by Judith Tarr
“You know it is!” Jonathan insisted. He was a stocky guy, but quick and surprisingly light on his feet, and when he got excited he bounced. The first time I saw him do it, I had to fight not to laugh.
He was bouncing now, stabbing the last of the hummus with a wedge of pita and glaring at Aunt Jessie. “It’s right there in the cartouche. It is Tawosret.”
“Maybe,” Aunt Jessie said. She can drive you crazy being noncommittal, and she was doing a good job of it now. “It’s fragmentary, and there are other interpretations. If this was a woman pharaoh, she’d have made sure to build her tomb and temple in the Valley of the Kings, not here with the queens.”
“So she built it for someone else,” Gwyn said. “Mother, maybe.”
“Daughter,” I said.
That came straight out of nowhere. I froze, hoping they were too busy arguing to notice, but of course they heard.
They all turned to stare at me. I braced to be jumped on, but even Aunt Jessie nodded. “That’s possible,” she said. “We know she had a son who died before he could father an heir, which left her to rule as king. She very likely had a daughter as well.”
I bit my tongue. Of course she had a daughter—one she loved with her whole heart and soul, and raised to be king. I knew that the way I knew what Egyptian beer tasted like.
“There’s no historical record of such a person,” Amira said, “and mortuary temples weren’t built for wives or children. They were built for the king. This must have another purpose.”
“Such as?” Gwyn demanded.
Amira shrugged. “Who knows? Maybe she wanted to honor the queens who went before her.”
“Guilt?” Gwyn said. “Because she got to be king and they didn’t?”
“More likely she’d want to let them know she’d attained godhood,” said Amira.
“Thumbing her nose at them for all eternity?” Gwyn looked downright offended.
Aunt Jessie’s voice came in between them before the argument got any uglier. “That’s enough, you two. There’s an answer somewhere in there, I’m sure. The more we excavate, the more we’ll find. Maybe we’ll finally find the tomb.”
As a distraction, that worked beautifully. They all sighed, even Aunt Jessie.
When archaeologists dream, they dream of being the first person to open a new and—that’s the next to impossible part—unrobbed tomb. Everybody’s heard about King Tut, because he’s the only pharaoh who survived all those thousands of years without being found and cleaned out.
That doesn’t stop anybody from hoping there’s another one out there somewhere. Even an empty tomb, or better yet, one that still has its mummy in it, is enough to get an Egyptologist excited.
Everybody wandered off after that. They had work to do in the lab or the library, and I had orders to take a nap.
I was more than ready to fall over. I left two messages first. One for Mom, just a ping and a Love you. And one for Cat and Rick and Kristen: Still alive. Miss you. The rest could wait till I woke up.
Once I was horizontal under the mosquito netting, with the ceiling fan blowing cool air over me and the little tortie cat purring on the pillow beside my ear, my brain came wide awake. The more I tried to fall asleep, the less sleepy I was.
I reached for my phone. Changed my mind. Pulled the laptop over instead.
I started an email to the usuals. Trip Report, I typed. Rock the First.
It was all in my head, starting with the flights and the airport and Aunt Jessie and the grad students and everything else that had happened since. What came out was completely different.
I think I’m going crazy. But it feels real. Like there are three of me, living at three different ends of time.
I could imagine what Rick would say to that. Something about physics. And psychiatry. Kristen would talk right past me about boys and horse shows. Cat would tell me that was a nice start for a story, but what about Egypt?
I typed an answer to her, sort of. I keep thinking about the temple and the woman king. She wanted her daughter to be king, too. But she built a temple for her where the queens were buried. Aunt Jessie thinks that means the princess died before her mother.
The thing is—I know she did.
All these people have been dead for thousands of years. But I can feel the sadness as if it happened yesterday. I feel Meritre in the middle of her vision, seeing that one last life the plague will take before it stops, and realizing no magic she can make will change what she sees. She doesn’t know yet which life that is, but I do. I know.
I know it the way I know what I had for breakfast yesterday, and what Bonnie’s mane smells like, and how to get from bio lab to Language Arts at school.
That’s got to be jet lag, right? How old do you have to be before schizophrenia starts?
“Maybe it’s a brain tumor,” Kristen said helpfully in my head. Besides boys and dressage shows, Kristen’s other obsession is medicine.
Right, I said with my fingers. It will be Mom’s turn to go crazy worrying about me, and my turn to do the chemo and the wig and the nightmares.
I shut off that thought before it went any further. I didn’t feel sick. I didn’t feel crazy, either, though that didn’t necessarily mean anything.
Suppose I’m not imagining things. Suppose I really am living someone else’s life. Time travel, magic—who knows what it is? I don’t have to believe in magic for it to be real, do I?
Meritre believed. She was still working on a spell to save her family from another round of the plague. Maybe it wouldn’t work. But maybe it would.
What if—
I shut that thought off, too. If magic could cure cancer, someone would have done it a long, long time ago.
Still, I typed, what if it could work? What if that’s what I’m doing here? Time traveling in my head, with this weird connection an ancient Egyptian person who happens to be just about the same age I am?
My fingers went still on the keys. What if I could find a spell that would make sure Mom never came out of remission ever?
As long as I was thinking impossible things, I couldn’t help but make the leap to the other side of time.
What if Meru is real, too? She’s thousands of years in the future. Science is so far advanced it might as well be magic. They must have cured cancer. Didn’t she say no one gets sick any more? Got. Will get. Damn, this is complicated.
Rick in my head, always the practical one, pointed out what I already knew. “Even if it is real, and you really are the midpoint of two lives at the far ends of time, what good will it do? All you can do is watch. You can’t communicate with them.”
Can’t I?
The scarab swung on its string around my neck. I closed my hand over it to make it stop.
Meritre has one like it. The one I logged in the tent can’t be that one, can it?
What if it is?
“Crazy,” I said.
“So?” Now my head gave me Cat, playing along. “If it is Meritre’s amulet, maybe it can help you communicate somehow. After all, what good is time travel if you can’t talk to each other? Are you supposed to just watch your separate train wrecks and not be able to do a thing about it?”
I stared at the disjointed mess on the laptop screen. Anybody I sent that to would be calling Aunt Jessie and telling her to get me some help—stat, as Kristen would say.
I hit Delete.
Are you really sure you want to delete this message? the computer asked.
There was one way to find out if I was right. I knew more or less where artifact storage was. If I was lucky, the box of scarabs would still be out in the open; someone had to double-check its contents against the log before they went into the vault.
Maybe I could volunteer.
As for the email…
I clicked Yes. Yes, I was crazy. No, I didn’t want the evidence sitting in my drafts folder, proving to everyone that I’d gone straight screaming around the bend.
I wasn’t tired at all. I felt as if I’d slept for
hours. I put clean clothes on and slipped my phone into my pocket.
The cat followed me out of the room. It seemed to approve.
Meritre would have said that was an omen. Who was I to say she was wrong?
Chapter 12
Containment was a bare and echoing cavern of a hall divided by force fields into a maze of rooms and cells. The fields in the cells were opaque, like walls of shimmering steel; they cut off sound as well as sight. Only the front wall was transparent.
Meru’s cell was one of the first. She could see the Guards leading new prisoners past her, as ruffled and wide-eyed from decontamination as she had been, but most were much less quiet.
She was careful not to look up. The starwing had gone invisible, but she could feel it near the summit of the vault. It watched over her as always; its calm flowed through her. She was safe—bored, twitching at the separation from the web, but safe.
She had tried already to reboot the web with the backup chip she had brought from home. She pressed it into her ear under cover of lying down to rest, and felt it click into the port inside the canal. Then she waited, but nothing happened.
The chip worked: it sent her the right messages as it logged into her neural network. But when it tried to connect to the web, it failed.
She pushed herself back to her feet. Even with the starwing to take the edge off, she was ready to fly apart.
There was water in the cell, and an elegant little box of sweet bean buns and pickled vegetables and groundnut soup that told her Vekaa had ordered it: it was exactly as she liked it, as if it had come from the family’s kitchen. That made her eyes sting.
She had seen Jian dead in front of her, and she had not shed a tear. One cup of starfruit tea with just the right measure of sweetener, and she burst out bawling.
Grief had a way of slipping sideways. Jian had told her that.
Her mother had told her so much. Even spending most of her time off Earth, leaving Meru with the family, she had been there on the web. All Meru had to do was think of her, and even if she was somewhere far and strange, there would be a message or a link or a memory.
Now there was nothing. Jian was gone. No more messages. No more links. Memory should still be there, but all Meru could see was Jian lying dead in that bare and dusty room.
Meru slammed shut the food-storage box without touching anything inside it. Her mouth was dry, but the thought of water made her gag. She paced the floor, not caring how close she came to the wall, even when it stung her.
The pain was welcome. It convinced her that she was real; that even without the web, she could still feel. But when she caught herself standing in the middle of the cell, poised to fling herself headfirst at the shimmer of the field, she stopped short and let her knees go, dropping to the floor.
The floors she had always known gave when a person fell on them. This shocked her with bruises.
That pain on top of the other cleared her head. She could think, more or less. She could focus on something other than her grief, and remember lessons she had learned long ago when she was small, about how the web worked. She still had her implants, complete with backup, and the web was still there. The wall that cut her off was like the force field: it was too strong for a single human to break, but it was not unbreakable.
The starwing had taught her something when it passed through the field around the old city. Brute force was no use. For this kind of work, she had to be subtle. If she could make her virtual self as insubstantial as a starwing, maybe she could penetrate the barrier.
If she did that, she would break laws that had held her world together for hundreds of years. She risked spending the rest of her life in just such a prison as this, cut off from the web without hope of ever finding it again. They would take her implants, blind and deafen her to the web forever, and make sure she did not die of it. She shuddered on the hard, cold floor.
The starwing stirred on its perch high above her. Its wings spread beyond reach of mere glass and steel.
When Meru looked at them from that angle, they looked strikingly like a neural net. Almost automatically she opened a link through it as if it had been a real net—and it worked. She was so startled she almost fell out of the link, but at the last instant she held on.
The connection was dim and somewhat blurred, but clear enough that she could piece the bits of data together. She scanned the web quickly, braced for the connection to disappear at any moment.
“Meru?”
As grainy and crackly and out of focus as the voice and image were, she still recognized Yoshi.
“Meru! Where are you? What happened?”
Meru’s first impulse was to shut him off. But then she realized what his presence meant.
“Yoshi! Can you link me to the feed? Search Northam Starport, old city.”
She could feel Yoshi’s puzzlement rippling through the interface, and the questions crowding behind it. But all he said was, “There’s nothing— Wait. Here.”
He sent it to her in a quick burst, blessedly clear but damnably vague, buried in the middle of a news feed: Northam Starport closed until further notice.
“That’s all I can find,” Yoshi said. “Is it unusual? They close SudAfrique every so often, if something alien comes in that might not be safe.”
“Something alien,” said Meru. “Maybe. Like infection.”
“Disease? From offworld?” Yoshi peered at her. “Meru! Are you sick?”
“I am not sick,” Meru said. “I am in Containment. I was in the old city. People—people were dead.”
“That’s not possible. There can’t be sickness on Earth. We’re protected.”
Meru held herself together with teeth-gritted care. “Yoshi, will you let people know I’m alive? And that I’m well.”
“Done,” he said with hardly a pause. Then: “Containment? But that’s not supposed to be—”
“No, it’s not.” The connection was starting to fray. “Yoshi! Can you lock in? Not the…usual way.”
Not the legal way, she meant. His understanding washed over her, prickling with static.
His link was like a line cast on the tide. Wind and spray tried to catch it and blow it away. Meru lunged for it, and nearly lost that other connection, the one the starwing held.
She hung between the two, with the parts of her virtual self beginning to stretch and fray.
Yoshi reinforced the link with a hack she had never seen before. She wondered if he had, either. A nanosecond later, the starwing sent a surge of energy along it, locking it in place.
It was still very thin and fragile, and it was weak: what data could come through it came in drips and spurts.
“If anything about this comes through,” she said to Yoshi, “anywhere, at any time—”
“I’ll ping,” he said.
She sent a spark of gratitude. He slipped away, but the link held, a tiny, tiny gap in the firewall that barred her from the web.
She explored the edges of the wall, searching for any other crack or weakness. But unlike the force field around the old city, this virtual barrier was new and fresh and strong.
After what seemed a very long time, in a far, far corner, she found a glimmer of light. It was even stranger than the link to Yoshi: without discernible source, and clear in all dimensions, even taste and smell, but weirdly remote. In one way she was part of it, as if she were the one walking down the odd square corridor past rows of closed doors. In another, she watched from above, like a starwing.
In that strange doubling of senses, she understood that she, or rather the persona on the web, was looking for something. There was a sense of age around that unspecified thing, a taste of sun and sand, and a sense that it had something to do with sickness and dying, and a mother’s face.
Meru must have fallen into one of the endless games that ran across the web, some so old that no one remembered where or when they began. She found them dull and usually shut them off. When she could spare any time to play, she played at being a s
tarpilot, sailing across the sea of stars.
This game for all its antique simplicity was oddly compelling. When the persona opened one of the doors—a thing so ancient it turned on hinges—and found herself in a high dim room full of shelves and boxes, Meru felt the same excitement and the same stab of guilty fear as the player, whoever it was, who ran the game.
The room had a distinct smell, sharp as a sneeze, like dust and ancient spices. At the far end was the steel door of the vault, locked and sealed. Everything outside it was either the archive—paper and printout: this game was truly ancient—or artifacts that were being studied or were not yet catalogued.
She was the only person in the room. Whoever had left the door unlocked would get in trouble for it, the persona suspected, then felt guilty all over again for being glad that someone had made a mistake.
She had to move fast. There was no telling when one of the students would come back. She scanned the room, trying to focus, to find one particular box in a room full of them. Her mind kept skipping over the numbers she had seen written on the box.
She stopped and took a deep breath. The box had come in today. No one had had time to do any archiving or filing. It had to be close to the door.
There—on the table labeled, of course, New Finds. The persona laughed at herself, breathed deep again, and lifted the lid from the box that sat on top of the rest.
It was full of beads or carved stones, most of them blue or green; a great many were identical. The persona looked at them in a wave of despair. How was she supposed to know which was the one she needed?
Meru could answer that. In games like this, the talisman had a marker on it, a tiny spurt of data that signaled when it was found.
The persona started slightly. Had it felt Meru’s presence? Its hand passed over the rows of stones.
Meru felt it when the persona did: not exactly like the crackle of a data spurt, but close enough. One blue stone, domed on the top, flat on the bottom, carved in the rough image of a beetle, was the one.