The Jovian Legacy (22 page)

The
accent exactly the same as Tweedledum and Tweedledee’s.

“Oh
yes, a cousin,” Jack said in a somewhat disrespectful manner
that surprised Megan. “Must be fairly distant though, I
think.”

“It
does not matter,” Siptah replied, “I am of the same
bloodline as you and your father.”

“Oh,
Okay, well, I’m Jack,” he replied, finally remembering
his manners.

Siptah
gestured to someone in the background, and a platter of delectable
goodies was brought in and placed on the gold side-table. “Please,
make yourselves comfortable. Would you care for a glass of
Karkaday?” he asked, handing Jack and Megan a glass each as he
asked, not giving them any choice.

Megan
sipped at her unknown clear, bright red drink, and the taste was
sensational.

“Thanks,
but we are wondering why we’ve been asked to come here,”
Jack said rather clumsily.

Siptah
cleared his throat. “You have a Lucre Box that I have already
given you. Here is the other box which forms the other half. These
two boxes, when placed together, will form a message that you may or
may not be able to read. It is in Egyptian,” he added.

“I
can,” Megan enthused.

“Yes,
and we’ve been down this track before,” Jack cut in,
glancing sharply at his girlfriend.

“When
you connect the boxes you will know what your destination will be,”
Siptah said, ignoring his statement.

“Destination?”
Megan and Jack questioned together.

“You must go now,” Siptah
said, and then retreated into another room, leaving Megan and Jack
looking after him.

“No
wait!” Jack called after him, but he had vanished.

“Well,
that was a quick visit,” Megan said on their way home. The
Lucre Box was sitting on the back seat.

“Destination,
I’ll be damned. As if we’re going to up and leave now,”
Jack said, annoyed.

“There’s
no way,” she agreed.

“The
last time I used those was to get into that compound to rescue you,
and once I got there the boxes turned to ice and shattered into tiny
pieces. That makes them a one-way ticket to who knows where. It’s
best if we leave them alone.”

“For
sure,” Megan agreed again.

A
t
the Thebes Federation of Science, Jack continued his contact with
Jamahn, who kept him informed on what was happening.

“There
is so much political unrest here, the people of Iraq do not know from
one day to the next whether or not they will survive. Homes are
uninhabitable and devastation is everywhere,”
Jamahn
typed.

Jack’s
colleagues wanted to do something about it.

“What
can
we do?” asked Jack, “You can’t organise
every good law-abiding person living on Earth to hop on a boat or
plane to travel across the Bermuda Triangle and be sucked up through
the green veil and live happily ever after on Jovian, can you?”

“No,”
his colleague agreed with a lilt in his voice, “but
you
can go back there, and through our help you will be able to achieve
world peace.”

“Hah!
Little ole me achieve world peace? Not possible!” Jack
retorted, glaring at them as if they were nuts.

“We
will help you,” his colleague repeated, unsmiling.

Jack
went home that evening and told his folks over dinner that the Thebes
Federation of Science wanted him to go back to Earth and achieve
world peace.

“Oh,
I thought only contestants for the Miss World Pageant do that,”
Megan snickered.

“Yeah,
well they can go and achieve their own world peace, I ain’t
goin’ nowhere. I came here to get away from all of that,”
he stated adamantly.

The
Thebes Federation of Science started to put pressure on Jack about
returning to Earth. They organised a meeting.

The
meeting was attended, not only by Jack’s colleagues, but by two
of the dignitaries that he’d initially met when he and Megan
first arrived on Jovian: Premier Tiberius and Marquis Ahmose.

“There’s
one thing,” Jack asked curiously and a little sarcastically,
“How am I supposed to return to Earth?”

“There
is a way. It involves the use of a set of ancient Egyptian Lucre
Boxes. However, they are virtually unobtainable, as only descendants
of the Pharaohs are privileged to possess them,” his colleague
stated matter-of-factly.

Everything
suddenly fell into place.
Siptah,
the Lucre boxes, and now this
.
Siptah must have known.

Jack
didn’t divulge the fact that he already had the boxes in his
possession. He didn’t intend to use them anyway.
Why on
Earth would I want to go back to a place that is riddled with greed
and crime when I have all this?
he
thought.
And when all my family is here.

He
told Megan how their meeting had gone later on that evening. “You
know, they expect me to give up my family and my new life when I’ve
practically just got here. I do feel for you though, Megs, that you
have left your parents behind. How have you been feeling about that
lately?” he asked compassionately.

“Well,
they’re always in the back of my mind,” she replied,
lowering her eyes. “They won’t have gotten over the hurt
of me abandoning them. They would’ve probably gone through
hell, probably would’ve organised a police search.”

Jack
noticed her tears and realised how much hurt she carried. He
suddenly felt very selfish. He had his family, but she didn’t.

Megan
composed herself and, surprisingly, declared, “Maybe you should
do as they ask.”

Jack
looked at her in disbelief.
“You’ve
done an about turn. Do you
want
me to go back?”

Megan
blew her nose. “Well, these people want to help our people,
not destroy them. What…if we both went back? They said we
could return here when we wish, by using the boxes for travel. And I
could visit my folks.”

Jack
was shocked. “What about the girls?”

“Sobek
and your parents can look after them. And they’ve got the
house staff,” she replied, looking at him questioningly.

“Wouldn’t
you miss them?” he asked, still finding it hard to believe what
he was hearing.

“Of
course I would,” Megan replied, looking away.

“We
might be gone for a year or so.”

“I
know,” she answered, about to become tearful again.

Poor
Megs. Torn between her parents and her little sisters.
Jack
wrapped his arms around his girlfriend and hugged her tightly.

He
organised another meeting with his colleagues, Premier Tiberius and
Marquis Ahmose.

Chapter 19

T
hey
sat across from each other, separated by a huge oval, solid gold
table.

“So,
if I go back to Earth how am I supposed to change the way everyone
behaves?” Jack enquired, cynical.

“Via
consumption,” Premier Tiberius stated. “It is anticipated
over time. If we adapted our food production to be compatible with
Earth’s produce of all fruit and vegetables, the citizens of
all Earth’s countries will benefit the advancement of taste and
goodness as alike our fellow citizens. It is through our food that
we have become such content people, with no desire for greed nor
power, with the exception, of course, of an unfortunate few with whom
you have already come into contact.”

“Well,
I’ve had some foods here that sure have a calming effect,”
Jack admitted.

Premier
Tiberius continued, “Jovian has been genetically modifying food
for decades and have mastered the technique to the highest degree.
You will act as our representative, and through you we will introduce
our genetically initiated produce of all varieties of the vegetable
and fruit family, which would in turn be consumed by all animals and
humans. We introduce an ingredient which stimulates brain cells and
alters the formation of neurons so that aggressive characteristics of
all humans and animals are all but dissolved, and simultaneously
positive characteristics are formed. It also enhances the senses,
and everybody benefits. Our people are the proof of such engineering.
On Jovian the produce itself is bigger, brighter, and the taste
incredibly better as you have discovered.”

“So
that’s your secret! The food here is unreal!” Jack
exclaimed.

One
of Jack’s colleagues spoke. “Over time, the food on Earth
will be
unreal,
as you put
it
. However, people there don’t like change, do they?
They will fear that men will all start growing donkey tails and the
women three breasts. This will never happen, but it will be your job
to convince them to make genetically modified food acceptable and
legal in all countries.”

“Whew!
That’s a tall order. How long will all this take?” Jack
queried, blowing through his lips.

“Five
to ten years,” replied his colleague matter-of-factly.

Colour
drained from his face, feeling like he’d just been handed a
prison sentence.

“What
if I don’t want to do it?” he questioned, suddenly
realising what it would mean. “I don’t want to leave my
family for that long.”

“Yes,
granted, you will be making a huge sacrifice. But you will be
rewarded for your efforts,” stated Marquis Ahmose. “We
have commenced a trust fund for your young charges so that they may
each receive forty million Egyptian pounds by the time they reach the
age of sixteen years. And of course you will already have returned
at that stage.”

“Forty
million Egyptian pounds! That’s about ten million each in New
Zealand dollars. You drive a hard bargain,” Jack protested.

“Pardon
me?” questioned Marquis Ahmose, who had never heard of such
colloquialism.

“It’s
just a figure of speech. Can I have some time to think about it?”

“By
all means, Mr Dunlop. Thank you. We will talk again,” Premier
Tiberius answered, putting out his hand.

Jack
thought sadly about the girls.

L
eft
alone in his research room Jack was deep in thought, staying until it
grew dark, the Babylonian time-piece on the wall illuminating the
time. He switched his computer on and pondered for a few minutes.
He wanted to escape for a time before he made his decision. He
applied the device to the base of his neck and typed in the date,
‘20
^th
February 1949’, thirty-three years before he was born. He was
feeling reckless and very much doubted it would work. He typed in
six hours and pressed the ‘enter’ key.

The
temperature around him plummeted, causing Jack to shiver. He is in
an old farmhouse at the crack of dawn. He hears a clunking noise
coming from another room. Jack slips out of his bed, throwing on a
coat that is hanging on a brass hook beside his bed, and quietly
tiptoes past a baby in a cot, towards the clunking noise. He enters
a kitchen where he sees a young girl of around ten lighting a fire in
an oven with a kettle sitting atop. After a while the kettle starts
to boil, and the young girl, with a thick cloth in hand, drags it off
the stove and pours hot water into a cast-iron pot. She then hoists
the pot onto the oven and begins to stir. Jack takes in the
familiar, comforting smell of porridge. She carries on stirring for
quite a while, then focusses on setting the table for breakfast. The
girl doesn’t look up at Jack, and he wonders why, though knows
that she would have a terrible shock to see a stranger in her
kitchen.

The
sun’s rays slice through the opening in the curtains and onto
the girl, her blonde hair catching the light. She is pretty and
petite with a small round face and strong nose of an Anglo Saxon.
Jack spots a clock on the mantelpiece above the fire when it begins
to chime, and counts up to six chimes before it stops. Before long
he hears the rest of the household shuffle out of their bedrooms and
make their way to the kitchen. A short woman with an especially
round face totters in and begins to slice bread, while a bleary eyed
boy, younger than the girl, makes a beeline for a cupboard and takes
out some bowls. He places them on the table while the girl pours the
porridge. Eight bowls frame the table and in a short time there are
four boys, all younger than their sister, seated at the table. The
children’s mother places a jug of milk on the table that she
stirs to mix in the cream that has settled on the top. The matching
set of crockery depicts a blue willow pattern. Jack watches as five
bleary-eyed children spoon brown sugar in their bowls, eating in
silence. The silence is broken only when a tall, lanky man strolls
in with a baby around a year old. The mother instructs her husband
to put Benjamin in his high chair and put a bib around his neck.

No-one
at all notices Jack standing in the corner observing them. He cannot
fathom it. He dares to speak, and introduces himself, but no-one
looks up. It is as if he is invisible and they are all deaf. He
makes his way back up the hallway and into one of the bedrooms. It
smells musty so he opens a sash window. A freestanding wardrobe with
a lowboy attached to it is set against the wall, an oval mirror with
a rainbow rim on its door. Jack purposely stands in front of it. No
wonder they don’t see him; he can’t see himself either,
only what is positioned behind him.