Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (54 page)

But if only a few hundred thousand “adults” could have lived in the city, why are there many times more this number interred in the temple? Are there other buried cities? Exploration has been limited, and even this has focused on one continent only.

Day 292
:

More and more dwellings are being excavated. They reveal a perplexing uniformity, an urban planning extremely efficient but devoid of art (with the exception of the nasty little god sculptures), and lacking open spaces where numbers of people could gather. Were there no parks, no temples, no libraries, no gardens? It resembles a sterile warren. Was this a slave city? If not, was it the home of a self-regimented master race whose distinguishing feature was their stupefying unoriginality?

We simply do not know.

Day 310
:

I was wrong about something I wrote a few weeks ago. Apparently, for the past month, low-orbit scanners with newly augmented capacities have been focusing all their instruments on the surface of every continent, re-examining them kilometer by kilometer. Now the findings are being presented to the public: only Continent 1 displayed any feedback indicating the possibility of buried cities. After concentrated effort, three more cities were discovered. There is one near the northern edge of the continent, also situated at a river mouth. There is another on the eastern side of the mountain ranges, farther south in the cooler latitudes. The fourth is in the wide valley between the central and eastern ranges, about four hundred kilometers south of the Temple of the Ship. Traces of roads have been found near all of them, and though surveys are not extensive, the roads appear to lead in the general direction of the Temple. There are hardly enough archaeologists and engineers to go around, but small parties have dug shafts in each of the newly discovered cities and found (at least, at first glance) that they differ in no way from City 1.

In the suburbs, so to speak, there are industrial ruins on a small scale, forges, brickworks, cement plants. Splaying outward from the urban cores are networks of irrigation canals. It would seem that agriculture was a major occupation of these people.

Day 316
:

Another presentation about the aliens’ ship, mainly interviews with scientists in various fields—metallurgy, propulsion, aero- and thermodynamics, etc. Though the craft has not yet been opened, scientists have determined that it was propelled by atomic energy. Its fuel supply was not great in mass, and the low level of radiation indicates that most of the unstable isotopes have already decayed.

Long ago, its initial thrust would have been impressive, one atomic engineer speculated. He went on to say that the ship was probably designed for a single journey from solar system to solar system, or a few such journeys at the most. If so, where did it come from? Once launched, it could have traveled great distances from any one of thousands of nearby solar systems, but how could it have sustained life during the extremely long duration of such journeys? Did they have anti-matter? Or did they have something else that brought them even closer to lightspeed?

Day 321
:

Just before dawn, Dariush found me sitting on my bench in the arboretum, listening to Mozart. Without explanation, he asked me to come with him to his room. I could see that something was troubling him because his eyes blinked rapidly and his face was flushed, his customary paternal expression vanished. Walking hastily a few steps ahead of me along the concourse, he seemed barely conscious of my presence. When we arrived at his room, he sat on the bed and gestured toward the desk chair, saying nothing. I sat down and looked at him expectantly. “What’s happened?” I asked.

With trembling hands he picked up a thin stack of paper from the desk. “It is difficult”, he murmured. “It changes everything.”

“Everything? What do you mean?” He glanced at the papers and closed his eyes.

“Tell me, Dariush.”

“The tablets. We have made progress in translation.”

“Really! That’s tremendous news!”

“Yes, insofar as the meaning of codices have become translucent—though not all the words—we can read the archival records.”

“This is an astounding breakthrough”, I exclaimed.

“Astounding”, he whispered.

“What do they say? What do they tell you?”

“There are thousands of tablets, as I mentioned to you last month. The linguistics team is presently scanning the final hundred thousand. Until now, we were unable to decipher any of them, neither by cyber-analysis nor by human labors. We exerted every effort at cryptanalysis, but lacking a key, we made no progress. For my part, I have focused my attention on the three gold codices that were found beneath the altar—each composed of several plates.

“Three days ago, a thought came to me. Because the codex characters are not dissimilar to our Mesopotamian cuneiform, I decided to run a new scan through the main computer, testing again for character identification.”

“And that broke the code!”

“In the beginning, it did not. Yet after repeated attempts and adjustments of coordinates, a word appeared—a single identifiable word— then another. At first, I believed it was the product of random chance.”

“Like the monkeys at typewriters composing a Shakespeare play, if given millions of years to do it?”

“Like that, I thought. But it was not so. The two words unlocked five more. Then we were faced with new obstacles. Though we cannot say this codex is cuneiform in the strict sense, its characters are similar in this regard: they are not alphabetic; they are syllabic, interspersed with a low percentage of logosyllabic, that is, ideograms and pictograms. In the codex I examined, there are 146 characters with assigned values, and many of these I presumed would have multiple phonetic values. This was an additional clue because the Babylonian Bisitun inscription, for example, has 150 characters with multiple phonetics. The characters are different, yet the pattern is nearly identical.” Dariush paused. “Babylonian has approximately 600 characters, the Hittite about 350, and so forth. A codex with only 146, therefore, while still very difficult, is yet within the capacity of cryptanalysis. You realize this is more complex than our Roman alphabet with 26 letters or the Greek with 24.”

“Yes, I can see it would be.”

“Even so, the computer was able to isolate a number of signs that appeared to be distinctly proto-Semitic in form. Many were close to the Akkadian, others remotely similar to Old Elamite. Still others seemed to be Vannic, and among the latter were entire phrases that resembled what the Assyrians called Urartu’s script.”

“Then it’s a hybrid of several languages, a Rosetta Stone for this civilization.”

“No. It is a coherent language of its own. The print-outs yesterday revealed this.”

I pointed to the papers in his hand. “Is that a sample?”

“A sample of utmost importance. This is the text of codex-1, the oldest of the three ‘enshrined’, one might say, beneath the altar in front of the ship. It appears to have been highest in significance to the people who once lived here. The three are dated at periods separated by many hundreds of years.”

“How old is this one?”

“Approximately nine thousand years, by Earth-reckoning. Testing on the plates’ isotope decay, though providing only raw dating, confirms its age, give or take a hundred years.”

“In any event, very old.”

“Yes. And it is an account of events even older than the time of writing. I have just now completed a careful check of the wording.”

“May I see it?”

He handed me the sheets. Before I could begin reading, however, he said a second time, “Neil, it changes everything.”

“Everything? In what sense?”

“Our understanding of history. Of civilization.”

“Their civilization you mean?”

“We suspected early on that they had not arisen spontaneously from this planet. The dearth of ruins indicated this. Now we know that only one continent had cities, despite their ability to make long journeys. This indicates a small population. There is no archeological evidence of primitive stages preceding their last era. Their achievements, as far as they went, were not typical of gradual progressions over long historical periods.”

“You’re saying they came here from somewhere else?”

“Yes. I thought at first that it might have been in the region of Barnard’s Star, or CN Leonis, or even as far as Sirius.”

“Maybe farther still.”

He shook his head negatively. “Their technology would not have permitted it.”

“They could have been dropped off here by a race with superior technology, like ours is now.”

Dariush did not respond to this. He continued, “As you will see, I have inserted punctuation for the sake of clarification. My annotations are in brackets wherever a word was either indecipherable or was meaningful but inexact by our standards. In the original codex tablet, proper names are logo-graphics enclosed in a square or rectangular incision in the plate.”

“Like an Egyptian cartouche.”

“Neil, please read the text.”

I read: [Document inserted]

Of the Coming

The chant of Dumu-er-se-tim [literally, “Child of the Underworld”—
D.I. Mirza
] of the up-leaving. This is the road [way of] departure. [To] the Lord of Night-gods, [be] praise. [To] Nisaba and Haia, god-protectors of scribes, [be] praise.

     Thus did the Night-gods come to Akri-mun-zi

     And bid him hearken:

     Obedient, he slashed his body with the knife.

     He burnt his hair and ate the ashes.

     Three times he walked in the pit of the venom-snake.

     Three times he lived and made chant of it.

     Three times he called forth the Lord of the Night-gods, [name].
¹

     The Ap-kalu [sage-priest] performed the summon[ing] rite With sacred [literally, “spirit force of the Night-gods”] sacrifice.
²

     [When] all rites were fulfilled

     Then did the Night-gods speak unto Akri-mun-zi

     From the mouth of the Ap-kalu.

     [He said:]

     “You will make a ship to break [penetrate] the blanket [literally, “cloak-water”] over the earth [land, world],

     For the sky-god [your] enemy is about to do an ill [evil, catastrophe] unto mankind.

     In this ship you will journey on the sea above,

     Unto a heaven in the heavens, which I will show you.
³

     I will point the road [way] to the triple-fires; [they are] lights in the heavens.

     Of the three, one is lesser, a flame of copper [literally, “red-metal”];

     Two are flames of gold and the greater of these is your destination.

     Of the greater are born the eighteen
⁴
and the seven[th] is yours.”

     “Our ships go only upon rivers and lakes,” said Akri-mun-zi to the Lord of the Night-gods.

     “We see no flames in the heavens, for the blanket covers all.

     It does not make a gate [literally, “opening in a wall”].”

     The Lord of the Night-gods answered:

     “Yet will I show you the making of marvels and strong devices to carry you up unto the sea.”

     Then did the vision-men under Akri-mun-zi

     Receive dreams of wonder-iron and the hand-craft [skill] to make it.

     Unto others did the serpent-head come forth from

     The mouth of She-Who-Sees-Far
⁵
and say unto them:

     “Go up to the mountains of Ara-arath and dig into the earth for the burn-stone [possibly “stone that burns”].”

     When Akri-mun-zi was 380 years old
⁶

     His son, the noble [exalted] Akri-mun-té, brought forth from the earth

     The stone that makes sick with tumors and burns flesh [of] man and animal.

     He stood afar and did not touch the stone; thus he did not sicken.

     Many
⁷
servants died; their deaths [were] slow; [there was] weeping in the city.

     The Lord of the Night-gods received their sacrifice.

     In the dreams of Akri-mun-té, the Lord of the Night-gods showed him the making of forges and devices

     To hold [uncertain meaning, possibly “harness, use, employ”] the power of the burn-stone in the tubes [uncertain meaning, literally, “hollow reeds”] made of the new iron that does not bleed [possibly “rust”].

     Forth from it came the flame of the Lord of the Night-gods.

     Many [circle-hand] died and the tubes rose unto the blanket; [they] did not return.

     Then unto the noble [exalted] Akri-mri, the son of Akri-mun-té, came the voice of the Lord of the Night-gods in a vision and said:

     “Now you will make unto my praise a greater [tube].

     A house for one man shall you build within [it].

     You shall ride upon the sky-arrow and see far.”

     Akri-mun-zi was 420 years old and Akri-mun-té [was] 390 and Akri-mri [was] 310, when Akri-mri rode upon the sky-arrow and went up into the blanket.

     He did not return. The Night-gods received his sacrifice.

     Akri-mun-zi was 431 years old [when] Krani-mhrod, one in [the] thirteen[th] generation of the body [literally, “seed”] of Akri-mun-zi, began to make a tower unto the heavens of marvel[ous] invention.

     [Thus] no more should the sky-arrows point to the heavens on the slopes of mountains.

     Krani-mhrod said unto the governor [literally, “King’s-steward”] of the lands:

     “The Lord of the Night-gods commands me.”

     Taken [was] he unto the King [unnamed, possibly Akri-mun-zi himself. —
D. I. Mirza
].

     The King said, “Krani-mhrod, what is this you say unto my steward?”

     Krani-mhrod answered him: “The Lord of the Night-gods commands me. I must build a ship to mate [literally, “have sexual intercourse”] with the tower unto the heavens. The sky-arrow will fly up in this way, and the hands of the sky-god [our] enemy cannot pull it down.