The Pharaohs Homework
Chapter 17: The Pharaoh's Homework
Sensei arrived at the Nobi household at precisely four-fifteen on a Tuesday afternoon.
He had not been invited.
He stood on the front path in his grey suit with his briefcase under one arm and his gradebook under the other, and he looked up at Nobita's bedroom window with the expression of a man who has graded enough excuses to recognize one from a distance.
Nobita's homework was two days late. Again.
Sensei had walked the nine blocks from the school specifically to deliver the message that this could not continue. He had walked nine blocks in autumn wind with dead leaves blowing into his glasses, and he was prepared to stand on this path until someone opened a window.
He was that kind of teacher.
He did not know that, on the other side of that window, a conversation was happening that would end with him in ancient Egypt.
"I just want to see them," Nobita said. "For a school report."
He was sitting on the edge of his desk, which was the casual, responsible posture he adopted when asking for something unreasonable.
"The pyramids," Doraemon said.
"For a school report," Nobita repeated.
"You have a school report due?"
Nobita thought about this. "I could have one. If I saw the pyramids, I would have something to report on."
Doraemon looked at him for a long moment.
"The Time Machine," he said, "is not a study aid."
"But it could be."
"It could also," Doraemon said, "be a way for you to avoid doing the homework you already have, which is due tomorrow, by spending the entire afternoon looking at pyramids and then telling Sensei you didn't have time because you were in ancient Egypt."
Nobita's face went through several expressions.
"That is not what I was going to do," he said, after a pause that was slightly too long.
"You were exactly going to do that."
"I was going to do both."
Doraemon sighed the sigh of someone who has lost this particular argument many times. He reached into his pocket and produced the Time Machine — a small, elegant device that looked like a remote control if a remote control could steer through the fourth dimension. He had added it to the updated pocket inventory three weeks ago, after the previous model had been used for something inadvisable involving Suneo's swimming trophy.
"This is the new version," Doraemon said. "It's been recalibrated. But it's been used a lot recently. The stabilizers are—"
"It'll be fine," Nobita said.
"I was still speaking."
"Doraemon. Pyramids."
Doraemon looked at the Time Machine. He looked at Nobita. He looked at the homework spread on the desk, which appeared to have been approached once and then abandoned in favor of a nap.
"Fine," he said. "But we go, we look, we come back. No touching anything. No bringing anything home. No starting anything with anyone."
"Obviously," said Nobita.
He was already standing up.
The Time Machine launched from Nobita's bedroom in a shimmer of light and a brief sound like a spinning top gaining speed.
What it did not do was launch cleanly.
The stabilizers, which Doraemon had not been allowed to finish explaining about, had been under strain since the Andromeda adventure, and before that the shadow world, and before that the ocean adventure with Shizuka, and before that several other trips that Doraemon had written up in his maintenance log under the heading INADVISABLE. The combined mileage was extraordinary. The machine was, by any reasonable technical standard, tired.
It made a new sound. A sort of twisting, hesitating sound, like a car engine that has decided it would rather not.
"Doraemon," Nobita said.
"I know," Doraemon said. He was pressing buttons very fast.
"Doraemon."
"I know, Nobita."
The machine spun. The display showed coordinates flickering — present day to two years ago to four hundred years ago to considerably further. The destination meter scrolled past numbers that increased rapidly.
"I am going to need you to not speak to me for approximately thirty seconds," Doraemon said.
Nobita did not speak.
The Time Machine gave a sound that was equal parts mechanical distress and something like indignation. Then, with a final lurch that felt like a very sudden stop at the bottom of a very tall staircase, it stopped.
They sat in the sudden silence.
Outside the portal window, the light was gold. Ancient gold. The thick, dry, permanent gold of a sun that had been practicing for a very long time.
"Where are we?" Nobita said.
Doraemon looked at the display. He adjusted his glasses. He looked again.
"Approximately 2560 BCE," he said.
"Is that—"
"Egypt," Doraemon said. "We are in Egypt."
There was also someone in the back of the Time Machine who had not been there when they left.
Sensei had been standing directly outside Nobita's window when the shimmer had happened. He had seen the window go bright. He had stepped forward to investigate — because he was that kind of teacher — and he had been caught in the edge of the departure field and pulled through into the fourth dimension before he could fully form the thought that this was irregular.
He was sitting on the floor of the Time Machine with his briefcase clutched to his chest and his gradebook open on his lap.
He looked at Nobita.
He looked at Doraemon.
He looked out the portal window at the ancient golden light.
He looked back at Nobita.
"Nobi," he said, in the very quiet voice he reserved for matters of extreme seriousness. "Where are we."
This was not a question. It had the grammar of a question but the tone of a statement, and the statement was: I am about to hear something impossible and I would like it delivered clearly and without further delays.
"We are in Egypt," Nobita said.
"Ancient Egypt," Doraemon added.
"2560 BCE," Nobita said. "Give or take."
Sensei was silent for a moment.
Then he took off his glasses, cleaned them on his sleeve, and put them back on.
He looked at the portal window again.
In the distance, rising out of a flat plain of pale sand and scattered construction, three shapes were visible. Two of them were close to finished. One was still climbing, stone by stone, toward a sky that had never seen anything like it.
"The Great Pyramid," Sensei said.
His voice had changed.
It was still quiet, but the quality of the quiet was different. It was the quiet of a man who has spent thirty years teaching about something and has just, unexpectedly, seen it.
"Doraemon," he said. "Can the Time Machine be repaired?"
"Yes," Doraemon said. "But not immediately. An hour, perhaps. Maybe two."
Sensei nodded.
He stood up.
He straightened his jacket.
He opened the door of the Time Machine and stepped out into the desert in his grey suit and his briefcase, and he stood in the full heat of a 2560 BCE afternoon and breathed in air that had not been breathed by thirty-seven billion subsequent human beings.
He was quiet for a very long time.
"I have been teaching about this place," he said, "for twenty-two years."
He walked toward the construction site with the purposeful stride of a man who has forgotten that he is technically a time traveler and has remembered instead that he is a history teacher and the pyramids are right there.
Nobita and Doraemon followed. Doraemon had tucked the Anywhere Door carefully into his pocket and was scanning the environment with the cautious expression of someone looking for reasons to worry.
He found one almost immediately.
The pyramid workers were building.
That was correct.
The angle at which they were building was not.
"Doraemon," Nobita said.
"I see it," Doraemon said.
The blocks being laid were oriented wrong. The base courses were inverted — narrow at the bottom, wide partway up, narrowing again in a way that would cause any structural engineer, ancient or modern, to feel extremely uncomfortable. The foremen were directing workers in frantic circles. A group of men who appeared to be architects were looking at a drawing and arguing, which was normal, except that the drawing they were arguing over appeared to be upside down.
Also the foreman was wearing a fish on his head.
Not as a headdress. Just a fish. Sideways. As if someone had put it there and he had not yet noticed, or had noticed and given up.
"That is not how you build a pyramid," Sensei said, in the tone of a man making a simple factual observation.
They passed a wall.
The hieroglyphs on the wall depicted a cat riding another cat. The cat on top was making what appeared to be a rude gesture. Below this, someone had written, in hieroglyphs, something that the Translation Gummy in Sensei's jacket pocket (he had found it on the floor of the Time Machine; Doraemon had distributed them during the landing without realizing) rendered as: YOUR MOTHER MEASURES CUBITS WITH HER NOSE.
Sensei stopped walking.
He looked at the hieroglyph.
He took off his glasses and cleaned them again.
He put them back on.
"This is the Great Pyramid," he said.
"Yes," Doraemon said.
"The most important construction project in human history."
"Yes," Doraemon said.
"Someone has put graffiti on it."
"Yes," Doraemon said, and looked at Nobita.
"I didn't do anything," Nobita said immediately.
They walked on, and the situation did not improve.
The Pharaoh's court was in the large tent complex beside the main construction site. Sensei and the others observed it from behind a supply cart stacked with limestone blocks, which provided an excellent vantage point.
The court was chaos.
Advisors had abandoned their formal robes and were wearing hats that had clearly been chosen for maximum hilarity — one had a very large green feather arrangement, one wore something that appeared to be a basket, one had balanced a small clay pot on his head and was very pleased about it. A ceremonial scribe was writing, but when you squinted at what he was writing, it appeared to be a list of things the Nile smelled like. Guards were doing cartwheels. A man who might have been the head priest was juggling.
On the Pharaoh's throne sat the Pharaoh, who appeared to be a dignified man of forty experiencing the world's worst week.
And on the Pharaoh's knee, lounging with the specific relaxation of someone who owns the room, was a figure in pale makeup and a rumpled purple coat.
He had green eyes and a red smile and he was telling the Pharaoh a joke.
The Pharaoh laughed the laugh of someone who has been laughing for a while and has lost control of it.
"There he is," Doraemon said quietly. "A Joker."
"You know him?" Nobita whispered.
"I know of the type. Chaos agents. There are several in the universe. They seek out places where order exists and they undo it, for entertainment." Doraemon paused. "He must have stolen a time-travel device from somewhere. He has been here for some time."
The Joker was now producing a small bag and scattering something from it. Where the powder fell, the soldiers and scribes began giggling. One soldier sat down abruptly and could not stop. A scribe started writing something, looked at it, started giggling, could not stop writing, kept giggling.
"Laughing powder," Doraemon said. "It interferes with concentration. With seriousness. With the ability to do anything deliberate."
The workers at the pyramid site were giggling too. That was why the blocks were going on wrong. They couldn't stop laughing long enough to line them up.
Sensei was watching all of this with his arms crossed and his glasses catching the afternoon light.
The pyramid was being ruined.
Not destroyed — not knocked down. Ruined in a specific way that was, in some ways, worse. It was being built incorrectly. In a hundred years, the mistakes would be set in stone. Literally. The greatest monument to human order, to the understanding that mathematics and patience and discipline could make something that would last four thousand years, was being constructed as a joke.
Sensei was quiet for a long time.
Then he said, in the very particular voice he used when a student had not done their homework for the fourth time in a row, and he had decided that a different approach was required:
"This will not stand."
His glasses caught the sun.
"I," he said, "am going to need the Translation Gummy to keep working. And I am going to need to see those original blueprints."
He picked up his briefcase.
He adjusted his jacket.
He walked toward the pyramid.