CHANCE
Click-clack went the beads. Click-clack. It was fast when you got the hang of it.
And when there was a whole room of people doing it, it could become noisy. But he found it more – human than the hum of the fans in a computer suite. Of course, in the bad old days there’d been the whir and swish of the tapes, or the clatter of the punch-cards. Thinking done outside the brain always made a noise.
He’d been lucky, he reflected, as he walked up and down the rows of calculators, checking how things were going, to have ended up here. The social structures were so easy to adapt to his purposes. (And more than one of the calculators had shown herself ready and willing to do the same.) Some of the technology was actually available in principle – even though no one would ever have thought to apply it in quite the way he wanted to. And the raw material was available in endless quantities.
Best of all, though: they’d believed in magic.
Real primitives would have seen him with the thing in his hand that showed them themselves made much smaller, and doing what they’d just done, again and again, and they’d have thought it had captured their souls, as well as their images, smashed it, smashed him, and made an end of it all. But here… there was real curiosity. They ached for the new and the strange.
They’d seen his strange bird fall from the sky, and made for the crash-site, even though they knew it would take them a while to get there, in the middle of the trackless desert. Better than that, they had ways of knowing where they were and where they were going – clear skies at night, and stars to guide them. Calling those stars by the names of gods and making up stories about them didn’t stop them being a way to fix your place on earth.
Of course, it had been his own fault that he’d fallen asleep, and let the auto-pilot take him away from the course he’d planned, but hadn’t set into it – and then there’d been the electrical storm that had woken him and flung him into the past… tumbling down, fumbling clear, the jerk of the parachute opening, the scramble to come to a stop, the decision to stay put by the wreckage, with the silk of the chute as a canopy for shade… Wise decisions, all of them – rewarded by his present position as Pharaoh’s Chief Administrator and Tax Gatherer.
Chance, he said to himself, what is Chance? Was it Chance that made me download to my smartphone a full guide to Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics? What else would a computer programmer do, setting off, in his own light plane, on a holiday to Egypt? And it surely wasn’t Chance that made me bring a solar charge-pack! Nothing as sad and useless as a dead device… And if you’ve dealt with Bill Gates, you learn modesty and compliance when faced with High Priests, which was why he’d had no trouble with them – he served them, and was not competition.
There was a noise at the far end of the room. It was those very High Priests that he’d just been thinking about, a procession of them, interrupting the work – but then, they had a right to – trumpets sounded – a special ceremony – the Highest of them bore a cushion in front of him, and on it, glinting, a large, golden key.
He could spare time. His calculators had all been well-trained. He took his place in the procession as they crossed the square and entered the Temple – but once inside, the priests melted away, and only the pair of Highest Priests still walked beside him, guiding him in silence to the Great Doors of the Holiest Shrine, in which the God spoke to His Priests. An honour indeed!
The Priests stood aside. He took the key, put it in the lock and turned. The doors opened silently. He went through and stood in the darkness while the doors closed just as silently behind him.
Slowly, glowing hieroglyphs formed in the air in front of him. He opened his phone to check their meaning.
On the screen, the message read SO GLAD WE FETCHED YOU HERE.
Mike Rogers
This story arose from the same set of cubes that inspired The Ankh key and the golden dragon - but the abacus is not just a toy: it is turned into a computer by the programmer flung unexpectedly into the past. And the "calculators" are human beings (mostly female!).
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