Keystone (53 page)

The Xynutian cocked
his head to one side and smiled.

“It is interesting,
statistically speaking, that the point at which your species’ population had
reached saturation point is also the point at which, for the first time, the
two emissaries sent by the Facility had an opportunity to actually meet.”

“Why are you
telling me all of this?”

The Xynutian
stared deeply into Gail’s eyes before disappearing into thin air.

Moments later,
the lights dimmed and the airlock opened. It was obvious that she was meant to
leave. As she entered the brightly-lit corridor between the Facility and the
Egyptian hall where she had left George, the Xynutian’s final thoughts echoed
inside her head.

We are telling you this, Gail Turner, as we
are also telling Seth Mallus, because it is time for you to go. Now is the time
of Aniquilus, and it must not find any trace of us here.

Gail and George left the Amarna
Library in silence. The shock of what she had seen and heard, and of the chilling
final thoughts of the Xynutian, had left Gail feeling weak and confused.

George helped
her through the gaps in the rubble that led to the surface. Hands reached down
towards her from above and pulled her up into the mid-morning light.

Sunshine
, she thought as she squinted,
her hand raised to shield her eyes.

“We thought
you’d be here,” Ben said, in a mildly accusing tone. “What have you been up
to?”

George made a
sign for him to be quiet as he emerged from the rubble.

Zahra walked
up behind Gail and touched her shoulder.

“Are you
alright, Gail?” she asked softly.

Gail nodded
her head and smiled weakly. She turned to the horizon in silence.

The sky was a
deep grey with streaks of black and red. She knew there was something wrong
with that but the others didn’t seem to notice the sky. Her mind flittered
between different realities, straying from Xynutian time capsules to Egyptian
prophecies, to the mad Seth Mallus hell-bent on the destruction of the world.
Now, she was back at the Xynutians. They had known, all those hundreds of
thousands, no,
millions
of years
earlier, that Aniquilus was coming. Somehow, they had predicted it, and had
protected as much of themselves as possible from it. And yet humans had been so
oblivious that they had simply failed to save themselves. Instead they had done
Aniquilus’ job for him. They had already destroyed themselves.

But it wasn’t
just anyone who had destroyed humans, it was Seth: an emissary. Everything he
had done had been because of that. And he was
still alive
. Even as she had been speaking to the Xynutian, he had
been receiving a similar message. After so many years she could barely remember
his face, but she fancied she could almost hear his voice, feel his presence.
They were, after all, linked.

She had always
known that she was different,
after all,
who isn’t?
she thought. But from that to finding out that she had been sent
by the Xynutians.
To do what?
Seth destroys the world, and I just get
caught up in it all
.
 
And then it
occurred to her, that somehow her innate intuition, seeded by the Xynutians,
had led her to this very spot, to make her momentous discovery. And without
that, Seth would have no book of Aniquilus, no Mars landing site, not even an
Armana Stickman.

She was
vaguely aware of George kneeling beside her, looking down at her with a worried
expression and she realised that she was no longer standing, looking towards
the horizon.

She was lying
on her back, looking up into the sky. And she could feel herself slipping away.

EARTH
, it thought as it entered the Solar System. Its myriad taste
buds tingled with anticipation. The cold depths of inter-stellar space had made
it weary and, more notably, hungry.

Nine years
later, it passed Mars with a cursory glance, before a carefully calculated
slingshot round the Sun brought it perfectly into orbit around the third
planet.

It stayed
there, observant, for several milliseconds, before unfurling six tentacles
round the planet, to join on the other side in an astronomical embrace.

Moments
passed, and then slowly, inexorably, it drew closer, tightening its grip on
Earth until its body touched the outer fringes of ozone. Any closer would be
deadly to it, and so it stopped.

Aniquilus let
its senses run free in the thick atmosphere.

Trillions of
filaments poured down from its vast body, connecting it with the land below.
Most plunged into the depths of the seas, sending back countless readings that
were processed and stored with interest. Evolution, intelligence, it seemed,
was slow in the waters of this planet compared to others. However, future
visits could still be worthwhile, it noted.

Many billions
of the infinitely-thin filaments reached solid ground, some penetrating several
hundred feet in their quest.

CURIOUS
, it thought.
 

Aniquilus
reeled in its first prey: a human.

The harvested
mind was weak, both in terms of intelligence and knowledge. The energy gained
from absorbing it didn’t even compensate for the energy used to harvest it.

Aniquilus knew
that one of three higher species was likely to be dominant at this time. It was
very hard to believe that with such an outlook after its last visit to Earth,
the reality could be so different. In nearly two million orbits of this fertile
planet around its star there should have been ample time for intelligent life
to repopulate, evolve and expand. It already knew that there had been trips to
nearby planets, from radio transmissions it had intercepted on its voyage.

And yet the
mind that it had sampled was stale, devoid of nutrition.

It withdrew
momentarily, to think things through, and then approached again for a more
detailed analysis; it sniffed the ozone cautiously, the tentacles drawing it as
close to the noxious atmosphere as it dared.

The upper
atmosphere was full of heavy particles, and little light was reaching the
ground. It was a miracle that any life had managed to survive at all.

WASTED
, it thought, forlorn; a wasted
crop.

It knew what
had come about on Earth. It was one of those things that just happened
sometimes. It was one of the undesired side-effects of intelligent life.

That creatures
with so much at their disposal could be so preoccupied by the certainty of
their own deaths that they simply forgot to live was one way of ruining a
harvest: depression tasted awful.

And this was
another undesired side-effect; with intelligence mostly came technology, but
not always responsibility. In this case, it was a catastrophic combination.

There was
nothing that could be done. It didn’t even dwell on the thought for more than a
second.

Once more the
filaments descended, but this time only as far as the upper stratosphere. They
sucked away the pollutant particles and scrubbed the air. Several moments
later, they withdrew, and Aniquilus pushed away from Earth.

CLEAN
, it thought.

It orbited the
planet one last time before heading to the Moon, which it used to slingshot out
towards the Sun, which in turn it would use to slingshot to the next solar
system, and the next world.

It left a
bright blue planet behind, its shroud of deadly grey removed.

George cradled Gail in his arms
and looked down at her in despair.

“It’s like
someone’s opened a curtain,” she said weakly, looking up at the clear blue sky.
Her voice sounded odd, as if she were drunk.

“Don’t try and
talk,” he said. “Zahra and Ben have gone for some medicine. You need to rest
until they get back.”

She looked up
at her husband in adoration.
Screw the
Xynutians
she thought to herself.
My
only purpose in life was you
, George.

“Hold on,
Gail. Everything’s going to be alright.”

“I love you,”
she managed to say with a faint smile. A dull pain started to spread across the
top of her head, and down her temples to her cheeks, causing her jaw to lock in
pain. An involuntary spasm caused her teeth to grate violently against each
other. The pain gained in intensity, until her vision blurred and a piercing
whine filled her ears.

I love you, George
, she thought with all
the willpower left within her.
Thank you
for always being there for me, for giving me Jake, for loving me so much. I
love you.

George buried
his head in Gail’s greying hair as her final breath left her body with a sigh.
He squeezed her tight and wept as the muscles in her neck went limp. Her hand
let go of his arm and fell loosely to the soft sand below.

“I love you
too,” he whispered.

Firstly, I would like to thank my
numerous proof-readers: Nigel Budd, for his technical insights, my brother Alex
and my parents, for their efforts to remain unbiased, and Najam Mughal, for her
insights into the Qur’an, Islam and Arabic. I would lastly like to thank my
wife, Sonia. When we first met I told her of my ambition to become a writer,
and without her it would still be just that.

On 10
^th
February 2011, protests began in Egypt against the establishment of Hosni
Mubarak. Spurred on by peaceful revolution in Tunisia, citizens occupied Tahrir
Square and within weeks Mubarak ceded all presidential power, which he had held
uncontested for nearly thirty years. There were hopes that this would be the
start of a new democracy for Egypt.

Unfortunately
civil unrest and violence have persisted during the two years since this
largely peaceful revolution.

One of the sad
consequences of this disorder has been a sharp rise in illegal excavations in
Egypt. In a country fiercely proud of its heritage and seven thousand years of
civilisation, in 2013 there have been reported cases of people simply going to
sites and digging, removing any artefacts they find and can get away with.

It is in
exactly this environment that Seth Mallus’ scroll would be found in 2015.
Unfortunately, we may never know what finds emerge from this chaos as they
disappear onto the black market and into personal collections. For those that
do reach an honest eye, they will have lost all context, something that is
hugely important for any archaeologist.

The clay
tablet delivered by the two messengers in the prologue, which Ben nearly throws
away over three thousand years later in chapter six, was actually part of the
famous
Amarna Letters
, a collection
of 382 clay tablets that would have originally been housed in a building now
referred to as the ‘Bureau of Correspondence of Pharaoh.’ They were first
discovered by a local woman digging for
sebakh
(deteriorated mud bricks from ancient sites, used as fertiliser by farmers)
around 1887 and sold on the antiquities market. The vast majority now reside in
the Pergamon Museum in Berlin, a few hundred yards away from Nefertiti’s bust
in the Neues Museum.

The Shuwardata
of Keilah, just south of Jerusalem, was indeed asking for help from the
pharaoh. As far as we know, his plea went unanswered.

The story of
Akhetaten and its erasing from history by subsequent kings of Egypt is the
epitome of the old ‘winners write history’ adage. Were it not for the
archaeology, an entire city that was once capital of ancient Egypt would have
gone unnoticed.

We still know
relatively little about Tutankhamen’s father, Akhenaten, and even less about
the enigmatic Nefertiti (she was his ‘Great Royal Wife’, he also had a lesser
Royal Wife, Kiya, and at least two other consorts).

Suggestions
that one of the two female mummies found alongside Akhenaten (in KV35 in the
Valley of the Kings) might be Nefertiti were quashed following detailed
analysis of the remains, now known to be those of Akhenaten’s mother Queen Tiye,
and an unnamed daughter of hers and Amenhotep III. So Akhenaten was buried with
his mother and sister.

Nefertiti’s
burial remains unfound.

There
is
a library hidden under the sands of
Egypt, we simply haven’t found it yet. The Villa of the Papyri in Herculaneum
is an indication that such hoards exist. One can only imagine what future
civilisations would learn about us, and think about us, if they uncovered the
British Library.

The
Backscatter X-Ray the engineers used to peer through walls is not science
fiction. Such devices do exist already, and have been used in airports around
the world, particularly in the United States and the United Kingdom. I have,
however, taken some liberties and assumed that in the next twenty years science
advances considerably, making them both more portable
and
powerful. It’s a wonderful thought that one day we might be
able to see through solid walls and have some idea of what is inside without
having to take an articulated lorry-full of equipment with us. The potential applications
for search-and-rescue, let alone archaeology, would be worth it.

There has been
much debate on the nature of the first manned mission to Mars, and I won’t add
to it too much here. However in speaking of
Clarke
’s
relatively small team of four explorers, it has recently been announced that a
crew of two, a married couple no less, may be sent to Mars as early as 2018.

I would love
to think that a manned mission to Mars will have occurred already by 2045. Both
George W. Bush and Barack Obama made pre-election speeches promising a landing
on Mars by the mid-2030s. In both cases, these promises were followed by budget
cuts to NASA after they reached office. It seems increasingly likely that
private enterprise will make the most daring steps into space in the coming
decades, and those steps will be built on business case rather than the spirit
of adventure. So while it’s more likely we’ll land on an asteroid before we
reach Mars, I am still hopeful that someone will set foot there within my
lifetime.

It does seem
unfair to give the ESA the burden of not being part of the manned mission, but
there is a very real risk that with funding decisions for the successor of
Ariane 5 (tentatively named ‘Ariane 6’) set to take place in 2014, and current
economics being what they are, there simply may not be a European rocket
capable of launching large payloads into orbit after the 2020s, so their
ability to contribute significantly may be low. The possibility that the ESA
will lag behind the Chinese is increasingly likely, and with manned missions
being undertaken by others, the focus could indeed centre on satellites and
robotic exploration. Getting Beagles 3 and 4 onto Mars would be a worthy
consolation prize, though.

Nuclear War is
something that seldom concerns people in the 21
^st
century. And yet
there have never been so many countries with weapons capability. There could be
as many as 250 warheads held by countries that have not signed the
Non-Proliferation Treaty, and thousands held in countries that have.

In 2012, the
United States spent up to $31 billion on its nuclear weapons activities. In the
same period, the NASA budget had been reduced from $18.5 billion to $17.7
billion.
 
And if you think this is an
American problem, the annual cost of running the UK’s Trident programme in 2008
was $3.3 billion. The UK Space Agency was set up in 2010 with a grand total of
$350 million of non-recurring funding.

There’s a
reason we haven’t gone to Mars yet.

In ecosystems,
there are particular species that provide equilibrium. They may not themselves be
very abundant, but they play a critical role in maintaining the order of an
ecological environment. Their presence helps to determine the variety and
population of other species in the community. It could be a certain species of
starfish that eats mussels, which have no other natural predators, stopping
them from endlessly multiplying and taking over the sea bed. Or a sea otter
that protects kelp forests by eating sea urchins, which would otherwise
completely remove the kelp from the ecosystem.

Such a species
would have been of great interest to Gail’s husband George, a marine biologist.

He would have
referred to it as
keystone
.

Luke
Talbot

February
2013