Eron had famfed a Rithian global map, and when the shuttle glided into the sunlight from the night’s shadow he recognized the vast river branches meandering across the Amazon Desert into the city of K’tismo. They crept onward. The desert slid behind them to be replaced by sparkling water... by clouds... and then they were leaving cloudy ocean to cross over a seacoast into eroding mountains cut by the ghosts of unused roads... and finally—in a slow downward drift—skimming above an onrushing landscape... to an unnatural stopness. Nothing moved. It was a very ordinary spaceport but it didn’t feel that way. Even the dust whirligigs seemed exotic.
Hahukum Konn had sent a courteous aerocar to pick him up. Its door opened automatically. “At your service, sir,” the machine said. “Please take a seat and make yourself comfortable. Your luggage will be loaded before I take-off.” There was no one else on board. Eron had half expected to be met by the Great Konn. He was disappointed. “Reception has been delayed until this evening by the unfortunate unavailability of staff. I have been instructed to offer you Second Rank Psychohistorian Konn’s special Rithian tour package until then. The Master suggests that you take the opportunity to instruct yourself in history and review the Rithian time-metrics. Having experience with the wrath of Konn, I strongly concur.”
“I’m afraid I would confuse Rithian history and outrageous myth. I don’t even know where I am.”
“May I then make a recommendation? Konn’s tour is flexible and offers many choices.”
“How about looking up a herd of camels?”
“Camels are extinct—perhaps because of their nasty habit of spitting. I do not spit. There are several good historical sites along our route, ranging from the dawn of hominid history to the reconstruction of 420th century (AD) Mestima. May I recommend the Great Pyramid complex? Since I work out of this local area I have become an expert on Inner Sea sites.” The robovoice was inflected with pride. “We will pass close to the Rithian Capital, which is well policed. There is adequate multilevel aerocar parking for tourists, and I am equipped to famfeed you Konn’s talking-tour guide and restricted mathematical adjuncts as well as maps on whichever related historical topic you choose. This will provide you with adequate time for study and allow me to bring you to Base Camp on schedule.”
A confusing number of touchdowns and takeoffs later— and after a long journey over the Inner Sea—Eron’s aerocar tilted, then leveled out to approach its destination. Rith’s capital metropolis sprawled along both banks of the Nile. Near the shores of the sea, across the river, rose the sunlit brilliance of three pyramids, one regal. They were touted as the oldest of Rith’s ancient monuments. They weren’t, of course, but the Great Pyramid was certainly the largest.
Eron’s aerocar informed him that the shoreline had reached inland during the Meltdown, earthquakes badly shaking the Great Pyramid as continents readjusted to the higher water level. Its restoration from an abandoned mound of stones dated only from the onset of the New Ice Age and the relocation of the System’s bureaucracy to the mouth of the Nile. The Khu-fu Pyramid itself had been reinforced with a plasteel frame that increased its dimensions by a factor of six fifths and its volume by a factor of seventy-three percent. The modernized Pyramid showed a facing of brilliant white concrete in imitation of the original limestone sheath vandalized by infidels to build a city since obliterated by blowing sands. The lesser two pyramids of the triad, still spectacular, had merely received cosmetic face-lifts.
The aerocar drifted toward the monument. The new facing was inlaid with glass courses opaque enough to reflect a whiteness as bright as the ersatz limestone but still transparent enough to light the myriad internal shops, cultural museums, opera houses, spacious malls. Evidently at night, while serving the needs of a gay city that never slept, surface-effect waveguides on the triangular sides redistributed any illumination leaking out from the inside to subdue what might have been a non-authentic “zebra” effect. The Great Pyramid was capped with a golden pyramidion that glowed multicolored in the sun. It was surrounded by a giant plaza large enough to hold both its shadows and the triangles of its reflected light.
With such a view before them, the aerocar was not content with simply flying. “The Pyramid’s function as a light-and-shadow sundial has been restored,” triumphed its voice box as they made their looming approach. “See those tiny bronze markers? Some indicate the solstices and equinoxes. Others are calibrated to tell the time of Rith’s day if you happen to know the month. Their variable month is calibrated more or less synchronically with their moon’s orbit and is about seventy-eight watches long. I’d buzz in for a closer peep if it were permitted. Try your fam’s zooming routines. This trip makes my wings shiver.” The vehicle did a complete circular tour of the site—at a legal distance—to display awe-inspiring views of this most sage of the 1024 Wonders of the Galaxy while outdoing itself with a paean of instructive praise for the oldest of them.
“In the eons of yore our ancestors”—there was a touch of insistence in the “our”—“tore this Pyramid from the stones of Rith’s heart to model the northern hemisphere of their gods-given homeworld. It was done on the scale of half the number of sidereal seconds in a solar day. Being of a hex nature myself, I find that the idea of butchering up a day into 86,400 seconds lacks a certain elegance. Still, for the priests of the Nile to have been able to break Rith’s rotation into that fine a gradation of intervals speaks of technical excellence. There is no denying that they did it—one cannot turn time into length without being able to measure it. Sixty laps of the base circumference of their Pyramid was half a degree, a good day’s march.”
“Was,” laughed Eron, very much aware that the refurbished Pyramid with its brilliant faux-limestone surface and interior shopping malls was larger in volume than the old Pyramid.
“Yes. But the new scaling factor has been set at one to 36,000. That is another very Egyptian number since the equator divided into 360 degrees divided by sixty minutes by sixty seconds, by a hundred, was their definition of the length of a foot—the symbol for a measuring rod was the same as their symbol for the sky. Actually the foot I just mentioned is the reformed foot used by their elite geographers. The Pyramid, among its other riddle-keeping duties, commemorated both Egypt’s invention of the clock and of geography. We can be proud of our illustrious ancestors!”
To hide the underground parking garages was a necropolis of temples set amid gardens fed by the Nile. The iris City sprawling in the background sprouted a babel of speckled architecture around the pupil simplicity of the pyramids. They dropped into the pupil, the aerocar there abdicating to traffic control, which piloted them neatly to a templetop landing where a waiting robovalet latched on and began to tow them down into the earth. While being chaperoned through tunnels the aerocar lectured Eron about the untouched graves of ancient Egyptians discovered during the excavation of the parking garage. Finally it would not unlock its doors until Eron had famfed the site guide and a twenty-four-hour Rithian clock with alarms set at appropriate intervals. ‘The phone is to be used to contact me only in an emergency. Please return on time. I will find it inconvenient to inform the police that you are missing.”
Eron tried to have the last word. “What if you’re the one who goes missing?”
“That will not happen. I have defenses.”
Tourist-collecting conveyor belts took him away.
The lower twenty floors of the Great Pyramid were madhouses of milling tourists, most of them with the sapiens cast of a Rithian, some with the more refined looks of the local upper caste, others obviously galactic hominids. The boutiques were situated along the inside of the modem facing while ancient limestone blocks lined the other side of the corridors. Anything could be had from the proudly smiling proprietors who were hawking incredible antique values (or manufacturum templates for the less wealthy tourist)...
...genuine Australopithecus flint arrowheads that had been used to hunt Tyrannosaurus rex; embalmed mouse-mummy souvenirs; genuine Celtic bro
aches cast in niobium-copper alloy; genuine lost scrolls from Alexandria’s library; trays of bronze dragons from Chin tombs; illuminated parchment books; Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s gold-plated skull recently recovered from the Arlington tombs (lesser presidential skulls also available said the sign); replicas of early twenty-first century (AD) disk books using improved quantum controllers and a colorful interface of singing Disney animas.
From an iconic shrine, Eron picked out a mysterious Betty Boop brooch, its large eyes perhaps celebrating some ancient religious visionary. “It’s fake, of course,” warned a passing galactic. The proprietress replied to the comment with an evil eye. Eron moved on through the feast, remaining polite.
... encrusted artifacts from the so-called thousand submerged cities; relics of the first sublight starships sold complete with their authentication papers; gaudy conversational pieces containing the quantronically imprisoned souls of ancient media stars to keep you company at the flick of a finger... “I have one of those,” exclaimed a tourist to her friend. “It does any kind of castrato in a most marvelously miniature voice.” There was more... sacred triple-cross healers of silver and lapis lazuli from the (AD) fifty-first century’s Religiosity; a decorative blaster that had once been used in the (AD) eighty-ninth century by artist-general Amubal Nekko to execute the winners of his Golden Streets heaven-lottery, proudly displayed by its hairy owner; sun-powered jewelry from the Hawaiian island of Loihi, probably early Pacific renaissance of the (AD) 537th century; Rossmalion icon flickers—(AD) 613th century—roughly concurrent with the founding of the Kambal Dynasty on Splendid Wisdom; a collection of non-quantronic musicons from all ages—brightly colored Doigaboo instruments from die Eta Cumingan Occupation, violins, chitters, baboos, horse trumpets, even a recent visi-aural, battered, that must have been contemporary with the Cloun’s conquests of twenty-four centuries past. Eron looked for books by Virgil but didn’t find any. The bookstore held mostly hundreds of illuminated Bibles, variously revised by the thirteenth, twenty-second, and twenty-ninth Messiahs, printed so perfectly that a naif could easily believe them to have been penned by the hand of God.
For a lark, Eron bought a ticket to the kiddie catacombs. The roboguide installed in his fam by the aerocar disapproved since its purpose was to give historical tours. Eron ignored the admonishing voice. Fun was fun. Secret passages had been carved out of the old limestone blocks and even down into the bedrock so that children and superstitious adults might be astonished on their stooped and crawling travels by virtual beings—mostly mummies lurking around hidden projectors, but some extinct animals like hippopotami and raptors and lions, even starbeast gods from the celestial sphere. Eron figured that he wasn’t that distant from childhood.
In these catacombs older children were left to themselves while younger children were required to wear spiritual guides. For those who couldn’t confront virtual ancestors alone, the roaming sapiens-beast Anubis could be hired as a companion. His specialty was shepherding Rith’s lost souls through the labyrinth of their Rithian confusion up into the immortal civilization of the stars while quoting liberally from the spells in the Book of Eternal Life—illustrated papyrus copies for sale in the funereal temple outside the Pyramid. Jackal-headed Anubis also located lost children by magic. One scared little kid (wearing his locator) followed Eron everywhere and even clung to Eron’s pants when a trapdoor opened and dropped them in for a visit with a hawk-headed man-god.
Finally Eron succumbed to the roboguide’s nagging. With its help he found the level on the north face where the old descending passage dropped off into the darkness of the Pyramid, his instructor’s inner voice informing him that the 104x121 cm rectangular tunnel had been carved down through bedrock and later, as the Pyramid was under construction, raised up through the core stones at an angle of 26.28 degrees for a perfectly straight 105 meters before... the robocomment droned on. Most intriguing was a diagram laid onto Eron’s visual cortex, elucidating the method by which the descending tunnel had been aimed at a point 3.72 degrees beneath the north pole—which, at the latitude of the
Pyramid, held a position 30 degrees above the north horizon. A right triangle leveled at an aspect ratio of 28 horizontal royal fingers to 15 vertical royal fingers (28.18 degrees) with a mirror attached to its hypotenuse would have bounced the light of the north star exactly down into the bowels of the earth along the correct path.
One would need a very good galactarium to find out which had been die north star to the Pyramid’s builders— when asked, Eron’s guide claimed that, at the time, the giant AO binary Thuban was passing within 100 arcseconds of the Rithian pole. Eron remembered Thuban only as the fifty-fourth-century GE staging base of an Etalun fleet bent on conquering the proud but squabbling Regionate—a war that wasn’t to take place until 670 centuries after the raising of the Great Pyramid.
A double-gabled entrance roof of massive stone over the descending tunnel was an awesome testament to the ingenuity of primitive man, exposed only because the white limestone exterior cladding, designed to make this stellar peephole invisible, had been robbed to build the palaces and mosques of a city which, empires ago, had itself been devoured by the dust of the desert. Out of respect for the antiquity of this entrance, no boutiques were allowed nearby; instead it was to be viewed pristinely from one of three galleries.
While he stared, his guide supplied him with images of an ancient Rithian stonemason’s tools and his lifting cranes. Why was Konn nudging him to understand these dawn architects? Or was it that he wanted Eron to understand how modem Rithians used the fabulous history of Rith to squeeze money out of stars they once worshiped? The locals here were certainly working their heritage for all it was worth.
Virtual pop-up signs announcing the King’s Chamber & Gambling Den beckoned to the greed of those bored by the mysteries of history and afterlife—and in need of properly aged luck. Eron followed the signs. Easy access had been provided by tunnel off the outer corridors and then by a bank of levitators up through the core stones. Eron took the more exciting old route carved out by the scholar-caliph A1 Ma-mun in his late attempt to rob the Pyramid of the astronomical treasures myth still rumored it to hold three and a half millennia after it had been sealed.
At the time of his break-and-enter al Mamun had already measured the circumference of Rith by the ancient Egyptian method of first computing the north-south distance one had to travel to get a stellar displacement of one degree and then multiplying by 360. Wanting more of the knowledge of the ancients—an old theme—al Mamun had used fire and water to crack the Pyramid’s limestone through which he had to force his way, almost missing the then-hidden descending passage until the sound of a dislodged stone had guided him sideways. Mamun’s hack work, smoothed by the hands of posterity, was now lovingly protected from tourists like Eron by a film of transparent etemite. Finding hard granite plugs in the roof of the descending passage blocking his way up a mysterious ascending passage, Al Mamun had continued to heat-and-douse, crack and excavate. Eron followed Mamun’s route through the softer rock around the plugs.
Even though the rock was protected by a thin layer of etemite, which gave good footing, the climb was slippery and cramped by a roof half the height of a man. No one came up behind him. The tourists seemed to prefer the modem tunnels and levitators. It wasn’t an easy ascent crawling up a 26-degree slope for forty-six meters. Once Thuban’s light had been reflected by a mirror up this passage to slice a perfect meridian through the Pyramid. Old superstitions gripped him; he could almost imagine that the suspended Rithian messiah was entombed somewhere in the rock near him, ready to be revived to save the Galaxy with his Egyptian knowledge—if only probes could find his hiding place in the rock!
Once out of the shaft, Eron skipped the horizontal tunnel leading into the Queen’s Chamber and the housing of the Great Clock, instead scrambling up into the thin Grand
Gallery, which continued uphill into the core for another forty-eight meters, magnificently corbeled wi
th gently sloping sides that rose vertically for eight and a half meters. At least he could stand. Incredible. The resulting transit-slit bracketed the celestial meridian, and here the modem Rithians had outdone themselves—a virtual meridian view recreated the southern sky as it would have been seen at the time that the Great Pyramid’s engineers had raised its platform to half height, the stars moving in real time. An astronomer’s paradise. Eron imagined that he could see loin-clothed priests on their perches while they timed the arc—the culmination—of important stars. Surveyors were simultaneously calling out the altitudes.
Men who have grown up to take tiny quantronic instruments for granted tend to forget that huge instruments can be as accurate as small precision devices. How this place must have thrilled its architects! Eron remembered his flush when the Chairman of the Bridge on that long-ago hyperffeighter had lent him the use of her telescope. Of course a pharaoh would want to make his transition to eternity here in this sacred observatory! Where else would the secrets of immortality be so accessible?
He kept on climbing and reached the low entrance to the King’s Chamber the hard way. The granite beams of its multitiered roof, cracked by a great earthquake in antiquity, had collapsed during later earthquakes. Rebuilt to a different architect’s vision, the King’s Chamber was now only an anteroom to an impressively extended casino. When Eron passed through a shimmering force curtain—the technological replacement for solid red granite—he was transported from an ancient stone heaven into the blare of galactic gambling. Moreover, for the gamblers’ visual pleasure Khu-fu’s coffin had been re-created in imitation of the one which had long ago been found in subterranean chambers by bureaucratic grave robbers of the Eta Cumingan Regionate, then shipped off to the stars as the cultural booty of their occupation of Rith. (Every few thousand years Rith sued for its return, explained Eron’s ghostly guide.) Khu-fu’s fake mummy was constantly attended by resident ibis-headed Thothians with sagaciously bearded beaks who spoke in a language that sounded like the Wisdom of the Ages. The mock Khu-fu’s elaborate humaniform coffin was smooth at the place where gambling sapiens and tourist alike had rubbed it for luck.
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