Channeling Cleopatra (2 page)

But someone had known that Egypt was to her
what Mecca was to most Egyptians and sent her the ticket. So, while
she had had a dandy time, she had also acquired a crick in her neck
from looking over her shoulder, trying to figure out who had done
her the big favor. And the corollary, of course. What did they want
in return? She knew her benefactor wasn't her dad, who could have
had half a new motorcycle for the price of admission and whose
income as a retired cop was certainly not up to it. It wasn't her
mom, who would never want to do something for her daughter that
Leda actually wanted. Or her brother, who had a wife and two kids
to support. So who?

Finally she grabbed a diet Coke and coaxed
her homicidal feet to carry her to one of the little lawn tables on
the mezzanine of the convention center. She parked the rolling
suitcase against the table and sat down heavily.

She was too tired and footsore at the moment
to make the trip to the parking lot all in one shot. She sucked
down the diet Coke, grateful for the coolness against the back of
her throat.

It just didn't feel right somehow, after
being someone's guest all day, not to wait around until they jumped
out and said, "Surprise!" But that wasn't happening, so she settled
back for a moment and spaced out from sheer exhaustion.

As she grew less tired and more aware of how
sore her butt was becoming from sitting in the distinctly
un-ergonomic chair, she also realized that the world outside the
glass wall of the convention center was dark and full of rain.

Well, it was Portland, after all. Of course it was raining.
She looked at her watch. It was close to seven p.m. already, a fact
that explained the rumbling in her stomach which was, after
forty-five years of valiant service, getting too old to live by
fast food and soda pop alone.

The crowd had thinned so that the noise
inside the convention center was no more than a footstep here, a
voice or two there. Only a handful of people still drifted through
the massive corridors. The escalators, so steep that when they were
shut down they could have been used as indoor training facilities
for baby mountain climbers, were almost empty.

Suddenly, she had the feeling she was being
watched. In her family this sort of feeling was not considered
paranoid. Both her dad and her brother were cops, and she worked
almost daily with the gruesome remains of those who probably should
have been more vigilant. She and all of the other adult Hubbards
were security conscious.

So she opened her big hazel eyes one more
time and looked around and up. Never fail to look up, Daddy always
told her.

And sure enough, there was a dark head
pressed against one of the windows, the face staring in her
direction.

That face looked familiar.

She waved. A hand appeared by the face and
waved briefly back at her, and then the person headed for the
escalator and rode it down to her level.

As the short, slim, dark-haired person
dressed in black fashionably reminiscent of Vietcong pajamas surfed
down the sliding steps, she recognized her--or was it him?—she
thought. Actually, she narrowed the identity down to two possible
suspects.

With the sleek black hair and the big brown
eyes and familiar smile, who could it be but Chime, Leda's bubbly
but brilliant cat-loving friend, a roommate from undergrad days at
the University of Heidelberg? But strangely, the person who seemed
so glad to see her also looked very much like Chime's equally
brilliant but much shyer, cat-allergic husband, Tsering. Leda was
startled to realize as the person grasped her hand and hugged her
that she continued not to be able to decide which one it was.

"Leda! How very good to see you. You
received your ticket, I see."

"Oh, so you were the one who sent it?" she
asked, not letting on that she hadn't decided which name to call
her benefactor.

"Yes. We arranged to be here along with the
recruitment delegation from Nucore, the corporation that sponsors
our work. We have a matter of a highly confidential nature we
wished to discuss with you—a matter involving your interest in
Egypt. If indeed you have continued with your studies and achieved
such eminence that our gift was a slight, forgive us. Since your
name did not appear on the list of invited dignitaries, we felt
that if we sent the ticket, and you came, we could take it as a
sign of your continuing fascination with Egyptology."

"Gee, I wish you had sent a note with it and
told me how to find you. We could have cruised around
together."

"That might have raised questions we were
unprepared to answer until now about matters we aren't at liberty
to discuss freely. And while here, our time was not our own until a
moment ago. However, we were told that you had arrived. One of our
security staff made certain that we would not miss you."

Looking around for the other—whichever one
it was—Jetsun, she asked cagily, "Is your better half with
you?"

"Oh yes, we are both here," her friend
answered.

Leda looked around. "Where?"

"Right. Here." The person tapped himself or
herself on the chest. The brown eyes twinkled at Leda's confusion.
"We are sorry, old friend. It is not fair to tease you this way. We
can say no more while we are here."

"I could drive us to dinner somewhere," Leda
offered.

"A fine idea."

She half expected her friend to whip out a
cell phone and call a third person and end her confusion, but
instead, a black silk clad arm linked with hers, and they walked
toward the parking lot. The voice was huskier than Chime's had
been. So it might be Tsering. On the other hand, there was a silver
pendant dangling down over the front of the black silk shirt, so it
was probably Chime. On the other hand, the pendant was a handmade
silver yin-yang pendant, like some emblem of monkhood, so it might
be something Tsering would wear, too. Leda grew more exasperated
the more she tried to figure it out.

Once they were safely inside her car, she
asked, "Look, I really appreciate the ticket and all—"

"You are welcome. We will be happy, whatever
your answer to our question, to see that you always receive a
ticket."

" 'We' who?" Leda asked at last. "I don't
mean to be rude, but unless you have a mouse in your pocket, there
is only one of you here."

When the person in black was silent for a
moment, Leda snapped her fingers. "You've had a sex change
operation, right?"

The person beside her laughed a laugh that
was almost Chime's but not quite. "You might say that, yes. But it
did not involve surgery. And we did not change our sex. We . . .
augmented it, I suppose you could say."

"You mean you're a hermaphrodite?" Leda
asked. She was just kidding, but to her surprise, the person beside
her considered her question carefully.

"Emotionally, spiritually, yes. But
physically, we are contained within the body of the one you knew as
Tsering Jetsun."

"What does
that
mean?" Leda
asked.

"Please, could you begin to drive? We will
attempt to explain on the way. The parking lot is probably not a
secure area, and our person, as well as the information we hold, is
of a highly confidential nature, most important to the company that
sponsors our work and which, if you agree, may sponsor yours as
well."

Leda's eyes widened as she took in that
information. "Okay, you're the . . . bosses."

She turned out of the parking lot and
rounded the block, onto the bridge spanning the river, and headed
toward downtown Portland. The rain, already fairly heavy when the
two of them left the convention center, rapidly intensified. It
flung itself in buckets against her windshield and rear window. The
windshield wipers slapped away only every other bucketful. Then
there was the steam rising off the warm car and the defroster,
which wasn't working well, not to mention the mist rising from the
surface of the river.

"Good thing I am a veteran submariner," Leda
told her passenger, who twitched nervously in the seat beside her.
She could barely see the headlights of oncoming cars, much less the
taillights of the ones ahead of her. One set of headlights followed
her onto the bridge and across it, not at all unusual. A little
unnerving that they followed so closely in this weather but not
surprising. Out-of-towners, no doubt.

"Yes, it is. You continued in the Navy then,
after you graduated?"

"Yeah, I retired eight years ago."

"You did not continue your studies?"

"Yes, but I've only been able to study
Egyptology informally. I've studied hieroglyphics for several years
now with a class sponsored by the museum. We have speakers and that
sort of thing. And the Egyptian section of my personal library is
bigger than the one in the main city library."

"No graduate school?"

"Oh, sure," she said very casually, as if it
didn't matter. "But I got into forensic anthropology instead. You
know, identifying remains from fragments found—kind of like
archaeology, but more recent remains."

"Oh, that is wonderful! Very useful!" Leda's
former friend clapped his or her hands together with satisfaction,
as if she had done something very bright.

"Well . . . yeah," Leda said, surprised. She
glanced in the mirror. The headlights were still behind her—two
sets of two long rectangular ones, riding high.

"Oh yes, you are already
familiar with DNA fingerprinting, then, and other skills we will be
much in need of if certain discoveries are made. We
knew
you were the one for
this task! We hope you will not think it unscientific of us to
confess this, but we dreamed we should come here to find
you."

"Uh-huh," Leda said, hanging a right onto
the Broadway Bridge and casting a glance into the rearview mirror
where the same twin pairs of rectangles still gleamed. "Did you
also dream someone would be tailing us when we got together again?
Tailing us inexpertly, I might add. Way too close and obvious."

"How annoying. They're just doing their job,
but it is confining to have security people tagging along
everywhere. That is why we asked you to take us away from the
convention center. What we have to ask you is not something we want
reported back to certain people at Nucore."

"I can probably lose them if you want," Leda
said. "Especially if they're not from Portland."

"We think not."

Leda accepted that for a wish to ditch the
headlights. She took the exit for Martin Luther King Boulevard
without signaling, which brought her back to the convention center
side of the water, where she'd entered MLK Boulevard, and she
promptly ducked back two streets into the residential district.
This was familiar territory to her because she lived here. After
cruising for ten blocks or so, she turned back onto MLK and, seeing
no signs of the double rectangle headlamps, continued on the road
until she once more reached the entry to the Broadway Bridge. She
took the bridge onto 1-5 south to the Terwilliger exit, ensuring
that the other car would lose her. This particular exit had
extremely misleading street signs. Everyone moving to Portland from
out of state had to spend two or three hours being hopelessly
befuddled while following the sign that said south when it took you
back north to Portland.

Then she wound her way up the back streets
to Hospital Hill, where the University Hospital and the Veteran's
Hospital were joined by a skywalk. Pulling into the underground
parking at the VA Hospital, she turned off her lights and cut the
engine.

"Eating can wait," she told her friend.
"Before we get interrupted by your keepers, please explain why you
talk about yourself in the plural. It makes me want to get you one
of those T-shirts that says, 'I'm schizophrenic and so am I.' You
are not, to the best of my knowledge, an editor, royalty, or a head
of state, so what gives?"

"You must keep an open mind, Leda," the
passenger said, looking rather small, frail, and worried.

"I'm listening," Leda said as patiently as
possible.

"As we told you, though this body originally
belonged only to Tsering Jetsun, it now contains the personalities
and memories of both of us: Tsering and Chime."

Leda stared hard in the darkness at Chime's
uncertain, diffident smile on Tsering's rather thin mouth. "Okay,"
she said cautiously. "How did that happen? Where's the rest of
Chime?"

"She died, Leda. Or at least, her body died.
And when she died, Tsering almost died, too; both of us nearly
ceased to be. Tsering would neither eat nor sleep, did nothing but
work, until Chime came to him in a dream and showed him how our
research could be combined into a process that would allow him to
use her DNA to incorporate her genetic and cellular memory—which is
far more extensive than formerly supposed—into his own. Since our
blending, we have become a new person, Chimera, and are the result
of the first trial of this process. As you can see, it was
successful."

"If you say so," Leda replied after drawing
a couple of long, slow breaths. "I mean, it does seem that your two
hearts now beat as one, but other than that, how far does it go,
this cellular memory? And how did you—well, transfer—or transplant
it? I've heard of organ transplants where the recipient starts
having the same vices or food cravings as the donor, but what
you're talking about sounds a lot deeper than that kind of
thing."

"Oh, yes. It is. In us it is as if Chime's
soul has joined Tsering's in a perfect blending of the two of us.
We have been very happy ever since our blending. But of course, we
were very happy and very close before Chime's death. And we knew
each other well, were always in each other's thoughts, could
sometimes read each other's minds. Therefore, the transition has
been uncommonly smooth and peaceful. Others have not achieved quite
the same union, although most have been successful."