Maria Hudgins - Lacy Glass 01 - Scorpion House (11 page)

“What about family? You said you were from California, didn’t you?”

“My parents and brother still live there.”

“You’re not married? No children?”

“No.” He stopped and pointed to the north. “Over that way a couple of miles is the burial site of the queen who routed the Hyksos and sent them packing. Back to wherever they came from.”

“A queen?”

“Right. She got the Medal of Freedom for bravery.”

Okay. He was kidding to some extent, but how much? Realizing Paul had slammed shut the topic of his personal life, she asked him to tell her more about this ancient queen.

* * *

After lunch, Lacy decided to spend the afternoon in the lab she shared with Graham and Shelley. She read all she could stand of the instruction manual for the x-ray spectrometer. Having the device itself in front of her helped her learn the parts quickly. It didn’t seem too complicated.

She set up the video microscope and looked at some of the paint chips she had brought back from the tomb. It was as amazing as Lanier had said. With it, she could see where more than one layer of paint had been applied, where the paint had pulled away from the underlying plaster, and where it had flaked off. With a mouse click she could magnify one tiny flake to fill the whole TV screen.

She picked up one of the linen strips Shelley had given her. How could she possibly extract enough pigment to analyze? Aha. Lights. She’d start by looking at the material under different wavelengths of light. That would tell her whether the piece had been decorated or treated with anything other than a simple dip in the dye vat. Whether some areas were richer in pigment than others. She could ask Kathleen, hoarder of all material found in the tomb, to let her scan some larger pieces with ultraviolet, infrared, far red, fluorescent—in fact all her lights. She had put at least a dozen types of bulbs on the wish list she submitted to Susan last summer. She hoped Susan had bought them and that they were here.

Graham walked in and plopped a napkin-wrapped sandwich on the workbench near the colorimeter. He had donned a white lab coat. He began pulling bottles of chemicals out of a storage cabinet.

“Did you find the ether?” Lacy asked.

“Sure did. See? Your little friend has already gone to that great desert in the sky.”

She crossed the room to the section of work space to which Graham had laid claim. The scorpion lay, dead, in the bottom half of a Petri dish. Its tail was missing.

“What did you do, cut off its tail?”

“Right. I don’t know how much neurotoxin I’ll be able to extract from one tail, but I hope I’ll get enough to analyze.” Analysis of scorpion venom was not in Graham’s job description here, but they certainly weren’t expected to spend all their time on grant-related work.

Lacy checked all the cabinets and drawers in the room until she found one that held an array of lights. Susan had indeed filled her order. Most of them were tubes rather than bulbs so she spent the next half-hour tracking down the correct kinds of lamps and batteries. She snapped a seven-inch ultraviolet tube into one and played it around the room. A brief spark of blue flashed, she thought, from somewhere near Graham’s elbow.

“Hold on!”

“What is it?” Graham looked up from his work.

“I don’t know. Let’s turn off the lights for a second.”

Graham returned a test tube to its rack, preparing for the dark. Lacy clicked off the overhead lights—two bare bulbs hanging from cords along the midline of the room. With one small window the only remaining light source, the lab was plunged into near-darkness. She switched on the ultraviolet beam and directed it toward Graham’s side of the room.

“Move to your right, Graham.”

She directed the beam at the Petri dish.

The scorpion lit up like a ghost in a haunted dungeon. It glowed blue-green with every joint, every segment of its many appendages clearly delineated. Lacy was speechless.

Graham, through the sandwich in his mouth, said, “I forgot to tell you. Scorpions fluoresce under UV light.”

Yeah, forgot! You probably didn’t know it until now.
Lacy didn’t want to let this slide so she teased him with, “UV-A or UV-B?”

“You’ll have to try both and see.” Graham wasn’t about to be caught so easily.

She carried the Petri dish to the table at her end of the room. She toyed with it, flashing the lamp on and off. This was great. Did this mean scorpions had the same cellular chemistry as so many sea creatures had? Where was it? In the exoskeleton or in the tissue beneath? She reminded herself that, like Graham, she wasn’t here to study scorpions.

“Hey, wait!” She said it so loudly it made Graham jump. “We can use this to make sure we have no scorpions in our rooms. I was worried about that. I could see myself with a flashlight, searching my whole room every night. I’d have to stir every drawer with a stick before I stuck my hand in to get my socks. This is so cool. I’ll keep the lamp in my room, but whenever you want to do a scorpion check you can borrow it. I’m definitely going to do a scorpion check every night. This is so cool!” She returned to her chair and did a little wiggle dance with her shoulders.

* * *

Lacy found Lanier on the porch, sipping a gin and tonic and watching the shadows drift across the hills and the temple. He waved her toward an empty rocking chair and offered to make her a drink.

“Whatever you’re having,” she said.

Lanier ducked into the house and returned a minute later with a gin and tonic and a freshened one for himself. “Susan replenished our booze supply in the duty-free shop when you flew in.”

“I was wondering how you buy it here,” Lacy said, sampling the drink. “Selim’s taking me to the airport to meet Joan, shortly. I’ll buy some while I’m there.”

“You can’t. You have to buy it within twenty-four hours of your arrival. There’s a new duty-free shop in Cairo, though, that only requires you to show a passport. Next time we have someone heading that way, we’ll send them with a shopping list for the house. You can contribute.”

Lanier raised his drink toward Lacy in a perfunctory, wordless toast. “Do you want someone else to go with you to meet Joan?”

“I think it would be best if I went alone.”

“You know her pretty well?”

“Yes.” She picked an ice cube from her glass and ran it behind her neck. The afternoon had heated up into the nineties. How should she broach the subject of what Lanier was hiding? Susan had charged her with that responsibility, but who was she to make such a demand? That’s how Susan was. She and Graham had talked about it several times. Susan Donohue considered herself to be in charge of everything as if the other six billion people on the planet had been put here for her convenience.

It was a safe bet the item Lanier had hidden from Susan this morning was the papyrus Joel mentioned. Hadn’t Joel told her Lanier would let her see it? She decided she might as well try. “Joel told me you had an important papyrus to show me. Is that right?”

“Aha.” Lanier set his drink on the floor beside his chair. “I couldn’t remember whether I told Joel to keep it under his hat or not. Obviously, I didn’t. Oh well, Roxanne knows, Joel knew, and you may as well know, too. Come with me.” He led the way inside. “It goes no farther than this, though. Agreed? What is it they say? Two people can keep a secret but if three people know, it ceases to be a secret. Well, you’ll be the fourth, and it must go no farther.”

Beyond the door to the hall, Lacy could see that the doors of all five occupied bedrooms were open. Lanier motioned her to stay put and walked the length of the hall alone, turning to glance into Susan’s room as he passed. He turned back to Lacy and waved her forward.

“Did Joel tell you what I’m doing here?” Lanier asked, opening the door to his laboratory.

“Well, basically, the same thing you told us. He told me you’re trying to reproduce the recipes and medications the ancient Egyptians used. He said you were using local materials, attempting to make them exactly like they were in ancient times.”

“Do you know about the Aswan High Dam?”

“I know it was built back in the sixties to control the Nile floods.” Lacy’s eyes scanned the room. She’d never seen a lab this neat, this clean. The tile floor gleamed. Two rows of shelving on the wall behind the long lab bench held perhaps fifty sparkling glass jars with screw-on lids and neatly printed labels like
Frankincense
, and
Mandrake Root
, and
Camel Grass
. All the labels were printed in the same font and all faced precisely forward.

“That’s right. And it did—does—limit the floods that controlled the pace of life along the Nile for thousands of years. Their year had three seasons. Flood time, seed time, and summer. They waited for the Nile waters to recede before they planted their crops. But now, there is no flood time and the growing season is longer. With irrigation the total amount of arable land is greater.” Lanier turned and looked straight into Lacy’s eyes. “Is this a good thing?”

“I would imagine that, like most of man’s improvements on nature, it has an up side and a down side.”

“Correct.”

“I would imagine the floods brought fresh silt to the flood plain and without them the soil would get poorer every year.”

“Of course. And farmers, quite predictably, have to resort to commercial fertilizers.”

“And the land above the dam would be permanently flooded.”

“They call it Lake Nasser.” Lanier walked to a cabinet along the north wall, bent forward as if to open the bottom drawer, then straightened back up and turned. “Now the down side. The water table here is rising and the soil is less fertile. The population has increased, putting more pressure on resources. Plants that used to live along the banks of the Nile from Aswan to the Delta are threatened. Some are going extinct. Lake Nasser is a whole new ecosystem.”

“I think I see what you’re getting at. The plants the ancient Egyptians used are disappearing and it may soon be impossible to recreate the ancient recipes.”

“Exactly! And that’s why I have to do this now.” Lanier’s face took on an almost frightening intensity. His hands, fingers spread wide, quivered on either side of his face. “Papyrus itself has almost disappeared. Oh, you can still find it up at Lake Nasser, but is it the
same
papyrus they used in the old days? There’s such thing as genetic drift, you know. And I can give you a dozen more examples.

“We’re finally beginning to recognize that ancient Egyptian medicine wasn’t just magical hocus-pocus. It was good medicine. Not all of it, of course. Some of it
was
hocus-pocus. But they used honey on wounds. Great anti-microbial stuff. Have you ever had to throw away moldy honey?”

Lacy shook her head.

“Of course not because it won’t mold. Bees put something in it. The blue lotus was almost sacred to them, sort of an aphrodisiac. They associated it with birth and rebirth. Now they’re telling us lotus does contain stimulants. So, were they crazy? I think not. They used aloe to soothe the skin and acacia for coughs.”

“We use those today,” Lacy said.

Lanier gathered up a few shriveled black lumps from an open dish on his work bench and placed them in Lacy’s hand. They were too big to be raisins, wrong texture to be prunes. She tossed them lightly. They were hard.

“They’re practically petrified because they came from Kheti’s tomb,” Lanier said. “An offering for the dead. They apparently ate these, but I’ve heard they taste terrible. Ah, well. For whatever reason, the ancients prized these because they’ve been found in lots of tombs including King Tut’s.”

“What are they?”

“Argun palm fruits. Remember what I was saying about the changing environment? These trees were thought to be extinct until a few years ago, and then somebody found a few growing in the Sudan.” Lanier got down on all fours near the end of the bench. Under it, a dozen or more clay pots were lined up and leaning against the back wall.

Lacy, remembering Lanier suffered from arthritis in his knees, said, “Can I help you?”

“No, thanks.” He reached under the bench and dragged out the seventh pot from the left end. Groaning and reaching out to Lacy for a steadying hand, he stood up, the pot cradled in one arm. He set the pot on the bench as if he was about to remove the clay seal from its neck, but got side-tracked again by a flattish mass of dried-out plant material lying on the bench in front of him. “Ah ha! Another prime example.”

It reminded Lacy of seaweed but it wasn’t. It looked as if it might grow on a rocky shoreline, but she knew everything one might find on a rocky shore and it didn’t include this. “What is it?” she said.

“
Bacopa monnieri.
Water hyssop. Used to grow in wet places along the Nile, but now it’s threatened. Good for epilepsy, hysteria, and insanity. Too bad, because there’s a lot of insanity about these days.” Lanier pointed to a box of latex gloves on a table behind Lacy. “Hand me a couple of those gloves and put some on yourself.”

Lanier tore a strip of thin white paper from a roll and spread it out on an empty stretch of the workbench. He removed the plug from the neck of the pot and reached in. Slowly, he drew out a cylindrical strip of brown papyrus, laid it on top of the clean paper, and coaxed the curled ends of the papyrus down, anchoring them with two smooth rocks that Lacy imagined stayed on the bench for this purpose alone.

The papyrus was about three feet long and a foot wide. Running lengthwise were three rows of precise drawings interspersed with writing that looked similar to the scribbles she’d seen on Susan’s steno pad.

“Hieratics, right?”

Lanier tapped his head and winked. “You learn fast, Dr. Glass.” He looked at the papyrus through the bottoms of his bifocals, moving his head back and forth as if he was looking for something in particular. “This is a botanical catalog. By far the oldest ever found. Eighteenth Dynasty. I found it in the tomb last season and sneaked it out before anyone else knew about it.”

“Why? I’d have yelled ‘Eureka,’ and opened a bottle of champagne!”

“Because of what I’ve been talking to you about for the last half hour.” Lanier looked up from the papyrus strip. “I’ve got what, maybe ten more years before I’m either dead or too old to work? Some of the plants called for in the recipes may have even less time before they’re gone forever, too. Who knows what wonderful cures may lie in the recipes they left carved on temple walls?” He turned and thumped Lacy on the shoulder with the back of his hand. “The problem is, if the Supreme Council takes charge of this papyrus, I’ll guaran-damn-tee you it’ll stay locked away where nobody can study it until long after I’m dead and half the species in it are gone!