The Riddle of the Sphinx

By M.J. Harkins

Horus sat on the throne. They were coming. His exile would end. His father would be resurrected. They would be reunited with his mother. His uncle’s usurpation was over. For how many centuries did they wait. Thrown here with these brutes. Remembering his father’s teachings, he took hold of himself. There was something special in this place. The inhabitants were capable of learning and understanding, but their short lives made things difficult. It felt as though you could barely get to the point of an intelligent conversation, and they were gone.

In anticipation of their departure, Horus assembled his current cabinet of ministers and joined with them for one final dreamwork. He learned to dreamwork at the feet of his parents. His race was long lived by any standard. The longest they had encountered in the Galactic Empire. While yes, they had been modified and augmented over the eons, and their habitats extended their longevity and the scope of their abilities, it came with its difficulties. Any essentially immortal race had issues, psychological, emotional, and occasionally physical, dealing with any shorter-lived species. And these inhabitants of Earth tested Horus’s very being.

The dilemma of abiding with humans for over a hundred centuries, especially in the beginning, had taken a toll on his father, who, possibly due to the conditions of this world, entered a coma centuries ago, leaving Horus to await the end, or the possibility of redemption. For thousands of years, on this forsaken rock, Horus watched and participated in his father’s dreamworks. He had vague memories of before, when his parents led the dreamworks of the Galaxy, orchestrating the upper echelons, like a fountain of song, with harmonies. When he and his father were cast on this bleak shore, with nothing but a minor vessel to accommodate their existence, they gradually moved this world from scavenging subsistence to a thriving society, albeit on a modest scale.

While Horus, still an adolescent, played with younger inhabitants, his father organized the adults. The inhabitants had never encountered such an individual. One could say they had never encountered an individual. They lived in some kind of communal psyche. There were some capable of strong volition, but it was usually accompanied by brute force. His father’s mind was like nothing they had encountered, and when he was in their ship it was impossible not to follow his will.

The first dreamwork his father undertook was to straddle the river, build a canal system, institute a farming ritual, and store grain for the off seasons. This was accomplished through a cascade of mind. The dreamwork requires a gathering, and the emanations flowed outward, like a fountain of thought. Its continuous reverberations conducted the endeavor. Horus watched and waited, playing with generation after generation of young men, learning their ways and imparting new ones. He played wargames, and as any child would build sandcastles, he erected fortifications, venturing further and further afield.

The first dreamwork took many human lifetimes, but to Horus and his father it was but a few seasons. The people came and went, not as quickly as the ebb and flow of the river, but it was not very different. There was the seeding of new generations, and the harvesting of the best and brightest, the willing and the wise, the company of men and women that understood what they did was for their generation and all the generations to come.

During his youth, which to humans seemed interminable, for his kind grew in stature slowly, although what seemed to them a boy he was stronger and had more endurance than any human, Horus remained with the young, and each generation was all the wiser for the time they spent with him. Wave after wave went into the service of his father’s dreamworks all the more capable.

Horus spent half is time with his “cohort” and the rest in the shadows at the foot of the stairs in the great hall that housed their ship, which had been opened to resemble a dais with a throne. His father, often entranced, waited upon by his inner circle, reading their thoughts, imparting his wisdom, people coming and going, like a font was his father.

Time flew by, and a curious thing occurred, a family of small creatures began to frequent the granaries. They weren’t like any of the domesticated animals, relentless in their independence, they maintained a symbiosis, they removed pests so long as nobody interfered with their comings and goings.

Watching this for a few generations, Horus started to see some interaction here and there. These “cats” would occasionally frequent dwellings and befriend some people. Suddenly, one of these creatures became enamored of Horus, and followed him constantly. Horus found himself attached to this creature. The only time it left his side was in the throne room. The cat would disappear as soon as Horus seated himself in the shadows.

Normally, his father rarely noticed his presence, but recently he found his father’s gaze on him more and more often and was finally summoned to his side. Courtiers orbited his father, a chair was summoned, it was placed beside his father, just to the right, slightly lower. His father instructed him that he would no longer sit in the shadow, he would sit just there. When Horus inquired, his father informed him that it was so he could better concentrate. It was bad enough that his son was forever seated in the shadows, but that darn cat is distracting. Horus looked around, and there to his right, perched upon a sill, sitting in the sun, wrapped in its tail, was Bastet. Warmth filled his whole being, and he didn’t know if it was because his father had seated him here, or that the darn cat precipitated the whole thing. They live shorter lives than humans, you see. He never had the time to befriend or be befriended by another. He was at his father’s side for the next millennia, before his father took ill.

So here he was. The legation was coming. They would resurrect his father. They would be home before the end of the next century. Time flies. He glanced to his right; a reverie resuscitated a memory. He only had to take a few breaths and began his final dreamwork. Within a few decades the structure took shape. Outside the palace, just to the right of the throne room, sleek and majestic, Bastet basked in the sun, and Horus, on his throne, glanced to his right, and perched on the sill, was that darn cat…