Pyramids

awed silence.
    “Are there many like her back at your place?” he said.
    “I don’t know,” Teppic admitted. “There could be. Usually they lie around the place peeling grapes or waving fans.”
    “She’s amazing. She’ll take them by storm in Ankh, you know. With a figure like that and a mind like…” He hesitated. “Is she…? I mean, are you two…?”
    “No,” said Teppic.
    “She’s very attractive.”
    “Yes,” said Teppic.
    “A sort of cross between a temple dancer and a band-saw.”
    They took their glasses and went up on deck, where a few lights from the city paled against the brilliance of the stars. The water was flat calm, almost oily.
    Teppic’s head was beginning to spin slowly. The desert, the sun, two gloss coats of Ephebian retsina on his stomach lining and a bottle of wine were getting together to beat up his synapses.
    “I mus’ say,” he managed, leaning on the rail, “you’re doing all right for yourself.”
    “It’s OK,” said Chidder, “Commerce is quite interesting. Building up markets, you know. The cut and thrust of competition in the privateering sector. You ought to come in with us, boy. It’s where the future lies, my father says. Not with wizards and kings, but with enterprising people who can afford to hire them. No offense intended, you understand.”
    “We’re all that’s left,” said Teppic to his wine glass. “Out of the whole kingdom. Me, her, and a camel that smells like an old carpet. An ancient kingdom, lost.”
    “Good job it wasn’t a new one,” said Chidder. “At least people got some wear out of it.”
    “You don’t know what it’s like,” said Teppic. “It’s like a whole great pyramid. But upside down, you understand? All that history, all those ancestors, all the people, all funnelling down to me. Right at the bottom.”
    He slumped onto a coil of rope as Chidder passed the bottle back and said, “It makes you think, doesn’t it? There’s all these lost cities and kingdoms around. Like Ee, in the Great Nef. Whole countries, just gone. Just out there somewhere. Maybe people started mucking about with geometry, what do you say?”
    Teppic snored.
    After some moments Chidder swayed forward, dropped the empty bottle over the side—it went plunk, and for a few seconds a stream of bubbles disturbed the flat calm—and staggered off to bed.

    Teppic dreamed.
    And in his dream he was standing on a high place, but unsteadily, because he was balancing on the shoulders of his father and mother, and below them he could make out his grandparents, and below them his ancestors stretching away and out in a vast, all right, a vast pyramid of humanity whose base was lost in clouds.
    He could hear the murmur of shouted orders and instructions floating up to him.
    If you do nothing, we shall never have been .
    “This is just a dream,” he said, and stepped out of it into a palace where a small, dark man in a loincloth was sitting on a stone bench, eating figs.
    “Of course it’s a dream,” he said. “The world is the dream of the Creator. It’s all dreams, different kinds of dreams. They’re supposed to tell you things. Like: don’t eat lobster last thing at night. Stuff like that. Have you had the one about the seven cows?”
    “Yes,” said Teppic, looking around. He’d dreamed quite good architecture. “One of them was playing a trombone.”
    “It was smoking a cigar in my day. Well-known ancestral dream, that dream.”
    “What does it mean?”
    The little man picked a seed from between his teeth.
    “Search me,” he said. “I’d give my right arm to find out. I don’t think we’ve met, by the way. I’m Khuft. I founded this kingdom. You dream a good fig.”
    “I’m dreaming you, too?”
    “Damn right. I had a vocabulary of eight hundred words, do you think I’d really be talking like this? If you’re expecting a bit of helpful ancestral advice, forget it. This is a dream . I can’t tell you anything you don’t know yourself.”
    “You’re the founder ?”
    “That’s me.”
    “I…thought you’d be different,” said Teppic.
    “How d’you mean?”
    “Well…on the statue…”
    Khuft waved a hand impatiently.
    “That’s just public relations,” he said. “I mean, look at me. Do I look patriarchal?”
    Teppic gave him a critical appraisal. “Not in that loincloth,” he admitted. “It’s a bit, well, ragged.”
    “It’s got years of wear left in it,” said Khuft.
    “Still, I expect it’s all you