Pyramid Scheme by Dave Freer and Eric Flint

Medea looked skywards. “Bitar? Smitar?”

Then she dissolved into tears. Cruz, who happened to be nearest, held her and patted her awkwardly.

“What’s wrong? She’s not that attached to those dragons,” said Liz, in an undervoice to Lamont.

“Her children,” answered Lamont quietly, understanding perfectly.

* * *

There was a path, and at length they came to a small mud-walled village. It reeked of fish. The locals were busy with the tasks of a small fishing village—the men lounging in the pretense of mending a net, while women washed. All the villagers shrieked in unison at the sudden appearance of the strangers. Previously indolent villagers moved with startling rapidity inside the wall. The heavy palm-wood gate thudded shut in the faces of the visitors.

Liz chuckled. “They certainly don’t like door-to-door salesmen much.”

“I wonder how they feel about telemarketers?” mused Lamont.

Jerry tried out a phrase in his best liturgical Coptic. No response.

“Ask if they’d like to come out and listen to a high-tech stock presentation,” suggested Lamont. “Tell them there’s a free gift holiday for two on offer.”

Jerry snorted. “Right. I was hoping for some dinner and shelter. It’ll be dark soon.”

Jerry altered his intonations in his next attempt. The result was totally unexpected.

Crabs began to appear. Not by ones and twos, but by the hundreds. Crawling out of every conceivable hole and crevice. The crabs ranged from pea-sized to the size of generous soup plates.

Of course, Henri got nipped. “Merde!” He stamped at the crab, splattering it with one of his once-elegant Italian shoes.

The results of that unpremeditated action were even more unexpected. The palm-wood gate was ripped open and the once-frightened villagers began pouring out in a flood. Judging from appearances—the faces transformed into berserk grimaces, the dervish dancing, the howling and shrieking, not to mention the waving clubs—they seemed hell-bent on beating the sacrilegious foreigners to a bloody pulp. . . .

* * *

Two things saved Jerry and his companions.

Firstly, the avenging Oxyrhynchites had to, at all costs, avoid hurting the crabs—which were all over the pace. Secondly, there was the fishing net hanging from a series of poles.

Cruz kicked over one pole. The net, probably the village’s most precious possession, fell on top of half of the crab worshippers. Mac and Lamont between them picked up an enormous basket of river sardines and flung them at the crowd. Now the locals had the double jeopardy of avoiding standing on their catch and the crabs.

“Merde alors!” cursed Henri. “You have me covered in fish slime!”

“Come on! Into this boat!!” yelled Liz. She and Medea had shoved three of the village’s papyrus-reed-bundle boats out into the Nile to drift away. They were waiting with the fourth, the last and the largest.

It was a splash and scramble, but the seven of them were soon out on the muddy waters, drifting upstream under a coarse flax sail away from the angry yelling mob on the shore.

“I think this is likely to stay virgin territory in the high-tech industry,” said Jerry ruefully.

“God alone knows what they’d have done if you’d offered them the opportunity to invest their precious crabs,” grumbled Lamont, feeling his bruises.

“Just what the hell happened back there?” asked Liz.

Lamont held up two fingers. “Well, I’d say we discovered two things. For sure.”

Liz raised an eyebrow. “Like what? Besides that they’ve got a crab problem. And they don’t like visitors.”

Jerry shook his head. “They might be quite friendly. But we—or at least Henri—committed sacrilegious murder. So . . . one of the things that we found out is that the locals belong to a sect, the Oxyrhynchites, who regard the spider crab as sacred. Ancient Egyptian reverence for various animals was truly amazing. There are whole cemeteries full of mummified cats and crocodiles. They were buried by the hundreds of thousands. I remember reading that the modern Egyptians were actually using the cat cemetery at Beni Hasan for making artificial fertilizer.”

It was the kind of information that usually silences cocktail parties. It did pretty well with the muddy-refugees-in-a-reed-bundle-boat party, too. It was a good minute and a half before Liz said: “And what was the second point?”