by Jack Geurts
“What are they?” said Io.
Jasper found it hard to take in the full scope of the images while he was standing with his neck craned back, so he lay down on the ground, keeping his hand on the Marker.
Io frowned. “What are you doing?”
“Getting a better view. Come on, lay down.”
Io hesitated a moment, looking around for any sign of the rider and seeing none. She lay down beside Jasper and together they stared up at the stars. Dia remained on his feet, gazing skyward and cocking his head to the left and then to the right, trying to understand what he was looking at.
Above, the images changed every few seconds – the Marker cycling through a series of four crude pictographs: a wavy line, a circle, a triangle, and a jagged line. Each time, the Marker would connect the dots between apparently random stars.
As the wavy line was projected up again, Io said, “That one is water. Do you think?”
“Yeah, looks like it.”
The image changed again, to the circle.
“That one might be the sun, or the earth.”
Next image.
“Well, that is obviously a pyramid,” said Io.
“Obviously,” Jasper said, mocking her, but in a playful kind of way. She turned her head to look at him so her cheek was flat against the ground. Jasper did the same, seeing her eyebrows raised in a challenge, but a smile tugging at the corner of her mouth.
For a few seconds, they didn’t break eye contact – staring at each other with the stars overhead, the fire dancing all around them. Then Io realised what was happening and she withdrew, turning back toward the heavens.
“That has to be a mountain range,” she said, as the final image came up. Jasper re-addressed the ceiling, studying the jagged line.
“Sure looks like one.”
As the images started cycling through again, Io said, “So what does it mean?”
Jasper shrugged. “I don’t know. The Emperor clearly thought it was important enough to build a constellation around, and model his tomb after. But they wouldn’t have known about these pictographs until they got it in here – inside, where they could see the images projected up onto the roof.”
“Do you think they knew what it meant?”
“Maybe. Maybe not.” Then he reconsidered. “No, wait...definitely not. It’s probably pointing to a location on the other side of the world. The Chinese hadn’t really even started sailing by this point. Odds are they wouldn’t have known where this Marker was telling them to go. They wouldn’t have known it was telling them to go anywhere.”
As the circle came up, he pointed to it. “See, they wouldn’t have thought that was the earth. Like a lot of ancient peoples, the Chinese believed the world was flat. More likely, they would have assumed it was the sun. So, we’ve got water, the sun, the pyramid and the mountain range.”
He descended into silence, thinking hard. Trying to piece it all together.
Finally, Io spoke. “Do you think it could be leading us to another one of those...how did you put it...civilisation cradles?”
Jasper smiled. “Cradles of civilisation. Yeah, possibly. The map’s already led us to two of them so far.”
“Well, which of them corresponds to these images?”
Jasper continued to think. Then he started to think out loud, mumbling low, as if to himself. “So, we’ve been to Eridu and the Yellow River. That leaves Egypt, Mexico, Peru and the Indus Valley.”
“Egypt?” Io said, venturing a guess. “Egypt has pyramids.”
“So do all the others. Except the Indus Valley, as far as I know.”
Io sighed. “Okay...so what about the water and the sun and the mountains?”
“The first two pretty much applies to all of them. Every civilisation needs water and sun to live, but mountains...Egypt’s fairly flat, same with Eridu and we’ve already been there. Pakistan has some serious mountains, but so does Peru and Mexico. China’s pretty rugged, but we’re already here, so it’s gotta be one of the other four.”
“What if it is not?”
“What do you mean?”
“Well, what if there is another cradle of civilisation your people have not discovered yet?”
Jasper paused. He hadn’t considered that. Finally, he said, “Well, in that case, we’re really screwed.”
He stared up at the images in silence as they cycled through again. Water, sun, pyramid, mountains. “I don’t get it,” he said. “The first clue was so simple. It told us exactly where to go.”
“Only because your people had become advanced enough for you to recognise it. This is also telling us exactly where to go, only it is much more crude and obscure – like pictographs that would have been chiselled into stone. Perhaps if you stop thinking about it as a map like the first clue...”
Slowly, Jasper’s eyes brightened with a dawning realisation. “A map...”
Io looked at him, frowning. “What?”
“Peru...”
“What about Peru?”
A wide grin had appeared on Jasper’s face. “It’s telling us to go to Peru.”
PART IV
THE LOST CITY OF PYRAMIDS
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Proof
Jasper and Io made their way back across the quicksilver and sand, firing blasts of blue and green Elemental at the crossbows waiting near the entrance. By the time they began to ascend the steps, there was nothing to be fired back at them, even as they set off trigger-stones the whole way up.
All they had to do this time was dodge around the arrows that had driven themselves into the floor – the ones Jasper had evaded to begin with.
They left behind the flame-lit courtyard and the broken soldiers, and proceeded through the antechamber and the narrow walkway that led them there. Finally emerging back into the tunnel, they boarded the Flight Pod and took their seats.
Panting, Jasper removed his respirator and Io did the same as she engaged the Pod’s invisibility cloak. Dia grudgingly allowed Jasper to unmuzzle him as Io was busy piloting the craft.
Though it was initially too dark too see anything, Jasper could feel the world outside changing once again – a distant howling wind and the shifting of earth on a massive scale. A feeling he had come to associate with travelling backwards – or forwards – through time.
Slowly, the tunnel began to dissolve. Jasper watched as the ceiling fell away and the walls crumbled, until they were sitting in an open pit with a multitude of slaves toiling all around them.
Io took the Flight Pod way up into the air. She slowed down the Time Reversion so they could see the sheer manpower involved in the building of this enormous tomb – the writhing mass of bodies, digging and carting the dirt away in buckets. Once again, Jasper was reminded that everything he had seen below – the glory and splendour of the Emperor’s tomb – was done by hand, in an age before machines.
“Can you take it forward again?” he said.
“Why?”
“I just want to see what it looked like when it was finished, with all the trees and stuff grown over it.”
Io didn’t see the harm , and so she shifted suddenly from a Time Reversion to a Time Progression. The mass of slaves toiling in the pit dispersed as it was covered over and the ziggurat structure was erected on top.
In the blink of an eye, the metal pyramid was rolled inside once again, the ziggurat was buried under a mound of earth and trees began to grow over it.
They grew until the hill was covered in rainforest, and it was here that Io brought things to a standstill. There it stood – a giant pyramid of jungle, rising 120 metres over the inner and outer city walls, the palaces, the guard towers. The fullest expression of its glory.
“Satisfied?” Io said, and Jasper nodded, speechless.
With that, time suddenly reverted back to the present and the burial mound shrank to half its original height – still roughly pyramidal in shape, but nothing like what it once was. Now, flags were flying, monuments had been erected a
nd tourists were swarming all over the place. They were climbing out of buses that had come from Xi’an and walking up the stepped pathway to the peak of the burial mound – none of them with any idea of what lay buried beneath their feet.
The city walls were gone now, as were the palaces and guard towers. All of it destroyed by man or time, until only the mound was left, and that only a shadow of its former self.
“Why is it so small?” Io said. “What happened?”
“Time,” Jasper said. “Two thousand years of wind and rain will do that.”
The Emperor’s body was buried somewhere beneath it all, beneath the bones of the slaves who had built it, beneath the alien pyramid. At least, that’s what Jasper assumed. He knew someday he’d regret not actually having laid eyes on the Emperor’s sarcophagus. He told himself that maybe some things were never meant to be found.
But it would be found, eventually. Archaeologists would dig up the mound to explore the tomb, and there they might find some things that they could not quite explain.
They might ask themselves why a lot of the Terracotta Warriors had been obliterated, or why the crossbows pointing inwards at the staircase were destroyed. They might ask themselves why the arrows had been fired in the first place. And perhaps, to add to their confusion, they might find the bones of another man. If indeed that man was dead.
It didn’t take Jasper long to realise that none of this made sense – Io had rewound time to allow their escape from the tomb, so now, it would be as if they never entered it at all.
They shot off through the sky toward their next destination, soaring over the rugged Chinese countryside, the tall skyscrapers of Shanghai and out over the North Pacific. Very soon, even the last traces of land had disappeared and all they could see was ocean.
Dia was already asleep on the saddle, and Jasper found himself half-smiling at the bird.
“So, are you going to tell me why we are going to Peru?” Io said. “Or shall I wait and see?”
She had brought up a Mind Map and was charting a course to Peru on the holographic globe. The glowing blue dot that was them moved steadily away from the Asian mainland.
“You told me to stop thinking about it like a map,” Jasper said, “but that’s exactly what it was. Do you have something I can draw on?”
“Just draw it in the air.”
Jasper hesitated, then raised his gloved hand and began to trace the wavy line of the water. To his surprise, a line of glowing green Elemental appeared in the air where he had drawn it – like a pencil on paper. He blinked a few times and then kept drawing. Above the water, he drew the circle, then the pyramid, then the mountain range – all exactly as they had been projected on the ceiling of the tomb.
“That is a map?” said Io, doubtful.
“It’s less obvious than the first one, but it’s a map alright. It’s not symbols representing a certain place like I originally thought – it’s a physical layout of the place we need to go to. Water first, then the circle, then the pyramid, then the mountains.”
“And that leads you to Peru?”
Jasper nodded enthusiastically. “The Norte Chico civilisation built a city on the coastal plain of Peru about four and a half thousand years ago. A place called Caral, the oldest city in the Americas.”
“I have not heard of the Norte Chico.” She had a little trouble pronouncing the name. “Who are they?”
“You’ve heard of the Incas, yeah?”
“Yes.”
“Well, the Norte Chico were like the ancestors of the Incas, who didn’t come along for another three thousand years. Even the Olmecs in Mexico, another one of the cradles of civilisation, wouldn’t appear for a full thousand years after the Norte Chico got started.”
“And this is another one of these cradles?”
Jasper nodded. “Yeah. Archaeologists had this theory that what made people go from living as hunter-gatherers to living in cities was warfare. People would band together for protection, to defend their precious resources from other tribes. That’s why they built weapons and went to war with one other. Then, like you said, the strongest warrior became the leader, and it was people like that who would go on to become kings and emperors and pharaohs. But in Caral...they found no evidence of warfare at all.”
Io was surprised. “None?”
Jasper shook his head. “Not one single thing. No weapons, no fortifications, no bodies that had been killed in combat. Nothing. And yet, they built a city.”
“What did they do then, if they were not killing each other as you humans love to do so much?”
Jasper bristled. “As opposed to your peace-loving people like Janus?”
“He is not one of my people,” Io said, becoming heated. “The only war we know is thanks to them.”
“Didn’t your parents ever tell you it takes two people to fight?”
“We would not need to fight if it was not for them.”
Jasper scoffed. “I’m sure that’s what everyone throughout history has said.”
Io didn’t answer that. Jasper ignored it, moved on. “The Norte Chico were peaceful, though. At least according to what we know about them. The desert plain where they lived between the mountains and the coast was the least likely place for civilisation to spring up.”
“How did it, then?”
“Well, there were rivers coming down from the mountains, passing through this plain on the way to the sea. They think that the Norte Chico carved out irrigation canals and turned it into a fertile paradise. One of the things they grew was cotton, which they traded with the fishermen by the coast, who made nets with them. In turn, the fishermen gave them fish, and this made up a large part of the Norte Chico diet, which is strange, considering they’re basically a desert people. But that wasn’t all – they traded for shells from Ecuador in the north, and for dyes and other plants from the highlands and the Amazon jungle further inland. It was a trade network spanning hundreds of miles in different directions. And to have all this without any kind of warfare is crazy – but there you have it. The world’s first peaceful civilisation, based on trade and...well, fun.”
“Fun?” said Io, the word catching her off-guard.
“Yeah, well, they didn’t seem to have any pottery or painting or anything, but what they did have was music. Archaeologists found all these flutes made from animal bones. Throw that together with these hallucinogenic plants they were getting from the jungle and you can imagine these huge feasts with everyone dancing around bonfires to the sound of flutes, people singing...”
Jasper trailed off, smiling – nostalgic for a place he had never been, for a time thousands of years before he was even born. “Why couldn’t we have just stayed that way?”
Io looked over at him and noticed that his smile had faded, that his eyes were suddenly full of some deep sadness. “What way?”
“The way they were living. No war or violence, just living in harmony with nature and with each other. Taking only what they needed, trading with their neighbours instead of killing them.”
Io had to admit it sounded good. “I do not know, Jasper. But from what I can tell, this was a unique culture compared to the rest of your early civilisations. By and large, you seem to be a warlike people, and I am not trying to insult you, only reading the facts.”
Jasper didn’t argue with her. He couldn’t. She was right – they were a warlike people for the most part. The entire history of his species was written in blood, ever since the first hunter-gatherer tribes began fighting with one another. Everywhere except Caral, it seemed. The one place that got it right.
All of this led Jasper to say something he’d been mulling over in his head for a while now. Something he’d been almost afraid to say, concerned about what Io’s reaction might be.
“Is Janus right?” he said. “Should we just...allow humanity to destroy itself?”
Io couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “What? How could you say that? These are your people, Jasper.”
�
��I know.” He looked down, wouldn’t meet her eye. “I just keep thinking that maybe he is right. Maybe they deserve what’s coming to them. And how do we know that even if we do save them, they won’t just keep destroying themselves and the planet anyway?”
“You do not know where this map is going to lead any more than I do, Jasper. We do not know what my ancestors have in store for humanity.”
Jasper went quiet, staring out at the open sea rushing past beneath them. Something seemed to be troubling Io, and after a moment, she said, “What makes you any better?”
Jasper was surprised by the question. “I didn’t say I was better.”
“You think that your people are inherently evil, that they are doomed and we should just let them wipe themselves out. Let me ask you a question: in this scenario, are you wiped out also?”
He hadn’t thought about that. “I suppose so.”
“Then you are prepared to die for the evils of your people?”
“I don’t know,” he said, growing steadily less sure of himself. “I guess.”
“Let me ask you another question, then: if the Progeny is as rotten and corrupt as you claim it to be, then are you not rotten and corrupt also?”
Jasper couldn’t find the words to answer the question, and his silence spoke volumes. He certainly didn’t consider himself to be evil, or that he would be wiped out in whatever cataclysm ended humanity. He had always assumed that the end of his species would come after he had died, after he had led a good life without harming the world or anyone in it. He had always assumed he was good.
“Before judging others,” Io said. “It might be best to look within yourself. Wonder if you would not have cut down a forest if your family depended on the grazing land for your livestock. Wonder if you would not have gone to war had a king told you to do so. If you would not have killed or plundered a city had you lived in a time when that was common. It is easy to stand in judgement of others, but much harder to stand in judgement of yourself.”
Jasper was ashamed now, still not meeting her eye. He knew she was right and he hated it. He hated how arrogant he had been, how superior he had thought himself. She wasn’t shouting and she wasn’t angry – she was simply speaking to him in a calm, rational voice, and he couldn’t argue with a word of it.