The Thrones of Eden 3 (Eden) (26 page)

It wasn’t as large as the nursery. But it was still roomy with walls of black silica. At the rear of the chamber was a single chair that was situated upon a staging platform, a throne that was adorned with the most beautiful ornamental images they had ever seen.  

The moment they stood upon the room’s flooring, a holographic image took shape upon the seat. It was tall with wan looking skin, the flesh appearing somewhat marbled. Its head was elongated and slightly bulbous. And Alyssa knew that this was the image of Anu, the peoples’ God. It was as He was before he was laid to rest within the sarcophagus, a man who appeared soft and paternal.

Hillary stepped forward with wondrous eyes. “Magnificent,” he whispered.

Savage held him back. “Don’t go wandering off,” he told him. “We have no idea if there are any triggers in here.”

“I doubt it,” he responded quickly. “He would never put His children at risk.”

Savage released him since Hillary had a point.

When Hillary was half way through the chamber everyone could swear that Anu’s head shifted so that it drew a bead on the archeologist, stopping him in his tracks.
But it’s just a holographic image!

When Alyssa and Savage joined his side, Anu appeared to study them all consecutively, His eyes moving from Hillary to Savage, then finally to Alyssa.

“My God,” whispered Hillary, “is it somehow . . . alive?”

Savage shook his head. “Impossible.” He then looked ceilingward for a lens of some kind, something that would project the image. But he found nothing. “What’s doing all this?” he asked to no one in particular.

Alyssa took a faltering step forward. “Can you understand me?”

The image remained still, His face impassive.

“Are you . . . real?”

Nothing.

She took another step forward. “Are you the Creator of Mankind?”

Still nothing.

“Your stanzas . . . Are they things that will be? . . . Or are they things that might be?”

The image remained idle. Its eyes, however, traced her every movement.

Then in a manner that was sadly imploring, she asked, “Why?”

The image suddenly galvanized into action by raising an arm and pointing a finger that was as long and thin as a tine of a pitchfork, to a neighboring wall.

Images suddenly alit against the wall that served as a makeshift theater screen. Figures of armies and warriors engaged in battle upon a field as runnels of blood coursed in rivulets. Crude weapons such as cudgels and stone-head axes swung in bloody arcs—the weapons bludgeoning, slicing, and tearing.

The scene then segued to other events of violence starting with the Crusades.

Warriors
wearing
suits of chain-mail armor with tunics bearing red crosses were, for nearly two hundred years, spreading Christianity with the sharp edges of their broadswords, cutting bloody arcs through the air. 

Scenes of gruesome torture played out against the wall as members of the Spanish Inquisition hunted Muslim and Jews and Protestants with impunity, executing somewhere between 3000 to 5000 people, some by torture, and others, with a particular scene playing out against the wall, of fourteen Protestants burning at the stake in the city of Valladolid.  

“They’ve been watching us all along,” Savage said evenly, almost repentantly.

The Spanish Inquisition quickly blended into other images, this time in France during the French Reign of Terror from 1793 to 1794. Guillotines were placed in the central part of the square serving as focal points of entertainment. People were resolved to their fates as they took the steps leading to the staging area where they were secured upon a platform and slid beneath the blade, the moments perhaps the longest in their lives waiting for the blade to fall. Whatever cinematic eye that was catching the moment slowly panned across the faces of the masses, catching glimpses of many pumping their fists in cheer, in blood lust, especially at every stroke of the guillotine’s blade.

The images then transitioned to images of Trench Warfare, World War I, the ditches becoming pre-burial plots for those who had succumbed to gases and chemical warfare as flies buzzed around bloated corpses whose eyes carried the milky sheen of death as they lay there half buried in mud and sludge.

World War II: the Holocaust.

There were immediate scenes of Hitler talking to the masses, giving the people of Germany false hopes and promises with the swastika, the image of intolerance, in the background. Next came the images of Jews lining the edges of a pit as Nazi soldiers drew beads with the points of their weapons, then fired, the victims falling en masse into the grave as Jews not yet put to death were forced to pour Lyme over the bodies of the dead. 

Scenes from a field: bodies, skeletal bodies, bodies that had atrophied inside the Death Camps of Auschwitz and Treblinka piled ten to fifteen feet high, a wall that was nothing more than a wild tangle of limbs being bulldozed into a deep trench by the blade of a plow.

Alyssa closed her eyes.

Three Jews now swung at the ends of a ropes along a beam inside an extermination camp, their feet less than a foot above the ground as their bodies swayed in lazy motions. Each one, two men and one woman, wore the stripped garments that bore the patchwork of the Star of David which denoted their faith of condemnation.

More scenes, heinous scenes: those of battlefront skirmishes and executions, of gassings and firing squads.

Then on the Japanese Front when Japan invaded China, were soldiers who committed themselves to campaigns of systematic beheading of their victims with katanas. This was followed up by subsequent images of Chinese men becoming targets of live bayonet practice to Japanese soldiers.  

Even Savage, a seasoned warrior, was disgusted.

Vietnam: scenes of a naked girl running down a street as her skin bore the burns from napalm. Villages burning as dead children lie dead on unpaved streets. Firefights from helicopter bays shown against the wall screen as bursts of gunfire from mounted machine guns ferreted out the enemy below as they ran for the cover of safer havens, only to be shot down mercilessly. In a separate scene, in South Vietnam, a North Vietnamese man is summarily executed in the middle of the street when an officer withdraws his pistol, aims it accordingly to the man’s temple, and pulls the trigger, the image a pivotal point of the Vietnam War as the man lay bleeding on the pavement with a halo of blood spreading outward from beneath his head.  

Hillary became disgusted. “There are two species on this planet that wage war against each other,” he commented softly. “One is the kingdom of ants—”

“And the other is mankind,” Savage finished for him.

“Sadly . . . Yes.”

A cross burned in a field as hooded figures wearing capes and conical-shape hats surrounded a Negro man who was swinging from the end of a rope that descended from the thick branch of an oak tree. More images of the KKK, this time flogging a man, a Negro. And more images of burning crosses came to view, the symbol of Christ, all burning as bonfires.

The Chicago Riots came to light where police engaged in batons fights, wailing away at victims with impunity, drawing blood and breaking bones as society began to crumble by the inches.

And then came 9/11: two planes flew into the World Trade Centers, the towers falling as smoke rose and dust-laden people ran through the streets of New York City in panic.

And then the subsequent battle that followed in the Middle East as images from Desert Storm and Desert Shield appeared to play outside the chronological order of things, the two wars blending as a single incident. There were scenes of Saddam Hussein and Chemical Ali, images of slaughter and beheadings, of men being tossed from rooftops, of suicide bombers at the moment of pulling the pin, the images gruesome. Then more scenes played themselves against the wall, vivid scenes, scenes of women and children and Kurds lying dead from the effects of chemical warfare, their skins blackened and mottled.

More images, that of people being slaughtered as a result of genocide in Rwanda where the Hutus were butchered by the Tutsis, and the weapon of choice, the weapon used in most executions, was the machete. Scenes of rape, mutilation and the deliberate spread of disease played out, the ultimate number of killing ranging between 500,000 to a million victims.

Additional images of genocide, this time of the Armenian Genocide beginning in 1915 as the rest of the world was distracted with World War I. Able-bodied men were slaughtered, and women and children were forced on death marches through the Syrian Desert. Entire villages were burned to the ground with their inhabitants still inside, and boatloads of Armenians were taken out into the Black Sea and sunk. During this period two dozen concentration camps were established where poisoning and gassing occurred. Worse, innocent children were injected by Turkish doctors with the blood of typhoid fever patients. In the end, an estimated number between 600,000 and 1.8 million Armenians perished during the genocide. On the wall, these images were clear and vivid, not the grainy black-and-white quality of cinematic film of the era.

The next images were quite familiar to John Savage as the Soviet Union fell and the far-reaching consequences that devastated the former Yugoslavia.  In 1990, the country began to splinter off into republics that lead to ethnic tensions and population displacement with Bosnia becoming Ground Zero for atrocities. The panoramic view now displayed against the wall was one of General Ratko Mladić of the Army of Republika Srpska leading the execution of thousands of Bosnian Muslims and Serbs in an attempt to “
ethnically cleanse
” the area.  In the end, however, there were more than twenty thousand casualties as a result of executions, rapes, fires, and public beheadings.

Alyssa whispered “Stop.” But no one heard and the images played on.

On a final note, the scenes were more up-to-date, showing images of the war in Syria where the indigent had fallen prey to chemical weapons with thousands dead and thousands more dying, as an exodus of people headed for Turkey.

“ENOUGH!”

The wall screen winked off.

The scenes were gone.

And Alyssa had gotten her message across.

E . . . nough!

The holographic image of Anu sitting upon his throne remained, however, his eyes pivoting inside their hollows as they followed everyone’s movement inside the chamber.

“Now we know why,” said Hillary.

Savage nodded. “We were just a trial run.”

“And we failed miserably as a race.”

Alyssa stepped forward as Anu’s haunting eyes traced her every step. She then held her hands out imploring. “How?” she asked. “How will this happen?”

Anu once again raised a bony figure to the far wall and the images began to replay themselves.

Savage looked around once again scoping for the source, like a projection beam, a lens, any type of emitter. But he found nothing. “It’s the same thing,” he finally said. “The same images. It’s like this thing is on a loop of some kind.”

The first thing he considered, the first thing that came to all their minds, was that the system was malfunctioning. What they had seen before was nothing more than random images playing out at the request of a verbal command, and that it would play itself over again on any word or phrase, like a loose trigger.

At least this was their hope.

When the images stopped everyone remained quiet.

Anu’s eyes, a startling liquid blue which could be seen from across the room, remained fixed on the team.

“We need to move,” Demir finally said. “We need to find the support system that’s keeping these things alive. And the only way out is through there.” He pointed to the furthest region of the room, to a bullet-shaped archway. As far as he was concerned it was unchartered territory. But it was the only way out. So they moved forward.

As they did the eyes of Anu continued to follow them.

How eerie it was, Alyssa considered, that a holographic image could bear so much life.

How eerie, indeed.

CHAPTER FIFTY

As they passed beneath the archway and began to ascend a corkscrewing incline, they could hear a waspy hum similar to that when they first entered the chamber.

Savage held up a hand in warning, the team stopping in their tracks. “You hear that?”

Demir stepped forward. “Yeah . . . I do.”

“It’s exactly like the sounds we heard down below. It’s the sound of generators,” said Savage.

Demir concurred with a simple nod of his chin.

As they took the spiraling incline, the hum grew louder but remained  a steady drone that did not vacillate in pitch or tone, peaks or valleys—just a flat-line measure.

At the top of the incline they could feel a cool breeze sweep through the air, a cooling system.

They immediately adjusted their shoulder lamps and moved into a vast chamber cast in darkness that was complete and absolute. The lamps could only penetrate as far as forty feet now that their numbers were vastly reduced.

As they moved forward, silhouetted images began to take shape. They were perfectly round and appeared elevated above the floor without any support to keep them aloft, the shapes appearing to float. But as they neared the vessels, beams of light lit upon orbs that were tethered by what appeared to be feeding tubes coming down from a stone ceiling that was the color of desert sand. The tubes pulsated like the beat of a heart as a green viscous fluid passed through the tubing like the flow of blood into the sphere.

As they neared the orbs they could see the fluid coursing through them in random patterns like amniotic fluid in constant motion, the liquid always moving.

The first thought that struck Savage and Alyssa was the energy source discovered in the ship beneath the Yucatan Peninsula on the previous mission: the sphere acted as the energy source that granted life to the creatures within.

These orbs were no different, they concluded. But there were thousands of them, the rows stretching deep until they finally disappeared into distant shadows. There was one for each life force, each sphere an umbilical tie to the inhabitants within the stasis bins on the level below.