Thought Canvas
Science fiction short story
Hapi’s previous mission, which explains his starting point in this tale: Servant of the Dead
It was a good day to be outside.
Hapi could feel the sweat beading down his spine as he strode across the dry fields. The open desert lay far ahead, dunes gleaming on the horizon, and the fields around him were empty and fallow at this time of year. The mud-brick houses were few and far in between, solid lumps in the distance with no sign of life. The midday sun was a white orb overhead, beating the shade into submission, and most of the farmers were using the heat and the lateness of the season as an excuse to stick to the shade, and their beer pots.
Hapi had someplace to be, on the other hand, and so he walked, crossing fields when he had to and sticking to the meandering wagon trail the rest of the time. His hide sandals powered over pebbles and sand alike, feeling the grit of the land between his toes as he walked, and his short kilt was a white meridian that separated his dark legs from his gleaming torso and arms. The hakip spear in his one arm rested easy on his shoulder, and the hide quiver across his back, filled with reed arrows, bounced alongside the simple hunting bow that went with it. On his head he wore a simple linen cowl, covering his neck and the short curls of his scalp, and he could feel the deep heat of the sun on his face reaching all the way into the bone.
It was a very good day to be outside.
His body - his real body - was in orbit around Garenos, strapped into a reclining chair in the simulation rooms where the Amath-Ra trained. There, aboard the medical frigate Sokheb’s Pride, Hapi and the rest of his team were recovering from their previous mission, which had scraped victory from the jaws of death at the expense of limbs and tissue that had taken weeks to regrow. Hapi had only dim memories of his first few days aboard the frigate, shunted from healing tank to operating table and back again by grim-faced Bastet doctors and orderlies, and it had taken several days before the delirium of the mission finally passed. The debriefings had started after that, hard-faced tacticians and Thoth engineers going over every part of his report, again and again, and only when they had been satisfied with his words - and those of the rest of his team - had he been released to continue the rest of his treatment and recovery.
The simulation rooms were part of that recovery process, and the implants in his body allowed him to experience new worlds and train for missions without ever leaving the gentle embrace of the sim chairs. He was slated for a simple test simulation that day, something to test his responses after the healing of the tanks, but - in the typical way that the simulation implants worked - he could only remember vague details of it when he was in the simulation itself. The simulations did not work when your mind kept going back to the reality outside it, and so the implants worked their magic to suppress the real world into a grey haze in the back of his mind.
He was back on Terra Primitiva, as far as he could tell, in lands that must have belonged to the First Empire. Everyone knew of Ancient Egypt, and the stories of the Nile and the pharaohs, the gods and the beasts, and the now-lost dunes of their ancestral homeland. It was a story they grew up with, a story that anchored them, and most of all - it was a story that guided them, firmly yet gently, as they went out amongst the stars and built their new empire.
Hapi stopped atop the next hill, and took some time to study the distant dunes to the east. The light there was soft, flowing around the sharp details and blurring things into a buttery warmness that he and the other Amath-Ra had long ago come to learn as signifying the edge of the simulation. Everything was possible here, in the simulated world, but even this world of digital impulses and electronic power had its spatial limits.
To the north, the path stretched on, curving slowly to the east, and Hapi had an idea that he was not meant to stay on it. The details of the simulation plan were elusive to him, a lost conversation in the simulation room that he just could not put his finger on, and so he studied the terrain and looked for clues. Blurs meant boundaries, which meant he had to keep looking…
There! To the west, in the lee of a larger hill, Hapi spotted a small hovel with movement outside it. His eyes narrowed until the details sharpened: an old man, carrying a small table, was busy setting up outside the hovel.
Was that his test? Hapi looked around, covering the rest of the horizon around him, but the bounding blurs surrounded him on all sides now the moment he tried to focus on the horizon in any direction. Only the hill to the west remained sharp and detailed.
Checking around himself for any other movement, and finding none, Hapi set off towards the hovel and the old man.
The old man was a painter, it seemed, and as Hapi drew closer he began to make out more and more detail on the table. The old man had brought a wicker basket out from the hovel as well, along with two small stools, and was busy unpacking jars and brushes from the basket onto the table as Hapi approached. Brown, leathery hands deftly arranged jars and implements in neat lines across the scarred wooden surface, and by the time Hapi stepped into the shade of the hovel there was a veritable maze of items arranged across the table. Clay jars with pigment, wooden brushes with stiff bristles, scrapers and thin-edged spatulas made of bone, a cluster of copper tools that varied in size from a toothpick to a knife - Hapi gave up trying to identify what it all was as he came to a halt.
“Greetings, elder.” Hapi inclined his head in a brief bow when he was still several paces from the table. Blue eyes, watery with age and hidden in a field of wrinkles, looked up at him for but a moment before returning to the table. The elder wore a loose desert robe of linen, faded and worn thin in many places, and almost indistinguishable from the desert sands around him. A bald pate, browned by the sun and shiny from lack of hair, bobbed in reply for a moment, before the wrinkled hands returned to the table and its contents.
Hapi waited, but there was no further response. Jars clinked as the elder began to unstopper containers in front of him, and soon the brown hands were mixing pigments and fat together with deft twists in one of the small bowls.
“Elder, do you know why I am here?” Hapi tried again, and this time got a frown in return.
“Are you a tree?”
The voice was old, yet Hapi detected a note of steel underneath it. Age had not robbed this elder of whatever strength he had possessed in his youth. The question did leave Hapi with an involuntary smile curling at his lower lip though, and he just shook his head in response.
“Then sit down, and stop blocking my light.” A gnarled finger indicated the low reed stool that waited on the opposite side of the table.
Hapi sat down, keeping his spear across his lap, and cast a suspicious glance at the doorway behind the elder. If someone was to rush out now and attack him, he could flip the table and…
“There is no-one else here, young one.” The old voice had a hint of mockery in it, although Hapi could not be sure. The elder’s gaze never left his hands as he worked. “Only Bastet, and she is no threat to the likes of you.”
As if on cue, a black cat sauntered out of the hut, stopping just outside the doorway to inspect Hapi. Yellow eyes flickered over his form, and then the cat sat down and began to groom itself, utterly indifferent to the two men.
Hapi felt the frown on his forehead before he realised he had allowed it to show. What type of simulation was this?
“Why am I here, elder?”
The elder’s laugh was deep, but soft - Hapi barely heard it on the other side of the table. Bowls clinked as the elder put down his one pigment batch and picked up a new bowl.
“I was just coming out to paint for the day, young one. Why are you here, on the Eastern Road?”
“I’m…” was as far as Hapi got before his mind ran out of words.
Why was he there?
The details of the simulation room were fading from his mind, water running through questing fingers even as he tried to grasp it. He could remember darkness, and something cool, and a voice, instructing him to…
The thoughts fled, and this time Hapi could not stop himself from scowling at the elder and the table between them.
“What is the matter now? Are you angry at my paints?” The blue eyes looked up, and a smile pulled through the field of wrinkles that regarded him. “They are but paints. I mix them myself, every day.”
“Excuse me, elder, but I must check something.” Hapi hauled himself up, spear in hand, and walked around the outside of the hut. It was a simple building, made from mud and bundled reed, and was barely more than a few paces on a side. The back, facing towards the hill, had several clay urns filled with water standing against the wall, and that was it. There were no windows, and only the one doorway from which the old man - and the cat - had come. Hapi found himself back at the table again in no time.
“Did you find what you were looking for?” This time, the elder did not even look up. His hands were moving over a bundle of clay the same colour as his skin, kneading the lumpy wetness from where it had been kept in one of the larger jars. “You have a long face for such a short journey.”
Hapi sat back down on the reed stool, and tried to pull the details from his mind. He knew he had to do something, some task - but there was simply nothing to recollect.
Why had he been walking on the Eastern Road in the first place?
Twisting around to look at the desert behind them, Hapi found the road again in no time, and then squinted at the distant horizon. Dunes ran off into the distance as far as the eye could see, fading into a pale whiteness that merged with the blue of the sky. Ra-Horakhty, the midday sun, was a fierce and proud spot of white heat far, far overhead.
“I don’t know why I’m here, elder.” Hapi sighed, and turned back to bow his head at the figure on the other side of the table. “Forgive me, but it… puzzles me, greatly.”
“It puzzles the wise and the great too, young one,” the elder cackled, and spat into the clay before continuing. “Some men spend their entire lives searching, and never find an answer.”
Hapi snorted, and just shook his head. At the side of the table, the cat - Bastet, apparently - looked up for a moment before continuing its grooming.
“Do you paint often?”
The question caught Hapi by surprise. He found himself looking at his one hand, which moments before had still been gripping the spear haft, before he answered. The training calluses on his palms and fingers were hard ridges from years gripping spear and bow and kopesh.
“No, elder. I have not painted in many years.”
“It is a good thing, to paint. It helps to clear the mind.” A mud-smeared hand uncovered a mold amongst the maze of items on the table, and began to press the clay into it. “I try to paint every day.”
“What do you paint?” Hapi had recognized the mold as an ushabti form by this time, for making the funerary servants that went into the tombs of the dead. Each miniature servant could be called upon to perform tasks in the afterlife, much like servants of flesh and blood performed tasks for the living.
“What do you think an old man paints?” the elder counter, and looked up with a sly smile. “My journey is almost at an end, and I have only one thing left to prepare for.”
Hapi bowed his head again, and thought back to the last time he had painted. They had received news of his father’s passing, and even though there had been no body to inter, they still had a tomb to prepare. Hapi had painted several of the ushabti figurines himself, young fingers clumsy with the thin brushes, but his mother had said nothing about his handiwork, and when the figures finally came out of the glazing kiln they had gone into his father’s tomb along with the rest of the fine figurines from the temple.
“So. Your memories of painting are not that comfortable, are they?” The elder’s voice snapped Hapi out of his reverie, and he realized that he must have spoken his thoughts out loud. His cheeks began to burn at the thought that he had shared something so private with a stranger, and yet…
“Yes, elder. I was young, and I did not understand what had happened. I resented him for not coming back.” Hapi bit the words off, and felt his hands tightening around the spear haft seemingly of their own volition. “I was angry, for a long time.”
“It is natural. We are often angry at the things we do not understand.” Muddy fingers finished with the mold, tamping it down one last time, before picking up the next. “Do you understand now?”
“He was serving the empire, and I understand now what that means.” Hapi looked up, and the old man on the other side of the table was looking at him with two eyes that seemed bluer than ever. “I understand now what sacrifice means.”
“Do you, now.”
Hapi opened his mouth to answer, and found he had nothing to say. The blue eyes on the other side of the table held his gaze for several long heartbeats before it dropped back down to the second mold. One muddy hand picked up a pigment bowl and held it over the table.
“Take this, and mix it for me.”
Hapi had to let go of his spear to take the bowl, which was surprisingly heavy once he had it in hand. The mixing spoon was a thick copper thing, clinging to the mixture in the bowl, and he had to use both hands to make progress with the syrupy mixture the old man had prepared.
They worked in silence for a while, Hapi’s thoughts spinning as he relived his father’s death, and only when the old man finished with the second mold did he speak again.
“Sacrifice is a strange thing. It comes in many forms, and we are not always wise to its meaning until after it has passed us by. Especially in times of war.” The elder splashed some water on his hands before rubbing them with a rag. Hapi found himself looking down at a bowl of fine bluish paint, the centre churned smooth by his relentless working of the mixing spoon. “You could say that about many things in life, but of sacrifice it is especially true.”
“Do you have a lesson for me, then, elder?”
The old man chuckled, and held out his hand.
“No. Give me the paint.” Hapi handed the bowl over, and received a new one in turn, this one with reddish-orange pigment. “Mix that one for me as well.”
The old man took the blue paint, adding some other drops and tinctures to it from his collection of jars, before stirring it further. Hapi frowned down at the bowl in his own hands, tempted to hurl it away, but when he looked up the cat was watching him, and he buried his thoughts with a guilty feeling and applied himself to mixing the second paint bowl as well.
Hapi ended up mixing three more bowls in silence - a white, a yellow, and a vivid green that sparkled with some crushed gemstone - before the elder spoke again.
“Now, we can paint.” The last bowl of green paint apparently needed no added touches, for the elder took it from Hapi and placed it aside before reaching into a small box on the side of the table. His hand came out holding a small clay figurine, which he placed in front of himself before drawing forth another which he passed to Hapi. Hapi was surprised to feel his fingers cramping when he reached out to gently grasp the figurine. The paint-mixing had strained muscles he had not used in a long time.
“This is Keb.” The elder nodded at the baked clay figurine in front of him, before pointing at the one in Hapi’s hands. “That is Amun. We will give them white kilts first, and then you can decorate with the rest of the colours as you wish.”
Hapi looked at the figurine in his hand. Amun was kneeling, hands on his lap, and had what looked like a basket on his back. Keb, on the other side of the table, was standing up, and held a staff in one outstretched hand.
Why did the names sound so familiar? Hapi was sure he had heard the names before - and not just Amun, who was the head of the High Gods. He knew people with those names, people he had…
The thought was water between his fingers again, and Hapi only came back when the old man harrumphed at him.
“You better start with a brush, unless you want to paint with your fingers like a child.” Keb already had a half-way white kilt on, and the old man’s gnarled hands held the tiny brush with surprising delicacy as he gently dabbed at the hard clay surfaces. “Or have you learnt nothing since your father passed?”
Anger flushed through Hapi at the barb, but he choked it down and reached for one of the clean brushes.
“I have learnt a great deal of patience, elder. A great deal.”
“A young man, speaking of patience?” The elder cackled, shoulders shaking as he laughed. The clay figurine in his dark hands did not move. “What will you tell me next - that you understand life? Just like you understand sacrifice?”
“I have bled for the empire. I have seen friends die. I have suffered and fought in the war, and done terrible things for our nation.” Hapi could not keep the heat out of his voice, but the old man on the other side of the table did not even look up. “I feel like you are mocking me without even knowing me.”
“I know you are a slow painter, that’s for sure.” The old man raised his figurine, and the white kilt was flawlessly done. Dabs of blue had already started to appear on the figurine as well from the second bowl. “Come. Paint. The day will not last forever.”
Hapi felt his hand tightening around the as-yet-unpainted figurine in his hand, and he was on the verge of closing his hand entirely when he felt something brush against his calf. The cat, eyes wide, meowed up at him from beside the reed stool when he looked down.
“See? Even Bastet wants you to paint.”
Hapi watched the cat watching him, and when he blinked the cat was gone, racing for the corner of the hut and disappearing around it in a spray of sand.
“Oh. Maybe she wants something else. The rats always come for my water.” The old man put his blue brush down and reached for the yellow bowl.
Hapi found his insides quivering as he strained at the memories that just did not want to come back to him. The words that had been so fresh on his tongue - his battles, his losses, his deeds - were a thin fog in his mind when he tried to grab them.
Where had he bled? Who had died?
Where had he suffered?
The brush in his hand shook when it went into the white bowl, and Hapi had to wait for several long moments before his hand was steady enough to apply the first dab of white paint on the figurine. The brush bristles were soft, and the paint thick, and it took a while for him to get the kilt done in a way that he felt satisfied with.
All the while, his mind boiled at the situation, and the unanswered questions that were stacking up in rows and rows before him.
Why was he even there?
What was he doing, painting ushabtis with an old man?
What was going on?
The painting seemed to help, though, and when Hapi reached for the blue brush the old man was already busy with the red. Keb, held in gnarled fingers, was coming to life with every delicate stroke, and the basic semblance of a face was already taking form.
“I don’t know why I am here.”
The words were out of his mouth before Hapi even realized.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, and I don’t know why I’m doing it.” The blue paint was thin, and Hapi had to do several layers before the colour took properly on the clay. The act of painting was the only thing that made sense any more, and Hapi felt like his mouth - and his thoughts - belonged to someone else who was far, far away. “I don’t even have questions any more, elder.”
“Life is not just about question, is it?” Wrinkles shifted into a momentary smile on the other side of the table. “Life is life. It does what it wills, and the end result… well, who knows?”
Hapi looked at the clay face in front of him. Amun’s clay visage was blank, with only the hint of a nose and two eye sockets in the surface.
When he looked up, the five paint bowls on the table drew Hapi in.
Simple colours.
Endless combinations.
All he had to do, was paint.
Hapi reached for the next colour, and began to paint in earnest.
Ra-Horakhty had turned into Atum, the evening sun, by the time they were done. Hapi sat back, studying his final brushstroke, and felt something deep inside him slowly dissolving away. The ushabti sat, yellow-red arms on its knees, the basket brown on its back, and the face painted a shade of green that he had dabbed with a touch of yellow to lighten it. The green reminded him of Osiris, who had died and been revived, and whose green face Hapi had seen so often in the temples of his youth.
He had painted his father’s ushabti green, as a child, and the memory swept over and through him without changing that strange feeling in his chest.
“So. Time for me to finish for the day.” The elder, who had been mostly quiet once Hapi started painting, straightened from where he had been hunched over his own ushabti. Keb was resplendent in white, yellow and blue, with touches of red and green on his arms and legs. “I think we are done here.”
The old man stood, Hapi joining him moments later, and began to stack pots and jars back into the wicker basket which they had come from so long ago. He worked with surprising speed, and before long there were only the two painted figurines left on the table.
“You may take one, if you wish.” The old man indicated the two waiting figures. They faced each other across the table, different in pose and colour, different in meaning - Keb to guide with his staff, Amun to collect and serve with his basket - and yet the longer Hapi looked at them, the harder it became to tell them apart. “My tomb is already rich, and I do not really need more servants, but… old habits die hard.”
Hapi, spear in hand, bowed low at the waist, and held the pose for a long moment even as the bow across his back strained against his chest. When he straightened, his eyes were burning.
“Please accept my humble gift, elder. I am a poor student, and a poor painter, and I could not leave here with something so valuable.”
The old man scoffed, and picked up the figurine Hapi had painted. Keen eyes studied it from up close.
“You are a poor painter indeed. But skill is not what makes the ushabti come to life.” The old man placed the figurine down on the table, before rapping the wooden surface once with his knuckles. Both of the figurines turned, facing Hapi, and bowed in turn. “We give power with our thoughts, and our hands and our memories can help, but our thoughts - that is where our power lies.”
When Hapi looked up, the old man was gone, along with the hut. A gust of wind shook through the desert, and when Hapi looked down, the table with the ushabti was gone as well. In the space behind the hut - had there ever been a hut? - a black cat sat, and looked up with surprise when it noticed Hapi. It gave a yowl and raced off for the hill that rose next to Hapi, and was gone in the blink of an eye.
* * * * *
Hapi slowly came to his senses in a dark room, and it was a while before he could begin to place the sights and sounds around him. The simulation chair was still in the horizontal position, and when he moved it slowly began to whisper back into the upright position. The sim room had muted walls, dark in the thin lights from overhead, and the door to the technician bay opened a moment later. Hapi had to struggle to put a name to the face.
“Koreb? What just happened?”
Koreb was a tall, thin man - space-borne, somewhere out on the Charioteer worlds in their orbital colonies - and gave Hapi a puzzled look as he struggled out of the sim chair.
“What do you mean? Nothing happened, I’m still resetting the simulation.”
“Resetting?” Hapi felt stupid as he echoed the technician’s words. “I was just in it…”
Koreb cut him off with a sharp shake of his head.
“No, sorry. I launched the regular simulation, but something tripped in our system. I’m waiting for the reset now to try again.”
Hapi froze on the edge of the sim chair. The decking tiles were cold under his questing toes.
“You mean I wasn’t in a sim now?”
“You might have experienced some random input from the system, but nothing coherent.” Koreb frowned, turning to a diagnostic panel clipped to his forearm. Deft fingers flicked through the haptic screens, each one being met with another head-shake. “No, it looks like your implants would have filtered those out too. At best you probably heard some static and saw some random lights, but nothing that could have made sense. With the time dilation, it would not have lasted more than a few minutes or so, from your perspective.”
Hapi looked down at his hands - scarred, and heavy with callouses from the years of weapon training - and could still feel the paintbrush between his fingers, and the smooth hardness of the ushabti figurine.
Koreb left, muttering about anomalies, and Hapi sat on the edge of the simulation chair for a long time before he finally laid back down again for his next test.
Brilliant, such a good twist at the end
Very clever world building. Really enjoyed this.