Robert Silverberg - Thebes of the Hundred Gates

“You’re a terrible woman.”

“Yes. I know that. —Listen, do you remember how it was for us when we first landed here? Helpless, bewildered, hopelessly lost in time, dressed like a couple of Romans fifteen centuries out of place, unable to read or write Egyptian, not speaking a word of the language, not the first inkling of it, hardly knowing anything about this civilization except what we learned in high school? Wondering how the hell we were going to survive? You remember how frightening that was?”

“We survived, though. We did more than survive.”

“Because we were good. We were adaptable, we were versatile, we were clever. Even so, we went through two years of hell before we started to make things happen for us. You remember? I certainly do. Life as a temple whore? You didn’t have to do that, at least, but you had your bad times too, plenty of them.”

“So? What does that have to do with—”

“This kid is here now, up against some of the same things we were. And the only two people in the world that he has anything in common with choose to turn their backs on him. I hate that.”

“What are you, in love with him?”

“I feel sorry for him.”

“We didn’t ask him to come here.”

“It was lousy of me just to dump him out on the streets to shift for himself in the City of the Dead. It’s going to be lousy of us to tell him that he’s wasted his time coming here, that we don’t want to be rescued, thank you very much but no deal. How would you feel if you came charging in to be somebody’s savior and got told something like that?” She shook her head firmly. “We have to go to see him.”

“You’re suddenly so soft-hearted. You surprise me.”

“Do I?” she said. “And here I was thinking you were the soft-hearted one. Secretly, behind the grim facade.”

“How discerning you are. But I still don’t want to see him.”

“Why not?”

“I just don’t.”

She moved closer to him.

“We have to. That’s all there is to it.”

“Well—”

“Do you think he’s a magician? A hypnotist? He’s just a kid, and we’ve got him locked safely away besides. He can’t make you do anything you don’t want to do. Come with me.”

“No.”

“Come on, Roger.”

“Well—”

“Come. Now.”

She led him, still grumbling, out of the building, past the temple of Amenhotep II and the pylons of Tuthmosis I and Tuthmosis III, down the avenue of ram-headed sphinxes and into the Precinct of Mut. The storeroom where she had parked Davis for safe-keeping was partly below-ground, a cool, clammy-walled crypt not very different from a dungeon. When they entered it, Davis was sitting huddled on the straw-covered floor next to a shattered statue in pink granite of some forgotten king that had been tossed into the room for storage two or three or five hundred years earlier. The Egyptians never threw anything away.

He looked up and glared balefully at her.

“This is Roger Lehman,” she said. “Roger, I want you to meet Edward Davis.”

“It’s about fucking time,” Davis said.

Lehman extended his hand in a tentative, uncertain way. Davis ignored it.

“You look a whole lot older than I expected,” Davis said. “I would never have recognized you. Especially in that cockeyed costume.”

“Thank you.”

“You expect me to be polite?” Davis asked bitterly. “Why? What the hell kind of fucking reception did you people give me? You think it was fun, falling across three and a half thousand years? Have you forgotten what that feels like? And then what happens to me when I get here? First she ships me across the river to be an embalmer’s apprentice. After which she throws me in this hole in the ground when I come back over. What am I, your enemy? Don’t you two stupid monkeys realize that I’m here to goddamn rescue you?”

“There’s a lot you don’t understand,” Sandburg said.

“Damn right there is. I’d like you to tell me—”

“Wait,” Lehman said. Sandburg shot him an irritated look and started to speak, but he held up his hand to silence her. To Davis he said, “Talk to us about this rescue plan of yours, first. What’s the arrangement?”

“I’m on a thirty-day mission. We don’t need the full thirty, now that I’ve found you so fast, but we’ve got to wait it out anyway, right? On the thirtieth day they’ll drop the jump field into an alleyway just north of Luxor Temple. It’s the one I landed in, with a graffito on the wall pronouncing a curse on some wine-merchant who screwed one of his customers. The field arrives at noon sharp, but of course we’re there waiting for it a couple of hours before that. The rainbow lights up, the three of us step inside, away we go. Back home in a flash. You don’t know how hard they’ve been working, trying to locate you two.”

“They couldn’t have been in much of a hurry,” Lehman said. “Did Elaine tell you we’ve been here fifteen years?”

“In the Home Era time-line you’ve only been missing for a year and a half. And they’ve been running calculations non-stop most of that time. I’m sorry we couldn’t match up the displacement factors any better, but you’ve got to understand it was really just a stab in the dark sending me to the year they did. We had a twenty-year probability window to deal with.”

“I’m sure they did their best,” Sandburg said. “And you too. We appreciate your coming here.”

“Then why did you send me to—”

She held up her hand. “You don’t understand the situation, Edward.”

“Damned right I don’t.”

“There are certain factors that we have to explain. You see, we don’t actually—”

“Wait a second, Elaine,” Lehman said sharply.

“Roger, I—”

“Wait a second.”

It was his priest-voice again, his stony Senmut-Ptah voice. Sandburg peered at him in astonishment. His face was flushed, his eyes were strangely glossy.

He said, “Before you tell him anything, we need to have a discussion, Elaine. You and I.”

She looked at him blankly. “What’s to discuss?”

“Come outside and I’ll tell you.”

“What the hell is this all about?”

“Outside,” Lehman said. “I have to insist.”

She gave him a glance of cool appraisal. But he was unreadable.

“Whatever you say, O Senmut-Ptah.”

They stood in the darkness of the garden of the Precinct of Mut. Torches flickered in the distance. Somewhere, far away, the priests of Amon were chanting the evening prayer. From another direction came a more raucous sound: sailors singing down by the riverfront.

Lehman’s long, gaunt figure towered above her. Lines of strain were evident in his face. It had taken on the same strange expression that had come over him the week before, the night when she had first told him of the arrival of a member of the Service in Thebes.

“Well?” she said, perhaps a little too harshly.

“Let me think how to put this, Elaine.”

“Put what?”

He made a despairing gesture. “Wait, will you? Let me think.”

“Think, then.”

She paced in a fretful circle around him. A dim figure appeared on the pylon of a distant temple and unhurriedly began to take in the pennants for the night. Some dark-winged nocturnal bird fluttered by just overhead, stirring faint currents in the warm air.

Lehman said finally, speaking as though every word were very expensive, “What I need to tell you, Elaine, is that I’m half inclined to go back with him. More than half.”

“You son of a bitch!”

He looked abashed, uncomfortable. “Now do you see why I told you I didn’t want to see him? You yourself pointed out last week that there were risks in talking to him, that it could stir up troublesome old memories. Well, it has.” Lehman touched his hand to his forehead. “If you only knew how I’ve been churning inside since he got here. Every day it’s gotten a little worse. We should have simply kept clear of him, the way we had always planned to do if anyone came. But no. No. Bad enough that he stumbled right into you first thing. You still had the option of keeping your mouth shut. No, you had to spill everything, didn’t you? And now—now—” He scowled at her. “I was wavering even then, last week.”