The Granite Key (Arkana Mysteries)

by N. S. Wikarski

  Startled, Cassie asked, “Why is it that I never get a chance to knock before you pop out like some kind of Jack In A Box with a necktie?”

  Griffin gave her a slight smile. “We have security cameras monitoring the grounds. I was alerted and came out to meet you.” He opened the door wide. “Please do come in. Are you ready for your grand tour of the vault today?”

  “As ready as I’ll ever be,” she said guardedly, remembering Maddie’s warning. “Wait until Griffin gets started.”

  He seemed a bit less ill at ease in her presence this time as they walked through the main schoolroom. It was just as quiet and empty as during her previous visit. When they entered the short corridor at the back of the building, Griffin stopped in front of what appeared to be a janitor’s closet. He pulled the door open to reveal another door immediately behind it. A modern steel elevator door. When he swiped a key card into a slot next to the door, Cassie could hear the elevator ascending to meet them.

  Reading her surprised expression, Griffin gave her a knowing look. “I would respectfully remind you of the adage about appearances and deception.”

  The elevator doors parted and they walked inside. There were no buttons to push for the floor they wanted. Instead Cassie saw a keypad on the inside of the door. Griffin punched in a code and they began to descend.

  Nothing could have prepared Cassie for the sight that greeted her when the elevator doors opened again. They were standing in an underground room that was the size of a school auditorium. There were desks. Row upon row of desks. And they were staffed by people of every nationality, race, gender and age. Over a hundred of them. Some people were working at computers, some were consulting books. Others were on the phone engaging in heated discussions with unknown people on the other end of the line.

  The ceiling was twenty five feet above them and light glowed overhead from some unseen source. Even though they were below ground, it felt like sunlight on Cassie’s skin. She was about to ask Griffin but he anticipated her question.

  “You like our lighting system? It’s quite clever, actually. Full spectrum illumination that mimics the progression and intensity of natural daylight.”

  She looked at him skeptically. “You mean you have a sunrise and sunset down here?”

  He nodded. “The duration and angle of light is calculated to match the time of year outdoors. It’s brighter on the east side of the room in the morning and on the west side in the evening. Once our artificial sun goes down, people can use their desk lamps, of course, but we also have an artificial moon rise that corresponds to the actual phase of the moon. While our daylight sky is opaque, our night sky is transparent, complete with constellations appropriate to this latitude and longitude at any given time of year. We want to preserve a natural environment as much as possible.”

  “Speaking of which…” Cassie pointed to a dog which was lying patiently next to the desk of a middle-aged woman in the front row. On another desk, a cat slept curled up in an out box. A third desk held a birdcage with a cockatiel inside.

  “People are encouraged to bring their pets to work. The more nature we can incorporate into the environment, the better.”

  “I guess,” Cassie commented as her eyes wandered around the space. There were potted trees around the perimeter, some nearly reached the ceiling. Waterfalls trickled and splashed in the far corners of the room.

  In addition to noticing every detail of her new surroundings, Cassie also noticed a new vibe coming from Griffin. She couldn’t detect any of the wariness he’d exhibited when they first met. Maybe he relaxed when he was in his natural element down in the basement. Whatever the reason, Cassie liked the change.

  “Is that a breeze I feel on my face?” the girl asked incredulously.

  At her question about the breeze, he bounced a bit on his heels, delighted that she had noticed. “Right you are. It mimics the prevailing wind at any given time of year, except winter of course. We keep it to a gentle breeze at all times. Don’t want papers getting blown every which way now, do we?”

  “No, I suppose not.” Cassie’s eyes were wandering again. On the wall to the right of all the desks, she could see six doors spaced equally apart. The sign on the first one read “Africa, the second one read “Asia,” the third one “Australia,” the fourth one “Europe,” the fifth one “North America,” and the final one read “South America.” Each door represented an entire continent. Cassie noted that there was no door for Antarctica.

  On the back wall beyond all the desks was a huge map of the world. There were pins stuck in various locations. Her eyes continued traveling around the perimeter to the wall on her left. It contained three doors. The closest one read “Operations Division,” the middle one read “Scrivener’s Office” and the farthest one “Security Division.”

  ”This is some place you’ve got here!” she exclaimed.

  Griffin chuckled. He clapped his hands loudly. “Everyone, may I have your attention please?”

  Immediately the cacophony of sounds in the room quieted. People who had been speaking on the phone paused in their conversations and looked up inquiringly.

  “It is my very great pleasure to introduce to you Sybil’s sister Cassie. Our new Pythia.”

  Suddenly a wave of humanity was rushing toward her. Cassie braced herself for impact. Hands reached out to shake hers, to pat her on the shoulder. Voices told her how happy they were to meet her at last. How much they had liked her sister. Everyone was offering encouragement, offering assistance with anything she wanted to learn, any time, any place. They all seemed to understand why she was here. They all seemed to know what she was supposed to do better than she did herself. They all seemed pleased to see her. She felt like Dorothy in Oz. The ruby slippers were on her feet and they were a perfect fit. “There’s no place like home, there’s no place like…”

  “Do you still think our vault is, as you put it, an empty schoolhouse with fancy bleachers and a big table?” Griffin asked with a mischievous gleam in his eye.

  “Wha…” was the only sound Cassie could manage to utter.

  He waited for the initial hubbub to die down and then he addressed the throng of well-wishers. “All right now, everyone, back to work if you please. Give the young lady a chance to breathe. I fear you’ve quite overwhelmed her.”

  He steered her toward the right side of the room and the doors labeled with the names of continents. Behind her, she could hear the echo of excited chatter. She allowed herself to be led without protest. Her senses were still reeling from all these new sights, people and sounds.

  “Why don’t we start with a peek into one of the records rooms,” he suggested.

  “Is that what’s behind Door Africa?”

  “Yes, as well as the other five. Let’s go to the one you’d find most familiar, shall we?” Griffin swiped his key card, punched in a code and opened the door marked North America. “This way, please.” He gestured for Cassie to walk in first.

  Once she stepped inside, she was reminded of those nested Russian dolls, one inside another, inside another. A door within a door within a door. The space was narrow and deep, more like a tunnel than a room. She couldn’t see to the opposite end. A long central corridor stretched off into the gloom lined on either side with yet another series of doors. They seemed to run in alphabetical order. “Aleutian, Athabascan…” she read.

  “All the way to Zuni,” Griffin added. “The indigenous tribes of this continent.”

  “So where are the states? Where’s Alabama and Alaska? This is North America, isn’t it?”

  He laughed. “It wouldn’t make much sense to use modern geographical divisions to track ancient artifacts, would it? The names assigned by a conquering overlord culture have no relevance to our pursuits. When we speak of North America, we mean pre-Columbian North America. You must remember that we are recovering the historical record of the original inhabitants of this land.”

  She walked up to a door marked Anasazi and tried to open it. It was l
ocked. She looked at Griffin quizzically. “Do you keep the Anasazi relics behind this door?”

  He shook his head. “No, this is a file room. We keep the records of our relics here. Oh dear, I’m going about this backwards. A proper definition of terms is in order. We are standing in what is called the Central Catalog. Its function is to account for the relics we’ve retrieved. The relics themselves are stored in places we call troves.”

  Cassie looked up and down the corridor. “So where are the troves?”

  “Not here obviously.” Griffin sighed. “It’s a major undertaking to keep track of them all. New ones are forever cropping up in the most unlikely of spots. Each continent has many of them scattered about. Individual countries have their own as well. Wherever a cache of important artifacts has been discovered, we attempt to build a collection site around it.”

  She tried to hide her disappointment at not seeing any actual relics. “Who manages the troves?”

  “The person who is charged with the responsibility for a particular group of treasures is called a trove-keeper though she or he also has many assistants.”

  Cassie wrinkled her brow. “So let me repeat this to see if I have it straight. The Catalog is the records department and it keeps track of all the items in a trove?”

  Griffin nodded. “Yes, that’s right.”

  “And this catalog we’re in keeps track of everything you’ve found in North America?”

  “Not exactly,” the young man hedged. “While each trove has its own version of a records department there is only one catalog. One place that contains records of the objects in all the troves. Maps, photographs, finder’s journals and written descriptions of each item recovered. The purpose of this facility is to keep track, at a summary level, of what’s in all the troves around the world. We call this the Central Catalog, or simply the vault. The one and only.”

  Returning her attention to the door before her once more, Cassie asked, “So what’s behind the Anasazi door?”

  The young man shrugged. “Something quite mundane, alas. A great many filing cabinets that hold the trove locations of our various Anasazi finds.”

  “I don’t get it,” Cassie said abruptly.

  “Excuse me?” Griffin appeared taken aback.

  “I see a bunch of doors with the names of Indian tribes. Anthropologists and archaeologists have been crawling over this continent for at least a hundred years now. They have museums full of artifacts. What’s the difference between what you’re doing and what they’re doing?”

  The young man gave a thin smile. “As much as anthropologists and archaeologists may protest to the contrary, their work is highly subjective. Their observations are tainted by whatever beliefs they carry with them into the field. That was especially true a century ago. Many if not all of them drew highly inaccurate conclusions about the objects they were collecting and the cultures they were observing. As the old saying goes, a fish cannot see water.”

  “What?”

  “A human being living in a particular culture is very much like a fish swimming in the ocean. The fish is immersed in the ocean and therefore cannot see the environment that supports it. Until quite recently with the onset of mass communication, humans have been so immersed in the values of their own culture, that they couldn’t see their fundamental assumptions at all. All of the anthropologists of the past century would have been raised with overlord values. They would have overemphasized conquest and domination and underemphasized the pivotal role that the female gender played in establishing human civilization. Therefore, when confronted with Native American culture and values, the only context they had for explaining what they saw was European.”

  Cassie stared at him skeptically.

  Griffin seemed mildly exasperated. “Look, I’ll show you what I mean. Come this way.”

  She trailed him down the endless corridor of doors until he stopped before one marked “Winnebago.” Sliding his key card into the slot, he disengaged the lock and they entered. Just as he’d told her, the room was full of metal filing cabinets. Griffin seemed to know exactly what he was looking for. He strode halfway down the room and opened a drawer to retrieve a manila folder. He returned to Cassie and handed it to her. “Have a look,” he prompted.

  Uncertainly, she took the folder and opened it. There was a faxed copy of an artifact. It was a wooden stick incised with lines, crescents and dots.

  Griffin leaned over her shoulder and pointed to the photo. “The first European who viewed an object like this took it to be a scepter of some sort. A wand of power used by an Indian chief to rule his subjects.”

  Cassie raised an amused eyebrow. “I just know you’re gonna tell me it ain’t so.”

  Griffin chuckled. “I’m attempting to illustrate my point about cultural perceptions. It’s actually a calendar stick used to measure time, coordinate lunar cycles with solar cycles and determine the date for various tribal rituals.” He paused for emphasis. “This method of timekeeping was originally developed by women, as were all early methods of timekeeping. Rather than being a symbol of male power, this sort of calendar would have been essential to midwives and expectant mothers to calculate the term of a pregnancy.”

  Cassie cocked her head and studied the photo again. “I wouldn’t have gotten that in a million years.”

  “Sticks much like this one are depicted in cave paintings dated from 50,000 BCE. They are always held by women and shamans, though I suppose the term women is redundant since the earliest tribal shamans were always female.”

  Griffin took back the folder of the calendar stick. “I think you can begin to understand the myriad ways in which we filter what we see through the values of our culture. Some errors of interpretation are minor. Some misperceptions are so fiercely protected that any attempt to correct the record would result in bloodshed. For instance, the meteorite enshrined at Mecca which Muslim pilgrims kiss so reverently was not originally sacred to the god Allah, but to the goddess Al Uzza, the Mighty One. Muslim worshippers circle their shrine seven times without ever realizing they are mimicking the actions of Al Uzza’s priestesses almost two millennia ago.

  Instead, Muslim lore tells that the meteorite landed at the feet of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden and was subsequently found by the biblical patriarch Abraham. Now if I were to tell a Muslim fundamentalist about Al Uzza and her prior claim to the stone, I’m sure he would consider me blasphemous and instantly declare a jihad against me.”

  Griffin refiled the folder and led Cassie out of the Winnebago room. “People cling stubbornly to their beliefs. We are attempting to set the record straight but our efforts carry a certain degree of risk. The evidence we are collecting is dangerous to those who dedicate themselves to maintaining the prevailing historical fiction.”

  “OK, I get your point,” Cassie conceded. “I can see why you’re going to so much trouble to protect a bunch of papers.”

  Griffin frowned slightly. “We aren’t merely protecting a bunch of papers. We are protecting the fragmented memory of the human race from those who would like nothing better than to erase everything that is inconsistent with overlord values.”

  He led her back toward the main room. In a lighter tone he suggested, “Why don’t we continue our tour.”

  Chapter 21 –Mothers Of Invention

  They exited North America and walked around the perimeter of the main room. People glanced up from desks to smile encouragingly as they passed. When they reached the back wall, Griffin paused before the giant world map.

  At close range Cassie could see colored pins stuck to different locations. Some were single, some in small bunches and some in clusters of twenty or more. “So what’s this?” Cassie asked.

  “A map of the world.” Griffin sounded playful.

  The girl rolled her eyes. “What are the pins for?”

  “We use them to keep track of our current recoveries.”

  “OK, new word.”

  “Yes, quite right. A recovery is an item that the
troves are in the process of retrieving or have just retrieved. It hasn’t yet been formally entered into the catalog. I believe you would use the word pipeline to describe something like this.”

  Cassie studied the map. About three dozen of the pins were clustered around a point in Turkey. “Why so many here?”

  “Oh yes, the Cybele artifacts. Excellent find. We’ve uncovered quite a few Thracian relics in that spot. We call what you see a concentration point. It will vary depending on the activity of a particular trove at a particular point in time. Right now, we’ve been very lucky in this geographic area.”

  Cassie felt a sense of misgiving. “Doesn’t the local government have something to say about what you’re taking out of the country?”

  “We only take artifacts out of their area of origin if the political climate is unstable enough to pose a threat. If there’s a chance they might be destroyed we will relocate them to the next closest stable area. As you might guess, the situation is very fluid.”

  Cassie shifted to another topic. Looking up toward the ceiling, she asked, “Are we still under the school?”

  “Yes, partly. We excavated additional space around it too.”

  “There are so many people down here. Why didn’t I see any cars when I drove up?”

  “An underground car park on the other side of the building. The ventilation system is state of the art.” Griffin cast a glance toward the multitude of desks in the middle of the room and gave a sigh. “It’s unfortunate our technological innovations haven’t yet extended to the information we collect.”

  “Huh?” the girl asked blankly.

  “We’re still in the throes of converting our paper records to computer format. Some of us are being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the information age. I confess that I, myself, am far more comfortable with the printed page.”