Shepley shrugged vaguely, began to mumble something about a secret basement in one of the gutted tombs nearby, but the Old Man cut in: ‘Don’t broadcast it everywhere! Traxel, you shouldn’t ask questions like that – he’s got his own living to earn.’
Traxel smiled, sphinx-like. ‘Right again, Doctor.’ He tapped the smooth untarnished case. ‘In mint condition, and a 15th Dynasty too.’
‘Tenth!’ Shepley claimed indignantly, frightened that Traxel might try to pocket the bonus. The Old Man cursed, and Traxel’s eyes gleamed.
‘Tenth, is it? I didn’t realize there were any 10th Dynasty tombs still intact. You surprise me, Shepley. Obviously you have concealed talents.’
Luckily he seemed to assume that the Old Man had been hoarding the tape for years.
Face down in a shallow hollow at the edge of the ridge, Shepley watched the white-hulled sand-car of the time-wardens shunt through the darkness by the old cantonment. Directly below him jutted the spires of the newly discovered tomb-bed, invisible against the dark background of the ridge. The two wardens in the sand-car were more interested in the old tombs; they had spotted the gyro-car lying on its side by the mono-rail, and guessed that the gangs had been working the ruins over again. One of them stood on the running board, flicking a torch into the gutted pavilions. Crossing the mono-rail, the car moved off slowly across the lake to the north-west, a low pall of dust settling behind it.
For a few moments Shepley lay quietly in the slack darkness, watching the gullies and ravines that led into the lake, then slid down among the pavilions. Brushing away the sand to reveal a square wooden plank, he slipped below it into the portico.
As the golden image of the enchantress loomed out of the black-walled chancel to greet him, the great reptilian wings unfurling around her, he stood behind one of the columns in the nave, fascinated by her strange deathless beauty. At times her luminous face seemed almost repellent, but he had nonetheless seized on the faint possibility of her resurrection.
Each night he came, stealing into the tomb where she had lain for ten thousand years, unable to bring himself to interrupt her. The long copper hair streamed behind her like an entrained time-wind, her angled body in flight between two infinitely distant universes, where archetypal beings of superhuman stature glimmered fitfully in their own self-generated light.
Two days later Bridges discovered the remainder of the drums.
‘Traxel! Traxel!’ he bellowed, racing across the inner courtyard from the entrance to one of the disused bunkers. He bounded into the ballroom and slammed the metal cans on to the computer which Traxel was programming. ‘Take a look at these – more Tenths! The whole place is crawling with them!’
Traxel weighed the cans idly in his hands, glancing across at Shepley and the Old Man, on lookout duty by the window. ‘Interesting. Where did you find them?’
Shepley jumped down from the window trestle. ‘They’re mine. The Doctor will confirm it. They run in sequence after the first I gave you a week ago. I was storing them.’
Bridges cut back with an oath. ‘Whaddya mean, storing them? Is that your personal bunker out there? Since when?’ He shoved Shepley away with a broad hand and swung round on Traxel. ‘Listen, Traxel, those tapes were a fair find. I don’t see any tags on them. Every time I bring something in I’m going to have this kid claim it?’
Traxel stood up, adjusting his height so that he overreached Bridges. ‘Of course, you’re right – technically. But we have to work together, don’t we? Shepley made a mistake, we’ll forgive him this time.’ He handed the drums to Shepley, Bridges seething with barely controlled indignation. ‘If I were you, Shepley, I’d get those cashed. Don’t worry about flooding the market.’ As Shepley turned away, sidestepping Bridges, he called him back. ‘And there are advantages in working together, you know.’
He watched Shepley disappear to his room, then turned to survey the huge peeling map of the sand-sea that covered the facing wall.
‘You’ll have to strip the tombs now,’ the Old Man told Shepley later. ‘It’s obvious you’ve stumbled on something, and it won’t take Traxel five minutes to discover where.’
‘Perhaps a little longer,’ Shepley replied evenly. They stepped out of the shadow of the palace and moved away among the dunes; Bridges and Traxel were watching them from the dining-room table, their figures motionless in the light. ‘The roofs are almost covered now. The next sandstorm should bury them for good.’
‘Have you entered any of the other tombs?’
Shepley shook his head vigorously. ‘Believe me, Doctor, I know now why the time-wardens are here. As long as there’s a chance of their coming to life we’re committing murder every time we rob a tomb. Even if it’s only one chance in a million it may be all they bargained on. After all, we don’t commit suicide because the chances of life existing anywhere are virtually nil.’
Already he had come to believe that the enchantress might suddenly resurrect herself, step down from the catafalque before his eyes. While a slender possibility existed of her returning to life he felt that he too had a valid foothold in existence, that there was a small element of certainty in what had previously seemed a random and utterly meaningless universe.
FOUR
As the first dawn light probed through the casements, Shepley turned reluctantly from the nave. He looked back briefly at the glowing persona, suppressing the slight pang of disappointment that the expected metamorphosis had not yet occurred, but relieved to have spent as much time awaiting it as possible.
He made his way down to the old cantonment, steering carefully through the shadows. As he reached the mono-rail – he now made the journey on foot, to prevent Traxel guessing that the cache lay along the route of the rail – he heard the track hum faintly in the cool air. He jumped back behind a low mound, tracing its winding pathway through the dunes.
Suddenly an engine throbbed out behind him, and Traxel’s camouflaged half-track appeared over the edge of the ridge. Its front four wheels raced and spun, and the huge vehicle tipped forward and plunged down the incline among the buried tombs, its surging tracks dislodging tons of the fine sand Shepley had so laboriously pushed by hand up the slope. Immediately several of the pavilions appeared to view, the white dust cascading off their cupolas.
Half-buried in the avalanche they had set off, Traxel and Bridges leapt from the driving cab, pointing to the pavilions and shouting at each other. Shepley darted forward, and put his foot up on the mono-rail just as it began to vibrate loudly.
In the distance the gyro-car slowly approached, the Old Man punting it along, hatless and dishevelled.
He reached the tomb as Bridges was kicking the door in with a heavy boot, Traxel behind him with a bag full of wrenches.
‘Hello, Shepley!’ Traxel greeted him gaily. ‘So this is your treasure trove.’
Shepley staggered splay-legged through the sliding sand, and brushed past Traxel as glass spattered from the window. He flung himself on Bridges and pulled the big man backwards.
‘Bridges, this one’s mine! Try any of the others; you can have them all!’
Bridges jerked himself to his feet, staring down angrily at Shepley. Traxel peered suspiciously at the other tombs, their porticos still flooded with sand. ‘What’s so interesting about this one, Shepley?’ he asked sardonically. Bridges roared and slammed a boot into the casement, knocking out one of the panels. Shepley dived on to his shoulders, and Bridges snarled and flung him against the wall. Before Shepley could duck he swung a heavy left cross to Shepley’s mouth, knocking him back on to the sand with a bloody face.
Traxel roared with amusement as Shepley lay there stunned, then knelt down, sympathetically examining Shepley’s face in the light thrown by the expanding persona within the tomb. Bridges whooped with surprise, gaping like a startled ape at the sumptuous golden mirage of the enchantress.
‘How did you find me?’ Shepley muttered thickly. ‘I double-tracked a dozen times.’
Traxel smil
ed. ‘We didn’t follow you, chum. We followed the rail.’ He pointed down at the silver thread of the metal strip, plainly visible in the dawn light almost ten miles away. ‘The gyro-car cleaned the rail. It led us straight here. Ah, hello, Doctor,’ he greeted the Old Man as he climbed the slope and slumped down wearily beside Shepley. ‘I take it we have you to thank for all this. Don’t worry, Doctor, I shan’t forget you.’
‘Many thanks,’ the Old Man said flatly. He helped Shepley to sit up, frowning at his split lips. ‘Aren’t you taking everything too seriously, Traxel? You’re becoming crazed with greed. Let the boy have this tomb. There are plenty more.’
The patterns of light across the sand dimmed and broke as Bridges plunged through the persona towards the rear of the chancel. Weakly Shepley tried to stand up, but the Old Man held him back. Traxel shrugged. ‘Too late, Doctor.’ He looked over his shoulder at the persona, ruefully shaking his head in acknowledgment of its magnificence. ‘These 10th Dynasty graves are stupendous. But there’s something curious about this one.’
He was still staring at it reflectively a minute later when Bridges emerged.
‘Boy, that was a crazy one, Traxel! For a second I thought it was a dud.’ He handed the three canisters to Traxel, who weighed two of them in one hand against the other. Bridges added ‘Kinda light, aren’t they?’
Traxel began to prise them open with a wrench. ‘Are you certain there are no more in there?’
‘Hundred per cent. Have a look yourself.’
Two of the cans were empty, the tape spools missing. The third was only half full, a mere three-inch width of tape in its centre. Bridges bellowed in pain: ‘The kid robbed us. I can’t believe it!’ Traxel waved him away and went over to the Old Man, who was staring in at the now flickering persona. The two men exchanged glances, then nodded slowly in confirmation. With a short laugh Traxel kicked at the can containing the half reel of tape, jerking the spool out on to the sand, where it began to unravel in the quietly moving air. Bridges protested but Traxel shook his head.
‘It is a dud. Go and have a close look at the image.’ When Bridges peered at it blankly he explained ‘The woman there was dead when the matrices were recorded. She’s beautiful all right – as poor Shepley here discovered – but it’s all too literally skin deep. That’s why there’s only half a can of data. No nervous system, no musculature or internal organs – just a beautiful golden husk. This is a mortuary tomb. If you resurrected her you’d have an ice-cold corpse on your hands.’
‘But why?’ Bridges rasped. ‘What’s the point?’
Traxel gestured expansively. ‘It’s immortality of a kind. Perhaps she died suddenly, and this was the next best thing. When the Doctor first came here there were a lot of mortuary tombs of young children being found. If I remember he had something of a reputation for always leaving them intact. A typical piece of highbrow sentimentality – giving immortality only to the dead. Agree, Doctor?’
Before the Old Man could reply a voice shouted from below, there was a nearby roaring hiss of an ascending signal rocket and a vivid red star-shell burst over the lake below, spitting incandescent fragments over them. Traxel and Bridges leapt forwards, saw two men in a sand-car pointing up at them, and three more vehicles converging across the lake half a mile away.
‘The time-wardens!’ Traxel shouted. Bridges picked up the tool bag and the two men raced across the slope towards the half-track, the Old Man hobbling after them. He turned back to wait for Shepley, who was still sitting on the ground where he had fallen, watching the image inside the pavilion.
‘Shepley! Come on, lad, pull yourself together! You’ll get ten years!’
When Shepley made no reply he reached up to the side of the half-track as Traxel reversed it expertly out of the morraine of sand, letting Bridges swing him aboard. ‘Shepley!’ he called again. Traxel hesitated, then roared away as a second star-shell exploded.
Shepley tried to reach the tape, but the stampeding feet had severed it at several points, and the loose ends, which he had numbly thought of trying to reinsert into the projector, now fluttered around him in the sand. Below, he could hear the sounds of flight and pursuit, the warning crack of a rifle, engines baying and plunging, as Traxel eluded the time-wardens, but he kept his eyes fixed on the image within the tomb. Already it had begun to fragment, fading against the mounting sunlight. Getting slowly to his feet, he entered the tomb and closed the battered doors.
Still magnificent upon her bier, the enchantress lay back between the great wings. Motionless for so long, she had at last been galvanized into life, and a jerking syncopated rhythm rippled through her body. The wings shook uneasily, and a series of tremors disturbed the base of the catafalque, so that the woman’s feet danced an exquisitely flickering minuet, the toes darting from side to side with untiring speed. Higher up, her wide smooth hips jostled each other in a jaunty mock tango.
He watched until only the face remained, a few disconnected traces of the wings and catafalque jerking faintly in the darkness, then made his way out of the tomb.
Outside, in the cool morning light, the time-wardens were waiting for him, hands on the hips of their white uniforms. One was holding the empty canisters, turning the fluttering strands of tape over with his foot as they drifted away.
The other took Shepley’s arm and steered him down to the car.
‘Traxel’s gang,’ he said to the driver. ‘This must be a new recruit.’ He glanced dourly at the blood around Shepley’s mouth. ‘Looks as if they’ve been fighting over the spoils.’
The driver pointed to the three drums. ‘Stripped?’
The man carrying them nodded. ‘All three. And they were 10th Dynasty.’ He shackled Shepley’s wrists to the dashboard. ‘Too bad, son, you’ll be doing ten yourself soon. It’ll seem like ten thousand.’
‘Unless it was a dud,’ the driver rejoined, eyeing Shepley with some sympathy. ‘You know, one of those freak mortuary tombs.’
Shepley straightened his bruised mouth. ‘It wasn’t,’ he said firmly.
The driver glanced warningly at the other wardens. ‘What about the tape blowing away up there?’
Shepley looked up at the tomb spluttering faintly below the ridge, its light almost gone. ‘That’s just the persona,’ he said. ‘The empty skin.’
As the engine surged forward he listened to three empty drums hit the floor behind the seat.
1963
NOW WAKES THE SEA
Again at night Mason heard the sounds of the approaching sea, the muffled thunder of breakers rolling up the near-by streets. Roused from his sleep, he ran out into the moonlight, where the white-framed houses stood like sepulchres among the washed concrete courts. Two hundred yards away the waves plunged and boiled, sluicing in and out across the pavement. Foam seethed through the picket fences, and the broken spray filled the air with the wine-sharp tang of brine.
Off-shore the deeper swells of the open sea rode across the roofs of the submerged houses, the white-caps cleft by isolated chimneys. Leaping back as the cold foam stung his feet, Mason glanced at the house where his wife lay sleeping. Each night the sea moved a few yards nearer, a hissing guillotine across the empty lawns.
For half an hour Mason watched the waves vault among the rooftops. The luminous surf cast a pale nimbus on the clouds racing overhead on the dark wind, and covered his hands with a waxy sheen.
At last the waves began to recede, and the deep bowl of illuminated water withdrew down the emptying streets, disgorging the lines of houses in the moonlight. Mason ran forwards across the expiring bubbles, but the sea shrank away from him, disappearing around the corners of the houses, sliding below the garage doors. He sprinted to the end of the road as a last glow was carried across the sky beyond the spire of the church. Exhausted, Mason returned to his bed, the sound of the dying waves filling his head as he slept.
‘I saw the sea again last night,’ he told his wife at breakfast.
Quietly, Miriam said: ‘Richard, the ne
arest sea is a thousand miles away.’ She watched her husband for a moment, her pale fingers straying to the coil of black hair lying against her neck. ‘Go out into the drive and look. There’s no sea.’
‘Darling, I saw it.’
‘Richard –!’
Mason stood up, and with slow deliberation raised his palms. ‘Miriam, I felt the spray on my hands. The waves were breaking around my feet. I wasn’t dreaming.’
‘You must have been.’ Miriam leaned against the door, as if trying to exclude the strange nightworld of her husband. With her long raven hair framing her oval face, and the scarlet dressing-gown open to reveal her slender neck and white breast, she reminded Mason of a Pre-Raphaelite heroine in an Arthurian pose. ‘Richard, you must see Dr Clifton. It’s beginning to frighten me.’
Mason smiled, his eyes searching the distant rooftops above the trees. ‘I shouldn’t worry. What’s happening is really very simple. At night I hear the sounds of the sea, I go out and watch the waves in the moonlight, and then come back to bed.’ He paused, a flush of fatigue on his face. Tall and slimly built, Mason was still convalescing from the illness which had kept him at home for the previous six months. ‘It’s curious, though,’ he resumed, ‘the water is remarkably luminous. I should guess its salinity is well above normal –’
‘But Richard . . .’ Miriam looked around helplessly, her husband’s calmness exhausting her. ‘The sea isn’t there; it’s only in your mind. No one else can see it.’
Mason nodded, hands lost in his pockets. ‘Perhaps no one else has heard it yet.’
Leaving the breakfast-room, he went into his study. The couch on which he had slept during his illness still stood against the corner, his bookcase beside it. Mason sat down, taking a large fossil mollusc from a shelf. During the winter, when he had been confined to bed, the smooth trumpet-shaped conch, with its endless associations of ancient seas and drowned strands, had provided him with unlimited pleasure, a bottomless cornucopia of image and reverie. Cradling it reassuringly in his hands, as exquisite and ambiguous as a fragment of Greek sculpture found in a dry riverbed, he reflected that it seemed like a capsule of time, the condensation of another universe. He could almost believe that the midnight sea which haunted his sleep had been released from the shell when he had inadvertently scratched one of its helixes.
The Complete Stories of J. G. Ballard Page 69