CHAPTER
THREE
“What do you think?” Lowanna asked as Marty studied the tablet on the table. “Is it really an example of predynastic writing, like Gunther’s been saying?”
But despite the wonder of the tablet, Marty found he was distracted by Lowanna. She was stunning, with skin so dark that the light reflecting off of it shone with an almost purple hue. She was probably in her mid-thirties, just a handful of years younger than Marty, but had the same wide-eyed expression he’d seen from undergraduates when he’d led them to the end of an old wisdom text in the original Egyptian.
“I’m sorry, but I’m quite curious about you,” he said. “About what growing up Arrernte was like, and how that led to you becoming an anthropologist.”
“Sure,” she said. “And I’m quite curious about . . . Are these really examples of predynastic writing?”
Marty laughed and shifted his gaze back onto the tablet. So it was none of his business.
“To be honest,” he said, “it’s an enigma. How familiar you are with Egyptian writing systems?”
“Not familiar at all. My focus is on the biological and sociological evolution of societies, including ancient ones.”
“Okay. Well, Egyptian writing is composed of many different logographic representations.” Marty pointed at some of the illustrations etched in the clay. “But the images don’t necessarily mean the thing they show. Sometimes a picture of a star means a star, but usually the pictures represent letters. Some pictures represent a single letter—like here, this picture of a foot. It makes a sound like our letter b.”
“Is there a whole alphabet?” Lowanna asked.
“The Egyptians don’t seem to have recognized one, but every consonant could be written with a single image, so, yes, sort of. But also, lots of pictures represent multiple consonants.”
“Syllables.”
“No, because they don’t tell us the vowels. And no, because they don’t even imply that there are vowels. They just show consonants. This picture is the letters m and r, and this one is p and r. This picture is three letters together: n, f, and r.”
“How do you know which picture makes which letters?”
“For an Egyptian, it was easy,” Marty said. “Well, once you had the training anyway. The symbol represents the consonants of the thing pictured. For example, in English, let’s say I draw a stick of butter.”
“Butter comes in bricks,” Lowanna muttered.
Marty smiled. “Fine, a brick of butter. What are the consonants?”
“B, t, t, r.”
“We ignore doubles, so b, t, r. So when I draw a brick of butter, I might be referring to butter. But using those same consonants . . . but different vowels . . . what else might I be referring to?”
“Better,” said Lowanna.
“Or batter,” Marty added. “Or bitter, or biter. Or maybe even bather or bother.”
“How do you know which?”
“Sometimes there are extra signs that give us hints,” Marty said. “Or a pattern of signs used consistently becomes a recognizable spelling. Sometimes you can only tell from the context.”
“Fascinating.”
“Isn’t it?” Marty grinned. “When I found out about this, I was just a kid, and I thought it was so interesting that I devised a hieroglyphic system for writing the English language, using only objects located in my bedroom. A picture of a desk was d, s, k, and the guitar was g, t, r, and the letters p, n were made with a drawing of a ballpoint pen.”
“Nerd,” Lowanna said. “Okay, so what’s the enigma?”
“The Egyptian writing system lasted some four thousand years, as far as we have evidence,” Marty said. “The language kept going, as Coptic, but it was written with a different writing system, mostly borrowed from Greek. Late in its life, the Egyptian writing system became more and more abstract. It was still these little pictures, but instead of a picture of a mouth, you might just have a straight line, or instead of an owl, you’d get a squiggle.”
“This tablet is early, then,” Lowanna said. “Because these are clearly painted pictures.”
“Yes. And that in itself is interesting, because the oldest written Egyptian we have is writing on objects that have other uses—walls, coffins, statues. Not tablets. And also, at first glance, this looks like really simple writing. Simple syntax, simple sentences, a limited vocabulary. Few determinatives. It does look like very early writing.”
Lowanna shrugged. “Nothing about that sounds like an enigma.”
Marty smiled. “Maybe ‘enigma’ was the wrong word. Let’s say . . . mystery. You see, the carbon dating says this tablet is six thousand years old, but the oldest known complete sentence in written Egyptian is estimated to be less than five thousand years old. If this writing turns out to be as old as the tablet it’s painted on . . . then this is not only the oldest Egyptian writing ever found, it’s the oldest human writing anyone has ever seen.”
Lowanna was quiet for a moment, her eyes unwavering as she looked up at him. “You would have been a great teacher.”
Marty shrugged. “As it turns out, I’m a pretty good woodworker. And tolerably decent small businessman.”
“Gunther told us about that. What made you get off the university track? Was it because you punched that guy?”
Marty sighed. “The university finally admitted it would never give me tenure. Punching that guy didn’t help, obviously. But the truth is I was already at odds with the whole thing.”
“Let me guess: there were never any available tenure slots.”
“I take it you’ve experienced that yourself?”
“Oh yeah.”
Marty nodded. “Well, add to that the fellow professor who got tenure ahead of me because his dad paid for new seats in the basketball arena. And the one who had a more politically attractive ethnic background than Chinese–Jewish American.”
“I don’t know, that sounds pretty exotic.”
“Not the right kind of exotic. Mostly it just means I make food for myself on Christmas.” Marty grinned. “Bad joke. Oh, and don’t forget the associate professor who was sleeping with the department chair. They’re all tenured professors now.”
“All those wrong reasons aside, do you think those others were deserving of tenure?” Lowanna asked.
Marty felt an old bitterness rearing its ugly head. “Not even close,” he said.
It was just before dawn the next morning, and Lowanna was watching surreptitiously from just inside a tunnel opening as Marty went through some kind of exercise routine.
Now, stripped naked to the waist, Marty was performing a complex series of steps involving spinning kicks, punches, and deep sweeping lunges. He was in fantastic shape, and moved with the fluidity of a professional dancer. After hearing Gunther talk about how Marty was into martial arts, Lowanna had figured he was one of those poseur types. But it was obvious the man was the real deal. Humble, quiet, and unassuming.
The kind of guy who would punch a handsy sociologist.
He continued for another two minutes before coming to the end of the form.
Gunther had said Marty was unmarried. Not that it mattered, if he really intended to read the inscriptions and then fly right back to Connecticut.
Marty crouched low, and for a moment he seemed to struggle with his balance as he breathed heavily, facing the rocky floor. Then with a deep breath, he hopped up onto his feet, bowed to nobody in particular, then turned to Lowanna with a smile.
“I see you’re awake,” he said.
Lowanna’s cheeks felt warm as she was caught intruding on this half-naked man’s . . . well, she wasn’t sure what he’d been up to.
“Sorry, yes,” she said. “Was that karate?”
Marty grabbed a towel from a rock and wiped the sweat from his face. “Kung fu, actually. Or at least that’s what my Grandpa Chang called it. Honestly, I have nothing to compare it to. Everything I learned was because my grandfather wanted to pass on what he knew.”
“Interesting. Was he a monk?”
“My grandfather would vehemently say ‘no’ to that question.” Marty smiled. “But my mother once told me that her father had been one of the senior monks at the Shaolin temple before he left the monastery and never looked back. Anyway, those were just some basic forms, mostly to get my pulse pounding a bit. Helps me clear my head.”
“Has it helped? Clear your head, I mean.”
With an amused grin, Marty shrugged into his shirt. “Some, I suppose. I have a lot on my mind right now.”
Marty looked around at the crew gathered around the table. “It’s old Egyptian,” he said. “My gut says that Gunther’s right, it’s predynastic, and maybe the text dates to the same time as the making of the tablet. So I think this is the longest text in predynastic Egyptian known to man, and the earliest known complete sentence. By far.”
Gunther cackled. “You haven’t even looked at the tunnel where there’s so much more of the same writing. Even so, just having this much translated would make you famous, my friend.”
“But it’s still Egyptian,” Marty continued. “Knowing the language and knowing how words are spelled later, it was relatively easy to work out the spellings here.” He opened his notebook and flipped through the fifty or so pages of scribbles he’d made during his effort to decode the meaning of certain characters.
“Relatively easy for you, maybe,” Gunther said. “I couldn’t make heads or tails of them.”
François, as always, was less reserved. “Incroyable! How you unraveled this in the span of twelve hours, I’ll never understand.”
Gunther patted Marty on the shoulder. “I told you, François. The man’s a genius. It’s a crime he’s not teaching at Chicago right now.”
Marty shook his head. “Anyway, I was able to make out about ninety percent of the text. Keep in mind, much of that is guesswork, based on words I know in other Afroasiatic languages. It’ll take a lot more study for me to get a translation I have full confidence in.”
“Leave some for your eventual grad students,” Gunther said, “and for the lesser scholars in your wake.”
Lowanna snorted.
François made a rolling motion with his hand, urging Marty to keep going. “Well, what did it say?”
Marty flipped through his notebook and landed on the last page. He cleared his throat, feeling the crew’s silent focus, then began.
“As instructed by our fathers, we built a wharf for the great sun to dock. For many generations, men said in their hearts it was a waste. But one night, the sun arrived.”
“Son?” François asked. “As in the male child of a father, or the big yellow thing in the sky?”
“The thing in the sky.”
“Ra?” asked Lowanna.
Gunther shook his head. “Ra becomes important to the Egyptians by about the Fifth Dynasty. If Marty’s right, this text is older than Ra.”
Surjan shook his head. “Older than the gods.”
François motioned for Marty to go on.
“The stars assembled into the sun and then walked on the land. They breathed like crocodiles, they spoke with the voices of beasts.”
“I knew it!” François said, positively giddy with excitement. “That must be an alien visitation! Breathing like a crocodile would be just like the sound of someone breathing through a respirator. Don’t you see? Oh, you can mock UFOs all you like, but technology and aliens make a much better hypothesis than gods!”
Marty bit his tongue. He had feared the Frenchman would come to precisely this interpretation.
Lowanna laughed. “I don’t know, François. Maybe the tablet is describing someone with a crocodile head. Don’t the Egyptians have a crocodile-headed god? I can’t read hieroglyphs, but I’ve seen enough of their art to know that much.”
“You’re thinking of Sobek,” said Gunther.
François turned to Marty. “Please. Continue.”
Marty nodded and went on with his reading. “They spoke of the battle. One that warriors must prepare for. And when the lands unite is when the work begins. Let the son be ready, because he will be the chosen.”
He looked around at the crew. “In this case, ‘son’ means male descendant. I don’t know what the significance is of these battles or being the chosen, but the lands being united immediately set me to thinking of Narmer, who united upper and lower Egypt. Roughly six thousand years ago, much of that area was ruled by the Badari civilization. It’s a prehistoric people who populated upper Egypt. And from what little we know, they were a distinct group, separate from other neighboring peoples.”
Marty returned to his translation. “He—that’s referring to the son again—will guide and set those on a path. A path of death or a path of life. Defeat your foes and continue. Lose and die. Complete the final battle and the sun will come again. And that ‘sun’ once again means the thing in the sky.”
“The aliens,” François murmured.
Marty frowned. “There will be a final battle at . . .” Marty shook his head. “I’m not sure how to read the location. It could be Meged.” He continued: “And for all, it will be life or death. We must prepare.”
“Well, that’s ominous,” said Surjan, breaking the sudden silence.
Marty felt a shiver down his spine. He would normally have laughed off François’s aliens and Surjan’s foreboding alike.
But what if they were right?
Marty ignored the sound of machinery as he held up the LED lantern to study the precisely painted text on the walls of the tunnel. It was without a doubt the same style and age as the writing on the tablet, with the same naïve grouping patterns and the same idiosyncratic glyphs. But there was simply so much more of it here. To really understand this phase of written Egyptian would take much, much more time.
François approached. “Anything yet?”
Marty shook his head. “I’ve only been looking at this section of the tunnel for half an hour. It’s . . . a lot.”
“Gunther told you to bring a toothbrush,” François said with a chuckle. “Are you understanding anything at all?”
“Well . . . I can tell that there’s something about a contest or maybe a battle.” Marty’s gloved finger hovered over a section of the wall. “And here’s more about the docking sun. I haven’t walked down the rest of the tunnel yet, but is the entire length of the tunnel filled with this writing?”
“The entire thing.” François grinned like a child on Christmas morning. “Come,” he said, motioning for Marty to follow farther into the tunnel. “Maybe it would be better if you started at the beginning of the text instead of the end. And besides, I want to see how the boys are doing with the new grinders I got them.”
“How do you know which end is the beginning?” Marty asked.
“I don’t. But isn’t that how the Pyramid Texts are supposed to be read? From the inside out?”
A guess, but not as crazy a guess as aliens.
As they continued along, the sound of something grinding echoed from up ahead. Suddenly the noise halted, replaced by a stream of Arabic cursing.
“Sounds as if Kareem and Abdullah are having a rough time,” Marty said.
They came around a corner, and saw the workers crouched in a shower of sparks.
François suddenly ran toward them and yelled, “Khalas! Stop it, you two!”
The men stopped, but only because one of the cutting discs on Abdullah’s angle grinder cracked, sending shards of the broken cutting wheel in all directions.
“What is wrong with you two?” François snapped. “Why didn’t you tell me the wall had metal in it?”
“It does?” both workers responded.
François rolled his eyes and began chiding the diggers in a mixture of French, Arabic, and English. Marty took the opportunity to study the wall that sealed the end of the tunnel.
It was simple blank stone. No writing. Smooth. It had the same texture as the sandstone on either side, but when he rapped his knuckles on it, he heard a faint echo, as though there was empty space on the other side. Just as Gunther had said.
Marty then crouched and looked closer at the section of the wall the men had been working on. “This doesn’t make sense,” he said. “You guys haven’t even scratched the surface. Even if this were made of metal, shouldn’t we see some marks on the wall?”
At that moment, Gunther came down the tunnel and stepped into the circle of portable LED lanterns. “Hey, guys,” he said. “Any progress?”
François ignored him and continued to huddle with Kareem and Abdullah, muttering something about equipment. But Marty picked up one of the broken cutting wheels, showed it to Gunther, and then pointed at the unmarked stone.
“There’s your progress,” Marty said with a lopsided grin.
Gunther shook his head. “Somehow I figured as much. So what are you doing all the way down here? Come to look at the weird hieroglyphs?”
“Actually I started with the writing at the entrance. But then François said maybe I should start at this end. I’m not sure that it matters, though, it’s all the same mystery.”
“Not over there it isn’t.” Gunther pointed to Marty’s left, to a section of wall near the floor that had a completely different writing style from the rest of the tunnel. The symbols were carved into the stone but left unpainted, as if the author had been interrupted before they could put the final touches on their work. “I mean, I can’t read the rest of the tunnel either, but at least I recognized the style everywhere else. This section—it’s utterly foreign to me. I don’t recognize a single glyph. Do you?”
Marty got on his hands to look, and his breath caught in his throat. He hadn’t seen this writing style in over twenty years. In fact, nobody else had either. They couldn’t have.
This is impossible.
He traced the hieroglyphs with his fingers. A teddy bear, a lamp, a curtain, a doorknob. A guitar. And, unmistakably, a ballpoint pen.
François stepped away from his men and walked toward Marty. “Well, magic language guru?” he said. “You see something interesting?”
Marty was at a loss for words. His skin tingled and his hands began shaking. “I . . . I recognize it.”
His heart was racing so quickly he was afraid he was going to suffer a panic attack. He swallowed hard and closed his eyes. Using a meditation trick his Grandpa Chang had taught him, he focused on his breathing.
How? How is this . . . here?
The symbols weren’t written recently; they had the same patina of age as the rest of the writing on the tunnel walls.
But they were in English.
Written in a script that only Marty knew.
Because he was the one who had made it up in the first place.
This was the silly writing system of his youth. The one he’d invented as a kid. And yet it was carved into the wall at an ancient dig site that Marty was certain was thousands of years old.
Could Gunther be pranking him? He’d told Gunther of his personal writing system, as he’d told Lowanna. It wasn’t a secret.
But he hadn’t taught them the symbols. Whoever had chiseled these images into the wall didn’t just know of Marty’s juvenile writing system. They knew the system.
Because this writing . . . it made sense.
“Well? What does it say?” François pressed.
Marty opened his eyes and stared at the symbols once more. He took a deep breath. His heart had slowed to a manageable rate, but he’d broken out in a cold sweat.
“It’s talking about the wall,” he said. “The end of the tunnel. It says there are six panels.”
Gunther stepped closer to the blank wall, then backed away a few steps, squinting and holding out his lantern. “Interesting . . .” he said. “I never noticed it before, but now that you say it, parts of the wall do have slight color differences. Almost like a checkerboard. A very faded checkerboard.”
He turned back to Marty. “What else does it say?”
Marty stood, and now he too could see the faded checkerboard. The wall had been put together with six different slabs of rock.
“It’s instructions,” he said. “For touching the wall in certain spots. I think I know how to . . . open it.”
François’s eyes widened. “Imshi!” he shouted, snapping his fingers at the diggers. “Hurry, move away from the wall.”
Kareem and Abdullah scrambled away, and François and Gunther backed off as well, leaving Marty standing alone before the wall.
Feeling a tingling racing through him, Marty reached up and touched the top left corner of the top left panel. He then touched the center of the top right panel, then continued through the other panels, following the instructions written below. He felt foolish; he had absolutely no idea what this was accomplishing, if anything.
Then, as the glyphs instructed him, he repeated the process a second time. And this time, when he touched the top left panel, the wall trembled.
He looked back at the others, who were staring wide-eyed back at him.
Marty tried to shrug away the tension building up in his shoulders. He took a deep breath, then continued through the other panels, trying to ignore the vibrations he felt under his finger. When he was done, he stepped back.
Nothing happened.
And then a tremor ripped through the entire tunnel and the lanterns went out, cloaking them all in darkness.
“Kareem! Abdullah!” François said. “Check the lanterns!”
Marty heard the sound of a switch being flipped repeatedly, then Abdullah said, “The lantern. It’s not working, by God.”
But another light appeared in the tunnel behind them, bouncing along, accompanied by the sound of footsteps.
“Are you gents all right?” Surjan called. “Did you feel an earthquake?”
“We’re fine,” called François. “Just bring that light over here.”
The light came closer, revealing not only Surjan but Lowanna, who was the one holding the lantern.
“What in the world?” she gasped, looking past them.
They all turned to look at the wall. The blank sandstone now glowed with a pale, bluish-white light. And as they watched, the six stone panels vanished with a sound like the crack of a whip, followed immediately by a strong gust of dust-laden wind that nearly knocked everyone off their feet.
“Mon Dieu!” François cried.
Marty blinked the dust out of his eyes and passed his hand through the space that had previously held an impervious barrier.
And then a voice spoke in his head.
“Seer, it is time.”
Marty felt a surge of energy, like a shot of adrenaline coursing through his veins. The voice in his head was speaking in ancient Egyptian.
“Bring your crew into the chamber of reckoning. As seer, you are the first. You will know. You will lead. You will tell others. You will seek what is needed. It is time.”
Marty looked at the others. “Did any of you guys hear a voice?”
They all shook their heads.
Marty did, too. He had no explanation for what was happening here. He’d spent many years in the field—a scholarly man of science and truth for all of those years. And he was at a complete loss.
Then again, there was one rational explanation for everything he had seen this day: He was insane.
But deep in his heart, he didn’t think that was it.
He motioned for the others to follow him, then stepped through the opening into the space beyond. It was a perfectly round, domed chamber, about twenty feet in diameter. The walls glowed with the same bluish-white light that the panels had.
The others stepped through behind him.
And the world flashed white.
The Administrator felt the ripple in the fabric of space itself, well before the hive reached out to alert him.
“We have a primary test triggering malfunction.”
The Administrator frowned. “Give me its local description.”
For the Administrator, the time it took for the hive to process the request and return an answer seemed like an eternity. But for those living within the brane, a thin membrane-like universe in which the test had been triggered, the processing time would have seemed like an instant.
“The local name for the event occurred on a planet named Earth, orbiting a G2V star called Sol, in the Orion arm of the Milky Way galaxy, a member of the Virgo supercluster, which is a part of the Laniakea supercluster.”
The Administrator’s presence appeared instantly above the planet and zoomed down over the test sites. He scanned the entire time from the moment the Builders had established the test sites up through the moment of the triggering, in a place now known as Egypt.
There were seven humans in the transport chamber.
But there had been an anomaly in the triggering. He sensed a wrongness on this planet. It had become unstable.
“The nature of the anomaly is?”
“The time allotted for the planet’s dominant species to complete its test is about to expire.”
The Administrator checked on the test site that had caused the anomaly. A seer had been assigned. However, the tests had not been run in many Earth years. So many years that the tests themselves should no longer be working. The earthquakes had already begun. This was the beginning of the end for the planet’s sentient hominids.
The Administrator made a decision.
One last chance for this species.
“I have stitched the tests to compensate for the delays. I will allow this one last set of champions to contest for their species’ fate.”
“Understood. The malfunction is cleared. Testing is underway.”
Marty tried to speak to the others, but found he couldn’t. He had no control over his body. In fact, he wasn’t in his body. He was just a mind.
He saw himself, though. He and the others were still standing in the chamber. They were frozen, like statues, and each person was bathed in a beam of shimmering white light.
Then the chamber faded, and he was surrounded by nothing but white. He knew he wasn’t alone only because he heard the thud of seven individual heartbeats.
The whiteness wavered ever so slightly, and something began to take shape. A shimmering gold image of an ankh appeared, hanging before him.
Marty reached out to it. And though he couldn’t see his arm moving or his fingers grasping the object, he felt a white-hot burning in his hand. The golden hue drained from the ankh as the searing heat crawled up his arm and traveled through his body.
And then with a crack, a swirling vortex of color appeared before him, and he found himself looking down at a horseshoe-shaped rocky massif. He descended, still bodiless, and swooped along the surface, the land speeding past him at an impossible rate. The sun rose and fell dozens of times as he headed eastward, past villages, farmlands, the outskirts of the desert.
In the distance, a dust cloud arose, as if kicked up by a large number of people traveling on foot, heading into the rising sun. An instant later he was upon them, an army, hundreds of people equipped with weapons of ancient war: spears, slings, bows, an occasional sword or staff. At the center of the army was a covered wagon, and he flew toward it. Toward it, and into it.
Inside, a man with bronze skin sat on a throne.
He looked up as if he could see Marty, and smiled.
“Welcome, Seer. It is time.”
The world of white exploded around Marty once more, and his ears popped. He fell forward onto all fours, overcome by an intense bout of dizziness. He clenched fistfuls of grass and held on. The world spun.
He heard the sound of someone nearby retching and Marty opened his eyes.
Gone was the chamber.
Gone were the rock walls that had surrounded him.
Somehow . . . someway . . . they’d been transported to a new place.
He looked up and found himself and the six others standing on a high rocky escarpment. Each of them held a metal ankh, about the length of a forearm.
The images of the flyover replayed in his mind.
As he climbed up onto his feet and scanned his surroundings, he knew that they were atop that horseshoe-shaped formation he’d seen in the portal.
This couldn’t be real.
Maybe he’d breathed in some ancient contaminant that was giving him hallucinations?
“It is time.” the voice in his head prompted him again.
“Shut up,” he told the disembodied voice.
He turned to the others, who were all getting up onto their feet, and Marty’s jaw dropped.