The End of Eternity
by Stephanie ZvanDr. Richardson knew he was spending too much time with the dead girl. On the rare occasions he made it home, Sandra gave him those corner-of-the-eye looks, the ones that said, "I know I married you for better or for worse, but how much worse is it going to get?" He didn't know how to answer without admitting to them both that Meryaset held some fascination for him that Sandra just...didn't.
Maybe it was because Meryaset had been so much harder to get. It was now seven years since he'd applied to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo to have the mummy of a minor priest's daughter and the contents of her tomb transferred to the U.S. Fifteen years before that to build the credentials and reputation that allowed him the presumption to ask. A surge of nationalist pressure at the last minute had almost kept her in Egypt. Finally, two weeks ago, he'd uncrated her and laid her out with his own hands.
The two weeks had done nothing to soothe his impatience. Before he could do anything else, everything had to be catalogued and scanned. He'd pushed his graduate students to work harder, faster, as they noisily checked off the shipping lists. He'd snapped at anyone making the obligatory horror film jokes.
That display of temper hadn't been impatience, though, but some strange desire to protect Meryaset. He could never quite remember she was dead. He didn't believe in the ancient Egyptian conception of an afterworld, but that hadn't stopped him from thinking of mummies as merely dormant. It had always been part of their allure.
Now, with all the students gone home, he stood over Meryaset and wondered whether Sandra was right to worry. Was fascination was slipping into obsession? Looking at the silent form on the table, it was too easy to believe she was just waiting for the right moment to awaken. A brief but vivid picture imposed itself on his mind: Meryaset in her linen, like a bride in her dress, looking to him to free her.
Dr. Richardson choked and fled, barely pausing to lock the door behind him. It was time to go home to his loving—living—wife. He hoped a normal evening at home and a good night's sleep would make him more rational.
When they lifted away the stone and paint that held her down, Mery drifted gently. Honeyed beer, perfumed oils, quiet music and the rich scents of fertile floodplains—all faded as she slid into the mists. She didn't notice. It had been so long since any of it had registered.
The mist itself brought her back to awareness. White and featureless, it was the first change in her surroundings in centuries. Just how long, she didn't know. Monotony had dulled her, and she had lost track of time long ago, then forgotten it existed. But now....
She thought to move more quickly in the direction she was drifting, but she'd forgotten how to try. Volition was a stranger to her, as were desire, anticipation and urgency. Perseverance was the one thing she still knew. She called on it and found herself speeding toward her unknown goal.
An abrupt lack of motion told Mery she had reached her destination. She had to dig far into her faded past to define the other change that came with her arrival, even as she reveled in its rightness.
It was a sensation, real physical sensation. Its return delighted her and brought her a little more back to herself. She tried to reach a hand into the gray in front of her and felt it more strongly. It was resistance, pressure...weight! She marveled. How much time must have passed since weight had become habit, rather than an inescapable force. Could she really have forgotten its existence? She welcomed it now as an old friend, stopping her struggle and relaxing into its embrace.
But stillness palled quickly. Her small taste of novelty bred a desire for more. She reached out again. Struggling to lift her arm, Mery wondered whether the unmeasured time since she'd last felt real weight had made her weak. She didn't think weight had always been such a formidable foe. She bent all her will on the single task of raising one arm, determined that this place, wherever she was, would not become just another prison.
Finally, something gave with a sound of tearing—she prodded at faded memories—of tearing cloth, and her arm was free. She brought it up in front of her face and felt a sharp disappointment. Her hand was only a featureless blur, moving as she told it to move. She had hoped, if she was finally to experience reality again, for something richer than dim shadows and small, indistinct noises.
She brought her hand closer to her face, willing her vision to improve. She almost laughed—how her spirit sang at the return of laughter, and of surprise—when it stopped without touching her. She forced her stiff fingers to curl, and with more tearing cloth, she could see.
The light was painfully bright. Despite her thirst for experience, this was too much. She tried to close her eyes against it, but that was beyond her power. She shaded her eye with her hand and slowly allowed her vision to adjust.
When she could face the light, she lifted her hand again to look at it. She didn't want to claim the shrouded, desiccated thing as hers, but it moved when she told it to. Her stained burial wrappings told her more about her situation. She set her freed hand to discover what it could of the rest of her.
Her eyes were hard, empty sockets that would never close. She wondered how she could see. Her proud nose was gone, and her lips would never stretch to cover her teeth again. Mery's mother had once told her she was pretty. No more. She hoped she was alone.
Then the thought of others made her dizzy with anticipation, and she forgot her momentary vanity. How long had she ached for a companion? She had begged the gods, the sky, the sand for someone to talk to, someone who could say unexpected things. Could she find that someone here?
Mery tried to ignore the rest of her shrunken body as she freed it from the most confining layers of linen. Even when free, her limbs were stiff. It took several tries to raise herself to a position from which she could see her surroundings.
There wasn't much there, but anything was a feast to Mery. The chamber around her was distinctly gray—walls, ceiling and floors. The two doorways she could see were sealed with gray slabs. The sparse furniture—flat-topped cabinets, shelves, and the table underneath her—was also gray. Only the slits in the ceiling that let light in were a different color. Still, it was something new. She pushed herself off the table and made her way, unsteadily at first, to the nearest cabinet. Her hand landed heavily on its top, and a brief metallic sound rang off the walls. Meryaset listened, then hit it again.
Here she found the painted jar containing her favorite falcon. Beside it was the cat, sweet and aloof, who had once shared her days. Mery's empty eye sockets ached. She wanted to cry. Her animals' company had sustained her through the first several of those long solitary centuries. They had played games and hunted imaginary prey endlessly for her amusement, over and again until there was no new way to play or hunt, until playing and hunting became meaningless.
Deeply grateful, Mery lifted each jar and kissed it as best she could. Then she carefully dashed them into a corner of the room. Whatever happened to her, they were free of the burden of eternity. The shattering was satisfyingly loud and vivid. Her little army of ushabti servants followed, making brighter noises.
More jars rested on another counter. Some were marked as containing figs and olives and other foods of which she had grown heartily sick when she'd still bothered to eat. She opened each of them and held them up to her missing nose. She greedily absorbed the scents of dust and decay. Then these, too, joined the shards in the corner.
Soon the only familiar items on the counters were her funerary jars. She could feel their vitality and knew it was tied to her own. She left them and continued around the room, stopping to touch or smell everything she found. The empty shelves made a beautiful cool shivery sound, and she struck each one as she went by. She twisted her fingers in the holes of their supports, feeling their sharp edges.
On the shelves she found the small store of household items that had followed her to the afterworld. Here, they had an immediacy they'd never aspired to there, where familiarity had taught her to hate them before they'd finally been forgotten. Seeing them, touching them made her feel alive again, as did those few things she'd never seen before, leaves of impossibly thin papyrus and odd metal devices whose purpose she couldn't guess.
Mery left the painted effigy on her sarcophagus for last. Static and enduring, it was the image of what she had been in her short life. She remembered the force, the intangible weight it had exerted to hold her in that unchanging afterlife. She tried to spit on her captor. Moisture had long since fled her mouth, and she spit instead a dusting of powdered muscle and skin. It had broken free as she moved around the room.
She looked from that imperious image to her own dark withered flesh and saw the changes wrought by her explorations. The remaining linen was flaking away, in layers and in clumps. Her skin was beginning to follow. Two fingertips and several knuckles were nearly bare, and a trail of debris stretched behind her.
She kept moving. If this existence was to be a short one, she wanted all she could get from it. She touched and smelled everything, including the rough walls and the smooth, cool shelves and counters on which all her things sat. She threw more and hit more, to hear the different sounds of breakage. She waded into her self-made sea of shards to find the food, prying her jaw open so she could taste what lingering flavor it had.
Mery was growing clumsier, but she pushed on, collecting sensation. Only when she couldn't grip anything smaller than her hand did she turn back to where she had started. When she couldn't pull the tops off the funerary jars, she panicked, thinking she'd left it too long. After savoring even this emotion for a long moment, she forced herself to be calm.
Methodically, she held each jar between her clumsy hands and shattered its head against the table's edge. Lungs and liver, stomach and viscera went into a pile as tidy as she could make it in the middle of the floor. She struggled again to get back on the table. When done, she sat and stared quietly around her.
She knew she had other choices. Although the idea made her want, impossibly, to vomit, she could return to her long unchanging afterlife. She could wait here quietly. Time might bring more new sensations before she crumbled completely into dust.
She glanced at the gray, nearly featureless ceiling above the table and made her decision. She'd had more than enough of eternity for any one person.
Guided by the intuition granted to the dead, who have so little use for it, she grasped the smallest bone of her left pinky and snapped the dry tissues that still held it in place. She threw it to the floor, where it rolled toward the pile as though drawn. Flame sprang up where it stopped and quickly spread over the whole pile.
Reveling in the heat, and even the pain, Mery settled back onto the table for a good scratch and her first long stretch in over 3,000 years.
When the police left about midmorning, as confused as everyone else, Dr. Richardson stepped into Meryaset's room. It was more to escape his colleagues than from any real desire to view the wreckage. The idiots were speculating without a shred of knowledge. He'd heard all sorts of theories, from intellectual jealousy to nationalist conspiracy to satanic ritual. There was, of course, the usual fearful babble about ancient curses, and it wasn't limited to the students.
The devastation was impressive, even though the tiny fire had burned itself out without spreading. Whatever had caused the damage had certainly been enthusiastic. One of the most complete tomb furnishings collections discovered in decades was now rubble. Badly scrambled rubble at that. He sighed. Oh, well. That was what graduate students were for.
Picking his way carefully across the floor, Dr. Richardson came to the table where he could see Meryaset, or what was left of her. The pristine promise of the night before was gone. Her wrappings lay around the room in scraps no larger than his hand. Her skin and muscle were in smaller pieces yet, some of it dust.
As his eyes followed the trail of her remains around the room, something whispered in his memory. He shuddered. He hadn't slept well last night, for all his good intentions. Instead he'd dreamed deeply and long. What he saw now followed those dreams far too well. He completed his turn and stared again at Meryaset. If his dreams had been true....
He fancied that the gaping of her jaw could be a smile, perhaps of satisfaction. He felt a rush of pity for this child who'd lived for all of fourteen years before being consigned to eternity.
He touched her arm lightly. "Rest well, Meryaset."
Her head tipped forward in a motion ridiculously like a nod, and he was very happy none of his colleagues were there to see him jump.
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