“Except when the Covenant does,” Nina said, fixing Sophia with a questioning stare. “You said you’d tell us about them. So, who are the Covenant? And how do they have the power to tell the president what to do?”
Sophia took a long sip of coffee, the silence in the room broken by the crackle of the jukebox changing records. “Obviously, I don’t know everything,” she said at last. “They don’t exactly regard me as a confidante. Even Gabriel was reluctant to tell me too much. But,” she went on, leaning closer, “I have my ways.”
“Yeah, we know,” Nina muttered. “Just the facts, okay?”
“Very well,” said Sophia sourly. “The Covenant of Genesis is a black operations unit—but one that doesn’t belong to any country. It was established to protect the mutual interests of three very old, very powerful, and very wealthy … well, ‘organizations’ isn’t quite the right word.”
“Do you mean, like, the Mafia or something?” Chase asked.
Sophia laughed. “I suppose there are some people who’d say that. But no, the right word is actually … ‘faiths.’”
It took Nina a moment to take in Sophia’s full meaning. “Wait, what? You mean faiths as in religions?”
Sophia nodded. “Three religions—all different, but with a common origin. Three leaders, one from each religion, sharing control. Vogler represents Christianity, specifically the Roman Catholic Church. Hammerstein is an Israeli, representing Judaism. And Zamal, a Saudi, comes from the fount of Islam. Between them, they have one mission: to suppress all knowledge of something that threatens everything they believe in.”
Chase leaned closer, intrigued. “Which is?”
“I, ah …” Sophia hesitated. “I don’t actually know.”
“You don’t know?” Nina snapped.
“Gabriel wouldn’t tell me,” said Sophia, folding her arms huffily. “That was something I couldn’t get out of him. I was only helping him with the translations. All I know is that it’s very old, that it involves people he calls the Veteres, and that the Covenant is using him to locate all traces of them—so they can be destroyed.”
“How long has he been working for them?”
“A long time; longer than I’ve known him. At least fifteen years. But the Covenant’s been around for a lot longer, more like fifty years.”
“That means that whatever it is they’re trying to hide, they’ve been very good at it,” Nina said, the realization sinking in.
“Very good—and very ruthless. They kill anyone who finds any evidence of the Veteres. I was with Gabriel at a site in Oman about eight years ago; I didn’t know what was going on at the time, but now I’ve realized that the Covenant must have destroyed it and killed the people who discovered it.”
“Doesn’t sound very religious,” said Chase. “What happened to the whole ‘Thou shalt not kill’ thing?”
“I imagine they pay it about as much attention as we do.”
“Hey!” Nina protested. “I haven’t killed anyone!” Chase and Sophia looked at her. “Well, not deliberately … and they were all trying to kill me!”
“I’m sure Saint Peter will accept that as an excuse,” said Sophia.
Chase put a reassuring hand on Nina’s back. “So now what do we do? If three really powerful religions want us dead, and now the president of the United bloody States wants us dead too, then we’ve got a big problem!”
“The way to stop Dalton is simple enough,” said Sophia. “Go to Switzerland, get the recording, and release it to the media. He’ll be out of the White House within a week.”
“There’s an easier way,” Chase said. “You just walk into the nearest TV studio and say, ‘Hey, guys, I’m still alive! You’ll never guess who let me out of Guantánamo …’”
She frowned. “Just one slight problem with that plan, Eddie. I’d be arrested. And then I’d be killed. Getting rid of Dalton doesn’t help me if I’m dead.”
“I dunno,” said Nina, “I don’t see any downsides.”
Sophia glared poisonously at her as Chase chuckled. “Even if we get the recording,” he said, “and get rid of Dalton, that still leaves the Covenant. How do we get them off our backs?”
“The same way as Dalton,” said Nina decisively, sitting upright. “We find what they’re afraid of before they do, and expose it to the world.”
“That simple, hmm?” Sophia said, raising an eyebrow.
“That simple,” Nina repeated. “We’ve got the photos I took of the inscription; we’ve got your knowledge of the language; we’ve got … whatever the hell this is,” she added, taking out one of the grooved clay cylinders and holding it up to the light. “That’s just as much as the Covenant has.”
“Gabriel will still be able to translate the text,” said Sophia. “I was only assisting him—he knows much more than me.”
“You mean you’re actually admitting to an inadequacy?” Nina scoffed, leaning back in her seat—only to jump in pain. “Ow!”
“What?” Chase asked.
“Son of a … I just sat on where that needle jabbed me in the ass!”
“So it wasn’t a bite from a funnel-web spider?” asked Sophia. “What a shame.”
There was another crackle from the jukebox as the record changed again. “A funnel-web?” Nina growled, rubbing her aching backside. “I’d have thought your kind of spider was a black … widow …” She trailed off, holding up the cylinder—then whirling to look at the jukebox. “Jesus!”
Chase followed her gaze as the next song started. “Is that ‘The Safety Dance’? Bloody hell, I haven’t heard that in years.”
“Not the record!” Nina exclaimed, staring with growing excitement at the cylinder. “I know what this is!”
“You do?” Sophia asked.
“Yes! But I need somewhere I can work—we’ve got to find a motel, get a room.”
“Three in a bed, eh?” said Chase suggestively.
“Eddie! And we need something else.” She called across the room to the waitress. “Excuse me—can you tell me how to get to the nearest hardware store?”
Traveling south toward Perth, they reached a small town that was home to a motel—and a hardware store.
Nina worked at their motel room’s small desk, which soon resembled a cross between a craft-fair disaster and a mad scientist’s lab. The trip to the store had resulted in the purchase of several sheets of cardboard, duct tape, a wooden dowel, a lamp stand, an electric screwdriver … and a set of large needles of the kind used to repair canvas and other heavy fabrics.
“You think it’ll work?” asked Chase.
“We’ll soon find out. I’m almost finished.” She tore off a piece of tape and used it to fix the screwdriver to the side of the desk with its empty chuck pointing upward, then pushed a short piece of dowel onto one of the screwdriver’s bits, having previously drilled a hole into one end. When it was on as far as it would go, she used another piece of tape to secure it, then inserted the bit into the chuck. Switching the screwdriver to its lowest setting, she experimentally pulled the trigger. The dowel spun with a low whir.
“Okay,” she said, “that part works. Now, let’s see about the rest …”
She picked up a cone made from a sheet of cardboard, taping it to the metal stem of the lamp stand by its narrow end. Once it was in place, she took one of the needles and carefully inserted it eye-first into the point of the cone before using more tape to hold it there. Then she slid the lamp stand across the desk, poising the needle above the piece of dowel …
“All we need’s a dog,” said Chase, with some pride at what Nina had managed to assemble, “and we’ve got His Master’s Voice.”
Sophia regarded the construction incredulously. “You’ve built a gramophone?”
“That’s right,” Nina replied, picking up the cylinder. “That’s what this is—it’s an audio recording! The groove’s like the one on a record, or more like an old wax cylinder, I suppose. There have been examples of pottery accidentally recording ambient
sounds while they were being inscribed with a stylus on the potter’s wheel—I think the people who made this developed the technique into something with practical applications.” She indicated the cone. “They used copper rather than cardboard, but the principle’s the same—the cone’s used to pick up the vibrations of sounds and transmit them through the needle onto the soft clay when the recording’s being made, and then amplify them like a loudspeaker when the fired, hardened cylinder is played back. And I know the size of the needle they used because, well, I got one stuck in my butt.”
Chase peered at the second cylinder on the desk. “So what did they record on them?”
“Voices, presumably. Religious sermons, speeches by their leaders … maybe even songs.” Nina carefully lowered the cylinder onto the makeshift turntable, sliding the dowel into the hole at its base. “We’ll soon find out.”
For once, Sophia actually seemed unsettled. “So you’re saying that if this works, we might hear a hundred-thousand-year-old voice?”
“A hundred and thirty thousand, if my dates are right. That’s well over half as long as humans have even existed.”
Chase grinned. “Who says it’s human? Maybe it’s aliens talking.”
“It’s not aliens,” said Nina in professional exasperation. She moved the lamp stand until the needle’s tip lightly touched the start of the groove near the cylinder’s top. “Okay. Here we go …”
Holding her breath, she switched it on.
The cylinder rotated, the screwdriver’s motor whining and grumbling at the extra weight … but even over the noise, they clearly heard something emerge from the improvised loudspeaker.
A voice. But like nothing they had ever heard before.
“Fuck me,” said Chase, suppressing an unexpected shiver. “Are you sure that’s not an alien?”
Nina had a similar response to the unnatural sound, a low, almost sinister moaning—but the sensation running up her spine was as much a tingle of excitement as it was the shock of the unknown. “It’s not at the right speed,” she explained, stopping the motor and adjusting the settings before moving the needle back to the starting point. “Let’s try again.”
This time, the voice sounded more like the product of a human larynx, though still slurred. It formed four distinct sounds—words, Nina assumed—before pausing, then speaking again.
“It’s still not at the right speed,” said Sophia, now fascinated. “It needs to go faster.”
Nina increased the screwdriver’s speed and restarted the motor. The voice, now revealed as male, spoke again—though with a strange sonorous reverberation to it. She strained to listen, picking out another sound beneath the speech, a faint, almost mechanical squeaking or groaning.
The speech lasted for a minute before the needle finally reached the end of the groove and scraped across the cylinder’s base. Nina hurriedly switched off the screwdriver.
“What was he was saying?” Chase wondered.
“Hopefully I’ll be able to figure that out—and that it’ll be something useful,” Nina told him as she delicately lifted the cylinder from its makeshift spindle. “Give me the other one.”
The recording on the second cylinder lasted slightly longer, spoken by a different man with a faster pattern of speech—though still with the same odd, throaty echo to his words. It began with three words rather than four, followed by a pause before the speaker continued.
Nina played the beginning back, then regarded the cylinder thoughtfully. Inscribed around its top were three words in the ancient language. “What if … what if the first words on each recording are like a title?” she thought out loud, removing the cylinder from the screwdriver and laying it beside the first. “So that whoever’s listening knows they’ve got the right cylinder?” She thought back to the chamber. “Ribbsley knew what these symbols were; he translated them. What did he say?”
Chase tried to remember. “Something about the sea. And wind.”
“Sea of wind,” said Nina, Ribbsley’s words coming back to her. She examined the first cylinder more closely. “Wind! Damn it, I should have figured that out already. Look!” She pointed. “This symbol, the three horizontal lines with the top one curling back on itself—it’s a representation of the wind!”
Sophia was dubious. “In a cartoon, perhaps.”
“Maybe, but that visual shorthand came from real life originally—it’s how dust or sand look if they’re being blown along a plain. Or a beach, and we know these people lived along the sea. Which means that this wavy line is, well … wavy! It’s their symbol for the sea. Wind and sea, together—sea of wind.” She examined the remaining characters. “The last one is also wind, and the third one’s not symbolic, it’s a word.” She tried to recall what Ribbsley had said. “Seasons! ‘Sea of wind, seasons, wind.’ Whatever that means.”
“Maybe it’s a weather report,” Chase suggested. “The prevailing winds’ll be different depending on the time of year. Useful thing to know if you’re planning on sailing across the Indian Ocean.” Both women looked at him, impressed. “Yeah, that’s right. I’m not just an awesome sex machine.” Now they exchanged knowing looks. “Oi!”
“What does the other cylinder say?” Sophia asked.
“Something similar—‘fish of the sea of wind,’ I think. Although the sentence structure’s reversed from English. It’s literally ‘wind sea, fish.’ Like the way the first cylinder uses a hierarchical structure almost like database cataloging. The main subject is ‘sea of wind,’ category ‘seasons,’ subcategory ‘wind.’ For an ancient language, it’s actually very efficient.”
“They’re not the same,” Chase remarked.
“What?”
“The words for ‘wind.’ They weren’t the same. Not the way Captain Caveman pronounced them.”
Nina replayed the start of the recording. Chase was right. Though the first and last words were written identically, the intonation of each was different. She played the second recording again. The pronunciation of the word matching the symbol for “wind” was the same as its first use on the other cylinder.
“Is it significant?” Sophia wondered.
“It could be,” said Nina. “Some languages, like Mandarin, put a lot of emphasis on intonation.” She turned the first cylinder in her hands, comparing the first and last inscribed symbols. “They look exactly the same, but have different pronunciations …” Her face lit up. “Of course! They’re heterophones!”
Chase lifted a questioning eyebrow. “Ways for straight men to talk to each other?”
“No, Eddie. It’s from Greek, it literally means ‘different sound.’ Like ‘wind’ as in blowing air, and ‘wind’ as in winding up a watch—the written words look the same, but the meaning changes in speech depending on pronunciation. So one of the symbols here does mean ‘wind’ in the weather sense, but the other’s something else.” Nina held the two cylinders next to each other, the wind symbols almost touching. “Maybe the word that appears with ‘sea’ is a modifier. It’s not literally ‘the sea of wind,’ but something the Veteres would know from the context.”
“Stormy sea?” Sophia suggested.
Nina considered it, then shook her head. “It’s too transitory. I dunno, it seems more like a name, something descriptive, like the Yellow Sea.”
“It must be something connected to wind, though,” Chase pointed out. “Otherwise why would they use the same symbol?”
She nodded. “So what else would the wind have meant to an ancient civilization? Apart from allowing them to sail, what does the wind do to them?”
“Same thing it does to us,” said Chase. “Makes you cold.”
“Cold,” said Nina, mulling it over. “The Sea of Cold, a cold sea.”
“But all seas are cold if you’re in open water and the wind’s blowing, even in the tropics,” said Sophia. “There must be more to it than that.”
“There is.” Nina sat upright as the answer struck her. “They lived in the tropics. It never gets cold—even d
uring an ice age, the temperature at the equator would still be in the mid-sixties. But when the Veteres left Indonesia, they headed south, to Australia—and according to the inscription, they went on to somewhere else to build their city. ‘The land of wind and sand,’ Ribbsley said. But since he didn’t know about the heterophones, he got it wrong. If the alternative pronunciation does mean ‘cold,’ then they went to a land of cold and sand. A cold land.” She smiled. “We’re in the Southern Hemisphere—what’s the coldest land you can think of?”
“Antarctica,” Chase and Sophia said simultaneously.
“Right! And if you go back a hundred and thirty thousand years, temperatures were several degrees higher than today. Antarctica would still have been cold—but habitable along the coasts. It’d have been like living in Alaska or Siberia. Tough, but survivable.”
“Where does the sand come into it, though?” Chase asked. “I mean, Antarctica’s not exactly famous for its beaches.”
“It’s another mistranslation,” said Sophia. “Or rather, a misinterpretation—not by us, but by the Veteres.”
“What do you mean?” Nina asked.
“Think about it. If you’ve lived your entire life in a hot, coastal climate, and then you move to Antarctica, you’re going to experience a certain amount of culture shock. Everything is different. And one thing you will certainly never have seen before is snow. It’s made of fine grains, it covers the ground, the wind picks it up and blows it … so you’re going to compare it to something with which you’re familiar.”
“Sand!” said Chase. “The land of cold sand … that’s what they called snow. Cold sand!”
“So they did go to Antarctica,” Nina said excitedly. “They left Australia and headed south, across what they called the Cold Sea … and built a new city there, away from the ‘beasts.’”
Sophia looked surprised. “What beasts?”
“Dunno,” said Chase. “And your boyfriend didn’t know either. But they sounded pretty nasty.”
“Some sort of predators,” Nina added. “Ribbsley thought they wiped out the Veteres who returned to Australia after leaving their city … which would definitely fit with Antarctica’s being its location,” she said, the realization dawning. “The higher temperatures a hundred and thirty thousand years ago were a blip, relatively speaking, only lasting a couple of thousand years; they were followed by an ice age. And if the temperature fell at the equator, you can imagine how much colder it got at the poles. They had to leave, or freeze to death.”