hose, and the flames whooshed out.
"What am I?" I said. I dropped the beets.
(The Haymakers still send me tribute every three hundred years: uranium juke boxes, fake books from all parts of the universe?with performance rights granted, since they know I like to gig on the acousticals Johnny gave me in Giza?music boxes with their songs transposed to Larmor frequencies, and so on. Three hundred years is a long time on Sanduleak, but for most of my galaxy, it’s a blink; Johnny and the boys are tremendously grateful to me, even though I really had no choice in the matter, and if I had, frankly, I wouldn’t have helped them.
I know that must sound pretty crass, given that the Italians were using Abu’s head for rifle practice during World War II, among other indignities that Ylemic Lord had to suffer during his captivity. Still, I thought of myself as an individual being for most of the time I was in the Milky Way. I didn’t think that the Sphinx was of any importance whatever! Deluded as that may be, I think you could call it a mitigating circumstance: not guilty by reason of insanity, Your Honor. I was looking out for Number One, so I thought, as if there were any.)
22. I’m You
"You are Abu al-Hawl," Nora said, "the Father of Terror, Rahorakhty, Sun God of the Two Horizons, and I am Queen of Punt, the land of incense, the land of purified desire. Gypsy is my servitor. Shaman is a foul grave robber. Abu al-Hawl, thou knowest everything. Abu al-Hawl, Soul of the Great Sphinx, Ka, I invoke you."
Nora was looking straight at me, but I could not believe that it was me she was talking to. She was talking through me, as if I were a phone tube. Behind her I saw Shaman laughing so hard he had to support himself against the glass door. "Tell the boy what you like to do in water closets, oh corpulent Queen of Punt." He made for us, stumbling and guffawing. He placed himself between us, one hand on the sneeze guard, the other on Nora’s bloody shoulder. Gypsy rose. "Tell him how you have to watch water swirl in toilets or sinks or maelstroms, wherever water goes down, oh Queen of the WC."
"You call it a toilet," Nora said. I couldn’t see her face now. Shaman was in the way. "You think that makes it something profane. I tell you Shaman, whatever is, is an effulgence of Abu al-Hawl, whose home is Sanduleak and the stars, but who dwells in all thoughts and all things. All that swirls, swirls down to him. Feces and incense are one to him. Who shuts himself off from one shuts himself off from all."
Shaman spun to face me. "I’m you," he said, "I’m you, I’m you," and the old feeling returned: a dumb, helpless beast, I was, stroked and prodded by my master.
"Remember, Mel," Nora said. "Remember the desert. It wasn’t New Mexico, Mel. It wasn’t New anything. It was Egypt, Mel, not a day or two ago, but five thousand years ago." Gypsy worked the ersatz flesh down his snake’s flank and moved toward us, his hard, small eyes fixed on Shaman.
I blinked and strained for a thought that seemed just beyond my reach. I had seen pyramids in the sand, Nubian slaves, teams of men laying massive ashlars, granite facing stones, on jagged tiers of limestone. It had been somewhere between Albuquerque and Espanola, not far from Saqqarah, somewhere around Abu Sir, Cairo or Santa Fe…
"I’m you," Shaman said. Gypsy’s i
chor-dripping, black maw yawned behind him. I smelled the stink of Gypsy’s breath. I had seen Chephren on Route 25, whose face was just like mine, just like the Sphinx’s. And everything historians and archeologists had written about the El Giza Sphinx was wrong. I remembered?But how??King Chephren had not fashioned the face of Abu al-Hawl to resemble his own. It was just the opposite!
Gypsy was closing his teeth together with Shaman in the middle, but I overturned the salad bar, tumbling steam trays of soup, shattering bowls and jetting forks, knives, and spoons into Gypsy’s tongue and palate, or what passed for tongue and palate. Shaman, wet with Gypsy, laughed. "I’m you!" he was saying. "I’m you! I’m you!" Nora cowered away from him, from me. Gypsy fell back.
Yes, it was I, the Sphinx who had fashioned Chephren in his, in my likeness?not the other way round?just as I had fashioned Mel, and a million other emanations of my Ka, the sacred Ka of Abu al-Hawl.
23. Abu al-Hawl
I had everything I needed there: maps, music, food, sanitary facilities, amusing art works on the walls. In the gift shop there were games, books, trifles aplenty, even T-shirts with my own likeness?weathered countenance, sandblasted by a myriad storms, pecked by shells from MP 40’s, jimmied block from ashlar and jammed with concrete in dullard "restorations"?cum space hat, in day-glo pink. Enough truck for my long passage beyond the realm of the living. At the rear of the main funerary chamber were twin rows of sacred fountains, one beyond the sign of "MEN," one beyond the sign of "WOMEN," swirling water eternally present at the touch of a silvered lever, the symbol of the devotion of Isis for Osiris, or of the Queen of Punt for Me. I had entered the Stream, neutral hydrogen smeared by tidal forces across two hundred thousand light-years between the Magellanic Clouds and the Milky Way.
Wherever My gaze falls, if the soil be fertile?this is what I realized?beings spring up in My likeness. Their thoughts are but foam on the waves of My mind. Each little creature is a door into Me. Seeking Me, they seek their true self. Invoking My name, they will come home in Me.
Come, then, Queen of Punt, ring my loins, receive My pollen. I will open into you. I crawled toward Nora over Gypsy’s slithering hulk. Shaman was pinned underneath him. "I’m you!" he pleaded in a tinny, squeezed voice. Nora opened her flower around me like Ganesha’s shakti. Lo, I destroy you from inside. "Bodies aren’t important," she moaned. Mine is the maelstrom you have sought. I swirled into her. You could not hold Me on Sanduleak. You could not detain Me in the Magellanics. My life is greater than that.
Gypsy coughed and spat black blood. Shaman struggled out from under him. "You’re still down there, still in Giza, still on Earth," Shaman told me. "I’m you. I stopped you there, Abu al-Hawl. I’m you. I held you as a man holds a morsel with his fork, then cuts and eats. I’m you. This being here is a flake of your dried flesh, a leaf trembling in your wind. I’m you. This being here is Mel, little Mel, will-less Mel, the hitchhiker through New Mexico?I’m you?through whom my pipeline has been laid. I speak to you, Sphinx, as one shouts through a cavern to a man buried in stone. You are not here."
The sun burned my back. Desert afternoon. I was seated in a huge limestone ditch. Between my paws, where Tuthmosis’s stela used to rise, tiny creatures teemed. They stared up at me, and I felt the pressure of their dreams against my stone skin. I had pressed my dreams into Tuthmosis (now Shaman) two thousand years before: Uncover Me, Noble One. Remove the sand that girdles and swallows Me. I shall make you king. He had dug me out, I made him Pharaoh, then he betrayed me, anchored me to this claustrophobic world by the very power I had dreamed into him. Now his stela was gone, its ground defiled by vulgar feet, but Tuthmosis still lived.
He was speaking to me in a mosquito’s voice, from an impossible distance: "I speak to you, Sphinx, as one shouts through a cavern to a man buried in stone. You are not here." Little people shuffled, jabbered, clicked and flashed in the shadow of my headdress. For the thousandth time, I perceived, Tuthmosis had changed his name. Like snake skins or like locusts’ hulls clinging emptily to the barks of trees, his old names polluted history. Now he was "Shaman."
"I’m you," Shaman said. A huge block rumbled and fell from my shoulder. The tourists scattered. "Sanduleak couldn’t hold you, but Earth will. I will. You are not in the Stream, Great One. You are in the desert near Nazlet El-Semman. Gypsy and Nora are the grave robbers, not I. They want to take you back to Gypsy’s galaxy, Abu al-Hawl, but you are so happy in the sand! You are so happy to be my sun, my blood, my radiance, my eternal source! The little brown man in the starship humping Nora is Mel, not you! It’s Mel, and the child he is making in her is a pitiable monster, a monster, Great One, and not the child of your Mind, not the vehicle of your mind seed, not the vessel of your radiance. This was a mirage. I am that. Tuthmosis is that. Shaman is your vessel. I’m you."
I felt heavy, very heavy. I had no desire to move. I was being slowly drained. Perhaps that was good. Perhaps it would lighten me. I scanned the crowd of little people skirting the chunks fractured from the fallen limestone. They were hysterically running east toward the tourist buses. Only one person remained at the site of the ancient stela. With great difficulty I focused on the small man between my paws. He was wearing a T-shirt with my image in day-glo pink, and behind that, the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren in blue. He wore Bermuda shorts and a pith helmet. There was a camera hanging by a thong over one shoulder and a canteen over the other. In one hand he held a shopping bag that said "Nefertiti Bazaar."
Large wraparound sunglasses covered his eyes and part of his forehead and nose. He peeled them from his face, and I saw the brow, one brow arching over both eyes. "Well," he shouted, "it’s been a year, just like I told you, and here I am, Melly-belly. Don’t time fly!"
24. Not the Memphis in Tennessee
"Looks like you’ve got a little dandruff there." Izzy scattered slivers of limestone with a playful kick. "And one of us could use a shave. But my cork held, didn’t it, bubeleh, in spite of all the bad-mouthing from various cosmic adventurers I could mention?"
He took a few snapshots of me?Click, flash!?mopped his forehead, downed a swig of water. The suck and gurgle of the water smacking back into the canteen when he pulled it from his lips. The distant murmurs of tourists huddling back as soldiers herded them with batons. Millennia whispering by: sand, wind, sun…
"So, you like it here or what? Sarvadhuka’s going nuts in the novelty shops and brothels. I told him he doesn’t get a disease or induce any pregnancies?Izzovision?so now he’s taken out all the stops, if you’ll excuse the expression. He got so burned when he found out that the Memphis I promised him nooky in wasn’t the one in Tennessee, I felt I had to share some information, to make it up to him.
"I like the weather station on your rump, by the way. Getty Institute, right? No, don’t bother to answer. That’s all right. Don’t exercise yourself, kid. That would really freak the tourists. As if it wasn’t bad enough having a piece of your shoulder fall off and then seeing a lunatic like yours truly gabbing at Old Stoneface here as if he was an old acquaintance.
"You just take it easy. Shaman talks a good game, but he can’t do nothing for a while yet. I’ll come back after nightfall. Me and Sovereign Duchy was just casing the joint thisaft, bagging a few collectibles and that. Don’t say goodbye. Don’t say thank you. Don’t say a thing, Great Abbadabba."
A moustached soldier in khakis and beret with a Kalashnikoff slung over his shoulder grabbed Izzy’s elbow to escort him from the Sphinx enclosure, the hollow I formed about me when I first crash landed on Earth and created human beings, a long, tiring process from the initial joining of nucleotides through the evolution of humans, through whom I could actuate my mental processes, and eventuating in the birth of Tuthmosis IV, on whom I believed I could rely, but consciousness has its own intrinsic imperatives, so here I was, anchored in this blank, vasty shoal, cut off from the stars my home, and utterly dependent on the ministrations of a punch press operator from Lockport, New York.
Somew
here on the wind a mite was buzzing: "I’m you! I’m you!" I felt so tired!
Two
25. The Mysteries of Monophysitism
Izzy did not make it back that night. He was being detained, I learned, in an Egyptian hoosegow. Sarvaduhka ran the message over to me. He had to pay one of his Cairo prostitutes one hell of a baksheesh, he said, to guide him, on the back of a camel, through Nazlet El-Semman over to the western funerary complex, and on to the enclosure, my enclosure. Mastaba by mastaba they crept. It gave Sarvaduhka the willies.
Sarvaduhka’s guide was a Coptic Christian, Lila Kodzi, who discoursed on the mysteries of Monophysitism at the most inappropriate moments. Sarvaduhka complained about it. He seemed to think I was God. He told me everything. At the moment of orgasm (Sarvaduhka’s orgasm?she didn’t have them) she would curse the Council of Chalcedon, some fifteen hundred years past, and she would vociferously affirm, in excellent English, the one divine nature of Christ, as Sarvaduhka twitched and spasmed, emitting expletives in three Sanskrit-derived languages.
Sarvaduhka and his shakti huddled at my hindquarters as lights flashed brilliantly on the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren and on my own disintegrating limestone hulk. It was just at the end of the late Friday night sound and light show, the German language one. The show must have been impressive for souls with human bodies and eyes, but all the information was false. As I said, it was I who made Chephren, and not the other way round.
26. What We Can Learn from Linguini
There’s nothing like a few thousand years in the sand to give you a certain sense of perspective. Something deep inside me had loosened up in the millennia since my New Mexico adventure, which, I now understood, preceded the Fourth Dynasty just as much as it followed it. Don’t let the dates fool you.
Izzy and the Father of Terror Page 4