Paw-Prints Of The Gods Page 9

  “How about last time we were here?” asked Xuthus. “A fortnight ago?”

  The Jamaican shook his head.

  “I did see her last time,” the pilot admitted. “She was talking to that Dhusarian nutcase down by the bar when the rest of you were in here waiting to use the transceiver. He’s a weird one, that Dagan. Gave me some leaflet on aliens.”

  “And she definitely did not return to Ascension on the ship?” asked Xuthus.

  “I’ve already said as much!” the pilot said irritably. “What’s wrong with you, boy?”

  “Don’t stress,” his co-pilot told Xuthus. “Your lady friend will be somewhere. You need some egg to smooth things out, make you mellow? I can do you a good price.”

  “You’re dealing drugs?” Xuthus looked shocked. Egg was the name given to an illegal yet popular mood-enhancing drug out of Epsilon Eridani. “I’ll tell Doctor Jones.”

  “Hey, chill out,” the Jamaican purred. “I ain’t no pusher. This is just between friends.”

  “No thanks,” Xuthus said firmly.

  “So where did Ravana go?” asked Hestia. Xuthus saw her concern and assumed rather uncharitably she was trying to impress him.

  “Probably crawled under a rock somewhere,” muttered Urania. “Or Dagan’s alien friends came along and whisked her away to the planet of the bitches.”

  “Urania!” exclaimed Hestia.

  “Hey, that’s not cool,” agreed the Jamaican.

  “Well, we haven’t seen her,” reiterated the pilot. “We’re just the taxi service. It’s not our fault if she went wandering off.”

  Xuthus stared at him in disbelief, unable to comprehend how an adult could abdicate responsibility so easily. Yet Urania’s taunts aroused feelings of guilt, for he remembered how he had not stopped his friends bullying Ravana when they first met many months ago, at the floating market in Hemakuta on Daode. Ravana had been a very private person on site, but even though Urania had for some reason taken an instant dislike to her, he did not believe Ravana would have run out on them without letting them know why. He still remembered the infamous finale of the peace conference, when Ravana and Raja Surya had dared to confront Yuanshi’s political leaders before hundreds of delegates and millions of holovid viewers. The girl who took the stage that night would not let someone like Urania get the better of them.

  He would mention Ravana’s disappearance to his father when Urania finally got off the holovid unit, but in the meantime Xuthus knew he should take his fears to Doctor Jones. Even talking to Dagan might prove more fruitful than trying to get any sense out the crew. He did not want to contemplate the horrible possibility that Ravana had somehow ended up outside the dome.

  “She can’t have just vanished,” he said. “How far can you get on a dead planet?”

  “Falsafah ain’t as dead as it looks,” said the Jamaican, giving him an odd look. “I’ve seen some mighty strange things out there.”

  “That’s because you take too much egg,” his colleague pointed out.

  Ignoring Urania’s giggle, Xuthus stared through the cockpit windows at the endless bleak desert beyond the landing strip. It was hard to imagine anything surviving out there.

  “Thanks,” he said. “For nothing.”

  * * *

  Professor Cadmus paused beneath the arch and raised the lantern high above his head. The ancient door had yielded easily under his determined attack with the mattock, whereupon he had stood and stared for what seemed an age into the dark ‘Y’-shaped passage beyond. The star chamber was built of glass blocks as perfectly aligned as those of the grand gallery in Khufu’s pyramid at Giza. The moment he set eyes upon the meticulous architecture within he knew without a doubt that he was right, Doctor Jones was wrong and the mysterious construction on Falsafah was indeed the work of an unknown alien intelligence.

  Years before in Egypt, Cadmus had led the team that discovered the secret vault behind the wall of the king’s chamber and been the first to gaze upon Khufu’s long-sought sarcophagus and treasures. The thrill he felt on that occasion was nothing compared to the fever that gripped him now. At Giza, he was lauded for finding the prize missed by countless archaeologists before him, but singularly failed to find the proof he personally sought that extra-terrestrials built the pyramids. Here in the Arallu Wastes was something beyond archaeology, beyond history; this was a discovery to make humanity a mere footnote in the universal story, the history of everything. To go it alone was a daunting prospect.

  The floor of the entrance chamber sloped down and split into two tunnels, leading in different directions sixty degrees apart, equally dark and mysterious. The walls were bare and incredibly smooth to the touch, reflecting the light of his lantern with a muted matt glow. Cadmus slipped the oxygen mask onto his face, took a hesitant step forward and paused. His academic mind knew he ought to be recording his observations in some way. On the other hand, the adventurer in him suspected that after smashing the door to smithereens it was probably too late to think about doing things properly. With a determined step, he strode forward and on an impulse selected the right-hand tunnel.

  He did not get far. After no more than twenty metres the passage veered again to the right, continued for the same distance to a sharp left, then carried on a little further before ending at a solid wall. Undeterred, Cadmus retraced his steps, carefully scrutinising the walls and ceiling along the way to make sure he had not missed anything. Once back at the entrance chamber, he barely paused before heading down the other passage to the left.

  Around twenty metres later this passage veered left, mirroring what he found in the right-hand tunnel. As expected, when he had gone the same distance again, the passage turned sharply right, only to split into two parallel tunnels, the right one sloping down. Confused, Cadmus shuffled to a halt and shone his light down the descending passage, conscious that the trench entrance was now far behind. Without the lantern the darkness would be absolute.

  “A labyrinth,” he murmured, his words muffled by his mask. “Crafty aliens.”

  His suspicious were confirmed when a quick exploration of the right-hand tunnel led him around a bend to another dead end. Upon returning to where the original passage split, Cadmus took a few steps down the left-hand tunnel and then stopped to root through his pockets for a piece of chalk. He was just about to leave a mark to help him find his way back when something further along the wall caught his eye. Curious, he shuffled across to look and then gasped. Barely a metre away along the same wall was a neat white cross. Someone or something had been here before him and had the same idea.

  He returned the chalk to his pocket, his hands shaking. As far as he was aware his expedition was the first to excavate at this spot, but the cross on the wall and Govannon’s earlier remarks about the odd stratification and a buried oxygen tank were making him think again. Yet he was certain there were no published archaeological reports on Arallu.

  He lifted a cautious finger to the cross and found it was indeed white chalk. With a casual sweep of his jacket sleeve the mark was gone. This was his moment in history and he wanted nothing to suggest otherwise.

  “This is my discovery,” he murmured. “Mine!”

  “The past belongs to all, I think you said,” a small voice replied.

  Cadmus froze. For a moment he thought he saw a small furry shape sitting on the floor ahead, then in a blink of an eye it was gone.

  “Hello?” he called, his voice wavering. “Is anyone there?”

  Silence greeted him like a heavy shroud.

  “Anyone?”

  There was no reply. Taking a deep breath, Cadmus swept the beam of his lamp down the empty tunnel before him and behind, then hesitantly walked onwards down the left-hand passage. He tried hard to convince himself that the silence and cloying darkness was playing tricks with his mind. Yet he was sure the voice had not been in his head.

  A short while later the passage veered again to the right, after which there was an identical stretch of tunnel that end
ed in another sharp left and a split into parallel passages, the right-hand one once again sloping down. When he looked for a chalk mark, he found it in the left-hand passage as before, reinforcing the idea he was following in someone else’s footsteps. After hearing the strange voice, it was not a comforting thought.

  He was beginning to understand the layout of the star chamber. He knew from aerial scans that the shape buried beneath the desert was a huge six-pointed star. It seemed he was moving clockwise within the outer wall, with every sixty-degree turn to the left followed by a hundred-and-twenty-degree turn to the right. As he followed the left-hand passage onwards, this deduction continued to prove true and two turns later he found himself at a sharp bend where again the passage split. Here he found another white cross, this time in the right-hand passage that descended into a darkness that felt thicker than ever. Pausing only to wipe the mark from the wall, he continued on his way.

  Once again a familiar pattern emerged of gentle left turns followed by sharp turns to the right, though the gap between corners was shorter than before. Despite the sloping passages, the ceiling level remained unchanged and was now twice as high as in the earlier tunnels. Every sharp right-hand bend had the same parallel split as before, all marked with ever-familiar chalk marks that he removed as quickly as he found them. With each half-turn around the perimeter, the white crosses directed him to a deeper and more compact level. It dawned upon Cadmus that the labyrinth was a concentric set of star-shaped passages, linked together in a slow spiral to whatever lay deep at its centre.

  After the twelfth cross Cadmus felt weary and subdued. The cloying darkness was making him hallucinate and on more than one occasion he was convinced he heard the patter of paws and a distant yet plaintive yowl of a cat. He had been in the chamber for almost three hours and was now so far underground that the light of his lantern no longer reached the ceiling. The narrow passage was nevertheless claustrophobic.

  “My dear Professor Cadmus,” came a voice. “I think maybe you’re in too deep.”

  Cadmus came to an abrupt stop and fearfully looked around into the darkness.

  “Who are you?” he cried through his mask. “Where are you?”

  A grey tabby cat ambled from the shadows. The professor stared at the apparition in disbelief, his mind doing somersaults. The cat regarded him solemnly, its yellow eyes glowing in the light of the lantern, then turned away to lick its fur.

  “No pets are allowed on site,” Cadmus reassured himself. “Cats do not talk. Therefore, the creature sat in front of me washing itself is clearly a figment of my imagination.”

  The cat paused in its ablutions and gave him a hard stare. All of a sudden, the four-legged phantom leapt dreamlike from the floor and promptly metamorphosed into a tall, raven-haired woman, dressed in a floor-length coat of silver and black fur. Cadmus gave a whimper and stepped back, fearful for his sanity. There was a god-like air to her that was both incredibly beautiful and unspeakably cruel, as if she would quite happily stab him to death with a hairbrush. The woman took a step forward, leaned casually against the wall and regarded the professor with a weary gaze. He was not surprised to see that within each yellow iris her pupils were dark vertical slits.

  “You have no imagination,” she purred. “You profess to be an academic but you’re nothing more than a feeble-minded bureaucrat, just one more pawn in the great game. Do you really know why you are here, deep down in this forgotten hole in the ground?”

  Cadmus took another step back. “Who are you?”

  “Some things are best left buried,” she told him. “You don’t have to be one of them.”

  “What?”

  “Turn around!” she said, sounding impatient. Her accent, together with her olive complexion, made Cadmus wonder if she was Greek. “Go back! You’re almost out of oxygen. Do you really want to die down here?”

  Cadmus glanced at the eye-level digital display of his mask. He had used almost three quarters of the contents of the tank.

  “The chamber is open to the dome,” he replied, wondering why he was bothering to have a conversation with a mirage, even one remarkably informed. “The life-support plant will eventually fill the whole labyrinth with air.”

  “Whatever,” she snapped. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you!”

  Abruptly, the figure was gone. Cadmus stared into the darkness, breathing heavily into his mask and wondering if he really had just been talking to a woman who was maybe also a cat. Yet the dust upon the floor was undisturbed and there was no sign that anyone or anything had been in the passage with him. Eventually, his breathing became more regular. He pushed the strange warning into the back of his mind and stepped forward once more.

  The distance between corners was now barely a dozen strides. The passage no longer split away to a lower level and his spirits rose with the thought he was near his goal. The third sharp bend on that level was indeed the last, for beyond the final chalk mark the tunnel curved gracefully into a tall archway that opened into the inky void at the heart of the labyrinth. Cadmus slowly turned to the arch, placed a foot upon the final slope and raised his lantern to the mouth of the pitch-black cavern beyond.

  “Oh my word,” he breathed. “Incredible!”

  The arch opened into a cathedral-like chamber some twenty metres across that rose into a dizzying darkness far above. The star-shaped ground plan remained, for in the light of his lantern he could see five triangular alcoves ascending like huge grooves to the distant ceiling, with the arch opening into the sixth. Yet all of this received a mere glance. Before him lay a tableau that baffled his archaeologist’s eye.

  In the centre of the chamber sat a huge egg-shaped cocoon. It was at least three metres tall with dull green skin, an oval aperture that gave a tantalising glimpse into a dark interior and multiple-jointed spindly legs that sprouted from the top and folded to the floor. The cocoon lay partly-submerged in a dark pool of what looked like oil, which in turn was surrounded by a ring of twelve grey rods that rose to waist height. A narrow tongue extruded from beneath the oval opening and formed a bridge to the solid ground beyond the pool. The bizarre, multi-legged monstrosity looked like the work of a crazed taxidermist who had taken pieces of a giant insect statue and reassembled them into a surreal playhouse for the deranged. The mottled pattern upon its skin suggested a biological origin, but if it had ever been a creature of flesh and blood Cadmus was fairly sure it had breathed its last aeons ago. The archaeologist in him knew he had done wrong to expose the chamber to air, for the lack of oxygen would have preserved it well.

  “A shrine, perchance?” he mused. The angular depths of the chamber swallowed all noise, reinforcing the aura of desolation. The idea that a multi-legged giant egg represented a strange alien deity lodged uneasily in his mind.

  Curious, he stepped down the slope and into the vault. To his alarm the ground was not solid and quivered beneath his weight as if it were a sheet of stretched rubber. Cadmus cautiously circled the rods and swung his light towards another indistinct shape lying in the shadows beyond. When his eyes fell upon the dark bulbous body and tangle of limbs, an uncontrollable shiver ran down his spine and he gave a little yelp of fright.

  “How gross!” he murmured.

  Half-submerged in the floor were the remains of a huge spider, with a body a metre long and a tangle of legs that must once have stood nearly three metres tall. The carcass was a tarnished maroon colour, which to his surprise was sheathed in what looked like plates of armour. Cadmus was perturbed by the suggestion that the arachnid had somehow sunk into the floor and he backed away, not daring to take his eyes from the horrible sight.

  There was something else behind the weird ancient cocoon. Cadmus stepped past the dead giant spider to get a better look and gasped in disbelief. In the shadows beyond lay a rounded capsule, about the size and shape of a human coffin. The faded emblem upon the white casing was the stars and stripes of the United States of America.

  “But that’s impossible!” he muttered.


  “Impossible?” came a familiar mocking voice. “Can you not open your heart and mind to the possibility of what you see here?”

  The woman leaned casually against one of the upright rods, examining her black-lacquered fingernails with a tiger-like grace. Cadmus had to admit he had a hell of a vivid imagination when it came to creating this particular delusion.

  “Oh,” he said, faking a weary nonchalance. “Little Miss Mirage is back to haunt me.”

  “You ignored my warning.”

  “Call me old-fashioned, but I tend to dismiss advice given to me by random cat women in dark tunnels,” he retorted. He glanced again at his face-mask display, wondering whether it was a lack of oxygen causing him to hallucinate. “As for opening my mind to the impossible, I assume my head must be a tad crowded right now if you’re already in there.”

  “That’s the trouble with you humans,” she said and sighed. “Always putting your faith in the wrong thing. Back in the old days you had proper places of worship and would beseech us to walk the Earth. You think this is a temple? It’s no more than a morgue.”

  “This alien, err... thing is buried with a human cryogenic survival capsule,” Cadmus said cautiously. “As I recall, the Americans experimented with them in the first half of the twenty-second century, before we had ships with ED drives. Yet this tomb is a hundred thousand years old. Would my dear mirage care to comment?”

  “Not really, no.”

  “Time travel!” exclaimed Cadmus. “The Americans invented a time machine!”

  “Don’t be ridiculous!” she snapped. “You humans have enough trouble getting from one day to the next.”

  Cadmus looked at the capsule and knew this was why his Que Qiao paymasters had sent him to Falsafah. Forgetting the cat woman, the egg-shaped cocoon and even the scary spider, he stepped closer to look. His boots kicked up a cloud of dust and for an instant he spotted a thin red line hovering above the ground, stretching from one side of the chamber to the other. Startled, he swept the lantern beam across the room and saw a small orange cylinder next to the entrance archway, fastened to the wall with a thoroughly-modern metal clamp. He was certain the amber warning light it flashed had not been visible before.