Keystone

by Talbot, Luke

  And with that she was gone, leaving them with the embers of a dying fire.

  Chapter 101

  Gail woke before dawn and dressed as quietly as possible so as not to wake the others. When she was ready, she woke George, and they tiptoed out of camp and down to the Nile, just as the first light of day started to paint the morning sky.

  During their nightly pillow-talk, they had agreed that they would go to the Library alone that morning. Gail still wasn’t sure what it was she was going to find, and with that uncertainty had decided Ben and Zahra should be kept out of the way at first, just in case.

  “It looks like the clouds may clear a bit today,” George commented as they found the group of small rowing boats the old couple had told them about under some overgrown, thorny bushes. They dragged one down the concrete slip to the water’s edge.

  It was, as usual from George, pointless optimism, designed as much to spark up a topic of conversation as to lighten the mood.

  Gail jumped from the boat knee-high into the water on the east bank and George followed gingerly.

  “I feel bad leaving without saying goodbye,” Gail said as they hiked along the road to the hills.

  George had only a minor grasp on what was going on at the best of times, but saw in his wife a trembling sense of excitement and restlessness. Deep inside he sensed that something monumental was about to happen. Good or bad, he didn’t know what to expect.

  And so they walked on in silence, save for the sound of their footsteps on the ground, as the once tarmacked road gave way to what had always been a rough dirt track that led to the Amarna Library.

  The entrance to the Library had changed little in two decades. The burnt out remains of the 4x4s had been taken away, one of the few things to have been achieved by the local government before greater worries came about. However, despite the attempted clean up, the main entrance was still a pile of rubble, with a hastily excavated path cleared down to the Library beneath.

  Gail fished a flashlight out of her pocket and tested the bulb. It came on first time, as bright as it had been in Walker’s hands eighteen years before. She had rarely used it, to the extent that George was surprised she even had it on her, fully charged and ready.

  “I always thought it might come in handy, one day,” she explained.

  They worked their way through the rubble and down the stairs, and quickly found themselves back in the Amarna Library. Memories came flooding back to them both, but while George sounded excited as they retraced their steps to the huge halls beyond, Gail’s humour gradually faded, until when they were standing in front of the Xynutian airlock, her face was sombre and voice passive.

  “I need to go in alone, George.”

  George hesitated, not least because that would mean leaving him in the dark.

  “There’s light in there, remember? You can keep the torch.”

  Before he could answer, she had passed it to him, and was entering the airlock, which had suddenly opened of its own accord. He leant in and hugged her, reluctant to let go. “I love you,” he said as he eventually loosened his embrace, and looked her directly in the eyes.

  The stone-like door of the airlock slid shut, separating them with the faintest waft of stale air.

  Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic. He couldn’t remember where the phrase came from, but it described the door perfectly. Thinking about how the door could possibly work; not only its mechanism, but also its longevity, to function so well after countless millennia, and its behaviour, to seem to open and close when it wanted. Magic before the Chaos – now in its wake even more so, he pondered.

  He sat down next to the naked statues of Akhenaten and Nefertiti, and waited for his wife to return.

  Chapter 102

  Gail hesitated as the inner door slid open. After a deep breath, she took a step forward, and almost the moment her trailing foot cleared the threshold she felt the slight rush of air as the door shut behind her.

  Did it shut differently all those years ago? She stood in silence for several minutes, until the ambient sound of her pulse and breathing had become almost unbearable. She looked up to the face of the Xynutian statue.

  Memories of the traumatic events from before the Chaos came flooding back. She looked to the floor where Walker had fallen, gunned down by George.

  Curious, she wondered, and moved round the statue to take a closer look at the floor and walls. Walker and Patterson’s bodies had been removed by the local police in the days after their escape. She looked to the opposite wall, against which Patterson had gasped his final warning to them regarding DEFCOMM. It all seemed so distant now, like it was from a different world.

  She knew from reports from their friends that the local police and forensic teams had performed a routine clean-up of the scene as part of their investigations, but there had been more pressing matters to worry about, and the amazing finds and criminal events in Amarna had quickly been overlooked and forgotten. The fact that there had been no interest or reporting of the finds hadn’t surprised her at the time.

  What did surprise her now was that there was absolutely no trace of blood, dirt, fragments of clothing or even marks on the walls from ricocheted bullets.

  It was then that she noticed the staff.

  She recoiled in shock. She had already seen the statue; it dominated the centre of the room, and as such was impossible to miss. But the fact that it was once more holding the staff aloft, as if she had never ripped it from its grasp years earlier, sent a shiver down her spine.

  The room was, as far as she could tell, as perfect as the day they had first discovered it.

  It was absolutely timeless.

  “The perfect time capsule,” she murmured in wonder.

  “How else?” said a voice behind her.

  She froze. There was something wrong about the voice. Something disconnected. Gail instinctively knew what she would be facing as she turned, slowly, towards it.

  The Xynutian stood in the doorway. No, ‘stood’ was the wrong word; at over seven feet tall and with the muscles of an athlete, it dominated the doorway. A simple cloth skirt hung round its waist.

  This wasn’t a statue, but an actual Xynutian; he, as she assumed it was a male, was practically human, and yet not at all. There was something unfamiliar about it. All she could think of was that word, superior; this was a superior human. A superhuman.

  The involuntary whimper in her throat barely made it past her teeth as she stood rooted to the spot.

  “How else could we build something that would last through the ages, and allow us to return once more to the surface to rebuild our civilisation?” he said, his lips and jaw unmoving as he stared deep into her mind with his jet black eyes. “This Facility is self-healing. It is at the same time the oldest and newest structure on the planet, constantly regenerating and rearranging itself on an atomic level, like the cells in your body, except with no degeneration whatsoever. It will be here as long as required, waiting for the time for us to return to the surface.”

  “How are you talking to me?” Gail managed to ask. “You’re speaking English, and yet your mouth isn’t moving.”

  “I am creating telepathic communication between us. More accurately, the Facility is creating it, but I am the channel it is using to do so. We are both thinking in our own languages, which are both, in essence, electrical impulses in very specific and controlled orders throughout our brains.

  “Telepathy is not beyond your understanding. And before you ask, you heard my voice behind you because that is where I was in relation to you. If your ears can tell your brain that I am behind you, then why would it not be possible for a direct message to the receptors in your brain to give the same impression?”

  Her mind was racing. The initial shock gone, she found that she was concentrating now more on the conversation inside her head than the actual Xynutian standing before her.

  “So many questions!” it said. “You will shortly know the answ
ers to most of them. But let me tell you first of all that I, indeed we, cannot answer everything. You must find some answers within yourself. I will answer the second most important question you have asked of me.

  “Why did we not return to the surface after the apocalypse that we suffered? That is an excellent question.” He shifted his weight slightly onto one of his massive legs and brought his hands together. “For that, I need to start at the very beginning. I have already mentioned that the Facility is self-healing. It is also self-governing, and the intelligence that governs it is based on the moral and scientific knowledge of my time, and that of my civilisation. Luckily, or unluckily depending on your point of view, morality changed significantly in the years it took to build the Facility. By the time it was complete, my race had become more attuned with the world around it; we felt that we were not at the centre of our ecosystem, but rather an integral part of it.

  “And so you are standing within a store of life as it existed nearly two million years ago. We saved everything that we could, from the tiniest insect to the largest land and sea creatures, the greatest trees to the most beautiful flower. I can see that that age surprises you, as you have by a great margin underestimated the distance in time between our two species; but it has indeed been that long since any of us walked the Earth.

  “So why didn’t we come back? Well, we are still waiting. Our best scientific minds, and you can testify for yourself that their minds far exceeded your own, estimated that the devastation of our civilisation on the surface would last a hundred thousand years, after which it would be safe enough for us to return.”

  “So what went wrong?” Gail asked. She was quietly hurt about the comment on Xynutian brains being bigger before remembering that it could read her mind.

  He looked at her for a few seconds.

  “By the way, I am not an it. I am most definitely a he.”

  She blushed.

  “Apology accepted. No, what happened was that instead of lasting a thousand years, it barely lasted a day. What the scientists did not predict is that the apocalypse had very minimal impact on other living creatures and plants. It was almost entirely directed at us. The Facility’s first directive was to not allow a return to the surface within the estimated duration of the apocalypse, without exception. By that time, life on the surface had thrived in our absence. The Facility has within its power the ability to propagate all of the species stored here across the entire planet. However, its second directive is to not let that happen if it is likely to cause unacceptable conflict within the existent ecosystem.

  “The Facility made the only logical decision, and decided not to return us. Since then, an opportunity to go back has not come up, and so we remain here.” The Xynutian didn’t sound in the slightest bit upset about the situation. “An ecosystem is a fragile thing, and for the Facility preserving that is more important than anything else.”

  “So you’ve been waiting ever since,” Gail said quietly.

  “Not exactly; we see the passage of time very differently to you. I am connected to the Facility, which is constantly aware of its surroundings, so I have knowledge of the past two million years within my mind. And yet, I have existed only since the very beginning of this conversation. As for the rest of the Xynutian species, and every other creature and plant here, they are frozen in time. When they are finally returned, they will be conscious of but a few moments since they were laid to rest. We are in no hurry, as the time that has already passed is a mere blink of an eye for Earth. The time of humans is ongoing, and we are happy to sit by and watch.”

  “You speak of a change of morals,” Gail said. “Is this what the Book of Aniquilus was based on? Is that why your race was destroyed?”

  “Ah, the books are another important question. The books are based on true events, but should be considered to be fiction. This Facility developed a habit, quite some time after the fall of my race, and shortly before the dominance of yours, not to interfere, but to try and help. It did so by using these vaults to send out emissaries: special messengers with key pieces of knowledge that would, it hoped, lead your species down a more fruitful path. As time passed, nature on the surface evolved, and so new samples of your ancestry were brought to the memory banks of the Facility, to be used in future emissaries.

  “At the beginning simple messages and concepts were sufficient enough to guide humans, but as time passed and your society developed, more complex ideas were required. This is similar to pushing a stone: the larger the stone, the more effort required to move it. The Facility encountered two problems. Firstly, the human brain, indeed any brain capable of any rational thought, is so caught up in its own inner workings and thoughts that it is very difficult to plant abstract ideas within it and expect any realistic results. The second, and perhaps the most damaging to the cause, is that you are an extremely social species, and as such find it difficult to act of your own accord.

  “Humans are, for the most part, like molecules of water in a river; each and every one of you is critical to the water’s flow, but you are individually quite incapable of changing its direction. Sometimes, however, one of the Facility’s emissaries would succeed in causing more than just a ripple of change, if only for a short period of time and in a small part of the river. The books you asked about are the result of such a ripple.

  “Most of the information in them about my race is accurate, however the emissary lived in her own time, and so many details are simply products of the ancient Egyptian culture and belief system. Having read your thoughts, I believe that it changed even further in translation since then; remember you are a product of your own time, and as such cannot expect to interpret, or even translate, entirely accurately.”

  “Nefertiti!” Gail gasped.

  “Yes. And before you ask of other emissaries, because I can feel your mind wandering there, He wasn’t from the Facility. Good people occur more frequently and naturally than you might think.”

  “Nefertiti was sent to warn us about Aniquilus, because your race was destroyed by it,” Gail muttered.

  The Xynutian cocked his head to one side as if hearing her voice this time, rather than simply reading her mind. “Warn you? Well, it may have come across that way, but that was not the intention; Nefertiti, as I have said, was a human being like you or any other, and as such was allowed to make her own interpretations. But there is no point warning you of the inevitable, and consequently the Facility would not have tried to do so.”

  “I’m confused.”

  “You are confused because I mention that Aniquilus is inevitable. For some reason you expect there to be a way of avoiding Aniquilus, but why should there be? Is there any way in which an ant can avoid the ant eater?”

  “So if there is no way to stop it, then why did the Facility keep sending emissaries? What would be the point?”

  “It is not because the apple tree dies that it did not lead a long and fruitful life, Gail Turner. The Facility’s aim was simply to help make minor, and sometimes major, adjustments. And yet, the Facility has a complex, evolving mind, and what may be best for you as a collective may not appear best for the individual. So what it thinks is a good idea in the long run, may not be something you can fully appreciate.”

  There was a long silence, during which time Gail’s mind raced back and forth. She had so many more questions to ask this amazing creature.

  “We are almost out of time,” the Xynutian said.

  “What happened to the astronauts?” Gail asked suddenly. It was something that had been in the back of her mind for a long time, and she couldn’t stop it leaping out.

  “They are safe, frozen in time inside a similar, though smaller, Facility, on Mars.” pointing towards the centre of the room, an image of the two astronauts materialised, sleeping like the Xynutians in this vault that she had seen all those years ago. “We cannot let them leave, yet, because they would die, alone on the surface of the planet. Their fate is tied to that of my race, now.”

 
“The Book of Xynutians said that Nefertiti would return. The date it gave was almost sixty years ago,” Gail said.

  “There are some questions that you already know the answer to, Gail Turner. But I will tell you this: emissaries are always created in pairs, one male, and one female. Nefertiti never met her male counterpart, as he was unfortunately killed in his youth in a place you now call France. There have been many emissaries since that young man and Nefertiti; they did indeed both return for the first time nearly sixty years ago, but this time it was the man who had the greatest impact. Not just a ripple in a river, but a wave.”

  “Mallus?” she asked incredulously. “You’re talking about Seth Mallus? He was an emissary?”

  The Xynutian cocked his head to one side and smiled.

  “It is interesting, statistically speaking, that the point at which your species’ population had reached saturation point is also the point at which, for the first time, the two emissaries sent by the Facility had an opportunity to actually meet.”

  “Why are you telling me all of this?”

  The Xynutian stared deeply into Gail’s eyes before disappearing into thin air.

  Moments later, the lights dimmed and the airlock opened. It was obvious that she was meant to leave. As she entered the brightly-lit corridor between the Facility and the Egyptian hall where she had left George, the Xynutian’s final thoughts echoed inside her head.

  We are telling you this, Gail Turner, as we are also telling Seth Mallus, because it is time for you to go. Now is the time of Aniquilus, and it must not find any trace of us here.

  Chapter 103

  Gail and George left the Amarna Library in silence. The shock of what she had seen and heard, and of the chilling final thoughts of the Xynutian, had left Gail feeling weak and confused.