Cycle of Nemesis (5 page)

“Sounds great,” said Phoebe without the slightest hint of malicious modem cynicism. “And?”

“Khamushkei the Undying destroyed it all. He pulled down the cities, he devastated the fields, he slaughtered the beasts and the birds, and he pursued and killed every man, woman and child on the Earth.”

We sat, silent.

“All that he left alive was the family of the serpents, to bring grief to anyone he might have missed in his world-wide career of murder.”

“I say, that’s a bit strong, isn’t it?” Pomfret licked his lips. “I mean—where did we all come from?”

“Now, George,” said Brennan with a small smile, “you run on into the normal stories of the Creation. You must be familiar with them. But they all take place after there had already been a perfect Earth.”

“You said something about the fruit of the union?” I asked. I admired the casual way Hall Brennan told his tale. Had he tried to spin a pseudo-biblical turn of phrase, a mystical verse-form, a sort of quasi-Gilgamesh epic from his material, I would have written him off much more readily than I was now prepared to do. The way he said what he had to say more than what he said carried conviction.

“The fruit?” He laughed now, a real laugh. “Bad eggs sometimes hatch good chicks—that’s true if you think about it. Anklo the Desired gave birth to the twins Mummusu and Shoshusu—the most beautiful girl and boy the world had ever seen. There was a lot of hanky-panky about Khamushkei the Undying trying to kill them and Anklo the Desired—redeeming her life at the end—sacrificing herself, freely, for their sakes. The twins decided that they must deal with their father. But he was Khamushkei the Undying and they could not kill him even had they been prepared for patricide. So they hit on a plan.”

“Anyone care for a little drink?” asked Pomfret b
rightly “Thirsty work, this, y'k
now.”

Phoebe rolled her eyes up at me. Brennan said with perfect gravity, “Thank you, George. Something soft, for me, please. That will be very pleasant.”

“What was the plan?” demanded Phoebe aggressively.

“They lured him into the finest house—a palace, rather —they could contrive and then, once their father was inside admiring his living quarters, they shut him in with a seven-locked incantation they had learned from Anklo as she lay dying. It took all their strength and all their powers of mind to finish the incantations for as soon as Khamushkei the Undying felt the first strands binding him he roared his fury and charged toward the doors to get outside to kill his son and daughter. So strongly did he rage that they had to build themselves an addition to the palace where they could five permanently to keep a guard on their father.”

“Selfless devotion to duty,” said Pomfret, coming across from the drinks cabinet. “Here’s your glass.”

“They dedicated their entire lives to keeping their father imprisoned, for the slightest lack of caution on their part, a hint of weakness, and he would break the incantations and escape—and then—”

“He’d jolly well wipe out this second Earth we have!” “Right.”

“But some powers he did retain, for the seven-locked incantation did not quite close. Only six shut fully. The seventh hung, and strain as they might, Mummusu and Shoshusu could not quite close it. So from that day to this they stand unending watch. And Khamushkei the Undying can reach out with some of his creatures who will sometimes do his bidding. He has other powers, too, that I will tell you of later.” Brennan finished his drink. “The most important information on his powers, though, came as a sort of postscript. We’d been digging down where we’d found the tablets containing the full story of what I’ve just told you; it was pretty hot and we were tired. So I called out to everyone to come up and take a break. One of ’em—remember, no names—came up with this white shard in his hand. By that time we all knew the hieroglyph for Khamushkei the Undying— pictograms, really, you’d call them—and so we fell on it at once.”

“Like the rayed disk of the sun for Shamash, the sun-god?”

“More or less, like a dragon and the marru for Marduk. Khamushkei the Undying was represented with a comet. At least, we took it to be a comet, with a fanged and winged beast riding it.”

The feeling that Brennan had been hedging around what he really had to say had been growing stronger to me for some time and now I recognized what he was driving at, at least in that last piece of information.

“It’s all of a piece,” I said more solemnly than I liked. “Everybody knows about the wheel.”

“We sat. there on the lip of the trench, hot and tired and dusty and so thirsty we were upending the bottles one after the other, and we read off what this last little white shard had to say.” Visible emotion gripped Brennan now; his fingers clenched and relaxed as though they held that white shard on George Pomfret’s lounge table.

“And?”

“And it said that Mummusu and Shoshusu, who were, never forget, the children of Khamushkei the Undying, would weaken over the years and the centuries, and the day would come when, unless they received succor in their turn, the giant strength of their father would prevail and he would snap the seven locks one after the other; then, roaring his anger and his venom, he would fly from the Time Vault to rend the sons of man and once again destroy the world.”

“Well, now, I wouldn’t tell that to my nephew and niece before they went to bed,” said Phoebe, with a primness I was forced with a little shock to attribute to fear.

“It isn’t pleasant reading.” Brennan nodded his head. “Those old folk were red hot at calculating out astronomical timetables. They knew their stuff. As near as we could figure it, they estimated the twins could hold out for about seven thousand years.”

“The seven again ...”

“We estimated—and this was a pretty wild guess in context—that the city we’d found had thrived at about the latter half of the fifth millennium. Pretty good long way back—and for the purposes of what happened, I, now, can stick my neck out and say with some degree of certainty that it would be something like three hundred years back into the fifth millennium.”

“Very pretty,” I said. “From that date to now is exactly seven thousand years.”

“Oh!” said Phoebe, on a breath. Her hands, which had tended to want to lead a life of their own, now clung with sudden renewed strength to mine.

“Now?” said Pomfret. Then, as he added it up: “Oh! I get it—you mean Khamushkei the Undying is due to break out of his Time Vault now!”

The relationship
between Khamushkei’s beast-bearing comet and Ezekiel’s wheel and ancient myths of space travelers visiting this world had to fade now. The central fact lay in that simple and devastating statement that Khamushkei was due to break out of the bonds his children had cast about him, was due to emerge from the Time Vault, was ready to ravage the world again.

George Pomfret stood up, putting his drink very carefully on the table. His face held a look at odd variance with the look one would have expected him to hold at this moment: a look of gimlet-eyed determination making him a caricature of a drunken owl. His face showed flat and taut, the lips firm, the complexion a shade paler than usual. He walked toward a cabinet built into the wall and heavily locked with the latest electronic brain-rhythm devices. He put the electrodes to his temples and the doors opened to the matching key sequences. He reached inside and came back to the table carrying a gun.

The gun was a Farley Express, not their latest model, which I, among others, still did not trust, but a well-proven positronic incoherer. A weapon at once adaptable as a single or two-handed weapon, with telescopic sight and shoulder butt optional extras, it fitted snugly into a suit pocket. It could cut a hole through ten yards of tungsten steel and neatly atomize a man’s midriff without really trying.

“If,” said Pomfret, “we are going to deal with this friend of yours, Hall, we’d better go prepared.”

My opinion of George Pomfret underwent a drastic revision.

“Now just a minute," said Phoebe, rearing back from the table. “What—”

“Easy,” I said gently. Then, to Brennan: “Hadn’t you better finish? I mean—old George here might go off half-cocked right away.”

Pomfret favored me with a look that meant, “I’d kick you downstairs if you weren’t my bosom pal.”

“There’s little left to tell, at least from my end,” said Brennan. He kept looking at Pomfret’s Farley Express with, I thought, the look of a professional. “I, too, realized that someone has got to shut those seals on the Vault if everything we’ve built up over the past thousands of years isn’t all to go smash. So I began working on that.” He looked at me intently, finishing with, “That’s when my two archaeological pals were killed.”

Phoebe asked the obvious.

“That globe,” answered Brennan. “I’d been following up scattered ideas, references, clues—they scarcely merit the importance of that name—when I met—this was in Singapore in one of those back street underground dives —this fellow Northrop.”

“Ah!” said Pomfret.

“Not the chap you’d have known, who took over Gannets. This was his son. Just about dead of drugs, the stupid idiot—no one needs to do that anymore—but I gave him a helping hand—a helping hand to die decently. All I could do. But he mentioned this weird character, Vasil Stannard. And the globe. It meant nothing to Northrop, of course; but it did to me. So I came as fast as I could.”

“Your heli?” I said, delicately.

He made a face. “I crash-landed. A rotor blew. Lucky.” I cleared my throat. “Some rather—unlikely—events occurred while we were at Gannets. I brought you along here because of that, mainly, and not through any altruistic idea of giving you the globe—”

“I offered to buy it—”

“—for double. I know. No, Hall. You tell me why a rotor blew on your heli. Then I’ll maybe tell you what I think.”

Brennan smiled. He looked every inch the toughly competent man of action who had faced danger a hundred times all over the worlds and satellites of the system. “I can guess, Bert, and I’ll say this—yes, you’re right.”

I glanced quickly at Phoebe Desmond, and Brennan, following my eyes, killed his smile. “She’ll have to be counted out, that’s for sure.”

But Phoebe Desmond was not so easi
ly written off as that. “Oh, no!
” she said with a flare of pride. “I’m coming, too.”

“What the hell are you talking about now?” demanded Pomfret, his face puzzled.

We all laughed. “Khamushkei the Undying doesn’t take kindly to people wanting to chain him up again, George," said Hall Brennan as though conveying the state of the game.

“Oh!” said Pomfret. He reached for his gun.

“What did Northrop tell you?”

“Simply that strange events had clustered about Gannets and that this Vasil Stannard had once told his father that he had seen himself walking there many times, in company with strangers he did not know. Stannard had dug over much of the territory we had skirted on the way down to our city—”

“And you think he dug up a link in the story of Khamushkei the Undying?” demanded Phoebe, once more rapt and absorbed by the old story.

“Yes. And whatever it was he found is in that globe
!
”

I looked at my globe. Well. It was important and a relic and a link with the past. But if inside it lay something incredibly more ancient that would finally give us the clue then, well ... I took out my knife and handed it hilt first to Brennan.

“Be my guest.”

Brennan chuckled his appreciation. “If Vasil Stannard was digging around near where that old story of Khamushkei the Undying was found, he could easily have uncovered details of it that would, by definition, have precluded our finding them. Whatever it was, if it bears on my search, that will be enough for me.”

I nodded at the knife, guessing that Brennan, after all his searchings had at last brought him within sight of his goal, now had those last minute reluctances to go on and uncover the secret, lest it prove false. Or, with the irrationality of mankind, lest in its proof of correctness it destroy some spark of his own fire to find out. The search is often more rewarding than the eventual

“Go on, Hall.” Phoebe Desmond could barely keep still with excitement.

Brennan took my knife and poised it over the globe.

“Be as gentle as you can, Hall....”

The feather-like tickle of there being something wrong now stirred my mental activities into sudden action; my arm thrust up and I caught Brennan’s descending forearm with my hand forming a crutch and taking the downward jolt. He reacted with startled surprise.

"What the—?”

“Just a minute, Hall. Look at this globe. It’s supposed to contain a clue left there by Vasil Stannard, something he dug up that you missed, or that he found close by that you never got to—and yet the globe was made a few hundred years ago, that’s clear—”

“Anyone can see that.” Brennan showed his frustration.

“Well, if you look carefully you’ll see the original plastic print is undamaged. The globe hasn’t been tampered with, nothing can be inside.”

“What!”

"But what about Northrop?” demanded Phoebe, incensed.

“What about him,” I said tartly—more tartly than I meant. I felt I was protecting my property. “I’ll be the first to open up the globe—but we’ll do it without damage to it. That fair?”

“Suppose,” said Pomfret with an amazing grasp of essentials. “Suppose we just find out what you expect to find in there, Hall.”

Hall Brennan glared at us. We’d all accepted his story at face value, its preposterous ideas taken in and digested and regarded as possible by us without comment. Now, I saw, this was our way of comment on that old story of Khamushkei the Undying.

Heavily, Brennan said, “I told you my heli was damaged. I told you my two associates were dead. I’ve indicated something of the power still remaining to Khamushkei the Undying. Now you’re pushing me—”

“I think we’re entitled to that,” I pointed out. “Confound it, Hall, you’ve spun a pretty ferocious sort of yam. That I, for one, believe you, doesn’t make the story true.”

“Granted. I’ll say this. I’ve been on the trail of Khamushkei the Undying for some time now. Little bits here, little bits there, traces of folklore that have been regarded with contempt by researchers falling into place and taking on meaning because of what I already knew. Things like that.” He smiled across at George Pomfret. “You talked of having to shut the Time Beast back into his Time Vault, George. A praiseworthy, if dangerous, idea. But—but just where do you expect to find this Vault?”

And there it was, of course.

That was the problem my globe was supposed to solve.

Phoebe stood up and walked across to the globe. She spun it deliberately beneath her fingers so that the continents and seas blurred into a racing chromosphere.

"I’ve been sitting doing nothing for too long,” she told us. “Now I want to do something exciting. Good grief!” She sounded comical in her vehemence. “If this isn’t the greatest chance for some
fun!”

“If getting killed is fun,” Pomfret said guardedly.

I had to make the decision. I didn’t know the others particularly well; George Pomfret with his money and his fine villa, his vague business associates from whom the money came, and his bluff hearty sportsman pose, well, I suppose I knew him better than the others. But Hall Brennan was a mystery, and Phoebe Desmond even more of a mystery. And yet, I knew, quite without equivocation, that if we opened up that globe we would be committing ourselves to a course of action from which we would not be able to draw back.

The decision had already been made, but, being by nature irritable, I like to sort things out first before telling those decisions. “All right,” I told Brennan. “Open it up—but treat it gently.”

“But,” said Phoebe, annoyed, “you said there couldn’t be anything in it.”

“I was still working it out, Phoebe. Just let Hall do his surgical stint, and then we’ll see.”

Brennan bent over the globe. The knife blade caught a glint from the sun and spattered red reflections. “Here,” said Brennan, sharply. “The plastic has been heat-sliced and resealed. Polystyrene cement, melting the edges and melding them—a neat job ... but...”

The knife blade disappeared in plastic. With a distinct and musical
pop
the globe sprang into two hemispheres.

A nylon-wrapped bundle fell out, trailing wires and retaining strips of plaster.

“It’s there
!
”

“Let me-”

Who spoke, who grabbed, I didn’t know. But it was my globe. I put out a quick hand, knocking away another grasping hand, said, “Wait! Hold it. That wire is connected to the interior of the globe—”

“A booby-trapped time-bomb?” asked Pomfret.

“If it was that,” I told him sourly, “it would have gone off already.”

“Thank
you!”
said Phoebe, sweetly venomous.

“What Bert is thinking, I imagine, is the wire must be connected to a place on tire sphere that corresponds with a geographical site on the outside of the globe.” Brennan glanced at me and I realized it was his hand I had knocked away. “I’d figured that, too, Bert.”

“All right.” I decided not to feel foolish. “But you might not have.”

Phoebe with her delicate woman’s fingers felt around inside and then ran her other hand over the outside of the globe. “Here,” she said. “Roughly, anyway.”

She pointed a manicured fingernail at a spot on the globe. Iraq. Well, what else, when you thought about it?

“Is that the place?” asked Phoebe. “Or is it just where Stannard found this?” She touched the wrapped packet.

Brennan lifted the packet carefully, not detaching the wire, his face concentrated on what he was doing. “That’s not the place where I dug,” he said softly, so we had to crane to hear him. “The wire will give a location a few miles in diameter, at the least. There must be a more detailed coordinate somewhere here.”

“Cut the wire and open the packet,” I said.

Brennan glanced up at me and then licked his lips. He gripped the knife more firmly. “Here goes.”

We all winced back as he pressed the blade of the knife against the wire and with a quick jerk cut through.

Nothing happened.

“Well, I didn’t think it would, old sport,” said Pomfret on an explosive breath of relief.

“I wish I had your confidence,” I said dryly.

Brennan unwrapped the parcel.

A clay tablet, broken, revealed itself as the wrappings peeled away. Brennan’s fingers, those broad powerful hands with the shining well-attended fingernails, and the whipcord tough wrists, all moved with a delicate balanced precision, stripping away plastic and packing to reveal the baked clay tablet.

We all drew in our breaths.

“A beauty!” said Brennan with deep affection.

“As sharp and clear as though it had been baked this morning,” I said. The light from the window fell across the indented writing, angular and sharp, somehow deeply moving simply by being there, the still-existing proof of the continuity of mankind.

Square, with a comer broken off, the tablet measured by the tape Brennan produced from a pocket sixteen and a half millimeters in thickness where the edge was broken away and he could measure without distortion due to the cushion effect, thirteen point seven centimeters in length and ten point nine centimeters in width. He stood with it on his palm, just looking, for a long time.

“Can you read it, Hall?” asked Phoebe.

“Bits and pieces. Look—” He pointed out to us the unmistakable beast and comet, the attributes of Khamushkei the Undying. “They’re at the top. They dominate everything else. And, significently, the rest of the tablet is divided into seven segments.” He looked up at us and I caught the glowing glimpse of triumph beginning in his face. “Seven.”

I said, flatly, feeling like a traitor, “The last one has the comer broken off.”

The darkened biscuit color of the tablet showed the sharp incisions of the writing with a mocking reminder of what had been lost.

“Archaeology,” I said into the silence that had followed my last observation. “I’ve had some under the sea. Nothing is perfect, much as you may will it. We’ve got to do what we can with what we have. George”—I turned to Pomfret—“can you get hold of a computer? A Johnson-Hayes, I think you said, Hall? A Mark Six?”

“That will do at a pinch,” answered Brennan.

“Yes. Yes, I can manage that.” Pomfret went at once to the phone.

“Well, at least something is happening.” Phoebe Desmond bent over the little baked clay tablet. “It looks so —so small and fragile and so, oh, I suppose you’d call it archaic.”

“It’s rather old, Phoebe—”

"I mean, old in concept and idea. I mean—we can put a whole encyclopedia into a thimble these days. So painstaking, so dark and old and primitive—”

“Someone had to start.” I had my own opinion. “Someone had to think up the idea and then put it into practice. It was a big thing. A pretty big thing, writing, when you think about it.”