The Covenant of Genesis (36 page)

Chase rummaged in his own pack for a lamp and switched it on, noticing a large gap on a shelf. ‘It’s not
that
entire. Somebody’s taken a bunch of stuff off this shelf. Hate to think what the overdue fines are after this long.’

‘There are more missing over here,’ Sophia added, peering down another aisle. ‘And here, too.’ Whole sections were empty, entire shelves gaping.

Nina took off her gloves, lifting a tablet at random. The ice crackled before finally giving up its prize. She recognised a handful of the words upon it; there was mention of wind, cold and storms. A record of the weather?

Another snap of ice from a few aisles away. ‘This one seems to be about some sort of dispute between families,’ said Sophia after a few moments.

Nina retrieved a couple of glowsticks and moved deeper into the maze, stopping at an empty shelf. Examining it, she made out words carved into the stone slab itself. ‘Sophia, look at this,’ she called. Sophia and Chase joined her. ‘I think it’s an index - it’ll tell us what’s missing, rather than what’s been left behind.’

Sophia brushed away the frost. ‘I think it says “grain”. Some sort of crop, anyway. And that’s “water” - not the sea, but fresh.’

‘Something about farming?’ Chase suggested. ‘Like how to grow grain?’

‘How to
irrigate
grain,’ Nina realised. The reason why some sections of the library were empty while others had been left completely intact was becoming clear. ‘That’s something that’d be useful if you had to pack up and start from scratch. But historical records, accounts of legal disputes . . . not so much.’

‘You think they took the missing tablets with them?’ asked Sophia.

‘They cleaned out the rest of the place when they left, so there’s no reason why they wouldn’t take valuable knowledge with them - the kind of knowledge that would help them survive. But this . . .’ She pulled another tablet free. ‘This is still an incredible find - it’ll give us an amazing amount of information about how the Veteres lived. But when they went back to Australia to escape the changing climate, they left it all behind, because it would just be dead weight. And when you’re sailing thousands of miles in primitive boats, the last thing you want aboard is dead weight.’

Sophia sounded almost offended. ‘So all this is worthless? They took all the most important tablets with them and left the junk behind?’

‘It’s
not
worthless,’ Nina said irritably, professional pride insulted. ‘I just said—’

‘It’s of absolutely no use to us right now. And it doesn’t help us deal with the Covenant. We already knew the Veteres left here and went back to Australia - we’re no better off than we were before. Just a lot colder.’

‘There’s still plenty more to look at,’ Chase said, standing beside Nina. ‘This tree they kept going on about might be just round the next corner.’

Sophia swung her torch back and forth, finding only more shelves. ‘Somehow I doubt that, Eddie,’ she said with a sneer.

‘I don’t mean
literally
the next corner, for fuck’s sake. Christ, this is just like when we—’

‘It’s
not
literal,’ Nina interrupted. Chase and Sophia looked at her. ‘The tree, I mean,’ she continued, mind racing as a new idea took form. ‘It’s not literal - the translation doesn’t literally mean tree! Ribbsley got it wrong, just like he did about wind and sand - it’s symbolic, something with multiple meanings depending on the context.’ She paced rapidly back and forth along the aisle. ‘What else can a tree represent? What’s the symbolism behind it?’

Sophia quickly overcame her anger to focus on the problem. ‘Growth and change,’ she said. ‘Or cycles, cycles of nature.’

Chase’s thoughts were more practical. ‘You get wood from trees. Or fruit.’

‘The tree of the gift,’ said Nina, ‘the tree of life. If it’s not a literal tree, then what is it? The
something
of life, the
something
of the gift.’

‘It’d help if we knew what the gift was,’ Chase said.

Nina tried to remember the Australian inscription. ‘The Veteres thought their god was punishing them. And their term for “god” included “tree” - “the one great tree”, wasn’t it?’ Sophia nodded. ‘So to them god and tree were interlinked. What were they thinking? How did their minds work?’ Words clicked through her own mind, alternative meanings flashing past like possible solutions to a crossword clue. ‘So what is God? God’s the creator, the provider, the giver of life . . . the
source
,’ she concluded. ‘The source of life, the source of the gift, the one great source. And a tree is a source, of lots of things - it gives you shelter, food, wood . . .’

‘It fits,’ Sophia realised. ‘They used the word tree as a symbolic representation for source - of anything.’

‘Which means,’ Nina said, looking at the shelves, ‘that we’re in “the source of the gift”. The library is the source of the gift.’

‘So what
is
this gift?’ Chase demanded.

‘It’s knowledge!’ Nina said, laughing. ‘The gift from their god was
knowledge
! The ability to record and pass on everything they’d ever learned to their descendants, who passed it on to
their
descendants, and so on. And all of this at a time when we thought humans hadn’t even developed cave paintings. My God, this is amazing!’

‘Their god wasn’t quite so impressed,’ said Sophia. ‘He tried to destroy them, remember? For “giving the gift of God to the beasts”.’

Chase looked dubious. ‘How do you give knowledge to animals?’

The answer came to Nina. ‘You train them. That’s what the hypogeum must have been - a training area. Start them out in harsh, cramped conditions under constant supervision to break them, then move them to easier surroundings once you’ve got control. First the stick, then the carrot. I doubt PETA would approve, but it’d work.’

‘So their god decided to freeze them to death for teaching their dogs to fetch? Bit steep.’

‘That’s primitive religion for you. If things go bad, the only conceivable explanation is that you’ve somehow angered your god.’

‘So if “the tree of the gift” is actually the source of knowledge,’ said Sophia, ‘what about “the tree of life”? The source of life?’

‘I don’t know,’ Nina replied, ‘but that sounds like something the Covenant would be interested in, don’cha think?’ She gathered up the glowsticks. ‘Let’s find it.’

 

The library extended for some distance. Nina judged that roughly a fifth of the storage space was empty - which meant that in their flight to warmer climes, the Veteres had been forced to abandon four-fifths of their entire recorded knowledge: an incredible loss to any society. Had they simply sacrificed too much of the knowledge they needed to survive?

They made their way through the maze, eventually reaching the far wall - and discovering the entrance to another room. ‘It’s not a library,’ said Chase, stepping inside. ‘Don’t know what it is, actually.’

Ally-ally-ally
. . . his voice echoed back. Exchanging puzzled looks with the others, he raised his torch, and saw that the new chamber’s roof was domed. Nina moved her light across the room. It was circular, with what looked like pieces of machinery spaced around its edge. There was another, larger machine at the centre, a conical copper tube extending upwards from it almost to the ceiling.

‘Curiouser and curiouser,’ said Sophia, moving to the nearest machine. ‘It looks like a potter’s wheel.’

‘They must have made some bloody weird pots,’ Chase opined as he approached an identical device on the opposite side of the entrance. There was indeed a large wooden wheel at about waist height, a metal rod rising from its centre, but mounted behind it on a hinge was a large copper cone, a thick needle protruding from the narrow end . . . ‘They’re gramophones!’ he exclaimed. ‘Like the one you made in Australia, Nina.’

‘This must be where they played the recordings on the cylinders,’ Sophia said.

Nina went to the chamber’s centre, holding out a glowstick to illuminate the machine there. ‘No,’ she realised, looking up at the copper tube. ‘It’s not where they played them. It’s where they
made
them. This room . . . it’s a
recording studio
. Look.’ She followed the tube up to the ceiling, where the interior surface of the dome was marked with odd indentations radiating out towards each gramophone. Even through the ice, it was easy to tell they had been carefully carved into a very specific pattern. ‘The sound of the original goes up the tube to the roof - and then goes outwards to each of the cones around the room. It’s a whispering gallery!’

‘Like the dome of St Paul’s Cathedral?’ asked Sophia.

‘Yes, only this one’s designed to send the sound out in multiple directions rather than just to the point diametrically opposite. Pretty sophisticated, even today. The Veteres just keep getting more advanced, don’t they?’ She took a closer look at the machine. Like the others, it had a wheel and a speaker cone, this one angled to point at the mouth of the tube above. Beneath the wheel, she noticed that the vertical axle was wound with fine copper bands. ‘I think this was designed to make copies of existing cylinders as well as recording voices. That’d explain why there was an echo on the cylinders we played in Australia - the recording cones were picking up sounds from other parts of the room.’

‘So this is like a prehistoric iTunes?’ Chase said. ‘Pick your favourite track and they’ll run off copies for you?’

Nina smiled at the comparison. ‘In a way, yeah. Although it might have been more for religious purposes. Just think what it would be like to have an actual recording of, say, the Sermon on the Mount. You wouldn’t need to interpret someone else’s written account - you’d have Jesus’s own words, exactly as he spoke them.’ She bent down, removing a glove to rub the frost off what appeared to be text on one of the copper bands. ‘Although it’d put a lot of religious scholars out of business if everybody could—
Ow!
’

She jerked back, clutching her finger. At the same moment, a mechanical
clunk
echoed through the chamber. The wheel of the central machine shuddered, straining against the ice before falling still.

‘What happened?’ Chase asked, hurrying to her. ‘Are you okay?’

‘I just got zapped!’ Nina shrilled, more surprised than hurt. ‘Like a static shock.’ She rubbed her finger. ‘Son of a bitch!’

Chase gingerly tapped the machinery. ‘It’s gone now.’

‘Great,’ Nina muttered. ‘A static charge sticks around for thousands of years, and guess who gets hit by it?’

‘Eddie, turn the wheel,’ Sophia called to them from the machine she had been examining. Chase took hold of the wooden wheel and pulled at it. It only moved fractionally, still jammed by ice - but the wheel of Sophia’s machine creaked in unison. The others did the same. ‘They’re all linked.’

Nina surveyed the room. ‘Makes sense. If you’re making copies, you want them to be identical. If each wheel was manually operated, they’d all be running at slightly different speeds.’ She looked back at the axle. ‘So what’s making it work?’

‘It can’t be electric, can it?’ asked Chase. ‘No way this lot were
that
advanced.’

Nina looked back in the general direction of the statue, a puzzled frown crossing her face. ‘I don’t see how, unless . . . could they have used earth energy somehow? Those copper things outside the temple - they could be antenna.’

‘Earth energy?’ Sophia asked.

‘That black project you said Callum was pissed off at us for wrecking?’ said Chase. ‘That used it.’

‘It was a way to channel the earth’s own magnetic fields into a weapon, using Excalibur as a superconductor,’ Nina explained.

Sophia raised an eyebrow. ‘Excalibur? Don’t tell me you found that as well.’

‘Yeah, kinda. Long story.’

‘It can wait,’ said Sophia, pointing her torch at an opening across the chamber. ‘Whatever powered all this, it seems to have stopped working - and finding the tree of life’s more important right now.’

Nina reluctantly had to admit they did need to move on from the fascinating chamber. The tilt-rotor had to return to the ship before nightfall, and they still needed to find another way back down to ground level. ‘Let’s see what’s through there.’

 

On the surface, Trulli double-checked that the walkie-talkie was still working. It had been some time since he’d heard anything from the party below. But the green LED was lit; the radio was fine despite the cold. He was tempted to call for a status report, but resisted. Knowing Nina, she was probably so engrossed in exploration that she’d forgotten the outside world even existed.

He was stuck in it, though, and so were the others. Shrugging to circulate the warmth inside his thick coat, he slowly turned to take in the scene. The BA609 was now parked further away; Larsson had heeded the warning about the dripping ice above the fumarole. Bandra was plodding across the ice from the aircraft, no doubt to come and complain about something new. Rachel and Baker both sat on folding chairs by the winch, huddled together in their bulky clothing like nesting penguins. He noticed they were sharing the headphones of Rachel’s iPod, and grinned. That was one way to start a relationship.

A faint noise, something other than the constant flutter of the wind across the plain. A low murmur. Powerful, mechanical . . .

And growing louder.

He turned again, scanning the sky. White haze on the horizon, the sun still crawling infinitesimally across the empty blue dome—

And something else, moving more quickly. Aircraft. Some way off, but heading towards him. He recognised the type immediately. C-130 Hercules transports, large, four-engined propeller craft. One painted in high-visibility red and white, the other a pale military grey.

The expedition wasn’t expecting visitors. And in the Antarctic wastes, the odds of encountering anyone by chance were effectively zero. Whoever was aboard knew they were here.