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Pyramid
by Steve Anderson
SGAcreative.com
(c) 1995-2005,
Steve Anderson, Writer@SGAcreative.com
The beginning of a story which was original at the time,
but became "derivative" when Stargate came out.
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"Um, Doc?"
Professor Carter Graham turned, reluctantly, and faced the graduate student he'd
brought along on the expedition. "Yes, what is it?"
Susan pointed to the walls of the passageway,
where torches ought to have been mounted. "No lighting."
Graham shrugged. "So they carried
their torches instead of mounting them. The legends all say this Pharaoh was a bit eccentric; doesn't
surprise me that his burial was unconventional, as well."
"But there's no discoloration," she
protested, shining her flashlight up at the ceiling, then down to the floor. "There's a lot of scuffing,
which suggests a good deal of traffic, but that many torches would've turned the ceiling black, wouldn't
they?"
"My dear girl," he said, slowly shaking his head, "housecleaning is not the sole property
of our time. With all the slaves the Egyptians had to work with, surely they could have spared one or
two to maintain decorum in the corridors of the Pyramid."
Susan frowned, her expression cast
into strange shadows by the professor's flashlight. "Are you sure about that?" she asked uncertainly.
"Of course I am! What alternative is there?" He paused a moment, then shook his head. "You don't
seriously believe that poppycock about the Egyptians having electricity, do you?"
Susan shifted
uncomfortably. The uncertainties were what had attracted her to archaeology in the first place, and
she wasn't ready to dismiss anything quite yet. "It's possible," she suggested tentatively.
Graham
laughed. "Nonsense! There's no evidence to support any of that!"
"But," Susan asked, standing
her ground, "what about the hieroglyph?" She hadn't believed it at first, but the image really did exist:
two Egyptian figures holding a gigantic lightbulb, complete with the filament and a coiled wire attached
to its base.
"So they had something the same shape as a modern lightbulb. It's the most basic
shape in glassblowing, and the fascination of the ship in the bottle--anything placed inside a glass
sphere, where the filament goes on a lightbulb--is almost universal. The fact that we have something
that looks the same and has a practical function is purely a coincidence. Now come on, let's go."
Without waiting for a response, Graham turned and headed deeper into the Pyramid, following the ancient
corridor down and in, and trusting that Susan would follow behind.
She did, considering what
he had said but not entirely convinced. His explanation seemed forced, somehow, and in any event, it
only explained one of the strangely modern images found over the years. There had been a small cylinder
with two chambers, each with a rod protruding out the top of the casing. One chamber had held one chemical,
the other signs of having once held another chemical which had, by then, long since evaporated--when
it was filled again by a researcher, he found himself holding an operational battery.
But the
professor would never accept that as evidence. The fact that it worked as a battery when a modern electrolyte
had been added didn't prove, he would say, that it had originally been intended as a battery, or that
the Egyptians could have harnessed its energy if it had ever been charged. It was, at best, an anomaly.
"The bird," Susan mumbled to herself, thinking of another story she'd heard. A small stone figure,
unearthed almost a century before and quickly classified as an oddly unrealistic statue of a bird, had
been reexamined decades later. On a hunch, the second researcher had tossed it lightly, like a paper
airplane--and it had flown almost one hundred feet. If the Egyptians understood the theories of flight.....
"Ridiculous," Graham muttered, overhearing Susan thinking aloud. "Understanding the anatomy that
allows a bird to fly, and being able to sculpt flight itself, are wonderful achievements, but they don't
indicate high technology."
"Yes, sir," Susan mumbled, reluctantly silencing her racing mind.
Graham was the expert, she reminded herself, and she would be well advised to listen to him and trust
his judgment.
Before she could change her mind on that, they had arrived at the main chamber.
It was spectacular. Real hieroglyphs all over the walls, the tomb in the center of the chamber--the
sense of standing where no one had stood for thousands upon thousands of years was overwhelming. This,
Susan knew, was what archaeology was all about. However much it might claim to be about reconstructing
the past, it was, in the end, really about this sensation of stepping into another world.
Smiling
absently, she got to work, gently brushing the layers of accumulated dust off the walls to reveal the
ancient writing. Between the two of them, they should be able to make out the sense of most of them,
but for the moment, Susan was more than content just to look in wonder at the lines and curves with an
aesthetic eye, admiring their permanence despite the long millenia.
As she started down another
of the panels that made up the walls, Susan noted an unusual contour farther down, around waist-level.
Curious, she crouched and brushed the dust away with the careful, gentle touch she had worked so hard
to learn.
Layer after layer of dust puffed away, and at last she found herself looking at a small
convex disk measuring three inches in diameter and apparently made out of glass. That was patently impossible,
of course--glass could never have remained this perfectly smooth for so long.
Susan stared into
the lens for a few moments, then turned her head. "Professor," she said uncertainly, "I think you should
take a look at this."
He turned, grumbling, from the hieroglyph he was busily interpreting on
the other side of the chamber and glared down at her. "What is it now?" he demanded.
Susan waved
her hand at the glass disk, trying to find words to explain herself with.
She never got the chance.
As her hand waved past the lens, the light it had missed for so long was interrupted, and a huge boom
sounded from the wall. Surprised, she tried to scurry away without bothering to stand up first, and
wound up sitting down hard, staring at the wall.
Behind her, Graham was staring at the wall,
as well, and so both saw at the same instant as, with a tremendous grinding racket and the dry crackle
of millenia of caked dust giving way, the two halves of the wall slowly swung away like gigantic, massive
stone doors.
And, more incredibly still, as the ancient systems restarted, the ceiling, not only
beyond the doors but here in the chamber, as well, began to glow, first softly and then more brilliantly,
shedding an even blue light across the room.
Susan stared, open-mouthed, her only coherent thought
the realization that this was why they hadn't needed torches in the entrance passage: the entire ceiling
was some sort of light source.
The Professor's mouth, too, hung open. At last, he forced it
closed and managed to breathe, almost silently, "Oh. My."
After a time, the two of them stood
and, side by side, stepped through the doors and started down the glowing passageway.
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