Voyage to Alpha Centauri: A Novel (56 page)

     The Lord of the Night-gods spoke through his mouth,

     And some saw the head of the serpent coming forth from the hole, as it is with She-Who-Sees-Far.

     The Lord of the Night-gods said:

     “See now, you are victorious in the test [which] I have given unto you.

     You have harkened to my command.

     Yet now I do a more great thing [and it is] this:

     I leave the fool to his work.

     I leave the wood-ship not burned.

     I leave it as a sign for you and all the peoples,

     Of sky-god folly, for the wood-ship is far from water.

     Yet my heavens-ship [name of the Lord of the Night-gods and the beast]

     Shall go up.

     The sky-god ship is a nothing, for it goes unto no-place.

     The Lord of the Night-gods-ship is great, for it shall rise unto the heaven in the heavens.”

     Yet Krani-mhrod was not destined [literally, “hand of the Night-god directs”] to depart unto the heavens.

     When he awoke in the tent of the King,

     He stood for a time and listened to the account of [what] the fool had done.

     Then he fell to the ground and rolled upon it, raving [literally, “babble-speech of the insane”] came from his mouth.

     It has not changed unto this day. He is in the house of the ill,
[he is] bound by cords [lest] he destroy himself;
he is preserved [kept alive] because he is King-blood.

     In his father’s place, Nih-kri-zi, the son of Krani-mhrod, was chosen to rule the ship in the fourteen[th] generation of the body of Akri-mun-zi.

     He shall prove the sky-god small.

     He shall prove the Lord of the Night-gods great.

     [Name of the Lord of the Night-gods] is greatest in the heavens for he has overthrown the sky-god.

     Then [said] the Ap-kalu unto the King:

     “The sky-god is shamed. Yet the sky-god is angry.

     We must make sacrifice unto the Lord of the Night-gods [to] rebuke the sky-god.”

     It was done.
¹³

     The great beast that is sacred to the Lord of the Night-gods

     Was brought unto the ship in [its] cage and it was fed

     With one hundred children [alive] who entered its mouth.

     Their scream[ing] is praise unto the Lord of the Night-gods.

     Five cities gathered in the plain for the departure [literally, “up-going”]

     And all the people were in the plain with the King and the Ap-kalu.

     Then the burn-stone was struck within the sky-ship

     And the fire of the Night-gods came from its tail.

     High-reaching, it climbed up the sky and went into the blanket.

     It pierced the blanket. As the gods had told, the blanket is thick water.

     Above it we came unto the great sea that is constant night,

     Yet [it is] full of the flames of the Night-gods.

     To honor the Lord of the Night-gods, who is mighty.

     To honor Nih-kri-zi, who rules this ship.

     To honor Nisaba and Haia, god-protectors of scribes.

     Through my hand, I, Dumu-er-se-tim, called Ti-shmi, [made] this chant.

[Codex-tablets, gold-hieratic-1, Temple of the Ship, AC-A-7; 27.51 degrees S, 18.35 degrees E. Translation: onboard KC main computer: Scan / cryptology: KC-y09-59858a; Adjusted scans / cryptology: KC-y09-59858a-b-c-d (the source decryption is d). Additional translation analysis and annotation: Dr. Dariush Ibrahimi Mirza, Cambridge University, staff Philologist,
Kosmos
expedition, AC-A-7. Ship’s chronometer: Day 320 since arrival AC-A-7,
Mundus Novus.
]

I looked up from the page, unable to say anything. I shook my head in disgust. When at last I found my voice, I said, “Thank God these murderous wretches are extinct.”

Dariush took a deep breath. “Neil, these people came from Earth.”

Day 322
:

My first reaction was disbelief.

“They couldn’t have come from Earth”, I said. “That’s impossible.”

“Why do you think it is not possible?” he asked.

“Because . . . because we know our own history. There was no developed technology before the modern era.”

“Do we, in fact, know with absolute certainty our own history—the history of mankind?”

“Yes, we do. Just because this chant or religious fantasy seems similar in a few details to our own biblical myths doesn’t mean it was connected to us. So we have a man building a wooden ship. How unusual is that? If, as you once told me, intelligence creates universal patterns, then the aliens could easily have had experiences similar to ours. Wherever there are trees and water, men make boats.”

“Are you saying it would be a product of universal intelligence for two men on two different planets to spend their lives building two massive ships in a place far from water, for no apparent reason?”

“You’re presuming that Noah existed, Dariush. You’re also presuming that the biblical flood happened as the scriptures tell it.”

“Yes, I am believing this.”

“It’s a myth. It’s
our
myth, and maybe another race light-years distant from us had a similar myth. Or maybe it was a scribe’s dream.”

“Neil, the dream was real enough that it was carried through the vastness of space and recorded in gold.”

“Cult documents of our own primitive civilizations were sometimes made of gold. But their dreams had no basis in reality.”

“Have you read the Epic of Gilgamesh or the Epic of Atrahasis?”

I shook my head.

“These are ancient poetic flood accounts. The Sumerian, Akkadian, Babylonian epics are part of a larger body of flood literature from the ancient world, including folklore and myth among many peoples. A great deluge occurred, and the stories of it share crucial details with the story of Noah.”

“All right, I see your point. But how do you
know
they weren’t fiction?”

“Have you read about the findings of Leonard Woolley at Ur and Nineveh, and those of Dr. Field at Kish, or those of Kathleen Kenyon at Jericho?”

Again I shook my head.

“In the early years of archaeology, the very deep flood deposits in those and numerous other sites in the Mesopotamian basin were thought to be a localized flood—immense in size and destructive effects, but still limited. Later, geologists discovered overwhelming evidence that the flood was far greater in size, covering most of Europe, India, Africa, and Asia as far as the Himalayas, and even parts of North America. Why, for example, are there the same flood deposits and a great salt lake on the Iranian plateau, the Dasht-e Kavir, thousands of meters above the level of Mesopotamia?”

I shrugged. Where did he get his information?

“I have walked on this very desert, Neil. It is in my homeland, bordered by mountains. Geologists confirm that in ages past this vast, sterile plateau was a fertile region surrounding a fresh-water lake.”

“All right, but look at the Dead Sea. We know how it came about—the ocean spilled in ages ago, the evaporation—”

“The Dead Sea is nine times saltier than the ocean. And it is twelve hundred feet
below
sea level. My beloved Caspian, the largest landlocked lake in the world, is also saline, though only one third the salinity of the ocean. Yet it is
above
sea level. The Kavir, as I have said, is far higher still, and there are similar high-altitude salt lakes elsewhere on our planet.”

“Okay. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that there was a worldwide flood—or nearly worldwide—in the Earth’s distant past. You’re still not addressing other details in this scribe’s chant. For example, his planet was covered by a thick cloud layer. The aliens knew darkness and light, night and day, but from what he says, they never saw the stars or the sun until the day their arrow went up.”

“There is a theory that the Earth was once surrounded by a dense layer of cloud, heavy with water. If this is so, it would explain many things, and could further dispel our presumption that the flood account is myth.”

“How?”

“If you read Genesis carefully, you will see that during the generations following Noah the ages of individual men are recorded. With each passing generation after the flood, the lifetimes of men steadily decline until they reach our present ‘threescore years and ten’.”

“But that could prove the earliest accounts were just ancient lore, exaggerated and wildly imaginative.”

“Or it could point to a cosmic catastrophe. If the dense cloud layer was broken—let us say by a comet or asteroid, if not by the direct hand of God—then solar rays and other cosmic rays detrimental to man’s health would then for the first time penetrate the atmosphere and begin our genetic degeneration.”

“A theory”, I murmured. “A theory with many
ifs
.”

“In the flood account, it is written:
All the fountains of the great abyss burst forth, and the floodgates of the sky were opened
.”

“Which could mean anything—such as a severe localized flood in Mesopotamia.”

“Yet it is written that the crest of the waters rose fifteen cubits higher than the highest mountains. Then there is the
bow in the heavens
established as a sign that God would never again destroy mankind by flood. It is recorded as an unprecedented phenomenon. Yet rainbows appear only in skies where sunlight pours through broken clouds.”

“But where is there any evidence of an advanced civilization before recorded history? There’s nothing, Dariush, nothing of any kind.”

“Geologists inform us that worldwide catastrophes have occurred during the history of our planet. The Earth has several immense impact craters, any one of which could have set off a chain of events, such as unthinkable tsunamis and shifting of tectonic plates and the axis of the planet. We have theories that attempt to explain diverse prehistoric phenomena separately and sometimes together, but we have no absolutely reliable map of the past. Within various scientific fields, there is much controversy over the chronologies and causality.”

“Granted, Dariush, but you’re jumping to some enormous conclusions here.”

“I am merely speculating.
If
—yes, I will dare to use this word—if a cataclysm with global effects occurred during Noah’s lifetime, is it not likely that everything preceding him would be swept away, and what remained would be buried beneath very deep deposits of sedimentation?”

“All right, I’ll grant you that too—
if
it happened.”

“There is also the question of the greenhouse effect created by the pre-flood cloud layer, which would have made a warm, humid environment permitting luxuriant botanical growth and large creatures.
There were giants in those days
, the scriptures tell us. These factors, combined with the longevity of man during that period, would enable a civilization to develop rapidly. It would not need to expend so much of its energies on survival. This would have changed with the collapse of the cloud layer.”

“Everything you’re saying is interesting, Dariush, very interesting. But it doesn’t in the least prove that the aliens came from Earth.”

In answer, he merely handed me another sheaf of papers.

“What’s this?” I asked.

“This is the translation of the second set of codices found beneath the black altar. It was written many hundreds of years after the arrival on AC-A-7. The author is unstated, yet the style is close to that of Dumu-er-se-tim, called Ti-shmi, the Child of the Underworld. A different hand, a different mind, but the author was of this culture.

“The document recounts the past, which at the time of writing is already very distant. He speaks of the ‘sacred arrow’ landing in a wide, fertile plain between mountains and sea. Then follows the establishing of a city, of agriculture, mines, forges, social hierarchies. There was a slave class, a priestly class, and an overarching cultic life that determined everything. The Night-gods spoke into their ears yet remained invisible. The Lord of the Night-gods was their supreme deity, and he too was invisible. Yet through the mouth of a later Ap-kalu, he commanded the people to carve an image of him and instructed them in the rites associated with it.

“The document describes a sickness caused by the ‘burn-stone’. It is the cause of deaths, since the ship’s fuel was removed from its safe compartments after arrival on the planet and enshrined in the city temple. The burn-stone is sacred, and those who touch it will die by the hand of the Night-gods. Now, the fuel must be put back into the ship’s safe compartments, and the people are commanded to coat the entire vessel with a material the Night-gods tell them how to make. The people must then carry the ship into the mountains and enshrine it in a new temple they will construct by cutting deep into a mountain. A road must be built on which to carry it.

“The new world is rich in resources, yet the people are unhappy. They are longing for the world they left behind, a world that had no harsh sunlight, where the air was thicker and all things grew more bountifully.”

Dariush paused.

“Even so,” I said, “this doesn’t necessarily mean they came from Earth.”

He thumbed through the document and handed me the final page.

“This is a scan of an image on the bottom tablet of codex-2.”

It was a print-out of a photo: a gold tablet inscribed with circles. In the center of the page was the largest circle, the only one with symbolic flames radiating from it. Revolving around it were thirteen circles and ellipses of varying sizes, with increasing radii. Eight planets and five small planetoids. The third out from the sun was the only colored one—intense blue.

“That is an inset stone”, said Dariush, touching it with his finger. “It is lapis lazuli.”

Inscribed beside it were typical alien hieroglyphics. “What do these letters mean?” I asked.

“It says,
The Beautiful Planet
.” He pointed to additional symbols beneath the third sphere. “These signify ‘domicile’ and ‘origins’—in other words,
home
.”