User:Fish/Damon Egypt
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{{#if:|}}| [[Image:{{{icon}}}|30px|center|Icon]] | Note: This page descends from a branching story called Dreams Incorporated. Follow the link to start at the beginning. |
Tomb Explorer
The moment Damon makes his selection on the screen, he feels the Dreams computer activate, overriding his sensory world. Everything swirls to blackness, to a void where there is no light or sound or sensation. In that timeless nothing, a new world — his Dream — stutters to life, one frame at a time. At first it is like a slideshow, then like a strobe light illuminating every other moment, then like a silent movie accompanied by a skipping compact disc. And then the world resolves.
Damon appears in mid-air, floating, bodiless, gliding smoothly over the terra-cotta buildings, domed mosques, and stone minarets of a crowded desert city. Below him, camels compete with vintage automobiles in congested, narrow streets. The smell of date palms wafts upward on the breeze, mixing with the scents sulfurous exhaust and dung and olives. The roofs of the buildings below are used to house poultry, or to dry laundry; there are no television aerials. No car that Damon can see, passing by overhead, are new in design: they are bulky, heavy, large-fendered vehicles with fancy grills and rumble seats and spare tires tucked on the running board. Most of the cars, and most everything else, is lightly dusted by the desert winds that swirl and eddy in the alleys.
As he floats by, the Dreams computer instills memories into his mind, and as the information trickles into his head he realizes that he recognizes the cars — that Packard, that Deusenberg, the Mercedes near the awnings of the open-air bazaar. The cars seem new, but none is more modern in design than 1935. Damon also can catch snatches of conversation in Arabic, though outside this Dream he understands not a word. Passing by an open window, he catches a glimpse of a woman sitting moodily in the sunlight by the sill, watching the world pass by with a sullen pout on her face. He can hear the song on the Radiola, recognizes it as "It Ain't Necessarily So" by the Gershwins. Damon attempts to wave to her, but he has no arms; and she doesn't see his invisible spirit gliding right before her eyes. If Seth is nearby then he, too, is also invisible.
He floats on through the air, descending gently, and approaches a large yellow and white stone building. It is an elaborate piece of Western architecture, out of place here among the sun-baked terra cotta buildings, with a wide shaded porch behind an arcade — a series of rounded arches that is distinctly Roman in appearance — and a veranda above, with doors of wrought iron and glass, and a canopy of white canvas above to keep out the punishing desert sun. Damon finds himself sailing straight for the closed doors of the veranda, and in an eyeblink, he has passed through them into the room.
Four people are there: three seated, one standing. Seated together before a wide, round table are two men in nondescript gray suits. One is perhaps fifty, with sparse white hair, quite thin, with intelligent eyes and a weak jawline. He sits primly in his wicker chair, holding an array of papers before him and a pair of spectacles on a string around his neck. The other is a heavy man, red-faced in the heat, with sweat soaking his collar: blonde, blue-eyed, with a mustache. He seems less querulous and hesitant than his companion, as if he is impatient to complete his business and leave, but holding his impatience in check by an effort of self-discipline. An open leather briefcase is at his elbow.
Sitting across from them is a woman of perhaps twenty-five, with an unidentifiable Mediterranean features and flawless, dusky skin. She wears a pair of rounded spectacles herself, with smoked blue lenses, perched low on her beautiful nose, and she is looking coolly over the top of the rims at the government agents opposite. Her hair is drawn back into an efficient ponytail and tucked behind the collar of her short-sleeved khaki shirt. She wears daring knee-length shorts, with plenty of pockets, and heavy boots with calf socks. She sits with her legs crossed daintily, radiating an air of effortless elegance, as if she were sitting in a four-hundred-dollar Vionnet backless evening gown in a ballroom, rather than dressed like a hunter on safari and sitting in a sweaty Cairo hotel.
The last figure in the room stands, occasionally pacing as if restless. He stands over six feet in height and has a rugged, well-worn appearance. His clothes are weather-beaten and stained through heavy use, fraying somewhat at the cuffs, and he has an unkempt look to him: his khaki trousers have not been pressed, his shirt is rumpled and open at the collar. At his hip he wears a belt, adorned on the right with a holster for a heavy revolver, and on the left with a bullwhip. The adventurer's eyes are a weary blue, and his face handsome if unconventional and unshaven. He wears a distinctive hat of Australian make, high in the crown, with a wide brim.
Damon takes in all of this in an instant as his disembodied spirit floats through the glass doors without a bump and circles the table, observing the tableau from all sides, and then he finds himself sailing straight for the woman. His spirit flies right toward her body, and dives in — merges with her form —
"Absolutely, totally unacceptable," one of the government agents was saying. It was the heavyset man with the moustache, agitated as if he had just been denied.