Luna Marine (16 page)

“
It remains to be seen whether human civilization was something bestowed on human slaves by the masters, or whether it was developed independently by primitive cul
tures attempting to emulate the godlike visitors in their midst
.”

She read the paragraphs again, her eyes tearing, her head making little, involuntary no-no motions. He had it all wrong! The Divine Masters hadn't been like that, couldn't have been like that at all! He was misinterpreting the data; he
had
to be!

No matter. Pastor Blaine would know what to do. He always did. He never admitted it, but she was certain he was somehow inspired by the Masters themselves, as they orbited the Earth in their invisible mother ships, watching over their people below.

She completed her final copy and uploaded it to the pastor's address. Then she checked through David's files once more, this time—with a painful curiosity that burned like the picking of an old scab—looking for any more of those saved vid recordings or other files that might have been sent by
that
woman.

She was almost disappointed when she failed to find any more.

FRIDAY
, 25
APRIL
2042

Institute for Exoarcheological
Studies
Chicago, Illinois
1610 hours CDT

There were no marching crowds today, for a change, no ancient-astronut mobs calling for revelation, no church groups denouncing him as inspired by Satan. Traffic flowed along Lake Shore Drive, building toward the afternoon rush, and, for once, Chicago was ignoring him.

It was still a little startling to David to stand at his office window, looking past Soldier's Field and the Adler Planetarium causeway out to the cold, flat, gray horizon of Lake Michigan, and realize that he'd actually been out
there
, on the surface of the Moon. He was now one of that handful of men and women who'd stood on the surface of three separate planetary bodies. A most exclusive club indeed.

And the place to which he'd returned, the real world of work and politics and deadlines, seemed so…ordinary.

“David?” Teri called from his desk. “Is something wrong?”

Fixing a smile in place, he turned. “No. Not a thing. Just woolgathering.”

She smiled and stroked the copy, cast in resin, of one of the artifacts he'd brought back from Picard. “Howard agrees completely with your analysis of P-3, right down the list, word for word. Congratulations!”

“Good,” he replied absently. “Uh,
very
good. Sorry. I just wish I had a little more confidence in that thing.”

“That thing” was the Expert System Program running in the Institute's local network, one of the new AIs that offered encyclopedic knowledge within its expert purview, combined with an almost human flexibility and reasoning power.

Almost
human.

Privately, he'd named this one after Howard Vyse, the nineteenth-century adventurer and soldier of fortune who'd done so much damage to the science of archeology in his ham-fisted and outright criminal explorations of the three main pyramids at the Giza Complex, in Egypt. Vyse, it was now nearly certain, had perpetrated several incredible hoaxes in order to establish that the Great Pyramids had been built as tombs by three particular Fourth Dynasty pharaohs—Khufu, Khephren, and Menkaure—all three within a period of eighty years, from about 2550 to 2470
B.C.
So much of the modern understanding of history and historical timetables had been built upon Vyse's claims, so much professional literature published, so many reputations established and doctorates awarded and names secured, that even now, two centuries later, there were firmly entrenched adherents to the “traditional” views of Egyptology. Vyse might have been a charlatan, the conservatives insisted, but he was still
right
. His conclusions were valid even if his proofs were faked. To claim otherwise would unravel two centuries of carefully interwoven dates and meticulously constructed historical comprehension.

By calling the Institute's archeological ESP Howard, David reminded himself not to take what it said as gospel.

“I still don't understand why you're so paranoid about expert systems,” Teri said with a laugh. “They give us access to more information than we could absorb in a decade or three of solid study, and without the human politics you're always railing about.” She patted the desk's open display screen fondly. “Howard wouldn't lie to us! The way you talk, you'd think we had your friend Kettering locked up in here!”

David snorted. Craig Kettering was a professional ri
val—an enemy, really—who'd been on the expedition to Mars. They'd parted ways when Kettering had gone along with the UN plan to hush up the Cydonian findings. Now that they were back on Earth, the man was happily publishing with the data David had made available, acting as though nothing at all had happened between them.

“Actually,” he said, “I think my problem is that Howard isn't political enough. He agrees with
everything
I say, and that's scary.”

“Well, if you can't trust the machine, can you trust
me
? I hope you don't keep me around here just because I'm good in bed!”

“Of course not!” Technically, Teri was on loan to the Institute from the Field Museum's Oriental Department. The Cydonian Research Foundation had paid a lot of money to hire her general archeological expertise, but when the Lunar tablets turned out to be partly written in ancient Sumerian, she'd proven herself absolutely invaluable.

“Your translations have all agreed with Howard's
and
mine.” She made a face. “Admit it, David. You're good, and that's all there is to it.”

“Maybe. But that's not going to be enough for…them.”

“‘Them'?”

“This could be Egypt all over again,” he told her. “
Worse
than Egypt. And here I'm just on the point of gaining my reputation back.”

She knew that story, of course. He'd told her about it the first time they'd slept together, in a hotel in Los Angeles during one of his public-relations appearances for the government upon his return from Mars. David Alexander had been an authority on Egypt before the war, an expert in sonic-imaging tomography, an expertise that had landed him that billet in a cycler to Mars. His discovery of confirmation that the Sphinx went back long before the Fourth Dynasty had ended with him being evicted from Egypt and his reputation being called into question; some lies, he'd discovered, were too well established—and too important politically—to be challenged. The Egyptian
government had a vested interest in maintaining the myth that
Egyptians
had raised the Great Pyramids, not some unknown civilization from eight thousand years before.

Things were far worse, with the dawning realization that extraterrestrials had been responsible for shaping human culture millennia ago. With the discoveries on Mars and, now, on the Moon, there could be no doubting their reality, or the fact that they'd visited Earth more than once and for long periods of time. The argument came down to how much, if at all, they'd actually interacted with humanity.

Belief was fast polarizing into absolute and unshakable opposites. On the one side were the ancient astronuts, with their cosmic-awareness sessions, their churches of universal life, and the conviction that ETs had done everything notable in human history, from building the pyramids to establishing each of the world's major religions. On the other side were the diehard conservatives within the archeological, anthropological, and historical-academic communities, who admitted—most of them, anyway—that, yes, extraterrestrials might have visited Earth, Mars, and the Moon in the remote past, but who stated point-blank that even open contact could have affected no more than a handful of individual humans…and human culture not at all.

The truth, as usual, lay somewhere between the two extremes. Establishing exactly where could well destroy his professional reputation for a second time.

“Are you saying,” Teri said carefully, “that you
want
Howard to be prejudiced? As political as Tom Leonard?”

He grimaced at the name. Leonard was one of his most outspoken critics, the author of several prominent papers attacking the cultural-intervention theory.

“It might help.” He gestured at the replica on the desk. “Leonard and his bunch are going to be all over this. All over our translations. If there is any possibility that we're missing something, missing some nuance or shade of meaning, or misinterpreting what was being said, we have to
know
.”

“I'd say our identification of this one name alone,
An
,
with the eight-pointed star as their symbol, makes any of their quibbles pretty irrelevant. The Sumerian tie-in is perfect.”

“Which is exactly the problem, Teri. It's
too
perfect. The astronuts are going to grab this and run with it. I…I don't think we'll be able to keep a lid on it after this.”

“So…what's worrying you? That your work is going to get lost in all the shouting and yelling? Or that people are going to call you dirty names? Damn it, it's the
truth
that's important.”

“I'm beginning to think that there is truth…and more important truth….” He rubbed his eyes. “I'm not even sure what I believe anymore.”

The reproduction on his desk was a resin faxcasting of the first of the seventeen gold, silver, and electrum artifacts he'd uncovered on the floor of Picard. His desk's computer screen was open, displaying long columns of symbols, Proto-Sumerian characters and English words, the beginning of a translation of the artifact's dual text.

In 1799, a French soldier with Napoléon's army working on the fortifications of Rashid, Egypt—a place Europeans called Rosetta—turned up a flat, polished stone inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics, with a kind of cursive hieroglyphic script called demotic, and Greek. The Rosetta stone was the key that allowed Jean-François Champollion to decipher the language of a civilization in some ways as alien to eighteenth-century Europe as the Builders were to humankind.

What he'd found at Picard was a Rosetta stone indeed…or, rather, seventeen Rosetta stones that together were slowly but conclusively hammering home a definite link between the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia, and another race of extraterrestrials that—if the Proto-Sumerian translations were accurate—called itself the An.

“If our translations are accurate,” David went on after a moment, “then we have a race, a civilization that called itself
An
, building colonies on Earth something like six thousand…maybe as far back as thirteen thousand years ago. The artistic style definitely ties them in with ancient Sumer.”

“What the natives called Shumer,” Teri said. “‘The Land of the Guardians.' The name of their chief god was An or Anu. And the pantheon of Sumerian gods was called the
Anunnaki
….”

“‘Those who came to Earth from the place of An,'” David added, translating. He'd been working on Proto-Sumerian translations now for days, and it was becoming second nature.

“You know,” she said, “this has always been one of the biggest mysteries of archeology, as big a question mark as the Sphinx or the pyramids. The Sumerian language is unrelated to any other we know. The people…we have no idea where they came from. They were not Semitic, like the Akkadians or the others who built on their culture later. And when they settled in Mesopotamia, well…it was almost literally as though civilization sprang into being overnight. They claimed the gods had given them writing, medicine, architecture. The gods domesticated animals and created new kinds of grain and other crops.”

“Small wonder some of the astronuts have been claiming the Sumerians themselves were extraterrestrial.”

She snorted. “That idea's ludicrous, of course. They were human, which means they shared their DNA with the life evolved here.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That's the one bit of silliness that gets me most about some of the ancient-astronut crowd. Adam and Eve were
not
shipwrecked visitors from another planet! Not when chimpanzees share something over ninety-eight percent of our DNA!”

“I do wonder, sometimes, if the Sumerians might have come from the human colony on Mars, the one the Builders put there. The bodies you found there?”

He grunted. “Hard to see how that would fit. The Builders were on Mars half a million years ago. That's a long time, between whoever built the Face and the rise of Sumeria. No, there's more to this. A
lot
more.” He shook his head. “Anyway, what we found on the Moon is going to upset
everybody
. The ancient-astronaut cults, established religions, the archeological community. The gov
ernment. Historians. It's hard to think of someone I'm
not
going to piss off when I release this stuff.”

“I still think you're being too sensitive. I can understand the problem with the conservative archeologists. But the cults? And the churches?”

“Remember all of those places in the Bible, in Genesis, where God says things like, ‘Let
us
make Man in
our
image?…' Holdovers from the Sumerian texts that those passages were based on. Hell, ever since George Smith translated the
Epic of Gilgamesh
, back in 1872, we've known that a lot of Genesis came to us from Sumerian myths and writings. The Garden of Eden, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, all of that.” He chuckled, but the sound was grim. “Don't you think the Vatican is going to be a bit upset if we produce proof that the Yahweh of the Old Testament was an Anunnaki, straight out of Sumerian myths?

“As for the ancient-astronaut churches, they all see the ET ‘gods' as saviors. Protectors. Angels and divine guides. Nice people who might turn up again someday to help Mankind out of its current mess.”

She made a sour face. “It would help if the An were the savior type.”

He reached out and lightly stroked the faxcast, with its row of five humans, bound and leashed. “Kind of puts the whole idea of worshiping God in a new light, doesn't it?”

What he'd translated so far seemed to match certain aspects of the Sumerian myths; humans had been slaves under the An, working in their mines and agricultural colonies and even as janissary armies, conquering “uncivilized” neighbors under the direction of their godlike masters. Most of the translations he'd worked out so far, with Howard's help, spoke of primitive tribes rounded up and “civilized” by troops under the command of
Sharu-Gaz
, a term literally meaning “Supreme Leaders of the Killers,” but which both David and Howard had translated as “war-Leaders.” They listed cattle, sheep, and crops taken, gathered, and counted; tributes offered; enemies killed; villages burned; precious metals—the Sumerian word was
zu-ab
—gathered for transport to “Heaven”; and
vast numbers of slaves captured, penned, and sold. The An, whoever they'd been, appeared to share human bio-chemistry, with left-handed amino acids and a preference for right-handed sugars. They'd been able to eat crops and animals native to Earth, and they'd forced the natives to raise those crops and herds. For them.