Chapter 2
Calculating a pyramid star
A giant moon hanging over the desert watched a pair speed across the early-morning golden sands…
Zooming through the overnight air, cooled to smell deliciously like warm toast, was Vincent the Vespa and Aunty Avril wearing her white helmet and ferociously-rimmed desert eye googles.
Beneath the moon, Egypt’s enormous pyramids loomed ahead like colossal coffins sliding slowly into their path.
The moon seemed to be propped up by the pointy tips of their enormous stone triangles.
While the three-sided giants become larger and larger to Vinny and Aunty Avril, the silent moon magically stayed exactly the same size.
“Which pyramid are we heading for?” he called out, his engine humming with excitement.
“The tallest one!” Aunty Avril shouted back, immediately regretting it as a mouthful of gritty sand crunched between her teeth.
Sun god Re
At the base of the Great Pyramid, a shiny black scarab beetle emerged, its shell gleaming like polished glass.
It waited patiently, clearly expecting them.
When the scooter skidded to a halt — ten seconds late — the beetle puffed out his chest and spoke in a surprisingly regal voice, “I am Re, the one and only sun god.”
They stared at the tiny creature in awe.
“I am moments away from completing my morning rebirth,” Re continued proudly, “Rising from humble beetle to divine god.
Each dusk, the celestial sky goddess Nut swallowed Re whole, and each dawn she gave birth to him anew.
“Fortunately,” Re added, glancing skyward, “Nut forgot to wind her alarm clock last night. She is running a little late.”
Above them, the sky yawned and stretched, then urgently seeped grey into pale blue
“There’s one minute left,” Re whispered urgently. “Just enough time for your clue.”
He raised a delicate front claw, leaned close to Aunty Avril’s ear and murmured, “Use the point of the smallest pyramid.”
Before she could reply, the ancient heavens shimmered as Nut descended to gently consume Re before vanishing in a ripple of light.
Getting the measure of Sirius
Holding her breath, Aunty Avril picked up her stellar parallax to calculate the distance of Sirius the star from the shortest pyramid’s point.
Later, after whispering the number to Vinny’s mechanical brain, she would note it in a top-secret notepad hidden in his engine.
Keeping a close watch out for strangers, the scooter noticed a thin bluish shadow.
“Aunty Avril,” Vinny hushed, “we have got company.”
“I know,” she said calmly, without looking up from her parallax tool.
Climbing back onto the seat, “Shadows don’t usually glow blue,” she said as Vinny sprayed sand before revving off in first gear.
“We are being followed, which means the game just changed,” she added.
Uneasy Pharaohs
Suddenly very interested in what was going on, the moon, sun and sky paused their celestial tasks to investigate the pair pursuing the bluish shadow darting across the desert.
The celestial beings were astonished to learn about humanity’s plans for an artificial star.
Listening in, even the buried pharaohs stirred from their afterlife in their stony coffins.
They were excited at their god-like authority being able to command a seeing-all object in the sky.
“We will become what we claimed to be,” they thought haughtily as Vinny and Aunty Avril lost sight of the shadow.
Meanwhile, in London,
Marmalade wondered how much Darjeeling tea he would require for his afterlife as he delicately sipped black Sri Lankan tea from a teacup decorated with black scarab beetles, and remembered to wind up his Florn alarm clock.