by Kage Baker
“Oh, have you found something, Professor?” Lewis stood and peered at the area of the sarcophagus that had just been cleared. There were hieroglyphics deep-cut in the pink granite. “The Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet? Oh, my, surely that’s a very good sign.”
And then he almost exclaimed aloud, because Petrie’s mind became like a glowing sun, such a magnificence of cerebration that Lewis felt humbled. But Petrie merely looked at him, and said flatly:
“Perhaps it is. It’s damned unusual, anyway. Never seen a seal quite like that on the outer sarcophagus before.”
“Really?” Lewis felt a little shiver of warning. “Do you think it’s significant?”
“Yes,” said Petrie. “I’m sure it is.”
“How exciting,” said Lewis cautiously, and turned back to chipping away at the wall. By twilight, when the first blessed coolness rose in salt mist from the canals, it was still hot and stinking in the tomb. Lewis wiped his face with the back of his hand, leaving a steak of red mud above one eye, and said casually, “I suppose we’d better stop for today.”
“Absolutely not,” said Petrie. “I’ve very nearly cleared the lid. Another forty-five minutes’ work ought to do it. Don’t you want to see Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet, boy?” He grinned ferociously at Lewis.
“More than anything, sir,” said Lewis, truthfully. “But do you really want to rush a discovery of this importance? I’d much rather get a good night’s sleep, wouldn’t you, and start fresh tomorrow?” Petrie was silent a moment, eyeing him. “I suppose so,” he said at last. “Very well. Though, of course, someone ought to sleep in here tonight. Standing guard, you know.”
“Allow me to volunteer!” said Lewis, doing his best to look frightfully keen. “Please, sir, it would be an honor.”
“As you like.” Petrie stroked his beard. “I’ll have supper and your bedroll sent out to you. Will that suit?”
It suited Lewis very well indeed, and two hours later he was stretched out in his blankets on the lid of the sarcophagus, listening to the sounds of the camp in its rituals as it gradually retired for the night. He found it comforting, because it was much more like the sound of mortals retiring for the night the way they had over the centuries when he had been getting used to them: the low murmur of a story being told,the cry of a dreaming child, the scrape of a campfire being banked. Modern rooms were sealed against sound, and nights had become less human. In London, you might hear distant waterworks or steam pipes, or the tinny clamor of a radio or a phonograph, or the creak of furniture. You might hear electricity, if it had been laid on, humming through the walls. Humanity was sealing itself away in tidy boxes.
“But,” he said to himself aloud, looking up at the ceiling of the tomb, “they used to do that, too, didn’t they? Though not while they were still alive.” He sat up cautiously and groped for his lantern. “At least not intentionally.”
He lit the lantern and set to work at once, chiseling away at the last layer of mud sealing the lid of the sarcophagus. It went much more quickly when you didn’t have to carefully collect every single chip and pass it out through the entrance in a basket, and Lewis felt certain qualms about the debris he was scattering everywhere.
“But we’ll leave the professor a treat to make up for it, won’t we Princess?” he muttered. “And, after all, history can’t be changed.”
Five minutes later he had freed enough of the lid to be able to toss the trowel aside and prize an edge up, and he yanked the granite slab free as though it were so much balsa wood.
“Wow!” he said, although he had known what he would see.
There was a mummy case reposing there, smiling up through a layer of grime as though it had been expecting him, and in a manner of speaking it had been. It represented a lady bound all in golden cerements, and painted about her shoulders was a feathered cape in every shade of lemon and amber, set here and there with painted representations of topazes and citrines. Her features closely resembled Lady Kiu’s, save that there was a warmth and life in her eyes missing from the living eyes of Lady Kiu. Under the dust, the whole case gleamed with a thick coat of varnish of glasslike smoothness and transparency. An analysis of its chemical structure would have startled scientists, if there had been any with electron microscopes or spectrographs in 1914. Lewis couldn’t resist reaching down to stroke along the side where the case was sealed, and could feel no seam or join at all. It would take a diamond-edged saw to get the box open, but that was all right; it had served its purpose. The chest at the top of the tomb had had no such treatment, and it had fallen to pieces where it stood, splitting open under the sheer mass of the treasure it contained: a crown of burnished gold, two golden pectorals inlaid with precious stones, coiled necklaces, armlets, collars, boudoir items, beadwork in amethyst, in carnelian, turquoise, lapis lazuli, obsidian, ivory.
“Let’s get this mess out of the way, shall we?” said Lewis, and, reaching in, he picked up as much of the treasure as he could in one grab and dumped it unceremoniously into a recess in the wall at one side. Beads scattered and rolled here and there, but he ignored them. It was just so much jewelry, after all, and he was fixed and focused on his objective as only a cyborg can be.
“Now, Princess,” he said, giggling slightly as he leaned down to lift the mummy case from its dais,
“Shall we dance? You and I? I’m quite a good dancer. I can two-step like nobody’s business. Oh, you’ll like it out in the world again! I’ll take you on a railway ride, though not first-class accommodations I’m afraid—” He set the case, which was as big as he was, down while he considered how best to get it through the opening.
“But that’ll be all right, because then we’ll go for a sail down the Nile, and that will be much nicer. Quite like old times, eh?” Deciding the time for neatness had passed, he simply aimed a series of kicks and punches at certain spots on the wall. He did not seem to exert much force, but the wall cracked in a dozen places and toppled outward into the tomb shaft.
“Literature Preservationist Lewis, super-cyborg!” he gloated, striking an attitude, and then froze with an expression of dismay on his face.
Flinders Petrie stood in the shaft without, just at the edge of the lamplight. He was surveying the wreckage of the wall with leonine fury, and the fact that he was wearing a pink singlet, pink ballet tutu and pink ribboned slippers did nothing to detract from the terror of his anger. Nor did the rifle he was aiming at Lewis’s head.
“Come out of there, you little bastard,” he said. “Look at the mess you’ve made!”
“I’m sorry!” said Lewis.
“Not as sorry as you’re going to be,” the old mortal told him. “I knew you were a damned marauder from the moment I laid eyes on you.” He settled the rifle more securely on his shoulder. “Though I couldn’t fathom the rest of it. What’s a super-cyborg? What the hell are you, eh?” Lewis raced mentally through possible believable answers, and decided on:
“I’m afraid you’re right. I’m a thief; I was paid a lot of money by a certain French count to bring back antiquities for his collection. The Comte de la, er, Cyborg. He ordered me to infiltrate your expedition, because everyone knows you’re the best—”
“Ballocks,” said Petrie. “I mean what are you?” Lewis blinked at him. “What?” he repeated.
“What kind of thing are you? You’re no human creature, that much is obvious,” said Petrie.
“It is?” In spite of his horror, Lewis was fascinated. He scanned Petrie’s brain activity and found it a roiling wasps’ nest of sparks.
“It is to me, boy,” said Petrie. “Mosquitoes won’t bite you, for one thing. You speak like an actor on the stage, for another. You move like a machine, mathematically exact. I’ve timed the things you do.”
“What kinds of things?” Lewis asked, delighted.
“Blinking once every thirty seconds precisely, for example,” said Flinders Petrie. “Except in moments when you’re pretending to be surprised, as you were just now. But there’s not much t
hat surprises you, is there? You knew about this shaft, you very nearly dragged Ali to this spot and showed him where to dig. It was so we’d do all the work for you, wasn’t it? And then you’d make off with whatever was inside.”
“Well, I’m afraid I—”
“You’re not afraid. Your pupils aren’t dilating as a man’s would,” said Petrie relentlessly. “You haven’t changed color, and you’re breathing in perfect mechanical rhythm.” But his own hand shook slightly as he pulled back the hammer on the rifle. “You’re some kind of brilliantly complicated automaton, though I’m damned if I can think who made you.”
“That’s an insane idea, you know,” said Lewis, gauging how much space there was between Petrie and the side of the shaft. “People will think you’re mad as a hatter if you tell anyone.” Petrie actually chuckled. “Do I look like a man who cares if people think I’m mad?” he said. He cut a bizarre little jete, pink slippers flashing. “It’s bloody useful, in fact, to be taken for a lunatic. Why d’you think I keep this ensemble in my kit? If I blew your head off this minute, dressed as I happen to be, I should certainly be acquitted of murder on grounds of insanity. Wouldn’t you think so?”
“You are absolutely the most astonishing mortal I have ever met,” said Lewis sincerely.
“And you’re not mortal, obviously. What would I see if I fired this gun, Mr. Kensington? Bits of clockwork flying apart? Magnetic ichor? Who made you? Why? I want to know! What are you for?”
“Please don’t shoot!” cried Lewis. “I was born as mortal as you are! If a bullet hit me I’d bleed and feel an awful lot of pain, but I wouldn’t die. I can never die.” Inspiration struck him. “Think about the Book of the Dead. All the mummies you’ve unearthed, Professor, think of all the priests and embalmers who worked over them, trying to follow instructions they barely understood. What were they trying to do?”
“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 hieroglyphics!”
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, cleverdick.”
“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 youneeded 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 runningout 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 camp fire 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.