Equilateral (15 page)

The music from the Khedive’s military band reaches them, with some of the instruments muted in the breeze and others amplified, producing exactly the sort of heavenly cry we may expect in the atmosphere’s upper strata.

Exhilaration courses through Thayer’s veins. He’s impressed with even more force than he was at the pitch factory, when he saw little more than Vertex BAC, or when he stood on the ridge above Side AC. His eyes are wide, his mouth half open. All these years of hard labor are laid out below him on the alabaster plain as if on his own drafting table.

Without saying a word, Thayer takes Miss Keaton’s warm right hand and squeezes it hard. For the next several minutes the secretary is unable to see the Equilateral, or the desert at all, or to hear the winds whistling through the lines that attach the gondola to the balloon. He releases his grip. When her vision clears and she can inspect the Equilateral below, she doesn’t think of looking for the foreshortening of the triangle’s upper portions in the far distance.

“My Lord Jesus.”

At first Thayer believes it’s Ballard who’s whispered this gentle oath, but no, it’s Sir Harry.

The few minutes aloft have wrought a transformation. Color has returned to his face. His mouth’s twisted into an unguarded grin that’s nearly boyish.

“My Lord Jesus,” he repeats. “Look what we’ve brought off! This is the greatest mark of man’s hand upon the Earth. Ballard, you’ve earned your place in history. Professor Thayer—” he begins, and then simply embraces him, almost overcome.

The Khedive is visibly moved as well, making lip-smacking noises and inward sighs. He lightly claps his hands.

“Bravo,” he says. He releases a childish giggle.

Having taken out his pocket telescope, Thayer surveys the excavations. He follows each line below him, AC and AB, to its vanishing point. He removes his face from the glass to assure himself that the lines are actually there. They are! Thayer gazes at the figure for several minutes as their vessel sails farther into the thinning air, then, beaming, he turns to the unmarked, unmapped desert to the south. He anticipates additional, more complicated geometric figures beyond the ones planned for this decade. In the next century, they will dig a line that intersects two parallel lines, producing congruent angles; also, a circle with an inscribed angle half the size of a central angle subtending the same arc. Meanwhile, his companions continue to marvel at what their labor, their capital, and their viceregal writ have accomplished so far.

They marvel, yet Ballard intuits that something’s amiss. He’s stirred into an unfocused wariness that will, in short course, save the expedition from disaster.

With his glass raised again, Thayer examines the low line of hills on the southern horizon. Something arrests the instrument’s drift. He peers at the hills with the intensity that he normally reserves for celestial observation. His mouth opens slightly. He closes down his other senses, even the internal commentaries and distractions that normally accompany thought, and bears down on the field of view.

“What do you see?” the Khedive asks.

Ballard and Miss Keaton follow the line of the glass to the horizon, they don’t see anything, and they turn back to the astronomer.

Thayer is straining now, his eyes narrow, his jaw set hard as he studies the distant hills. But Ballard is the one who observes something definite—a deadly, silvery flash—right on board the gondola.

The engineer lunges at it, but the weapon strikes the Khedive first.

In a moment Ballard is wrestling on the narrow deck with the pilot, his hands gripping the wrist that holds the knife, whose cruel arc ends in a black ivory handle. There are cries and shouts and Thayer drops his glass against the rail, shattering the lens. Then the Khedive, uncowed by the attack, falls on the would-be assassin, pins him, and puts his knee hard against his windpipe. The man loses the knife and Miss Keaton kicks it away. Thayer and Sir Harry, who have stood back from the scuffle, cut lengths of mooring rope with the relinquished blade. They truss the man like a game fowl, even as he issues a series of imprecations.

But the Khedive is hardly finished.

He questions him severely in Arabic, apparently demanding to know his cause and his patron. The pilot responds with taunts that, Thayer gathers, impugns the honor of the Egyptian royal family, including by name the late Khedive Tewfik. This abuse enrages the son, who puts the knife to his throat. The bound man writhes in rebellion.

When the Khedive jerks him from the deck, the gondola shifts precipitously. As Thayer falls forward and grabs a guy wire supporting the basket, there’s nothing between him and the Equilateral, which is laid out in front of him, quite close it seems, like his destiny. The Khedive inclines the pilot over the rail.

“Your Highness!” Sir Harry cries.

But the Khedive knows no inhibition. With a strength infused by his righteous anger at the insult to Mehmet Ali’s royal line, which has governed Egypt for ninety years, he hauls the man over the railing, holding him by the ropes. The prisoner has been cut by his own knife. Blood freely runs down his face and uniform, but of more immediate concern to the dangling wretch is the obduracy of the African continent, thousands of feet below.

This threat proves remedial. Fear is lit in the villain’s eyes as he apprehends his situation, which is made even more intolerable by the immobility of his hands, arms, and feet. When the Khedive poses the question again, the man responds—if not with complete civility, for terror has gained command over his composure, then at least usefully. The Khedive is sobered
by the information imparted. A spasm of concern roils his forehead. He asks the man another question with evident urgency.

The Khedive is sufficiently satisfied by the man’s response to return him to the gondola, so that he can be further interviewed by the police. But he proves to be an unwieldy package. As the Khedive pulls him in, the prisoner slips from his grasp.

Suddenly lightened, the balloon rockets heavenward. Sir Harry falls to the floor of the gondola, but the others grab the rail and watch the man drop, turning over and over, still bound. The vessel is now soaring above the southwest interior of the excavations. As the traitor silently plummets, and more seconds seem to pass than is possible, he shrinks in apparent size until, the Equilateral rushing to meet him, he becomes no more than that which is without parts, a single-dimensional element, a position but no magnitude—in other words, a point. Given that Egyptian methods of extracting information would blanch a Turk, his fall is a certain mercy.

“Professor Thayer,” the khedive says, once the balloon stabilizes at its new altitude, about seven thousand feet. “I trust that your expertise in the arts and sciences encompasses the piloting of ascension balloons.”

Thayer is in no position to confess that this is his first aeronautical expedition, as either operator or passenger. He consults with Ballard quietly on the use of the gas valve above the gondola, and together they make the adjustments necessary to descend comfortably. Employing the distinct, gentle breezes
that prevail at each altitude, they reach the ground not far from Point A.

Δ

A military detachment rides out at a hard gallop. The Khedive’s bodyguards saw from below that something sinister was transpiring on board the gondola and when they witnessed the body plunge into the desert wastes, they expected the worst. They cheer when they’re met by the beaming Khedive, refreshed by his tussle with the treacherous pilot.

Not until then does anyone remark that the Khedive’s tunic is sliced open across his chest, probably by the villain’s initial parry. While his commanders voice consternation, the Khedive, who has already shown his royal mettle, coolly proceeds to unbutton his uniform.

The knife has gone clear through his tunic and undergarments, but when these are removed his corpulence shows itself unpunctured. The skin’s marked only by a pale pink scratch that runs the full length of the blade’s course, from nipple to umbilicus. It’s as straight a line as anything conceived by Euclid.

Δ

Thayer is puzzled by the attack on the Khedive. Once they’ve returned to Point A, he asks Ballard if he believes the Mahdists are responsible.

“They’re adamantly opposed to Egypt’s rule in the Sudan,” Ballard notes. “They despise the Khedive—as a tool of the
British, for his Albanian blood, for his palaces, for his yachts, and for his harem girls. Fair enough, I suppose. He’s bold to come this far south, and damn foolish. But the assassin was not sent by the Mahdists at all.”

“Then … ?”

“The Sublime Porte has never reconciled itself to the Equilateral.”

“But I went to Constantinople! I met with the Sultan. I gave him sketches of Mars, showing the canals definitively. He expressed enormous enthusiasm.”

“The Turks are masters of dissimulation,” Ballard says. “Rather than play a losing hand, they switch the deck.”

Unable to overtly resist the Concession, the Ottoman Sultan fears the Equilateral as yet another European scheme to wrest Egypt from his increasingly feeble grip. The Khedive’s elimination would have jeopardized the project and sent Egypt into more than its usual turmoil. Yet the Mahdists would have been the ones to profit, so, Ballard concedes, perhaps Thayer’s original supposition is correct.

The engineer asks Thayer what he observed through his pocket telescope.

“Nothing, really.”

“Reticence doesn’t become you, Thayer. Before that bit of unpleasantness with the pilot, you were looking at a definite position on the ground.”

Thayer turns to gaze across the desert. He finds the approximate place, staring at it for a while, but without the advantage of elevation.

“There was motion of some kind,” he says at last. “I think
that’s what it was, motion, not a distinguishable object. Motion in the desert always catches the eye. This was on the horizon, a disturbance, a boiling, or something like the seething of a hive. I don’t know. I saw it for only a moment and then I was jostled and I lost my glass.” He adds, “Now, thank you, I have to send to London for its replacement.”

Twenty-Five

They never learn the particulars of the turncoat’s confession, but his concluding statement is enough to bring about a series of arrests. Men are taken away. A Nubian corporal surrenders unprompted. Two bodyguards suddenly turn on a third, putting him in irons. Complementary actions are taken within the Khedive’s palace in Cairo. The seizures seem entirely at random, or according to occult principles. The assault on the viceroy’s life may have involved the Sublime Porte, and it may have involved the Mahdists, and it must be part of a larger scheme, but whatever it is, the conspiracy operates below the plane of the Equilateral. It recalls to the Europeans that they sojourn in Byzantine lands.

Because the lands are Byzantine, the evening’s royal banquet unfolds as scheduled, with the scheduled extravagance: slaughtered goats, martyred lambs, mountains of rice, towers of figs and dates, a panoply of jellies and sauces, and rolling blue cumuli of hashish smoke. The bagnio girls have joined their sisters from the Khedive’s harem for the night. Decked out in new raiments, hennaed, rouged, and bangled, they’ve been imparted with fresh glamour. They’re pillowed at the table with the Khedive
and his European companions, and they encourage and amplify the party’s ribald humor. The Cairo haremites seem less worldly, but perhaps even more enticing for their pretensions to lustrous innocence. A wizened musician picks at a qa-noon. Miss Keaton has of course absented herself.

Thayer is considerably more troubled by the attack than the Khedive appears to be, and even Sir Harry seems to have recovered his composure. The astronomer ignores the girls and eats little. No one speaks of the arrests. The two visitors to Point A lean across their plates to share a private observation. Sir Harry snorts in amused contempt. Thayer recognizes that he doesn’t know every arrangement that has been made between the Khedive and the Concession. Not every appendix and codicil has been made public. The machinery of world politics turns invisibly. The ties of blood, clan, sect, and military obedience that maintain the Khedive’s rule, and parallel ligatures bound in opposition to it, lie beyond Thayer’s comprehension.

His early departure is hardly remarked. The day has taken much from him. When he arrives at his quarters, Bint has already left. He performs his own toilet and puts himself to bed, winning no more than an uneasy slumber that’s roiled by visions of flashing knives and men plummeting into geometric figures.

Δ

Waking fevered in a darkened tent, Thayer calls for Bint. Another attendant appears. She comes at once, deferential and comely.

“Where’s Bint?” he asks, the question a parched croak.

She smiles modestly and says, “Bint.”

The girl looks very much like Bint, with the olive skin and almond eyes characteristic of the Near East’s women. As a rule, males and females of the Eastern races do not display the variety of physical characteristics that distinguish individuals among the Europeans. Compare, say, Miss Sarah Bernhardt with Miss Eleonora Duse; both lovely and talented, yet as different in appearance from each other as the ocean and the sky (with the tempestuous Divine Sarah being the ocean, of course). Thayer can’t be blamed for confusing the identities of two ordinary Arab serving girls.

“Yes, I need Bint,” he says. “Please send her to me.”

“Bint,” she repeats. She pours water from an earthenware pitcher and offers him the cup.

Knowing that he’s ill and that fever can cloud his perceptions, and also because he’s a man of open mind, Thayer wonders if he’s mistaken, and if this is indeed the girl who has been taking care of his domestic needs for more than a year. Especially after the turmoil of the previous day, he can be mistaken. He considers the familiarity of her features and mannerisms: the prow-like nose, the wide-eyed stare; she leans forward when she speaks, raising an arm as if in defense.

“You’re not Bint,” he declares. “Bint! Are you here?”

He struggles to stand and, still in his nightgown, he pulls open the entrance to the tent.