The Covenant of Genesis (27 page)

‘Okay,’ she said, ‘that part works. Now, let’s see about the rest . . .’

She picked up a cone made from a sheet of card, 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 on to 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 on to the makeshift turntable, sliding the dowel into the hole at its base. ‘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 realised, 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 spoke again, now revealed as male - 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, recorded 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 it 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 cataloguing. 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 civilisation? 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 during 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 be 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 realised. ‘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.’

‘And then they got eaten by killer kangaroos,’ said Chase ruefully.

Nina put down the cylinders. ‘But we can find where they lived. Ribbsley’s translation said they built the city in a valley near the sea, and when they left they dammed up the valley and flooded it. So it’ll still be there - in a frozen lake under the ice.’

‘And how are we supposed to find that?’ Sophia said sceptically.

Nina grinned. ‘I know just the man to ask . . .’

‘
H
ey, Nina!’ cried Matt Trulli. ‘How’s it going?’ ‘Kinda weirdly, to be honest,’ Nina replied. They embraced, Nina kissing his cheek. ‘Great to see you again, Matt.’

‘Well, you timed it right,’ said the pudgy, spike-haired Australian. ‘Another day and you’d have missed me - I’m off to Antarctica for three weeks! Flying out to the survey ship tomorrow. This your first time in Oz?’

‘Yeah. Seems a nice place, though.’ She looked up at the Victorian Classical architecture of Sydney Hospital.

‘Nice place?’ Trulli hooted in mock offence. ‘That the best you’ve got to say?’

‘Hey, c’mon,’ Nina said, grinning, ‘I’m a New Yorker. Nothing compares!’ She tipped her head towards the nearby statue: a large boar, dark all over its body except for the snout, which was the sculpture’s natural bronze. ‘I do like this, though.’

‘Oh, Il Porcellino?’ he said with some pride. ‘Great little fella, everyone loves him. Rub his nose - it’ll bring you good luck.’

‘I could certainly use some.’ Nina rubbed the pig’s snout, then touched her pendant for added fortune. ‘Il Porcellino, though? Doesn’t sound very Australian.’

‘Nah, the original’s from Italy - just like my grandad!’ Trulli stroked the statue’s snout as well, then turned back to Nina. ‘So, what brings you down under?’

‘Long story.’

‘I’ve got time. Come on, we’ll take a stroll. The Opera House is just up the road - we’ll grab a coffee.’

They started northwards, heading towards the harbour. As they walked, Nina gave him a potted account of her recent discoveries and exploits - minus, for the moment, any mention of Sophia or Dalton. ‘Crikey,’ Trulli muttered when she finished. ‘Sounds like these Covenant blokes are bad news.’ He suddenly looked worried. ‘They won’t be coming after me now, will they?’

‘They won’t know we’ve met you,’ Nina assured him. ‘Hopefully they don’t even know that we’re in Sydney. We were watching for people following us while we drove across the country. Didn’t see anyone suspicious.’

Trulli glanced nervously over his shoulder, as if expecting to see assassins springing out from every corner. ‘Hope you’re right. The way you attract trouble, you really do need all the luck you can get.’