Robert Silverberg - Thebes of the Hundred Gates

“Where do I have any chance of salvaging anything?”

“It’s all up to you,” she said. “I’ve come here to try to help you work things out.”

She came closer to him and pulled aside her veil. In the flickering glow of the lamplight her violet-flecked eyes had an amethyst sheen. Her face looked younger than it did by day. She seemed unexpectedly beautiful. That sudden revelation of beauty jarred him, and he was startled by his own reaction.

He said, “There’s only one way you could help me. I want you to let me out of here.”

“I know you do. I can’t do that.”

“Why not?”

“Don’t try to sound naive. If we release you, you’ll go back to Home Era and tell them exactly where and when we are. And the next time they’ll send out a whole crew to get us and bring us back.”

He thought for a moment.

“I could tell them I never located any trace of you,” he said.

“You would do that?”

“If that was the price of my being allowed to go home, yes. Why not? You think I want to be stuck here forever?”

“How could we trust you?” she asked. “I know: you’d give us your word of honor, right? You’ll swear a solemn oath at the high altar of Amon, maybe? Oh, Davis, Davis, how silly do you think we are? You’ll simply go back where you came from and let us live out our lives in peace? Sure you will. Five minutes after you’re back there you’ll be spilling the whole thing out to them.”

“No.”

“You will. Or they’ll pry it out of you. Come on, boy: don’t try to weasel around like this. You aren’t fooling me for a second and you’re simply making yourself look sneaky. Listen, Davis, there’s no sense either of us pretending anything. You’re screwed and that’s all there is to it. There’s no way we’re going to let you go home, regardless of anything you might promise us.”

Her voice was low, steady, unyielding. He felt her words sinking in. He could hear the hundred gates of Thebes closing on him with a great metallic clangor.

“Then why have you come here?” he asked, staring into those troublesome amethyst eyes.

She waited a beat or two.

“I had to. To let you know how much I hate having to do this to you. How sorry I am that it’s necessary.”

“I bet you are.”

“No. I want you to believe me. You’re a completely innocent victim, and what we’re doing is incredibly shitty. I want to make it clear to you that that’s how I feel. Roger feels that way too, for that matter.”

“Well,” he said. “I’m really tremendously sorry that you’re forced to suffer such terrible pangs of guilt on my behalf.”

“You don’t understand a thing, do you?”

“Probably not.”

“Do you have family back there down the line?”

“A mother. In Indiana.”

“No wife? Children?”

“No. I was engaged, but it fell apart. You feel any better now?”

“And how old are you?”

“27.”

“I figured you to be a little younger than that.”

“I’m very tricky that way,” Davis said.

“So you joined the Service to see the marvels of the past. This your first mission?”

“Yes. And apparently my last, right?”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?”

“It doesn’t have to be,” he said. “You still could let me go and take your chances that I’ll cover up for you, or that the Service will have lost interest in you. Or you could opt to go back with me. Why the hell do you want to stay in Egypt so much, anyway?”

“We want to, that’s all. We’re accustomed to it. We’ve been here fifteen years. This is our life now.”

“The hell it is.”

“No. You’re wrong. We’ve come up from nowhere and we’re part of the inside establishment now. Roger’s considered practically a miracle man, the way he’s revolutionized Egyptian astronomy. And I’ve got my temple responsibilities, which I take a lot more seriously than you could ever imagine. It’s a fantastically compelling religion.” Her voice changed, taking on an odd quavering intensity. “I have to tell you—there are moments when I can feel the wings of Isis beating—when I’m the Goddess—the Bride, the Mother, the Healer.” She hesitated a moment, as though she was taken aback by her own sudden rhapsodic tone. When she spoke again it was in a more normal voice. “Also I have high connections at the court, very powerful friends who make my life extremely rewarding in various material ways.”

“I know about those connections. I saw one of your very powerful friends leaving your temple just as I was arriving. He’s crazy, isn’t he, your prince? And you sound pretty crazy too, I have to tell you. Jesus! Two lunatics take me prisoner and I have to spend the rest of my life marooned in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt for their convenience. A hell of a thing. Don’t you see what you’re doing to me? Don’t you see ?”

“Of course we do,” she said. “I’ve already told you so.”

Tears were glistening on her cheeks, suddenly. Making deep tracks in the elaborate makeup. He had seen her weep like that once before.

“You’re a good actress, too.”

“No. No.”

She reached for him. He jerked his hand away angrily; but she held him tight, and then she was up against him, and, to his amazement, her lips were seeking his. His whole body stiffened. The alien perfume of her filled his nostrils, overwhelming him with mysterious scents. And then, as her fingertips drew a light trail down the skin of his back, he shivered and trembled, and all resistance went from him. They tumbled down together onto the pile of furs that served him as a bed.

“Osiris—” she crooned. “You are Osiris—”

She was muttering deep in her throat, Egyptian words, words he hadn’t been taught at Service headquarters but whose meaning he could guess. There was something frightening about her intensity, something so grotesque about this stream of erotic babble that he couldn’t bear to listen to it, and to shut it off he pressed his mouth over hers. Her tongue came at him like a spear. Her pelvis arched; her legs wrapped themselves around him. He closed his eyes and lost himself in her.

Afterward he sat with his back against the wall, looking at her, stunned.

She grinned at him.

“I’ve wanted to do that since the day you came here, do you know that? Ever since I first saw you stretched out on that bed in the House of Life.”

His heart was still thundering. He could scarcely breathe. The air in the room, hot and close and dense, sizzled with her strange aromas.

“And now you have,” he said, when he could speak again. “All right. Now you have.” A new idea was blossoming in his mind. “We were pretty good together, weren’t we?”

“Yes. I’ll say we were.”

“Well, it doesn’t have to stop there. We can go back together, you and I. Lehman can do whatever he damned pleases. But we could become a team. The Service would send us anywhere, and—”

“Stop it. Don’t talk nonsense.”

“We could. We could .”

“I’m almost old enough to be your mother.”

“It didn’t seem that way just now.”

“It would in broad daylight. But regardless. I choose to stay in Egypt. And therefore you have to stay too.”

Her words came at him like a volley of punches.

He had almost hoped, for a moment, that he had won her over. But what folly that was! Change her mind with a single roll in the furs? Expect her to walk away from her plush life at Pharaoh’s court for the sake of a little heavy breathing? What a child you are, he told himself.

He heard the hundred gates clanging shut again.

“Now you listen to me,” she said. She crouched opposite him, on the far side of the little lamp, under the bas-relief of Sobek and Isis. She was still naked and her body had an oiled gleam in the near darkness. She still looked beautiful to him, too. Although now, in the aftermath of passion, he was able to see more clearly the signs of aging on her. “You said a little while ago that you think Roger and I are crazy for wanting to stay here. You want to save us from ourselves. Well, you’re wrong about that. We’re staying here because it’s where we want to be. And you’ll feel the same way yourself, after you’ve been here for a little while longer.”