Catacombs

by John Farris

  Were there any significant ruins in Tanzania?

  "Well, if you're fascinated by digs, you must pop over to Engaruka for the day. Nyshuri, dear girl, would you mind terribly freshening my gin for me? There's a love."

  And still Jumbe was missing.

  Dinner was served, buffet style, at which point Marshal Victor Kirillovich Nikolaiev and his party arrived en masse, creating the kind of circusy stir all Russians take delight in. Kumenyere's relief at seeing them was evident.

  The Soviet Minister of Defense, who was wearing a business suit too heavy for the climate, surveyed the dining room and caught Morgan's eye. He seemed to care about no one else who might be there. He brushed Kumenyere aside, walked over to Morgan and, with a sudden happy smile, embraced him. He was a Georgian, short, but with a weight lifter's torso and strength. He had to reach up to get an arm around Morgan's shoulders.

  "Mr. Secretary, no one is tell me about you until I'm here. What unexpected pleasure!"

  Morgan replied in kind; they shook hands and embraced again. They had never met; but the dossiers, with photographs, which each man had on the other were detailed and up-to-date. They could have chatted for hours on a quasi-intimate basis. Morgan observed that Nikolaiev continued to dye his hair black. His health seemed generally good, although he was a heavy breather and had lost an eye to diabetes three years ago. He still drank and smoked Turkish cigarettes and was fond of startling strangers at private functions by suddenly shrieking with laughter and stubbing out a lighted cigarette on the surface of the glass eye. Aside from his social idiosyncrasies he was a shrewd, dangerous man, the highest-ranking Stalinist in a country where many people still yearned for a return to the good old days. He was known in some circles as the Dracula of Katyn, for certain infamous acts of butchery committed during World War Two.

  Nikolaiev waved his interpreter away from them; he had learned his English, heavily laced with G.I. scatology, in Berlin in 'forty-five and 'forty-six, and he could cope with six other languages. The calypso music had stopped. From outside came the nerve-prickling squall of an animal. Morgan and the Russian exchanged looks of mutual perplexity. Nikolaiev seemed uneasy in this equatorial environment. He squeezed Morgan's arm and drew him closer, spoke confidentially.

  'What do you think of that man?" he said, referring to Kumenyere.

  "I hardly know him."

  "But you're of the same color, like two coons."

  Morgan cleared his throat. "We're black," he explained with a tactful smile. "That doesn't make us lodge brothers, like the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. To call someone of our race a 'coon' is a form of insult."

  Nikolaiev nodded. "Okay. That's not coon, it's black. I want to remember that. But let's get serious. What's the reason you're doing here?"

  "I came for reasons of friendship. Jumbe invited me for the weekend, and it's been a long time since I've seen him. How well do you know Jumbe?"

  "So-so. Meeting him on a state visit to Moscow. Two, three years ago. That's all." He slipped his arm around Morgan's waist and walked him toward the buffet. "Okay, my friend," he said, loudly enough for all to hear. "This looks good chow from smelling it. But not for me. Special diet I'm eating, my own chef daily. We will see each others. Later. For very big and important talk." He chuckled at the absurdity of this impromptu summit. "I'm telling you all my bullshit and you're telling me yours."

  There was a total silence. Out of the corner of his eye Morgan saw the expression of horror on the face of Nikolaiev's interpreter.

  Morgan laughed. Everyone else laughed too. Nikolaiev roared the loudest, until tears ran from his good eye.

  At a few minutes before eleven o'clock Morgan, Nikolaiev, his interpreter, whose name was Boris, and eight other men gathered in the conference room at Chanvai.

  A stone hearth with a crackling fire took up one end of the room. There was an area like a conversation pit, ringed with metal patio chairs cushioned and draped with zebra skins. In the center of the ring stood a table, a six-foot oval of solid onyx with veins of orange and rust and white on a massive, beautifully gnarled mahogany stump polished and artificially petrified to resist the borer beetles. The louvered windows in one wall were open; the night droned and screeched outside. Rhinoceros beetles whacked against the screens. The flag of Tanzania was displayed on the wall opposite the windows, a yellow-edged black bar dividing diagonally a field of sea blue and light green.

  Each chair had a name on it. Houseboys served drinks to those men who were still in the mood, or cups of the strong, locally grown coffee. The lights in the room had been dimmed to the approximate number of footcandles afforded by the firelight. After a full evening of social discourse none of the men were very talkative, and a few seemed edgy with nerves. They tried to get comfortable, listened to the bats stirring under the roof and glanced expectantly at the pair of doors to the room.

  Dr. Kumenyere entered, carrying an attaché case and two gold, leather-bound notebooks under his arm. He stood aside for Jumbe Kinyati, who followed him with his great old head bent at what seemed to Morgan an alarming angle. He had a black wood staff in one hand. He was wearing a plain red-ochre shuka and a strip of leopard or cheetah pelt that was bound around his forehead like a sweatband. Morgan had never seen Jumbe when he wasn't wearing a western-style business suit, usually with a white shirt open at the throat; frequently he had also affected a tarboosh, as a gesture of solidarity with the Muslims of Zanzibar.

  His feet were in sandals that softly slapped the concrete floor. He took his place at the head of the table, where there was no chair, and stood contemplatively with his fingertips pressing down on the onyx. He didn't look at the assembly. Kumenyere placed the two fat loose-leaf notebooks and the case near Jumbe, and went to close the windows. Jumbe seemed to tremble as the louvers snapped shut.

  "Good evening," Jumbe said. His voice gained strength as he drew a deep breath and raised his head slowly. In Africa the buffalo, nyati, and not the lion, is the most respected of' all the animals, for its speed and power and unpredictability. Jumbe's head was, unmistakably, the head of a buffalo, with even the suggestion of horns in the way his hair grew back over his ears from a kind of tough, wiry gray pompadour. For an African he had small eyes. They were yellow as egg yolk, and widely spaced. His face was angular, narrowing to a clump of gray beard. His massive shoulders were rounded, and there was a hump between them that had grown more prominent with the years. Even in illness–it was obvious Jumbe was not well–he continued to be impressive.

  "To my friends Morgan Atterbury and Victor Kirillovich Nikolaiev, welcome. I regret I haven't had the opportunity to be with you before." Now he looked at the other faces around the table. "Much of what I am about to relate is already known to the majority, but I would like to bring our visitors from America and the U.S.S.R. up to date."

  Kumenyere took a chair beside Jumbe and sat back, folding his hands, surveying the company with his beautiful, imperturbable eyes. The president stood gazing at the fire for a few moments, then continued softly, "Nearly a year ago the Chapman Institute of the University of London applied to our government for the necessary permits to conduct an archaeological investigation along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, where some evidence of a prehistoric burial ground had been found. Permission was granted. An expedition funded by the Institute was mounted, with the famous archaeologists and explorers Chips Chapman and Erika Weller as field directors."

  At mention of Chapman's name Morgan glanced at Robeson Kumenyere, recalling the scene at the airport, the impassioned young man who had said he was Chips Chapman's son. His glance went unacknowledged.

  "Their expedition," Jumbe continued, "established a base camp near the designated site in one of the more remote and least accessible areas of Tanzania. There are no roads and few villages in a mountain fastness of some eighteen hundred square miles.

  "Shortly after they began their explorations, all radio contact with the camp ceased. After several weeks of silence,
government troops were sent into the district to search for the explorers. Remains of the camp were found, but they had all disappeared. We believed that they had set out along the lake in rubber boats to reach otherwise isolated cliffs, and were drowned in one of the frequent storms that strike without warning during the northeast monsoons. Needless to say, areas of Lake Tanganyika teem with crocodile, so the prospect of recovering bodies was dim."

  Jumbe paused, to allow Boris the opportunity to catch up in his translation. He apparently wanted to be sure that Marshal Nikolaiev understood him perfectly.

  "How large was the party of explorers?" Morgan asked.

  "More than thirty, and a score of Tanzanian laborers and service staff."

  "Surely some of them would have remained in camp."

  "As it turned out," Jumbe said, smiling at Morgan, "our assumptions concerning the fate of the explorers were wrong. They had seemingly vanished from the earth, but they were alive and well. Just six weeks ago, following months of silence, we learned what had happened to them."

  "I don't remember reading about any of this," Morgan said. "An expedition of that size, out of touch with the world for several months? Every bureau chief in East Africa must have been nodding off on the job."

  "The expedition was conceived and conducted with utmost care, to guard against unwanted advance publicity. For reasons I think will be evident. The Chapman/Weller discovery is of awesome proportions, unprecedented. They have found the burial place, or Catacombs, of the elders of an advanced civilization that flourished on this continent ten thousand years ago, a civilization that left a complete record of its one-thousand-year history for modern man to study."

  "Fascinating," Morgan murmured, looking at the faces of the other men.

  Most of them were rapt, already true believers.

  Henry Landreth's black eyes reflected firelight, his face was impassive, but his foot nervously tapped the floor: Nikolaiev sat back with his arms folded, wheezing. Morgan was familiar with his expression, a glazed stoicism common to all Russians who think they are in for a healthy dose of vranyo, or snake oil.

  Kumenyere had left his chair to lower the already dim lights in the room. Jumbe complacently absorbed the skepticism of Morgan and Nikolaiev. Then he pulled the attaché case slowly toward him and unlocked it with shaking fingers.

  "Here is a part of that record," he said.

  The case was opened; two spotlights in the rafters lanced down.

  The case contained a two-inch-thick block of Lucite. Mounted in the Lucite were- twenty-four gemstones, egg-shaped, red as rubies, each cut into what seemed to be a hundred dazzling facets, like those of a geodesic dome.

  The beauty of their combined fire stunned everyone. Morgan's throat dried up; he couldn't look anywhere else. Jumbe moved the case inchwise turning it to the left and then to the right. Within the icy redness blazed other colors, equally intense: lavender; pink; a shade of gorgeous, lethal blue, like a poisoned sea. Jumbe selected one of the stones and held it between yellow-horned fingers in the dark, where it had its own brilliance, the distant violence of an exploding star.

  "They are red diamonds," Jumbe said, looking at Morgan and then at Nikolaiev. "The rarest of the precious stones known to man. Those few previously discovered are far inferior to the stones you see here. Each of the bloodstones, as we have come to call them, weighs approximately fifty carats. The odds against more than one turning up in the course of centuries is astronomical. Yet the bloodstones you see are part of a store of hundreds, preserved in the Catacombs, along with the crystal tombs of ancient men. A priestly caste of yellow men, with straight eyes, who were known as the Lords of the Storm."

  He selected another of the bloodstones, passed one to Morgan and one to Nikolaiev. Two more spotlights shone down for their benefit as they examined the stones.

  "Damon Paul will vouch for their authenticity," Jumbe said.

  On close inspection Morgan discovered that the facets had been etched, almost microscopically, with some kind of writing.

  Damon Paul got up and stood beside Jumbe.

  "In association with Dr. Markey," he said, nodding in the direction of the crystallographer, "I've studied the bloodstones for several days, and run some tests. They're diamonds, absolutely authentic. Some of the stones are less than perfect, but those minor flaws only enhance their beauty. Any one of them, on today's market, is worth in the neighborhood of two and a half million dollars. Even if they were marketed in this quantity, they would be snapped up at extraordinary prices.'

  "Don't the etchings detract from their value?" Morgan asked.

  "Not in the slightest. By the way, it would take a skilled man working for several months to cut and polish a single stone."

  "How long would it take to complete the etchings?"

  "I can't imagine. I'm sure there's no way to accomplish the work mechanically. One thing you should bear in mind: Only a diamond can cut a diamond."

  "What about a laser?"

  "There's a possibility. But technically not within our means at this time."

  "Has anyone deciphered the etchings?"

  "Yes," Jumbe said. "The Chapman/Weller expedition spent nearly six months in the Catacombs, sustained in rooms of crystal that were as bright as a meadow beneath a full moon. With the aid of computers they were able to translate the language and interpret the mathematics of the vanished civilization, known as Zan. The stones we have assembled here are etched with hundreds of equations, some of which indicate that their physicists were successful in unifying the forces of electromagnetism and gravity. Dr. Zollner; Dr. Ambetti; their distinguished colleagues–all agree that the ancient people achieved a sophisticated technology, based on quantum mechanics, solid state, and high-energy physics. And their greatest feat, recorded on another cache of diamonds secure in the Catacombs, was FIREKILL."

  A few moments of silence; Dr. Zollner looked up from the pipe he was stoking.

  "FIREKILL, Jumbe? What is 'FIREKILL'?"

  "Forgive me, Dr. Zollner. You and your colleagues were shown only selected bloodstones, for purposes of attribution and to compare certain models by the physicists of Zan with current research. Someday I hope you will have the opportunity to study the full range of achievements recorded on the bloodstones. For now, I would like to keep explanations as brief as possible. Let me say that the country of Zan included most of what today is East and Central Africa. Many great cities were built, of which only the ruins of Engaruka and Zimbabwe are extant; other ruins remain to be excavated in the dense forests of Zaire and Mozambique.

  "Nearly one hundred centuries ago, the people of Zan were endangered by 'fires from space,' which might have been a periodic meteor shower of great intensity, or the explosion of the large planet that existed where the asteroids now circle the sun. To prevent certain devastation, they devised a shield called FIREKILL, a spatial distortion achieved by combining the forces of electromagnetism and gravity to create unusually strong gravitational fields. A force field, if you will. It was one-hundred-percent effective. This shield, if erected today over an area as large as, let us say, the city of Moscow, U.S.S.R., would serve as a foolproof antimissile, antinuclear device. No explosion that modern man can create will disturb it. The cost is moderate in terms of expenditures necessary to maintain present defensive postures, the technology available. The necessary knowledge–" Jumbe spread his hands like a conjurer over the array of bloodstones.

  Zollner chuckled edgily. "Force field! Jumbe, the concept is a total absurdity. Mathematically, the major problem with gauge theory has always been one of infinities . . ."

  Almost instantly the physicists were quarreling.

  "Not according to the Zurhellen-Dzaluk models, which predict . . ."

  "No, no, the interaction cannot be assumed to be manifestations of the same effect . . ."

  "But my work in photon stability . . ."

  ". . . Super gravity . .

  ". . . Acceleration phenomenon . . ."

  Only
Henry Landreth, Morgan observed, was silent, sitting back aloofly. Morgan glanced from the red diamond in the palm of his hand (which was sweating, although the bloodstone seemed cold) to Nikolaiev. He now had a good idea of the attraction that had been offered to persuade the old soldier to come to Chanvai. Nikolaiev was impatiently trying to follow the arguments of the physicists.

  Jumbe had the floor again. "Although I have no background in the physical sciences, I know that much of your work is based on speculation, and is necessarily incomplete. A lifetime of intellectual drudgery may result in two minutes of truly creative insight. The physicists of Zan, whose genius you have acknowledged, had a thousand years in which to develop their theories."

  "If they did contrive a viable force field," Morgan said, "we should all be speaking dialects of Zan today."

  "The story of the annihilation of the people of Zan is frightening and fascinating; it will be told, in the course of time, but tonight I must hurry on."

  "One more question, Jumbe?'

  "Yes, Morgan."

  "The discovery of these stones, apart from what may or may not be engraved on them, would seem to be an archaeological triumph. The credit, apparently, belongs to Chips Chapman and Erika Weller. Why aren't they with us tonight?"

  "The answer is quite obvious," Jumbe said with a placating smile. "The members of the expedition were exhausted from their work in the Catacombs, where they knew no division between day and night. They are now recovering, as honored guests of the Tanzanian government, in a location that must remain undisclosed for now. At their request they will be incommunicado, untroubled by representatives of the media, until they have had time to recover their strength and put all of their valuable data into an acceptable form for presentation to the world's scientific communities."

  Almost before he finished speaking, the doors to the conference room burst open, startling the men inside. Somalis and Sikhs in uniforms of pale green and blue filled the hall. They were heavily armed. Their commander, who was carrying a submachine gun, walked in. His finger was on the trigger. With a swagger stick he turned the lights in the room all the way up. His eyes glittered. He had pox-scarred cheeks and shavings of curly white in his full beard. He crossed the room to Jumbe and Kumenyere and spoke urgently to them.