Descent Hour Four
Upper Chamber
The shaft was about seven feet wide and seven feet high, Serena guessed, and sloped into total darkness. A coin toss had won her the bragging rights of being the first inside, this after the drill team had sent a twenty-two-pound, six-wheeled modified Mars Sojourner down the shaft with a blowtorch and camera. The remote robot confirmed what Conrad had suspected: the shaft led directly to a chamber in the heart of P4.
As Serena stood on the landing the Americans had erected along the north face of P4 and looked into the mouth of the shaft, she could feel her heart racing. She was still disturbed by the little girl frozen in the ice, she realized, not to mention the sudden, cataclysmic end to an entire society. If only the child hadn’t looked so terrified.
She had always taken comfort in the theory that Genesis was a myth and the flood a theological metaphor. Yes, fossil evidence suggested a natural cataclysm. And no, she harbored little doubt that there was some sort of global deluge. But as divine retribution for humanity’s wickedness? That was simply Moses’s opinion. Unfortunately, she found the alternative worldview, that impersonal cycles of nature wiped out entire species in random fashion, even more distressing, if only because it sapped any meaning from her righteous indignation.
Perhaps it had something to do with her own childhood, she could hear the Holy Father telling her. She had seen herself as a child, an innocent victim, encased in ice, frozen in time like parts of her own personality. Or maybe it was simply the failure of her faith to provide any genuine comfort regarding the inexplicable evil and suffering in this world. It was as if Satan had his own guardian angel-God. But then that would make God the Devil, a thought too terrible for Serena to dwell on.
Her trance was broken by Conrad’s voice behind her.
“If you’d like, Serena, I could always take the lead.”
She glanced over her shoulder at Conrad and frowned. He was cocky now that he had found a back door into the pyramid. The implication in his eyes was that once again he was right, as always. Not just about P4 but about everything else, including her. As if in time he could figure her out like any other archaeological riddle.
Infuriated, she said, “So you can translate ancient alien inscriptions too?”
“The written word is but one form of communication, Sister Serghetti, as you well know,” Conrad replied.
She hated this sort of academic posturing, probably because she was so often guilty of it herself. Or maybe because, like their exchange in the habitat module, it denied the intimacy she felt they had established during the descent down the ice chasm.
“Besides,” Conrad added, “I don’t think we’ll find any inscriptions inside.”
“How would you know that?”
“Just a hunch.” Conrad ran his hand across the shiny white surface of the pyramid. “Now notice the interlocking casing stones that sheath the whole structure.”
If there were any fine grooves, she couldn’t see them because of the brilliant reflection. “So how come our pyramids don’t shine white like this?”
“The sheathings were stripped for mosques during the Middle Ages,” Conrad explained. “The pyramids became cheap quarries. Feel it.”
Serena ran her glove across the surface. There was a glassy feel to the stone. “A different ore?”
Conrad smiled. “You noticed. No wonder radio-echo surveys never detected the pyramid. You were right, Yeats. This stuff is slicker than a stealth bomber.”
“And harder than diamonds,” Yeats added impatiently from somewhere behind Conrad. “Broke all our drills trying to bore holes before we found the shaft. We don’t have a name for it yet. Now if we could move ahead and-”
“Oreichalkos,”Conrad answered.
Conrad’s voice seemed to bounce up and down the shaft walls. Serena asked, “What did you say?”
“Oreichalkosis the name of the enigmatic ore or ‘shining metal’ Plato said the people of Atlantis used,” Conrad said. “It was a pure alloy they mined, an almost supernatural ‘mountain-copper.’ It sparkled like fire and was used to cover walls-and for inscriptions. I’m betting the outer six feet of the pyramid is made of this stuff.”
He seemed way too sure of himself. She said, “You think you have all the answers, don’t you?”
“We won’t know until we get inside, will we?”
“And what if the builders laid a trap?” she said.
“The Atlanteans are the ones who got trapped, remember?” Conrad said. “Besides, the builders never intended entrants to penetrate from the sky, through this shaft. The only booby traps, if any, are scattered around P4’s base and any tunnels leading up to key chambers.”
She looked over Conrad’s shoulder at Yeats, whose brow was furrowed with either concern or, more likely, impatience. Lopez, Kreigel, and Marcus, standing next to him, were as stone-faced as ever.
“Let’s find out,” she said and stepped into the shaft.
Conrad was right about theoreichalkos, she soon discovered. About seven or eight feet into the shaft, the surface of the walls changed to a rougher, darker kind of stone or metal. It scraped lightly on her Gore-Tex parka, but she found that she could creep down the shaft with both feet by leaning back and holding her line taut. The light from her headtorch could only pierce about fifty feet of the darkness ahead.
“How are we doing down there?” called Yeats. His voice sounded flat and tinny in the shaft.
“Fine,” she replied.
But she didn’t feel fine. The air was heavy and suffocating. The wet, dense walls seemed to close in on her the farther they descended down the thirty-eight-degree grade. As she crept along the shaft, a tingling sensation started in the small of her back and slowly rose up her spine.
Twenty minutes later they emerged from the shaft into a massive, somber reddish room that seemed to radiate tremendous heat and power. It was completely empty.
“There’s nothing here, Conrad,” she said, her voice echoing. “No inscriptions. Nothing.”
“Don’t be so certain.”
She turned and watched Conrad rappel off the wall from which the shaft emptied, followed by Yeats and his three officers.
Conrad swept the room with his floodlight, revealing walls made of massive granitelike blocks. The floor and ceiling were likewise spanned by gigantic blocks. The chamber was longer than a football field and Serena guessed more than two hundred feet high. Yet it felt like the walls were pressing down on her.
“Talk about megalithic architecture,” Conrad said as he ran his light beam across the ceiling. “The engineering logistics alone for this are amazing.”
Conrad was right about the architecture, she thought. It revealed much about its builders. That’s what made linguistics so intriguing to her. Language often tried to hide or manipulate meaning. In so doing it revealed the true nature of the civilization behind the artifacts.
But there were no inscriptions here. There was nothing. Even in the sparest of digs she could usually find an object that connected her in some way to the people of those times. A shard of pottery, a figurine. They were more than artifacts. They belonged to thinking, feeling human beings. It was like looking through her father the priest’s personal items after he died and finding the most trivial yet telling clues about her past.
She felt no connection here. Nothing. Just absolute emptiness, and it was chilling. Not even a sarcophagus-a burial coffin, which if her memory of Egyptian pyramids served her, should have been at the western end of this chamber, but wasn’t. At least a tomb was built for someone. But this place was cold, utilitarian, aloof.
“I don’t see any other shafts,” she said. “You said we’d find another one. And there are no doors. We’re stuck.”
“There it is.” Conrad’s beam caught the shaft in the southern wall. It looked just like the one they had emerged from.
Serena said, “All we’re going to find at the end of it is the ice pack.”
Conrad took a closer look and nodded. “In the Great Pyramid in Giza, the southern shaft led the deceased pharaoh to his reed boats to sail his earthly kingdom. The northern shaft was for him to join the stars in the celestial kingdom.”
“That’s nice,” she said. “But I don’t see the burial coffin of a deceased pharaoh in here.”
Serena watched as Conrad walked to the center of the room. His footsteps seemed to reverberate more loudly the closer to the center he went.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“If there’s nothing inside the room, then we have to look at the room itself.” Conrad walked over to the western wall and turned to face east. He took out what looked like a pen and bounced a thin laser beam off the walls. Then he checked his readings. “This chamber forms a perfect one-by-two rectangle,” he announced. “And the height of this room is exactly half the length of its floor diagonal.”
“So?”
“Since the chamber forms a perfect one-by-two rectangle, the builders have expressed a golden section, phi.”
“Phi?” asked Yeats.
“Phi is an irrational number like pi that can’t be worked out arithmetically,” Conrad explained. “Its value is the square root of five plus one divided by two, equal to 1.61803. Or, the limiting value of the ratio between successive numbers in the Fibonacci series-the series of numbers beginning 0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13-”
“In which each term is the sum of the two previous terms,” said Serena, completing his lecture. “What’s your point?”
“The builders left nothing to chance here. Every stone, every angle, every chamber has been systematically and mathematically designed for some grand purpose. This isn’t only the oldest and largest structure on the planet. It’s the most perfect too.”
She swallowed hard. “Meaning?”
“Meaning it’s humanly impossible.”
Serena studied him carefully and concluded that he believed what he was saying. She didn’t yet, but she was impressed with his brilliance. It was rare she met a man smarter than she was. Only Conrad was perhaps too brilliant for his own good, like the geniuses used by the Americans to build the atomic bomb during World War II. And too sure of himself. He obviously somehow fancied he was going to take something out of P4 and stake his claim in history.
But Yeats would never allow it, she knew, glancing at the American general. His cold, stone-faced expression told her that once Conrad had served his usefulness he would be disposable. Not as his son, but certainly as an archaeologist. Conrad, however, was too smart to be disposable. Which is why she wasn’t worried so much by what Conrad was saying as by what he wasn’t saying.
“So now you’re concluding that P4 is alien?” She shook her head. “The bodies we found in the ice are human. Yeats said the lab autopsies proved as much.”
“That doesn’t mean those people built P4,” Conrad said. “This thing might have been here long before they arrived.”
The way he referred to “this thing” bothered her. P4 wasn’t a thing. It was a pyramid. Or was it? Without any inscriptions, she was powerless to find any meaning for this monument or argue with Conrad, except to say, “You don’t know that for sure.”
“Have some faith.” Conrad crossed the room and walked over to the opposite shaft. He then pulled out a handheld device from his belt.
“What are you doing?” she said.
“Launching my astronomical simulator.” Conrad pushed a button to call up a graphic on the display. “The northern shaft we came through is angled at thirty-eight degrees twenty-two minutes. This southern shaft is angled at fifteen degrees thirty minutes.”
Serena walked over. “You lost me.”
“You’re forgetting this pyramid may be a meridian instrument to track the stars,” Conrad said as he glanced at the palm display. “The shafts in the king’s chamber of the Great Pyramid, for example, target Orion and Sirius. My hunch is that they were modeled after this. All we have to do is match the shafts with various celestial coordinates throughout history and we can date P4 to the precise-” Conrad stopped short. He was staring at his display.
“Go on,” Serena said.
“Wait.” Conrad frowned. “This can’t be right.”
“What is it?”
“Something wrong, Conrad?” asked Yeats, who was still looking up the southern shaft with his flashlight.
“The angle of the shafts targets certain stars in a certain epoch,” Conrad said. “This shaft targets Alpha Canis Major in the constellation of the Great Dog. It was known as Sirius to the ancients, who associated it with the goddess Isis, the cosmic mother of the kings of Egypt.”
“As opposed to the cosmic king Osiris,” Serena said.
Conrad’s eyes lit up. “Whose constellation Orion is rising in the east right now.”
“You told me all this back at Ice Base Orion.” Yeats was now impatiently looking over Conrad’s shoulder.
“You don’t understand,” Conrad explained, and Serena herself was trying to catch up. “This shaft targets Alpha Canis Major right now, on the cusp of the Age of Aquarius, as seen from the South Pole at sunrise on the spring equinox.”
Yeats said, “It’s September, Conrad.”
“For you northerners,” Serena reminded Yeats. “It’s spring here and in the rest of the Southern Hemisphere.” She turned to Conrad. “So what’s the meaning?”
“Well, from a fixed point on the ground, the skies are like the odometer on a car. The heavens change over one complete cycle every twenty-six thousand years,” he explained. “Meaning either this pyramid was built twenty-six thousand years ago, during the last Age of Aquarius. Or-”
“Or what?” she demanded.
“Or it was built to align with the stars at a date in the future.” He looked her in the eye, and she felt her spine tingle. “For this present moment, right now.”