Margaret St. Clair (30 page)

“Ahhhhhh!” he sighed, and then, to me, “Put more butter on the toast than you did last time.”

When I came back with the tea, he was standing by one of the bookcases looking at Woolley’s little book, Ur: The First Phases.

“Silly book,” he grumbled. “That stuff about the plano-convex bricks is all wrong.”

“What do you know about it?” I asked him.

“I sold a nuse installation to King Nebu-kalam-dug of Ur of the Chaldees on this last trip.”

“Oh, yes? Well, the home office ought to be pleased with you. Perhaps they’ll give you a vacation back in your own time.”

The nuse man made no direct answer, but his battered, lumpy face grew dark. He bit into a slice of toast so savagely that I feared for his iridium alloy teeth.

“Don’t tell me that something went wrong with the nuse again!” I cried.

This time he couldn’t have answered if he had wanted to. He had choked over some toast crumbs, and I had to beat him on the back and pour tea down him before he could speak.

“Why are you so prejudiced against nuse?” he demanded at last. “The nuse had nothing to do with it. It was the king and the priests that birded it up.”

“I’ll bet.”

-

The nuse man’s face turned even redder. It was a shade or two darker than the lapels around the waist of his trousers. “I’ll tell you all about it!” he said passionately. “You be the judge!”

“Oh, Lord.” There was no polite way of getting out of it. “All right,” I said.

“Everything was going fine,” the nuse man began, “until the old king Nebu-kala m -dug, died. I’d sold him a nuse installation —”

“General or special?”

“Special, of course. Do I look like fool enough to put a general nuse installation into the hands of a lot of 3000 B
.
C
.
yaps? I sold him a special nuse installation in exchange for a stated number of Sumerian gold artifacts, so many on installation and so many each lunar month until the price was paid.”

“What were the artifacts?”

“Gold wreaths and necklaces and jewelry. Of course, gold’s nothing. Only good for lavatory daises. But the workmanship was interesting and valuable. I knew the home office would be pleased. Then the old yoop died.”

“What killed him?”

“His son, Nebu-al-karsig, poisoned him.”

“Oh.”

“Everybody in the court knew it, but of course nobody would talk about it. I was sorry the old king died, but I wasn’t worried, because I thought I could work out the same sort of deal with the new king. Even when I saw how scared the court ladies looked when they were gett i ng ready for the funeral, I didn’t apperceive. And then the soldiers came and arrested me!”

“What had you done?” I asked suspiciously.

“Nothing. They were short little tzintes with big muscles, and they wore sort of skirts out of sheepskin with the woo l twisted into bunches to look elegant. They wouldn’t say a word while they were arresting me. Then I found out I was supposed to be strangled and put in the royal tomb with the dead king.”

“Why?”

“Because I’d been one of the old man’s special friends. At least, that was what young Nebu-al-karsig said. The prime minister and two or three of the councilors were being strangled along with me.”

“Gosh.”

“I argued and argued, and talked and talked. I told the young king we hadn’t been su ch good friends as all that. And finally he said, very well, I could go with the court ladies in the death pit.”

“Were you scared?”

“Of course I was scared,” the nuse man said irritably. “I didn’t have my chronnox —they’d arrested me in too much of a hurry for that —so I couldn’t get into another time. And I had no way of getting in touch with the home office. Certainly I was scared. And then there was the indignity —somebody from when I come from to be killed by a lot of primitive button heads. It m ade me sore.”

-

He slurped at his tea. “When we got to the pit.” he continued, “they were just closing the old king’s tomb up. You understand the tomb was at the bottom of the pit, and there was a ramp leading down into it. They hung matting over the si des of the pit, to cover the earth, and then they backed old Nebu-kalam-dug’s war chariot down the ramp; he’d want his chariot in the next world. Then the rest of us went down the ramp into the pit.”

“Who was ‘us’?” I asked curiously.

“Oh, harpists and singers and court ladies and slaves and soldiers and attendants. If anybody didn’t want to go, the soldiers had spears they used for prodding. I counted, and there were fifty-eight of us.”

“Pretty barbarous,” I said sympathetically.

“Nobody from your period has any right to call anything barbarous,” the nuse man said severely. “I’ve seen some bad ages, but yours —! Anyway, there we were.

“The funeral services began. The harpists twanged on their harps and the singers sang in high falsetto voices. It sounded awful. The priests chanted prayers from the edge of the pit above. The soldiers passed around an opiate in little bronze cups for us to drink. The priests prayed some more. It was beginning to get dark. Then they started shoveling earth in on us.”

“Were you sorry for the others?” I asked.

“I was more sorry for myself. It was their era, and if they wanted to die in it, that was their business. After all, they thought that when they woke up they’d go on serving old Nebu-kalam-dug in the next world . / didn’t —and even if I had, he was nobody I’d want to serve.”

“How did you get out?” I asked quickly. I did not like the thought of the scene in the death pit, even if it had taken place so many thousands of years ago.

“I got under the car of the chariot to shelter myself from being crushed. After a long while, the earth stopped coming in and I decided the mourners had gone away. I didn’t have my chronnox, and, as I told you, I couldn’t get in touch with the home office. But I was wearing an ipsiss i fex. I started materializing myself up through the earth of the pit.”

“You
didn’t!”
I said incredulously.

“I did, though. Each ‘me’ was a little farther up through the earth layer of the pit.”

“You mean there are five or six ‘you’s buried back there in Ur of the Chaldees?”

“Seven. Of course they weren’t
really alive —you know how an ipsissifex is.”

-

It was the first time I had ever heard the nuse man admit that one of the devices he was p eddling might have a flaw.

“I clawed my way up through the last few inches of dirt without any more materializations,” he said, “and started walking up the ramp. There was a soldier on guard at the top. When he saw me, his spear began to shake . I t shook so much he could hardly hold it. The moon was coming up, and my shadow fell in front of me on the ramp.

“He licked his lips and swallowed before he could say anything. ‘Get back in the pit and die,’ he said finally. “What are you doing out here? You’re supposed to serve our lord Nebu-kalam-dug in the other world. Go on back and be dead.’

“I didn’t say anything. I just kept walking closer to him. When I was about two feet away, he dropped his spear and ran.

“I didn’t have any trouble getting in at the palace, either. Young Nebu-al-karsig was playing checkers on a fiddle-shaped board with one of his girls w hen I walked into the great hall. When he saw me, he jumped up and the board fell to one side and the pieces rolled over the floor. I said, ‘My lord Nebu-al-karsig, I am harder to kill than your noble father was.’

“He had turned a dirty greenish tan. He said, ‘I saw —I saw —’

“I sat down on the floor in front of him and bumped my head on it a couple of times to show I was going to be polite. Then I said, in a deep, serious voice, ‘A magician cannot die until his time has come, my lord. Shall we discuss extending the nuse installation I made for your respected sire?’ And he said, ‘Yes, let’s.’”

“It’s a wonder he didn’t try to poison you,” I commented.

“Scared to,” the nuse man said briefly. “Anyhow, we agreed I was to increase the nuse installation by one third, and in return Nebu-al-karsig was to pay me twice as many gold artifacts each lunar month as his father had, and for half again as long. It took a lot of figuring and explaining by the royal scribes before the king could un d erstand the terms of the agreement, but he finally was satisfied with the arithmetic. Oh, and I got my old rooms in the palace back.”

“What did the special installation do?” I poured the last of the tea into the nuse man’s cup and went out to the kitchen to put water on to heat for more.

“It made bricks,” he said when I came back. “Beautiful, even, true, symmetrical mud bricks. Nebu-kalam-dug had been crazy about those bricks, and even Nebu-al-karsig thought they were pretty neat. You should have seen t he adobe junk the brickmakers had been turning out by hand —sloppy, roundish affairs, all different sizes, with straw sticking out of them. Yes, my installation made bricks.”

“What did they use the bricks for?” I asked.

“For ziggurats —stepped temple pyramids. They made the first story black, the second white, the third red, and the last blue. Sometimes, just for a change, they’d do an all-blue or an all-red pyramid.

“For a while, everything was fine. Ziggurats were going up all over the place, and the skyline of Ur altered rapidly. The priests were pleased because all those ziggurats meant more priests were needed. Nebu-al-karsig was pleased because he was going down in history as the greatest ziggurat builder of his dynasty. And I was pleased beca u se I was getting a lot of elegant artifacts. Then things started to sour.”

“The nuse,” I murmured. “I knew it.”

-

The nuse man glared at me.

“It … was … not … the … nuse!” he said, biting off the words. “What happened was the brickmakers sta rted to get sore. They were out of jobs, you see, because of the nuse. And the bricklayers were almost as badly off. They were working twelve hours a day, seven days a week, without any overtime, trying to use up all the bricks. Pretty soon there would be riots in the streets.

“Nebu-al-karsig asked me what I thought he ought to do. I told him, let the brickmakers into the bricklayers’ guild. That way he’d have twice as many men to build ziggurats. So he issued a decree. And then there were riots in the st reets.

“ ‘What,’ said the bricklayers, ‘let those dirty sheep’s livers into our union? When they haven’t served a seven years’ apprenticeship?’ ‘What,’ said the brickmakers, ‘be forced to give up our noble art, sacred to Nintud since time im memorial, in exchange for slicking mud paste over heartless mechanical bricks?’ Then both sides shrieked ‘Never!’ and barricades, made out of brick baskets and cobblestones, began to go up everywhere.

“I suppose the fuss would have died down in time. Peo ple —as your age has learned —can get used to anything. But Nebu-al-karsig was sleeping badly. Palace gossip had it that he’d wake up screaming from dreams about his father. He asked the priests what the cause of the trouble was, and they told him that s ome of the minor gods, those who hadn’t got ziggurats yet, were mad at him. The people in Ur had about four thousands gods. So he decided to have the nuse installation turn out more bricks.

“Every morning, as soon as it was daylight, a bunch of shave-hea ded priests would file into the nuse factory. They’d stand in front of the installation, concentrating, for an hour, and then a new batch of priests would come. They kept that up all day. Nuse, of course, is basically a neural force. By the end of the day, bricks would be simply pouring out of the brick hoppers. Even to me, who had nothing to do with laying them, seeing all those mountains and mountains of bricks was very discouraging.

“I tried to argue with Nebu-al-karsig about it. I told him as politely as I could that he was endangering his throne. But he’d never liked me, and after the episode of the brickmakers’ guild, he hadn’t trusted me. He wouldn’t listen. I decided it was time I got out of Ur.

“I had one more installment of artifacts due me. I would collect that and then leave. By now the chest of artifacts in my bedroom was almost full.

“The day of the installment came and went, and no artifacts. I mentioned it to Nebu-al-karsig and he showed his teeth at me. But on the next day, ten or twelv e priests came to my rooms with a little box. The head priest opened it and gave it to me. In it were the missing artifacts.

“They weren’t quite what my contract called for, but I was glad to get them. I thanked the head priest for them as nicely as I kn ew how, and he smiled and suggested that we have a drink. I said, fine, and he poured it out. One of the minor priests was carrying goblets and the wineskin. I put out my hand for the cup and the head priest —did I tell you I’d put a small general nuse i n stallation in my rooms?”

I thought back. “No, you didn’t.”

“Well, I had,” said the nuse man. “I wasn’t going to be bothered with slow, stupid slaves waiting on me. I put out my hand for the cup and the priest went sailing up in the air. He hit on the c eiling with a considerable thump. Then he went around the room, floating just at eye-level, and whacked solidly against each of the four corners. He hit the fourth corner harder and faster than he had the first. I could see that his mouth was open and he l ooked scared.

“There was a kind of pause while he hovered in the air. Then he went up and hit the ceiling, came down toward the floor, up to the ceiling, down again, up, hovered, and then came down on the floor for the last time with a great crashing whu mp! He landed so hard I thought I felt the floor shake. I knew he must be hurt.

“I stood there frozen for a moment. I couldn’t imagine what had happened. Then it came to me. The drink in my cup had been poisoned. I suppose Nebu-al-karsig hadn’t had nerve enough to do it himself. And the nuse installation in my room hadn’t let the head priest get away with it.

“A nuse never makes a mistake. ‘The airy servitor. Don’t think, use nuse.’ The more I sell it, the more I’m convinced that it’s wonderful stuff. This time it had saved my life. I couldn’t help wishing for a minute, though, that it had just tipped over the poisoned cup quietly, because banging a priest around like that was sure to be sacrilege.