The Eye of Ra

by Michael Asher

  46

  I took another, closer, look at Akhnaton’s corpse. There was something terrifyingly feral in that leering mouth, the narrowed eyes, the elongated snout — something which raised’ your hackles instinctively. Close up, the body wasn’t familiar at all, I realised. It belonged neither to a man nor to a woman, but to something that had been trying desperately to assume human shape and had never quite managed it.

  ‘Akhnaton’s race have the ability to alter their own genetic code,’ Maryam said.

  ‘Race? You mean there are more of these things?’

  ‘Yes, they are numerous. They were advanced in genetic engineering thousands of years ago, before your civilisation even existed. They are what you would call shape-shifters, but as you can see, in Akhnaton’s time their ability was only approximate. Akhnaton could never have passed for human at close quarters, which is why he lived an ascetic life in his own city. No one was allowed to get close to him but slaves and minions, and they were expendable. Have you ever wondered why the stelae depicting Akhnaton in nobles’ houses show him with distorted features, while those among the common people idealise him? It was because he had to get those who actually saw him — albeit from a distance — accustomed to his unusual appearance.’

  ***

  I didn’t really have any doubt what lay in the second sarcophagus, anyway, I read the cartouche before I looked inside. It was the body of Akhnaton’s beautiful queen, Nefertiti, preserved in the same alien way as her husband. Except that, unlike Akhnaton, Nefertiti was clearly one of us — I mean, Homo sapiens. So here was the Zerzura legend, I thought: ‘a king and a queen asleep on a hoard of treasure’ inside a ‘white city’. Either someone had found the ship in ancient times, or the story of Akhnaton’s burial-place had leaked out by word of mouth and come into legend in garbled form. The description Nikolai had found in al-Khalidi’s Lost Treasures — the one Julian had worked on — was probably a garbled version of a garbled version. I wondered whether it would ever have led them here.

  ‘Who are you?’ I asked.

  ‘It’s better if you think of me as Maryam.’

  ‘No, but who are you really?’

  ‘A projection’, she said, ‘part of the ship’s defensive mechanism — it has the power to read human minds telepathically, and use the images it finds there.’

  ‘Defences against what?’

  ‘When we finally rid the earth of Akhnaton millennia ago, we could have destroyed the ship or removed it. Instead we decided to leave it as a message for humankind. The message would be meaningless until humans were ready for it, of course, so we installed a defensive device. Over the centuries many Bedouin stumbled across it by accident, but once in the ship’s field they were guided by projections — apparent reflections of themselves, if you like — which deflected them harmlessly and gave them selective memories. Our intention was never to harm humans unless they threatened themselves.’

  ‘What do you mean, threatened themselves?’

  ‘Advanced technology in primitive hands is a recipe for disaster. We wanted to avoid that at all costs.’

  ‘Who is we?’

  ‘Your friend Doc Barrington got it right when she talked about “The Cohorts of Michael”.’

  ‘You mean you’re an angel?’

  ‘That’s about the nearest human concept to what we are, but of course we’re not really that. You might call us the Guardians.’

  Three types of beings, I thought — humans, Jinns and Angels. Where had I heard that before?

  ‘Did you build this ship?’ I asked.

  ‘No, it was built by Akhnaton’s people — you can call them Nommos or Neteru — a race from the star-system you call Canis Major. They have been in contact with this planet for at least twelve thousand years. They were what your people call the Ancient Ones, The Shining Ones, the Dwellers-in-the-Sky, who created Egyptian civilisation on earth...’

  I remembered the wall-paintings in the water-cavern — six globe-headed gods who were later transformed into the gods of ancient Egypt, the Nommos of Dogon legend, the Oannes of ancient Mesopotamia.

  ‘Come, Omar,’ Maryam said, ‘you’re hungry and thirsty. Let me show you more of the wonders of this place.’

  She led me to a kind of elevator, constructed of the same pitted metal I’d seen in the other chamber, which descended into the depths of the ship. It was cylindrical, but inside I saw no switches, buttons or flashing lights. It was as if the lift knew where we wanted to go, and it glided down soundlessly. We walked along tunnels and corridors full of strange symbols and unnameable instruments, all of them with that ‘fused together’ look that had characterised the floating machinery upstairs — no wires, no sockets, no plastics, no protrusions or sharp angles — everything looked as if it had been carved by hand, honed down into soft curves and then etched with a fine needle. We entered another huge chamber, where, under a domed ceiling brilliant with light-strips, was an oasis, a real oasis out of a Bedouin’s dream. There were fruit trees, looking something like date-palms, but subtly different, laden with what seemed to be ripe fruit. The floor of the chamber was covered in sandy earth, and amid the trees was a deep pool of pure blue water. I threw myself down at the water’s edge and prepared to drink like an animal. ‘Careful!’ Maryam said. ‘You’re dehydrated. You could damage yourself.’ I stopped myself, removed my shamagh and dipped it in the water. Little waves rippled out from my hand, glittering richly in the light —it was like dipping my hand in a rainbow. I sucked the water little by little from the cloth, and Maryam brought me some sticky brown fruit from the trees. ‘What is it?’ I asked. ‘Just eat,’ she said. I sampled the fruit, it tasted like a combination of date, strawberry, pineapple, mango, guava and a dozen other flavours combined in one. I ate ravenously and ‘Maryam’ passed me more. ‘This is a dream,’ I told her, ‘it has to be. I’m going to wake up soon. I mean, an artificial oasis, inside a star-ship?’

  ‘This is the only part of the ship that most of our visitors remember,’ she said, laughing.

  ‘Of course! The Bedouin legend — lush palms, grapevines and open water.’

  ‘It’s the Bedouin concept of paradise. Their interest usually went no farther.’

  ‘What is this place?’

  ‘It’s a cybernetic system, a hydroponics network that recirculates moisture and gases filtered out of the desert over thousands of years. A self-sustaining life support circuit for a long voyage through space. The star-system you call Sirius B is 8.6 light-years away — a long voyage by most standards.’

  ‘How did they achieve it?’

  ‘They developed an anti-matter drive converting almost ninety per cent of the fuel-cell’s mass into pure energy. This ship can accelerate to within ten per cent of light speed, but even at that speed Sirius B takes more than fifty years.’

  ‘That’s incredible. Just imagine...’

  ‘How valuable it would be to you humans? Yes, and how it could be misused. The technology aboard this ship would represent a quantum jump forward for the human species. If it were available to you.’

  ‘And it’s not?’

  ‘Not yet.’

  ‘Then why am I here?’

  ‘You’ve been chosen to receive a message.’

  ‘Chosen by whom?’

  ‘By thousands of years of evolution. You possess a recessive gene which appears to its fullest only once or twice in a generation — let’s call it a “psi-gene”. You inherited it from your remote ancestors, the Anaq. Many have possessed it over the millennia — in a few it manifested itself strongly — those were the legendary great amnirs of your people. In many, though, it appeared only feebly, as in your uncle, Mukhtar. Over the ages, of course, the gene has spread to other families, other races, but only in the Hawazim does it appear in its most undiluted form.’

  ‘What’s the significance of this “psi-gene” anyway?’

  Instead of answering, she beckoned me through more tunnels of ‘fusion sculpture’ into a chamber fille
d with huge stacks like atomic piles or enormous generators. There were slender columns with fins at the base like the buttresses of jungle trees, giant bell-jars, crystals cut in irregular shapes, and waist-high pylons. The roof was supported by more squat, fluted pillars, all of them decorated with symbols and hieroglyphs, and the walls seemed to be covered in massive metal shields, which close-up looked more like manhole-covers with raised openings to fit a giant’s hand. The chamber was lit in patches by what looked like luminous flat strips along the ceiling, but there were no obvious instruments or controls — no handles, levers, dials, gauges, clocks or computer-screens as you’d expect to find in an aircraft or on the bridge of a sea-going ship. In the middle of the hall was a domed chamber like a tiny chapel with open sides, under which a globe-shaped helmet like a goldfish-bowl had been carved in an opaque, greenish crystal, over the bare slab of a seat. ‘Sit,’ Maryam told me, gesturing to the seat. I stepped inside the open chamber and saw that the inside of the dome was painted with stars — Orion, Sirius A and Sirius B.

  ‘What’s this?’ I asked.

  ‘This is the Recorder,’ she said, ‘the message we’ve been waiting to give humans for a long time about the origin of your civilisation. You are the Chosen One.’

  ‘What about Wingate?’

  ‘Wingate had the psi-gene, yes. He was almost but not quite an illuminatus. We led him here, but in the end he failed. Then, before we could prevent it, he let his companion try — the result was madness.’

  ‘How do you know the same won’t happen to me?’

  ‘You are an illuminatus — the psi-gene has never shown itself so strongly in anyone for generations. Your potential is enormous — as yet you’ve only glimpsed the surface. If you only open yourself to it, you are capable of holding ten thousand years of human memories in your own head. With the right training you could look deep into the future, even communicate across space.’

  ‘What do you mean, across space?’

  ‘Sit. All your questions will be answered.’

  I sat down on the cold slab, ducking under the inset ‘goldfish-bowl’.

  ‘You must put your head inside,’ Maryam said. ‘Don’t worry. You’ll be able to breathe.’

  Cautiously I placed my head inside the globe. For a moment there was darkness, and then I felt a prickling sensation as if my scalp was being probed by a million tiny wires. Suddenly my head exploded with a shock of light that smashed the breath from my body and almost knocked me over. I was rushing through a light vortex at blinding speed. I heard myself screaming, but the scream was distant, remote. ‘I’ was somewhere far away, absorbed in visions of the night sky, stars, constellations — there was Orion and under its wing, Sirius A with its dark sister, Sirius B near by, orbiting it on an elliptical path, once every fifty years. Images and bytes of information zapped through my mind like streaks of lightning. I was in the distant past — Zep-Tepi, the First Time —twelve thousand years ago. I saw a traveller from a planet in the Sirius B system landing on earth using some kind of teleportation-drive. The figure was a blurred, out of focus image, because, I realised, he was without definite shape — a shape-shifter, appearing now as a terrifying monster, half-hominid, half-fish, with a scaly body and a tail as well as legs, now a globe-headed man, now as a man with the head of what looked like an ibis, but was not. It was Thoth, the pathfinder of five more travellers from Sirius who landed later, the five Neteru of ancient Egyptian mythology — Osiris, Isis, Horus, Nepthys and Set — the Nommos of the Dogon.

  I saw them through the eyes of my ancestors, the Anaq, a stone-age tribe of hunter-gatherers living on the plains of what is now the Western Desert of Egypt. I saw the Anaq bowing to them, offering them sacrifices. But something had gone wrong; the Nommos were troubled. They could not get home. They’d lost contact with the parent race and were stranded on an alien planet with no way of sustaining their technology. They were inventive; they used local materials, employed the natives, taught them the basics of civilisation — the reckoning of time, measurement, astronomy, medicine, engineering. The great monuments of Egypt, the Sphinx, the pyramids, the temples had all grown out of their teachings. By manipulating their own DNA code, they even managed to mate with humans and produce offspring. Over the centuries, the original ‘landing party’ merged with the natives and its original technology degenerated.

  Images and sounds poured into my mind with incredible detail, a maelstrom of voices merging together, some of them speaking ancient Egyptian, others languages which I didn’t recognise at all. The information streamed through my head like a river of light, pouring into the sump of my unconscious. It was thousands of years after the original landing, now, and the Nommos had been immortalised as the gods of ancient Egypt — gods who were said to have once walked the earth. There had been quarrels between their descendants, and a great struggle between the followers of Set and Nepthys and those of Horus, Osiris and Isis. They had given birth to an advanced civilisation, the first civilisation of earth. I tried to pause, to take a mental respite, but the images were crowding in on me faster and faster. It was as if I was getting a matrix of thoughts recorded from everyone who’d lived through the events I was experiencing. The sheer volume of information streaming into me was colossal. I sensed suddenly why others had failed in this task; their minds must simply have balked at the endless streams of thought. I saw temples dedicated to the falcon-headed god Ra — the supreme godhead — and a corps of shaven-headed priests in white robes conducting ceremonies of sacrifice, studying the stars, writing papyri, supervising vast building projects, performing medical operations, dedicating tombs, examining human beings. These activities and thousands of others went on over a vast span of time, but gradually it dawned on me that these priests — the priests of Ra — had maintained a single obsessive purpose which had never faltered. They were selecting and testing human beings with the object of isolating a rare gene — the ‘psi-gene’ — and of breeding an individual with the power to transmit telepathic messages across the parsecs of space. With a shock, it struck me that the whole edifice of Egyptian civilisation had been constructed as a complex long-term rescue-plan for the Nommo landing-party, which had been stranded here in 12,000 BC!

  Suddenly the face of a pharaoh flashed into my mind. It was Amenophis III — supposed by some to be the father of Akhnaton. I knew with certainty that Amenophis was a Chosen One — an illuminatus — the end product of the psi-gene programme, which had lasted more than seven thousand years. By Amenophis’s time, the programme had devolved into a ritual. The original Nommo strains had long since been absorbed into Homo sapiens, the Nommo parent-race from Sirius had lost all record of any contact with earth, and had anyway evolved into something quite different. The teleportation-drive that had brought the explorers to earth was to the current Nommos a failed experiment from the depths of ancient history, which had long ago been replaced by an anti-matter drive. Amenophis III’s telepathic messages into space did not bring a rescue mission. Instead they brought the creature that would become Akhnaton, a renegade Nommo with objectives of his own. He landed his craft in the Western Desert, forced himself on the pharaoh, killed him and his son Thutmose, abolished the Ra priesthood whose painstaking work had brought him here, and usurped the throne. The images in my head accelerated again, assaulting me with a shocking flow of visions and voices. There were glimpses of torture — human beings being herded into enclosures like cattle-pens, dismembered and examined by the creature calling himself Akhnaton and his minions. I knew suddenly what Akhnaton’s purpose had been: to produce an alien-human cross that could be used as a stepping stone to some higher dimension, a hybrid creature devoid of all human characteristics. But something went wrong. There was resistance. Unseen forces intervened. I saw scenes of savage fighting — fires, guards being overthrown by crowds of people and palaces destroyed, and everywhere I looked I saw men carrying a secret symbol — the Eye of Ra. I saw Akhnaton fleeing across the desert. I saw him arriving back at his ship wi
th a small band of followers and their frantic attempts to get the great thing space-borne. All in vain. They were trapped on earth just as their ancestors had been. Finally, there were shadowy eminences — The Guardians — laying Akhnaton in his sarcophagus and sealing the doors.

  The vision faded suddenly, a mote of light dying away like a shooting star. I felt as if I was rising through space, like a bubble in water. There was a moment of utter darkness during which I groped to find myself — Omar James Ross — buried under the accumulated psychic rubble of twelve thousand years. I wondered if I still existed, if I could ever be the same individual with all that information inside me — information no other individual had ever had from the beginning of time. ‘Omar!’ my mother’s voice called and I dipped out of the ‘helmet’ to find ‘Maryam’ still watching me. I stood up, staggered and almost fell. I felt drained of every ounce of energy, burned up as if a million volts had just buzzed through me. I was at the end of a long journey across space-time — I’d been further and seen more than any human traveller in history. Yet I could remember only fragments. I held on to the wall. ‘Shit!’ was all I could say. ‘Holy shit. What was that?’

  ‘Call it a history lesson for the human species.’

  ‘I was being bombarded by the memories of millions of dead people!’

  ‘The Recorder works through your genes, it plugs in to the collective unconscious and liberates it. That’s why it could only work with an individual with an advanced psi-capacity. Psi-capacity is the ability to experience the collective unconscious of a species on a conscious level. The ability to call up a million years of human experience is power.’

  ‘But I can’t remember more than a few fragments; no one could.’