“It then came to me by way of a business partner. I made my fortune in nanotech back in the late twenties, and this person had just acquired the jar. He found the scroll inside, itself sealed inside a tube, and realising he couldn’t open it was looking for a buyer.”
The image of the Book of Xynutians on-screen was replaced with a picture of the scroll. Gail immediately recognised the hieratic text. A stylised, cursive form of hieroglyphs, hieratic looked like a cross between hieroglyphs and modern Arabic. Another similarity with Arabic was that it always read from right to left. Two colours had been used in the text: ochre-red and black. The quality of the papyrus was excellent, and she was amazed at how complete it looked. It would have taken pride of place in any public museum, even in Egypt where such things were so much more common.
“I’m glad you like it,” Mallus said. “A couple of years passed with it sitting in storage before I got the chance to try and open the scroll. If I knew what the text was about, you see, I might be able to make more of a profit. And so when I bumped into Dr Patterson during a science convention in Boston, we found we had this mutual interest. His equipment at Harvard helped open the scroll, and as it unfurled so too did the story of our architect.”
“So that’s how you knew about the texts; fine.” Gail interjected. “But while the books and this scroll are priceless to me, that value is academic. Even on the black market no one would pay enough to warrant you going to all this trouble.”
“Not everyone values life to the same extent, Dr Turner. But anyway, you’re right, of course: the books are worth a great deal of money, but it’s the message they contain which is their true value. The Book of Aniquilus is like a Bible for the Aten. As you know, it gives clear guidelines on how life should be lived in order to achieve so-called ‘celestial magnificence.’ But the Book of Xynutians is entirely different. It tells a story of a cataclysm so immense it wiped out an entire civilisation, the same race of Xynutians that you see on the cover of the book. It tells of their ascent to power, and then of their demise. Can you imagine, Dr Turner, such a technologically advanced race, wiped out?”
“I find it difficult enough to accept they existed in the first place, let alone their being wiped out,” she said sarcastically.
Until now, Patterson had been quiet. He took this opportunity to cut in.
“I think I felt the same way, Dr Turner, until I saw the book for the first time.”
She turned to him. “Then show me the book. Hell, why not show the whole world the book? I’m not stopping you.”
“Unfortunately, it’s not that simple. This book would cause a major issue in the public domain. You don’t appreciate how much: these books are proof of intelligent life pre-dating our own by hundreds of thousands of years. It may seem trivial, but such a thing would turn religion on its head. It de-centralises man’s understanding of his position in the Universe.”
She sighed. “So you’re saying that all this needs to stay hush-hush because you’re worried that if it gets out, there’ll be trouble?”
“Not quite. Within this story of their destruction comes a clear warning: what happened to them will happen again, to us. We need your help to decipher the last pieces of text that Patterson has been struggling with, so that we can avoid that fate.” He seemed almost nervous as he said this, and he looked away from them both, towards the hieroglyphs on the screen.
Patterson cleared his throat. “The Book of Xynutians was written under instruction from Nefertiti. It recounts the fall of the Xynutians more than two hundred and fifty thousand years earlier. It claims that the final coming of Nefertiti will signal the beginning of the next cataclysm. The problem is that according to the statement in the book, the final coming of Nefertiti occurred nearly forty years ago.”
Gail sat back and looked at them both. Patterson had seemed nice enough, but he also appeared to be as passionate about this story as Seth Mallus, who in every way was coming across as completely insane.
She looked at her options carefully; on the one hand, she could protest, demand to be freed, make a nuisance of herself, and then probably end up dead like Mamdouh. On the other hand, she could cooperate for the time being, play their little game, and wait patiently for her chance to escape.
That option made the most sense to her now. And in any case, she would be lying if she said she wasn’t eager to get her hands on the book that had been snatched from under her nose back in Egypt all those years ago.
“Fine,” she said. “I’ll help you finish interpreting the Book of Xynutians.”
Chapter 54
“Ridiculous,” she muttered as Henry Patterson sat down beside her in what she had been told was her ‘room’, but which to her only represented her prison cell. “Absolutely absurd. For a start, how would the Egyptians have known anything about these people?”
“Xynutians,” Patterson added helpfully.
“Whatever! This so-called intelligent race with such advanced technology conveniently leaves no trace at all of its existence. All we’re left with is a picture book written long after they were wiped out. Xynutians indeed! You’ll be telling me Star Trek is a fly-on-the-wall documentary next!” She shook her head and pushed his folder of notes back towards his side of the desk.
Pushing the folder back, he selected one scanned page from the Book of Xynutians. “Look at the detail, Dr Turner,” he pointed to a vehicle. “Look at the back: it has what look to be exhaust pipes. Look at the driver: he’s holding a joy stick. How can the ancient Egyptians have even imagined such things? They must be based on something!”
“Why? Why must everything have a meaning? Isn’t it possible they knew about steam power? That the person who drew this understood what could be done with steam, like the ancient Greek Hero Engine, and that any vehicle propelled in this way would need to expel steam? Isn’t it just obvious that in a forward moving vehicle the exhaust goes at the back, so you can see where you’re going?”
“I agree in principle, but the Hero engine wouldn’t be invented for another twelve hundred years after this book was buried deep underground. And in the case of Hero, it’s thought his invention was simply an object of fascination. This picture shows actual vehicles being propelled.”
“So the Egyptians thought differently. And besides, what does it prove? I’ve seen films where spaceships battle it out using lasers and death rays. If some other civilisation discover those same films in a hundred thousand years, do they have to assume we actually had that technology?”
Patterson sighed. “So you think this is a work of Egyptian science fiction? That the writer was the Asimov of his time?”
“Maybe!”
“What other examples of ancient science fiction are you aware of?”
“How the hell should I know? It’s not exactly my domain!”
He flipped through the pages until he arrived at a long manuscript. There were no Egyptian symbols or pictures to be seen. “This story tells of a trip to the Moon, and of a battle between the king of the Sun and the king of the Moon, involving many types of creature, including ants thousands of feet long.”
She looked at the text briefly. “So?”
“It was written in the second century AD by Lucian, a Syrian philosopher,” he said dramatically. “You’re right to question the veracity of the Book of Xynutians, in the same way you would be right to assume that Lucian didn’t really sail to the Moon. But the difference is that no one takes Lucian seriously, partly because of his own disclaimer, but also because his story is obviously fake. The hallmark of ancient fiction is exaggeration. It wasn’t a lion, because that’s too easy to defeat: it was a lion with wings. Or a woman who turned you to stone on sight whose hair was actually made of dozens of snakes. It’s not a trip to the Moon, it’s a trip to the Moon in a sailing ship after a two hundred mile journey into the sky on the uplift of a tornado. It’s clearly imagination.