Cycle of Nemesis (4 page)

“Why do you want it?” I said, not bothering to wonder why I spoke as though I had known him for years.

“I cannot tell you that. I would have been here earlier but my heli was—was damaged. I beg of you—”

Evidently, he did not feel for me any of the strange sense of comradeship I felt for him. I sensed this as a loss to myself.

“I particularly want that globe. I have bid for it and—”

“Money? Is that your problem? I’ll give you double what you gave—”

I smiled at him. Headless naked girls, naked girls pursued by ghastly parodies of monsters of nightmare, men who looked like me, vanishing, and now a man who would pay me two hundred percent for an old but normal globe of the world, all these happenings had occurred to me at what should have been a perfectly respectable country house auction.

I could not get to grips with the vanishing man who looked like me. The girl and the monster had also vanished. And the first headless girl was dead.

But this man stood before me, smiling his strong silent smile, and holding my arm, and offering to pay me over and above for this globe . . . Oh yes, there was no doubt in my mind.

“I think,” I said with exquisite politeness, “you had better come with me. You and I have a few things to say to each other. Oh, yes—and we’ll bring the globe with us, too.”

And I took his hand from my arm and in turn gripped his am in my fist.

The man who
had introduced himself to us as Hall Brennan banged a fist on the table more in compliance with the idea that this would illustrate to us the importance of what he had to say rather than in any habitual intemperance of expression. George Pomfret raised his eyebrows a fraction, as though to say he hardly expected such behavior in his own house, while the girl, Phoebe Desmond, sat hunched together, the bang of the fist startling her and making her shudder deep within herself.

The globe which had aroused such deep passions sat smugly on the floor at our side, where I had moved it out of the direct path of the sunbeams falling through Pomfret’s lounge windows. Pomfret, not at all loathe to leave the odious Benenson to await the Bernini Aphrodite, had agreed with alacrity to my request to use his house for the interview, while Phoebe, clinging to my arm, had refused to stay off. Gannets another minute without a friend at her side.

“For you are my friend, now, Bert. I feel it to be so. We both went through that ghastly experience together and that bonds us—”

“Like the brotherhood of the trenches?”

"You can joke all you like,” she had spat back fiercely. “But you damn well know what I’m talking about and you damn well know it’s true. So there.”

So there we were, gathered around Pomfret’s lounge table and listening to the fairy story being spun by Hall Brennan.

“I’ve been following up clue after clue for twenty years now. Ever since that first time when I saw myself I determined to get to the bottom of it.”

That remark, alone, had hooked me.

“But what brought you to Gannets, just like that?” demanded Pomfret. "I mean—the sale of these wonderful effects has been widely enough advertised.”

Brennan passed a hand across his clipped moustache. He smiled with the rueful air of a man acknowledging that fate is not with him. “The final clue led me to the globe. One globe out of countless thousands—I thought my search had come to an end, and then, like a lucky win on the rocket races for a wetneck, I saw an account of Gannets and the discovery of all those incredible treasures. I came here as fast as I could. My heli—my heli was attacked on the way.”

“Attacked?”

“I’D tell you later.” He produced a pocketknife. “Right now I want to open up that globe.”

“Just a moment, Mr. Brennan.” I felt absolute confidence that I could protect my property in any physical scuffle that might develop, but I harbored the unpleasant conviction that he would prevail upon me to deface the globe merely through power of will. “Just a moment. That globe is mine. I didn’t buy it to be cut open—”

“I know, and I will pay you twice—”

“That’s not the point. I’ll agree to this operation only on condition that you fully satisfy me. In other words, I want to know what’s going on.”

The butter rich slabs of sunshine that lay across the carpet in Pomfret’s lounge and dazzled from his windows, the fresh air, the sound of birds, the scents of

early flowers drifting in across those sunbeams, all these homely natural comforting things chilled as Brennan began to speak,

I felt a tickling pressure on my hand and, opening the fingers, felt Phoebe’s hand snuggled within mine, my fingers grasping and closing over hers.

“The story is very simple,” Brennan said in a dull voice that rang with the echo of lead. "Simple but lethally so. I suppose none of you has heard of the Time Beast? The Time Beast lying for all eternity in his Time Vault? No? Well, I thought not, and it is natural enough, God knows. I sometimes wonder if I am the only one unnatural, accursed, forsaken upon the face of the Earth.

“I speak of Khamushkei the Undying.”

The name splintered deafeningly against my consciousness. I stared around at my companion, and for a moment I thought the ormolu clock on the mantleshelf had stopped ticking, that the dust motes dancing in the sunbeams had stopped trembling.

"Khamushkei the Undying,” Hall Brennan said, on a breath, his head held up, chin high, his fine eyes chips of azure beneath his thick brows. “I speak of the Time Beast in his Vault of Time.”

I swallowed, about to venture some remark, when Pomfret said, “I don’t know the fellow. What’s he got to do with Bert’s globe?”

And the moment of timelessness fractured.

Phoebe laughed and shivered and her fingers tightened in mine.

“The first time I stumbled across the name,” Brennan said with most of his attention focused on me, as much as to say that even though I owned the globe he could at least find a kindred spirit in me and not, alas, a Philistine ass like George or a beautiful numbskull like Phoebe. If he did think that, as I for a moment had guessed he thought, then he would be wrong. Probably I did him an injustice. Brennan went on: “I was poking around some of those very early city-sites they’ve recently discovered and begun to excavate out into the desert from the pipeline from Kirkuk. Of course, all around there and mostly southeasterly is well dug over; I mean, further south, Akkad and Sumer are archaeological tourist traps now.”

“I thought they’d brought the desert back into cultivation now, with grass and seedlings and water and weather control.” I tried not to let my interest in these things cloud my defense of my globe.

“Oh, yes.” Brennan laughed. “Archaeology out there isn’t like the old days, with trial trenches, and thousands of natives for labor, and machines if you have the money, and digging and digging and more digging. How those old boys must have worn out spades by the basketful!”

“What’s this got to do with that—” began Phoebe.

I pressed her hand. “We don’t know, Phoebe,” I said in a low voice although not a whisper, “that what we saw has anything to do with Mr. Brennan.”

“Anything at all has to do with me if it affects my life’s work!” said Brennan with restrained fierceness, as though what he had spoken were a self-evident truth.

“I’ll grant you that,” I told him with a smile. “Get on with the story. You have my interest, at the least.”

“The Tigris, what they called the Hiddekel, has changed its course from time to time, and so has the Euphrates, the Great River. I struck more southerly, had a flier and a couple of friends, and we went archaeologically probing southward, off the usual run. Actually hit some real old-time desert, too. We found ourselves a city.”

The way he spoke convinced me of his sincerity.

“When was this?” I asked. “The last major city discovered, as well as I recall, was that remarkable complex on the outskirts of what had been the Indian Thar desert—fascinating—" I shot it at him. “I don’t remember any new Assyrian city in connection with your name.”

“Point taken,” he returned like a tennis player negligently flicking back a weak backhand. “Naturally, I didn’t publish anything.”

“Naturally?”

His smile chilled me for the first time in our short acquaintance.

“My two friends—good hearted, fine in an emergency —I won’t tell you their names—they’re dead. Both of them. Dead. Khamushkei the Undying. You don’t advertise too much—”

“Go on
!
”

“That city was an eye-opener. Oh, I know we’ve dug up ceramic pots and bits of copper wire and from that theorized that the Babylonian priests worked their idol’s miracles through a crude form of electricity. And much of what we do find we can’t fully understand. You turn up a broken statuette of a nude woman and at once scream ‘Primitive goddesses! Ishtar
!
’ when in all probability what you’ve found is the remains of little Lulu’s best doll. The most simply explained models and pictures in terms of children’s toys or pictures for enjoyment and decoration are invariably given a god or goddess appellation. Nothing ever found is ever anything less than an offering, or an idol or some great and wonderful religious artifact. It’s understandable. It’s far more important sounding and the museums are going to queue up if you find a goddess, an Ishtar or Astarte, rather than a little girl’s doll.”

“So?”

“So we went in there with our eyes open. If we found anything we’d handle everything with exact and scrupulous scientific care. We found the temples and palaces of an early pre-Akkadian city, reasonably well-preserved. That curious formation of brick, the carvings in soft stone, the potsherds, all spoke eloquently and we went at it hard. You could go back there tomorrow and find everything as we found it. We desecrated nothing-well, only one thing—we recorded only.”

I saw that his hand trembled slightly and he, seeing the direction of my gaze, snatched it off the table and hid it below the wood, on his lap, out of sight.

"We found cylinder seals, very primitive, and we found tablets. One of the men with me could read hieroglyphics off pretty well and I’d brought a Johnson-Hayes computer, one of their little Mark Sixes, and we fed the stuff through and out came the translations like hot pies. It was a great way for archaeologists to carry on.” He spoke with an affected toughness of speech now, a melodramatic devil-may-care insouciance that I, for one, found uncharacteristic even in our short acquaintance, and saddening. “We shot the stuff in and out came the answers, in out, in out—Khamushkei the Undying came out.”

He took paper and pencil from his pocket and, with hands no longer trembling, wrote the words for us to read.

“But what—?” began Phoebe.

“I have the whole translation and you can read it at your leisure, some other time.”

As he finished speaking Brennan glanced uneasily around and then stood up and walked with a stiff-legged gait, rather like that of the brown-clad guards, over to the window and looked out. He cocked his head up to stare into the bright dazzlement of the morning sky.

Clicking his tongue, he returned to the table and as he passed by the globe he paused to put a hand on the quadrant, as a man lays a hand on his mount before a long chase, and then he resumed his seat at the table.

All the time he had performed these small actions we others had sat quite silently and still, watching him.

“Briefly,” he said as though no interruption had occurred, “in the beginning was darkness. Then the spirit of the darkness moved and was alone and cried out in his agony of loneliness and the waters of his tears fell and multiplied and swirled into a mighty ocean in the darkness. And some passed to the left and some passed to the right and some dried upon the center into a small cloud.” He glanced at me. "After that we come to the familiar bits about the sweet water Apsu and the salt water Tiamat, but told in a much earlier version than any I had previously seen. There were differences, too.” “From the feminine spirit, the sea, the blind forces of chaos, from Tiamat,” I said, “and from Apsu, like the River Oceanos primordially dedicated to creation by Homer; from the fusion of these two waters came all things and all peoples and all gods—"

"What a load of old horse-rubbish!” said Pomfret, his cheeks tastefully purple.

“Yeah, maybe,” I said. "Nowadays. Go on, Brennan.” “If were in this thing together you’d better call me Hall. I’m apt to answer quicker.”

Phoebe smiled at him. "I’m Phoebe.”

“I had noticed.” He gripped a fist up to indicate the break for station identification was over. “The usual Assyro-Babylonian mythology kept popping in and out of these tablets—they must have been the forerunners of much of the Akkadian and Sumerian legends on which the later Assyrians and Babylonians—and Jews—built. After that and the birth of Lakhmu and Lakhamu, the monstrous serpent twins, the story differed considerably. Next to be born was the Fair-haired One, the Lord of Light. Notice how early in the story he makes his appearance, antedating, for instance, Marduk very considerably.”

“So?”

“So he was set upon by the next to be bo
rn
, Anklo the Desired—there were some statues of her that would have rendered the rest of the pornographic market completely pass£—and after one of those long and confused Giants and Gods wars, eventually the Fair-haired One was taken and bound.”

“Long live reaction, then, situation normal?”

“Oh, after this there was again the usual catalog of
internecine
warfare. But what struck us was the way this next incident was handled. Anklo the Desired had the Fair-haired One castrated and cast his genitals into the sea, and immediately a host of fiery serpents rose up and were about to devour her. She cried aloud for succor—that’s interesting alone—and down from the sky plunged a great and burning light. The light was described as burning. Without description, without any other introduction, Khamushkei the Undying swept into action and, we are told, devoured all the fiery snakes and all the opponents of Anklo the Desired.”

“Bully for her,” said Pomfret, glancing at his watch. “What happened then?” demanded Phoebe, entranced. “The usual thing that happens between a subjected
woman who has asked for deliverance and the heroic conqueror. But before the fruit of that union could be bo
rn
, Khamushkei the Undying went off on a rampage of destruction. For by this time the Earth was being populated and men and cities were growing and commerce was booming along. A whole wonderful Earth, filled with the finest creations of the original fusion of the seas and their godlike offspring, whose own arduous labors had helped fashion an Eden, a paradise; a world where men were the masters of their own destinies with the gods well-wishers and encouragers but not interferers, and all was created and intended for the good of mankind.