ALEC! DON'T BE A BLOODY JACKASS! AIN'T NOBODY SUPPOSED TO KNOW

ABOUT THE THINGS YOU CAN DO WITH YER TOOLKIT! ALEC! TELL THE WENCH

YOU'LL SEND THE NAVSAT A DISTRESS SIGNAL AND SOME-BODY'LL BE ROUND TO

PICK HER UP LATER! ALEC! ARE YOU READING ME, BOY? ALEC!

Smiling confidently, Alec ignored the screen and grabbed up his tool case. He was whistling A Bicycle Built for Two as he climbed back aboard the Seasprqy Two.

He slipped on his earshells and visor, plugged himself into the Seasprqy'?, console, and at once knew perfectly well what the problem was; he could see it like a broken wall in a burning field, strings of symbols in sad disarray, ravaged as though an army had marched through them. But he pretended to run diagnostics and look at components, while the girl watched anxiously and chattered at him:

"... Daddy's boat and I wasn't supposed to go out alone but I got mad, I guess that was silly of me, but I really wanted to record the sounds of the open sea for this project we're doing in Circle and I didn't know it was so quiet out here, did you? So then I tried to hook up the holocam to get some images, but that's when it all went wrong."

"You used the wrong port," Alec informed her. "And it got a semantic paradox going, and now your console thinks it's in drydock for maintenance. That's why it won't let you go anyplace."

"Oh," said the girl, and in her chagrin she added a mildly obscene word, which caused Alec to have a semantic paradox of his own.

He coughed, drew his toolkit over his lap and assured her, "B-but I can fix it, no problem."

"Oh, thank you!" exclaimed the girl, and she threw her arms around him from behind and kissed his cheek. Alec could feel her pulse racing, hear her quickened breath, and her scent was telling him... His mouth began to water. He held on to his purpose like a drowning man and pretended to do things to the console with a microgapper while he sent his mind roaring through the error zone, adjusting, righting, realigning...

There was a low roar, the fusion generator started up, and a clear precise voice spoke: "All systems operational. Set course, please."

"There you go," said Alec hoarsely. "What course d'you want?"

"I just need it to go back to Yarmouth," said the girl, looking at him with wide helpless eyes. "Can you set the course for me?"

"Course laid in," said Alec, and put away the visor and earshells. "You can set sail any time."

"Okay," said the girl. "Thanks so much."

He lurched to his feet and she stared at him, or, to be more precise, at the front of his shorts.

"Er," said Alec, "I guess I'll just go, then."

"Um," said the girl, "Would you... like to see what the cabin looks like inside?" They considered each other a moment. Alec gulped, and in the terribly suave voice he'd heard men use on holo shows said, "So, babe, can I interest you in exploring the amazing mysteries of life with me?" And he gave her the daredevil smile that had caused Beatrice Louise Jagger's knees to weaken. The girl smiled at the big strong stranger, and her smile was bright and sharp-edged. She glanced up once in the general direction of the satellites, and then—with a graceful inclination of her head that indicated Alec should follow her—stepped down into the secure privacy of the Seaspray's cabin. Like black stars, a row of asterisks rose above the horizon. Somewhere a train roared down a tunnel, and white breakers foamed and crashed, and a missile was launched in majestic clouds of flame. Skyrockets climbed in graceful arcs through heaven to burst in glory, with a boom and thump that were felt in the marrow of the bones, and the slow fire drifted down gently afterward.

"That was really lucky, you having a packet of Happihealthies," Alec murmured. The girl yawned and stretched in bliss.

"Saved you going back on your boat to get yours, didn't it?"

Alec, who was not paying proper attention, nuzzled her and replied, "I haven't got any, actually."

"Tsk!" the girl smacked at him playfully. "How many do you go through a week, you wicked stud?"

"Dozens," Alec lied, nestling in close again and inhaling the fragrance of her hair. "So, anyway... Will you marry me? We'll have to wait a few years until I come of age, but I'll buy you a cool engagement ring."

For a heartbeat's space more she was as warm and yielding as she had been, and then he felt something like quicksilver run through her.

"You haven't come of age yet?" she inquired in an odd voice.

"Not exactly," Alec stated.

"When do you turn eighteen?" The girl grabbed his chin in her hands and tilted his head up to stare into his eyes.'

"Not for another four years," said Alec. "But—"

She screamed and seemed to evaporate like mist, so quickly she was out of his arms and dragging the sheet between them. "You can't be fourteen!" she cried in horror. "You're huge!"

"Half an hour ago you didn't have a problem with me being huge," Alec protested.

"But I'm eighteen!" the girl wailed. "Don't you know what they'd do to us if anybody found out? Don't you know what they'd do to me?"

"Nobody'll find out!" Alec assured her frantically, but she wasn't listening; her eyes had widened as a sense of degradation was added to her terror.

"Ohmigod, you're in the fourth form!" she shrieked. "I'd never live this down! Get up! Get up and get out of here now!"

Frightened and crestfallen, Alec pulled on his clothes as quickly as he could.

"I'm really sorry," he said. "Can I look you up in four years? You're the most wonderful—"

"GET OUT!"

He had recovered himself enough to be grinning guiltily as he put the Sirene about and sped away, but as soon as it was safe the Captain burst into existence, glaring at him from the prow.

"If you ever sing that goddamned "Daisy"'-song at me again I'll keelhaul you, you ungrateful little swab!"

Alec winced. "I'm sorry. It was funny."

"Not to a AI, it ain't funny!"

"Okay. Sorry."

"And you gone and risked the job for the first lassie you spied, and me down there with the Long John and the cargo the whole time, gnashing me teeth in case that bloody cutter comes back, and what're you doing? Dancing the pegleg waltz with some duke's daughter from Yarmouth what ain't got no more wits than you do! What'd you promise me, eh? What'd I tell you about how dangerous it was?" the Captain raved. "At least she were of age!"

Alec glowered at his knees. "It's not like anybody'11 ever find out," he said sullenly.

"You can be damn sure the lady ain't telling," snarled the Captain. "Not with a lifetime in Hospital waiting for her if she does. You ain't so much as sniffing at another wench until you comes of age, boy, do you hear?"

"Yes, sir," muttered Alec.

"I mean that, now!" The Captain drew a simulacrum of a large redhandkerchief from his breast pocket and went through the motions of mopping his face. "Bloody hell. You think this is easy for me? Me, what only started out as a Playfriend module? If they'd got you the Pembroke Young Person's Companion I'd have had some files on puberty ready-made, but oh no, poor old Captain Morgan's only rated ages two to eleven, everything else he's got to improvise on his damned own, ain't he? Jesus bloody Christ, Alec!"

"Yes, sir. Sorry."

The Captain gave the appearance of collapsing onto the midship thwart, sighing and resting his elbows on his knees. He stared hard at Alec.

"Aw, hell. I don't reckon yer going to make it to eighteen without setting yer jib boom a few times, but will you promise me you'll wait a couple more years at least? And don't never do it again where yer likely to get caught by the Coastal Patrol?"

"Yes, sir."

"That's my boy." The Captain looked away, looked back at Alec. "At least it don't seem to have given you no traumas."

"Oh, no!" said Alec earnestly. "It was brilliant! Fabulous! Captain, it was the most wonderful thing that's ever happened to me! Until she started screaming and telling me to leave," he added.

"Well, that happens, sometimes," the Captain said. He snorted, "You got away clean, I reckon."

"And we've still got the sugar," Alec pointed out. "We're successful smugglers, Captain sir!"

"We'll be successful when Long John'?, made the drop off Fitzworth Point and that Despres lubber transfers them funds like he's agreed to," said the Captain grudgingly. "Not afore. And we ain't working this bit of coast again, not with that damned maniac and his laser cannon out there!"

"Oh, it'll all turn out fine." Alec leaned back again, allowing his grin to return. "And life is pretty cool, isn't it? Lost my virginity and outfoxed my first customs official all on the same day, yeah? Let's celebrate!

Can I have some music, Captain sir?"

Rolling his eyes, the Captain went through the motions of pulling a battered concertina from cyberspace and proceeded to play a medley of the old seafaring tunes Alec had loved since he was five years old. Music boomed from the Sirene's console. Alec sang along, baying happily as the little sailboat sped across the water toward their rendezvous at Poole Harbour, with the Long John following faithfully just under her keel.

"This is only the beginning, Captain sir," Alec yelled. "One of thesedays we'll be really free! We'll have a tall ship with a hold full of cargo— and we'll have adventures—and maybe we'll find a girl who'll come with us and, how'd you like a couple of little tiny pirates running around, eh? Sort of grandkids? Wouldn't that be really cool?" He whooped and beat his chest in sheer exuberance. "YEEEoooo! Today I am a man!"

Not by a long shot, laddie, thought the Captain, regarding his boy as he played on. Glumly he contemplated the puzzle of Alec's DNA and reflected that Alec was unlikely ever to be a man any more than he himself was one, at least in the sense of being a member of the human race. One of these days the boy would have to be told.

And now the Captain had puberty to worry about, and how, oh, how, was Alec ever going to find a girl who'd come with him? A lover would get close to his boy, would notice all sorts of little odd things about Alec. Where was there a girl who'd love Alec enough to stay, if she knew the truth about him?

One worry at a time, the Captain decided, and accessed the stock exchange to see what promising investments might present themselves for the payoff from this job. He had to make his boy independently wealthy, after all, and then there were the taxes to be evaded...

The girl was out there somewhere. She'd wait.

Stephen Hawking, an extraordinary mortal if ever there was one, has argued that the best evidence that time travel is impossible is that we haven't met any visitors from the future. Good point. Though I think that anyone visiting the past would scarcely announce their presence, would in fact be much more likely to have access to a range of disguises we couldn't hope to penetrate. And there are all those Fortean accounts of out-of place artifacts such as chains embedded in anthracite coal seams, certain proof of temporal visitors to the early Cretaceous— or it would be proof, if the artifacts themselves hadn 't mysteriously disappeared since, like the famous spark plug that was embedded in a geode. (Although it turned out to be embedded in a lump of mud, not a geode, which sort of deflates the geological anomaly a bit... )

Who knows? But my money's on time travel, all the same.

The Queen in Yellow

The lady waited in her motorcar. It was a grand car, the very best and latest of its kind in 1914, a Vauxhall touring convertible with a four-litre engine, very fast. It was painted gold. Until recently the lady would have been waiting on a horse, by choice a palomino Arabian stallion. She preferred her current transportation system, because she did not particularly care for living things. She did admire machines, however. She liked gold, too.

Her name was Executive Facilitator for the Near Bast Region Kiu, and the sleek golden motorcar in which she waited was parked on a deserted road in the middle of a particularly ancient and historically significant bit of Nowhere. Not so far behind her, the Nile flowed on through eternity; above her, the white moon swam like a curved reed-boat across the stars, and it and they shed faint soft light on the rippled dunes of the desert and the green garden country. Lady Kiu cared no more about the romance of her surroundings than the Sphinx, who was her junior by several millennia. She did not show her eleven thousand years, almond-eyed beauty that she was. She looked no older than a fairly pampered and carefree twenty-two. Her soul, however, had quite worn away to nothing. Lady Kiu was impatient as she waited. Her perfect nails tapped out a sinister little rhythm on the Vauxhall's steering wheel. You would think such an ageless, deathless creature would have long since learned to bide her time, and normally Lady Kiu could watch the pointless hours stagger past with perfect sangfroid; but there was something about the man for whom she waited that irritated her unaccountably. The man was standing on a ridge and staring, slack jawed, at the beauty of the night. Moon, sand, stars, gardens, the distant gleam of moonlight on the river: he had seen a lot of moons, stars, sand, gardens and rivers in his time, but this was Egypt, after all! And though he too was a deathless, ageless creature, he had never in all his centuries been to Egypt before, and the Romance of the Nile had him breathlessly enchanted.

His name was Literature Preservationist Lewis. He was a slight, fair-haired man with the boyish good looks and determined chin of a silent film hero. He was moreover brave, resourceful and terribly earnest about his job, which was one of the things about him that so irritated Lady Kiu. He also tended to get caught up in the moment to such an extent that he failed to check his internal chronometer as often as he ought to, with the result that when he did check it now he started guiltily, and set off at a run through the night. He was able to move far more quickly than a mortal man, but he was still five minutes late for his rendezvous.

"Sorry!" he cried aloud, spotting Lady Kiu at last, sullen by moonlight. He slid to a halt and tottered the last few steps to her motorcar, hitching up his jodhpurs.

"Sand in your pants?" inquired Lady Kiu, yawning.

"Er—actually we've all got sand everywhere. We're roughing it, rather. The professor doesn't go in for luxuries in the field. I don't mind, though! He's really the most astonishing mortal, and I'm used to a bit of hardship—" said Lewis.

"How nice. Your report, please."

Lewis cleared his throat and stood straight. "Everything is on schedule and under budget. I guided the fellaheen straight to the shaft entrance without seeming to, you see, quite subtly, and even though it's been. blocked with debris, the excavation has .been going along famously. At the current speed, I expect we'll reach the burial chamber exactly at twilight tomorrow."

"Good." Lady Kiu studied her nails. "And you're absolutely certain you'll get the timing right?"

"You may rely on me," Lewis assured her.

"You managed to obtain a handcar?"

"All I had to do was bribe a railway official! The princess and I will roll into Bani Suwayf in style."

"The mortal trusts you?"

"Professor Petrie? I think I've managed to impress him." Lewis hooked his thumbs through his suspenders proudly. "I heard him tellingMr. Brunton what a remarkable fellow I am. 'Have you noticed that fellow Kensington?' he said. Petrie impresses me, too. He's got the most amazing mental abilities—"

"Darling, the day any mortal can impress me, I'll be ready for retirement," said Lady Kiu, noting in amusement that Lewis started and quivered ever so slightly at her use of the word darling.

"I can expect you at Bani Suwayf at midnight tomorrow, then," she added. "With the merchandise."

"Without fail!"

"That's a good boy. We've set you up a nice workroom on the boat, with everything you'll need for the restoration job. And in your cabin—" she reached out a lazy hand and chucked him under the chin

"—there'll be a bottle of well-iced champagne to celebrate. Won't that be fun?" Lewis's eyes widened. Struck mute, he grinned at her foolishly, and she smiled back at him. She expected men to fall in love with her—they always did, after all—but Lewis fell in love with anything beautiful or interesting, and so he wasn't worth her time. Still, it never hurt to give an underling some incentive.

"Until tomorrow," she said, blowing him a kiss, and with a roar her golden chariot came to life and bore her away toward the Nile.

You will find the pyramid of Senuseret II west of the Nile, near Al Fayyum. It is an unassuming little twelfth-dynasty^ affair of limestone and unburned mud brick. It is quite obvious how it was built, so no one ever speculates on how on earth it got there or who built it, or argues morbidly that apocalyptic knowledge is somehow encoded in its modest dimensions.

To the south of Senuseret's pyramid is a cemetery, and on this brilliant day in 1914 it had a certain holiday air. The prevailing breeze brought the fragrance of fields, green leaf and lotus surging up in the brief Egyptian spring. Makeshift huts had been put up all along its outer wall, and Englishmen and Englishwomen sat in the huts and typed reports, or made careful drawings with the finest of crow quills, or fanned flies away from their food and wondered plaintively what that furry stuff was on the tinned pilchards, or fought off another wave of malaria.

Within the cemetery walls, several shaft tomb entrances admitted sunlight. In such shade as there was, the Egyptian fellaheen sat sorting through fairly small basketfuls of dig debris, brought to them by brown children from the mouth of another shaft. Lewis, his archaeologist ensemble augmented by a pith helmet today, stood watching themexpectantly. His riding boots shone with polish. His jodhpurs were formidable.

Beside him stood a mortal man, burned dark by the sun, who wore mismatched native slippers without socks, patched knickerbocker trousers, a dirty shirt that had lost its buttons, and a flat cap that had also seen better days. He was white-haired and gray-bearded but had a blunt powerful form; he also had an unnervingly intense stare, fixed not on the fellaheen but on Lewis.

William Matthew Flinders Petrie was sixty years old. He had laid down the first rules of true archaeology, and that made him very nearly a patron saint for people who invested in history as much as Lewis's masters did.

Though invested is not, perhaps, the correct word for the way the Company got its money. Lewis never thought about that part of it much, to avoid being depressed. He had always been taught that depression was a very bad thing for an immortal, and the secret to happiness was to keep busy, preferably by following orders. And life could be so interesting! For example, one got to rub elbows with famous mortals like Flinders Petrie.

"So you think this grave hasn't been robbed? You have an intuition about this, have you?" Petrie said.

"Oh, yes, Professor," said Lewis. "I get them now and then. And after all, theft is a haphazard business, isn't it? How systematic or careful can a looter be? I'd be awfully surprised if they hadn't missed something."

"Interesting," said Flinders Petrie.

"What is, sir?"

"Your opinion on thieves. Have you known many?"

Actually Lewis had worked with thieves his entire life, in a manner of speaking. But remembering that he was supposed to be a youthful volunteer on his first visit to Egypt (which was half true, after all), he blushed and said "Well—no, sir, I haven't, in fact."

"They have infinite patience, as a rule," Petrie told him. ".You'd be astonished at how methodical they are. The successful ones, at least. They take all manner of precautions. Get up to all sorts of tricks. Sometimes an archaeologist can learn from them."

"Ah! Such as wearing a costume to gain access to a forbidden shrine?" Lewis inquired eagerly. "I have heard, sir, that you yourself convinced certain tribesmen you were mad by wearing, er, some rather outlandish things—"

"The pink underwear story, yes." Petrie gave a slight smile. "Yes, itsometimes pays very well if people think you're a harmless fool. They'll let you in anywhere."

As Lewis prepared to say something suitably naive in response, children came streaming from the mouth of the shaft like chattering swallows. A moment later an Egyptian followed them and walked swiftly to Petrie, before whom he bowed and said:

"Sir, you will want to come see now."

Petrie nodded once, giving Lewis a sidelong glance.

"What did I tell you?" said Lewis, beaming.

"What indeed?" said Petrie. "Come along then, boy, and let's see if your instincts are as good as you think they are."

The mouth of the shaft had been blocked, as all the others there had been blocked, with centuries of mud and debris from flood runoff, and it was hard as red cement and had taken days of labor to clear in tiny increments. But the way was now clear to the entrance of the tomb chamber itself, where a mere window had been chiseled through into stifling darkness. A Qufti waiting with a lantern held it up and through the hole, flattening himself against the wall as Petrie rushed forward to peer inside.

"Good God!" cried Petrie, and his voice cracked in excitement. "Is the lid intact? Look at the thing, it hasn't been touched! But how can that be?" He thrust himself through, head and shoulders, in his effort to see better, and the Qufti holding the lamp attempted to make himself even flatter, without success, as Petrie's body wedged his arm firmly into the remaining four inches of window space and caused him to utter a faint involuntary cry of pain.

"Sorry. Oh, bugger all—" Petrie pulled backward and stripped off his shirt. Then he kicked off his slippers, tossed his cap down on top of them, and yanked open his trousers. The sole remaining fly button hit the wall with the force of a bullet, but was ignored as he dropped his pants and jumped free, naked as Adam.

"Your trowel, sir," said the Qufti, offering it with his good arm as he drew back.

"Thank you, Ali." Petrie took the trowel, draped his shirt over the windowledge, and vaulted up and through with amazing energy for a man of his years, so that Lewis and Ali endured no more than a few seconds of averting their eyes as his bottom and then legs and feet vanished into stygian blackness.

"Er—what a remarkable man," observed Lewis.

The Qufti just nodded, rubbing his arm.

"GIVE ME THE LAMP!" ordered Petrie, appearing in the hole for a moment. "And keep the others out of here for the present, do youunderstand? I want.a clear field." He turned on Lewis a glare keen enough to cut through limestone. "Well? Don't you want to see your astonishing discovery, Mr. Kensington? I'd have thought you'd have been beside yourself to be the first in!"

"Well—ah—I'm certain I couldn't hope to learn as much from it as you would, Professor," said Lewis. Petrie laughed grimly. "I wonder. Never mind, boy, grab a trowel and crawl through. And don't be an old maid! It's a sweatbath in here."

"Yes, sir," said Lewis, racing for the mouth of the shaft, and for all his embarrassment and reluctance there was still a little gleeful voice at the back of his mind singing: I'm on a real Egyptian archaeological dig with Flinders Petrie! The Father of Archaeology! Gosh!

In the end he compromised by stripping down to his drawers, and though Petrie set him to the inglorious task of whittling away at the window to enlarge the chamber's access while he himself worked at clearing the granite sarcophagus, Lewis spent a wonderful afternoon. His sense of rapport with the Master in his Element kept him diverted from the fact that he was an undersized cyborg wearing nothing but a pair of striped drawers, chipping fecklessly at fossilized mud while sweat dripped.from the end of his nose, one drop precisely every 43.3 seconds, or that he was trapped in a small hot enclosed space with an elderly mortal who had certain intestinal problems.

The great man's vocal utterances were limited to grunts of effort and growls of surprise, with the occasional "Hold the damned light over here a moment, can't you?" But Lewis, in all the luxury of close proximity and uninterrupted except for having to pass the debris-basket out the hole on a regular basis, was learning a great deal by scanning Petrie as he worked.

He was not learning the sort of things he had expected to learn, however. For example, his visual recordings of Petrie were not going to be as edifying as he'd hoped: the Master in his Element appeared nothing like a stately cross between Moses and Indiana Jones, as depicted in the twenty-fourth century. He resembled a naked lunatic trying to tunnel out of an asylum. That didn't matter, though, in light of the fascinating data Lewis was picking up as he scanned Petrie's brain activity. It looked like a lightning storm, especially through the frontal lobes. There were connections being made that were not ordinarily made in a mortal mind. Patterns in data were instantly grasped and analyzed, fundamental organizational relationships perceived that mortals did not, as a rule, perceive, and jumps of logic of dazzling clarity followed. Lewis was enchanted. He watched the cerebral fireworks display, noted theslight depression in one temple and pondered the possibility of early brain trauma rerouting Petrie's neural connections in some marvelous inexplicable way...

"I must say, sir, this is a great honor for me," said Lewis hesitantly. "Meeting and actually working with a man of your extraordinary ability."

"Nothing to do with ability, boy," replied Petrie, giving him a stare over the edge of the sarcophagus.

"It's simply a matter of paying attention to details. That's all it is. Most of the people out here in the old days were nothing more than damned looters. Go at it with a pick and blasting powder! Find the gold!

Didn't care tuppence for the fact that they were crumbling history under their bloody boots."

"Like the library of Mendes," said Lewis, with bitter feeling.

"You remember that, do you?" Petrie cocked a shaggy eyebrow at him. "Remarkable; that was back in '92. You can't have been more than an infant at the time."

"Well, er, yes, but my father read about it in the Times, you see," temporized Lewis. "And he talked about it for years, and he shared your indignation, if I may say so. That would have been Naville, wouldn't it, who found all those rooms filled with ancient papyri, and was so ham-fisted he destroyed most of them in the excavation!" His vengeful trowel stabbed clay and sent a chip whizzing into the darkness.

"So he did," said Petrie, picking up the chip and squinting at it briefly before setting it in the debris basket. "I called him a vandal and he very nearly called me out. Said it was ridiculous to expect an archaeologist to note the placement of items uncovered in a dig, as though one were to note where the raisins were in a plum pudding! Mark that metaphor, you see, that's all an excavation meant to him: Dig your spoon in and gobble away! Never a thought for learning anything about what he was digging up."

"And meanwhile who knew what was being lost?" Lewis mourned. "Plays. Poetry. Textbooks. Histories."

Petrie considered him a long moment before speaking again, and Lewis was once more aware of the bright storm in the old man's head.

"We can never know," Petrie said. "Damn him and everyone like him. How can we ever know the truth about the past? Historians lie; time wrecks everything. But if you're careful, boy, if you're methodical, if you measure and record and look for the bloody boring little details, like potsherds, and learn what they mean—you can get the dead to speak again, out of their ashes. That's worth more than all the gold and amulets in the world, that's the work of my life. That's what I was born for. Nothing matters except my work."

"I know exactly what you mean!" said Lewis.

"Do you?" said Petrie quietly.

They worked on in silence for a while after that.

At some point in the long afternoon the auroral splendor of Petrie's mind grew particularly bright, and he cried out, "What the deuce?"

"Oh, have you found something, Professor?" Lewis stood and peered at the area of the sarcophagus that had just been cleared. There were hieroglyphics deep-cut in the pink granite. "The Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet? Oh, my, surely that's a very good sign."

And then he almost exclaimed aloud, because Petrie's mind became like a glowing sun, such a magnificence of cerebration that Lewis felt humbled. But Petrie merely looked at him, and said flatly:

"Perhaps it is. It's damned unusual, anyway. Never seen a seal quite like that on the outer sarcophagus before."

"Really?" Lewis felt a little shiver of warning. "Do you think it's significant?"

"Yes," said Petrie. "I'm sure it is."

"How exciting," said Lewis cautiously, and turned back to chipping away at the wall. By twilight, when the first blessed coolness rose in salt mist from the canals, it was still hot and stinking in the tomb. Lewis wiped his face with the back of his hand, leaving a steak of red mud above one eye, and said casually, "I suppose we'd better stop for today."

"Absolutely not," said Petrie. "I've very nearly cleared the lid. Another forty-five minutes' work ought to do it. Don't you want to see Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet, boy?" He grinned ferociously at Lewis.

"More than anything, sir," said Lewis, truthfully. "But do you really want to rush a discovery of this importance? I'd much rather get a good night's sleep, wouldn't you, and start fresh tomorrow?" Petrie was silent a moment, eyeing him. "I suppose so," he said at last. "Very well. Though, of course, someone ought to sleep in here tonight. Standing guard, you know."

"Allow me to volunteer!" said Lewis, doing his best to look frightfully keen. "Please, sir, it would be an honor."

"As you like." Petrie stroked his beard. "I'll have supper and your bedroll sent out to you. Will that suit?"

It suited Lewis very well indeed, and two hours later he was stretched out in his blankets on the lid of the sarcophagus, listening to the sounds of the camp in its rituals as it gradually retired for the night. He found it comforting, because it was much more like the sound of mortals retiring for the night the way they had over the centuries when he had been getting used to them: the low murmur of a story being told,the cry of a dreaming child, the scrape of a campfire being banked. Modern rooms were sealed against sound, and nights had become less human. In London, you might hear distant waterworks or steam pipes, or the tinny clamor of a radio or a phonograph, or the creak of furniture. You might hear electricity, if it had been laid on, humming through the walls. Humanity was sealing itself away in tidy boxes.

"But," he said to himself aloud, looking up at the ceiling of the tomb, "they used to do that, too, didn't they? Though not while they were still alive." He sat up cautiously and groped for his lantern. "At least not intentionally."

He lit the lantern and set to work at once, chiseling away at the last layer of mud sealing the lid of the sarcophagus. It went much more quickly when you didn't have to carefully collect every single chip and pass it out through the entrance in a basket, and Lewis felt certain qualms about the debris he was scattering everywhere.

"But we'll leave the professor a treat to make up for it, won't we Princess?" he muttered. "And, after all, history can't be changed."

Five minutes later he had freed enough of the lid to be able to toss the trowel aside and prize an edge up, and he yanked the granite slab free as though it were so much balsa wood.

"Wow!" he said, although he had known what he would see.

There was a mummy case reposing there, smiling up through a layer of grime as though it had been expecting him, and in a manner of speaking it had been. It represented a lady bound all in golden cerements, and painted about her shoulders was a feathered cape in every shade of lemon and amber, set here and there with painted representations of topazes and citrines. Her features closely resembled Lady Kiu's, save that there was a warmth and life in her eyes missing from the living eyes of Lady Kiu. Under the dust, the whole case gleamed with a thick coat of varnish of glasslike smoothness and transparency. An analysis of its chemical structure would have startled scientists, if there had been any with electron microscopes or spectrographs in 1914. Lewis couldn't resist reaching down to stroke along the side where the case was sealed, and could feel no seam or join at all. It would take a diamond-edged saw to get the box open, but that was all right; it had served its purpose. The chest at the top of the tomb had had no such treatment, and it had fallen to pieces where it stood, splitting open under the sheer mass of the treasure it contained: a crown of burnished gold, two golden pectorals inlaid with precious stones, coiled necklaces, armlets, collars, boudoir items, beadwork in amethyst, in carnelian, turquoise, lapis lazuli, obsidian, ivory.

"Let's get this mess out of the way, shall we?" said Lewis, and, reaching in, he picked up as much of the treasure as he could in one grab and dumped it unceremoniously into a recess in the wall at one side. Beads scattered and rolled here and there, but he ignored them. It was just so much jewelry, after all, and he was fixed and focused on his objective as only a cyborg can be.

"Now, Princess," he said, giggling slightly as he leaned down to lift the mummy case from its dais,

"Shall we dance? You and I? I'm quite a good dancer. I can two-step like nobody's business. Oh, you'll like it out in the world again! I'll take you on a railway ride, though not first-class accommodations I'm afraid—" He set the case, which was as big as he was, down while he considered how best to get it through the opening.

"But that'll be all right, because then we'll go for a sail down the Nile, and that will be much nicer. Quite like old times, eh?" Deciding the time for neatness had passed, he simply aimed a series of kicks and punches at certain spots on the wall. He did not seem to exert much force, but the wall cracked in a dozen places and toppled outward into the tomb shaft.

"Literature Preservationist Lewis, super-cyborg!" he gloated, striking an attitude, and then froze with an expression of dismay on his face.

Flinders Petrie stood in the shaft without, just at the edge of the lamplight. He was surveying the wreckage of the wall with leonine fury, and the fact that he was wearing a pink singlet, pink ballet tutu and pink ribboned slippers did nothing to detract from the terror of his anger. Nor did the rifle he was aiming at Lewis's head.

"Come out of there, you little bastard," he said. "Look at the mess you've made!"

"I'm sorry!" said Lewis.

"Not as sorry as you're going to be," the old mortal told him. "I knew you were a damned marauder from the moment I laid eyes on you." He settled the rifle more securely on his shoulder. "Though I couldn't fathom the rest of it. What's a super-cyborg? What the hell are you, eh?" Lewis raced mentally through possible believable answers, and decided on:

"I'm afraid you're right. I'm a thief; I was paid a lot of money by a certain French count to bring back antiquities for his collection. The Comte de la, er, Cyborg. He ordered me to infiltrate your expedition, because everyone knows you're the best—"

"Ballocks," said Petrie. "I mean what are you?" Lewis blinked at him. "What?" he repeated.

"What kind of thing are you? You're no human creature, that much is obvious," said Petrie.

"It is?" In spite of his horror, Lewis was fascinated. He scanned Petrie's brain activity and found it a roiling wasps' nest of sparks.

"It is to me, boy," said Petrie. "Mosquitoes won't bite you, for one thing. You speak like an actor on the stage, for another. You move like a machine, mathematically exact. I've timed the things you do."

"What kinds of things?" Lewis asked, delighted.

"Blinking once every thirty seconds precisely, for example," said Flinders Petrie. "Except in moments when you're pretending to be surprised, as you were just now. But there's not much that surprises you, is there? You knew about this shaft, you very nearly dragged Ali to this spot and showed him where to dig. It was so we'd do all the work for you, wasn't it? And then you'd make off with whatever was inside."

"Well, I'm afraid I—"

"You're not afraid. Your pupils aren't dilating as a man's would," said Petrie relentlessly. "You haven't changed color, and you're breathing in perfect mechanical rhythm." But his own hand shook slightly as he pulled back the hammer on the rifle. "You're some kind of brilliantly complicated automaton, though I'm damned if I can think who made you."

"That's an insane idea, you know," said Lewis, gauging how much space there was between Petrie and the side of the shaft. "People will think you're mad as a hatter if you tell anyone." Petrie actually chuckled. "Do I look like a man who cares if people think I'm mad?" he said. He cut a bizarre little jete, pink slippers flashing. "It's bloody useful, in fact, to be taken for a lunatic. Why d'you think I keep this ensemble in my kit? If I blew your head off this minute, dressed as I happen to be, I should certainly be acquitted of murder on grounds of insanity. Wouldn't you think so?"

"You are absolutely the most astonishing mortal I have ever met," said Lewis sincerely.

"And you're not mortal, obviously. What would I see if I fired this gun, Mr. Kensington? Bits of clockwork flying apart? Magnetic ichor? Who made you? Why? I want to know! What are you for?"

"Please don't shoot!" cried Lewis. "I was born as mortal as you are! If a bullet hit me I'd bleed and feel an awful lot of pain, but I wouldn't die. I can never die." Inspiration struck him. "Think about the Book of the Dead. All the mummies you've unearthed, Professor, think of all the priests and embalmers who worked over them, trying to follow instructions they barely understood. What were they trying to do?"

"Guarantee that men would live forever," said Petrie, with perhaps just an edge of the fury taken off his voice.

"Exactly! They were trying to approximate something they knew about, but couldn't ever really achieve, because they didn't have the complete instructions. My masters, on the other hand, truly can make a man immortal."

"Your masters?" Petrie narrowed his eyes. "So you're a slave. And who are your masters, boy?"

"I'm not a slave!" said Lewis heatedly. "I'm more of an—an employee on long-term contract. And my masters are a terribly wise and powerful lot of scientists and businessmen."

"Freemasons, by any chance? Rosicrucians?"

"Certainly not." Lewis sniffed.

"Well, they're not so clever as they think they are," said Petrie. "I saw through you easily enough.

'Sit-Hathor-Yunet,' you said when you saw that cartouche, without a moment's hesitation. And you'd said you couldn't read hieroglyphics!"

Lewis winced. "I did slip there, didn't I? Oh, dear. I wasn't really designed for this kind of mission."

"You weren't, eh?"

"I'm just a literature preservationist. Scrolls and codices are more my line of work," Lewis admitted. "I was only going to handle the restoration job. But my Facilitator—Facilitators are the clever ones, you see, they're designed to be really good at passing themselves off as mortal, one of them would never make the mistakes I did—my Facilitator pointed out that a woman would be out of place in a camp like this, doing all sorts of dirty and dangerous work, and that I'd arouse much less suspicion than she would. She said she was sure I could handle a job like this." He looked up at Petrie in a certain amount of embarrassment.

Petrie laughed. "Then you've been rather a fool, haven't you? You're that much of a man, at least." Lewis edged slightly forward and the barrel of the rifle swung to cover him.

"Stop there!" said Petrie. "And you can just put Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet down too, cleverdick."

"Er—I'm afraid I can't do that," said Lewis. "She was the whole point of my mission, you see. Can't I have her? You wouldn't learn anything useful from her, I can promise you."

"There's something odd about her, too, isn't there?" demanded Petrie. "I knew it! Everything about the bloody burial was queer from the first."

"Suppose, a long time ago, you had something valuable that youneeded to put away for the benefit of generations to come, Professor. You'd want to hide it somewhere safe, wouldn't you?" Lewis said. "And where better than sealed in a tomb you knew wouldn't be opened until a certain day in the year 1914?"

"So you've got one of Mr. Wells's time machines, have you?" Petrie speculated. "Is that how you know the future? What's the princess, then? Is she another of your kind?"

"No! You can't really make an immortal like this," said Lewis in disgust, waving a hand at the mummy case.

"Then how is it done? I want to know!"

"I'm afraid I can't tell you that, Professor."

"You will, by God." Petrie cocked the rifle again.

"Oh, sir, does it have to come to this?" Lewis pleaded. "Just let me go. I've left you the nicest little cache of loot in payment, really a remarkable find—"

He gestured at the jewelry he had dumped into the recess behind the sarcophagus. Petrie glanced at it, and his gaze stayed on the gold in spite of his intention, only a second longer than he had planned; but that was enough time for Lewis, who fled past him like a wraith in the night. He was a hundred meters away by the time the bullet whizzed past his ear, bowling over Ali and the other fellaheen in his passage. He'd have been farther if not for the aerodynamic drag that the mummy case exerted. Gasping, he lifted it over his head like an ant with a particularly valuable grain of barley and ran, making for the railway line.

"Damn!" he groaned, as he sprinted on, hearing the shots and outcry in his wake. "My clothes!" They were still sitting in a tidily folded heap in the shaft, where he'd meant to put them on prior to exiting stealthily. Can't be helped, he thought to himself. Perhaps I won't be too conspicuous?

Lewis had a stitch in his side by the time he reached the railway line, and set the mummy case down while he cast about for the hut in which he'd hidden his handcar. Ah! There it was. He flung open the makeshift door and stared blankly into the darkness for a moment before the sound of approaching gunfire rammed the fact home: someone had stolen the handcar. He tried looking by infrared, but the result was the same. No handcar.

He lost another few seconds biting his knuckles as the pursuit grew nearer, until he distinguished Petrie's voice, louder than the others and titanic in its wrath. Dismayed, Lewis grabbed up the mummy case again and ran for his immortal life, through the lurid scarlet night of Egypt by infrared. A frightened cyborg can go pretty far and pretty fast before runningout of breath, so Lewis had got well out of the sound of pursuit before he had to stop and set down the mummy case again. Wheezing, he collapsed on it and regarded the flat open field in which he found himself.

"I hope you won't mind, Princess," he said. "There's been a slight change in plan. In fact, the plan has gone completely out the window. You probably wouldn't have enjoyed the railway ride anyway. Don't worry; I'll get you to the Nile somehow. What am I going to do, though?" He peered across a distance of several miles to a pinprick of light a mortal couldn't have seen.

"There's a camp fire over there," he said. "Do you suppose they have camels, Princess? Do you suppose I could persuade them to loan me a camel? Not that I'm particularly good at persuading mortals to do things. That's in a Facilitator's programming. Not something a lowly little Preserver drone is expected to be any good at."

A certain shade of resentment came into his voice.

"Do you suppose the professor was right, Princess? Did Lady Kiu take advantage of me? Did she send me in on a job for which I wasn't programmed simply because she didn't want to bother with it herself?"

He sat there a moment in silence on the mummy case, fuming.

"You know, Princess, I think she did. Mrs. Petrie did plenty of crawling about in the shafts. So did Winifred Brunton. Granted, they were English. All the same... " Lewis looked up at the infinite stars. "Can it be I've been played for a fool?"

The infinite stars looked down on him and pursed their lips.

"I'll bet she weasels out of sleeping with me, too," he sighed. "Darn it. Well, Princess, you wait here. I'm going to see if I can borrow a camel."

He rose to his feet, hitched up his drawers and strode away through the darkness with a purposeful air.

Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet smiled up at the sky and waited. It was all she knew how to do. She didn't mind.

After a while a darkness detached itself from the greater darkness and loomed up against the stars, to become the silhouette of Lewis, proudly mounted on the back of a camel.

"Here we are!" he cried cheerily. "Can you believe it, Princess, there was a runaway camel wandering loose through the fields? What a stroke of luck for us! I hate stealing things from mortals." He reined it in, bade it sit, and jumped down.

"Because, you see, the professor was wrong about me. I steal things

for mortals. Actually it isn't even stealing. I'm a Preserver. It's what I do and I'm proud of it. It really is the best work in the world, Princess.Travel to exotic lands, meetings with famous people... " He scooped her up and vaulted back on the camel's hump. "Dodging bullets when they decide you're a tomb robber... oh, well. Hut-hut! Up and at 'em, boy!" The camel unfolded upward with a bellow of protest. It had been content to carry Lewis, who if he did not smell quite right had at least a proper human shape; but something about the princess spooked it badly, and it decided to run away.

It set off at a dead run. The little creature on its back yelled and yanked on its reins, but the great black thwartwise oblong thing back up there was still following it no matter how fast it ran, and so the camel just kept running. It ran toward the smell of water, as being the only possible attraction in the fathomless night. It galloped over packed and arid hardpan, through fields of cotton, through groves of apricot trees. Lewis experienced every change in terrain intimately, and was vainly trying to spit out a mouthful of apricot leaves when the camel found water, and stopped abruptly at the edge of a canal. Lewis, and Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet, did not stop.

The black earth and the bright stars reversed, not once but several times, and then it was all darkness as Lewis landed with a splash in the canal, though with great presence of mind kept his grip on the mummy case. Down they went, and then the buoyancy of the sealed case pulled them upward again, and Lewis gulped in a lungful of air and scanned frantically for crocodiles.

"Whew!" he said, finding none. He noted also that the tidal flow was taking them Nileward at a leisurely pace, and, settling himself firmly atop Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet, he began to paddle energetically.

"Well, call me Ishmael! My apologies, Princess, but needs must and all that sort of thing. We'll be out of this in no time, you'll see. In the meantime, enjoy the new experience. I take it you've never been body-surfing before?" He began to giggle at the idea of body surfing and couldn't control himself, laughing so hard that he nearly fell off. "Whoops! No, no, you headstrong girl! This way!" Leeches floated up eagerly from the black depths, sensing a meal; just as the mosquitoes had, they came into contact with the minute electromagnetic field surrounding Lewis's skin and changed their minds in a hurry.

About the time that Lewis spotted the lights of Bani Suwayf in the distance, he also identified a pair of crocodiles a kilometer off. Crocodiles take rather more than an electromagnetic field to discourage and so, splashing hastily to the side of the canal, Lewis pushed the mummy case out and scrambled after it. He paused only a moment to let the water stream from his ballooning drawers before picking up the case and resuming his journey by land.

"We're almost there, Princess, and we're not even late!" he said happily, as he trudged along. "I'll have a thing or two to say to Lady Kiu, though, won't 1? Let's see... Ahem! Madam, I feel I have no choice but to protest your... mmm. Lady Kiu, this is a painful thing for me to say, but... no. Kiu, old girl, I don't think you quite... that is, I... I mean, you... right."

He sighed, and marched on.

Bani Suwayf was a small town in 1914, but it had a railway station and a resident population of Europeans. One of them, M. Heurtebise, was a minor functionary in a minor bureau having to do with granting minor permits of various kinds to other Europeans, and he deeply resented the smallness of his place in the order of things. He took it out on his wife, his servants, his pets, and once a week he also took it out on a person whom he paid for the trouble and who was therefore philosophical about his nocturnal visits.

He was returning from one of these visits—it had not lasted long-in his motorcar, and was just rounding the corner of the main street as Lewis entered it from the little track leading from the canal. He looked up, aghast, when the bug-eyed lights caught and displayed him: a muddy and sweating figure wearing only striped drawers, balancing a mummy case on his head.

"Stop!" cried M. Heurtebise on impulse, hitting his chauffeur on the shoulder with his cane. "Thief!" he added, because it seemed like a good bet, and he pulled out a revolver and brandished it at Lewis. Lewis, who had used up a lot of energy on his flit from Professor Petrie, decided the hell with it and stopped. He set down the mummy case very carefully, held up his hands in a classic don't-shoot gesture, and vanished.

"Where did he go?" exclaimed M. Heurtebise. When no answer was forthcoming from the night, he struck his chauffeur again and ordered, "Get out and look for him, Ahmed, you fool!" Ahmed gritted his teeth, but got out of the car and looked around. He looked up the street; he looked down the street. He looked everywhere but under the motorcar, where Lewis had insinuated himself into the undercarriage as cunningly as an alien monster.

"He is not to be found, sir," Ahmed told M. Heurtebise.

"I can see that, you imbecile. But he has left an antiquity in the roadway!" Ahmed prodded Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet with his foot. "So he has, sir." Muttering to himself, M. Heurtebise got out of the motorcar. He strode over to the mummy case and his eyes widened as he noted the excellence of its condition and its obvious value.

"This has clearly been stolen," he said. "It is our duty to confiscate it. We will notify the proper authorities in the morning. Put it into the car, Ahmed."

Ahmed bent and attempted to lift it.

"It is too heavy, sir," he said. "We must do it together." Mr. Heurtebise considered striking him for his insolence, but then reflected that if the mummy case was heavy, it was possibly full of treasure, and therefore the issue of prime importance was to get it out of the street and into his possession. So between them, he and Ahmed lifted the case and set it on end in the back seat. They got back in the motorcar and drove on the short distance to M. Heurtebise's villa. When they pulled into the courtyard and got out, Ahmed opened the door to the ground-floor office and they carried the mummy case inside. M. Heurtebise opened the Venetian blinds to admit light from the courtyard lantern, and he directed Ahmed to set Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet on two cane chairs. The office was a comfortable room in the European style, with a banked fire in the hearth, leather overstuffed chairs with a small table and lamp between them, and a formidable desk with a row of pigeonholes above it. There was also a large cage in one corner, covered with canvas sacking. As Ahmed pushed the two chairs closer together, a hoarse metallic voice began to exclaim from beneath the cover. It said something very rude and then repeated it eighteen times.

"Silence!" hissed M. Heurtebise. "Bad parrot! BAD PARROT!" He took his cane and hammered on the side of the cage, creating such a racket Ahmed winced and put his hands over his ears. A stunned silence followed. M. Heurtebise nodded in satisfaction. "That's the only way to teach him, by the devil."

"May I go now, sir?"

"Go." M. Heurtebise waved him away. They left the study, and Ahmed drove the motorcar into what had formerly been the stables. Here he got out, closed the great door and locked it, and went off to the servants' quarters. M. Heurtebise paused only long enough to lock the office door, and then climbed the outer stair to his apartments on the second floor.

Alone in the darkness, Lewis uninsinuated himself from the under-chassis and fell groaning to the floor. He was now smeared with black grease in addition to being muddy and wet. He lay there a moment and finally crawled out from under the motorcar. He got to his feet, staggered to the door and rattled it. He was locked in. He shrugged and looked around for a suitable tool.

In the office, however, something else was just discovering that it was not locked in. In his enthusiasm, M. Heurtebise had beaten on the bars of the cage with such force that he had shaken the cage's latchhook loose, though with the cover being in place he had not noticed this. However, the cage's inhabitant noticed, once its little ears had stopped ringing. It cocked a bright eye and then slid down the bars to the cage door. Thrusting its beak through the bars, it levered the latch the rest of the way open. It pushed its head against the bars and the door opened partway. There was a rustle, a thump, and then a parrot dropped between the cage cover and the bars to the floor. It ruffled its feathers and looked around.

It was an African Grey, all silver-and-ashes except for its scarlet tail.

"Oh, my," it said. "You bad boy, what do you think you're doing?" It waddled across the tile floor like a clockwork toy, looking up at the long slanting bars of light coming in from the courtyard.

"Oh, la la! You bad boy bad boy!" it said, and beat its wings and flew to the top of the window-frame rail. Laughing evilly to itself, it reached down with its powerful little beak and snipped the topmost Venetian blind in half with one bite. The slat having parted with a pleasing crunch, the parrot then made its way along the rail to the cord and rappelled down it, stopping at each blind and methodically biting through, until the whole assembly hung in ruins.

The parrot swung from the end of the cord by its feet a moment, twirling happily, and then launched itself at the desk.

"Whee! Oh, stop that at once, you wicked creature! Stop that now! Do you hear? Do you hear?" It made straight for the neat stack of pencils and bit them each in half too; then pulled out the pens and did the same. As though tidying its work area, it threw the pieces over the edge of the desk, one after another, and for good measure plucked the inkwell out of its recess and pitched that over too. The inkwell hit the floor with a crash and the ink fountained out, spattering the tiles. The parrot watched this appreciatively, tilting its head.

"As God is my witness," it commented, "if you don't be quiet NOW I will wring your neck! I mean it!

Stop that this instant!"

It turned and eyed the pigeonholes. Reaching into the nearest it pulled out M. Heurtebise's morning correspondence, dragged it to the edge and, with a decisive toss of its head, chucked it over the side too. The envelopes smacked into the mess already there, and spread and drifted. The parrot peered into the other pigeonholes and poked through them, murmuring, "Wicked, wicked, wicked, wicked... tra la la." Finding nothing else of interest on the desk, it backed out of the lastpigeonhole, gave a little fluttering hop and landed on the nearest of the armchairs. It strutted to and fro on the smooth leather surface a moment before lifting its tail grandly and liquidly.

"Allons, enfants de la patrie—eee—eee!" it sang. "La la la!" The parrot looked across the gulf of space at Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet, but she presented no opportunities nor anything it might get hold of. It contented itself with worrying at an upholstered chair-button. Snip! That was the way to do it. The parrot noticed there were several other buttons within reach on the chair's back, and crying "Ooooh! Ha ha ha," it carefully removed every one in sight. Biting neat triangular holes in the upholstery with which to pull itself up, it scaled the chair's arm and stepped out on the lamp table.

"You're a naughty boy and you don't get a treat," it declared, looking speculatively up at the lamp, which had a number of jet beads pendent from its green glass shade. Straining on tiptoe, it caught one and gave it a good pull. The lamp tilted, tottered and fell to the floor, where it broke and rolled, pouring forth a long curved spill of kerosene. It came to rest in the hearth.

"Oh, my," said the parrot. It looked at the broken lamp with one eye and then with the other. "Oh, what have you done now? Bad! Too bad!"

With a soft whoosh flames bloomed in the hearth. They leaped high as the lamp tinkled and shattered further, throwing bits out into the room. The parrot ducked and drew back, then stared again as the inevitable tongue of blue flame advanced over its kerosene road across the floor, right to M. Heurtebise's scattered correspondence and the cane chairs whereon reposed Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet.

"Oooh!" said the parrot brightly. "Oooh, la la la!"

Lewis had been carefully sliding the stable bolt out of its recess in tiny increments, nudging it along with an old putty knife he had slipped between the planking. He had only another inch to go when he heard the breaking glass, the roar of flames.

'Tikes!" he said, and gave up on any effort to be polite. He punched his fist through the door, opened the bolt, dragged the door to one side and scrambled out. In horror he saw the flames dancing within the office, heard the mortals upstairs begin to shout.

He was across the courtyard in less than the blink of an eye, and yanked the office door off its hinges.

"Good evening," said the parrot as it walked out and past him, its little claws going tick tick tick on the flagstones. Lewis gaped down at it before looking up to see the first flames rising around Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet.

He was never certain afterward just what he did next, but what hewas doing immediately after that was running down the street with the mummy case once again balanced on his head, in some pain as his hair smoldered. He heard the rattle of a motorcar overtaking him, and Lady Kiu slammed on the brakes.

"You're late," she said. Lewis tossed Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet into the back seat of the Vauxhall and dove in headfirst after her, not quite getting all the way in before Lady Kiu let out the clutch, downshifted, stepped on the gas again and they sped away.

"I'm sorry!" Lewis said, when he was right side up again. "All sorts of things went wrong—most unexpectedly—and—"

"You idiot, you've gotten grease on the seats," snarled Lady Kiu.

"Well, I'm sorry it isn't attar of roses, but I've had a slightly challenging time!" Lewis replied indignantly, clenching his fists.

"Don't you dare to address an Executive Facilitator in that manner, you miserable little drone—"

"Oh, yeah? I've got pretty good programming for a drone, your Ladyship. I can perform all kinds of tasks a Facilitator is supposed to do herself!"

"Really? I can tell you one thing you won't be doing—"

"Oh, as though I was ever going to get to do that anyway—"

They careened around a corner and pulled up at the waterfront, where Lady Kiu's yacht was even now on the point of casting off. The Vauxhail's headlights caught in long beams three burly security techs, waiting by the gangway. They ran forward and two of them seized the mummy case to muscle it aboard. The third, in the uniform of a chauffeur, came to attention and saluted. Lady Kiu flung open the door and stepped out on the running board, as the motor idled.

"Take that to the laboratory cabin immediately! We're leaving at once. You, Galba, take the Vauxhall. Meet us in Alexandria. I want the slime cleaned off the upholstery by the time I see it again. That includes you, Lewis. Move!"

"Oh, bugger o—" said Lewis as he climbed from the back seat, his words interrupted as he found himself staring down a rifle barrel.

"Where's the damned mummy case?" said Flinders Petrie.

"How'd you get here?" asked Lewis, too astonished to say anything else.

"Railway handcar," said Flinders Petrie, grinning unpleasantly. "The fellaheen found one hidden away the other day and I thought to myself, I'll just bet somebody's planning to use this to get to the Nile with stolen loot. So I confiscated the thing. Threw a spanner into your plans, did it?" He had apparently traveled in his pink ballet ensemble, though he'd sensibly put on boots for the journey; his slippers hung around his neckby their ribbons, like a dancer in a painting by Degas. Nor had he come alone; behind him stood Ali and several of the other fellaheen, and they were carrying clubs.

"Look, I'm sorry, but you must have realized by now the sarcophagus was a fake!" said Lewis. "What in Jove's name do you want?"

"It may be a fake, but it's a three-thousand-year-old fake, and I want to know how it was done," said Petrie imperturbably. "I'm still wearing my insanity defense; so you'd best start talking."

"What is this?" Lady Kiu strode around the motorcar and stopped, looking at the scene in some amusement and much contempt. "Lewis, don't tell me you've broken the heart of an elderly transvestite." Petrie lifted his head to glare at her, and then his eyes widened.

"You're the woman on the mummy case!" he said.

Lewis groaned.

"And it's a smart monkey, too," said Kiu coolly. She began to walk forward again, but slowly. "Too bad for it."

Lewis scrambled to get in front of her.

"Now—let's be civilized about this, can't we?" he begged. "Professor, please, go home!" Even Petrie had backed up a step at the look on Kiu's face, and Ali and the others were murmuring prayers and making signs to ward off evil. Then Petrie dug in his heels.

"No!" he said. "No, by God! I won't stand for this! My life's work has been deciphering the truth about the past. I've had to dig through layers of trash for it, I've had to fight the whole time against damned thieves; but if creatures like you have been meddling in history, planting lies—then how am I to know what the truth really is? How can I know that any of it means anything?"

"None of it means anything at all, mortal," said Kiu. "Your life's work is pointless. There's not a wall you can uncover that hasn't got a lie inscribed on it somewhere."

"Stop it, Kiu! Why should we be at odds, Professor?" Lewis said. "My masters could do a lot for you, you know, if you worked for them. Money. Hints about the best places to dig. All you'll have to do is keep your mouth shut about this embarrassing little incident, you see? The Company could use a genius like you!"

"You're trying to bribe the monkeys? That's so foolish, Lewis," said Kiu. "They're never satisfied with the morsel they're given. Better to silence them at the outset. Galba, kill the servants first." Galba, watching in shock from the other side of the motorcar, licked his lips.

"Lady, I—"

"It's forbidden, Galba. Kiu, you can't kill them!" Lewis protested. "You know history can't be changed!"

"It can't be changed, but it can be forgotten," said Kiu. "Fact efface-ment, we Facilitators call it." She looked critically at Petrie. "Mortal brains are so fragile, Lewis. Especially all those tiny blood vessels... especially in an old man. If I were to provoke just the right hemorrhage in a critical spot, he might become... quite confused."

She reached out her hand toward Petrie, smiling.

"No! Stop! God Apollo, Kiu, please don't damage his mind!" Lewis cried. "Haven't you scanned him yet? Can't you see? He's unique, he's irreplaceable, you mustn't do this!" Lady Kiu rolled her eyes.

"Lewis, darling," she said in tones of barely-controlled exasperation, "How many ages will it take you to learn that not one of the wretched little creatures is irreplaceable? Or unique? Nothing is."

"That's a damned lie," said Flinders Petrie, from the bottom of his soul, and took aim at her throat with the rifle, though his hands were trembling so badly it was doubtful he'd have hit her.

"OH!" cried Lewis suddenly, in a theatrical voice. "Oh, Lady, look out, he'll damage you!" He launched himself at Kiu and bore her backward. Before she had recovered from her shock and begun to claw at him they were both teetering on the edge of the pier, and then they had gone over into the Nile with a splash. Galba ran to see what was happening in the water. He glanced over his shoulder at the mortals, and then made a conscious choice not to notice what they did. Killing wasn't in his job description, nor was taking the blame for a bad field decision.

Petrie looked at the Vauxhall, still idling.

"Khaled, you know how to work these machines, don't you?"

"Yes, sir." Needing no other hint, Khaled vaulted into the driver's seat. Ali and another Qufti lifted Petrie between them, as gently as though he were made of eggshell, and set him beside Khaled in the front. The rest of them piled into the back or jumped onto the running boards. Khaled swung the motorcar around and sped off into the ancient night, under the ancient moon, while behind them crocodiles scrambled hastily onto the banks of the ancient Nile. Like Galba, they knew when to stay out of a fight.

But as he rode along Petrie stiffened in his seat, for he heard a voice—or perhaps it would be more correct to say that he felt a voice, drifting into his mind from the ether, hanging before his internal eye like a smoke signal.

... we'll be in touch, mortal...

He looked over his shoulder, and shivered.

"Khaled, drive faster."

The stars were fading and the yacht was well downriver by the time Lewis was sitting in the laboratory cabin, completing the last pass along Princess Sit-Hathor-Yunet's case with a whirring saw. On the floor by his chair, a silver bucket of melted ice slopped gently to and fro with the motion of the river, and the champagne bottle in it rolled and floated.

Lady Kiu stood watching him. Both of them wore bathrobes. Lady Kiu merely looked damp and furious, but Lewis looked damp and battered. There were red lines healing on his arms where claw marks had recently been, and one of his eyes was still a little puffy and discolored, suggesting that an hour or two ago he had had a remarkable shiner. Some of his hair seemed to have gone missing, as well. But he was smiling as he heard a crack and then the faint hiss of decompression. The mummy case's inner seal gave way.

"Perfect," he said, and set down the saw, and with quick skilled hands lifted the lid of the case.

"Look! It's a remarkable body of work!" he chortled. Lady Kiu merely curled her lip, but there was a certain satisfaction in her gaze as she regarded the occupant of the mummy case. On first glance it appeared to be a mummy, neatly wrapped in linen strips white as cream. It was, however, a great deal of rolled papyrus, cunningly laid out to approximate a human form. Lewis reached in with a tiny, sharp pair of scissors and snipped here and there. He lifted out a single scroll, sealed in wax, and looked at the inscription.

"The complete text of the Story qf Sinuhe," he murmured. "Oh, my. And what's this one? The Book of the Sea People, gosh! And here's the Great Lament for Tammuz, and... this is the True Story qf Enkiddu, and this one appears to be—wait—ah! This is your prize. The Book of the Forces that Repel Matter."

He held up a thick scroll bound twice with a golden band, and Lady Kiu snatched it from him. She looked at it hungrily.

"You'll do the stabilization on this one first," she ordered, handing it back to him. "It's the most important. The rest is nothing but rubbish."

"My predecessor doesn't seem to have thought so," remarked Lewis. "What a lovely haul! The Hymns to the God Osiris, the Hot Fish Book (racy stuff, that), the Story the Silk Merchants Told Menes. And look here! Opinions of all Peoples on the Creation of the World!"

"Manetho was a pointless little drone, too," said Kiu. "It doesn't matter; we'll find private buyers for that stuff. But you'll have the scroll on antigravity ready to go by the time we reach Alexandria, do you hear me? Averill will be waiting there and it's got to go straight to Philadelphia with him."

"Yes, Great Queen," said Lewis, looking dreamily over the scrolls, "Care for a glass of champagne to celebrate?"

"Go to hell," she told him, and stalked to the doorway. There she paused, and turned; all the witchery of charm she had learned in eleven millennia was in her smile, if not in her dead and implacable eyes.

"But don't worry about the mission report, Lewis darling. There won't be a word of criticism about your performance," she said silkily. "You're still such a juvenile, it wouldn't be fair. There was a time when the mortals impressed me, too. There will come a time when you're older, and wiser, and you'll be just as bored with them as I am now. Trust me on this."

She took two paces back and leaned from the waist, bending over him, and ran a negligent hand through his hair. She put her lips close to his ear and whispered:

"And when you're dead inside, like me, Lewis dear, and not until then—you'll be free. But you won't care anymore."

She kissed him and, rising, made her exit.

Alone, Lewis sat staring after her a moment before shrugging resolutely.

He opened the champagne and poured his solitary glass. His hair was already beginning to grow back, and the retina of his left eye had almost completely reattached. And, look! There was the rising sun streaming in through the blinds, and green papyrus waved on the river bank, and pyramids and crocodiles were all over the place. The ancient Nile! The romance of Egypt!

He had even been shot at by Flinders Petrie.

Lewis sipped his champagne and selected a scroll from the cache. Not The Book of the Forces that Repel Matter; that was all very fascinating in its way, and would in time guarantee that Americans would rediscover antigravity (once they got around to deciphering a certain scroll, long forgotten in a museum basement), but it wasn't his idea of treasure.

He took out the Story qf Sinuhe and opened it, marveling at its state of preservation. Settling back in his chair, he drank more champagne and gradually lost himself in the first known novel. He savored the words of mortal men. The Nile bore him away.

This story got started in Mendocino at a beautiful restored Victorian hotel, with a new garden-court restaurant built on to the side. To get into the restaurant you have to cross the hotel lobby and pass through the old bar beyond. This is what I was doing when the story arrived, full-blown, out of nowhere-.

The bright summer day went to black and I saw them there, three women and two men, staring fixedly at a cheap radio in a bakelite case on the back of the bar. Everything looked shabby and old. Two kerosene lanterns and the dim orange glow of the radio dial were the only lights. It was dark as pitch outside and raining hard, and ice-cold. The people were frightened about something. The Hotel at Harlan's Landing

There was just the five of us in the bar that night.

The lumber mills were all shut down for good and there hadn't been a ship come up to the wharf in years. No more big schooners down there in the cove, with their white sails flying in at eye level to the bluff top like clouds. Dirty little steamers stayed well out on the horizon and never came in, going busily to San Francisco or Portland. Nothing to come in for, at Harlan's Landing.

All this stuff the weekenders find so cute now, the gingerbread cottages and the big emporium with its grand false front and the old hotel here—you wouldn't have thought they were much then, when they were gray wood beaten into leaning by the winter storms, paint from the boom days all peeled off. No Heritage Society to save us, no tourists with cash to spend. Nobody had cash to spend. It was 1934. I couldn't keep the hotel open, but after the Volstead Act was repealed I opened the bar downstairs and things brightened up considerably. Our own had some place to go, had sort of a social life now, see?

We come that close to being a ghost town that everybody needed to know there was still a place with the yellow lights shining out through the windows, fighting to stay alive. And it wasn't like there was anyplace else to go anyhow, not with the logging road washed out in winter, which was the only other way to get here from the city back then. I felt I sort of owed the rest of them.

Especially I owed Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina. I had that awful year in 1929 when Mama got the cancer and I lost Bill, that was my husband, he was one of the crew on the San Juan, see. They were realkind to me then. Stayed by me when I wanted to just die. Aunty Irina baked bread, and Uncle Jacques fixed the typewriter and told me what I ought to write to the damn insurance people when they weren't going to pay. People who'll help you clean your house for a funeral twice in one year are good friends, believe you me.

Then, if Uncle Jacques hadn't kept the Sheep Canyon trail cleared we'd have had nothing to eat but venison, because there'd have been no way I could have got the buckboard through to Notley for provisions most of the time. It must have been hard work, even for him, just one man with an axe busting up those redwood snags; because of course Lanark was no use. But Uncle Jacques looked after all of us, he and Aunty Irina. They said it was a good thing to have a human community. And, see, once I opened the bar, there was some place to go. Lanark didn't have to stay alone in his shack watching the calendar pages turn brown, and Miss Harlan didn't have to stay alone in her cottage hearing the surf boom and wondering if Billy was going to come walking up out of the water to haunt her. I didn't have to sit alone in my room over the lobby, thinking how my folks would scold me because I hadn't kept the brass and mahogany polished like I ought to have. And Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina had a nice little human community they could come down and be part of for a while, so they didn't have to sit staring at each other in their place up on Gamboa Ridge.

I had it real cozy here. That potbellied stove in the corner worked then; fire inspector won't let us use it now, but I used to keep it going all night with a big basket of redwood chunks, and I lit the room up bright with kerosene lamps and moved some of the good tables and chairs down from the hotel rooms. Uncle Jacques brought me a radio he'd tinkered with, he called it a wireless, and I don't know if it ran on a battery or what it had in it, but we set it behind the bar and we could get it to pull in music and shows. We had Jack Benny for Canada Dry and Chandu the Magician, and Little Orphan Annie, and even Byrd at the South Pole sometimes.

So Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina would dance if there was music, and Miss Harlan would sit watching them, and I'd pour out applejack for everybody or maybe some wine. I used to get the wine, good stuff, from a man named Andy Lopez back in Sheep Canyon. Lanark would drink too much of it, but at least he wasn't a mean drunk. We'd all be happy in the bar, warm and bright like it was, though the rest of the hotel was echoing and dark, and outside the night was black and empty too. And that night it was black with a Pacific gale, but not empty. The wind was driving the sleet sideways at the windows, the wild airblustered and fought in the street like the sailors used to on Saturday nights. Every so often the sky would light up horizon to horizon, purple and white lightning miles long, and for a split second there'd be the town outside the windows like it was day but awful, with the black empty buildings and the black gaps in the sidewalk where the boards had rotted out, and the sea beyond breaking so high there was spume flying up the street, blown on the storm. You wouldn't think we'd be getting any radio reception at all, but whatever Uncle Jacques had done to that thing, it was picking up a broadcast from some ballroom in Chicago. And damned if the bandleader didn't play Stormy Weather! Aunty Irina pulled Uncle Jacques to his feet. He slipped his arm around her and they two-step shuffled up and down in front of the bar, smiling at each other. Miss Harlan watched them, getting a little misty-eyed like she always did at anything romantic, and she sang along with the music. Lanark was pretty sober yet and making eyes at me from his table, and I smiled back at him because he did still use to be handsome then, in a wrecked kind of way.

He had just said, "Damn, Luisa, you throw a nice party," and I was just about to say something sassy back when the music was drowned out by a crack-crack-crack and screeching static, so awful Miss Harlan and me put our hands over our ears, and Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina stopped short and stood apart, looking like a couple of greyhounds on the alert.

Then we heard the call numbers and the voice out of the storm, telling us that some vessel called the Argive was in trouble, two aboard, and could the Coast Guard help? And I wondered how the radio had switched itself over to the marine band, but it was Uncle Jacques's radio so I guess it might have done anything. They gave their location as right off Gamboa Rock, and I felt sick then. See it out there? That's Gamboa Rock. See the way the water kind of boils around it, even on a nice summer day like this, and that little black line of shelf trailing out from it? It used to be a ship-killer, and a man-killer too, and we all knew the Argive wasn't ever going to see any Coast Guard rescue, if that was where she was. Not in weather like that.

And in the next big flash of lightning we could see the poor damned thing through the windows, looked like somebody's yacht, rearing on the black water and fighting for sea room. I only saw her for a split second, but I could paint her to this hour the way she looked, almost on her beam-end with her sail flapping. Then the dark swallowed up everything again. There was just a tiny little pinprick light we could still see for a while.

The voice on the radio was high and scared and there wasn't anyCoast Guard answering, and pretty soon they began begging anybody to help them. They must have been able to see our light, I guess. It would have broken your heart to have to sit there and listen, the way they were asking for lifeboats and lines, which we didn't have. We couldn't have got to them anyway.

Lanark had lurched to his feet and was staring out into the storm, and I guess he was thinking how he could have made a try of it in the Sada if she hadn't been rotting up on sawhorses ever since he'd lost his arm. Miss Harian had put her ringers in her ears and was rocking back and forth, and I didn't blame her; she didn't take death too well. I was crying myself, and so was Aunty Irina, wringing her hands, and she was staring up at Uncle Jacques with a pleading look in her eyes but his face was set like stone, and he was just shaking his head. They murmured back and forth in what I guessed was their language, until he said "You know we can't, Rinka."

He sat her down and put his arms around her to keep her there. Lanark and I took a couple of lanterns and went out into the street, but the wind nearly knocked us over and there was nothing to see out there anyway, not now. We got as far as the path down the cliff before another burst of lightning showed us the sea coming white up the stairs, and the old platform that had been below torn away with bits of it bobbing in the surge, and the spray jumping high. I think Lanark would still have tried to go down, but I pulled him away and the fool paid attention for once in his life. Coming back I near broke my leg, stepping in a hole where a plank was gone out of the sidewalk. We were gasping and staggering like we'd swum a mile by the time we got back up on the porch here.

It was lovely warm in the bar, but the voice on the radio had stopped. All that was coming through the ether now was a kind of regular beat of static, pop-pop, pop-pop like that, just a quiet little death knell. I said, "We all need a drink," and poured out glasses of applejack on the house, because that was the only thing on earth I could do. Miss Harian and Lanark came and got theirs quick enough, and he backed up to the stove to warm himself. Uncle Jacques let go of Aunty Irina and stood, only to have her reel upright and slap him hard in the face.

He rocked back on his heels. Miss Harian was beside her right away, she said, "Oh, please don't—it's too awful—" and Aunty Irina fell back in her chair crying.

She said she was sorry, but she couldn't bear sitting there and doing nothing again, when somebody might have been saved. Lanark and I were in a hurry to tell her that nobody could have done anything, thatwe couldn't even get down into the cove because the stairs were washed out, so she mustn't feel too bad. Uncle Jacques brought her a glass, but she pushed it away and tried to get hold of herself. Looking up at us as though to explain, she said, "We had a child, once." Uncle Jacques said, "Rinka, easy," but she went on:

"Adopted. My baby Jimmy. We had him for eighteen years. He wanted to enlist. We thought, well, the war's almost over, let him play soldier if he wants to. He'll be safe. There wasn't any record—but we didn't think about the Spanish influenza. He caught it in boot camp in San Diego. Never even got on the troop carrier. They had him all laid out in his uniform by the time we got there... Only eighteen." Real quiet, Uncle Jacques said, "There was nothing we could have done," as though it was something he'd repeated a hundred times, and she snapped back:

"We should never have let him go! Not with that event shadow—" And she started crying again, crying and cursing. Miss Harian offered her a handkerchief and got her to drink some of her drink, and when she was a little calmer led her off to the ladies' lavatory upstairs to powder her nose. They took one of the kerosene lanterns to find their way, because it was pitch black beyond the bar threshold. A fresh squall beat against the windows, sounding like thrown gravel.

Uncle Jacques dropped down heavy in his seat, and gulped his drink and what was left of Aunty Irina's. Lanark drank too, but he was staring at Uncle Jacques with a bewildered expression on his face. Finally Lanark said, "Your kid died during the war? But... how old are you?" And I thought, oh, hell, because you couldn't trust Lanark with a secret when he drank; that was why we'd never told him the truth about Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina. Uncle Jacques and I looked at each other and then he cleared his throat and said:

"Irina was talking out of her head. It was her kid brother died in boot camp. We did adopt a baby once, but he died of diphtheria. She went a little crazy over it, Lanark. Most times you wouldn't know, but tonight—"

"Oh," said Lanark, and I could see the wheels turning in his head as he decided that was why Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina lived up there alone on Gamboa Ridge, and never had visitors or went up to the city for anything.

I said, "Have another drink, Tom," and that worked like it always did, he came right away and let me fill his glass up. It never took much to get that man to stop thinking, poor thing. Just as well, too. We turned the radio off and I had another drink myself, I was feeling so low, and Lanark drank a bit more and then said we ought to go outat first light to see if there were any bodies washed up at least, so we could bury them Christian until one of us could ride up to the Point Piedras light and have them pass the word to the Coast Guard about the wreck. Uncle Jacques roused himself from his gloom enough to say we'd need to notify the Coast Guard even if we didn't find bodies, so at least the historical record would be correct.

That was about when 1 saw the face outside. I am not a screaming woman. I saw enough God-awful things in this town when it was alive to harden me up. You get some hideous accidents in a sawmill, which I'm sure those folks who eat lunch there now it's a shopping arcade would rather not know about, and a redwood log that jumps the side of the flume doesn't leave much of anybody who gets in its way. Then there's the dead hereabouts, that hooker somebody killed in Room 17 who still cries, or poor Billy Molera who used to come up from the sea and go round and round Miss Harlan's cottage at night, moaning for love of her, and leave a trail of seaweed and sand in her garden come morning. You get used to things.

But it did give me a turn, the white face out there beyond the glass, just glimpsed for a second with its black eyeholes and black gaping mouth. Where I was, perched up on my stool behind the bar, I had a good look at it, though neither Lanark nor Uncle Jacques could have seen the thing. I didn't make a sound, just slopped my drink a little. Uncle Jacques looked up at me sharply. He said, "What's scared you?"

I wasn't going to say, but then we heard it coming up the steps. Two, three steps from the street onto the porch, it must have crossed right here where I'm sitting now, and pushed that door open, that I hadn't bolted at night in ten years. Lanark lifted his head, just noticing it when the blast of cold air came in, and even he heard the floor creaking as it took the ten steps across the dark lobby. Then it was standing in the doorway of the bar, looking in at us.

Its wet clothes were half-shredded away. Water ran down from it onto the floor and it was white as a corpse, all right, except for the red and purple places, like crushed blackberries, where it must have been pounded on the rocks. It had taken a terrible beating. Its mouth was torn, jaw hanging open. But even while I was staring at it I saw the bruises swirling under the skin and fading, the wounds closing up. It lifted its white hand and closed its mouth; reset the jaw with a dick, and the split cheek knit up into a red line that faded too.

Lanark gave a kind of strangled howl, not very loud, and I thought he might be having a heart attack. I thought I might be having one myself. The thing smiled at Uncle Jacques, who right then looked every year of his real age. He didn't smile back.

It pushed its wet hair from its face and it said, "I don't appreciate having to go through all this, you know."

Well, surprise. He had a live person's voice, in fact he sounded cultured, like that Back East guy who used to narrate those newsreels. Uncle Jacques didn't say anything in reply and the stranger went on to say:

"I really thought you'd come out to me. What a hole this is! The Company still hasn't a clue where you've gone; but then, they haven't got our resources."

That was when I knew what he was, and I'd a whole lot rather it'd been some reproachful ghost from the Argive, come to punish us for not trying to save him. Lightning flashed bright in the street, and if it had shown me a whole legion of drowned ghosts standing out there, I'd have yelled for them to come in and help us.

Uncle Jacques had slumped down in his seat, but his eyes were clear and hard as he studied the stranger. He said, "Are you from Budu?" and the stranger said:

"Of course."

Then Uncle Jacques said, "I'll surrender to Budu and nobody else. You go back and tell him that. Nobody else! I want answers from him."

The stranger smiled at that and stepped down into the room. As he came into the lamplight he looked more alive, less pale. He said, "I don't think you're in any position to call the tune, Lavalle. You know what he thinks of deserters. I can't blame you for being afraid of him, but I really think you ought to cut your losses and come quietly now. The fool mortal wrecked my boat; perhaps one of these has an automobile we can appropriate?"

Uncle Jacques shook his head, and the man said, "Too bad. We'll just have to walk out then."

"You don't understand," said Uncle Jacques, "I'm not surrendering to you. I'm giving you a message to deliver. If Budu won't come to me, tell me where he is and I'll go straight to him. Where is he, Arion?" The man he called Arion grinned and shrugged. He said, "All right; you've caught me in a lie. The truth is, we don't know where the old man's got to. He's dropped out of sight. Labienus has been holding the rebellion together. Wouldn't you really rather surrender to him? He's quite a bit more understanding. I'd even call him tolerant, compared to old Budu, who as you know never forgave doubters and weaklings...

"

Then Uncle Jacques demanded to know how long this person called Budu had been missing, and when Arion hemmed and hawed he cut him off short with another question, which was: "He was gone before the war, wasn't he?"

And Arion said, "Probably."

Uncle Jacques showed his teeth and said, "I knew it. I knew he'd never have given that order! Who was that behind the wheel of the archduke's car, Arion? Was that Labienus's man? The epidemic, was that Labienus too?"

His voice was louder than thunder, making the walls rattle; Lanark and I had to clutch at our ears, it hurt so. Arion had stopped smiling at him. He said, like you'd order a dog, "Control yourself! Did you really think history could be changed? Labienus simply arranged it so that things fell out to our advantage. Isn't that what the Company's always done? And be glad he developed that virus! Can you imagine how badly the mortals would be faring right now, if those twenty-two million hadn't died of influenza first?

Think of all those extra mouths to be fed in the bread lines."

Uncle Jacques said, "But innocents died," and Arion just laughed scornfully and said:

"None of them are innocent."

I swear, Uncle Jacques's eyes were like two coals. He said, "My son died in that epidemic," and Arion said:

"Yompet mortal died. They do die. Get over it. Look at you, hiding out here on the edge of nowhere!

Labienus is willing to overlook your defection. He'll offer you a much better deal than the Company might, I assure you. Unless you'd like to be deactivated? Is that what you'd prefer, to crawl back on your knees to all-merciful Zeus for oblivion?"

Uncle Jacques just told him to get out.

But Arion said, "Don't be stupid! He knows where you are. What am I going to have to do before you'll see reason?"

He looked at Lanark, who was just sitting there gaping, and then over at me. I wanted to dive behind the bar, but I knew the shotgun wouldn't stop him. Uncle Jacques said, "You're going to kill them anyway."

Arion sighed. He said, "You chose to hide behind them, Lavalle. But you can save them unnecessary suffering, you see? I'm tired, I'm cold, we've got a long walk ahead of us and I want that mortal's coat. Don't make me wait any longer than I have to, or I'll pull off his remaining arm. Let's go, shall we?" I guess that was when Uncle Jacques took his chance. I couldn't see, because they were both suddenly moving so fast they were only blurs in the air, but things began to smash, and I threw myself down on the floor and just prayed to Jesus.

They don't fight like us. You would think, being the creatures that they are, that they'd shoot lightning at each other, or fight with flaming swords, but it sounded more like a couple of animals snarling andstruggling. Once when the fight got too close to me, I saw the wall panel next to my head just burst outward in splinters, and a second later there was four long gashes there, like a bear had clawed it. You can still see it, down near the floor, where we filled it in with wood putty later. I don't know how long it lasted. Suddenly it got a whole lot louder, as something crashed straight down through the ceiling and there was a new voice screaming, shrill as a banshee. Right after that there was a wet-sounding thud and then it was quiet.

You can bet I was cautious as I got up and peered over the bar. There was Uncle Jacques, sitting up supported by Aunty Irina kneeling beside him, and he had his hand up to his face and it looked like one of his eyes was gone. She was still snarling at Arion, who lay on the floor with his throat slashed open, and she had got a crowbar from somewhere and run it through his chest, too. There was blood everywhere.

Lanark was still where he'd been sitting, wide-eyed and white-faced. I heard footsteps above and looked up to see Miss Harlan peering down through the hole in the ceiling, and by the light of the kerosene lantern she was pretty pale too. God only knows what I looked like, but my hair had come half down and was full of dust and splinters.

I collected myself enough to say, "That's one of those people you're hiding from," to Aunty Irina. She looked up, I guess startled at the sound of a human voice, and after a moment she said yes, it was. I found a clean rag and brought it for Uncle Jacques, who pressed it to his eye and thanked me. He got unsteadily to his feet, and I saw his coat was about half ripped off his back, just hanging in ribbons. The skin underneath seemed to be healing, though. The edges of his cuts were running together like melting wax.

I said, "At least you got the bastard," and Aunty Irina shook her head grimly. She said:

"He's just in fugue," and I looked at Arion and saw that the wound in his throat was already closing up. Aunty Irina made a disgusted noise. She drew a knife from her boot and cut his jugular again. It only bled a little this time, I guess because he didn't have a lot of blood come back to flow yet. I asked, "What happens now?" and Uncle Jacques said hoarsely:

"We'll have to run again." He looked around at the mess of the bar and added, "I'm sorry." Lanark began to cry then, that dry hacking men cry with, and I knew he'd been scared clean out of his mind. Aunty Irina went over to him and took his face in both her hands and kissed him, a deep kiss like they were lovers, and then she stared into his eyes and talked to him quietly. He began to blink and look confused.

Uncle Jacques meanwhile crouched with a groan and took Arion by the feet, starting to drag him backwards toward the door.

Aunty Irina turned quickly and said, "Leave that. You just sit and repair your eye." He said, "Okay," and sat down, breathing pretty hard. They feel pain as much as we do, you see. What happened was that we had to do it, me and Aunty Irina, and as we were dragging the body out through the lobby Miss Harlan came down with the lantern and helped us. Every so often as we took him up the road to the sawmill, he'd start moving a little, and we'd have to stop while Aunty Irina cut him again. The wind almost blew out the lantern and the rain soaked us through. Still, we got him up there at last.

We found a couple of old rusty saws in an office, and they didn't work real well, but Aunty Irina showed us how to do it so he'd come apart in a couple of places. She explained how nothing could kill him, but the more damage we did, the longer it'd be before he could piece himself together to come after her and Uncle Jacques. So we did a lot to him. It was hard work, just three women there working by one kerosene lantern, and the rain coming through the roof the whole time in steady streams. You don't think women could do something like that? You don't know the things we have to do, sometimes. And knowing the kind of creature he was made it easier.

Most of him we dropped down a pit, and used the old crane to send a couple of redwood logs after him, and I reckon they weighed a couple of tons apiece. I'm not telling you where we put the rest of him. It might have been near dawn when we finished and came back, but it was still black as midnight, and the storm wasn't letting up. There was two empty bottles on the bar and Lanark had passed out on the floor. Uncle Jacques had made himself an eyepatch. He said it'd be likely another day before he got his eye working again.

I offered to fix them some breakfast before they set out. They thanked me kindly but said they had better not. They gave us some careful instructions, me and Miss Harlan, about what to look out for and what to say to anybody else who came looking around. They told us some other stuff, too, like what that awful Hitler was going to do pretty soon and about International Business Machines stocks. Cut off from the world like we were, we couldn't make a lot of use of it, but it was nice of them. And they apologized. They said they'd only been trying to make the world a better place for people, and it had all gone wrong somehow.

I got one of Papa's coats down for Uncle Jacques, and he shruggedout of the bloody torn one he had on. I burned it in the stove later. It flared up in some strange colors, I tell you. Then they walked out together into that awful night, poor people, and we never saw them again. When Lanark sobered up he said he didn't remember anything, but he never asked any questions either, like why there was a hole in the ceiling or where all the blood had come from. We cleaned up and mended as best we could. One thing we had plenty of in this town was lumber, anyhow. That's all. The radio worked for a few years, and when it finally broke we couldn't fix it, so I put it away in the attic. We missed it, especially once the war started, but maybe we were better off not worrying about that, with what we'd been told.

Lanark never talked about what happened in so many words, but one time when he was sober he told me he'd figured out that Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina must have been Socialists, because of the way they talked, and maybe J. Edgar Hoover had come after them. I told him he was probably right. Anyway nobody else ever came sniffing around after them. There was a wildfire across Gamboa Ridge a few years later, 1938 that would have been, and now there's only an old rusted stove back in the manzanita to show where their house was.

Lanark drank more after that, but why shouldn't he, and it got so I'd have to walk him home nights to be sure he got there. Sometimes he kissed me at the door, but he was too broken up to do anything else. Eventually I'd have to go make sure he was still alive in the mornings, too. One morning he wasn't. That was back in 1942, I guess.

Miss Harlan lived on a good long time in that cottage, kept Billy waiting until 1957 before she went off into the sea with him. At least, I imagine that's what happened; the door was standing open, the house all full of damp, and there was a trail of sand clear from her room down to the beach, like confetti and rice after a wedding. Nobody haunts the place now. That snooty woman sells her incenses and herbal teas out of it, but I have to say she keeps the garden nice.

So I'm the last one that knows.

I kept the bar open. Right after the war the highway was put through, and those young drifters found the shacks that didn't belong to anybody and started living in them, with their beat parties and poetry. Then later the hippies came in, and pretty soon rich people from San Francisco discovered the place, and it was all upscale after that.

Not that it's a bad thing. When Kevin and Jon offered me all that money for the hotel, I was real happy. Being the way they are, I knew they'd fix everything up beautiful, which they have, too, mahogany andbrass all restored so 1 don't have to feel guilty about it anymore. They're kind to me. I stay on in my old room and they call me Nana Luisa, and that's nice.

They sit me out here in this chair so I can watch everything going on, all along the street, and sometimes they'll bring guests and introduce me as the town's official history expert, and I get interviewed for newspapers now and then. I tell them about the old days, just the kinds of stuff they want to hear. I listen more than I talk. Mostly I just like to watch people.

It's pretty now, with the flower gardens and art galleries, and the cottages all lived in by rich folks with sports cars, and you'd never think there'd been whorehouses or saloon brawls here. The biggest noise is the town council complaining about the traffic jams we get weekends. People talk about how Harlan's Landing was such an unspoiled weekend getaway once, and how more tourists are going to ruin it. They don't know what ruin is.

I look out my window at night and there's lights in all the little houses, the human community all nice and cozy and thinking they're here to stay, but that cold black night out there is just as heartless as it was, and a lot bigger than they are. Anything could happen. I know. The lights could go out, dwindling one by one or all at once, and there'd be nothing but the sea and the dark trees behind us, and maybe one roomful of folks left behind, lighting a lamp in the window so they don't feel so alone. But I don't worry much about Arion.

Even with all the restoration and remodeling, even with them selling T-shirts and kites and ice cream out of the sawmill now, nobody's ever found any of him. He's still down there, under that new redwood decking, and sometimes at night I hear him moaning, though people think it's just the wind in a sea cave. He's growing back together, or growing himself some new parts; Aunty Irina said he might do either. He will get out one of these days, but I figure I'll be dead by the time he does. That's one of the advantages to being a mortal.

I do worry about my sweetie boys, I'm afraid this AIDS epidemic will get them. I wonder if it's something to do with that Labienus fellow, the one Uncle Jacques told me cooks up epidemics because he hates mortal folk. And I wonder if Uncle Jacques and Aunty Irina found a new place to hide, some shelter in out of the black night, and how the war for power over the Earth is going. Because that's what it is, see. I'm not crazy, honey. It's all there in the Bible. For some have entertained angels unawares, but some folks get let in on their secrets, you follow me? And it isn't a comforting thing to know the truth about angels.

***

"Introduction: The Hounds of Zeus," copyright © 2002 by Kage Baker.

"The Dust Enclosed Here," first published in Asimov's, March 2001.

"Facts Relating to the Arrest of Dr. Kalugin," first published in Asimov's, October/November 1997.

"Hanuman," first published in Asimov's, April 2002.

"The Hotel at Harlan's Landing," copyright © 2002 by Kage Baker. Unpublished.

"Lemuria Will Rise!" first published in Asimov's, May 1998.

"The Likely Lad," first published in Asimov's, September 2002.

"The Literary Agent," first published in Asimov's, July 1998.

"Monster Story," first published in Asimov's, June 2001.

"Noble Mold," first published in Asimov's, March 1997.

"Old Flat Top," copyright © 2002 by Kage Baker. Unpublished.

"The Queen in Yellow," copyright © 2002 by Kage Baker. Unpublished.

"Smart Alec," first published in Asimov's, September 1999.

"Studio Dick Drowns Near Malibu," first published in Asimov's, January 2001.

"The Wreck of the Gladstone," first published in Asimov's, October/November 1998. Copyright © 2002 by Kage Baker. These stories were first published in slightly different form and appear here in the author's preferred text.

Edited by Marty Halpern

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Baker, Kage.

Black projects, white knights : the company dossiers / by Kage Baker. — 1st ed. p. cm. ISBN

1-930846-11-8 (alk. paper)

1. Immortalism—Fiction. 2. Time travel—Fiction. 3. Science fiction, American. I. Title. PS3552.A4313 B55 2002

813'.54—dc21 2002002503

Printed in the United States of America. First Edition

Three thousand copies of this book have been printed by the Maple-Vail Book Manufacturing Group, Binghamton, NY, for Golden Gryphon Press, Urbana, IL. The typeset is Caxton Light and Bold with display set in Quixley, on 55# Sebago. The binding cloth is Arrestox B. Typesetting by The Composing Room, Inc., Kimberly, WI.

Originally scanned by Avagadro Damangathang Munroe.

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