Keystone (22 page)

Gail’s phone had not stopped
ringing all morning. She had cancelled her remaining lectures and seminars for
the day and returned to her office with David Hunt to look at the Mars findings
in more detail. Despite speaking to dozens of people, her mobile still had over
thirty missed calls, and her desk phone had more voicemails than she dared
count.

She held her
head in her hands and exhaled loudly.

“Gail, I know
this may be hard, but you may have to accept that Amarna and Mars are linked,”
David said apologetically.

Looking up at
him, she scowled before burying her face again. “Easy for you to say,” she
mumbled. “You’re used to people trying to discredit you! This is Egyptology;
I’ll be hung out to dry!”

Professor
David Hunt knew exactly what she meant. Over the years, dozens of weird and
wonderful theories had been put forward regarding the pyramids, the Sphinx, and
the pharaohs; all of those theories had been ridiculed by Egyptologists. Often,
they would simply not bother trying to disprove the theory, but would dismiss
it out of hand. Gail was worried about keeping her career intact and away from
disrepute.

“Look at the
bigger picture, Gail: they’ve found evidence of intelligent life on Mars!” he
said. “And those creatures used the same symbol as your Amarna people. You
couldn’t have gone to Mars to plant evidence any more than you could have
carved the Stickman into all those shelves in Amarna, so they can’t possible
claim that you made any of this up, can they?”

“That’s not
the point!” she whined. “The Egyptian authorities are renowned for refusing to
authorise archaeological excavations if they believe an unfavourable
alternative theory is being developed. They famously stalled excavation of
irregularities in Khufu’s pyramid because Japanese and French researchers
couldn’t satisfy their demands that it would significantly advance science. The
second I openly admit to a link between Mars and Amarna, I can kiss my access to
the Amarna Library goodbye, and there are still over three thousand books that
we haven’t even opened yet!”

“Not this
time: this is science, Gail! You can see as well as I can that those symbols
are identical. There is only one possible reason for that isn’t there?”

Gail sat
holding her head for several minutes as David waited patiently for an answer.
She looked up. “There is another possible explanation.”

He looked her
in the eyes and his face fell. “Gail, don’t do this!” he pleaded with her.

“But you have
to admit it’s possible, don’t you? That the Mars photos are faked is a hell of
a lot more likely than the alternative, don’t you think? Why do you so readily
believe that they are genuine?”

“The truth is
that regardless of where those images came from, regardless of how authentic
they may be you simply don’t
want
to
accept that there may be some inherent link between the two sites,” he told
her, firmly. “You’re grappling for a conspiracy theory that disproves the
relationship between the two, instead of objectively looking at all the
evidence and judging it on its own merits.” His eyes met hers and softened.
“The reason I can still work here, despite all my years trying to prove my
unpopular theories, is because I have never forgotten that archaeology is a
science, and that scientific method is the foundation of everything that we do.

“I know that
there is a twenty-three thousand year old village on the edge of the Caspian
Sea because of scientific evidence, not because that’s what I wanted to be
true. Had it been only four thousand years-old, it would still have been an
important find. As it is, it helped fuel my career for the past fifteen years.
Look for the evidence to support a link between Amarna and Mars, and you may be
surprised. There may be something in the texts that you have already seen that
may now make more sense.”

“I am
absolutely sure that there is nothing in the texts I have looked at that
suggests a link. There is no evidence I know of in the archaeology in Amarna,
or even in the rest of Egypt – the rest of the world! – that can point to a
link with extra-terrestrials.” She was angry now, her eyes filled with emotion.
Her entire career had been based on the Amarna Library, but the photos from
Mars had her looking at a bleak future. “I have two choices,” she said as
calmly as possible. “Either I support the possibility of E.T., or I refute it
completely.”

David looked
at her and smiled. “You made your choice years ago, Gail, when you accepted
your scroll from the Dean. You have to be a scientist.”

“There’s
always a choice to be made. But first, I have to speak to Professor al-Misri.”

As if on cue,
the desk phone started ringing.

Gail was
tempted to let it ring: the sheer volume of calls that morning had left her
weary of lecturers, friends, family and even students, all asking her the same
questions. But then she recognised the Cairo telephone number on the display.

“Mamdouh, I
was just about to call you, how strange!”

David pushed
himself up from the armchair in which he had been lounged and gestured to Gail
that he was popping into his own office for a while.

Gail nodded
and continued speaking to the Professor. “Yes, I saw the news. How couldn’t I?
I’m fairly certain it’s faked, or that –”

He had just
reached the door when Gail stopped mid-sentence. Something about the lengthy
pause in her telephone conversation made him prolong his stay in her office for
a few moments.

“But, how do
you know?” she said, the words stumbling out.

David backed
away from the door and regained his seat, all the time studying her face for
any signs of what the Egyptian could be saying to her on the other end of the
line.

Suddenly, she
was saying her goodbyes and hanging up. She sat in silence for over a minute, looking
into space, before David could bear it no longer.

“Well?” he
urged. “Doesn’t he think that the photos are faked?”

She looked at
him, and shook her head slowly. “No.”

“Why not?”

“Because he
has seen proof that suggests otherwise.”

“What kind of
proof?”

“He can’t tell
me over the phone. I have to see him in Cairo tonight. He’s already booked my
flight.”

There was
something about her pale face and expression, telling him that there was more
to it than that. “What’s wrong, Gail?” he asked softly.

She looked him
in the eyes. “He says that there’s another book from the Amarna Library, one
that I’ve never seen.”

David sighed.
“There’s more than just one, Gail! There are more than three thousand books in
the Library that you’ve not yet had the time to study, and you know more than
anyone
about that place.”

Now she was
frantically clicking through folders of images on her computer screen, some
that had been used in her book, many thousands more that had not. She finally reached
the folder she was looking for.

A rendition of
the Backscatter X-ray, from a few days before they had entered the Library for
the first time, filled the screen. She zoomed in on the plinth, on which the
Stickman book had been found.

She flicked
through a pile of papers on her desk and brought out an A3 print of another
photo, this one taken from inside the Library, behind the plinth. The Stickman
book covered less than half of the plinth’s surface.

Comparing the
two images, her jaw dropped.

“How did I not
notice this before?” she wondered.

“Unbelievable,”
he whispered.

“My entire career,
all my studies, my lectures, my thesis, everything! It’s all been based on
corrupted evidence!” she wailed.

He looked at
her wide-eyed as she broke down in front of him. He was horrified and upset for
his colleague. But deep-down inside, part of him thrust a clenched fist in the
air and cried victory. All his life he had searched for proof of archaeological
and historical cover-ups, and now it looked like he would finally get what he’d
been looking for.

For on close
inspection, the Backscatter X-ray showed the Stickman book, and right next to
it, with barely a gap between, was a second identically-sized tome. The photo
from inside the Library, however, showed only one, lonesome book.

Not only had
there been a cover-up, but it had happened right in front of her eyes.

Gail subconsciously adjusted her
backrest and fastened her seatbelt. She raised her hand and asked the nearby
steward for a glass of water. Pulling her tablet computer from her bag, she hit
the ‘On’ switch and waited for the welcome screen before using a stylus to
enter her access signature.

A sudden burst
of computer graphics brought her to her desktop, where all of her useful
applications were waiting to be used. It was the same workspace as at her desk,
and on the video wall at home, with all the applications and data synchronising
in real time with a farm of University servers, probably deep inside a hill
somewhere Gail had never even been. The tablet was never truly ‘off’ unless its
battery was drained, and was constantly performing quick-syncs whenever it had
access to WiFi.

The benefits
to her and fieldworkers everywhere were enormous. What she saw on her tablet
was identical to what she saw on her desktop machine in her office. No matter
where she was, she could see the same files, applications and settings, saving
her valuable time. In the field, it meant that she could input data and start
analysing it on site, and collaborating with colleagues hundreds of miles away,
before continuing at her leisure either at home, in the office, or as she was
doing at that very moment, on the plane to Cairo. And if ever she lost her
tablet, logging on to any new device as herself would synchronise everything
once more

She tapped the
screen to access her emails and scrolled down the list until she came to a
recent one from George.

There was no
text, just a picture of a cartoon rabbit looking sheepish. She smiled and
checked the time of the mail: half past three in the afternoon. He must have
sent it from his phone, as there was no way he could be home yet after having
dropped her off at the airport. She saved the picture to her personal files and
closed the message.

George didn’t
pretend to know much about Egyptology, but he wasn’t an idiot either. He had
known enough to understand that the news from Mars could be both good and bad.
Knowing that he would always be with her and supporting her touched her deeply.

When he had
learnt about the call from Mamdouh, he had been genuinely shocked. Gail and
George had spent numerous holidays in Egypt over the past ten years, and had
grown very close to the Professor. That he had never mentioned the missing
book, even during one of his after-dinner ramblings, was surprising to say the
least, as a great deal of their conversations had tended to centre on Amarna
and the Library.

Gail had had
time to think about things more now, and on reflection thought that she
understood the situation better. In fact, as she deleted a selection of junk
emails, she could even accept why the Professor would have hidden the book.

If it had
shown any kind of link with Mars, then an unqualified archaeologist discovering
it in the desert with no prior study of the area would seem too good to be
true: the scientific community would never have believed that the book was genuine.
Removing it ensured that the Library as a whole would be accepted without
question.

But it did not
all fit, she thought as she fired off a quick reply to a student, wondering if
the lecture notes from that morning’s interrupted lecture would be available on
her website. ‘
Yes
’ was
all she had written. Not everything made sense to her. For starters, removing
one book on the spur of the moment couldn’t ensure that no similar evidence was
present elsewhere in the Library. No one would have been able to check the
thousands of books before she entered. And if you’re going to remove a book,
then why not the one with the Amarna Stickman engraved on its cover? And why,
when all the other books related to politics, economics and demographics, was
her book so different, its content almost biblical in comparison? Surely, from
what had been seen so far in the Library, her book was unique;
but not enough to be removed?

Most confusing
of all, though, was the fact that Mamdouh couldn’t have removed a book from the
Library himself. Gail was the first to enter after the engineers, and the book
had been sitting on the plinth undisturbed.

How had he
made the swap?

She closed the
email program and sipped her water. Her emotions had given way to curiosity,
and concerns over the future of her career had been replaced by a number of
questions she was eager to put to her friend in Cairo. Unfortunately, since
their brief phone conversation, he’d not answered any of her calls or emails.
Maybe he’s fending off questions left, right
and centre, too
, she thought.

She brought
another application to the front of the desktop. A simple window, not unlike a
word-processor, filled her screen. She dragged George’s sheepish rabbit picture
over and dropped it in, then tapped a button on the application toolbar. A
simple dialogue popped up asking her to enter her keyword.

She smiled to
herself and typed
bunny
. A progress
bar briefly worked its way along the bottom of the picture, and then a message
emerged:

Good Luck Bunny, always with you. Love
George xxx

The
application she was using had been written by George as a Christmas present for
her several years earlier. At first, she had believed it to be a simple viewer
for all of her scanned pages of books from the Library. She had thanked him,
but had secretly been a little disappointed that the fruit of his labours – three
months of programming in the evenings after work – had produced a simple
program she could have obtained for free from the Internet.

George had
said nothing more of it.

The Christmas
holidays had been over for nearly a month before Gail actually
used
the program he had made. She had
uploaded her scanned images, and had been idly flipping through them when she
noticed the strange icon along the toolbar. She had clicked it, only to be
faced with an error:
Please select
glyph(s) for translation
. Her heart had literally left her chest.

George had not
simply made a
viewer
for her Egyptian
texts, he had made a tool that helped her
translate
them. She grinned to herself as she remembered how she had thanked him that
evening for his Christmas present.

Closing the
message and the picture, she dragged another file into the application and a
series of tiny rectangles filled the screen, as if someone had ripped the pages
from a book and laid them out in rows on a grey background.
 
She tapped the first page and zoomed in to the
wooden cover of the book from the Library plinth, the
Stickman book
as it had become known. The engraved Stickman looked
so real she felt she could touch it. Memories of the dry atmosphere of the
Library came flooding back to her, memories of the smell of old leather and
wood.

The
application let you select a hieroglyph or group of hieroglyphs, such as a
cartouche, and add custom text, which would serve as the translation. The
application would then run through all of the text and suggest the same
translation for any matching symbols. It used a simple bitmap comparison
algorithm with some additional routines for cleaning up background noise, so it
couldn’t do anything
too
sophisticated. A common problem was that Egyptian hieroglyphs should be read in
the direction in which the characters were facing. This meant that the bitmap
analysis would correctly match two sets of glyphs reading from left to right,
but would fail to recognise that a third set, reading from top to bottom, was
also a match. It was a minor gripe, which George had promised to look into at
some point in the future.

Once the
analysis was complete, tooltips would appear all over the text. An overview
pane would also give a summary of all the available translations in any given
selection. By selecting multiple tooltips, it was possible to add further
contextual translations too, giving a second or even third meaning to common
groups when used in conjunction with each other. Over time, the more she used
it the more complete the dictionary became, and while Gail’s own grasp of
ancient Egyptian had improved to the extent of near-fluency over the past ten
years, George’s application had evolved such a sophisticated dictionary that it
became the envy of her peers. One of her outstanding actions in the Faculty was
to wrestle the source code from her husband and hand it over to the Department
of Computer Science, so that they could enhance its functionality and
distribute it more widely. But before he would let her do
that
, he had to remove his ‘love-letter’ system, which was what allowed
them to hide words in pictures, only to be revealed when a keyword was input.

She
highlighted a group of hieroglyphs and read the lines of English text, along
with annotations, that appeared in a box below the page.

To conquer
|
{and} gain dominion {rule?} {wage war?} | leads to no victory {?} | all
{we?} shall be judged as one {together
?}

She had read
the first line of text a thousand times. It was isolated at the top of the
page, separated from the rest of the hieroglyphs by the Amarna Stickman.

Gail
highlighted the next line of symbols.

A beauty has come {Nefertiti}
|
with guidance {a message?} of
 
|
{???}

She had never
wanted to provide a translation for the Stickman symbol. In her mind, to do so
was to admit that they would not find the genuine translation of the glyph and
with so many texts from the Library unstudied, she looked forward to the day
when she would triumphantly give the application its final translation. In the
meantime, it simply returned three question marks whenever it occurred.

The religious
undertones of the Stickman book were hard to escape. On every page could be
found morals, stories, proverbs, and illustrations, all seemingly pointing to
an idyllic way of life, a ‘just path’ as it had been dubbed, which she had
interpreted as being an unsuccessful ideological movement started by Nefertiti
under the reign of her husband Akhenaten. It fitted well with the
archaeological evidence of the era: a new capital, a changed foreign policy,
changing art, all capped by a worship of an old god, the Sun deity
Aten
. The movement had clearly failed,
and future pharaohs had done everything possible to eradicate its memory.

To Dr Gail
Turner, the evidence was quite clear, and her thesis had brought widespread
acclaim. Many of the pieces of the puzzle surrounding Amarna and Nefertiti
seemed to fall into place.

But that
hadn’t stopped other theories cropping up on the Internet. As soon as her
research had been published, stories appeared of the ‘
first coming of the Lord
’, in female form, over twelve centuries
before Jesus Christ, passing on his teachings to the most powerful people on
Earth. The similes between the Bible and the Stickman book were there if one
looked hard, and an increasingly large group of people had made it their sole
purpose to look as hard as possible. The
Amarna
Adventists
believed that Nefertiti was the true
daughter
of God. They had lifted ancient passages word for word
from her book, including some of her own translations, and used them to form
their own controversial ‘bible.’

Amarna
Adventists were not the only people to read more into the Library finds than
the Egyptologists. The Internet was full of interpretations of the Stickman
figure, from four-legged aliens to strange spaceships. For her part, Gail had
felt that the Stickman represented a direction towards the Sun god Aten, its
head being the Sun, and the arms, legs and body representing an arrow of some
sort. It was an interpretation shared by most serious academics.

Now, however,
as Gail read the sentence over to herself, and with the day’s revelations in
mind, she wondered whether the Internet theorists hadn’t been more close to the
mark.

The plane shot
down the runway and lifted gently into the evening sky, leaving Heathrow and
England behind.

And had she
known for one second that she would never return, she would have given them
more than just a fleeting glance as they disappeared beneath the clouds.