Thebes of the Hundred Gates

Nine

This part of the Karnak complex that they had brought him to was new to him, a round two-story domed building behind the main temple. Since Roger Lehman’s priestly specialty was supposed to be astronomy, the building was surely his observatory, Davis thought. So far as he could recall there had been no trace of any such structure in the modern-day Karnak ruins that he had visited on the orientation trip. Perhaps it had been demolished during the tremendous religious upheavals that were due to hit Egypt after Amenhotep III died.

“How about a little wine?” Lehman asked, with unconvincing geniality. “This is good stuff, from the royal vineyards in the Delta. The very best.”

“You must have good connections at the court,” Davis said.

“The very best,” said Lehman.

From a cupboard in the wall he drew forth three alabaster drinking-cups embellished elaborately with hieroglyphics and a tall graceful terra-cotta amphora with two small handles and a pointed base. A clay stopper plugged its narrow mouth. As he broke it he said, “Elaine? Wine?”

“Please.”

Davis took a sip, and then a deeper draught. The wine was sweet and thick, with a raisiny underflavor. Not bad, really. And the cup he was drinking out of was a little masterpiece, museum quality. The room itself, Lehman’s private priestly chamber, was splendidly furnished, the walls magnificently covered with dark, vividly realistic murals of gods and demons and stars. It had a look of quiet luxury. Sandburg and Lehman had done all right for themselves in Egypt, especially considering that they had started with absolutely nothing only fifteen years ago, worse off than slaves, having no identities, not even knowing how to speak the language. Lehman seemed to have made himself into an important figure in the scientific establishment, such as it was. And she a high priestess and the mistress of the heir to the throne, no less. Both of them obviously wealthy, powerful, well connected. He had felt sorry for them a year ago when he first had heard the story of their being lost in time, far from the Imperial Rome that had been their intended destination, marooned in some alien hostile place where they were doubtlessly eking out miserable, difficult lives. He couldn’t have been more wrong about that. They had proved to be paragons of adaptability. But of course they were Service personnel, trained to handle themselves satisfactorily under all sorts of unfamiliar and bewildering conditions.

Lehman turned to the cupboard again. This time he took from it a lovely little game-board, ebony inlaid with golden hieroglyphic inscriptions. Thirty gleaming squares of ivory veneer were set into it, arranged in three rows of ten, each square separated from its neighbors by ebony strips. From a box at its base he withdrew a pair of odd curving dice and a handful of pawn-shaped gaming-pieces made of some polished blue stone.

“You know what this is?” he asked.

“A senet-board?” Davis said at once.

“They really gave you a good briefing.”

“The works. But I’ve always been interested in Egypt. I made special studies on my own.”

“You don’t know how to play, though, do you?”

“Senet? No. The rules are lost.”

“Not here they aren’t. Everyone plays it. Soldiers, slaves, construction workers, whores. The king plays it very well. So does the royal astronomer.”

From a corner of the room Sandburg said, “Roger, why don’t you get down to business?”

“Please, Elaine,” Lehman said.

Calmly he arranged the pieces on the game-board.

“It even figures in the Book of the Dead, you know. Spell 17: the dead man plays senet with an invisible adversary, and has to win the game in order to continue his passage safely through the Netherworld.”

“I know,” said Davis. “But I’m not dead, and this isn’t the Netherworld. Ms. Sandburg is right. If there’s business for us to get down to, let’s get down to it.”

“Let me show you the rules of the game first, at least. We arrange the pieces like this. And then—a roll of the dice to determine who the challenger is and who’s the defender—”

“Roger,” Sandburg said.

“There. You challenge. I defend. Now, we start at this end of the board—”

“Roger.”

Lehman smiled. “Well then. Senet afterward, perhaps.”

He poured more wine into Davis’ cup and his own and leaned forward across the table, bringing his face uncomfortably close. Davis saw what fifteen years of the Egyptian sun had done to Lehman’s skin: he was as dry as a mummy, his skin drumhead-tight over his bones.

He said, “About this rescue proposal of yours, Davis. It was very kind of you to take the leap all the way back here for the sake of locating us. And marvelous luck that you found us at all. But I have to tell you: it’s no go.”

“What?”

“We’re staying here, Elaine and I.”

Staying?

Davis stared. Yes, yes, of course. It all fit together now, their odd fidgety elusiveness; her failure to disclose herself to him the first day, when she had heard him babbling deliriously in English; her side-tracking of him to the City of the Dead; her clapping him in that dungeon-like storeroom once she finally had blurted out the truth about herself. They were renegades. They were deserters. So dumb of him to have failed to see it.

He could hear Charlie Farhad’s words echoing in his mind.

The past’s a weird place. It can make you pretty weird yourself if you stay in it long enough.

Farhad hadn’t been willing to go looking for them.

I’m not so sure I want to find out what they’ve turned into, Farhad had said.

Yes.

“You like it here that much?” Davis asked, after a bit.

“We’ve settled in,” Elaine Sandburg said from across the room. “We have our niches here.”

“We’re Egyptians now,” said Lehman. “Very highly placed court figures leading very pleasant lives.”

“So I see. But still, to turn your back forever on your own era, your own world—”

“We’ve been here a long time,” Lehman said. “To you we’ve only been missing a year or so. But we’ve lived a third of our lives here. Egypt’s a real place to us. It’s fantastic, it’s bizarre, it’s full of magic and mumbo-jumbo that doesn’t make the slightest bit of sense to modern-day people. But it’s beginning to make sense to us.”

“Osiris? Thoth? Gods with the heads of birds and beetles and goats? They make sense to you?”

“In a larger sense. A metaphorical sense. You want more wine, Davis?”

“Yes. I think I do.”

He drank more deeply this time.

“So this place is real to you and Home Era isn’t?” he asked.

Lehman smiled. “I won’t deny that Elaine and I feel a certain pull toward Home Era. Certainly I do. I suppose I still have family there, friends, people who remember me, who would be happy to see me again. I have to admit that when you first showed up I felt a powerful temptation to go back there with you when the jump field comes to get you. What is it, a thirty-day mission, you said?”

“Thirty, yes.”

“But the moment of temptation passed. I worked my way through it. We’re not going to go. The decision is final.”

“That’s a hell of a thing. Desertion, in fact. Completely against all the rules.”

“It is, isn’t it? But it’s what we want. We’re sorry about the rules. We didn’t ask to come here, or expect it or want it. But somehow we did, and we made our own way upward. Clawed our way. You think working in the mummy factory is bad? You ought to know some of the things Elaine and I had to do. But we put new lives together for ourselves, against all the odds. Damned fine new lives, as a matter of fact. And now we want to keep them.”

“The Time Service is a damned fine life too.”

“Screw the Time Service,” Lehman said. He wasn’t smiling now. “What did the Service ever do for us except dump us fifteen hundred years from where we were hoping to go?” His long skeletal fingers toyed with the pieces on the senet-board. He fondled them a moment; then, in a single swift motion, he swept them brusquely off the board and into their box. “That’s it,” he said. “That’s what we had to tell you. Your kind offer is refused with thanks. No deal. No rescue. That’s the whole story. Please don’t try to hassle us about it.”

Davis looked at them in disbelief.

“I wouldn’t dream of it,” he said. “Stay here, if that’s what your choice is. I can’t force you to do anything you aren’t willing to do.”

“Thank you.”

Davis helped himself to a little more of Lehman’s wine.

They were both watching him in a strange way. There was something more, he realized.

“Well, what happens next?” he asked. “Now do you take me back to that beautiful little room under Ms. Sandburg’s temple so I can get a little sleep? Or am I supposed to catch the night ferry over to the City of the Dead, so that I can learn a little more about how to make mummies before my time in Egypt runs out?”

“Don’t you understand?” Sandburg said.

“Understand what?”

“Your time in Egypt isn’t going to run out. You’re staying here too, for keeps. We can’t possibly let you go back. You mean to say you haven’t figured that out?”