Keystone (52 page)

Gail hesitated as the inner door
slid open. After a deep breath, she took a step forward, and almost the moment
her trailing foot cleared the threshold she felt the slight rush of air as the
door shut behind her.

Did it shut differently all those years ago?
She stood in silence for several minutes, until the ambient sound of her pulse
and breathing had become almost unbearable. She looked up to the face of the
Xynutian statue.

Memories of
the traumatic events from before the Chaos came flooding back. She looked to the
floor where Walker had fallen, gunned down by George.

Curious
, she wondered, and moved round
the statue to take a closer look at the floor and walls. Walker and Patterson’s
bodies had been removed by the local police in the days after their escape. She
looked to the opposite wall, against which Patterson had gasped his final
warning to them regarding DEFCOMM. It all seemed so distant now, like it was
from a different world.

She knew from
reports from their friends that the local police and forensic teams had
performed a routine clean-up of the scene as part of their investigations, but
there had been more pressing matters to worry about, and the amazing finds and
criminal events in Amarna had quickly been overlooked and forgotten. The fact
that there had been no interest or reporting of the finds hadn’t surprised her
at the time.

What did
surprise her now was that there was absolutely no trace of blood, dirt,
fragments of clothing or even marks on the walls from ricocheted bullets.

It was then
that she noticed the staff.

She recoiled
in shock. She had already seen the statue; it dominated the centre of the room,
and as such was impossible to miss. But the fact that it was once more holding
the staff aloft, as if she had never ripped it from its grasp years earlier,
sent a shiver down her spine.

The room was,
as far as she could tell, as perfect as the day they had first discovered it.

It was
absolutely timeless.

“The perfect
time capsule,” she murmured in wonder.

“How else?”
said a voice behind her.

She froze.
There was something
wrong
about the
voice. Something
disconnected
. Gail
instinctively knew
what
she would be
facing as she turned, slowly, towards it.

The Xynutian
stood in the doorway. No, ‘stood’ was the wrong word; at over seven feet tall and
with the muscles of an athlete, it
dominated
the doorway. A simple cloth skirt hung round its waist.

This wasn’t a
statue, but an
actual
Xynutian; he, as
she assumed it was a male, was practically human, and yet not at all. There was
something unfamiliar about it. All she could think of was that word,
superior
; this was a
superior
human. A superhuman.

The involuntary
whimper in her throat barely made it past her teeth as she stood rooted to the
spot.

“How else
could we build something that would last through the ages, and allow us to
return once more to the surface to rebuild our civilisation?” he said, his lips
and jaw unmoving as he stared deep into her mind with his jet black eyes. “This
Facility is self-healing. It is at the same time the oldest and newest
structure on the planet, constantly regenerating and rearranging itself on an
atomic level, like the cells in your body, except with no degeneration
whatsoever. It will be here as long as required, waiting for the time for us to
return to the surface.”

“How are you
talking to me?” Gail managed to ask. “You’re speaking English, and yet your
mouth isn’t moving.”

“I am creating
telepathic communication between us. More accurately, the Facility is creating
it, but I am the channel it is using to do so. We are both thinking in our own
languages, which are both, in essence, electrical impulses in very specific and
controlled orders throughout our brains.

“Telepathy is
not beyond your understanding. And before you ask, you heard my voice behind
you because that is where I was in relation to you. If your ears can tell your
brain that I am behind you, then why would it not be possible for a direct
message to the receptors in your brain to give the same impression?”

Her mind was
racing. The initial shock gone, she found that she was concentrating now more
on the conversation inside her head than the actual Xynutian standing before
her.

“So many
questions!” it said. “You will shortly know the answers to most of them. But
let me tell you first of all that I, indeed
we
,
cannot answer everything. You must find some answers within yourself. I will
answer the second most important question you have asked of me.

“Why did we
not return to the surface after the apocalypse that we suffered? That is an
excellent question.” He shifted his weight slightly onto one of his massive
legs and brought his hands together. “For that, I need to start at the very
beginning. I have already mentioned that the Facility is self-healing. It is
also self-governing, and the intelligence that governs it is based on the moral
and scientific knowledge of my time, and that of my civilisation. Luckily, or
unluckily depending on your point of view, morality changed significantly in
the years it took to build the Facility. By the time it was complete, my race
had become more attuned with the world around it; we felt that we were not at
the centre of our ecosystem, but rather an integral part of it.

“And so you
are standing within a store of life as it existed nearly
two million years ago
. We saved everything that we could, from the
tiniest insect to the largest land and sea creatures, the greatest trees to the
most beautiful flower. I can see that that age surprises you, as you have by a
great margin underestimated the distance in time between our two species; but
it has indeed been that long since any of us walked the Earth.

“So why didn’t
we come back? Well, we are still waiting. Our best scientific minds, and you
can testify for yourself that their minds far exceeded your own, estimated that
the devastation of our civilisation on the surface would last a hundred thousand
years, after which it would be safe enough for us to return.”

“So what went
wrong?” Gail asked. She was quietly hurt about the comment on Xynutian brains
being bigger before remembering that it could read her mind.

He looked at
her for a few seconds.

“By the way, I
am not an
it
. I am most definitely a
he
.”

She blushed.

“Apology
accepted. No, what happened was that instead of lasting a thousand years, it
barely lasted a day. What the scientists did not predict is that the apocalypse
had very minimal impact on other living creatures and plants. It was almost
entirely directed at us. The Facility’s first directive was to not allow a
return to the surface within the estimated duration of the apocalypse, without
exception. By that time, life on the surface had thrived in our absence. The
Facility has within its power the ability to propagate all of the species
stored here across the entire planet.
However
,
its
second
directive is to not let that
happen if it is likely to cause unacceptable conflict within the existent
ecosystem.

“The Facility
made the only logical decision, and decided not to return us. Since then, an
opportunity to go back has not come up, and so we remain here.” The Xynutian
didn’t sound in the slightest bit upset about the situation. “An ecosystem is a
fragile thing, and for the Facility preserving that is more important than
anything else.”

“So you’ve
been waiting ever since,” Gail said quietly.

“Not exactly;
we see the passage of time very differently to you. I am connected to the
Facility, which is constantly aware of its surroundings, so I have knowledge of
the past two million years within my mind. And yet, I have existed only since
the very beginning of this conversation. As for the rest of the Xynutian
species, and every other creature and plant here, they are frozen in time. When
they are finally returned, they will be conscious of but a few moments since
they were laid to rest. We are in no hurry, as the time that has already passed
is a mere blink of an eye for Earth. The time of humans is ongoing, and we are
happy to sit by and watch.”

“You speak of
a change of morals,” Gail said. “Is this what the Book of Aniquilus was based
on? Is that why your race was destroyed?”

“Ah,
the books
are another important
question. The books are based on true events, but should be considered to be
fiction. This Facility developed a habit, quite some time after the fall of my
race, and shortly before the dominance of yours, not to
interfere
, but to try and
help
.
 
It did so by using these vaults to send out
emissaries: special messengers with key pieces of knowledge that would, it
hoped, lead your species down a more fruitful path. As time passed, nature on
the surface evolved, and so new samples of your ancestry were brought to the
memory banks of the Facility, to be used in future emissaries.

“At the
beginning simple messages and concepts were sufficient enough to guide humans,
but as time passed and your society developed, more complex ideas were
required. This is similar to pushing a stone: the larger the stone, the more
effort required to move it. The Facility encountered two problems. Firstly, the
human brain, indeed any brain capable of any rational thought, is so caught up
in its own inner workings and thoughts that it is very difficult to plant
abstract ideas within it and expect any realistic results. The second, and
perhaps the most damaging to the cause, is that you are an extremely social
species, and as such find it difficult to act of your own accord.

“Humans are,
for the most part, like molecules of water in a river; each and every one of
you is critical to the water’s flow, but you are individually quite incapable
of changing its direction. Sometimes, however, one of the Facility’s emissaries
would succeed in causing more than just a ripple of change, if only for a short
period of time and in a small part of the river. The books you asked about are
the result of such a ripple.

“Most of the
information in them about my race is accurate, however the emissary lived in
her own time, and so many details are simply products of the ancient Egyptian
culture and belief system. Having read your thoughts, I believe that it changed
even further in translation since then; remember you are a product of your own
time, and as such cannot expect to interpret, or even translate, entirely
accurately.”

“Nefertiti!”
Gail gasped.

“Yes. And
before you ask of other emissaries, because I can feel your mind wandering
there,
He
wasn’t from the Facility.
Good people occur more frequently and naturally than you might think.”

“Nefertiti was
sent to warn us about Aniquilus, because your race was destroyed by it,” Gail
muttered.

The Xynutian
cocked his head to one side as if hearing her voice this time, rather than
simply reading her mind. “Warn you? Well, it may have come across that way, but
that was not the intention; Nefertiti, as I have said, was a human being like
you or any other, and as such was allowed to make her own interpretations. But
there is no point warning you of the inevitable, and consequently the Facility
would not have tried to do so.”

“I’m confused.”

“You are
confused because I mention that Aniquilus is inevitable. For some reason you
expect there to be a way of avoiding Aniquilus, but why should there be? Is
there any way in which an ant can avoid the ant eater?”

“So if there
is no way to stop it, then why did the Facility keep sending emissaries? What
would be the point?”

“It is not
because the apple tree dies that it did not lead a long and fruitful life, Gail
Turner. The Facility’s aim was simply to help make minor, and sometimes major,
adjustments. And yet, the Facility has a complex, evolving mind, and what may
be best for you as a collective may not appear best for the individual. So what
it
thinks is a good idea in the long
run, may not be something you can fully appreciate.”

There was a
long silence, during which time Gail’s mind raced back and forth. She had so
many more questions to ask this amazing creature.

“We are almost
out of time,” the Xynutian said.

“What happened
to the astronauts?” Gail asked suddenly. It was something that had been in the
back of her mind for a long time, and she couldn’t stop it leaping out.

“They are
safe, frozen in time inside a similar, though smaller, Facility, on Mars.”
pointing towards the centre of the room, an image of the two astronauts
materialised, sleeping like the Xynutians in this vault that she had seen all
those years ago. “We cannot let them leave, yet, because they would die, alone on
the surface of the planet. Their fate is tied to that of my race, now.”

“The Book of
Xynutians said that Nefertiti would return. The date it gave was almost sixty
years ago,” Gail said.

“There are
some questions that you already know the answer to, Gail Turner. But I
will
tell you this: emissaries are
always created in pairs, one male, and one female. Nefertiti never met her male
counterpart, as he was unfortunately killed in his youth in a place you now
call France. There have been many emissaries since that young man and
Nefertiti; they did indeed
both
return for the first time nearly sixty years ago, but this time it was the man
who had the greatest impact. Not just a ripple in a river, but a wave.”

“Mallus?” she
asked incredulously. “You’re talking about Seth Mallus?
He
was an emissary?”