2041 Sanctuary (Let There Be Light) (36 page)

Spread out before him on the thin sleeping bag lay the printouts of the photos he’d taken of the frieze, and the numerous inscriptions and carvings he’d discovered on the ground around the city’s eastern quarter. As with everything else in their camp, such things as printers were scarce and the ink and paper to go with them scarcer still. However, being the director had its privileges and he’d been able to convince one of the civilians to let him utilise their precious kit. Now with time to spare, he’d been able to study the images in detail and he jotted down notes on anything he found that might aid them in their plight. So far such writings had been unrelated observations, and yet he felt some had merit.

A large photo of the frieze had proven the most useful. From what Goodwin could see the pentagram in its centre, while missing a couple of its points, was the structure upon which the sculpture had been based. Everything seemed to revolve around it. The passages Rebecca had quoted from the Bible also weaved their magic around his mind like the murmurings of messages through time. Did the Anakim have links to human culture? Did the creatures depicted portray the fallen angels of God, the Nephilim? And if they did, how did that help him?

His eyes strayed to a separate photo of the spiral map of the city’s centre. It covered a massive area and each spiral arm encompassed some of the largest towers, its middle dominated by the massive structure that continued to amaze with its purple light show. He’d been told, however, the unusual phenomenon was winding down. Each time the energy flowed up its great bulk to discharge into the sparkling ceiling of the chamber beyond, its duration diminished. When they’d first witnessed it, the event had lasted for nearly twenty minutes. Since that time it had reduced to only a few, its decline estimated to reach non-existence within the week.

He wondered for the hundredth time if they were missing anything. Should they be doing something to use this resource?

Goodwin’s frustration mounted and more time passed as he struggled to pluck meaning from obscurity before Kara appeared, pushing aside the tent flap to enter.

She looked down at the images on the bed. ‘Wasting more resources, I see.’

Goodwin hastily swept the photos aside as she sat down. ‘I’m not wasting anything. There’s something here, I know it.’

Kara eyed him, her expression unfathomable, and Goodwin reached out a hand. ‘Please,’ – he touched her arm – ‘will you take a look for me?’

She gave a weary shake of her head and picked up some photos. ‘Do you want to know about the search?’ she said, flicking through the images.

Not really
, he thought. ‘Have they found anyone else?’

‘Two more bodies washed up. They’re still looking for the others.’

‘It’s not looking good, then.’

‘They tell me if the fish haven’t finished them off, the cold water will have done.’

Goodwin sought the words to say, but feeling sympathy when depressed was like trying to grab an eel in oil. Instead he pointed to the corner of one of the photos. ‘Those symbols keep appearing all over the city.’

Kara paused and gazed at the carved lines he’d indicated:

She handed them back to him. ‘They’re meaningless.’

Goodwin went back to his analysis and rearranged his media while Kara undressed for bed. Putting a foot into the sleeping bag, she stopped to look over his shoulder at the images of the symbol and spiral map he now held. Goodwin saw her brow furrow.

He moved the photos closer to her. ‘You see something, don’t you?’

She squirmed under the cover. ‘It’s nothing.’

‘Tell me.’

‘I told you, it’s nothing.’

She tried to roll away from him, but he held onto her shoulder. ‘Kara, if you’ve seen something it could be important. Just because you’re angry with me, don’t punish everyone else.’

She sat up. ‘Angry? No. Furious? Yes. But I’m also worried out of my mind. In almost a matter of days you’ve lost touch with reality, chasing after shadows and ignoring your responsibilities.’

‘So you don’t want to encourage me, is that it?’

‘That’s not what I said. Are you even listening to what I’m saying?’

‘For God’s sake, Kara, JUST TELL ME!’

She blinked at his ferocity, her eyes brimming in distress and turned away to hide under the covers once more.

He looked heavenward, cursing himself.
She’ll never tell me now
.

Deep within he wanted to snap out of his malady, to be who he was, to be the man she wanted, not the morose, ill-tempered monster he felt himself becoming. He lay down beside her, his thoughts in turmoil. Mistakes past and present ran through his mind, tormenting him. Everything seemed too much. Everything was too much. Whatever he did turned to pain and darkness.
People are dying and I don’t even care
. The thought horrified him and it was all he could think about until morning.

Chapter Forty One

An alarm woke Goodwin from his shallow slumber, his cumulative hours of sleep numbering just one. Kara was already up and dressed.

She switched off the buzzer and gazed down at his bleary eyes before moving to the tent’s exit.

‘Kara—’

‘It’s a constellation.’

He propped himself up on an elbow. ‘What?’

‘The symbols on your Anakim carvings, they match the constellation of Libra.’

He leant over and peered at one of the photos he’d left on the floor. ‘Are you sure?’

‘Pretty sure, and the map spiral, it looks—’

He blinked back his tiredness, trying to concentrate. ‘Looks like what?’

‘The Milky Way, the spiral arms match our galaxy.’

Stunned, Goodwin could see she still held more information back. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

Her expression turned pensive. ‘If the carvings are truly ancient, then the stars would have altered positions. The constellation should look … different.’

‘How different?’

‘I don’t know. I’m not an astrophysicist and I have work to do, look it up.’

The tent flap rustled and she was gone.

He rolled out of bed, his fatigue forgotten and neurons firing.

Fifteen minutes later Goodwin entered the civilian computer centre on the other side of the camp.

A man with long hair and a beard shuffled around a desk towards him. ‘Director, we don’t normally see you in these parts.’

‘I need to use your netcube.’

‘Haven’t your Darklight chaps got one?’

‘They have, but it’s integrated into their control setup and I need it mobile.’

The man grimaced and picked up a large square device by its carry handle. ‘People won’t be happy if you take away their only source of reference.’

‘I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can,’ Goodwin said, accepting the heavy computer, ‘I promise.’

‘I’ll hold you to that, Director!’ the man called after him as he left to return to his tent.

By the time Goodwin reached his spartan dwelling, he’d had to swap the device from one hand to the other numerous times and his shoulders and arms ached with pain. He set the box down with relief and connected it to a power supply from the small water-powered generator Darklight had set up nearby. He then unfolded his mobile computer’s large screen and synced the netcube to it.

A wonder of the modern age, even ten years ago the capacity of storage drives would have been nowhere capable of holding the vast amount of data of a modern day netcube. But when humanity had neared the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, the power of fluid drives had taken a leap forward and the possibility of storing – not the entire World Wide Web, but the majority of its mainstream data – had become a reality. Of course, the company that provided the
webinabox
, as they’d become known, could be told what sites and files to omit so valuable space for knowledge wasn’t taken up by videos of amusing kittens or unforeseen accidents starring the unfortunate.

A search box popped up on-screen and Goodwin entered the term
Libra Constellation
. A myriad of entries spooled up, and he clicked on the first. The image shown was indeed similar to the stone carvings he’d found dotted around the city, except the carvings had one line omitted from the image. Unable to think of any reason why the Anakim had failed to link all the points, he switched his attention to the image of the galaxy. According to the sites he read, it seemed the actual number of major and minor arms in the Milky Way’s spiral – and their positions – had been hotly contested by the scientific community for decades. That was until more advanced deep space telescopes, probably designed with tracking the approaching asteroids in mind, had cleared up the ambiguities; which meant the Anakim had possessed technology sophisticated enough to realise complex cosmological structures.

Kara was correct in her assumptions, however. It seemed – given a long enough period in time, say fifty thousand years – the constellations in the night sky would alter, which meant something was amiss if the symbols matched the current position of stars for the Libra collective.
Unless
, he reasoned,
the symbols were carved much later. Although according to Corporal Walker, Sanctuary has been abandoned too long for that to be an option. So what does it mean? It means
, he realised,
that the Anakim designed the symbols to coincide with the position of the stars as they are today, or at least during the current duration of human civilisation
.

Rebecca’s biblical prophecy, Jude 1:6, once more came to the forefront of his mind …
kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day
. His eyes strayed to the photo of the unearthed frieze and the demonic nature of its sculpture. He shuddered and thought of the creature that roamed the darkness.
It could easily be classed as some kind of ethereal being, but a fallen angel?

He typed in the word Nephilim and read on. It seemed the term could mean a number of things, depending on what source of reference you listened to. The Bible indicated they were the offspring of the sons of God and female humans, as per Rebecca’s quotation from Genesis 6:4, although, according to other sources, specifically another passage from the Bible, Numbers 13:30-33, the Nephilim were giants who lived in a place called Canaan.

But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, ‘Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.’ Then the men who had gone up with him said, ‘We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.’ So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, ‘The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.’

So, the Nephilim were not as he’d initially thought, fallen angels, but their half-human offspring, half human, half demon. More investigation revealed they could also be the children of Seth, the brother to Cain and Abel and the third son of Adam and Eve. Goodwin sipped some water, his lack of sleep catching up with him. This was confusing stuff in itself, but to then try and link that with far older Anakim sculptures made for a powerful headache. He needed some help. Collecting his photos, he stowed his personal computer, picked up the netcube and left his tent.

A few minutes later he’d worked his way across the floor of the dark chamber and followed the camp’s sparse lighting rigs to Rebecca’s sprawling tent.

He ducked his head inside to see all was quiet. Rebecca and the two other mental health carers, Julie and Arianna, sat on the ground in muted conversation, while their brood, including Joseph, slept in a mass huddle near the back of the tent. A pang of guilt for bringing these people here lanced through him. He’d saved them from the rioting after the asteroid had hit, the streets of Albuquerque having turned to chaos, but he’d brought them here, to a pit of despair as barren as his own mind.

Julie saw him and nudged Rebecca, who turned round to wave him over.

‘Richard, what brings you here?’

He sat down opposite her while Julie and Arianna went to make themselves busy elsewhere.

Rebecca caught his look. ‘It’s nothing personal; they needed to get the noon meal ready anyway.’

‘I need your help,’ – he held up the netcube – ‘I’ve had a breakthrough.’

♦

‘So, let me get this straight,’ Rebecca said, ‘the symbols are the Libra constellation, the spiral is the galaxy, and the frieze has a pentagram, which we also think mirrors, tenuously, passages from the Bible.’

‘Correct.’

‘And Kara says the constellation should be different if it’s as old as we think it is?

‘Yes.’

She looked thoughtful. ‘Then we should go through it methodically; perhaps we need to find more links between the Anakim and the Nephilim.’

Goodwin gave a nod, he was glad she could be rational, just having someone lay it out in simple terms was enough to get him back on track. He typed in the two words and looked at the results thrown up by the netcube.