‘Tonight, Shepley,’ Traxel told him firmly in his hard clipped voice, ‘you must find a tape. We cannot support you indefinitely. Remember, we’re all as eager to leave Vergil as you are.’
Shepley nodded, watching his reflection in the gold finger-bowl. Traxel sat at the head of the tilting table, his high-collared velvet jacket unbuttoned. Surrounded by the battered gold plate filched from the tombs, red wine spilling across the table from Bridges’ tankard, he looked more like a Renaissance princeling than a cashiered PhD. Once Traxel had been a Professor of Semantics, and Shepley wondered what scandal had brought him to Vergil. Now, like a grave-rat, he hunted the time-tombs with Bridges, selling the tapes to the Psycho-History Museums at a dollar a foot. Shepley found it impossible to come to terms with the tall, aloof man. By contrast Bridges, who was just a thug, had a streak of blunt good humour that made him tolerable, but with Traxel he could never relax. Perhaps his coldly abrupt manner represented authority, the high-faced, stern-eyed interrogators who still pursued Shepley in his dreams.
Bridges kicked back his chair and lurched away around the table, pounding Shepley across the shoulders.
‘You come with us, kid. Tonight we’ll find a megatape.’
Outside, the low-hulled, camouflaged half-track waited in a saddle between two dunes. The old summer palace was sinking slowly below the desert, and the floor of the banqueting hall shelved into the white sand like the deck of a subsiding liner, going down with lights blazing from its staterooms.
‘What about you, Doctor?’ Traxel asked the Old Man as Bridges swung aboard the half-track and the exhaust kicked out. ‘It would be a pleasure to have you along.’ When the Old Man shook his head Traxel turned to Shepley. ‘Well, are you coming?’
‘Not tonight,’ Shepley demurred hurriedly. ‘I’ll walk down to the tomb-beds later myself.’
‘Twenty miles?’ Traxel reminded him, watching reflectively. ‘Very well.’ He zipped up his jacket and strode away towards the half-track. As they moved off he shouted ‘Shepley, I meant what I said!’
Shepley watched them disappear among the dunes. Flatly, he repeated ‘He means what he says.’
The Old Man shrugged, sweeping the sand off the table. ‘Traxel . . . he’s a difficult man. What are you going to do?’ The note of reproach in his voice was mild, realizing that Shepley’s motives were the same as those which had marooned himself on the lost beaches of the sand-sea four decades earlier.
Shepley snapped irritably. ‘I can’t go with him. After five minutes he drains me like a skull. What’s the matter with Traxel? Why is he here?’
The Old Man stood up, staring out vaguely into the desert. ‘I can’t remember. Everyone has his own reasons. After a while the stories overlap.’
They walked out under the portico, following the grooves left by the half-track. A mile away, winding between the last of the lavalakes which marked the southern shore of the sand-sea, they could just see the vehicle vanishing into the darkness. The old tomb-beds, where Shepley and the Old Man usually walked, lay between them, the pavilions arranged in three lines along a low basaltic ridge. Occasionally a brief flare of light flickered up into the white, bone-like darkness, but most of the tombs were silent.
Shepley stopped, hands falling limply to his sides. ‘The new beds are by the Lake of Newton, nearly twenty miles away. I can’t follow them.’
‘I shouldn’t try,’ the Old Man rejoined. ‘There was a big sand-storm last night. The time-wardens will be out in force marking any new tombs uncovered.’ He chuckled softly to himself. ‘Traxel and Bridges won’t find a foot of tape – they’ll be lucky if they’re not arrested.’ He took off his white cotton hat and squinted shrewdly through the dead light, assessing the altered contours of the dunes, then guided Shepley towards the old mono-rail whose southern terminus ended by the tomb-beds. Once it had been used to transport the pavilions from the station on the northern shore of the sand-sea, and a small gyro-car still leaned against the freight platform. ‘We’ll go over to Pascal. Something may have come up, you never know.’
Shepley shook his head. ‘Traxel took me there when I first arrived. They’ve all been stripped a hundred times.’
‘Well, we’ll have a look.’ The Old Man plodded on towards the mono-rail, his dirty white suit flapping in the low breeze. Behind them the summer palace – built three centuries earlier by a business tycoon from Ceres – faded into the darkness, the rippling glass tiles in the upper spires merging into the starlight.
Propping the car against the platform, Shepley wound up the gyroscope, then helped the Old Man on to the front seat. He prised off a piece of rusting platform rail and began to punt the car away. Every fifty yards or so they stopped to clear the sand that submerged the track, but slowly they wound off among the dunes and lakes. Here and there the onion-shaped cupola of a solitary time-tomb reared up into the sky beside them, fragments of the crystal casements twinkling in the sand like minuscule stars.
Half an hour later, as they rode down the final long incline towards the Lake of Pascal, Shepley went forward to sit beside the Old Man, who emerged from his private reverie to ask pointedly, ‘And you, Shepley, why are you here?’
Shepley leaned back, letting the cool air drain the sweat off his face. ‘Once I tried to kill someone,’ he explained tersely. ‘After they cured me I found I wanted to kill myself instead.’ He reached down to the hand-brake as they gathered speed. ‘For ten thousand dollars I can go back on probation. Here I thought there would be a freemasonry of sorts. But then you’ve been kind enough, Doctor.’
‘Don’t worry, we’ll get you a winning tape.’ He leaned forward, shielding his eyes from the stellar glare, gazing down at the little cantonment of gutted time-tombs on the shore of the lake. In all there were about a dozen pavilions, their roofs holed, the group Traxel had shown to Shepley after his arrival when he demonstrated how the vaults were robbed.
‘Shepley! Look, lad!’
‘Where? I’ve seen them before, Doctor. They’re stripped.’
The Old Man pushed him away. ‘No, you fool. Three hundred yards to the west, by the long ridge where the big dunes have moved. Can you see them now?’ He drummed a white fist on Shepley’s knee. ‘You’ve made it,lad.You won’t need to be frightened ofTraxel or anyone else.’
Shepley jerked the car to a halt. As he ran ahead of the Old Man towards the escarpment he could see several of the time-tombs glowing along the sky lines, emerging briefly from the dark earth like the tents of a spectral caravan.
TWO
For ten millennia the Sea of Vergil had served as a burial ground, and the 1,500 square miles of restless sand were estimated to contain over twenty thousand tombs. All but a minute fraction had been stripped by the successive generations of tomb-robbers, and an intact spool of the 17th Dynasty could now be sold to the Psycho-History Museum at Tycho for over 3,000 dollars. For each preceding dynasty, though none older than the 12th had ever been found, there was a bonus.
There were no corpses in the time-tombs, no dusty skeletons. The cyber-architectonic ghosts which haunted them were embalmed in the metallic codes of memory tapes, three-dimensional molecular transcriptions of their living originals, stored among the dunes as a stupendous act of faith, in the hope that one day the physical re-creation of the coded personalities would be possible. After five thousand years the attempt had been reluctantly abandoned, but out of respect for the tomb-builders their pavilions were left to take their own hazard with time in the Sea of Vergil. Later the tomb-robbers had arrived, as the historians of the new epochs realized the enormous archives that lay waiting for them in this antique limbo. Despite the time-wardens, the pillaging of the tombs and the illicit traffic in dead souls continued.
‘Doctor! Come on! Look at them!’
Shepley plunged wildly up to his knees in the silver-white sand, diving from one pavilion to the next like a frantic puppy.
Smiling to himself, the Old Man climbed slowly up the melting slope, submerge
d to his waist as the fine crystals poured away around him, feeling for spurs of firmer rock. The cupola of the nearest tomb tilted into the sky, only the top six inches of the casements visible below the overhang. He sat for a moment on the roof, watching Shepley dive about in the darkness, then peered through the casement, brushing away the sand with his hands.
The tomb was intact. Inside he could see the votive light burning over the altar, the hexagonal nave with its inlaid gold floor and drapery, the narrow chancel at the rear which held the memory store. Low tables surrounded the chancel, carrying beaten goblets and gold bowls, token offerings intended to distract any pillager who stumbled upon the tomb.
Shepley came leaping over to him. ‘Let’s get into them, Doctor! What are we waiting for?’
The Old Man looked out over the plain below, at the cluster of stripped tombs by the edge of the lake, at the dark ribbon of the gyro-rail winding away among the hills. The thought of the fortune that lay at his fingertips left him unmoved. For so long now he had lived among the tombs that he had begun to assume something of their ambience of immortality and timelessness, and Shepley’s impatience seemed to come out of another dimension. He hated stripping the tombs. Each one robbed represented, not just the final extinction of a surviving personality, but a diminution of his own sense of eternity. Whenever a new tomb-bed emerged from the sand he felt something within himself momentarily rekindled, not hope, for he was beyond that, but a serene acceptance of the brief span of time left to him.
‘Right,’ he nodded. They began to cleave away the sand piled around the door, Shepley driving it down the slope where it spilled in a white foam over the darker basaltic chips. When the narrow portico was free the Old Man squatted by the timeseal. His fingers cleaned away the crystals embedded between the tabs, then played lightly over them.
Like dry sticks breaking, an ancient voice crackled
Orion, Betelgeuse, Altair,
What twice-born star shall be my heir,
Doomed again to be this scion –
‘Come on, Doctor, this is a quicker way.’ Shepley put one leg up against the door and lunged against it futilely. The Old Man pushed him away. With his mouth close to the seal, he rejoined.
‘Of Altair, Betelgeuse, Orion.’
As the doors accepted this and swung back he murmured:
‘Don’t despise the old rituals. Now, let’s see.’ They paused in the cool, unbreathed air, the votive light throwing a pale ruby glow over the gold drapes parting across the chancel.
The air became curiously hazy and mottled. Within a few seconds it began to vibrate with increasing rapidity, and a succession of vivid colours rippled across the surface of what appeared to be a cone of light projected from the rear of the chancel. Soon this resolved itself into a three-dimensional image of an elderly man in a blue robe.
Although the image was transparent, the brilliant electric blue of the robe revealing the inadequacies of the projection system, the intensity of the illusion was such that Shepley almost expected the man to speak to them. He was well into his seventies, with a composed, watchful face and thin grey hair, his hands resting quietly in front of him. The edge of the desk was just visible, the proximal arc of the cone enclosing part of a silver inkstand and a small metal trophy. These details, and the spectral bookshelves and paintings which formed the backdrop of the illusion, were of infinite value to the Psycho-History institutes, providing evidence of the earlier civilizations far more reliable than the funerary urns and goblets in the anteroom.
Shepley began to move forward, the definition of the persona fading slightly. A visual relay of the memory store, it would continue to play after the code had been removed, though the induction coils would soon exhaust themselves. Then the tomb would be finally extinct.
Two feet away, the wise unblinking eyes of the long dead magnate stared at him steadily, his seamed forehead like a piece of pink transparent wax. Tentatively, Shepley reached out and plunged his hand into the cone, the myriad vibration patterns racing across his wrist. For a moment he held the dead man’s face in his hand, the edge of the desk and the silver inkstand dappling across his sleeve.
Then he stepped forward and walked straight through him into the darkness at the rear of the chancel.
Quickly, following Traxel’s instructions, he unbolted the console containing the memory store, lifting out the three heavy drums which held the tape spools. Immediately the persona began to dim, the edge of the desk and the bookshelves vanishing as the cone contracted. Narrow bands of dead air appeared across it, one, at the level of the man’s neck, decapitating him. Lower down the scanner had begun to misfire. The folded hands trembled nervously, and now and then one of his shoulders gave a slight twitch. Shepley stepped through him without looking back.
The Old Man was waiting outside. Shepley dropped the drums on to the sand. ‘They’re heavy,’ he muttered. Brightening, he added. ‘There must be over five hundred feet here, Doctor. With the bonus, and all the others as well –’ He took the Old Man’s arm. ‘Come on, let’s get into the next one.’
The Old Man disengaged himself, watching the sputtering persona in the pavilion, the blue light from the dead man’s suit pulsing across the sand like a soundless lightning storm.
‘Wait a minute, lad, don’t run away with yourself.’ As Shepley began to slide off through the sand, sending further falls down the slope, he added in a firmer voice ‘And stop moving all that sand around! These tombs have been hidden for ten thousand years. Don’t undo all the good work, or the wardens will find them the first time they go past.’
‘Or Traxel,’ Shepley said, sobering quickly. He glanced around the lake below, searching the shadows among the tombs in case anyone was watching them, waiting to seize the treasure.
THREE
The Old Man left him at the door of the next pavilion, reluctant to watch the tomb being stripped of the last vestige of its already meagre claim to immortality.
‘This will be our last one tonight,’ he told Shepley. ‘You’ll never hide all these tapes from Bridges and Traxel.’
The furnishings of the tomb differed from that of the previous one. Sombre black marble panels covered the walls, inscribed with strange gold-leaf hieroglyphs, and the inlays in the floor represented stylized astrological symbols, at once eerie and obscure. Shepley leaned against the altar, watching the cone of light reach out towards him from the chancel as the curtains parted. The predominant colours were gold and carmine, mingled with a vivid powdery copper that gradually resolved itself into the huge, harp-like head-dress of a reclining woman. She lay in the centre of what seemed to be a sphere of softly luminous gas, inclined against a massive black catafalque, from the sides of which flared two enormous heraldic wings. The woman’s copper hair was swept straight back from her forehead, some five or six feet long, and merged with the plumage of the wings, giving her an impression of tremendous contained speed, like a goddess arrested in a moment of flight on a cornice of some great temple-city of the dead.
Her eyes stared forward expressionlessly at Shepley. Her arms and shoulders were bare, and the white skin, like compacted snow, had a brilliant surface sheen, the reflected light glaring against the black base of the catafalque and the long sheath-like gown that swept around her hips to the floor. Her face, like an exquisite porcelain mask, was tilted upward slightly, the half-closed eyes suggesting that the woman was asleep or dreaming. No background had been provided for the image, but the bowl of luminescence invested the persona with immense power and mystery.
Shepley heard the Old Man shuffle up behind him.
‘Who is she, Doctor? A princess?’
The Old Man shook his head slowly. ‘You can only guess. I don’t know. There are strange treasures in these tombs. Get on with it, we’d best be going.’
Shepley hesitated. He started to walk towards the woman on the catafalque, and then felt the enormous upward surge of her flight, the pressure of all the past centuries carried before her brought to a s
udden focus in front of him, holding him back like a physical barrier.
‘Doctor!’ He reached the door just behind the Old Man. ‘We’ll leave this one, there’s no hurry!’
The Old Man examined his face shrewdly in the moonlight, the brilliant colours of the persona flickering across Shepley’s youthful cheeks. ‘I know how you feel, lad, but remember, the woman doesn’t exist, any more than a painting. You’ll have to come back for her soon.’
Shepley nodded quickly. ‘I know, but some other night. There’s something uncanny about this tomb.’ He closed the doors behind them, and immediately the huge cone of light shrank back into the chancel, sucking the woman and the catafalque into the darkness. The wind swept across the dunes, throwing a fine spray of sand on to the half-buried cupolas, sighing among the wrecked tombs.
The Old Man made his way down to the mono-rail, and waited for Shepley as he worked for the next hour, slowly covering each of the tombs.
On the Old Man’s recommendation he gave Traxel only one of the canisters, containing about 500 feet of tape. As prophesied, the time-wardens had been out in force in the Sea of Newton, and two members of another gang had been caught red-handed. Bridges was in foul temper, but Traxel, as ever self-contained, seemed unworried at the wasted evening.
Straddling the desk in the tilting ballroom, he examined the drum with interest, complimenting Shepley on his initiative. ‘Excellent, Shepley. I’m glad you joined us now. Do you mind telling me where you found this?’
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 68