Paradox

by Alex Archer

  She became aware of Baron's vindicated smirk. Charlie Bostitch had tears running down his big saggy cheeks.

  "We need to set up camp outside," Bostitch said. "I know, I know—we're all excited about this. About finally confronting irrefutable proof of the literal truth of God's Word."

  "But—" Annja began. No one paid attention.

  "But Ms. Creed's right. We need to go about this in a systematic way. We don't want skeptics picking our story apart, now, do we?"

  "No!" the Young Wolves cried in one voice.

  "Then haul ass outside," Baron snapped, "and start pitching camp."

  They hustled out, with Trish and Tommy following behind, locked onto the expedition leaders like sight-hounds following the prey. In a moment Annja and Levi found themselves alone in the chamber, seemingly forgotten in the general exhilaration.

  "Are we already just footnotes to this story?" she said softly.

  "No," Levi said. "Not the story to come."

  He put his face up to the slanting sunbeams, turned slowly around and around through them. "It really does seem as if the gods are vying here, both to hinder and help us," he said.

  "Levi!" she said, more sharply than she intended. "I really expected something better of you. You seem to be playing right to their expectations and prejudices."

  He shrugged. He seemed nearly as transported as the born-again contingent from Rehoboam Academy. "Not to their straight-arrow monotheism, surely?" he asked puckishly, face still uplifted to the sun. "We've found something here. Something fantastic. What it really is remains to be seen, that I admit."

  He looked at her. "Don't forget that, while I'm a rationalist, I am also a religious scholar." His eyes and voice were gentle, as they always were. "Unlike some I see no difficulty reconciling the two. I am, after all, dedicated to discovering the truth. Whether or not it accords with any dogma, including my own."

  Annja stood flatfooted. I should be as elated as everybody else, she thought. I'm all about finding truth, too. Instead she felt deflated. Defeated.

  Am I that invested in my own dogma? Do my beliefs, which I thought served the truth, help to blind me to it?

  "What if this really is the Ark?" she asked, in something like panic.

  Levi laughed. "Annja, I'd be as astonished as you if that turned out to be the case. For one thing, while I make no pretensions of being versed in geology, I confess to serious reservations about the Creator's flooding the entire planet to a depth of three miles. Where would the water go afterward? And I'm as doubtful as you about the concept of a wooden vessel, however holy, being floated ever higher up the cinder cone on successive surges of lava. There's something fantastic here, obviously. It's a huge, remarkable structure. We're standing in it, and I accept the evidence of my senses, at least to that degree. And part of it at least I think we can definitely say is artificial. It's still a long way from that to demonstrating that it's old Noah's boat, though."

  "I'm relieved to hear you say that," Annja said in a quiet voice. She became aware of a strange hush in the chamber. It was eerily quiet. "Actually finding out the Anomaly's not just a big rock, much less a discovery as amazing as this, it just—"

  She shook her head, feeling helpless still. "It overwhelms me. I don't know what to believe."

  "I'm with you on that," said Levi, who'd begun to work his way cautiously through the treacherous tumble of fallen masses, most encrusted with ages of snow and ice. He peered down intently as he did so. Annja didn't think he was just worried about twisting an ankle. "As far as that goes, my own belief is that the whole Flood story, like the whole of Genesis, is an extended metaphor. So let's play at not believing anything at all, until we have some basis to know."

  Annja laughed. "So I, the trained scientist and dedicated rationalist, get schooled in Science 101 by a Qabbalist rabbi? I don't know whether to be annoyed or grateful, Levi."

  "Well, I'd certainly lobby for the latter, if those were the choices," he said waggishly. "Don't underestimate us scholarly rabbis. You can never tell—hey, what's this? Wait, now."

  He stooped down and scooped at some snow with his bare hands. His long pale fingers were turning blue, a fact he disregarded, in the cold. It occurred to her to remind him to retrieve his gloves from where he'd ditched them earlier.

  Suddenly he grabbed at something in the snow. His joyous whoop echoed through the vaulted, tilted space. Dislodged snow and dust filtered down from above.

  "Be careful," Annja cautioned. "We don't want to bring anything heavy down on top of us."

  "Sorry, sorry," Levi said. "But just look at this! Look. Look."

  "It's a clay tablet," Annja said, leaning forward to stare at the object he thrust at her in the uncertain light. "Covered in—is that cuneiform?"

  "Yes!" he trilled triumphantly. "Let's see, now. The ancient kingdom of Urartu, of which this area was part, used cuneiform writing. But…no. That's not it. This is written in Akkadian. From the seventh century BC, I'd say. That makes it Neo-Assyrian."

  "I recognize the names from school," she said, "but they don't mean much to me. That's far away from my time and place of study."

  "Ah, but not from mine, as you're aware." Levi had straightened and held the tablet right up against his nose, squinting to read the little narrow wedge-shaped marks in the light from above. "Probably from the reign of the last of the Neo-Assyrian kings."

  "The Assyrians were notably nasty characters, weren't they?" Annja asked. "Even by ancient standards?"

  "Oh, yes. Nasty customers indeed. Made no bones about it. Rejoiced in it. Their kings boasted about their atrocities all over their monuments. Complete with very detailed pictures. Not, I've always thought, for the reasons the Mongol and Turkic nomads used epic atrocity, as a deliberate weapon of psychological warfare—the way our enlightened modern governments use genocide bombings of civilian populations. The Assyrians did it, I think, just because they thought it was good fun."

  "So you can read it?" she asked.

  He glanced at her, then went back to squinting at the dull red tablet. "Oh, yes. Crucial part of my studies. The mystic writings of the ancient Near East form a sort of web, you see—it's impossible to study Hebrew myths and religion from the period without taking them in context."

  "But what would an Assyrian cuneiform tablet of any sort, religious or otherwise, be doing way up the mountain here in Noah's Ark?" Annja said.

  "What we tend to think of as Noah's Ark," he corrected. "But things are not that simple. And that ties up with the only reason I can think of."

  He shifted his glasses up to his forehead, so they were stacked below his goggles, giving him an alarming six-eyed look. He brought the tablet up almost to one eyeball and then the other. "And that's—yes. Yes! 'Dedicated to…immortal Utnapishtim…saved mankind from the wrath of the gods.'"

  He lowered the tablet from his face to turn and stare at Annja in wonder. "Don't you see what this means? If this is—against all odds—an Ark we've found, what we've established isn't the literal truth of the book of Genesis at all."

  "It's not?"

  "No," he said. And he began to laugh. He laughed so hard the tears sprang from his eyes and coursed down his cheeks into his curly mouse-brown beard. He laughed so hard he had to sit down on an ice-rounded beam and clutch at his thighs.

  Annja gaped at him, not understanding a bit of this. "Levi, are you all right?"

  "No," he said, struggling to control his laughter. "Yes. Don't you see it yet?

  "If anything, this would prove the literal truth of Babylonian myth. And Sumerian, of which it's a straight translation. In other words not the existence of Jahweh. Not my people's cantankerous deity. But rather it would confirm the existence of what they taught were false gods—Enki and Anu and Enlil and all the rest.

  "That's the wonderful joke. The cosmic joke. If this discovery confirms any theology at all, it's pagan theology!"

  Over his renewed laughter Annja heard a noise. She turned quickly to face the entry
way to the great tilted chamber.

  Her eyes met the blue eyes of Larry Taitt. They were saucer-wide and rounded with horror. His face was the color of the snow that lay upon the glacier outside.

  Tears welled in his eyes. He turned and stumbled away out of sight.

  "I have a bad feeling about this," Annja said.

  Chapter 22

  Larry Taitt could barely see through his tears to walk. If it was a miracle he didn't step on anything that would twist beneath his boot and sprain his ankle, or into a concealed opening that would capture his foot and snap his leg neatly as any deliberate trap…it was a dark sort of miracle indeed.

  Somehow he made his way outside. He found the sky more full of clouds than he could have guessed from the sun shining through the top of the Anomaly. Snow fell in fat flakes like slow albino moths.

  He found his leader and Leif Baron inland of the Anomaly, overseeing as his comrades pitched tents, partially protected by the object's mass against a rising storm. They were getting set up for a full-scale excavation of the site. Robyn Wilfork stood watching nearby. The two remaining unbelievers from the New York television crew were somewhere out of sight, presumably photographing the Anomaly from the outside.

  A sob escaped Larry's mouth as he stumbled toward the older men. Baron whipped around and scowled. Mr. Bostitch turned more slowly.

  "Why, Larry," his employer said, "what's the matter with you?"

  Hesitantly, stumbling over words he hated the taste of, he told them what he had overheard.

  For a moment everyone stood shocked into horrified silence. Baron looked to Mr. Bostitch.

  "There's only one thing to do, you know," the former SEAL told his superior.

  "You're right," Mr. Bostitch said. "We can't let any of this get out. Instead of proving the Bible's truth, we'll destroy the faith of billions! Then our Lord will be unable to return to sit in judgment over the Earth."

  Larry's comrades had stopped working on the tents, which were mostly erected anyway, when he began his story. They all seemed to understand. It was more than Larry, in his current distraught state, could say for himself.

  From beneath their bulky jackets the young men produced handguns.

  He knew about the weapons. He carried one himself, as ordered by Mr. Bostitch and advised by Mr. Baron, in a shoulder holster beneath his left armpit, inside his parka. It was uncomfortable and the harness bound him in ways that were anything but helpful during the tricky, ultimately demanding business of rock-and ice-climbing. His ribs had turned a rainbow of sullen colors from banging the holstered piece against the rock. Yet he had been ordered to do it, and he believed in discipline, so he obeyed.

  But now he was simply appalled.

  "What are you doing?" he stammered.

  "Our duty to our Lord," Baron said.

  Mr. Bostitch clapped a hand on Larry's shoulder. "You've done your part, son," he said. "And thank you. I know it wasn't easy to tell us this. You just sit out here in a tent and leave the rest to us."

  "You can't be talking about killing them! Ms. Creed and the others?"

  "You can't make an omelet without breaking eggs," Baron said. "Didn't you learn that at the academy? It's Leadership 101. To do any less than the Lord demands is to do the Devil's work."

  Larry spun to face him. He'd always been afraid of the security-contracting mogul. But he knew right from wrong.

  "I won't let you—"

  He never heard it coming. The bullet. He merely felt it hit like a sledgehammer between the shoulder blades. His chest seemed to explode in blackness.

  He found himself on his knees without knowing how he got there. The glacial ice was very cold and very hard but didn't hurt. Nothing hurt. He felt numb. Detached.

  Craning his head over his shoulder he saw the big cold-mottled, pink-and-blue-white face of Charles Bostitch, his slab cheeks shiny with tears, his blue eyes puffy above the sights of a gun.

  "Lord forgive you, boy," his employer whispered.

  He saw a flash, bright as a thousand suns, and then he died.

  * * *

  "OH, GOD," CHARLIE BOSTITCH said over and over, gazing down at the body of his factotum, in a graceless sprawl with his head haloed in scarlet. Bostitch held his black handgun as if uncertain how such an evil article had come into his hand.

  He felt a pressure, comforting, on his other arm. It was Baron. His muscular face was calm. Purposeful.

  "You did what you had to do, sir," Baron said quietly. "Think of it as saving the boy from the Devil's clutches. It was an act of sheer mercy to strike him down before he could betray his faith."

  Charlie nodded. His stomach rebelled. He turned and vomited into a snowbank.

  As he did he heard Leif Baron snapping, "You know what to do. Go. Go!"

  * * *

  SITTING ON WHAT MIGHT HAVE been a curved beam fallen from above, beneath its coating of ice, Levi looked up from peering at the innocuous-looking clay tablet in his palm.

  "What was that?" he asked.

  Annja came out of freeze. "Levi, stand up," she said, speaking low and struggling to keep her voice calm. "Right now. We have to get out of here. Now."

  He blinked myopically at her. "But why, Annja? There's so much yet to look for. We haven't even started!"

  "Not now," she said. "That was a gunshot."

  As she spoke another hard rap echoed from outside the ruin.

  * * *

  STANDING BY THE TENTS Bostitch saw the two unbelievers from New York, Trish Baxter and Tommy Wynock, run out of the entry where they had, against his wishes, wandered back inside the Ark without the rest of the party to get some footage.

  Although it was not without regret, he watched with pride as the leading elements of his fine young men, Josh Fairlie and Zeb Miller, opened fire without hesitation. The two television crewpeople collapsed in the snow. Despite the dimming light their blood glared shocking red against the new bright snow.

  "What a pity," he said, shaking his head.

  "They couldn't be trusted," Baron said grimly. "It's the only way."

  Bostitch shrugged. "Our fine young men can learn to work their audiovisual equipment. With God's help they can do anything, bless them. That's how you teach them in my academy, after all. And Mr. Wilfork can make sure they know what's important to shoot. Film, I should say."

  Looking around he added, "Where's that white-haired scamp gotten off to? He was here a second ago."

  "Probably hiding somewhere, shaking in terror," Baron said. "After all, he's nothing but a half-reformed old commie. And as my daddy always used to say, you can't trust people who don't believe in God."

  Despite the sorrow in his ample belly Bostitch smiled. "Oh, but I do trust him, Leif," he said. "I trust him to be true to a steady paycheck. You can always rely on communists for that. They surely know the value of a buck."

  * * *

  DEEPER AND DEEPER INTO THE RUIN Annja dragged Levi, as fast as she dared. And then a bit faster. She had cracked a light stick of her own. He followed compliantly.

  "Why are we going this way?" he asked mildly, stumbling over rubble.

  "If we go out the front door we'll run straight into the guys with the guns," she said. "I'm hoping there's another way out."

  "And if there's not?"

  Her cheeks drew back toward her ears, baring teeth in an expression that was nothing like a smile. "We find a place to hide and try to ambush them. Play it by ear. Unless you can think of something better on real short notice."

  "Oh, no, Annja. You'll find the best way. You always do. I have faith in you."

  He glanced back to the great chamber. "Look, the light's fading again in there. Maybe the gods really are arm-wrestling over our fate." He grinned dreamily at the thought.

  "Whatever," she said. "I prefer to think my fate's in my own hands."

  "Couldn't find better ones," Levi said with complacent confidence that half annoyed her and half made her despair.

  His belief in me is like a child's
in its parent, she thought. How can I let him down? But—how will I not?

  She heard voices calling from behind, echoing with deceptive gentleness through the cathedral spaces of the Anomaly. The Young Wolves were on their trail. The pack was giving chase.

  The way narrowed around them. Annja grimaced. Their enemies had guns; they had no need to close in and face the final surprise of her sword. I might've just robbed us of room to dodge, she realized.

  But the passage, illuminated by her light stick's eerie green glow, turned abruptly left. That was, to the landward side, toward the unseen summit of Ararat. Bending low and turning sideways was the only way to follow. Annja had to let go of Levi's wrist to do so. But he was moving on his own quite well now.