“It’s time,” Calderon said, “for the new library to meet the fate of the old.”
10.
Over Pakistan
“One more unscheduled stop, I swear.” Colonel Temple emerged from the pilot’s cabin and faced his passengers. Phoebe sat beside Aria, who was sound asleep but turning fretfully, her eyelids fluttering. Orlando sat on the other side, as if they were the girl’s protective parents, and for a few minutes before takeoff, he actually let himself imagine such a fantasy—that he and Phoebe were living out normal lives. Maybe returning from Disneyworld with a tuckered out daughter.
But then the plane banked away from the sandstone cliffs and Aria looked back on her father, sedated and asleep, hooked to an IV and sprawled out on the back three seats. Orlando met Phoebe’s eyes, which for a moment were clouded with fear and adrift in loss, before she managed to find strength in him and draw it to herself.
She reached over and held his hand and tried to smile. “So, where are you taking me on our next date?”
Drifting off, Aria managed a giggle. “I like you two.”
“We like you,” Orlando said. “Even if we don’t understand how you do what you do.”
Her eyes were the bluest he’d ever seen, but the pupils were so large, threatening to spill over into the blue. It was as if she had been drugged. And maybe she has, he thought. He knew Colonel Temple needed her fresh and alert when they got back to the Stargate base, and her powers weren’t really needed here, as long as they were a swiftly moving target at fifty thousand feet. They were safe. So maybe he did give her a little help in order to sleep.
“I just do it,” she said. “It just happens. Natural, like if I threw a rock at you. If you couldn’t dodge it, what would you do?”
Orlando looked at Phoebe, then back at the girl. He shrugged. “Try to block it or hide behind my arms?”
Aria nodded. “Just like that. Reflex. Except instead of raising my arms, I raise this… thing. This layer, like a blanket, except it’s really wide and long and stretches pretty far back in time too.”
“Neat,” Phoebe whispered. “But you look exhausted. Your dad’s stable now, he’s resting. You should do the same.”
Aria yawned, closed her eyes and smiled. And then she was out.
Even Temple’s entrance didn’t wake her. “Don’t worry,” he said. “We don’t need her for this.”
“For what?” Orlando asked, straining to see out the window. His ears had just popped with their descent. “We haven’t been flying for more than an hour. Where are we?”
“Over part of Pakistan.”
“Ugh,” Phoebe said with a groan. “Please tell me we’re not making another extraction or going into another cave.”
Temple shook his head. “This one’s simple. We land, you get out and you give me your impression of the site.”
“What site?” Orlando asked. And he started wracking his brain for possibilities. What was in the mountains of Pakistan that they needed to see? What, besides another terrorist cell, or a cache of weapons or something?
“Just something I have my team members probe to test their talents.”
“Another test?” Phoebe asked. “Really? After all we just did?”
Temple folded his arms over his chest. “Okay, it’s not a test. I just want to see if you two can give me more information than those other psychics. Please, it’s important.” He took a seat in front of them, strapping himself in.
“Important for whom?” Orlando muttered. He grabbed hold of the armrests, preparing for a bumpy landing.
“For you,” Temple replied. “Because this… you just have to see. I don’t have your gifts, but I’m told it’s quite… earth shattering.”
“Mohenjo-Daro,” Temple said after he had led them from the small landing strip to the edge of a hill overlooking a vast plain and a sprawling view of ancient red brick walls, ledges and boundaries, a few silo-like towers, arches and perfectly aligned streets. “The Mound of the Dead, as it’s translated.”
Orlando whistled. “I know this place.”
“Thought you might,” said Temple.
“Figures,” Phoebe said, rubbing the sleeve of her blouse across her forehead, dabbing the sweat. The sun was just descending, but painfully intense, baking the ancient ruins below. “It’s an old city, right? Archaeologists found it, and yeah it’s pretty cool. So why are we here?”
“We’re here to take a peek,” Orlando guessed. He cracked his knuckles, stretched his arms and gave a little jog in place, as if warming up before a race.
“Yes, a peek.” Temple waved his arm over the view. “Mohenjo-Daro was re-discovered in the 1920’s. They believed it was built in 2600 BC and that it served as one of the centers of the Indus Valley civilization, of which very little is known. An incredible degree of sophistication went into the planning and design of this city. Urban sanitation systems like we wouldn’t see again for two thousand years.”
“Always a good thing, but probably no plumbers union back then.” Orlando grinned, then shrugged at Phoebe.
“Precise geographical and astronomical layouts of the streets and buildings, and despite the best efforts of the world’s leading linguists, a written script that has never been successfully translated. A mature language that appeared in these two cities as well as several thousand other sites across the area—for which they can find no evolution or development. It seems to have just appeared.”
“Yeah, yeah,” Orlando said. “Get on with the real juicy morsels. You know, tell her what’s really crazy about this place.” He glanced at Phoebe. “I tried to get your brother to let us make Mohenjo-Daro an objective that we should scout out during our downtime. But he thought it wasn’t worth our effort.”
“Doesn’t sound like him. He must’ve been preoccupied.” Phoebe kept staring at the city, and in the hazy sun the ancient buildings began to shimmer and wobble. She was feeling the tug of a vision.
Temple coughed. “I can understand Caleb’s reluctance. But I must also now tell you in complete sincerity that what I’m about to say is above top secret, and—”
“Yeah, we know. Tell no one…” Orlando raised his hands in a gesture of being terrified. “…or else you’ll have to kill us.”
“Oh, I won’t kill you,” Temple said with a smirk. “But someone else assuredly will. Now, listen Phoebe, since I gather Orlando has already been briefed by Wikipedia or Conspiracies-R-Us…”
“Hey!”
“But this site, and its sister city not far from here, called Harrapan, are much, much older than 2600 BC.”
“How old?”
“Undetermined. The problem with you psychics is that while you can see the past, you never manage to glimpse a newspaper or something with the date on it.” He grinned. “Just kidding. But the problem of dating remains unsolvable. Best we can do is look to the geographic landmarks—or in some rare cases, we’ve had luck with the remote viewer coming out of the vision and drawing what the night sky looked like.”
“Ah,” Orlando said, clapping. “Plug the constellations into a computer program and let it match up the orientation with the patterns of stellar drift and the Earth’s precession and wobble, and—”
“All right, all right.” Phoebe rubbed her temples. “So did you do any of that with this site?”
Temple nodded. “But I’m not divulging that information yet, as uncorroborated as it is. I don’t want to taint your impressions. Bad enough you already have a guess as to the target, and Orlando has his… theories. I need you to try to see for yourself.”
“The target is Mohenjo-Daro,” Phoebe said, nodding and taking a deep breath, focusing on the city.