Channeling Cleopatra (9 page)

"No kidding?"

"Oh, yes, I don't know how much you know
about her . . ."

"I started to read up on her but got
distracted a lot back at Nucore. Chimera was always wanting me to
look at something new and amazing through a microscope. Most of
what I know about her is from the movies."

"She was a genius! A heroine as well and a
warrior in the only way she could be. Had she been a man, we would
have heard only about her intellect and scholarship and what a
great pharaoh she was, preserving Egypt as a political entity
thirty years beyond when it should have fallen. Since she was
female and had to capitalize on every possible asset, her use of
her femininity to preserve her kingdom caused her to be vilified
and perhaps worse, cheapened, by the history written by the
conquerors. She loved all of Egypt and was considered the
embodiment of Isis by the people."

"But she was a Ptolemy, a Macedonian Greek,
right?"

Gabriella shrugged. "Officially, yes. She
was born a Ptolemy and yet, who can say which alliances had been
made within that bloodline before Alexander came to Egypt?" Her
voice dropped in register and was vibrant with emotion now.
"Perhaps some descendant of an Egyptian princess was captured or
married for political reasons into the Macedonian royal family
before ever Alexander set foot here. Or perhaps the spirits of the
pharaohs really did possess living people at times . . ."

"Dr. Faruk! How unscientific of you! Have
you been hiding Steven King novels behind the covers of your
professional journals?"

"No, no! I am quite serious. What else,
after all, is Chimera's process but scientifically induced
possession?"

"Well, it's not quite that cut and dried.
The imported person doesn't always dominate—"

Gabriella waved that aside, and Leda looked
around her, relieved to see they were still quite alone. Gabriella
shot her a considering look that said she had been aware of their
solitude and would not have spoken so freely otherwise.

"Anyway, you must read more about her. She
was a fascinating person and a very great woman, much
misinterpreted. She loved Egypt more deeply than she cared for
either of the men with whom her name is so often linked, and
probably more than their children. However, once she was gone, the
looting of the country began, and it has not stopped to this
day."

"But it's illegal now to remove antiquities,
isn't it? Bodies are reburied, that sort of thing?"

"Yes, though it is, as a professor of mine
from Texas used to say, closing the barn door once the horses have
made good their escape. And it is also true that in the last half
of the twentieth century, many of the great museums that housed
collections rightfully belonging to Egypt but plundered from us
returned many artifacts and remains. This was during a period of
politically correct fervor which was ultimately abandoned as
unprofitable and stopped short of returning the greatest treasures
of intrinsic value. Our own countrymen learned from that lesson.
Until the plan was formed to raise ancient Alexandria rather than
raze it, as has been done so often in the past, sites were quickly
excavated and sifted for items of interest, data recorded, and then
some new office building or theater was erected on the site. My own
museum is thought to occupy the site where Cleopatra's great
library once stood."

"There's not much left, for sure," Leda
said, looking around at the ruins, which seemingly could have been
simulated in a day or two by a couple of energetic kids with pails
and shovels.

Gabriella looked very sad. "Alexandria was
in its heyday the most beautiful and cosmopolitan city in the
world. Books for the library were commandeered from the many ships
docking here. Copies were hastily made and returned to the ships,
but the real scrolls remained with us, and many of the scholars as
well. The other great cities could not stand it, and when Egypt
fell, they destroyed their rival city without regard for the loss
to civilization." She sighed. "Of course, that's really only part
of it. Most scientists now say that earthquakes caused most of the
damage such as that to the structures that are being raised from
the harbor.

The Pharos Lighthouse, the palaces, the
Caesarium, whole little suburbs, actually. Our environment has been
no less tempestuous than other elements of our history. Myself, I
am so grateful to Nucore for funding the restoration of these
ruins. The government would never have done it without that money.
And it will give new life to the city."

"Yes," Leda said. "It would be a real hoot
to go back downtown to the corner of Daniel and Canopic or whatever
and see all those columns and pillars you were talking about
someday instead of the garbage heaps and graffiti."

On their way back to the villa, she got a
call on the cell phone from her dad telling her the beluga was up
and ready for business.

So the next day, with the
help of Gabriella and the cousins, she removed her equipment to her
new air-conditioned lab complete with its own generator. Her dad
and some of the security staff he had already appropriated to erect
the beluga, four young Egyptian men who acted like he was the
president of the country instead of just the head of security,
finished installing plugs and switches, cabinets and flooring. Pete
popped his head in and flirted briefly with Gabriella, who was,
Leda noticed to her pleasure, the reason the flirtation was brief.
Gabriella didn't act as if she wanted much to do with old
Pete.
Tough luck, fella.

Good as it was to have a loyal friend and
colleague so early in the game, Leda followed the move into the lab
with a move of her personal stuff to the Cecil Hotel. This was over
the protests of Gabriella and her aunts, who reminded Leda
uncomfortably of a sort of summit conference of her dad's ex-wives,
had her stepmoms all chosen to wear designer clothes and quite a
lot of jewelry in the privacy of their own garden. Dinner with the
aunts the night before had been noisy and funny. Gabriella didn't
realize Leda spoke Arabic, and Leda was too unsure of her skill to
admit to it. But some of Gabriella's translations and the aunts'
comments were very funny, and Leda had to suppress her giggles
until Gabriella told her what was allegedly being said.

Gabriella's Western-isms were generally
frowned upon by the aunts, according to her, though they seemed
extremely indulgent and even deferential, from what Leda could see.
However, their attitude toward Leda as a genuine specimen of the
truly decadent American woman with all of the wild and crazy
privileges allowed the species, was rather awestricken. Clearly, as
the aunts had seen from their hiding places the night Leda arrived,
even her own father approved of her lifestyle and behavior and
accompanied her on her adventures, so she was a nice girl, despite
her otherwise scandalous behavior. Leda suspected she gave them
something to fantasize about. They didn't seem to get out much.

However, when she and Gabriella returned
from setting up the beluga to collect her own belongings, a
delegation awaited her. The aunts and a couple of female cousins
were dressed with their head scarves pinned securely beneath their
chins, and each one insisted on carrying some item of Leda's
belongings, no matter how small. Then they all piled into the same
taxi Gabriella had been using all along, which turned out to belong
to Mohammed. A short time later, they exited the cab like a line of
graceful and noisy native bearers and wended their way to her new
room at the Cecil, where the bed, the chairs, and the television
were all duly tested by the family. The aunts liked the room but
were chilled by the air-conditioning, which they disdained,
chattering among themselves.

Leda felt like she could finally breathe for
the first time since she'd arrived, but Gabriella said, "They fear
you will catch cold. It is better you should acclimate yourself,
they think."

"Tell them I'll turn it off before I get
frostbite," Leda said.

This required some explanation from
Gabriella, but once the joke was understood, everybody laughed,
then departed to leave Leda in peace for her third night in
Alexandria.

CHAPTER 7

By the time the first
tremor came, Leda felt like the whole excavation could
use
a shaking up.
Unwilling to stay cooped up in the windowless lab, however cool,
while the science and exploration went on in the harbor bed, Leda
had set out to charm all and sundry. She introduced herself to
Namid and actually apologized for putting him out on the day of her
arrival with her inopportune phone call. She used her best phone
sex voice and her eyes to full effect. He wasn't as receptive as he
would have been if she looked as she had twenty years earlier, but
he did make a grab at her ass when she was bent over the
scaffolding looking at the carving on a stone emerging from the
filth on the harbor floor.

She didn't even break his
hand. Duke was impressed, which pleased her. He had been her main
tutor when it came to figuring out how to turn on the charm, but
she wasn't about to tell him that. "You'd better watch it, Kid, or
you'll get the rep for being a team player," he teased her one
evening when they were sipping nice
cold
brews on the lanai that was part
of her hotel suite. He preferred staying in the barracks with the
other unattached men. He could keep an eye on things better from
there, he said. She didn't have anything except the equipment to
keep an eye on, herself, and he posted a guard on the beluga when
she was away, so she didn't worry about it.

"Well, all those years in
the Navy teach you nothing if not how to kiss up and worm your way
into the good graces of total creeps," she said with a shrug.
"Besides, I
am
a
team player; we both are. We're just not saying whose team we're
on."

She kissed up with a vengeance, begging for
the shittiest jobs and pleading her ignorance often, while still
performing the hard, dull work she was given with meticulous
competence. Meanwhile, she spent a lot of time listening to people
young enough to be sure they had all the answers pontificate for
hours about the subjects of their theses—usually the diving
expeditions conducted in the harbor's waters a couple of decades
ago.

It wasn't all bad. After the initial
complaints from her arthritic joints, which she medicated and
ignored, as usual, she actually began to feel better. Maybe it was
because she was doing something that she'd always wanted to do and
her mind wasn't taking any crap from her body, so to speak, but she
made herself walk as much as the others, back and forth across the
miles of scaffolding covering the harbor floor, up and down the
ladders reaching to the top of the dam, the island, and the dike
supporting the island.

She spent hours bent over the scaffolding,
unearthing carved bits of stone from the muck on the harbor bottom.
She squatted, sifting dirt. She lifted what felt like tons of soil
and stone. She sweated buckets and buckets and felt she was
drinking as much, but as the water poured out of her body, she grew
lighter and that made the moving quite a lot easier. Also, even
though the Cecil had very nice European-style meals, she wasn't
there for most of them but snacked on cold food at the site or in
the lab.

After awhile, the sweating even lessened her
frequent trips to the chemical toilet, which was not in the harbor
basin where somebody might pee on an artifact—never mind that the
sewage had been dumped all over them for years—but up top.

If the other members of the expedition
wondered why Nucore had sent a beluga to house the work of someone
who seemed to be doing about the same thing the Egyptian laborers
did, they were too busy telling her all about their own ideas and
personal problems to ask. All the while, she maintained an internal
fantasy of being a modem-day counterpart to her favorite fictional
Egyptologist, Amelia Peabody. This helped her listen through the
sweat pouring down her face and the throbbing of her joints and
muscles.

As she worked, she looked up often to see
her old man prowling the dike and the dam, staring into the hole
with his eyes shaded like some Indian scout from an old politically
incorrect Western. The kind he liked. His eyes were still pretty
sharp, though he needed reading glasses, and he could spot her from
clear back at the dam. If she happened to catch his eye, she waved,
and he returned it. She didn't bother returning to the Cecil in the
afternoon but went to the air-conditioned lab. The air-conditioning
was a waste of money, when she was spending little time there and
had only the specimens she brought with her, but they were precious
specimens, obtained through a lot of trouble and at high cost. And
she could keep a few beers in the little fridge. Her dad often
stopped by and helped her drink them. And sometimes she actually
took a siesta, though more often she input data on her computer,
keeping track of the work done on the site. Then by around three in
the afternoon, it was time to return to the basin and get back to
work until dark.

After dark, she returned to the Cecil. If
Dad wasn't on duty, he might come by to enjoy the luxury away from
the former Egyptian Navy barracks he occupied with the other
foreign men who had no families. Once or twice he brought Pete with
him. They had really hit it off. She asked Pete why someone in his
surely highly paid position didn't indulge in a hotel room, too. He
grumbled something about needing to be on the site to keep an eye
on the dam.

"That's not it, though," her dad told her
later. "You were right about the guy not being any good at
marriage, Kid. He keeps marrying women who make less than he does
and don't know how to manage money, so he has to pay a lot of
alimony and child support and stuff. Keeps the poor devil broke."
Leda got a lot of grim satisfaction from that, as her father had
known she would. Dad, of course, had always married women who had
enough money that they wouldn't miss an extra withdrawal once in
awhile when there was a toy her dad wanted or a fishing or hunting
trip he wished to take. He worked, of course, but the things he
liked to work at didn't quite support him in the style he
liked.