* * *
Nine months after I disappeared into the jungle, I resolved to make my life useful and worthy by beginning the fight against Halford, desperately hoping that I wasn’t too late. I left my group of friends and returned to the jungle close to Tikal, from where I could get regular news updates with less of the inevitable distortion of facts caused by long distance travel.
Halford was mentally in a bad way, it seemed. In everything he did, his judgements had become blurred by his unending grief for his wife. He appeared to have lost the ability to assess the mood of the people, or he no longer cared what they thought, which amounted to the same thing. All around the city walls were pinned the flattened bodies of dissenters who had been crushed by the rolling stone. I began to doubt that I would ever see a civilised Mayan society again.
I tried developing relationships with other outcasts, but distrust was so deeply ingrained in everyone’s psyche that no one would talk to me about political matters, other than to report the facts as they saw them. No one dared express any opinion or criticism of Halford. With this kind of barrier all around me, I knew I stood no chance of raising a liberating force. It seemed useless even to remain close to the city with its inherent risks of discovery by government troops. I took up a position a few miles back in a hidden cave in the side of the hills. The cave was deep and safe, and there I bided my time.
During my forays for food, I would meet people in passing and hear reports of Mayan invasions of surrounding lands. Nobody would say so explicitly, but I understood that Halford had made a severe error of judgement when he sent troops into the southern states where there were many casualties. The nature of the error was unclear, but I learned that in his madness he was planning to distract his people from the catastrophe by announcing another invasion, this time on a grander scale. It appeared to be a prelude to an attempt at world conquest by attacking Atlantis, India and all of the southern continents.
The evidence from my vantage point on the hillside was clear. Instead of being better off under Halford’s rule, ordinary people were becoming bankrupt from sacrifices for the war effort, and hundreds appeared to leave the city every day, never to return.
My information about the planned invasions of all the most powerful states in the world was incomplete, I was subsequently to learn. There was to be no actual invasion, only destruction. All of Maya’s nuclear bombs were to be armed and fired at every opposing state on the globe. I learned this when one morning, instead of hundreds of people fleeing the city, there were suddenly tens of thousands of traumatised refugees. There was widespread panic; people were stealing vehicles and aircraft in their desperation to escape.
This, then, was the end. No matter where these people went they wouldn’t be able to avoid the retaliatory strikes that would surely come. I grabbed as much food off the trees as I could and ran into my cave. As I stood, looking out for one last time over the city and the surrounding lush greenery, I saw a rocket take off from behind a remote hill. People started screaming as it rose into the air, but I knew it wasn’t a nuclear missile – they were located in secure bunkers further from the city. The site of the rocket launch was the centre of Maya’s space operations, the heart of Project Quetzalcoatl. Someone was leaving the planet before the bombs arrived.
I picked up my small stores of food and water and continued deep into the cave, where I might have a chance of surviving a direct hit upon Tikal. When the blast came, it knocked me over. A ramrod of air made my ears bleed and caused temporary deafness. It was accompanied by a light that lasted only a fraction of a second, but for that time it was as bright as the sun. I clutched my head and wept for a lost world, distraught that I had survived only to face a post-nuclear nightmare.
I remained deep in the cave, cut off from light and unaware of anything that was happening in the world, if indeed anything at all was left there to happen. My remorse for the neglect of my duty that had led to the destruction of the world nearly drove me to suicide. The only thing that prevented me from taking my life was the thought that if survival was to be as difficult and unpleasant as I suspected, then it was something that I deserved. I imagined a handful of survivors struggling through a nuclear winter, living off ageing stores of food and drinking contaminated water, slowly dying from starvation and radiation poisoning.
I was heavily despondent, feeling as if I had already entered hell and must now face an eternity of torture. I wondered if I was the only man left alive, or whether there might be sufficient humans for the species to survive, or whether the number was irrelevant if we were all destined to die slowly from the effects of the nuclear fallout.
When my food and water ran out, I slowly moved to the mouth of the cave, shielding my eye from the daylight for many minutes until I could see without pain. The sky was thickly overcast, but even the diffused light burned more brightly than was comfortable for a subterranean dweller. When I looked out across the hillside I saw the result of my indulgence, my neglect, my apathy. Tikal was gone, reduced to a few piles of charred remains. The surrounding jungle was gone, scorched down to the brown soil. Nothing moved on the ground. Nothing flew in the sky except the fluttering flakes of fallout, whisked up from the dry land by the wind.
I had inherited an empty and silent world. Even those already dead had suffered, robbed of their chance of resurrection. The cemetery annexe was an immense limestone building based on a quadrilateral foundation with four triangular sides that tapered to a central peak. It was designed to withstand the ravages of time and nature, and had contained every mummified body so carefully preserved by our doctors. And yet it had been built at the heart of the city, and had been vaporised in the nuclear strike.
It seemed futile to attempt to do anything. I could stay in the cave and die quietly, alone and in shame. I could go into the remains of the city to look for food and people, but I knew I would find nothing there. Or I could walk east, towards the nearest coast, where it might be possible to find food in the sea. I would probably end up in a ditch, decaying, becoming part of the earth, every atom of what was once me for ever bound up in this dead planet, but I resolved to undertake the journey to the east. It gave me the illusion of purpose and challenge.
I walked at a slow and steady pace for two days. At the end of the second day, Tikal seemed an immense distance behind me, but the eastern coast was still an even more impossible journey ahead. There was no recognisable road or path that I could follow; my only indication of which direction to take was the rising sun, towards which I pointed myself. The remains of the vegetation were eerie, all leaning in the same direction, where the blast had flattened them, as if bowing to their god.
On the morning of the third day, I found a river that had not been scorched dry. I knew the water would be contaminated, but even radioactive water would help me walk further than no water at all.
For a few hours after that drink I had more energy, but by the time I arrived at a high point from where I could see the beautiful coast I was starting to sicken. I felt as if what little there was inside me wanted to come out. I sat for an hour to nurse my aching insides. I was on high ground, and could see clearly the scorched land that ran all the way to the blackened beach. The sea looked unchanged, as blue as I had remembered it, but the islands that were once so green were charred like the rest of the country.
Something was moving on the water. I wiped my eye to check that I wasn’t imagining it. It was a ship, and it seemed to be heading closer to the shore. I was not the only survivor. Feeling strangely elated, I ignored my sickness and walked briskly down the hillside, covering the final few miles to the coast in less than an hour.
The relief and joy at seeing other humans were indescribable. Here, on the singed sand, were humans in varying states of illness, all hoping the ship they had spotted would come and take them away. Some were losing hair, some had lost areas of skin, and many were weakened by hunger and by vomiting blood. I ran my hands tentatively through my hair and realised that I too had
lost much of it in the past days. Clumps of hair remained tangled in my fingers, having fallen out without any sensation of pain.
It was a sad scene, we pitiful remnants of a grand civilisation reduced to a helpless state on a hot, shadeless beach without food or water. We were all too weak to speak to one another, and there was nothing really about which to talk. Either this ship would rescue us and some of us might live, or we would all be dead by the following morning. No amount of talking would change that. Already I felt death surround me, but I hoped, when my final moment came, to welcome it with dignity.
* * *
SPHINX SCROLL # 10
* * *
I woke up in a dark room that was swaying. Tubes were connected to my arm and my stomach, and I could hear hushed voices close by.
‘The eye injury predates the radiation,’ I heard a woman saying in an Atlantan tongue. It was a language in which I was entirely fluent, having been involved in international political negotiations throughout my time as Leader. ‘He’s one of the stronger ones. It looks like he avoided the worst of the fallout.’
‘Is he worth keeping?’
‘We should get a couple of years out of him before he becomes too sick to be useful.’
‘Right. That’s another one accepted then.’
The woman came into my room alone.
‘Are you awake yet?’
I groaned to let her know I was alive.
‘Good. The rehydration seems to be doing the trick. Glad to have you on board.’
‘Where am I?’
‘I’m not sure where we are exactly. You were lucky, you know. Yours was the last batch of survivors we picked up. Unless we decide to dump any more non-viable patients in the sea there won’t be any more stops until we find somewhere habitable, if there is anywhere left.’
I wanted to tell her my name, to declare my former importance – my leadership experience would be valuable to any community in a crisis situation – but I succumbed to apathy once again, content to wallow in easy anonymity. My degraded physical appearance and the widespread reporting of my public execution would doubtless have made prohibitively difficult the job of convincing anyone of my identity.
‘How did you survive?’ I simply enquired.
‘We were in the South Atlantic on an expedition to collect living animal and botanical samples. This ship is full of specimens of edible plants, mating pairs of animals, insects, young trees, anything we find. We’ve got virtually every species you’ve ever heard of. It’s a nightmare keeping them all happy down there. The purpose was to have sufficient variety of plant and animal stock that, whatever land Atlantans decided to colonise, we would have everything we needed to ensure sufficient biodiversity to keep everyone healthy. Of course, it’s all irrelevant now. After this war there’s no significant population to relocate. There’s just us, and possibly other small groups like us, sailing around what remains of our world. We were on our way home. Now we have no home to go back to.’
‘Everyone we knew is dead,’ I said.
‘Yes,’ she replied, her eyes suddenly filling with a sadness that we would all come to take for granted. ‘Our country was doomed by the shrinking of the polar regions and the melting of the ice, and then the bombs hit. If anyone tried to find any trace of Atlantis under the sea, they would find nothing at all. Our entire culture and history now only resides in the memories of a handful of survivors.’ Her voice was becoming dry, but she seemed to benefit from talking. ‘Even the people who underwent mummification in order to guarantee that our culture would have an influence thousands of years from now are all gone.’
‘Same with Maya,’ I remarked.
‘Except one,’ she said coldly.
‘I saw the destruction for myself. Nothing could have survived it. The cemetery annexe was obliterated.’
‘I refer to your Project Quetzalcoatl,’ she said in a tone that was oddly accusatory. ‘Do you know anything of it?’
‘The Project Quetzalcoatl rocket contained a ballistic probe designed for deep space exploration,’ I told her. ‘It was fitted with a mummification tank. We were planning to send an astronaut on an elliptical loop that would return him to Earth in the distant future. The astronaut would be clean of all infections and diseases in order to avoid contaminating future populations with viruses to which they might have no immunity. The capsule was designed to be as basic as possible with no life support systems, no parts that could fail. Just a solid tomb that would follow a course determined by the relative gravitational pulls of the planets, ultimately falling back to Earth. The astronaut had to self-mummify before the oxygen expired. The trajectory was intended to return him to the Earth after twelve and a half thousand years. It was conceived as a cultural gift to our descendants, an opportunity to deliver to them someone who could enlighten them as to our way of life, our beliefs, our knowledge. Another Quetzalcoatl, in other words. We felt we had a duty to continue his example. We believed that a deep space entombment would be safe from earthquake and the other forms of natural and human destruction to which burials on Earth are vulnerable.’
She looked at me suspiciously.
‘How come you know so much about Mayan rocketry?’
‘I used to work in a governmental position,’ I replied. ‘Before Halford. I thought Project Quetzalcoatl was abandoned when he took over.’
‘Oh no. Far from it,’ she told me. ‘Halford disappeared before the annihilation. He made a radio transmission before the bombs hit. We traced the source of the signal to a position two hundred miles above the Earth.’
I said nothing for a moment, and then suddenly I sat bolt upright and started hyperventilating. The woman checked my pulse and administered something with a needle, and soon had me calmed again.
‘It’s nothing physical,’ I explained. ‘It’s just that you’ve made me realise something terrible. Are you saying Halford hijacked Project Quetzalcoatl?’
I recalled the rocket launch I had witnessed. I felt a deepening sickness at the realisation of who was on board. My former belief that Halford had died in Tikal with everyone else had been a small comfort for me. To learn of his survival was to lose what little hope remained for our dying planet.
‘That is what I heard.’
‘So precisely twelve and a half thousand years from now Halford is going to return to the Earth, not a day older, not cleared of infection, and still as psychotic and evil as he was in our time. He’s going to return to a planet that has healed from the atomic explosions and is ripe for him to exploit and destroy again.’
‘Yes, but it’s not something we’re going to have to worry about, is it?’
‘What do you mean? These are our children we’re talking about. These are our descendants. If the species is going to survive at all, it’s going to be our genes specifically that will make up the human race of the future. We can’t let this man come back and destroy us again.’
‘How can we warn our children? It’s not as if we can put another mummified person into space to arrive before him. As far as I know, all space technology on Earth has been destroyed. The atomic pulse generator in this ship could be the only advanced engine left on the planet, and there’s no way we could build a rocket out of these spare parts.’
I conceded, but I spent the remainder of the voyage mulling over the problem of how to send a message forward in time to those who would benefit from it.
With the enormous ship up above the waves on its hydrofoils, virtually flying, we crossed the Atlantic Ocean, in search of unspoiled lands, in just a few days. The coast of Africa loomed large on the horizon, but gave everyone immense disappointment when they realised that it too showed evidence of the mass destruction that had afflicted the world. The shoreline was scorched and bare, save for occasional unmoving human forms.
The Atlantans decided to move on northwards, following the coastline until they found land that was unaffected by the bombs and the fallout. As we travelled on this leg of the journey, I decided it was time
to tell them who I was and to reveal to them the idea I had conceived for sending a warning into the future. The validity of my identity was taken less than seriously by most present, but I made them understand that in our current circumstances my identity was actually irrelevant. All that mattered now was our responsibility to future generations, my idea and its fulfilment.
I told them we must find a location that would support us all, first and foremost. Supplies aboard the ship were limited, especially with all those animals to feed, and it was essential that we settle somewhere quickly. The animals must not be sacrificed for short-term gains, for they were vital to our future on the planet. When we had settled, our task would be to construct a time machine that would carry our message of warning into the distant future, from the Age of Leo to the Age of Aquarius, more than twelve thousand years from now. Given that there was no prospect of our small group being able to reproduce the achievements of Atlantis at its recent scientific height, our only option was to build a machine that travelled through time at the same rate as us.
I explained what I meant. We had to build something that would last more than twelve millennia. We had to build it with simple tools. We had to find some way of indicating when we had built it and of containing our story within it. Those criteria were accepted by all present, but no ideas came forward as to how it could all be achieved.
I took a tour of the lower decks of the ark. In an atmosphere of atrocious odours and noises, a team of men and women was working hard to care for the animals in captivity. In the small refrigerated deck at the very bottom there were penguins and large birds that I didn’t recognise. On the next deck up were seed banks and endless rows of plants growing under artificial light. There were flowers, cereals, vegetables and fruit, and even the weeds seemed to be cherished. The dung from the animals elsewhere in the boat was being used to fertilise these plants. On the next deck I was met with the astonishing sight of hundreds of cages containing wild and domesticated animals of all varieties. The cacophony deafened me as I strolled nervously amongst the snakes, llamas, giraffes, pigs and other species, but it was the lions that caught my attention. Lying in her cage was a lioness, staring with great dignity out through the bars. I looked at her form, marvelling at her majesty. This was Halford’s symbol.
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 37