Miamon: Beloved of Amon

By Anthony Peacey

The Gean culture was the most truly civilized that Earth had ever known. When it found itself under threat a starship was dispatched beyond the limits of earlier exploration to investigate, but something went terribly wrong. Now the mind or minds in charge of that mission need to restore a shattered reality, need to find their way home, need to find somewhere to be and someone to be with. But is there any hope of success across such an abyss of time and space? Does any kind of home remain, or are the works of humanity and humanity itself now no more than dust blowing in the winds of lost years?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Anthony Peacey
• Release date: Sep 19, 2021
• ISBN: 9780645097115

Anthony Peacey

This fellow lives in the forest with his wife, whom he met in their teens. At her first square dance she caught him in her butterfly net. She threw away the net and they've been fluttering around together ever since. To help pay for the necessary nectar and a leaf over their heads (there started to be caterpillars, long since butterflies themselves) he has bent umbrella handles (truly), delivered bread, milk, mail, worked as a shop assistant, in forestry, wild life research (ornithologist), taught English as a second language, driven interstate trucks, lectured in computer science—among other things. He first saw the light of day in Gloucestershire, England; migrated to Australia aged 30; and lived near Perth for a long time. Recently they moved to Far North Queensland.

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MIAMON

Beloved of Amon

Anthony Peacey

Copyright 2021 Anthony Peacey

Smashwords Edition

Cover: Ross Robinson Graphic Design

All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or in part, without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations.

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for GLORIA

Table of Contents

Titulary of Ramses II

Part 1 RAMESSES : Ra has put thee into the world

Part 2 USER MAAT RA : Strong is the truth of Ra

Part 3 MIAMON : Beloved of Amon

Epilogue

About the author

Other titles by Anthony Peacey

Connect with me

THE TITULARY OF RAMSES II

Pharaoh of Egypt c.1290-1224 BCE

Horus Name KA NAKHT MERY RA : Mighty bull beloved of Ra

Vulture-Cobra Name MEK KEMET WAF KHASUT : Protector of Egypt, chastiser of foreign lands

Golden Horus Name USER RENPUT AA NEKHTU : Rich in years, great in victories

Throne Name USER MAAT RA SETEP EN RA : Strong is the truth of Ra, chosen of Ra

Son of Ra Name RAMESSES MERY AMUN (Greek form, RAMESSES MIAMON) : Ra has put thee into the world, beloved of Amon

Miamon is pronounced Mee-ah-mon, with the stress on ah

Part 1

RAMESSES : Ra has put thee into the world

I

I am the pyramid.

I am eternal.

Look on my works, ye mighty ...

Look on my flanks of rose-red granite, look on the jutting stones, look on the rugged steps made jagged by the shadows of the setting of a million suns.

I am the mountain, I am the giant, I am the crystal, self-made.

Look on my flanks of rose-red rock, brushed by the whispering sands of the desert, kissed by the dust of stars.

Eternal.

The sands of time fall softly spent at my feet.

Cold, dry, unchanging I am in the hollow hollow of the dark and boundless world.

I am the mountain, immovable, star-kissed; assaulting, resistless, heaven. I am the pyramid, the mer, the tomb, the womb, the mother, the father of the world.

O Narmer uniter of the two lands, O Snofru, O Khufu builder of the Great Mer, O Khafre Khufu’s son, O Teti, O Pepi king for a century, O Sesostris, O Sebeknofru, O Thutmose mighty warrior, O Amenhotep magnificent builder, O Akhenaton heretic king, O Tutankhamon restorer of faiths, O Ramses of the hundred children, O Siptah, O Seti, Sheshonk, Osorkon, Piankhy where are you now?

I am Narmer, I am Snofru, I am Khufu ...

O Hetepheres Khufu’s mother, O Hatshepsut wearer of the pharaoh’s beard, O Nefertiti, O Ankhesenamon, O Tuia mother of Ramses, O Nefertari, O Manefrura ...

O, Cleopatra.

The blank stone eyes gaze across the desert, the blank stone eyes from which the sand of dead stars and the dust of long-gone centuries has washed the painted colour.

The whisper has whispered for a thousand years ... and a thousand years ... and a thousand thousand years ...

Those olden pharaohs have forgotten they await their resurrection.

What dreams are dreaming within the crystal lattices of granite where the dust of stars scarcely penetrates; within the layered wrappings of time past, the gold casings, the capsules of stone; under the strata of forgotten millennia? What cries are locked in the deepest layers, in the stressed geometries of metamorphic time?

I am the pyramid, the apex. I bear the last seed. Within myself I am the pod, the carpel, that all the layers of time’s dry seabeds cannot render indehiscent.

Ten thousand years roll back. The airs whisper this way and that like breezes in a dream. Particles of stone, microcrystals, molecules and atoms accrete once more to their parent bodies, monoliths, colossi, undoing the soft abrasions of centuries.

The timeship, skeletal, silvery, drops into the sand with a scuff. Silence reconquers the night, silence that hisses in the inner ear.

The two men sit.

The pyramid rises smooth, fresh and new, blocking from half the sky the few hardy stars that challenge the dominion of the moon. The light of that moon cascades down the triangle of stone that climbs beside the timeship, climbs and slopes to a far, cold, high apex. The light of the moon, of the eye of Horus, which was wounded when he fought with Set, the vengeance fight for his slain father, Osiris ...

Ah, the ancient gods are alive tonight; the ancient gods that not Christ, not Mahomet, not the New Gurus, not Fogaty himself will ever truly dethrone.

The two men climb down from their seats slowly. The sand greets their feet: scuff, scuff ... scuff. Both men are tall, but they move slowly, taking a bag and equipment from behind the seats. Then they walk side by side, silent, in the moonlight to the mortuary temple which is in the centre of that side of the pyramid. But they pass the pillared sanctum and go on to smaller unimportant buildings. Behind one they move a slab of stone and enter a dark hole. They must go down, a twisting narrow way, before they can go up to the King’s Chamber at the pyramid’s heart.

Almost every tomb in Egypt was — will be — robbed while antiquity is still young; but who of the funerary priesthoods, what officials of the pharaonic courts, what bespectacled Egyptologists to come would guess that the robbers of this the mightiest of tombs came from centuries yet unborn, that these most ancient vandals had the sanction of scholarship most modern, that of all pharaohs entombed in hope this earliest desecrated would wake to a true afterlife? Charmer smiles in the darkness at the thought.

In the darkness.

Charmer has become separated from the other, and the other has the light. But no matter. Charmer even feels some elation at his solitude, and the darkness is comfortably warm. He walks carefully, slowly, trailing his fingers along the stones of the wall, which are flat but roughish, textured — with chisel cuts? The slight sounds of his passage return to apprise him that the place is narrow.

He is not concerned about finding his companion, less about recovering light, yet his pleasure has leaked away. Something, not the darkness but something that is where the darkness is, that permeates the space around him and even the heavy comforting mass of stone, is not friendly. Charmer shivers in the warm settled air. He has walked a long way, taken many turnings, passed branching tunnels. He is in a maze.

He hurries along stooping, sweating on his body. The skin under his eyes feels stretched, eyes which stare and see nothing. Only blackness and phantom streaks of light, but he knows those originate in his brain. He runs. The pervasive, inimical something gnaws at his mind; a discomfort, a drunkenness of fear is in his limbs.

The Fogaty Glyph — I must find the Fogaty Glyph. O, stupid idea! The Fogaty Glyph will not be carved for centuries! Will Fogaty himself come here?

There is diversion if not comfort in the thought.

At last Charmer cries out for his companion, ‘Lordren!’

‘Yes. Here.’ The pyramid itself has answered.

Charmer ceases to be afraid. Then he sees the light, and moments later he enters the great burial chamber, the King’s Chamber.

There are thickets of shadow along the walls and in the corners, from which peer statuesque jackals, gods and furnishings inlaid with glowing gold. Lordren grins at him, many narrow teeth, black eyes, Arab nose and that crooked ear. Lordren looks pleased with himself.

When Lordren moves Charmer can see more clearly the massive sarcophagus of red granite within which lies the mummy of Ramses II whose brain they have come to remove, to take back to their own unimaginable time.

Lordren stretches the end of the thermuscle jack into a thin sheet and inserts it between the body of the sarcophagus and the lid, activates it. The lid rises a few inches on that side and he props it. He adjusts the jack.

They get the lid balanced on one side of the sarcophagus, then tilt it onto the jack and ease it, a ton weight perhaps, to the floor.

Now the lid of the sarcophagus, the lids of gold-covered wooden coffins, the lid of the solid gold mummiform casket, all of which fitted within each other, lie on the floor. The golden mask fashioned in the pharaoh’s likeness, eyes, eyebrows and headdress inlaid with coloured glass and lapis lazuli, looks up at Charmer.

Lordren is at the end of the chamber investigating a folding screen covered with scenes of ancient life.

Charmer looks at the golden face. It is young and very beautiful with that strong down-curving nose. The mummy’s actual face will be old with tight skin, wispy hair and stretched eyelids slitted together. The mummy, the very flesh of Ramses II, Ramses, who under the tutelage of Amon, king of gods, by his own hand subdued the Syrians; Ramses, who dug wells along the impassable desert route to the gold mines; Ramses, who raised a thousand colossal statues of his imperial self all over Egypt and its dominions; Ramses, who sired more than a hundred children.

Charmer leans on the hard edge, reaches down into the sarcophagus to remove the mask. He grunts at its weight; it seems to adhere to the mummy’s head and shoulders. He lifts with the blood pressing into his head, until the mask rests on the stone edge, from which it slides to the floor with a heavy crunch.

Charmer, rigid, glares at the face, at the expressive flesh sleeping on the strong jutting structure of bone, at the thick black hair. Within cavernous orbits beneath heavy brow ridges the eyelids are not stretched to slits but closed smoothly over full, living orbs. The forehead is high and pale.

A mewing noise unwinds in Charmer’s throat; his own deep eyes stare, his own high forehead glistens. With acute motions he fetches a mirror of polished bronze from the top of a chest, stares at his face in the mirror, stares at the face of the undead pharaoh, forth and back.

‘Lordren!’ the shout rings in the rock chamber.

‘Wha — ?’

‘Ahh! Lordren, it’s me!’

‘Uh.’

‘The mummy, it’s me!’

Lordren is folding the screen back.

Charmer looks again at the mummy. It is breathing and now its breath falters; it makes a deep inhalation. The eyes fall open, dark feral eyes, Charmer’s own; they seek about with twitching movements and come to rest on Charmer’s face.

‘Eiiaaahh!’ The mummy’s scream rips the darkness, driving new blades of stress into the crystal lattices of imponderable stone.

Charmer back, as if struck.

‘Aaii! Aaii! Aaaahh!’ the mummy shrieks. ‘Let me go, let me go! I am not you, I am not you, I am not you!’

Its fear and anger, its rage, pound Charmer like waves. He turns trembling from that red granite prison.

Lordren has pushed the screen right back and the main control consoles of the starship are revealed. Making rapid adjustments, pressing himself and snaking his arms all over the banks of glowing instruments, he looks like a big spider trying to copulate with sensate machinery.

Frightened, Charmer rushes to a wide viewport. Outside he can see the faint glow of the field drive and the occasional violet streaking of sismag radiation screens. Moonlit Egypt drops slowly below, his view expanding to take in the white causeway from the pyramid to the wide Nile, more tiny pale buildings, and palm trees fringing the river. Out on the water there is a barge festively lit by many lamps and hung with translucent veils of silk. Many people, young with glistening limbs, move about the Queen who reclines in the centre. Cleopatra. The servants and slaves are playing music on drums, tambourines and flutes, are fanning the Queen with large ostrich feather fans. She is looking up at Charmer, sadness upon her wide beautiful face.

If I had the strength I could reach out and touch you, Cleopatra.

O Cleopatra.

A feeling of loss is pouring into his soul, of loss, of the emptiness of the universe, emptiness pouring, expanding, drowning.

Goodbye, lovely Queen. You must have Antony’s children, not mine.

Charmer is aware of the golden thread that joins their hearts, his and the Queen’s. The golden thread is stretching, stretching, becoming more tenuous as the lightyears flee.

It shatters.

The fragments coalesce into globules, spheres, stars, burning along the eternal roads of space.

II

Charmer did wake.

Wrenched air into lungs.

Enclosed. Warm now.

‘Mmmm.’

Residual fluid was being absorbed in the deepest alveoli, next to his newly beating heart.

Relief.

And some fear.

‘Mom — mother?’

Once she came and smiled down at him, picked him up into her soft rich smell. Sammi was not with her. Good, good, Sammi is not with her.

No, no, wrong. Mother, Marya, cannot come. What’s that hissing noise of wind, of mechanical wind? You’re frightened. Something is moving out there, outside the window. Something shiny and hard. What a funny window. It goes all over Bo’s cot, Bo’s bed. Bo doesn’t like the mess on it, he can’t see out properly. He’ll wipe it off. Uh, your arms are fixed tight. Something is tight round your arms.

‘Mmmmm.’ I’m breathing. I wasn’t breathing before. Toes. I want to see the toes. No, they are fixed too. Here comes the shiny thing. Outside the window, up above.

There is a violent gurgling sucking sound. The last water going down the hole.

Hey, there aren’t any blankets! And air is blowing in here. The window is going up. The window is all in one piece, it’s pretty big. Something just moved off my feet, now my hands. I can lift the hand, I can see my fingers.

But above him stood fat enamelled several-armed ...

... Man or groundcar?

The world shifted: as if he had been seeing it through a twisted mirror and that glass now became straight.

‘I am Bo, I am Bo Charmer, I am Bo Charmer Deorland!’

He was a man, of course, not a child.

A photobomb burst in his skull destroying the world with light.

‘I’ve been dead!’

I’ve been dead!

Mother’s ice, I’ve been dead!

And now I’m alive again.

Naturally he was joyful.

But where are the people? There’s something wrong with all this.

Irrationally he felt angry at his new life. He knew where he was now, and what had happened: he was in a whole-body tank. They had been developed from the zero metabolism units of starships for secondlifers, those who could afford them. But Charmer was not a secondlifer, he was an orthodox Gean who never concerned himself to question the philosophy of Fogaty upon which his lifeview rested, and he had already lodged a request that his body be exposed in the desert for the jackals. Who the ice had stuck him in a tank?

All the while the red and purple enamelled metal man or giant tortoise stood looking down at him with distant glass eyes.

Charmer moved his head, and discovered that it wasn’t very movable. His hands found the helmet, bulky.

The switchdown helmet, that damn thing should have come off along with the rest of the junk, he thought as he pushed it from his head.

‘Switchdown helmet!’ He sat up now. ‘Damn it to ice! This is a ZM pod, not a gangrenous bloody whole-body tank!’

His legs stretched before him bent up slightly at the knees, the black hairs plastered to his skin by the remaining moisture; his penis lay curved onto his right thigh. Sitting up made his stomach feel heavy and uncomfortable.

‘Am I on a starship, then?’

His own voice said, ‘Of course I am,’ and at the same time another voice said, ‘We are the starship, O Charmer.’

What was that? That metal voice that was nonetheless deep, resonant, complete with timbre, stress, character? Did it come from this plastic and metal slave of the manipulatory arms or out of the wall?

‘No, I have not been dead, then, not really dead after all.’

He gripped the side of his pod (there were others in the area, all with their glassy lids closed) and twisted round to look at the helmet. It was not a switchdown helmet but a much bulkier dreamhat, trailing wires in bundles through the top end of the pod where new holes had been cut and seals arranged for the extra cables.

‘Nnnnnh — hnnnhnnnhh,’ rage choked through the constriction of his throat as he climbed out of the pod viciously forcing his stiff joints. He wrenched at the dreamhat tearing the seals, popping plugs out beyond them.

‘You should shower, O Charmer,’ said the voice.

Swinging the dreamhat on the end of its bunched cords he crashed the heavy thing against the floor.

Again and again.

Of course the icedamned floor made cunning adjustments of its submicrcscopic geometries each time the dreamhat fell, absorbing most of the shock harmlessly.

Charmer threw the dreamhat against the solid plinth of his pod and ran from the ZM area. The floor received each footfall with a firm accommodating grip. The corridors and wider spaces were dark but an area of light was around him, following where he went.

‘O Charmer, you should take a shower now.’

He sought haphazardly until in a workmanish place of tools and equipment and smells of oil he found a metal implement nearly a metre long, heavier at the nether end. He carried it back to the coffin room — so the ZM area had been called at sometime.

The slave of enamelled planes and dextrous appendages had picked up the dreamhat.

‘Drop that thing you iced bastard!’

It did place it with quick gentleness on the floor.

The first down-circling blow gashed the dome laying open nets of wires and glittering matrices to the light.

‘No, no!’ Certainly the metal voice was coming from the slave, and it could express hysteria.

But Charmer hurled blow after blow upon the dreamhat.

‘No, stop. Rubin, stop, Rubin, Rubin, Rubin. Ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah, ah ... ’

Rubin?

Charmer was panting heavily, drooping over his victim; the head of the bludgeon lay on the floor, its handle heavy in his hand.

The remains of the dreamhat glittered, innards all exposed like the tubes, large and small, of a former man ripped forth in sacrificial catastrophe on the groundcar circuit at Romanuova. But this destruction was dry: no crimson smoking oil, nor worse humours ...

The spasmic pains that had been developing in his colon and rectum compelled Charmer to move.

He reached the jakes just in time, sat, and let go. The shit slid warmly away. And slid, and slid.

I know about this, this fantastic coprolith, this fantastic shit. You eat this doughy inert stuff, you fill your bowels with it before going into ZM. Then it lies there while you’re in ZM, gently packing the bowels, doughy, inert, sterile packaging. For years and years. It can lie there for centuries. I know about it. I may have shat a shit like this before.

Then he did shower.

Went to the galley and the galley served him a little food.

Then he found a place to sleep.

And slept.

III

I woke.

I am lost.

I think I am on a starship.

Of course I am worried.

I’m lost in space — I don’t know where I am — and also in mind.

I should be more worried but my feelings are flat and unemotional. That can be a sign of mental trouble. I hope it is not so now.

So I am writing to get my bearings, to catch and pin down some observable facts.

I woke in this room. I have not been out of it since waking. If I am on a starship it must be the captain’s cabin. And he was a Spartan beggar — the bed is hard. There are seats. There is an alcove with a washbasin, shower and toilet. I have showered and relieved myself. This desk folded out of the wall when I asked for it. I could ask for recording, viewphone, holostage ... but stylus and paper are tangible and the record cannot be interfered with. Clothes, yes, I must ask for clothes.

These are things I know.

I know there must be a cybo running the ship’s automatic functions. I know starships are relatively new. They can only make half lightspeed so the crew spends most of a voyage in zero metabolism units.

I could ask the cybo where I am, where we are going. But I want to remember for myself.

So:

My name in Bo Charmer Deorland.

It took me a minute to recall Deorland, and I can’t yet see any members of that family in my mind’s eye.

I was born at Byerg just off the coast from Stalyar in Scandia, in 3445. I am fifty-four years old, I think, or is it fifty-seven?

Since I wrote the last sentence I have sat for ten minutes without being able to recall a single detail of my life. I have been staring at the picture. The picture is a molecular reproduction in a gilt frame of Venus’ Dressing Room, by an Italian of antiquity, Francesco Albani. Venus reclines among her ladies who are dressing her hair. She has small breasts, it seems. The dressing room is a glade in a forest and around the women there are a number of cupids.

This won’t help me now — except that I must have seen this picture before.

I have a confused memory of yesterday. I think I came out of ZM yesterday. I seem to remember one of the cybo’s slaves talking to me. It seemed to be worried or frightened. That’s ridiculous.

Again I have been thinking for a long time without writing. I can get at nothing definite, just vague images, shapes of thought and disturbing feelings. I’m not sure it’s safe here. If I’m on a starship where are the other people? If I’m in the captain’s cabin