Pyramids

with barely-suppressed excitement.
    “We’ll have to use granite for the lower slopes,” he said, talking to himself, “the limestone wouldn’t take it. Not with all the power flows. Which will be, whooeee, they’ll be big. I mean we’re not talking razor blades here. This thing could put an edge on a rolling pin.”
    Ptaclusp rolled his eyes. He was only one generation into a dynasty and already it was trouble. One son a born accountant, the other in love with this new-fangled cosmic engineering. There hadn’t been any such thing when he was a lad, there was just architecture. You drew the plans, and then got in ten thousand lads on time-and-a-half and double bubble at weekends. They just had to pile the stuff up. You didn’t have to be cosmic about it.
    Descendants! The gods had seen fit to give him one son who charged you for the amount of breath expended in saying “Good morning,” and another one who worshipped geometry and stayed up all night designing aqueducts. You scrimped and saved to send them to the best schools, and then they went and paid you back by getting educated.
    “What are you talking about?” he snapped.
    “The discharge alone…” IIb pulled his abacus toward him and rattled the pottery beads along the wires. “Let’s say we’re talking twice the height of the Executive model, which gives us a mass of…plus additional coded dimensions of occult significance as per spec…we couldn’t do this sort of thing even a hundred years ago, you realize, not with the primitive techniques we had then…” His finger became a blur.
    IIa gave a snort and grabbed his own abacus.
    “Limestone at two talents the ton…” he said. “Wear and tear on tools…masonry charges…demurrage…breakages…oh dear, oh dear…on-cost…black marble at replacement prices…”
    Ptaclusp sighed. Two abaci rattling in tandem the whole day long, one changing the shape of the world and the other one deploring the cost. Whatever happened to the two bits of wood and a plumbline?
    The last beads clicked against the stops.
    “It’d be a whole quantum leap in pyramidology,” said IIb, sitting back with a messianic grin on his face.
    “It’d be a whole kwa—” IIa began.
    “Quantum,” said IIb, savoring the word.
    “It’d be a whole quantum leap in bankruptcy,” said IIa. “They’d have to invent a new word for that too.”
    “It’d be worth it as a loss leader,” said IIb.
    “Sure enough. When it comes to making a loss, we’ll be in the lead,” said IIa sourly.
    “It’d practically glow! In millennia to come people will look at it and say ‘That Ptaclusp, he knew his pyramids all right.’”
    “They’ll call it Ptaclusp’s Folly, you mean!”
    By now the brothers were both standing up, their noses a few inches apart.
    “The trouble with you, sibling, is that you know the cost of everything and the value of nothing!”
    “The trouble with you is—is—is that you don’t!”
    “Mankind must strive ever upward!”
    “Yes, on a sound financial footing, by Khuft!”
    “The search for knowledge—”
    “The search for probity—”
    Ptaclusp left them to it and stood staring out at the yard, where, under the glow of torches, the staff were doing a feverish stocktaking.
    It’d been a small business when father passed it on to him—just a yard full of blocks and various sphinxes, needles, steles and other stock items, and a thick stack of unpaid bills, most of them addressed to the palace and respectfully pointing out that our esteemed account presented nine hundred years ago appeared to have been overlooked and prompt settlement would oblige. But it had been fun in those days. There was just him, five thousand laborers, and Mrs. Ptaclusp doing the books.
    You had to do pyramids, dad said. All the profit was in mastabas, small family tombs, memorial needles and general jobbing necropoli, but if you didn’t do pyramids, you didn’t do anything. The meanest garlic farmer, looking for something neat and long lasting with maybe some green marble chippings but within a budget, wouldn’t go to a man without a pyramid to his name.
    So he’d done pyramids, and they’d been good ones, not like some you saw these days, with the wrong number of sides and walls you could put your foot through. And yes, somehow they’d gone from strength to strength.
    To build the biggest pyramid ever…
    In three months…
    With terrible penalties if it wasn’t done on time. Dios hadn’t specified