The Winds of Marble Arch and Other Stories (49 page)

“Evolve,” Sarah said.

On Wednesday there was another
memo in Paleontology’s boxes. It was on green paper, and Robert snatched it up and took off for the Parking Authority office, muttering dark threats. He was already there and standing in line behind a young woman in a wheelchair and two firemen when he finally unfolded it and read it.

“I
know
I was parking in a handicapped spot,” the young woman was saying when Robert let out a whoop and ran
back to the Earth Sciences building.

Sarah had a one o’clock class, but she wasn’t there. Her students, who were spending their time waiting erasing marks in their textbooks so they could resell them at the bookstore, didn’t know where she was. Neither did Dr. Albertson, who was making a papier-mâché foraminifer.

Robert went into Dr. Othniel’s class. “The prevalence of predators in the Late
Cretaceous,” Dr. Othniel was saying, “led to severe evolutionary pressures, resulting in aquatic and aeronautical adaptations.”

Robert tried to get his attention, but he was writing “BIRDS” in the chalk tray.

He went out in the hall. Sarah’s TA was standing outside her office, eating a bag of Doritos.

“Have you seen Dr. Wright?” Robert asked.

“She’s gone,” Chuck said, munching.

“Gone? You
mean, resigned?” he said, horrified. “But she doesn’t have to.” He waved the green paper at Chuck. “Dr. King’s going to do a preliminary study, a—what does he call it?—a preinitiatory survey of prevailing paleontological pedagogy. We won’t have to worry about him for another five years at least.”

“She saw it,” Chuck said, pulling a jar of salsa out of his back pocket. “She said it was too late.
She’d already paid her tuition.” He unscrewed the lid.

“Her tuition?” Robert said. “What are you talking about? Where did she go?”

“She flew the coop.” He dug in the bag and pulled out a chip. He dipped it in the sauce. “Oh, and she left something for you.” He handed Robert the jar of salsa and the chips and dug in his other back pocket. He handed Robert the flight brochure and a green plastic
square.

“It’s her parking sticker,” Robert said

“Yeah,” Chuck said. “She said she won’t be needing it where she’s going.”

“That’s all? She didn’t say anything else?”

“Oh, yeah,” he said, dipping a chip into the salsa Robert still held. “She said to watch out for falling rocks.”

“The predatory dinosaurs flourished for
the entire Late Cretaceous,” Dr. Othniel said, “and then, along with their
prey, disappeared. Various theories have been advanced for their extinction, none of which has been authoritatively proved.”

“I’ll bet they couldn’t find a parking place,” a student who had written one of the letters to the Parking Authority and who had finally given up and traded his Volkswagen in on a skateboard, whispered.

“What?” Dr. Othniel said, looking vaguely around. He turned back to
the board. “The diminishing food supply, the rise of mammals, the depredations of smaller predators, all undoubtedly contributed.”

He wrote:

“1. FOOD SUPPLY

2. MAMMALS

3. COMPETITION,” on the bottom one fifth of the board.

His students wrote “I thought it was an asteroid,” and “My new roommate Terri is trying to steal Todd away from me! Can you believe that? Signed, Deanna.”

“The demise
of the dinosaurs—” Dr. Othniel said, and stopped. He straightened slowly, vertebra by vertebra, until he was nearly erect. He lifted his chin, as if he were sniffing the air, and then walked over to the open window, leaned out, and stood there for several minutes, scanning the clear and empty sky.

There was a curse. It lay on all of us, though we didn’t know it. Anyway Lacau didn’t. Standing there, reading the tomb seal out loud to me in my cage, he didn’t have a clue who the warning was meant for. And the Sandalman, standing
on the black ridge watching the bodies burn, had no idea he had already fallen victim to it.

The princess knew, leaning her head in hopelessness
against the wall of her tomb ten thousand years ago. And Evelyn, eaten alive by it, she knew. She tried to tell me that last night on Colchis while
we waited for the ship.

The electricity was off again, and Lacau had lit a photosene lamp and put it close to the translator so I could
see the dials. Evelyn’s voice had gotten so bad that the fix needed constant adjusting. The lamp’s flame lit only
the space around me. Lacau, bending over the hammock, was in total darkness.

Evelyn’s bey sat by the lamp, watching the reddish flame, her mouth open and her black teeth shining in the light. I expected her to stick her hand in the flame any minute, but she didn’t. The air was still and full of dust. The lamp flame didn’t even flicker.

“Evie,” Lacau said. “We don’t have any time left. The Sandalman’s
soldiers will be here before morning. They’ll never let us leave.”

Evelyn said something, but the translator didn’t pick it up.

“Move the mike closer,” I said. “I didn’t get that.”

“Evie,” he said again. “We need you to tell us when happened. Can you do that for us, Evie? Tell us what happened?”

She tried again. I had the volume dial kicked as high as it would go, and the translator picked
it up this time, but only as static. Evelyn started to cough, a sharp, terrible sound that the translator turned into a scream.

“For God’s sake, put her on the respirator,” I said.

“I can’t,” he said. “The power pack is dead.” And the other respirator has to be plugged in, I thought, and you’ve used up all the extension cords. But I didn’t say it. Because if he put her on the respirator he would
have to unplug the refrigerator.

“Then get her a drink of water,” I said.

He took the Coke
^*
bottle off the crate by the hammock, put the straw in it, and leaned into the darkness to
tilt Evelyn’s head forward so she could drink. I turned the translator off. It was bad enough listening to her try to talk. I didn’t think I could stand listening to her try to drink.

After what seemed like an hour,
he set the Coke bottle down on the crate again. “Evelyn,” he said. “Try to tell us what happened. Did you go in the tomb?”

I switched the translator back on and kept my finger ready on the record button. There was no point in recording the tortured sounds she was making.

“Curse,” Evelyn said clearly, and I pushed the button down. “Don’t open it. Don’t open it.” She stopped and tried to swallow.
“Wuhdayuh?”

“What day is it?” the translator said.

She tried to swallow again, and Lacau reached for the Coke bottle, pulled the straw out, and handed it to the bey. “Go get some more water.” The little bey stood up, her black eyes still fixed on the flame, and took the bottle. “Hurry,” Lacau said.

“Hurry,” Evelyn said. “Before bey.”

“Did you open the tomb when the bey went to get the Sandalman?”

“Oh, don’t open it. Don’t open it. Sorry. Didn’t know.”

“Didn’t know what, Evelyn?” Lacau said.

The bey was still staring, fascinated, at the flame, her mouth open so that I could see her shiny black teeth. I looked at the thick green bottle she was holding in her dirty-looking hands. The straw in it was glass, too, thick and uneven and full of bubbles, probably made out at the bottling plant.
Its sides were scored with long scratches. Evelyn had made those scratches when she sucked the water up through the straw. One more day and she’ll have it cut to ribbons, I thought, and then remembered we didn’t have one more day. Not unless Evelyn’s bey suddenly pitched forward into the red flame, honeycombs sharpening on her dirty brown skin, inside her throat, inside her lungs.

“Hurry,” Evelyn
said into the hypnotic silence, and the little bey looked over at the hammock as if she had just woken up and hurried out of the room with the Coke bottle. “Hurry. What day is it? Have to save the treasure. He’ll murder her.”

“Who, Evelyn? Who’ll murder her? Who will he murder?”

“We shouldn’t have gone in,” she said, and let her breath out in a sigh that
sounded like sand scratching on glass.
“Beware. Curse of kings.”

“She’s quoting what was on the door seal,” Lacau said. He straightened up. “They did go in the tomb,” he said. “I suppose you got that on your recorder.”

“No,” I said, and pushed “erase.” “She still isn’t down from the dilaudid. I’ll start recording when she starts making sense.”

“The Commission would have found for the Sandalman,” Lacau said. “Howard swore they didn’t
go in, that they waited for the Sandalman.”

“What difference does it make?” I said. “Evelyn won’t be alive to testify at any Commission hearing and neither will we if the Sandalman and his soldiers get here before the ship, so what the hell difference does it make? There won’t be any treasure left either after the commission gets through, so why are we making this damned recording? By the time
the Commission hears it, it’ll be too late to save her.”

“What if it
was
something in the tomb, after all? What if it
was
a virus?”

“It wasn’t,” I said. “The Sandalman poisoned them. If it was a virus, then why doesn’t the bey have it? She was in the tomb with them, wasn’t she?”

“Hurry,” somebody said, and I thought for a minute it was Evelyn, but it was the bey. She came running into the room,
the Coke bottle splashing water everywhere.

“What is it?” Lacau said. “Is the ship here?”

She yanked at his hand. “Hurry,” she said, and dragged him down the long hall of packing crates.

“Hurry,” Evelyn said softly, like an echo, and I got up and went over to the hammock. I could hardly see her, which made it a little easier. I unclenched my fists and said, “It’s me, Evelyn. It’s Jack.”

“Jack,”
she said. I could hardly hear her. Lacau had clipped the mike to the plastic mesh that was pulled up to her neck, but she was fading fast and starting to wheeze again. She needed a shot of the morphate. It would ease her breathing, but this soon after the dilaudid it would put her out like a light.

“I delivered the message to the Sandalman,” I said, leaning over to catch what she would say. “What
was in the message, Evelyn?”

“Jack,” she said. “What day is it?”

I had to think. It felt like I had been here years. “Wednesday,” I said.

“Tomorrow,” she said. She closed her eyes and seemed to relax almost into sleep.

I was not going to get anything out of her. I sprayed on plasticgloves, picked up the injection kit, and broke it open. The morphate would put her out in minutes, but until
then she would be free from the pain and maybe coherent.

Her arm had fallen over the side of
the hammock. I moved the lamp a little closer and tried to find a place to give the injection. Her whole arm was covered with a network of honeycombed white ridges, some of them nearly two centimeters high now. They had softened and thickened since the first time I’d seen her. Then they had been thin
and razor-sharp. There was no way I was going to be able to find a vein among them, but as I watched, the heat from the photosene flame softened a circle of skin on her forearm, and the five-sided ridges collapsed around it so I could get the hypo in.

I jabbed twice before blood pooled up in the soft depression where the needle had gone in. It dripped onto the floor. I looked around, but there
was nothing to wipe it up with. Lacau had used the last of the cotton this morning. I took a piece of paper off my notebook and blotted the blood with it.

The bey had come back in. She ducked under my elbow with a piece of plastic mesh held out flat. I folded the paper up and dropped it in the center of the plastic. The bey folded the plastic mesh over it and folded up the ends, making it into
a kind of packet, careful not to touch the blood. I stood and looked at it.

“Jack,” Evelyn said. “She was murdered.”

“Murdered?” I said and reached over to adjust the fix again. All I got was feedback. “Who was murdered, Evelyn?”

“The princess. They killed her. For the treasure.” The morphate was taking effect. I could make her words out easily, though they didn’t make sense. Nobody had murdered
the princess. She had been dead ten thousand years. I leaned farther over her.

“Tell me what was in the message you gave me to take to the Sandalman, Evelyn,” I said.

The lights came on. She put her hand over her face as if to hide it. “Murdered the Sandalman’s bey. Had to. To save the treasure.”

I looked over at the little bey. She was still holding the packet of plastic, turning it over and
over in her dirty-looking hands.

“Nobody murdered the bey,” I said. “She’s right here.”

She didn’t hear me. The shot was taking effect. Her hand relaxed and then slid down to her breast. Where it had pressed against her forehead and cheek, the fingers
had left deep imprints in the wax-soft skin. The pressure of her fingers had flattened the honeycombed ridges at the ends of her fingers and pushed
them back so that the ends of her bones were sticking out.

She opened her eyes. “Jack,” she said clearly, and her voice was so hopeless I reached over and turned the translator off. “Too late.”

Lacau pushed past me and lifted up the mesh drape. “What did she say?” he demanded.

“Nothing,” I said, peeling off the plastic gloves and throwing them in the open packing crate we were using for the
things Evelyn had touched. The bey was still playing with the plastic packet she had wrapped around the blood-soaked paper. I grabbed it away from her and put it in the box. “She’s delirious,” I said. “I gave her her shot. Is the ship here?”

“No,” he said, “but the Sandalman is.”

“Curse,” Evelyn said. But I didn’t believe her.

I had been burning eight columns about a curse when I intercepted
the message from Lacau. I was halfway across Colchis’s endless desert continent with the Lisii team. I had run out of stories on the team’s incredible find, which consisted of two clay pots and some black bones. Two pots was more than Howard’s team out at the Spine had come up with in five years, and my hotline had been making noises about pulling me off on the next circuit ship.