Resurrection (6 page)

Present Day

“Africa. Egypt, Libya, Tunisia, Algeria, Morocco, Mauritania…” Pruit recited the names as she jogged. The treadmill faced a large screen that displayed a map of the planet Earth.

Her ship was in orbit around the fifth planet of the system, a gas giant named Jupiter by the inhabitants of the third planet, Earth, her target.

She had reached her target star system and come out of stasis six months ago. Her mission was now in its second phase. From one of the control stations at the middle of the ship, she could hear the alternate crackle and blare of the frequencies Central was monitoring. Earth had fared reasonably well in the last five millennia. The planet was in a slightly more developed state than would have been ideal for Pruit’s mission, but the availability of fast transportation technology would be helpful.

She was allowed to make no transmission to Earth until her body was in shape and she had learned the languages she would need for the remainder of her mission. She had selected two languages: English, because it was the dominant language of the planet as a whole, and Arabic, because it was the dominant language of her target area.

With the help of Central’s language-learning facilities, she had achieved a good fluency in both over the past months. The languages had no common root and entirely different alphabets, so this had been no easy task. But Pruit had honed her language skills on Herrod, where the soldiers in the Sentinel learned up to five ancient Kinley languages as training. These languages, dead for thousands of years, with odd syntax and varied pronunciation, were used by Kinley to speak in codes that the Lucien who barricaded had difficulty breaking.

English and Arabic had unique personalities; though Arabic struck Pruit as the more sensitive and civilized of the two, English was the more expressive.

She checked her heart rate and distance, and saw that it was time to cool down.

“Screen off,” she said, and the screen went blank, the fibers that made up its surface returning to their neutral smoothness and light-tan color. The screen retracted into the wall at her side.

She grabbed a towel, sat on the exercise mats nearby, and began the cooling stretch routine.

There was a jump in volume from the control station. Central was scanning up and down on Earth’s broadcast frequencies, looking for an ancient beacon that did not seem to exist any longer, or if it did, was drowned out by the cacophony of transmissions from the rest of the planet.

She waited to see if Central would comment on the abrupt noise, but the computer remained silent. Nothing new to report. Probably an entertainment program starting its broadcast. This world Earth was inundated with entertainment programs. Having few real worries of their own, in Pruit’s view, the natives delighted in make-believe ones.

Earth was an interesting world in terms of natural resources. In addition to huge bodies of water, it appeared to have an almost unlimited supply of metals. Herrod was the opposite. It had almost no naturally occurring metal ores. Metals existed on the atomic level, bound up with other substances, but copper, gold, silver, tin, aluminum, and their ilk were virtually nonexistent in their naturally extractable forms. As a result, the Kinley civilization had matured without metals to mark their development. There was no Iron Age or Bronze Age in their history. The result of this was a science based almost exclusively in organic compounds and biological material.

As Pruit spread her legs out to either side and laid her chest on the floor, she was aware of the pleasure of having her body fit again. She had been so drained upon waking the final time that it had taken her a full six months to regain muscle tone and strength. She had achieved them at last, and her muscles were now long and lean, her skin healthy and less ashen. Her hair had even regained much of its former shine. She was physically ready to begin the next phase of the mission.

When her stretches were finished, she performed a brief fight routine, landing kicks and punches into a heavy target dummy. Then she showered and changed into her coveralls. She took a seat at the medical station and slipped the medical reader around her wrist.

“Central, please confirm my medical check. I’m ready to move the mission into the third phase.”

There was a pause as the computer examined her readings.

“You’re ready, Pru,” the computer agreed. It was still using Niks’s voice, and it had developed his patterns of speech more and more since her final waking. Pruit supposed the computer was continually drawing on recorded conversations between Niks and her. Central even altered its voice tone based on Pruit’s attitude, much the way Niks would have done.

“Good,” she answered, peeling the reader off her wrist. She felt the glow of anticipation pushing out the sadness that had lately occupied her mind. “Let’s get to work.”

She slid into a chair in front of the primary control station and pulled down three books from a shelf on her left. The first was her mission Master Book of contingencies. She opened it and flipped to the current page. It read:

Using reference material 20.-c, transmit to beacon location.

 

She opened her reference book and confirmed the transmission frequency and target location. She had rehearsed this a dozen times in the last six months, and already knew that she would be targeting an area on the Nile River, but she went through the motions of confirmation nonetheless.

She opened the third book, the book of background materials, and flipped to the page marked “Final Transmission from Survey Crew.” On this page was a copy of that final ancient transmission. Written in the script of a long-dead language was the information she needed: the frequency and code words she must use—“Rescue has arrived.” In addition, there were several entry combinations she would need later.

She sank her hand in the putty control pad and entered the frequency and code words into the ship’s computer.

“Central, I’m ready to send transmission.”

“Acknowledged, Pruit.”

She moved her hand and executed the transmission. She was sending her message in a single, compressed nanosecond to avoid detection by anyone on Earth. If the beacon set up by those long-dead members of the Kinley survey team was still there, was still operable, her message should provoke a reply.

The chances were slim, but she had her contingencies. If this did not work, she would move to the next plan on her list and begin a search for the beacon on the ground. She wondered how long they had lasted, those survey crew members who had entered stasis. Had they slept fifty years? A hundred? Two hundred? Did they die quickly in the first few years, or did they live a long time and eventually give up hope and rejoin the world around them? Could a beacon survive so long? Doubtful.

An hour passed, ample time for the signal to reach Earth and a reply to be sent. None came.

“Central, resend every hour and continue monitoring all traffic.”

“I will,” the computer responded in Niks’s voice. But the response was far more patient than Niks ever would have been.

Pruit looked again at the final transmission from the survey crew. It was a last desperate plea from six people who wanted to return home:

…in stasis we await your return. Do not forget us…

 

There was no way they could have known how little of their home was left when they sent that message. They had planned to go to sleep for a few years, but Herrod itself had almost gone to sleep forever.

2606 BC
Year 1 of Kinley Earth Survey

Then the earth shook and quaked; and the foundations of the mountains were trembling and were shaken, because He was angry.

 

—Psalms 18:7

 

“Mother’s Love, it’s murderously hot today,” the Captain breathed as he wiped his forehead with a handkerchief.

He sat on a litter, which swayed rhythmically as the litter bearers beneath it jogged across the low, rolling hills of sand and dirt that separated the survey team camp from the cities along the great Nile River. There was a canopy stretched over the litter, so he was sitting in shade, but the heat of the air itself was stifling.

The litter bearers were all lean young men, their bodies perfectly muscled. They wore only a small strip of material around their waists, which was tied in front. The two ends of the material hung down over their genitals, providing only the slightest amount of covering. They did not mind. Nudity was not something the natives here found embarrassing. In such a warm climate, clothes were often a hindrance to work, and many in the worker class did without them entirely.

The litter bearers were sweating profusely, but they were used to their task and kept up their steady pace.

The Captain’s wife, the Archaeologist, sat in a litter to his left. She too was mopping her brow. He glanced at her profile—fine features with long blond hair tied up behind her head. He had always thought she was beautiful, but now, as he looked at her, he thought, perhaps, stately was a better word.

On the other side of the Captain, the Mechanic sat in his own litter. The Captain could tell that the man secretly reveled in being carried by others. He was fanning himself with a palm leaf.

Behind the litters ran ten workers, each carrying a small sack full of the medicinals they would be using to tend to the citizens of Memphis. Behind them were three water bearers who periodically brought ladles of water to the others.

The Archaeologist had many qualifications for being on this mission, aside from being the Captain’s wife. She had spent her professional career in digs all over Herrod, where she had studied dozens of ancient cultures. Her specialty was the evolution of government in society and its relationship to religion.

The Captain had always been proud of finding a wife so comparable to himself. They had been together for over twenty years. Their one child, a son, was with them on this mission.

This was to be their first visit to Memphis, capital city of the Egyptian empire. The Archaeologist had been studying the culture from afar to prepare them for this day. They had many local workers at their camp, which sat in the desert between the Nile and the Red Sea. By carefully questioning these workers over the past three months, she had developed a very good idea about how Egypt was organized. She was briefing her traveling companions a final time as they approached the city.

“Egypt is an interesting place,” she said. “The kingdom stretches over hundreds of miles along the banks of the river. Because of the great distances between the cities, there is a tight-knit bureaucracy in place to ensure things are run properly.

“The king is the intermediary between his people and their many gods. And there are many gods. Every town or village has its own, and these are lorded over by the higher, more powerful deities. It’s pretty typical, as societies progress, for the local gods to be subsumed within the personalities of the larger gods, until, ultimately, there are only a few left, each with dozens of aspects. Egypt is in the early stages of this.

“The people are quite superstitious, which is normal for this stage of development. Their science is rather crude. They still have not figured out the wheel, for example. Nature is unexplainable in many ways, so they create gods to explain it.

“Because the kingdom is so large, it will be important for the king to categorize us. We must strike just the right tone. We want to show that we are powerful so he does not threaten us, but we don’t want to appear too powerful, or we might soon be deified, and then we will have entirely disrupted their religion.”

The litter bearers slowed now. They had come up over a rise and were passing through the villages that lay outside the walls of Memphis. These villages were groupings of small houses, lined along the sides of the canals that ran out from the river. The houses were all of mud bricks, made from a mixture of riverbank mud and straw that was left to bake in the sun. The mortar to hold the bricks together was a combination of mud, straw, and sand, which was usually smeared over the entire surface of the walls to make them smooth and weather-resistant.

There were windows facing north, to let in the cool breezes that came from that direction. There were gardens behind walls, where the tops of trees were visible. Trees were considered highly valuable in this desert land.

Men, women, and children walked along the dirt streets, which were packed as hard as rock on the main throughways. The Captain could see women and men washing clothes and gathering water in the canals. They were a dark-skinned people, with dark hair, most naked from the waist up.

Children stopped and pointed as the three litters passed through. They chattered wildly to each other as they watched the fair-complexioned people being borne past. News of their ship’s arrival in Egypt had spread quickly through these villages and through the cities, and it was known, or at least rumored, that these golden-haired people were the ones who had come from the sky. This was impressive, but within the context of the Egyptian worldview, not outrageous or unbelievable.

Upon the survey team’s arrival in the desert, King Snefru, ruler of all Egypt, had sent an emissary with armed escort to their camp. The Captain had explained to the emissary that their mission was entirely peaceful and they wished only to observe local culture. In exchange, he had offered to share his team’s medical knowledge with the king and his people. As a token of friendship, the Captain had asked the Doctor to prepare a small medicinal kit for use by the king’s own physicians, and he had invited the physicians to come to camp and be trained in the use of the kit.

The king had sent back a reply indicating that the visitors were welcome to stay in his kingdom as long as their intentions remained peaceful and as long as they attempted no influence of a political nature. He thanked the Captain for his gift, but did not send his physicians for the training.

He’s waiting to be convinced of our competence
, the Captain mused.
And, like my wife says, he wants to categorize us. Are we a threat?

With the king’s approval, they had begun to treat the locals in a minor way, first gaining the trust of those who made the twenty-mile trek to the camp in hope of being healed. Many of those had stayed to work in the camp, finding the survey team both friendly and generous.

Today would be their first foray into the city to treat the population there. The Captain had now fully realized the value of their medical knowledge. Every human had ailments. By curing them the survey team immediately became treasured friends. The king, by messenger, had given his permission for this day’s outing, and the Captain was determined to make the best of it. It was his hope to be granted free access to all Egyptian cities for his entire team. This would allow them to quickly catalog Egyptian society, and then they would be free to move on to one of the other Earth cultures.

The Doctor herself should have been on this expedition, but two of the local women working at camp had gone into labor that morning, and with the high infant mortality rate in this land, she had preferred to stay and deliver the babies. The Captain and the Archaeologist had sufficient medical training to address the local ills, and the Captain had brought along the Mechanic as a helper.

“How do we strike the right tone?” he asked his wife.

“We do a good job, we cure people, and we show deference toward the king and his family. To other high officials, we adopt an attitude of friend. Thus, we make the king feel important, but establish ourselves a senior to any of his underlings.”

“Very good. Look there.”

The three of them looked up and saw the encircling wall of Memphis coming into view. It was a tall mud-brick structure, and even from this distance, they could see the great open doors leading into the city.

They were now joining other traffic heading for Memphis. There were men driving donkeys laden with produce, teams of oxen pulling sledges loaded with bags of seed or flax, or small cages full of geese. A few young men with military bearing, dressed in the short linen skirts of the upper classes, walked briskly toward Memphis, perhaps heading back to their army battalion at the end of a furlough.

The Captain found his eyes wandering to the shapes of the young women. Most wore thin, snug dresses that left their breasts bare. With their hardworking lives, they stayed trim and healthy, and the Captain found them beautiful.

Within half an hour, they had reached the city. The gates, which were twenty feet high and thirty feet wide, were flung open for the day, but would be closed at sunset. Ten guards were posted at the sides of the gateway. They were tall young men, with short linen skirts bordered in green, the color of their army division. They carried long spears and small oblong shields made of tough leather. Their dark hair was shoulder length and combed back from the forehead.

They saluted by bringing their fists to their chests as the Captain’s entourage passed through the gates. It was a sign that the king welcomed them.

They passed into the city, and the change in atmosphere was immediate. Here was a cultural center. There were buildings and private houses lining the street, many in tight rows of abutting structures. Wood was in use as well as mud-brick. In the more well-to-do houses, there was a wide gap between the roof and the top of the walls. Through this gap came breezes to keep the interior cool.

There was a smell of human waste, for there was no sewage system in Egypt. Instead, families were forced to collect their waste and carry it outside the city walls where it was dumped into an ever-increasing pile. Much waste was dumped into the river as well. Thus infection was rampant among the lower classes, for though the Egyptians were a clean people and fond of bathing, their water supply was polluted.

As they made their way down wide streets, the Captain caught a glimpse of the king’s palace atop a hill at the very center of the city. It too was mud-brick and wood, for the Egyptians only used stone for temples or tombs. The palace was an impressive complex of structures nonetheless. From the Captain’s vantage, he could see several graceful buildings of three stories set in an enormous garden of flowering trees.

“Look there, darling,” he said to his wife, and she followed his gaze.

“It’s beautiful.”

There were crowds forming around them, people pointing and gossiping. It was clear their reputation had preceded them. The people here were more sophisticated. Most wore wigs of false hair, elaborately coifed into tiny curls or long, straight tresses with decorative hair pins. The children wore their hair in a sidelock, a single long lock on the right side of their heads, with the rest of the head shaved. Many of the women had fine linen dresses, some with rich, dyed colors. There was jewelry on almost everyone who could afford it, much of it featuring designs in colored stone.

As the Captain’s entourage made its way to the market square, it pulled a crowd of city folk with it. They would have an enormous audience today.

At last, they reached the square, and their litter bearers deposited them on a stone dais in the corner. Here the workers who had followed the litters from camp carefully unloaded their burdens. The Captain instructed his three water-bearers to ladle out generous portions to the men.

The Archaeologist busied herself setting up the jars of medicinals on wooden crates along the front end of the dais, and she began instructing the Mechanic in how to prepare some of the more common poultices they would use. Inside the city walls, the heat was even more oppressive, and the Captain took a long drink of water as he surveyed the market square.

Mud-brick market stalls covered an area of over two acres, the proprietors within selling everything from produce to wool to cosmetics to livestock. The square had four ornate wooden gates leading into it. On all sides, large, well-kept houses bordered the square. This was a desirable neighborhood.

The morning market rush was over, but there were still a few hundred customers browsing the stalls and haggling over goods. These customers were now being overwhelmed by the hundreds of people who had followed the Captain through the streets. A long line of prospective patients was already forming in the midst of the crowd.

“Are you ready, dear?” he asked his wife as she set up the last of the medicinal pots.

“Yes, we’re set.”

The Captain turned and spoke to his workers, addressing them through a translator that enabled him to carry on natural conversations in the local tongue. The translator was a small, flat strip that wrapped around the user’s ear and down along the jawline to his chin. Inside was a computer with advanced language programming. If the translator was exposed to a language for a sufficient amount of time, it would begin to translate into Haight, the language he and the rest of the survey team spoke. It drew power from the kinetic energy of its user. “Organize the line, and show people up to us one at a time.”

The chief worker nodded, not in the least bit fazed by the fact that the Captain’s voice and mouth motions were out of synch. After all, he had been working at the camp of the sky visitors for over a month. Miracles were commonplace.

Under the direction of the Captain’s men, the crowds stood back, and the line of patients was left with a clear path to the dais. The first patient was ushered up the three stone steps to the top of the platform. It was a middle-aged man, his natural gray hair sticking out beneath his dark-black wig of tight curls. His face was lined, and he had lost several teeth. He gestured to his shoulder. On inspection, the Archaeologist found that there was a sharp splinter of wood lodged deep under the skin. There was an angry wound around the splinter. The Archaeologist tended to him herself, numbing the area with a poultice that combined some of the medical supplies from their ship with local herbs, then carefully cutting in and removing the splinter.