FRIDAY, 25 APRIL 2042

Institute for Exoarcheological
Studies
Chicago, Illinois
1610 hours CDT

There were no marching crowds today, for a change, no ancient-astronut mobs calling for revelation, no church groups denouncing him as inspired by Satan. Traffic flowed along Lake Shore Drive, building toward the afternoon rush, and, for once, Chicago was ignoring him.

It was still a little startling to David to stand at his office window, looking past Soldier’s Field and the Adler Planetarium causeway out to the cold, flat, gray horizon of Lake Michigan, and realize that he’d actually been out there, on the surface of the Moon. He was now one of that handful of men and women who’d stood on the surface of three separate planetary bodies. A most exclusive club indeed.

And the place to which he’d returned, the real world of work and politics and deadlines, seemed so…ordinary.

“David?” Teri called from his desk. “Is something wrong?”

Fixing a smile in place, he turned. “No. Not a thing. Just woolgathering.”

She smiled and stroked the copy, cast in resin, of one of the artifacts he’d brought back from Picard. “Howard agrees completely with your analysis of P-3, right down the list, word for word. Congratulations!”

“Good,” he replied absently. “Uh, very good. Sorry. I just wish I had a little more confidence in that thing.”

“That thing” was the Expert System Program running in the Institute’s local network, one of the new AIs that offered encyclopedic knowledge within its expert purview, combined with an almost human flexibility and reasoning power.

Almost human.

Privately, he’d named this one after Howard Vyse, the nineteenth-century adventurer and soldier of fortune who’d done so much damage to the science of archeology in his ham-fisted and outright criminal explorations of the three main pyramids at the Giza Complex, in Egypt. Vyse, it was now nearly certain, had perpetrated several incredible hoaxes in order to establish that the Great Pyramids had been built as tombs by three particular Fourth Dynasty pharaohs—Khufu, Khephren, and Menkaure—all three within a period of eighty years, from about 2550 to 2470 B.C. So much of the modern understanding of history and historical timetables had been built upon Vyse’s claims, so much professional literature published, so many reputations established and doctorates awarded and names secured, that even now, two centuries later, there were firmly entrenched adherents to the “traditional” views of Egyptology. Vyse might have been a charlatan, the conservatives insisted, but he was still right. His conclusions were valid even if his proofs were faked. To claim otherwise would unravel two centuries of carefully interwoven dates and meticulously constructed historical comprehension.

By calling the Institute’s archeological ESP Howard, David reminded himself not to take what it said as gospel.

“I still don’t understand why you’re so paranoid about expert systems,” Teri said with a laugh. “They give us access to more information than we could absorb in a decade or three of solid study, and without the human politics you’re always railing about.” She patted the desk’s open display screen fondly. “Howard wouldn’t lie to us! The way you talk, you’d think we had your friend Kettering locked up in here!”

David snorted. Craig Kettering was a professional rival—an enemy, really—who’d been on the expedition to Mars. They’d parted ways when Kettering had gone along with the UN plan to hush up the Cydonian findings. Now that they were back on Earth, the man was happily publishing with the data David had made available, acting as though nothing at all had happened between them.

“Actually,” he said, “I think my problem is that Howard isn’t political enough. He agrees with everything I say, and that’s scary.”

“Well, if you can’t trust the machine, can you trust me? I hope you don’t keep me around here just because I’m good in bed!”

“Of course not!” Technically, Teri was on loan to the Institute from the Field Museum’s Oriental Department. The Cydonian Research Foundation had paid a lot of money to hire her general archeological expertise, but when the Lunar tablets turned out to be partly written in ancient Sumerian, she’d proven herself absolutely invaluable.

“Your translations have all agreed with Howard’s and mine.” She made a face. “Admit it, David. You’re good, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Maybe. But that’s not going to be enough for…them.”

“‘Them’?”

“This could be Egypt all over again,” he told her. “Worse than Egypt. And here I’m just on the point of gaining my reputation back.”

She knew that story, of course. He’d told her about it the first time they’d slept together, in a hotel in Los Angeles during one of his public-relations appearances for the government upon his return from Mars. David Alexander had been an authority on Egypt before the war, an expert in sonic-imaging tomography, an expertise that had landed him that billet in a cycler to Mars. His discovery of confirmation that the Sphinx went back long before the Fourth Dynasty had ended with him being evicted from Egypt and his reputation being called into question; some lies, he’d discovered, were too well established—and too important politically—to be challenged. The Egyptian government had a vested interest in maintaining the myth that Egyptians had raised the Great Pyramids, not some unknown civilization from eight thousand years before.

Things were far worse, with the dawning realization that extraterrestrials had been responsible for shaping human culture millennia ago. With the discoveries on Mars and, now, on the Moon, there could be no doubting their reality, or the fact that they’d visited Earth more than once and for long periods of time. The argument came down to how much, if at all, they’d actually interacted with humanity.

Belief was fast polarizing into absolute and unshakable opposites. On the one side were the ancient astronuts, with their cosmic-awareness sessions, their churches of universal life, and the conviction that ETs had done everything notable in human history, from building the pyramids to establishing each of the world’s major religions. On the other side were the diehard conservatives within the archeological, anthropological, and historical-academic communities, who admitted—most of them, anyway—that, yes, extraterrestrials might have visited Earth, Mars, and the Moon in the remote past, but who stated point-blank that even open contact could have affected no more than a handful of individual humans…and human culture not at all.

The truth, as usual, lay somewhere between the two extremes. Establishing exactly where could well destroy his professional reputation for a second time.

“Are you saying,” Teri said carefully, “that you want Howard to be prejudiced? As political as Tom Leonard?”

He grimaced at the name. Leonard was one of his most outspoken critics, the author of several prominent papers attacking the cultural-intervention theory.

“It might help.” He gestured at the replica on the desk. “Leonard and his bunch are going to be all over this. All over our translations. If there is any possibility that we’re missing something, missing some nuance or shade of meaning, or misinterpreting what was being said, we have to know.”

“I’d say our identification of this one name alone, An, with the eight-pointed star as their symbol, makes any of their quibbles pretty irrelevant. The Sumerian tie-in is perfect.”

“Which is exactly the problem, Teri. It’s too perfect. The astronuts are going to grab this and run with it. I…I don’t think we’ll be able to keep a lid on it after this.”

“So…what’s worrying you? That your work is going to get lost in all the shouting and yelling? Or that people are going to call you dirty names? Damn it, it’s the truth that’s important.”

“I’m beginning to think that there is truth…and more important truth….” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m not even sure what I believe anymore.”

The reproduction on his desk was a resin faxcasting of the first of the seventeen gold, silver, and electrum artifacts he’d uncovered on the floor of Picard. His desk’s computer screen was open, displaying long columns of symbols, Proto-Sumerian characters and English words, the beginning of a translation of the artifact’s dual text.

In 1799, a French soldier with Napoléon’s army working on the fortifications of Rashid, Egypt—a place Europeans called Rosetta—turned up a flat, polished stone inscribed with Egyptian hieroglyphics, with a kind of cursive hieroglyphic script called demotic, and Greek. The Rosetta stone was the key that allowed Jean-François Champollion to decipher the language of a civilization in some ways as alien to eighteenth-century Europe as the Builders were to humankind.

What he’d found at Picard was a Rosetta stone indeed…or, rather, seventeen Rosetta stones that together were slowly but conclusively hammering home a definite link between the Sumerians of ancient Mesopotamia, and another race of extraterrestrials that—if the Proto-Sumerian translations were accurate—called itself the An.

“If our translations are accurate,” David went on after a moment, “then we have a race, a civilization that called itself An, building colonies on Earth something like six thousand…maybe as far back as thirteen thousand years ago. The artistic style definitely ties them in with ancient Sumer.”

“What the natives called Shumer,” Teri said. “‘The Land of the Guardians.’ The name of their chief god was An or Anu. And the pantheon of Sumerian gods was called the Anunnaki….”

“‘Those who came to Earth from the place of An,’” David added, translating. He’d been working on Proto-Sumerian translations now for days, and it was becoming second nature.

“You know,” she said, “this has always been one of the biggest mysteries of archeology, as big a question mark as the Sphinx or the pyramids. The Sumerian language is unrelated to any other we know. The people…we have no idea where they came from. They were not Semitic, like the Akkadians or the others who built on their culture later. And when they settled in Mesopotamia, well…it was almost literally as though civilization sprang into being overnight. They claimed the gods had given them writing, medicine, architecture. The gods domesticated animals and created new kinds of grain and other crops.”

“Small wonder some of the astronuts have been claiming the Sumerians themselves were extraterrestrial.”

She snorted. “That idea’s ludicrous, of course. They were human, which means they shared their DNA with the life evolved here.”

“Yeah,” he said. “That’s the one bit of silliness that gets me most about some of the ancient-astronut crowd. Adam and Eve were not shipwrecked visitors from another planet! Not when chimpanzees share something over ninety-eight percent of our DNA!”

“I do wonder, sometimes, if the Sumerians might have come from the human colony on Mars, the one the Builders put there. The bodies you found there?”

He grunted. “Hard to see how that would fit. The Builders were on Mars half a million years ago. That’s a long time, between whoever built the Face and the rise of Sumeria. No, there’s more to this. A lot more.” He shook his head. “Anyway, what we found on the Moon is going to upset everybody. The ancient-astronaut cults, established religions, the archeological community. The government. Historians. It’s hard to think of someone I’m not going to piss off when I release this stuff.”

“I still think you’re being too sensitive. I can understand the problem with the conservative archeologists. But the cults? And the churches?”

“Remember all of those places in the Bible, in Genesis, where God says things like, ‘Let us make Man in our image?…’ Holdovers from the Sumerian texts that those passages were based on. Hell, ever since George Smith translated the Epic of Gilgamesh, back in 1872, we’ve known that a lot of Genesis came to us from Sumerian myths and writings. The Garden of Eden, the Flood, the Tower of Babel, all of that.” He chuckled, but the sound was grim. “Don’t you think the Vatican is going to be a bit upset if we produce proof that the Yahweh of the Old Testament was an Anunnaki, straight out of Sumerian myths?

“As for the ancient-astronaut churches, they all see the ET ‘gods’ as saviors. Protectors. Angels and divine guides. Nice people who might turn up again someday to help Mankind out of its current mess.”

She made a sour face. “It would help if the An were the savior type.”

He reached out and lightly stroked the faxcast, with its row of five humans, bound and leashed. “Kind of puts the whole idea of worshiping God in a new light, doesn’t it?”

What he’d translated so far seemed to match certain aspects of the Sumerian myths; humans had been slaves under the An, working in their mines and agricultural colonies and even as janissary armies, conquering “uncivilized” neighbors under the direction of their godlike masters. Most of the translations he’d worked out so far, with Howard’s help, spoke of primitive tribes rounded up and “civilized” by troops under the command of Sharu-Gaz, a term literally meaning “Supreme Leaders of the Killers,” but which both David and Howard had translated as “war-Leaders.” They listed cattle, sheep, and crops taken, gathered, and counted; tributes offered; enemies killed; villages burned; precious metals—the Sumerian word was zu-ab—gathered for transport to “Heaven”; and vast numbers of slaves captured, penned, and sold. The An, whoever they’d been, appeared to share human bio-chemistry, with left-handed amino acids and a preference for right-handed sugars. They’d been able to eat crops and animals native to Earth, and they’d forced the natives to raise those crops and herds. For them.

There was even the extraordinarily disturbing possibility that large numbers of humans had been taken away…as food. He was beginning to wonder if that, in fact, was the root of the worldwide primitive practice of sacrifice.

Each of the artifacts recovered at Picard appeared to be a different list of tribute and conquest. Seventeen dual inscriptions, in Proto-Sumerian and in a totally unknown language that David assumed was the native language of the An colonizers, had opened a crack in the door to an entirely new and previously unguessed-at chapter in human history, one reaching back far before the known, historical beginnings of civilization three to four thousand years earlier.

A chapter in which humanity had been enslaved by war-like invaders with a technology vastly superior to their spears and bows.

The discussion had left David feeling depressed. Lonely. The universe was not the small and comfortable place it had been back when he’d written his doctoral thesis…or when he’d married Liana.

Teri seemed to sense his mood. She leaned forward, touching his arm. “So,” she said, “not to change the subject…but what are you doing tonight? That new gel-bed of mine could use a real workout. I might even be able to rent a dolphin, just for the evening.”

He stared into her eyes for a moment and into the promise behind them. Then he looked away. “Damn. I’m sorry, Teri, no. I wish I could…”

She gave his arm a squeeze. “That’s all right, love. We’ll just have to be patient.”

He laughed, a harsh and bitter sound. Patient? He was fed up with being patient! Liana almost certainly knew about his relationship with Teri, even if she wasn’t aware of the depth of his feelings for her, but still she refused to talk about getting a divorce or even a legal separation.

The truth was that he and Liana simply weren’t well matched with each other. They’d married when he was twenty-nine and she was nineteen; lust, he’d long since decided, had a nasty tendency to cover up a person’s character flaws.

Well…not flaws, exactly, unless you called having the brains of a box full of facial tissue a flaw. And there’d been some good times, especially early on. But damn it all, how could he stay with someone as enamored of these weird cults and bizarre religions as she was, especially when those same groups seemed to be feeding off the information he’d uncovered? Sometimes, it seemed like distorted versions of his discoveries were being bandied about on the Earthnet talk shows before he’d even released them to the director of the institute. It was eerie how quickly the news was spreading through the religious underground out there.

Liana kept pestering him for information about his discoveries. Damn, but he hated that. Sometimes, he wondered if he hated her. He didn’t want to; he really simply wanted the two of them to agree that they’d made a mistake, that they weren’t well matched, and that they should go their separate ways. But the way she was clinging to him, his disdain for her was going to turn to hatred pretty soon.

He was, he realized, unhappy with his life, and that wasn’t Liana’s fault. Working jaunts to Mars and the Moon were a wonderful perk—at least, they were when he wasn’t being shot at—and the chance at making discoveries destined to change humankind’s understanding of history went a long way toward guaranteeing that he would never be bored…but there was still a bitter restlessness within. He wasn’t even sure it had anything to do with Liana. Maybe it had more to do with the constant uphill battle against entrenched academia.

Damn it all, he needed to be sure of these translations. Self-doubt, that was the big weakness. If he could confirm this connection between the An and the Sumerian Anu, prove his discovery despite the unsavory connections with ancient astronuts and all that that entailed, maybe he could still get the last laugh on Tom Leonard and all of the rest.

After that, all he would have to do was prove to his wife and the other crackpot astronuts that he wasn’t some kind of reluctant messiah. That was what he hated most about the church groups his wife was involved with. They looked to him as some kind of prophet, and he simply wasn’t willing to fill that role.

And then there was the problem with the government.

They’d sent him to the Moon to investigate the UN’s discoveries there, and he’d turned up more than anyone had expected. Still, discoveries involving ancient Sumeria and alien slave-raiders were pretty remote…things that might upset astronut churches, the Vatican, and mobs in the streets but didn’t have much to do with the war at all. The government had been far more interested in that piece of an ancient spacecraft that had already been salvaged at Picard than in any of the engraved artifacts he’d found.

He was still keeping secret the information Marc Billaud had given him about an ancient alien base at Tsiolkovsky. There was too much he was still unsure of, too many questions about the exact translations of some of what he’d found.

Before he could go much farther, he needed to be certain of his translations—and he needed something more reassuring than Howard’s cheerfully matter-of-fact pronouncements.

Shesh-Ki, which he translated as “Guardian of the Earth,” and which seemed, by context, to refer somehow, to the Moon.

Gab-Kur-Ra, “In the Chest of the Mountains” or “In the Hiding Place of the Mountains.” The phrase seemed to refer to some sort of secret cavern or base, again, from the context, located on the Moon. That was the secret place Billaud had talked about…on the Lunar farside, at Tsiolkovsky.

Shu-Ha-Da-Ku. “Supremely Strong, Goes Bright” was the exact translation, but it sounded ominously like a reference to a weapon.

And, perhaps most worrisome of all, was the repeated mention of a terrible threat, an enemy that threatened the An, and Earth itself, with Tar-Tar, with utter destruction. The name of this enemy was variously rendered Gaz-Bakar or Ur-Bakar, sometimes with the preface “Shar,” which meant great or the ultimate. Gaz-Bakar—David was guessing, here—must mean something like “Killers” or “Smiters of the Dawn.” Ur-Bakar, then, could be translated two ways, as “Foundations of the Dawn,” or as the far more ominous “Hunters of the Dawn.”

Marc had mentioned that phrase first, on the Moon, when he’d named the nemesis of the An.

The phrase sent an icy shiver down David’s spine. Such phrases, ever since the first decipherings of ancient Sumerian pictographs and the later cuneiform, had been assumed to be poetic references, figurative language only. Now he knew that some, at least, of the allusions were to something all too real.

What had so completely destroyed that An ship above Picard? What had happened to the An colony on Earth, a complex of several dozen high-tech settlements scattered from Egypt to the Indus Valley? He had to know, had to know his translations were right. Confirmation. He needed confirmation.

“Teri, who would you say is the best Sumerian linguist?”

“Hmm. I’d have to say François Villeret at the Sorbonne.”

David nodded thoughtfully. “That would have been my call, too.” He picked up the cast and tucked it under his arm. “Excuse me a moment, Teri,” he said, walking to the door.

“What are you doing, David?”

“Trust me. You don’t want to know. I’ll be back in a few minutes.”

It would be better if he could keep her out of what he was about to do.

In the larger room outside of his office was a faxcaster, a table-sized piece of business-telecommunications equipment. He opened the bin, placed the artifact inside, engravings down, and closed the lid. At the keyboard, he typed in his Earthnet access and two addresses—that of the ultimate destination, and that of his blind remailer address in Finland. With a hum and a leaking of brilliant light from around the seal of the bin’s lid, lasers scanned the cast, as a computer converted each detail in three dimensions into a string of data, uploaded to the Net.

That data would wait in Villeret’s server thousands of kilometers away, until it was used to recast and carve an exact duplicate.

The fact that some people would consider him to be committing treason by sending this data to a French national was worrisome, of course…but David Alexander had no patience with the blinkered authorities and idiot politicians who were running this ridiculous war.

If François confirmed the translations he and Teri had made, he’d be a lot happier about publishing.

And the hell with what anyone else had to say about it.