The Ancient Starship (9 page)

As they strode up the side of the hill to the hotel, Amelia said, ‘I can see why you would want to, ah … reconstitute yourself as a human before you came through the gateway.'

The Munfeep woman gave her a sideways look and said nothing.

‘I mean,' Amelia went on, ‘my mum freaked out when Bowler-Hat Man didn't come out of his room for two days. I get why you'd want to avoid that. Plus, you'd have to dispose of the cocoon …'

‘Hm.' The woman marched a bit more deliberately, and her face was stern. Amelia realised it wasn't an arrogant face at all, but
guarded.

‘I suppose you don't want to talk about it,' she said at last. ‘Sorry.'

The woman sighed, and then said, ‘It's not what I want or don't want – the Munfeep simply
do not talk about it.
After the Fourth Law killed more than half of us, and the rest of us scattered, we had to make ourselves invisible.'

Amelia gasped. ‘You can do that?'

‘No, I don't mean literally invisible. I mean, we melted into whichever world we found ourselves in – we hid away any clue that we were Munfeep, and as far as we could, we became identical to those around us. We have done it so well, most people have forgotten we ever existed. As you saw from those Control agents, a lot of people wish we never had.'

‘Oh.' Amelia thought hard and walked on in silence.

As they got closer to the hotel, both of them sped up, skipping up the main steps to the front doors, striding across the lobby, and then almost sprinting up the marble staircase to the guest wing.

Amelia was slightly breathless as they jogged down the hall to Bowler-Hat Man's door. ‘He's in that room.'

‘Right next door? The whole time?' The woman laughed softly.

Amelia wondered if she should leave and give them some privacy, but from the look on the woman's face, she'd as good as forgotten Amelia was there. All her attention was on the door to Room 7.

With a deep breath, she knocked. After a long pause, the door opened, and the new, younger, handsomer version of Bowler-Hat Man stood in the doorway. He was still wearing his bowler hat, even in the privacy of his own room.

‘Can I help you?' he said politely.

‘Oh, I hope so,' said the woman. ‘That is, if you don't mind, I need to ask just one question …'

The man smiled quizzically. ‘Yes, all right.'

The woman swallowed and then, looking him straight in the eye, spoke in a rushed, lilting jumble of sounds that Amelia guessed was Munfeep.

The man staggered back, his hand over his mouth. Then he replied in the same musical torrent, grinning. ‘Q'Proll?'

She gave a shout of laughter in return. ‘K'Torl?'

They talked hurriedly back and forth, and then suddenly the man threw off his bowler hat, and Q'Proll pulled her scarf back. Amelia saw, rising up from the hair on their heads, slender pairs of antennae. As Q'Proll and K'Torl stood nose to nose with one another, the antennae gently bobbed toward each other, and then entwined.

In that instant, Amelia knew two things: that Bowler-Hat Man was, against all logic, the woman in the scarf's long-lost husband, and that – as the antennae continued to wrap themselves into writhing knots – she was witnessing her first full-on alien kiss. It was definitely time to go and find Charlie.

The next day the snooty human woman, her two little kids and the quiet old lady checked out of the hotel, and no other human guest had made a booking for the week.

Q'Proll and K'Torl asked if they could throw a party. Arxish looked a bit queasy at the thought of hanging out with a couple of Munfeep, but Ms Rosby couldn't have been more delighted and accepted on behalf of Control. For a while, Amelia thought there might be an out and out argument between the two, but things calmed down when everyone realised just how lavish the Munfeep party was going to be. In fact, Arxish was so won over, he actually offered the use of his teleporter.

‘How can you afford to pay for all this?' Charlie asked bluntly, gawping over yet another load of food, decorations and gifts that K'Torl had been busy ferrying back from Egypt with the help of the teleporter.

‘I've worked most of the six and a half thousand years I've lived on Earth,' he said. ‘I've saved a little here, made a few investments there … it's amazing how it all adds up after a while.'

In fact, when Charlie pressed him a bit harder, it turned out that K'Torl had accumulated
millions
of Egyptian pounds, as well as nearly four
billion
US dollars, several million British pounds, and similar amounts of Chinese yuan, Japanese yen, Euros, and Russian roubles, plus he owned some small islands in the Pacific Ocean.

‘But they're not a long-term investment, obviously,' he said modestly.

Charlie was speechless.

‘Well, I got in on investment banking during the Middle Ages,' K'Torl shrugged. ‘It wasn't hard to make a profit.'

Amelia wondered what Callan would say if he knew …

By lunchtime, the ballroom had been swept, dusted, aired out and mopped clean, and by nightfall it had been carpeted from wall to wall with gorgeous silk rugs. The walls had been hung with tapestries, and every table and chair was draped in the finest Egyptian linen. The tables were covered with gold-rimmed bowls and platters, and they in turn were filled with fragrant koshari rice, spicy meat, dozens of salads, sweet nut pastries dripping in rosewater and honey, fat dates stuffed with nougat and dipped in chocolate, and warm bread so soft and fresh from the oven it made you forget about everything else.

As if that weren't enough, K'Torl and Q'Proll had bought presents for everyone. Amelia still couldn't believe the lapis lazuli necklace they'd given her. Charlie, in a red fez, was overjoyed by the perfect creepiness of a real ancient cat mummy.

‘Was this your cat, K'Torl?' he asked. ‘Did you mummify it yourself?'

‘No,' K'Torl laughed. ‘I'm more of a dog person.'

James had finally put down his book of Ancient Egyptian astronomy charts and was dancing with Ms Rosby, who had hooked over one elbow her new walking stick with the head of an ibis. Arxish and the two other Control agents had arrived so relaxed that, in violation of their own protocols, they had turned off their holo-emitters and were reclining on sofas like Cleopatras – if Cleopatra had been a twelve-legged land squid (Arxish), a thin, curly-furred monkey-rabbit, or a giant wood louse.

Q'Proll came and slipped her arm around K'Torl's waist – they hadn't been apart for more than three minutes all night.

‘So what happened to you, anyway?' said Amelia. ‘How did you get out of your ship? That was like a magic trick!' Then she caught herself, and added, ‘That's if you don't mind me asking …'

‘No, it's quite a story,' K'Torl said. He saw that Lady Naomi, Dad and Mum had drifted over to listen. Mary and Tom were too busy at the buffet table to care.

‘Well,' he went on, ‘as you already know, I crashed. The Fourth Law damaged my ship before I escaped through the rift, and I had little control over it as I shot out into this galaxy. I flew on for thirteen thousand years, until I was pulled into this solar system by your sun's gravity. I identified Earth as my only opportunity for survival, and managed to direct my ship into orbit. I was very weak at this point – I had been in hibernation for millennia, and though I had revived myself only a couple of decades earlier, I was out of food and badly hungry.

‘When I crashed into the sands of Egypt, the impact knocked me unconscious and when I awoke, the entire ship was encased in glass.'

‘Buried alive!' Amelia said in horror.

‘Indeed,' said K'Torl. ‘But by my very good fortune, I was in the body of a Saurestian fire crab at the time, and it was very easy for me, even in that state, to crack the glass and dig my way out of the sand.'

Amelia swallowed.
Crack the glass?
It had been almost six inches thick in places! And digging through sand – how could he have survived?

‘I realised that the glass was a great disguise for my vessel, and was able to emit enough heat from my claws to re-melt the glass and seal up the pod again.'

Charlie nodded. ‘Which is why it looked untouched when they found it.'

‘So there I was, on the surface of this alien world, a plume of smoke coming from the sand, and me all shaky with fatigue. Of course, I was soon surrounded by humans who had heard the crash. Poor creatures – imagine them there, trying to figure out what this big sign from the skies meant, and then seeing me crawling out of the ground in front of them. And as I was, all shining in my blue and gold exoskeleton, I looked like a giant scarab beetle. They thought I was a god. One poor fellow fainted of fright on the spot, while the rest ran away.'

Amelia touched her necklace – a gold scarab beetle hung in the centre between the blue stones. Perhaps for K'Torl it had brought back memories?

‘I thought,' he continued, ‘that they might have gone to fetch weapons, and honestly, I was so tired, I didn't care. I just lay in the sand and rested. But the dear things – it turned out they had arranged a sacrifice in my honour, and they brought me all sorts of meat and honey cakes and wine. Far more than any of them could afford, of course, but I didn't know that at the time. I just fell on it and ate the lot. I'll always be profoundly grateful.

‘Well, they were all around me, clapping and singing, and it was very kind and welcoming, but obviously it couldn't go on. Fortunately, I managed to snip a little hair from one of them – I believe he took it as a special blessing – and after I had eaten and rested enough to return to full strength, I simply flew away to a more isolated place, and reconstituted myself into a human body.'

‘But you were all alone,' said Lady Naomi, her face full of pity. She glanced over at Tom. ‘No-one there for you, to help you survive.'

K'Torl shrugged. ‘I am Munfeep,' he said. ‘Being alone is how we survive.'

‘But you're not alone now!' Q'Proll chided, and snuggled closer into his side.

‘Ah.' K'Torl turned to her. ‘But I'm not just surviving anymore, am I? Now we are together, finally I can begin to
live
.'

Rolling his eyes and barely suppressing a gagging sound, Charlie dragged Amelia away.

‘I wanted to hear what happened next!' Amelia protested.

‘I already know what happens next,' said Charlie. ‘The same thing that's been happening all night: they kiss and slobber all over each other for about an hour.'

Looking back over her shoulder, Amelia saw that Charlie was right.

‘But still,' she said, ‘I wanted to know how he got here, to the hotel, at the exact moment that Q'Proll did.'

‘Oh, I can tell you that.' Charlie threw himself down into an armchair.

‘You can?' Amelia sat in the chair beside him.

‘Yeah, he told Arxish he'd been hanging around the dig site since the archaeologists first found the ship. Like, a year ago or whatever. And then when Control's advance team went in a couple of weeks back, K'Torl overheard them talking about the gateway.'