“Hello,” he said as I answered the bell. “You’ve aged in the last six months.”
Before I could wrap my tongue around the obvious ettu (he was looking terrible—his clothes looked as if they had been slept in by machinery, and there were bruises and cuts and lumps all over his face)—he had pushed past me into the living room and was sitting down in my husband’s easy chair. The dachshunds, who have never liked the nuse man, were growling at him earnestly. He put his feet up on the fireplace and lay back in the chair on his spine.
“Ahhhhhh!” he sighed, and then, to me, “Put more butter on the toast than you did last time.”
When I came back with the tea, he was standing by one of the bookcases looking at Woolley’s little book, Ur: The First Phases.
“Silly book,” he grumbled. “That stuff about the plano-convex bricks is all wrong.”
“What do you know about it?” I asked him.
“I sold a nuse installation to King Nebu-kalam-dug of Ur of the Chaldees on this last trip.”
“Oh, yes? Well, the home office ought to be pleased with you. Perhaps they’ll give you a vacation back in your own time.”
The nuse man made no direct answer, but his battered, lumpy face grew dark. He bit into a slice of toast so savagely that I feared for his iridium alloy teeth.
“Don’t tell me that something went wrong with the nuse again!” I cried.
This time he couldn’t have answered if he had wanted to. He had choked over some toast crumbs, and I had to beat him on the back and pour tea down him before he could speak.
“Why are you so prejudiced against nuse?” he demanded at last. “The nuse had nothing to do with it. It was the king and the priests that birded it up.”
“I’ll bet.”
The nuse man’s face turned even redder. It was a shade or two darker than the lapels around the waist of his trousers. “I’ll tell you all about it!” he said passionately. “You be the judge!”
“Oh, Lord.” There was no polite way of getting out of it. “All right,” I said.
“Everything was going fine,” the nuse man began, “until the old king Nebu-kalam-dug, died. I’d sold him a nuse installation—”
“General or special?”
“Special, of course. Do I look like fool enough to put a general nuse installation into the hands of a lot of 3000 B.C. yaps? I sold him a special nuse installation in exchange for a stated number of Sumerian gold artifacts, so many on installation and so many each lunar month until the price was paid.”
“What were the artifacts?”
“Gold wreaths and necklaces and jewelry. Of course, gold’s nothing. Only good for lavatory daises. But the workmanship was interesting and valuable. I knew the home office would be pleased. Then the old yoop died.”
“What killed him?”
“His son, Nebu-al-karsig, poisoned him.”
“Oh.”
“Everybody in the court knew it, but of course nobody would talk about it. I was sorry the old king died, but I wasn’t worried, because I thought I could work out the same sort of deal with the new king. Even when I saw how scared the court ladies looked when they were getting ready for the funeral, I didn’t apperceive. And then the soldiers came and arrested me!”
“What had you done?” I asked suspiciously.
“Nothing. They were short little tzintes with big muscles, and they wore sort of skirts out of sheepskin with the wool twisted into bunches to look elegant. They wouldn’t say a word while they were arresting me. Then I found out I was supposed to be strangled and put in the royal tomb with the dead king.”
“Why?”
“Because I’d been one of the old man’s special friends. At least, that was what young Nebu-al-karsig said. The prime minister and two or three of the councilors were being strangled along with me.”
“Gosh.”
“I argued and argued, and talked and talked. I told the young king we hadn’t been such good friends as all that. And finally he said, very well, I could go with the court ladies in the death pit.”
“Were you scared?”
“Of course I was scared,” the nuse man said irritably. “I didn’t have my chronnox—they’d arrested me in too much of a hurry for that—so I couldn’t get into another time. And I had no way of getting in touch with the home office. Certainly I was scared. And then there was the indignity—somebody from when I come from to be killed by a lot of primitive button heads. It made me sore.”
He slurped at his tea. “When we got to the pit.” he continued, “they were just closing the old king’s tomb up. You understand the tomb was at the bottom of the pit, and there was a ramp leading down into it. They hung matting over the sides of the pit, to cover the earth, and then they backed old Nebu-kalam-dug’s war chariot down the ramp; he’d want his chariot in the next world. Then the rest of us went down the ramp into the pit.”
“Who was ‘us’?” I asked curiously.
“Oh, harpists and singers and court ladies and slaves and soldiers and attendants. If anybody didn’t want to go, the soldiers had spears they used for prodding. I counted, and there were fifty-eight of us.”
“Pretty barbarous,” I said sympathetically.
“Nobody from your period has any right to call anything barbarous,” the nuse man said severely. “I’ve seen some bad ages, but yours—! Anyway, there we were.
“The funeral services began. The harpists twanged on their harps and the singers sang in high falsetto voices. It sounded awful. The priests chanted prayers from the edge of the pit above. The soldiers passed around an opiate in little bronze cups for us to drink. The priests prayed some more. It was beginning to get dark. Then they started shoveling earth in on us.”
“Were you sorry for the others?” I asked.
“I was more sorry for myself. It was their era, and if they wanted to die in it, that was their business. After all, they thought that when they woke up they’d go on serving old Nebu-kalam-dug in the next world. I didn’t—and even if I had, he was nobody I’d want to serve.”
“How did you get out?” I asked quickly. I did not like the thought of the scene in the death pit, even if it had taken place so many thousands of years ago.
“I got under the car of the chariot to shelter myself from being crushed. After a long while, the earth stopped coming in and I decided the mourners had gone away. I didn’t have my chronnox, and, as I told you, I couldn’t get in touch with the home office. But I was wearing an ipsissifex. I started materializing myself up through the earth of the pit.”
“You didn’t!” I said incredulously.
“I did, though. Each ‘me’ was a little farther up through the earth layer of the pit.”
“You mean there are five or six ‘you’s buried back there in Ur of the Chaldees?”
“Seven. Of course they weren’t really alive—you know how an ipsissifex is.”
It was the first time I had ever heard the nuse man admit that one of the devices he was peddling might have a flaw.
“I clawed my way up through the last few inches of dirt without any more materializations,” he said, “and started walking up the ramp. There was a soldier on guard at the top. When he saw me, his spear began to shake. It shook so much he could hardly hold it. The moon was coming up, and my shadow fell in front of me on the ramp.
“He licked his lips and swallowed before he could say anything. ‘Get back in the pit and die,’ he said finally. “What are you doing out here? You’re supposed to serve our lord Nebu-kalam-dug in the other world. Go on back and be dead.’