Keystone (44 page)

Walker was the first to take a
step towards the Xynutian, who hadn’t moved since the door had opened. Its
steadfast gaze, although very lifelike, was utterly lifeless.

The statue was
in the centre of a large hall, about thirty feet on each side. Directly
opposite was another doorway, towards which Walker now marched.

Gail entered
the hall slowly. When she reached the Xynutian, she turned and looked back down
the corridor.

“They’re
looking at each other,” she said in wonderment. “They’re acknowledging each
other across the millennia.”

Walker hurried
her up. “No time for history lessons now, sweetheart. You promised to get us
out of here, and part of that means you going first.”

The entrance
hall gave onto a larger room, as brightly-lit as the first but almost twice as
large. Along the middle of the room were three benches with glass tops. The
opposite end of the room housed three doors.

It seemed that
each door corresponded with one of the benches.

“It’s a
worktop,” Patterson said. “They must have worked almost lying down, though.” He
looked back through the door at the statue, and tried to imagine the Xynutian
using the knee-high displays.

“Or they used
their feet,” Ben joked.

Gail knelt
down and touched the glass on the middle one. Immediately, shapes sprang to
life in mid-air, hovering several feet above the worktop. Three concentric
circles rotated at different speeds in front of her. The largest of them was
also the slowest, barely moving at all, while the smallest rotated fastest,
completing two revolutions in the time it took the middle ring to rotate only
once.

Gail touched
the two remaining screens and they sprang to life in a similar fashion. Soon,
they all showed what looked like three clocks, with varying symbols and
colours.

Examining the
doors, she noticed three symbols etched into the floor of the room, one in
front of each. The middle door was the outline of a Xynutian; the left hand that
of a bear, while the one on the right showed a tree.

She went back
to the right hand console. Whatever this place was, trees sounded less scary
than Xynutians and bears.

Moving her
hands over the display, she touched all of the symbols in turn, hoping for some
response. Occasionally, the symbols would reconfigure, bringing
incomprehensible charts and graphs to the foreground, before automatically
fading them away to return to the spinning concentric circles.

“There’s
something we’re missing here,” she concluded. “The ancient Egyptians were able
to write a whole book on this place, showing what happened to the Xynutians in
some detail, and also, correct me if I’m wrong, Henry,” she gestured at him,
“they spoke of Mars, hence the Mars mission and what’s going on up there.”

Patterson
didn’t disagree.

“Unless they
made it all up from the pictures and writing they saw back in the main hall,
there’s no way they could have written so much from what we see here. And more
importantly, we know they’re called
Xynutians
from the cartouches in the book. By the same token,
Aniquilus
too. So where did the Egyptians hear those names, unless
they could interpret the Xynutian writing on the walls in the hall?”

She didn’t have
time for hypotheses; instead she strode back to the previous room and searched
for any hidden symbols.

The room was
bare, the walls perfectly smooth and featureless. Running her fingers along the
surfaces, she had a sudden flashback to the vivid dream she had experienced
just before waking inside DEFCOMM. It was that same seamless floor, almost
too
perfect. There, she had been in the
dark save for the glow of her mobile phone; but here light was coming from
recesses in the ceiling about six feet above the tip of the Xynutian’s raised
staff.

She gave the
statue her full attention. From the nails of its toes to the pupils of its
frozen eyes, it was absolutely perfect. Like a waxwork model of a celebrity,
she could almost feel it breathing down her neck as she studied the intricate
needlework on its tunic, which fell between its legs, leaving the powerful
thighs exposed.

If this were a
prime example, she was certain it would have been able to use those legs to run
faster than any human athlete, and she could only imagine how strong it was.

It was human
in every way, and yet somehow different.

Curiosity
getting the better of her, she carefully lifted the tunic and peered
underneath; there was no doubt this Xynutian was a man. Suddenly realising that
she was staring at the Xynutian’s private parts, she quickly dropped the tunic,
her cheeks reddened. Whatever its culture, their gender had been private enough
to cover.

She wondered
for a moment about Nefertiti and Akhenaten, at the opposite end of the
corridor, completely naked. There was some definite symbolism in the use of
clothing going on here, she realised. Perhaps some form of submission to the
Xynutians, as she had first suspected; but instead of submission to Aniquilus,
this suggested it was submission to the Xynutians.

She shook her
head and cursed herself for not having at the very least a notebook and
pencil.
 

She stood back
and stared at the creature head on. The Xynutian was huge, about two feet
taller than her, its raised staff reaching a good three to four feet above her
head.

The staff itself
was a rod of what looked like solid gold. Certainly there was no tainting of
the metal after so many years, and she could think of few other metals that
possessed that property. It culminated in a clear-stone ball, perfectly
spherical and, it occurred to her, as near as damn it in the exact centre of
the room.

“Is that a
switch?” Patterson asked, pointing up to where the Xynutian gripped the staff.

Ben and Walker
had been staring at each other in the other room, but at Patterson’s question,
Walker pushed the Egyptian through the door and they joined them next to the
statue.

“Too high for
me to reach,” Gail said. “Walker, you’re the tallest, you press it.”

He laughed.
“Nice try. No, you press it, I’ll be waiting over here, keeping an eye on you.”
He retreated into the corner and kept the pistol pointed in their direction.

After a brief
discussion, Gail agreed to be lifted up on Ben’s and Patterson’s shoulders.
With the added height, she easily reached where the Xynutian was holding the staff,
and fumbled around for the switch. She felt it move under her fingers, and
pressed it fully until it was flush with the shaft.

She had barely
been returned to the floor when the lights went out.

A faint glow
emanated from the stone ball on the end of the staff, and the walls, ceiling
and floor of the room dissolved into nothingness.

She was in the
depths of space; the spirals and warm glows of distant galaxies and nebulae beckoned.
She soon found herself shooting up through wispy gaseous clouds. Leaving the
plane of the Universe behind, she soared upwards: below her was everything that
ever was.

The experience
had taken her by surprise, but the visual effect was so intense that Gail felt
herself lift from her physical self, her extremities numb. This was a voyage of
the mind, like a dream, yet at the same time very real and tangible. She would
have asked the others how they felt, what they could see, but she was on her
own. They were still in the same room, yet at the same time millions of light years
apart.

The galaxies
swam beneath her, like small whirlpools, swells and ripples in a turbulent
river. Gail had seen the Nile behave like that. She found herself inexorably
drawn towards one galaxy, its tentacles wrapping round each other like an
octopus in a spin. She recognised it as the Milky Way. As the galaxy enveloped
her, she saw a single star ahead. She entered the solar system, and the gas
giants flew past at breakneck speed as if their mere existence was
inconsequential. Asteroids and debris from ancient collisions during the
system’s formative years littered her trajectory, but somehow she made it
through and before long Mars appeared and expanded from a small red dot until
it filled her field of vision. It was beautiful, the outline of continents and dead
rivers on the planet’s surface top and tailed by the frozen poles; memories of
a more active past.

She hovered
briefly by the shore of a vast empty ocean; a jetty thrust out towards a
strange ship, hovering in mid-air.

But before she
had time to focus in on the details of what was happening, she shot back up
into space again, towards Earth.

Her heart
filled with warmth as she saw the blue planet and its moon, dancing in the dawn
like illicit lovers, their faces lit up by the familiar Sun as they whirled
round and round to their own private rhythm.

Gail passed
the Moon, and skimmed the atmosphere of the Earth. But something below her was
different. She couldn’t see the familiar continents and oceans. Instead, there
was one massive continent in the centre of one hemisphere, while the rest of
the planet was a vast expanse of ocean.

Pangaea; she
could remember this from history at school. All present day continents had
emerged from a single landmass many millions of years ago.

Somehow, in
this immersive simulation that was playing out around her, she could sense from
different perspectives at the same time. It was as if she was in two or three,
or maybe a dozen different places at once, and could see, hear and smell all of
them seamlessly. She continued to orbit the Earth, but the black space around
her turned to forests and she found herself deep inside an ancient jungle. Rain
was falling in drops the size of her thumbnails, beating the blades of fan-like
leaves into submission and creating rivers in the mud.

The rains
ended, and below her the landmass on Earth started to change shape; at the same
time, small dinosaurs started to move around the forest, eating foliage. The
continents became more distinct, and she could easily recognise North and South
America drifting away from Africa and Eurasia.

All around her
the dinosaurs grew to monstrous proportions, the familiar long-necked
herbivores and ferocious meat-eaters only a tiny fraction of the thousands of
species she was now looking at.

Most of the
landmass remained on one hemisphere, the Atlantic and Indian oceans far smaller
than she was used to on modern maps. With the exception of Europe and Asia, the
continents looked correct. Central America still didn’t exist, and though on
each orbit she searched for them, Britain and Ireland also refused to emerge.

She was
completing another orbit when an object hurtled past her and landed next to
where Mexico would be. The debris thrown skywards hit the top of the atmosphere
and flattened against the roof of the world like an umbrella, covering the
continents below. Gail tried desperately to see through the haze, but it was
impossible.

She knew
without a doubt that she was looking at an event 65 million years ago: the
extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs.

The air
remained murky as she orbited several more times, slowly clearing to reveal the
ravaged earth beneath. Notably, Central America had risen from the sea.

To her
surprise, dinosaurs still roamed the Earth, though in lesser numbers and variety
than before, and the great giants of the Jurassic had gone.

Somewhere in a
small forest, a small rodent emerged from a hole in a riverbank and shot up a
tree. It started dangling from branches to reach nuts and fruit in the forest
canopy and as it did so its limbs stretched. The tail, at first a long,
straight point, started to curl round and balance the animal as it grew larger,
reaching bigger fruits and insects, and eventually other small animals.

Suddenly it
dropped from the trees and emerged from the forest into a grassy plain. It
balanced on its hind legs to see above the long grass. Seeing it was safe to do
so, it walked into the grass and away from the forest. As it did, its limbs
elongated, giving it higher standing and allowing it to stride with greater
comfort and speed through the fields.

It picked up a
branch, and within one step it had become a spear. A step later the creature
was wearing rough clothes, and within a few more Gail was looking at a fully
developed human, only much stronger; a Xynutian.

Had she been
able to feel her arms, she would have pinched herself. It was the Xynutian version
of her first biology class on evolution at school.

The long grass
turned to farmland and holes in the earth on the banks of the river turned into
elaborate dwellings rising into the sky. Industry became apparent, smoke
churning out of small round buildings away from the river, and in a matter of
minutes the first vehicles emerged. Roads connected the rapidly growing city to
its neighbours up and down the river, and the first lights came on.

She looked
down at the planet beneath her and saw that all the continents were now in
place, although they appeared somehow bloated, fatter versions of their modern
selves, due to lower sea-levels. Europe still touched Africa along parts of the
Mediterranean, Britain and Ireland, while now recognisable for the first time,
were still part of the continental landmass, and Scandinavia was simply a blob
near the Arctic circle.

In the
Atlantic, connected to Spain and Morocco, she noticed part of Europe that
didn’t seem familiar. It only took a few seconds for her to realise that she
may be looking at the mythical Atlantis. The Xynutians had obviously lived with
Atlantis, so to them it probably had little or no significance, but thousands
of years later it still sparked the imagination of humans who had never known
it and had no proof it had ever existed.