Sudden searing anger went roaring through him.
“You were simply playing with me, that other time. Pretending you had no idea where I was from. Asking me where America was, whether it was farther from here than Syria.”
“Yes. I was playing with you, I suppose. Do you blame me?”
“You knew I was from Home Era. You could have told me who you were.”
“If I had wanted to, yes.”
He was mystified by that. “Why hide it? You saw right away that I was Service. Why’d you hold back from identifying yourself? And why ship me over to the other side of the river and stash me among the embalmers, for God’s sake?”
“I had my reasons.”
“But I came here to help you!”
“Did you?” she asked.
Seven
Lehman said, “Where is he now?”
“In one of the temple storerooms. Under guard.”
“I still can’t understand why you told him. After chewing me out the way you did last week when I was the one talking about doing it. You made a complete hundred-eighty-degree reversal in a single week. Why? Why?”
Sandburg glowered at him. She was furious—with herself, with Lehman, with the hapless boy that the Service had sent. But mainly she was furious with herself. And yet, even in her fury, she realized that she was beginning to forgive herself.
“Originally we thought he was simply here on an independent research mission, remember? But when he told me that in fact he had come here looking for us—that he had come to rescue us—”
“Even so. Especially so. You recall what you said last week? You just want to be left alone to live your life. Your life in Eighteenth Dynasty Egypt. And therefore we can’t let him know a thing, you said. But then you did, anyway.”
“It was an impulse that I couldn’t overcome,” she said. “Have you ever had an impulse like that, Roger? Have you?”
“Don’t call me Roger. Not here. My name is Senmut-Ptah. And speak Egyptian.”
“Stop being such an asshole, will you?”
“I’m being an Egyptian. That’s what we are now: Egyptians.”
They were in his astronomical chamber, a small domed outbuilding behind the oldest shrine of the main Karnak temple. Cool bright sprinklings of starlight penetrated the openings in the roof and sketched patterns on the brick floor. Across the blue-black vault of the ceiling the fantastically attenuated naked figure of the goddess Nut, the deity of the sky, stretched from one side of the room to the other, great spidery arms and legs yards and yards long spanning the starry cosmos, with the Earth-god Shu supporting her arched nude form from below and complacently smiling figures of ram-headed Khnum standing beside him. Dense rows of hieroglyphs filled every adjacent inch of free space, offering intense assertions of arcane cosmological truths.
Sandburg said, “I was being just as Egyptian as I could be. But there he was solemnly telling me all about the Service, really sweating at it, trying to explain to a priestess of Isis where America was and where Rome was and how two people from this Service of his had overshot their mark and disappeared somewhere in the depths of time—no, wait, he didn’t try to tell me it was time-travel, he just used geographical analogies—and suddenly I couldn’t hold it in any longer. I couldn’t just go on standing there in front of him pretending to be a fucking ancient priestess of Isis, looking lofty and esoteric and mystical, when this kid, this kid who had come three and a half thousand years to find us, who I had sent over to the City of the Dead to work as a pickler of mummy-guts because we wanted to get him out of our hair, was begging for my help so that he could find you and me. Our rescuer, and I was treating him like shit. Playing games with his head, making him reel off yard after yard of completely needless explanation. I couldn’t keep the pretense up another minute. So I blurted out the truth, just like that.”
“An impulse.”
“An impulse, yes. A simple irrational impulse. You’ve never had one of those, have you? No—no, of course not. Who am I asking? Roger Lehman, the human computer. Of course you haven’t.”
“That isn’t true and you damned well know it. You like to think of me as some sort of android, some kind of mechanical man, but in fact I’m every bit as human as you are, and maybe a little more so.” In his agitation he snatched up one of his astronomical instruments, a little gleaming armillary disk from whose center a hippopotamus image yawned, and ran his long tapering fingers around its edges. “Remember, I was the one who originally wanted to have a little talk with him, to find out, at least, what might be going on down the line. You said you shouldn’t do it, and you were right. And then you did it. An impulse. Christ, an impulse! Well, I have impulses too, whatever you may think. But even so I still have enough sense not to jump out of a third-floor window simply because I happen to be on the third floor. And enough sense not to say the one thing I shouldn’t be saying to the one person I shouldn’t be saying it to.”
“If I seriously thought that it could have done any harm—”
“You don’t think it can?”
“He’s here alone. I’ve got him in custody. He can’t make us do anything we don’t want to do. We’ve got complete control of the situation. Really we do.”
“I suppose,” Lehman said grudgingly. He wandered around the room, fingering his charts and instruments. He rubbed his hands over the bits of gold and lapis-lazuli embedded in the wall. He picked up three long tight rolls of sacred papyri that he used in his divinations and set them fussily down again in slightly different places. “How do you think they were able to trace us?” he asked.
“How would I know? Something with their computers, I guess. Calculating probable trajectories. Maybe they took a guess. Or a bunch of guesses. You know they sweat a lot whenever any mission goes astray. So they sweated the computers until they came up with a hypothetical location where we might have landed. And sent this kid to check it out.”
“And what happens now?”
“We go to talk to him. You and me both.”
“Why?”
“Because I think we owe it to him. There’s no sense pretending any longer, is there? He’s here, and he knows I’m here, and he’s probably guessed that you’re here too. He’s Service, Roger. We can’t simply leave him in the dark, now. We’ve got to make him understand the way this has to be handled.”
“I don’t agree. I think the best thing for us is just to keep away from him. I wish you hadn’t said anything to him in the first place.”
“It’s too late for that. I have. Anyway, he’s probably got news from people we knew in Home Era. Carrying messages, even.”
“That’s exactly what worries me.”
“Don’t you want to hear anything about—”
Lehman gave her a wild-eyed stare. “Elaine, those people are thirty-five centuries in the future. I want to keep them there.” He sounded almost desperate about it.
“Last week you were hot to hear the gossip,” she said.
“That was last week. I’ve had a week to think about things. I don’t want to stir all that old stuff up again. Let it stay where it is. And let us stay where we are. I’m not going to go near him.”
His lower lip was quivering. He seemed actually afraid, she thought. Where had granite-faced Senmut-Ptah gone?
She said, “We can’t simply stonewall him. We can’t. We owe him at least the opportunity to talk to us.”
“Why? We don’t owe him anything.”
“For Christ’s sake, Roger. He’s a human being. He came here with the intention of helping us.”
“I’m aware of that. But—”
“No buts. Come on with me. Right now. You’ll be sorry if you don’t. I can guarantee that.”