Large wraparound sunglasses covered his eyes and part of his forehead and nose. He peeled them from his face, and I saw the brow, one brow arching over both eyes. "Well," he shouted, "it’s been a year, just like I told you, and here I am, Melly-belly. Don’t time fly!"

"Looks like you’ve got a little dandruff there." Izzy scattered slivers of limestone with a playful kick. "And one of us could use a shave. But my cork held, didn’t it, bubeleh, in spite of all the bad-mouthing from various cosmic adventurers I could mention?"

He took a few snapshots of me?Click, flash!?mopped his forehead, downed a swig of water. The suck and gurgle of the water smacking back into the canteen when he pulled it from his lips. The distant murmurs of tourists huddling back as soldiers herded them with batons. Millennia whispering by: sand, wind, sun…

"So, you like it here or what? Sarvadhuka’s going nuts in the novelty shops and brothels. I told him he doesn’t get a disease or induce any pregnancies?Izzovision?so now he’s taken out all the stops, if you’ll excuse the expression. He got so burned when he found out that the Memphis I promised him nooky in wasn’t the one in Tennessee, I felt I had to share some information, to make it up to him.

"I like the weather station on your rump, by the way. Getty Institute, right? No, don’t bother to answer. That’s all right. Don’t exercise yourself, kid. That would really freak the tourists. As if it wasn’t bad enough having a piece of your shoulder fall off and then seeing a lunatic like yours truly gabbing at Old Stoneface here as if he was an old acquaintance.

"You just take it easy. Shaman talks a good game, but he can’t do nothing for a while yet. I’ll come back after nightfall. Me and Sovereign Duchy was just casing the joint thisaft, bagging a few collectibles and that. Don’t say goodbye. Don’t say thank you. Don’t say a thing, Great Abbadabba."

A moustached soldier in khakis and beret with a Kalashnikoff slung over his shoulder grabbed Izzy’s elbow to escort him from the Sphinx enclosure, the hollow I formed about me when I first crash landed on Earth and created human beings, a long, tiring process from the initial joining of nucleotides through the evolution of humans, through whom I could actuate my mental processes, and eventuating in the birth of Tuthmosis IV, on whom I believed I could rely, but consciousness has its own intrinsic imperatives, so here I was, anchored in this blank, vasty shoal, cut off from the stars my home, and utterly dependent on the ministrations of a punch press operator from Lockport, New York.

Somewhere on the wind a mite was buzzing: "I’m you! I’m you!" I felt so tired!

Izzy did not make it back that night. He was being detained, I learned, in an Egyptian hoosegow. Sarvaduhka ran the message over to me. He had to pay one of his Cairo prostitutes one hell of a baksheesh, he said, to guide him, on the back of a camel, through Nazlet El-Semman over to the western funerary complex, and on to the enclosure, my enclosure. Mastaba by mastaba they crept. It gave Sarvaduhka the willies.

Sarvaduhka’s guide was a Coptic Christian, Lila Kodzi, who discoursed on the mysteries of Monophysitism at the most inappropriate moments. Sarvaduhka complained about it. He seemed to think I was God. He told me everything. At the moment of orgasm (Sarvaduhka’s orgasm?she didn’t have them) she would curse the Council of Chalcedon, some fifteen hundred years past, and she would vociferously affirm, in excellent English, the one divine nature of Christ, as Sarvaduhka twitched and spasmed, emitting expletives in three Sanskrit-derived languages.

Sarvaduhka and his shakti huddled at my hindquarters as lights flashed brilliantly on the pyramids of Cheops and Chephren and on my own disintegrating limestone hulk. It was just at the end of the late Friday night sound and light show, the German language one. The show must have been impressive for souls with human bodies and eyes, but all the information was false. As I said, it was I who made Chephren, and not the other way round.

26. What We Can Learn from Linguini

There’s nothing like a few thousand years in the sand to give you a certain sense of perspective. Something deep inside me had loosened up in the millennia since my New Mexico adventure, which, I now understood, preceded the Fourth Dynasty just as much as it followed it. Don’t let the dates fool you.

The people who wrote down the Bible understood this kind of thing. Look and see: Genesis, XIX:3, for example. Lot bakes matzohs?Passover bread?in his house in Sodom. But this was before Moses, before the exodus from Egypt, before Passover started, with the unleavened bread the Children of Israel baked in the sun while the current Pharaoh was saddling horses. Israel (i.e., Jacob) hadn’t even been born yet. So what was Lot doing baking matzohs back in Sodom?

If Izzy has taught me anything at all, it’s that clock time isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sometimes five p.m. comes a week or two before six, and sometimes they’re simultaneous. The so-called excluded middle is positively a jungle, teeming with unenumerated possibilities. And causality, so far from being the one-dimensional line that Kant and even Hume talked about, is as wild as linguini on a rolling boil.

Where I now live, for example, on Sanduleak, the surface temperature is three or four hundred times what it is on Earth or Mars. Since Sandy went supernova and contracted to a neutron star, it’s a thousand degrees Kelvin?in the shade! That makes things go pretty fast. By Earth scale, a decent life span for a citizen on Sandy is maybe a quadrillionth of a second. It feels like a long time here. You’d think a bridge like that could never be gapped, that Earthers and Sanduleans could never communicate, and you’d be right except that, in this man’s universe, there is no absolute standard. We have a sliding scale. And I mean sliding!

The Earther Protagoras had it right:

Man is the measure of all things.

Well, not Man, but Mind really, not to be anthropocentric. All those scales and numbers and laws of science are just hypostatizations of something that actually belongs to the realm of Mind. Mind made them. Mind measures them. Mind compares, adjusts, interprets, changes. That’s what the epoche is all about, for example. That’s why Shaman was such an imminent threat even from a couple hundred million miles away, even if it had been light-years away?c is not the top speed in this man’s universe, not when you can do an epoche. Nature is a lot less rigid than that, believe me.

Look at linguini.

"Mel, is that you, Mel? Abu al-Hawl?" Sarvaduhka was whispering into my hindquarters, the pyramid of Chephren at his back, and in between, Lila Kodzi and two camels tethered to a rock. "I can’t believe I drove you in my VW Squareback on Route 40. Is this you? Izzy says you are the Father of Terrors from before the pharaohs and that you have shepherded the dynonucleic acid ancestors out of the primal soup down to modern Homo sapiens such as I myself, Sarvaduhka, that you are the progenitor of all life on Earth. Izzovision. Is this the truth? You did not appear this way to me in New Mexico or Texas. I hope I did not offend you, Great One, by anything I may have said or done at that time, Om Shantih."