“Look at the map,” Eddie said. “See that ridge to the left? Check our course.”
She studied the map and pencilled in their current path.
“We’re doing fine. This is the right direction.”
He took a long drink of water from the plastic bottle next to his seat. “You didn’t tell me—what was this dig, exactly?”
She didn’t turn her head from the view. “Some tomb. What else?”
“What dynasty, do you know?”
“I can’t even remember. Five thousand years ago, something like that.”
“Fourth Dynasty, then, probably. My favorite. What did they find? I didn’t know there were any mortuary structures out this far. We’re going a long way past the usual border of ancient civilization.”
“They didn’t find much.” She sat back into her seat and looked over at him. “Just a few artifacts, nothing major.” After a several days talking to Eddie, the American idiom had become quite natural for her. “I’m embarrassed to say I don’t know much about it.” She would have to come up with something more convincing than that before they arrived.
Eddie looked at her. He was smiling slightly. Slowly, he said, “You’re wondering what you’re going to tell me when we get there, aren’t you?”
Her eyes met his, but she kept her face casual. “What do you mean?”
“Pruit, you aren’t a bad liar,” he said. “It’s just not possible to appear completely normal when you’re new somewhere and you’re spending a lot of time with someone who’s not new.”
She felt a jolt in her stomach. “What do you mean?” she asked again.
“There are too many little things. I wouldn’t have noticed if I’d seen you for an hour, but it’s been three days. The way you spoke when we first met. The way you tasted my omelet yesterday morning—like you had no idea what you were in for. But, mostly, it was the pyramid. And the crystal.”
“The crystal,” Pruit said quietly. “What do you know about that?”
Eddie stuck a hand in one of his pockets, pulled something out, and handed it to her. It was a crystal, orange with green bands, much like her own. It was undoubtedly of ancient Kinley origin, and her heart sped up. She would have to get it into her crystal reader as soon as possible.
“I know I found this one and six just like it buried in a temple that’s been under the ground for five thousand years,” Eddie said. “I know we don’t have the ability to make a crystal like this now. I know it’s not natural.”
“You found this at your dig?” she asked, and now she felt a pang of panic. Had she overlooked something? Was Eddie’s dig site in some way relevant to her mission?
“Tell me who you are, Pruit.”
“You tell me,” she said.
“At first, I thought you were an archaeologist, someone who had been to Egypt before. But it was obvious after a few minutes that that couldn’t be the case. Then I thought you had stolen your crystal from another dig site, or someone had stolen it and given it to you. Then you and I went into the pyramid and it shook, and you didn’t seem the least bit surprised.”
“Why should I have been surprised? The guard told us it had been shaking for several weeks.”
“So now,” he continued, ignoring her, “I’ve started to think that you’re not from here at all.”
“What are you saying?”
“I’m saying Earth isn’t your home.”
She smiled somewhat condescendingly at his earnest look. “That’s a fairly drastic conclusion from pretty flimsy evidence.”
“Yes, I know,” he said, his voice now betraying excitement. “It sounds crazy, and truthfully, it never would have occurred to me. But yesterday afternoon I went into your room.”
She stared at him, and her smile evaporated. Her supplies and tools were essential to her mission, and there was no excuse for leaving them unguarded. “You went into my room?” she asked quietly.
“I was looking for the crystal. But I found your backpack, and inside it was that that red suit of yours. It took twenty minutes for me to figure out how to unroll it, but eventually, I did. I put my hand in one of the sleeves, and I watched those arms grow out. Grow out! Into my skin! Are you going to tell me that was made somewhere on Earth?”
She held his gaze, then looked away, back out at the desert.
“Tell me who you are, Pruit.”
“I’m not sure you’d want me to tell you,” she said quietly. “It would change things for you.”
“Good!” Eddie looked away, saying nothing for several moments. Then, almost whispering, he said, “I’ve been coming to Egypt since I was a teenager and wandering and meeting strangers and hoping for…something. My whole life I’ve wanted to believe that you exist.”
“Me?”
“Someone like you.”
She looked at him skeptically.
“There are huge holes in the history of our race,” he said. “Maybe you can explain some of those dark areas.”
Pruit smiled at him, with some pity. It was up to her who she took into her confidence. If Eddie ever proved to be trouble, she could easily make sure he never had the chance to betray her. But he seemed to think her mission would solve some personal dilemma for him. “I am here to shed light on ancient mysteries. But not yours so much as my own.”
“So I’m right?”
“Yes. I am new to Earth.”
She did not elaborate, though she could see he had an avalanche of questions waiting.
“Just tell me this,” he said, “are you bringing changes to Earth?”
“Eddie, your world is no concern of mine. I only hope to find what I need and then leave this place behind.”
Slowly, he nodded. “I’m happy to be the one helping you,” he said seriously. “No,” he corrected himself. “I’m ecstatic to be the one helping you.”
“I appreciate your help.” She sighed, then activated the skinsuit control panel on her left forearm. Eddie watched intently, but did not comment. She marked their current precise coordinates on the map. “This is so much easier than trying to estimate with your compass.”
The sight of the skinsuit was a final piece of proof, and he began to laugh quietly. “Will you tell me what we’re going to find?”
“Something very old and, I hope, very valuable,” she said. “At least to me.” She said no more, partly because she enjoyed keeping Eddie in suspense, partly because she did not want to explain the entirety of her life and mission just yet. That would be a tiring conversation, and she needed to keep herself fresh as they closed in on their destination. “Now, let’s see what this crystal of yours holds.”
She reached for her backpack and drew out an odd contraption that looked something like a microscope, with a large, irregularly shaped body. It was made out of a crystalline substance with a metallic luster. At the top of it was a double eyepiece.
“What is that?” he asked. “I couldn’t figure it out yesterday.”
She cast him an annoyed glance. “It’s a crystal reader,” she said. “The ancients of my world used crystals for data storage. They hold an incredible amount of information. I want to see if yours is relevant to me.”
She took Eddie’s small crystal and inserted it into the side of the reader. The machine made a soft whirring sound, and the crystal disappeared within it. Pruit peered through the eyepiece. The reader scanned for the first line of data and displayed it, the words spelled out before her in Haight. She scanned through pages and pages and, at last, lifted her head.
“What does it say?” Eddie asked her.
“It’s a medical handbook describing how to use local plants to make medicines for various ills. Very interesting, but not relevant to me, unfortunately.” She handed it back to Eddie.
It was nearly evening when a long, low ridge of rocks came into sight in the distance ahead of them, standing out clearly against the sun in the west. By then, they had been driving for nearly ten hours, and both were exhausted. Pruit continued to watch the coordi
nates as they read out on her arm. It became evident that the rocks were their target.
They drove up to the base of the ridge, then got out of the car, shouldering two large backpacks Eddie had prepared for them, which contained water and food and camping necessities.
“It’s not far,” Pruit said as they reached the rocks and began to pick their way up toward the top of the ridge. “Maybe two hundred feet in a straight line.”
They slowly made their way over dusty, shale-covered rock to the crest of the low ridge and found themselves looking down at several other tiers of ridges stretching away for half a mile. The sun was low in the sky, shining in their eyes and casting long shadows between the rocks. They worked their way through the trough between the first ridge and the next, then to the top of the second rise. Pruit’s eyes were on her suit readout. They were now only thirty feet away. She scanned the rocks, but could see nothing.
“Thirty feet that way,” she told Eddie, pointing. “Can you see anything?”
“No.”
All that was visible were rocks and sand. They continued down and, in a few minutes, arrived in the trough between the second and third ridges. Pruit held her left arm in front of her, watching the coordinates as she moved. Her skinsuit locating device was accurate to about ten feet. In a few moments, her suit informed her that she had arrived.
“Apparently, I’m here.”
Eddie came up next to her, and they scanned the sand.
“There!” he said, pointing to a small depression near the foot of the ridge.
They moved closer and could see that rocks had recently been moved or thrown from the depression—there were several dozen large stones that had been pushed outward from a common center. A few of them were perched precariously on top of each other, in positions that would certainly change over time.
He was here, Pruit thought. It was not a computer. It was a person. I woke him, and he left the cave, just days ago.
“Something happened here recently?” Eddie asked, studying the stones.
“Yes, I think so,” she said. “Let’s dig.” They let their packs drop to the ground, and they began to scoop away sand from the bottom of the depression. The sun was dipping below the horizon now, and the sand around them was in darkness. In moments, their hands touched something hard. They pulled more sand away and saw a dark surface, hard like rock, but too smooth to be natural. Pruit cleared away more sand until she had uncovered a circular hatchway. Its position in the trough between two ridges protected it from wind and weather, and its isolation in the desert kept it far from prying eyes. If the covering rocks had still been in place, it would have been almost impossible to find.
Eddie stared at the hatch, trying to contain himself. “I assume this is it,” he said.
Pruit was too intent at her task to catch the thrilled humor in his voice. Her fingers felt along the edges of the circle, and a small flap of the stone-like material flipped up, revealing a hand pad and a dial of Haight letters. She pulled a folded piece of paper from her pants pocket and read the instructions she had copied out of her mission Master Book. She knew them by heart, but read them carefully anyway. Then she placed her hand in the pad and quickly rotated it in a specific sequence to point at various letters. When she reached the final one, the hatch activated.
A screening force field sprang up, ejecting her hand from the pad and sending her sprawling back onto the sand. The grains of sand that had remained on top of the hatch sprang away. Then the hatch began to move. Silently, it rose up, pulling with it the telescoping vertical tunnel beneath. It rose a foot, clearing the surface level of the sand, then stopped.
“In case the trough had filled with sand,” Eddie said quietly, marveling at the engineering. “The hatch could always rise above it.”
Pruit nodded, but she was searching for far greater feats of engineering. She watched as the hatch silently slid open. As it did, dim yellow lights came on in a room beneath it.
She and Eddie looked at each other.
“Holy Christ,” he breathed.
They looked down through the hatch and saw a stone ladder leading through a narrow chute to a passageway below.
“Let’s go,” she said, her calm voice belying the excitement she felt. She made a quick check of her weapons through her clothes. Then she swung her legs down through hatch, grabbed hold of the ladder, and climbed out of sight. The ladder was about twenty feet long, leading through a chute of the same substance as the hatch, ending three feet above the floor. She dropped down and looked into the passage before her. It was high enough to stand, with an arched ceiling and perfectly smooth walls. Its floor sloped gently downward, leading farther underground. The lights were thin recessed strips that she guessed were using a chemical reaction to generate the yellow glow. They were quite adequate to see by.
“Toss the packs down and come in!” she called up to Eddie.
He did, and she caught them, setting them to one side. Then she could see Eddie against the evening sky as he was making his way down the ladder.
“Shut the hatch if you can.”
He examined the underside of the hatch rim and found a simple tab. He pushed it, and the hatch slid shut above him. He started down the ladder. As he did, the telescoping hatch retracted back to its original level. He smiled at the workmanship. There was no other possible reaction to something so old that worked so well.
They passed down the hallway and came to a full-sized door set in the side wall at the end of the passage. Pruit flipped up the stone cover to the hand pad and, referring again to her paper, entered the combination. Three doors retracted in quick succession, disappearing into the walls on either side. Beyond them was a ten-foot passage and another set of doors. She entered her third combination and watched as the final doors drew away. They found themselves looking in at the sleepers’ cave.
It was a large, rectangular room that appeared, like the tunnel, to be carved from dark rock. The ceiling was low, perhaps nine feet above the floor. Immediately in front of them were the stasis tanks, large, dark, coffin-shaped boxes on bases that held them three feet above the floor. The tanks stretched in a line of eight along the far wall.
They stepped into the cave and saw that there was little else inside. To the immediate right of the door was a shower alcove. On the far left wall a computer of some sort was embedded into the rock. There were several outlines on the walls indicating where sealed storage space would be found. Nothing else.
Eddie let out a low whistle. This was his every archaeological fantasy come true.
Pruit scanned the stasis tanks. The last two, the two just in front of them, had lights on their control panels. There were two sleepers yet alive.
CHAPTER 32
They camped that night in the tunnel outside the stasis chamber, unrolling their sleeping bags and eating a light dinner of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches prepared by Eddie.
Before going to bed, Pruit had entered the commands into the stasis tanks to wake the occupants, and she had discovered that the waking process was lengthy, perhaps as long as three days. She had turned her attention to the computer and had eventually succeeded in waking it up. Its operations were completely unfamiliar to her, however, and she preferred to wait for the two sleeping strangers to join her before she attempted to use it. If they could not help, she would try it again.
She and Eddie had found the large storage closet filled with leather cases of data crystals and paper manuals. Her first urge had been to scan all of the crystals immediately, but she had stopped herself. They had been driving and walking for over twelve hours, and she knew that she was tired. It would be better to examine them with a fresh mind.
So they had each showered, giving each other privacy while doing so, and they were now in their lightest set of clothes, climbing into sleeping bags in the hallway.
They spent the next day in the cave, with Pruit studying every crystal in the crystal reader, while periodically checking on the waking stasis tanks. She w
as concerned that there seemed to be some malfunction with one of the tanks, but the occupant appeared to be waking nonetheless.
Pruit let Eddie look through the reader eyepiece from time to time, but the script was totally alien to him, and he soon occupied himself studying the interior of the cave.
“We don’t know much about the Eschless Funnel,” Pruit explained as she inserted a new crystal and focused the reader. This one was on botany, a library’s worth of information. It would one day prove quite interesting, she was sure, for it addressed the subject from an entirely different perspective than its current orientation on Herrod. But, for the moment, it did not concern her. She set it aside and took up the next crystal. “If we did, perhaps I wouldn’t need to be here. We know it was named for its inventor, Eschless. But, beyond that, we’re in mystery.”
“Why Funnel?”
“Your guess is as good as mine. The current thinking is that the engine funneled the ambient energy of the universe into something useable, but really, who knows? Maybe the engine was just shaped like a funnel.”
“But you know that it was invented,” Eddie said, inspecting the empty stasis tanks. “Wouldn’t that make it possible to duplicate the invention? This isn’t rock, by the way.”
“I think it’s some mixture of rock and metal. Probably much stronger than either on its own. Remind me to take a sample of it. To answer your question, no. It hasn’t been possible to duplicate the Funnel, because we have no record at all of the technology itself. The Funnel was what we call a technological flash, a sudden breakthrough that sends the technology of a whole culture leaping forward instantly. I’m sure Earth has had such flashes.”
“The telephone,” he agreed. “Or the microchip.”
“How can you generate a flash? By its very nature it is the brilliant inspiration that changes the way people think.” She began on a new case of crystals. These took up the subject of atmospherics. Again quite interesting, but not relevant to her search. “We estimate that we are about five hundred years behind our ancestors, technologically. Maybe more. And we can’t wait that long for inspiration.” She expected him to ask why, but his attention had moved to other things.