After several seconds, the ground quieted. There were a few residual waves of motion, but these soon dissipated. The disturbance had been brief but intense. The three of them looked back at the camp. The domed tents still stood, relatively unaffected by the motion. But beyond them, at the workers’ camp, most of the huts had collapsed.
“Mother save us!” the Doctor breathed, and then she was running toward the huts to tend to the injured.
“What in the name of Her Wrath was that?” the Lion asked, moving to follow the Doctor.
“Unstable land mass, I think,” the Engineer replied. “Shifting to relieve pressure.”
“That was pretty violent! How big an area do you think was affected?”
The Engineer and the Lion looked at each other, and a thought passed between them.
“The Champion!” they said in unison.
In minutes, they had climbed up into the shuttle, strapped themselves into the pilot seats, and had the engines revving up. The Engineer waited only till power reached minimum safe levels; then he gunned the throttle and sent them skyward. At ten thousand feet, he leveled off and pointed them north to the Mediterranean Sea. Below them, the camp had disappeared, and towns along the Nile flashed by. It was difficult to see damage from their altitude, but the Lion thought he could see larger buildings in other cities collapsed into rubble.
The river was the only clear feature from this height, its canals cutting through the narrow strips of fertile land on either side. Heavy boat traffic moved up and down the water. Then they were over the delta, where the great Nile branched into a dozen arms on the final leg before returning to the sea. Then they were over the ocean. Below them, along the coast, Egyptian ships sailed east and west on trade routes, their sails augmented by slave rowers. The sea looked blue-black today, against a sky of pale blue.
As they flew, the Lion glanced down at the ocean and noticed something strange. He saw a long dark line far out in the water. It was not a straight line, but a slight arc, and it was moving—very fast, he realized. He did not recognize what it was, but he knew there was something wrong about it. It was moving toward the coast.
“Engineer, look at that.”
The Engineer glanced down; then he and the Lion knew what it was. Like a three-dimensional drawing on a flat piece of paper, its shape suddenly made sense, and they stared in horror as the line defined itself into a wall of water. No wave could ever be that high. Just as they realized what it was, it swept into a caravan of ships and engulfed them entirely. They were too high up to see the encounter in much detail, but it was clear the ships and their crews were destroyed. And the wall of water was heading for the coast.
“Saintly Mother’s curse!” the Engineer breathed. The shaking of the earth had covered an enormous area, and his urgency to find their own ship doubled.
He arrowed the shuttle north and west, and soon they were approaching their landing site. They flew above a chain of tiny islands, and the Engineer let the shuttle lose altitude. Theirs was the second-to-last island in the chain. In a few moments, they could see it, its steep cliff walls rising high above the ocean surface.
“Weren’t there seven islands?” the Lion asked.
“Yes, seven.”
“I only count five.”
The sea was in turmoil. The Engineer reached the landing island and put the shuttle into hover mode above it. The island was very small, no more than three acres of surface area. It was rocky and well guarded, for it was all cliffs, with no beachfront where someone might land by sea. It had been the ideal resting spot for their ship: safe from natives and, they had thought, high enough above the water to be safe from the sea.
But there was no ship on the island below them, only scrub plants and rocks. The Engineer circled the island twice, and they both scanned and scanned again the barren rocks beneath them, as if the ship might appear if they were to look hard enough.
“It’s not the right island,” the Lion said at last.
“What do you mean? We’re looking at the coordinates. That’s it.”
“No, it’s not the right shape. And it’s too small. Somehow this is the wrong chain. The coordinates are off.”
“No,” the Engineer said slowly as understanding dawned. His voice lost all emotion. “The coordinates are correct. It isn’t the right shape. And you counted right; there are only five islands. But we’re in the right place.”
He moved the shuttle down for a closer look at the north side of the island. “Look, Lion, it’s gone. That whole cliff face is new. Half the island sheared away into the sea.”
It took the Lion a moment to believe it, but he saw that the Engineer was right. The cliff face was clearly new. The rock was lighter and unweathered. And the sea below was churning.
Somewhere down there, under the tossing whitecaps and millions of tons of stone, was their ship. Destroyed. The Champion, the first manned ship using an Eschless Funnel, the first interstellar transport. Gone.
“We’re stranded,” the Lion said slowly. He did not say it fearfully, merely as a fact they would now have to examine.
“Yes,” the Engineer agreed. “But not for long, Lion. The next team will be here in a few years. We’ll send the courier tomorrow.” He was referring to the tiny unmanned Eschless Funnel ship they used to send messages back and forth from home. “Maybe they can outfit the new ship to accommodate a double crew. We’ll be all right.”
He swooped the shuttle down close to the water, but the churning ocean was too wild for them to see below the surface.
“Mother-of-all,” the Engineer said quietly, “I loved that ship.”
CHAPTER 10
Present Day
It was past midnight in Egypt, and the desert air was chilly. In Cairo, the city known as “Mother of the World,” where old mosques and Roman fortresses and modern high-rises elbowed each other for room, most of the population was sleeping. Twenty miles away, on the Giza Plateau, stood the last of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Great Pyramid, which had once been covered with white limestone, now stood shorn of its fine casing. It was a dingy brown color that faded into the night.
The troop of white-clad guards with machine guns over their shoulders had long since left for the day, and the plateau was watched over by a handful of sleepy night guards, who were kept company by the stray dogs that prowled the plateau hoping for food from the tourists.
Near the Great Pyramid were its two successors, pyramids of the same proportions, though smaller than their great brother. All three had been built by kings of the Fourth Dynasty, nearly five thousand years before. The Great Pyramid, however, had something the other two did not. It housed a large, empty chamber situated almost in the very middle of its bulk, and above this room were five smaller chambers, stacked on top of each other, which performed a function loosely analogous to organ pipes. The design of the pyramid was such that it would transmit and enhance any sound that passed through it.
For hundreds of years, since an entrance had been hacked into the pyramid by Al Mamum, Caliph of Cairo, in the ninth century, visitors to the pyramid had noticed that speech inside the great chamber was almost impossible. Echoes in the room were so loud and of such great length as to interrupt all subsequent speech. The granite walls themselves seemed designed to amplify sound. What visitors and scholars did not realize was that the granite and the pyramid were equally receptive to vibrations of other kinds.
That night, at two o’clock in the morning, the Great Pyramid was hit by such a vibration. Pruit’s brief transmission fell squarely upon it. The wave of this transmission hit the outer stone of the structure and was passed inward to the great chamber. Here it was amplified, enhanced, and sent back out through the walls. The entire transaction took no more than a single second, but during that second, it was as though a shiver had passed through the pyramid.
Out on the plateau and a little way off, two guards paused in a game of cards by flashlight and turned to look at the pyramid. Whatever had happened h
ad passed, though, and there was nothing to look at but the profile of the massive structure against the night sky.
The shiver that passed through the Great Pyramid was redirected by mechanisms built into the stone itself and was emitted with a new destination in mind. Forty-five miles away, an underground receiver caught the shiver and passed it on.
In a dark room that lay below the desert, encased in natural rock, something very old began to wake up.
CHAPTER 11
The Mechanic felt, rather than saw, the lid of his stasis chamber withdraw. Its motion made a low rumble, almost below his audible range of sound. Which wake is this? he wondered. Forty-four? Forty-five? Forty-three? He could not remember and would have to look it up on the computer. Anyway, what did it really matter? What were two hundred years here or there?
He sat up, and his head and torso came out of the thick grease that encased his naked body. It was not grease exactly, for it was organic in composition, but it felt like grease, machine grease that had been exposed to cold weather and was partially congealed. It was called “gunk” in the casual language of his onetime peers. The gunk was not cold, despite its texture, and it smelled awful, like compost that had just begun to decay. It was brown with an undertone of green.
As he sat up, the lights of the cave came on, dim yellow glows around the walls. The Mechanic carefully pulled a long plastic tube out of his throat and unhooked his nose plug. The smell of the gunk assailed him, but he had grown accustomed to it. He unhooked the various other tubes that were attached to his body and let them fall back into the soup. He looked like a troll who had just risen from a swamp, his dark-gray hair and the gray of his skin matted with the gunk. He grasped the sides of his tank and stood up. The tank was raised several feet above floor level, and when he stood, his head reached nearly to the ceiling of the low room. Inches above was the artificial rock that enclosed them, and beyond that was the natural rock into which their room had been inserted.
The stasis tanks themselves were made of the same artificial rock that formed the floor, walls, and ceiling. It was a substance created from a combination of metal and stone, an ingenious invention of the Engineer that had proved ideal in keeping out the elements. There were eight tanks sitting in a row across the floor of the room, each resting on a stone pedestal that concealed the inner workings of machinery that kept the occupants of the tanks alive.
The Mechanic wiped as much of the gunk as he could off of his skin, then carefully stepped out of the tank and onto the rock floor. There were slight brown markings on the ground where he had dripped gunk on previous wakes and not bothered to wipe it up. In the closed system of the cave, it did not disintegrate.
As he walked toward the tiny latrine and shower alcove, something caught his eye. He turned to the computer, embedded in the rock wall to his right, and saw that the crystal screen had come to life. Typically, the computer did not rejuvenate itself automatically; it was up to the Mechanic to tell it to wake. But there it was, already on.
He took a seat on the stone bench before it, stray pieces of gunk sliding off of his skin as he did so. There were words on the crystal of the screen, a log of recent communications to the computer. They read:
Transmission received:
“Rescue has arrived” (frequency) (time stamp)
Execute command - Wake Tank #5
Repeat transmission (time stamp)
Repeat transmission (time stamp)
Repeat transmission (time stamp)
The “Repeat transmission” lines continued, dozens of them.
The Mechanic stared at the top three printed lines for several moments, unable to believe what he was reading. Someone had come for them. Five thousand years late, someone had come for them. And the computer, unaware that vast reaches of time had come and gone, had simply executed its standard program: Wake tank number five—the Mechanic’s tank.
He checked the computer’s internal clock and found that this was not a standard two-hundred-year increment. He had been woken early, at least twenty years early.
He stared at the message a while longer. Rescue. Why? After such a time period, it no longer made sense. Could it be a chance transmission? But the transmission had been repeated at regular intervals throughout the past three days, while the Mechanic woke.
He could trace the transmission, he realized. Shakily, he slid his hand along the right edge of the screen, manipulating a control panel and requesting that the computer find the origin of the message. The computer sent a tiny signal from the cave to the beacon pyramid. The signal bounced directly back, modified by the infinitesimal remnant vibrations of the last transmission. This modification, when analyzed, would yield the origin point of the transmission.
He waited as the computer parsed the information. It was successful, and in a moment, he was looking at a map of the star system. The signal had originated from an orbit around the fifth planet.
Could the Earth locals have achieved the capability of making such a transmission? In his previous wakes, he had detected no indication of advanced cultures on the planet above. Civilizations must have risen and fallen scores of times in the outside world, but there had never been much technological advancement as far as the Mechanic could tell. Never a hint of radio communications. But, still, it was a possibility.
He instructed the computer to monitor communication frequencies in the local area. The computer hummed for several moments, rejuvenating the portion of itself that would be necessary to carry out this task, for much of the computer was kept in a stasis-like state to survive the long years in the cave. After a few minutes, the computer complied.
The noise almost blew the Mechanic’s ears out. There was an avalanche of transmission traffic. As the computer scanned up and down standard frequencies, the Mechanic heard voices, data, static, and more voices in languages that were totally unfamiliar, pouring over each other. A mere one hundred and eighty years had passed since the Mechanic had last awakened, but in that short space of time, the world had come alive.
Could the locals have sent the transmission? he asked himself.
No, unlikely, he answered. It was sent on the beacon frequency and with the code words. He was dividing himself into two parts, his standard procedure when debating a course of action. One part was sure of his abilities and his needs and was willing to do any action necessary to guard his own interests. The other part, while aware of these things, was primarily concerned with the actions others might take if they disagreed with the Mechanic’s intentions. The second part of him was his cautious adviser.
What does it mean, then?
It means the Kinley have returned, he thought.
They cannot possibly believe that we are still alive. That was his cautious side. Five thousand years is beyond the realm of credibility. It’s only because the Engineer, may the Mother curse him, was so careful in designing this cave that we have survived.
That’s true, that’s true. And we haven’t all survived, have we? The Mechanic smiled.
So why? his cautious side asked. They are transmitting to the beacon, which means they are aware of our final message to home. They know the code words. They are definitely looking for the survey crew. If I hadn’t changed the computer program, the beacon would already have sent them our location.
Maybe they’re looking for something the survey crew had. Or something the survey crew left here. What?
Some physical thing of permanence, perhaps? Maybe the beacon itself. But this didn’t ring true. The beacon was an impressive structure, but other than its inherent purpose to transmit messages, it held nothing of real value. What else is there? What else would be valuable enough to make this trip after so long?
Neither side of the Mechanic was able to answer that. He sat in front of the screen for several more minutes, but he could not yet puzzle it out. He noticed his body then, still naked, with gunk drying to his skin in several places. He took one last glance at the message on the monitor, then stood and headed for
the shower.
The shower and latrine were built together in a small alcove at one end of the cave. The fixtures were of the same metalrock that was used everywhere in the room. They looked, felt, and operated just as they had when they were first installed. If it weren’t for the computer date log, there would be little reason to believe more than a few months had passed over the last five thousand years.
When he had cleaned himself, the Mechanic put on a suit of brown cotton work clothes from one of the sealed drawers embedded in the cave walls and sat down at the computer again. Another repeat transmission had arrived while he was bathing, but he ignored this. It worried him that the Kinley were arriving, for if they found him, he might have to explain those empty stasis tanks. But he had come to the conclusion that anxiety was premature. He had too little data and must research present-day Earth. The more he knew of his actual circumstances, the better he could judge his choices.
With a few adjustments to the crystal display, he was able to tune in television broadcasts and soon found himself looking at Earth in technicolor. He was assaulted with images of people, buildings, automobiles, airplanes, wars, food, entertainment programs, heads of state giving addresses, and a hundred thousand other views of a technological civilization.
The Mechanic watched for hours, unable to understand the languages, but nonetheless able to discern the level of the civilization. Earth had finally reached the very beginning of a technological curve that would vault its natives from quaint tribal loyalties to space-faring masters of their planet and their sun. Herrod, too, had gone through this stage, though the specific trappings had been different.