Keystone (33 page)

“I’m glad you’re settling in
well,” said Dr Patterson. “I was afraid you may have resented me because of
your situation. But you can see that I didn’t want you to be brought here under
these horrible circumstances, can’t you?”

Gail smiled
across the table. “Sure.” She put her fork down after toying with the chunk of
meat on her plate and looked at her guest across the table in her new quarter’s
modest dining room-cum-kitchen-cum-living room.

The fact that
she’d been moved so quickly from the sterile ‘cell’ to this almost comfortable
apartment worried her; it felt permanent. Ironically, that very feeling made
her want to leave more than ever before.

The apartment
was divided into the dining area, single bedroom and shower room. There were no
windows and she was, presumably, underground, built into the vast complex of
corridors and offices belonging to DEFCOMM.

“I know you’re
one of the good guys, Dr Patterson. Can I call you Henry?”

Henry grinned
and nodded approvingly. “Of course, but only if I can call you Gail?” he added
cheekily.

Gail grinned
back.
Henry
. It would be easy calling
him that, she told herself, as she’d gone out with an annoying idiot called
Henry many, many years ago.

The only
problem was that Henry was turning out to be far less of an annoying idiot than
she had expected.

“Tell me,” he
said. “I’ve read your research on Amarna and Aniquilus. But everything,
including of course my research here, has centred around the main texts from
the pedestal in the Library. What else have you found?”

She gave a wry
smile. “You haven’t read my research very well, then, have you?” He looked down
briefly, as if ashamed at not having known more about her. “The Library
contained a vast number of texts, indeed thousands, broken down into four
categories,” she continued. “The tablets, mostly made out of clay, we found
stacked on most of the lower shelves. Remember the shelves were made of wood,
so the bottom ones were probably the best place to put them. We also found that
the shelf space was classified quite carefully: the higher the document in the
shelf, the more important it appeared to be. The pedestal is clearly the epitome
of this.”

“So the
tablets were the least important?”

“It appears
so. Ironically, they’re also the best preserved by a good margin. In a dry environment,
the hardened clay doesn’t deteriorate visibly. What they showed, almost
exclusively, were purchase ledgers for agricultural produce, such as the trade
in livestock and the provision of grain to the royal palace. They were written
in a mixture of cuneiform, obviously for international trade, and hieratic
hieroglyphs. One tablet was different, in that it had a mixture of full
hieroglyphs and hieratic; we believe,
I
believe,
that it was written by the Library’s architect, a sort of ‘I did this’ note,
although there is no signature.”

Henry raised
an eyebrow. “I wonder if it could be matched to the story that led us to Amarna
in the first place.”

“You mean your
architect’s scroll? Well, you could try, but tablets were written on by
pressing a stylus into soft clay, whereas scrolls are written with
brushstrokes. In my opinion you could probably trace two tablets back to the
same stylus, but it would be impossible to link a scroll to a tablet. You may
however be able to link the hieratic, which is highly stylised, to the same
author. Your main problem would be getting hold of the tablet in Cairo. I would
have been happy to help, but then this all happened.”

“What other
types of text were in the Library?” Henry did his best to ignore her jab.

“The papyrus scrolls.
We were pretty excited to find those, because they’re exceptionally rare.
Because papyrus can’t be folded without cracking, it’s generally rolled up.
This was the principal medium for storing long texts until the time of the
Romans, when parchments were chopped into pages and bound into a codex with a
wooden cover. Papyrus is really susceptible to pretty moderate conditions. It
doesn’t like damp, because it rots, and it doesn’t like dryness, because it
cracks. In fairness, they had nothing better and at the time it was a
technological revolution, as papyrus is cheap and easy to use. But for us
archaeologists, they couldn’t have made a worse choice. Most surviving papyrus
scrolls are from the Roman era, so the Library discovery was remarkable.” She paused
to sip some wine. “Your architect scroll is a unique sample. From what I saw,
it may be one of the oldest and best preserved. It belongs in a museum.”

“What of the
scrolls in the Library?” he tried to change the subject. Ten years ago he had
missed his only opportunity to get the scroll in a museum, and it was too late
to go back now.

She sighed.
“We were spoilt. While a lot of the scrolls were evidently ruined, dried to the
extent that they disintegrated on contact, most were solid. Solid evidently means
they cannot be unravelled by hand. The reason some were better preserved than
others probably goes back to the origin of the papyrus reeds themselves, their
age, storage prior to entering the Library, possibly even the ink used to write
on them. The surviving ones were boxed up pretty much within a day of the
Library being accessed, and over the next few years, robotic ‘readers’ at the
Museum of Cairo opened them, millimetre by millimetre, until their content
could be read. The first to be opened revealed a biography of an inhabitant of
Amarna. The everyday account of one family’s life, who they were, what they
did, and why they were there. On its own, that one scroll confirmed the main
theory behind Amarna: that it was a religious experiment, a new beginning and a
departure from the ways of the previous dynasties. What astounded us more than
anything was the way you could really sense the excitement in the text. They
were living in an age of religious enlightenment, where the Pharaoh was not so
removed from his people; a more ‘down to earth’ culture. They really had no
idea the experiment wouldn’t work. Since then, half a dozen scrolls have been
accessed, all with the same subject matter, but each focusing on a different
family.”

“Why did the
experiment fail?”

She shrugged.
“There are many ideas. It probably became economically unviable, there would
have been foreign pressure on a shrinking Egyptian military power, a coup
driven by supporters of the traditional polytheistic ways could have ousted
them, and so on. Tutankhaten, Akhenaten’s son from a marriage with his own
sister, Tiye, changed his name to Tutankhamen, becoming the first king to
return to the old capital at Thebes and reject the worship of one god, the
Aten. He was young and quite unwell, so probably bowed easily under pressures
from traditionalists, most notably the priesthood and military leaders.”

“What do you
believe?” he looked at her intently.

She accepted
his offer of a refill and took a gulp of wine. The more she drank, the sweeter
it tasted. “I think that someone, Nefertiti to be precise, persuaded her
husband, the new King of Egypt, to leave behind Egypt’s militaristic,
expansionist ways in favour of a simple life in the country. From what I know
now, I believe she did this because she believed that the old ways, if
continued, could only lead to destruction and suffering for us all. I think she
was a pacifist and a humanist. But in the long run, it failed. Professor
al-Misri once compared Amarna to the old Soviet Union, because it looked
impressive, but was badly built from poor quality materials, and in the end
destined to crumble.

“But it also
has another parallel to the Soviet Union: it couldn’t exist in isolation, and
its premise was counter-intuitive to human nature. They were surrounded by
other civilizations, all ready to eat away at their weakened state. You have to
remember Egypt was a superpower at this time, so it was an attractive target,
too. And as if that wasn’t enough, Nefertiti’s utopian ideal was destroyed from
within by greed. To be honest, I’m amazed it lasted as long as it did.” She
finished talking and emptied her glass. Henry filled it again.

“Sounds like a
good theory.”

“Hypothesis,”
she corrected him.

“What else was
in the Library?”

“Architectural
drawings carved into wooden tablets, some maps, and our famous books. Until the
last couple of days, I thought that my Book of Aniquilus was the only surviving
Egyptian codex, predating any known Roman effort by more than a thousand years.
But now, it has a twin!” She stopped talking for long enough to realise that
Henry was looking at her with a smile on his face. She cringed. He was nice
enough as a person, but she could see where this was going; the wine, the mood
lighting, the meal.
His greasy bald head.

“Indeed. Do
you think there’s anything else in the Library, something you might have
missed?”

“Why?” She
dragged her eyes away from the top of his head, which was reflecting the
spotlight above the table.

“Because of
what’s happening on Mars,” he said. “Two of the crew disappeared behind a door,
and we haven’t heard from them since. There’s obviously a link between the two
places, and the books don’t mention it. So maybe there’s something in the
Library, something
architectural
? If
we found it, it might help us find a way to get them out, or at least find out
for ourselves what’s behind the door.”

Gail thought
to herself for a moment. There had been one big puzzle, one that even the
Professor had been stumped by. She looked into her wine, as if it would help
her decide whether or not she would share this information with Henry.

“What is it?”
he asked.

He’s not the enemy
, she told herself.
He just wants to help those poor people on
Mars. And he’s always treated you well, hasn’t he?
And it’s not a bad thing that he’s obviously attracted to you – if
anything you should be flattered
.
When
was the last time George showed this much interest in your work? In you?
She held the stem of the glass and moved it round in circles, the centripetal
force causing the wine to rise up the sides of the glass.
Or was it centrifugal?
Either
way,
I have to get out of here, and
this is my chance
.

She looked
across the table and into his eyes.

“There is
something we never solved. The contents of the Library were so incredible that
the place itself was overlooked. Over the last few years it has been revisited,
but never with the resources it fully deserved. Remember, it’s just a big empty
room, now. It’s not even that interesting to look at, just a hole underground.”

Henry urged
her to continue.

“Well, I don’t
know how much you know about the original dig,” she explained, “but we pretty
much forced our way in using a big drill.” He nodded implicitly. “OK, you know
that, because the engineers were your guys, weren’t they?”

“Well, not
mine, but certainly on the same payroll, yes.”

“Anyway, they
cut a big hole in the wall, which has been used as the door ever since. There
was talk of sealing the hole with a submarine-style hinged door, but it was
easier to just move everything inside to a better location to preserve it; once
the seal was broken, the environment inside the Library became environmentally
unstable, open to the changing humidity of the outside world; everything was at
risk, whether we closed the door again or not.”

“So if you cut
a hole in the wall, where was the original, Egyptian door?”

“Exactly.” She
let the word hang over the table like an unwelcome guest for several moments
before continuing. “At first, before we got inside, it was something we had
wondered. But inside the antechamber, all the other walls were bedrock. Only
the one we drilled through had anything on the other side. Once we got inside,
the contents of the Library blew us away, but even so it didn’t take long to
work out that there was no obvious door.”

“So it’s never
been found?”

“Not just that,”
she had a sparkle in her eye. “We had so much to study from the Library and so
much preservation work to undertake, it would have been scientifically
irresponsible to uncover anything else before we had reasonably dealt with the
initial finds first.”

“
Initial
finds? I thought you said you
emptied the Library. What else are you expecting to uncover?”

“Think about
it: if we found the Library by digging through the wall, we must have missed
the main entrance, and any other rooms in between. Because of its location
underground, and our searches above ground, the main entrance has to be some
way off. So somewhere down there is something more than
just
a Library. I believe, and so did the Professor, that the
Library held the main treasure trove, the hidden secrets of Amarna. But I also
believe that once we find the door inside the Library, we’ll find something
that Egyptologists have been trying to find for over a hundred years.”

Henry looked
at her blankly, and she groaned. “You
really
don’t know much about this, do you?” she said rolling her eyes. “Nefertiti! The
Library is part of the tomb complex of Nefertiti!”

“Incredible,”
he said with genuine surprise. “So the Library is only part of an as yet
unexplored tomb at Amarna, and you believe you can get inside?”

“I think that
with the correct tools and equipment, we can. Do you think it’s worth a try?”

He thought for
a few seconds. “I do. There’s obviously a massive difference in the two sites,
in that one predates the other by a couple of hundred thousand years, and happens
to be on another planet,” he laughed dryly. “However, they are also strikingly
similar: they both contain the only known uses of the Aniquilus symbol, the
Stickman, and they’re both ‘tombs’ underground. Finding out the secrets of how
to open doors in the Library may help with Mars.” He curled his bottom lip and
looked down. “And besides, it’s all we have to go on, so it’s better than
sitting here doing nothing.”