* * *
‘Why go to all that trouble, writing the scrolls, sealing them in vacuum tubes and building the Sphinx to hide them if it’s just a made-up story?’ asked Ruby, putting down the papers.
‘If it is untrue, which I doubt, then it must be an allegory,’ said the Patient.
‘Why beat about the mulberry if you’re trying to warn someone?’ asked Ratty.
‘To warn the right people, without the wrong people understanding,’ said the Patient.
‘So who the hell is right and who is wrong?’ asked Matt.
‘That eternal question has no answer,’ the Patient suggested. ‘It all depends upon where one is sitting.’
‘Of course,’ said Ratty. ‘Indeedy. That is what you did when you quoted Larkin at me, Rubes. “Time has transfigured them into Untruth”. Old Otto wouldn’t have been able to interpret it in the same way. He didn’t share the history we shared, the connection with that poem that is unique to us. You know what, Rubes? That poem changed my life. And yet I was never frightfully sure what you honestly meant by it.’
Ruby curled her upper lip, about to answer him, when the Patient stood up.
‘Philip Larkin died in nineteen eighty-five,’ he announced. ‘On his deathbed he ordered the destruction of his private diaries. The evidence supports a hypothesis that the diaries contained writings related to his father’s visits to Nazi Germany.’
‘Those facts about his father are public knowledge,’ said Ruby. ‘They can’t be the sole reason for burning his diaries.’
‘Correct, but the twenty diaries that Larkin’s father wrote during the war are held in the University of Hull and are closed to researchers,’ said the Patient. ‘They are closed for the same reason that his son’s diaries were burned.’
‘And how would you know what is written in diaries that are held in a city that you’ve never visited and which everyone is forbidden to read?’ asked Ruby.
‘Because I have read the papers written by my own grandfather,’ explained the Patient. ‘I know of the involvement of Sydney Larkin in the Mengele story. I know that during one of Larkin’s visits to Germany in the thirties, Josef tried to recruit him to search for the other half of the stele here in Shropshire. I know that Sydney Larkin broke into this very manor house during the war, but was unable to locate the stele amid the clutter. He then became distracted by the manor’s library and wasted much time in attempting to impose a sense of order among the shelves. I know that the poem An Arundel Tomb is allegorical. The two effigies upon the tomb symbolise the two Mayan stele. The poem highlights the fact that the interpretation of the stelae’s inscriptions has become distorted with time, and even hints at the Sphinx to which they lead. The poem talks of “little dogs under their feet”, but when you see the stone effigies it is clear that they are not both dogs. One is a lion. A Sphinx. The poem contains a deliberate mistake, leading to the answer of the mystery of the stelae.’
‘Gosh. Goodness. Is that true, Rubes?’
‘Er, if you insist. It’s a better answer than the one I was going to give.’
‘May I trouble you for that answer in any case? It would settle a disquiet that has been threatening to disrupt my renal regularity.’
‘I was pissed off at you, Ratty. You didn’t read my message about the importance of the stele. You were about to hand it to someone whose intentions seemed dubious to say the least. I didn’t have time to think about it. I just needed to say something to get a reaction from you without Otto reading anything into it. It didn’t matter what I meant. I just had to get you to think about what you were doing. When you read me that poem years ago it made me run away. Doubtless my disappearance made you think. I just wanted to remind you of that night. It was an instinct, a quick, easy way to connect to a side of you that appeared frustratingly dormant while you were sitting in Otto’s study.’
‘This whole damn thing makes no sense,’ grumped Matt, steering the discussion away from Ruby and Ratty’s gossamer thin romantic history. ‘If the scrolls are not literal, how could those Mayan jungle Jims see into the future?’
‘We all see the future,’ replied the Patient.
‘Bull.’
‘You know something of the future. So do Ruby, Ratty, myself and the whole world.’
‘Come on, man. Get real. If I could see the future, I’d be winning the lottery every week and if you could see into the future you’d have seen this coming.’ Matt flicked the Patient’s ear with his fingers.
The Patient remained stoical, refusing to give Matt the satisfaction of a response, waiting for the American’s ego to deflate. It didn’t take long.
‘To continue the point I was making before that unhelpful interjection,’ said the Patient, ‘I maintain that certain aspects of the future can be foreseen. For example, I know that Ruby will shortly serve us some small, but doubtless delicious, portions of omelette. I know that the sun will set tonight and will rise tomorrow. Looking further ahead, I know that these snows will thaw and spring will follow this winter. I also know that the stone from which this house was constructed will continue to decay, as will the cells of all of us present. And, more importantly, I can see further. I know that the wobble in the Earth’s axis will cause the constellations to appear to rotate around the night sky over a period of twenty-six thousand years. I know that Comet McNaught will return in ninety-two thousand years. These are things beyond the span of any human life, and yet I know they will occur. The details we cannot predict, but the broad brush of our future is there for all to see.’
A sigh emanated from Matt with a resonance that his companions could feel through their chests. He was tired of listening to statements that he considered obvious. In fact, he was bored, period. The frustration of being refused entry to Ruby’s bedroom in the East Wing had been gnawing at him. He knew that Ratty’s suite was on a different floor in another wing, but that wasn’t sufficient comfort to dispel the gut-wrenching feeling that perhaps, despite the skin-crawling repulsiveness of the idea, something was going on between them during the long winter nights. Occasionally, he thought he could see in their eyes the same sparkle he had once shared with her, but sometimes the Patient displayed a similarly inexplicable fondness for His Lordship. The President’s twin didn’t appear to be in any hurry to return to Guatemala; he seemed content to remain at Ratty’s house for ever. Matt walked to the window, staring at nothing, sensing everything. He had gotten the message. His services here were now superfluous. His publisher had asked him to write a second book, this time an honest thriller. He was ready to write his story of a man waking from a long coma to a changed world. It was time to go home, provided the world was prepared to do him the favour of not ending too soon.
‘The message in the scrolls is a clear caveat from the ancient past,’ said Ratty, pausing to eat a mouthful of his tiny breakfast. ‘Whether or not the peril is literal, one must consider what it might mean for the planet. For instance, you might look at the twentieth century and summarise its first half as a period plagued by devastating war and wotnot, but it didn’t happen in a jiffy. Events took a few years to turn queer. If the scrolls tell of great unpleasantness happening now, it could be that it begins somewhere, very small, and it might be years before we know what it is.’
Matt was reminded of the incubation and growth of his own little lie, which after some years had exploded in a shower of truth upon everyone who had believed in him. He didn’t care. He had found his own truth, and it was stronger than his fiction.
‘Let’s assume our ancestor fellows have been dreadfully naughty and done something irreversible that could hurt us today,’ Ratty continued. ‘If the scrolls are not literal, what might they mean? Presumably it isn’t some kind of cyclical natural disaster that they predicted. Could it be that they planted seeds of ideas in their fellow chaps that would fruit after many generations?’
‘You mean like the way religions grow?’ asked Matt.
‘You might be able to predict the growth of id
eas, but not the timescale,’ said the Patient. ‘It is the same with our DNA. That is what survives of us into the future. It was Dawkins who said that we are mere survival machines for our genes. Disposable shells, to be used and abused. It is not we who can look ahead to eternal life, but the DNA that we carry imprinted within our cells.’
‘Hey, the Dawkins guy. Never could get why he sells more books than me.’
‘A not entirely relevant contribution to the discussion, I fear,’ stated the Patient. ‘Take the genes that created Hitler, for instance. That particular strand of DNA was blindly carried through the millennia from his ancestors, a quietly ticking time bomb waiting to destroy the mid-twentieth century. But the timing could never have been foreseen.’
‘Perhaps it’s you,’ joked Ruby to an unamused Patient. ‘You and Orlando share the genes that almost triggered another world war. Perhaps the ancients saw it coming somehow.’
‘Or the aircraft you dug up,’ suggested Matt. ‘That was in the ground for twelve thousand years. Maybe there’s something else they buried, something bad.’
‘I don’t think we’re really getting anywhere,’ said Ruby. ‘All we know is that an awful lot of people think the world will end tomorrow, and if the scrolls come true in any recognisable interpretation then we’re in a whole lot of trouble. The message is what it is. I don’t think there’s any ambiguity in our translation. Maybe the timing is approximate. Maybe pre-Egyptian mummification was based on advanced science. Maybe we’ll all be in for a shock in one or two uinals. Or maybe there’s something that we missed in our understanding of it. I’ve been studying the first couple of scrolls again this morning. I’m going to carry on and read the rest of them to you. Pay attention. Take it all in afresh, and make your own conclusions.’
A chorus of groans provided the background tone as she picked up the pile of papers.
‘Why don’t you at least skip the next bit about Hocol’s life story and how the Peruvians invented powered flight?’ asked Matt. ‘We’ve all read that stuff too.’
Now it was Ruby who groaned, selecting the next few pages and casting them aside before finding a starting point from which to read.
* * *
SPHINX SCROLL # 03
* * *
Our nation pushed forward the boundaries of human knowledge. Libraries filled with texts on every tangible subject, scientists became superstars. They proved that this simple biological creature, the human being, related to and not much different from any other vertebrate life on the planet, could understand and control the physical world around it.
The problem was, however, that the scientists were right. The human animal, designed only to fulfil its basic biological functions, was now in charge of complex social systems, with control of nature, presiding over weapons of mass destruction. The evolution of morality was slower than the evolution of technology. Superstition, distrust and blinkered selfishness progressed further than ethics.
The lack of advancement in philosophical thinking and the failure as a race to learn humility and respect created the greatest dilemma: weaponry moved into the nuclear age, but attitudes and beliefs did not. Humankind was left behind by creations that it had not learnt to control.
* * *
‘This guy could have been writing about the twentieth century,’ chipped in Matt.
‘The wheel has come full circle,’ added the Patient.
‘Will you please be quiet and pay attention to the scrolls?’ Ruby didn’t look up from her pages as she spoke. ‘We have a lot to get through.’
‘But you’re not seriously going to read everything?’ asked Matt. ‘Come on, just give us the highlights.’
‘Shush,’ said Ruby, pressing on regardless.
* * *
SPHINX SCROLL # 03 [CONTINUED]
* * *
The aircraft in which Hocol died was the zenith of advanced nuclear engineering. He had lived long enough to experience this wonder of science, but it was to kill him.
The simple savages of northwest Europe and of northern America remained blissfully ignorant of his death, of course, as they did of most things, but the educated world went into mourning for Hocol.
I wanted Hocol to have a presence amongst my people, even after his death. I ordered the construction of a statue one hundred feet high and lit by a thousand giant bulbs, but this project was soon overshadowed by the greater issues of the day: the direct threats from Halford and from Atlantis, and the more distant rumblings in Asia.
* * *
‘Asian food gives me distant rumblings,’ whispered Matt. No one reacted.
‘A more significant question is our use of the name Atlantis,’ said the Patient. ‘I know we argued at length about whether it was an appropriate interpretation of the word in the scroll, but we have to accept that its use is dependent upon a number of assumptions being correct.’
‘I thought we chose it in order to get those hippie types interested in our work,’ said Ratty.
‘I don’t think it matters either way,’ sighed Ruby. ‘Let’s crack on with the next scroll.’
* * *
SPHINX SCROLL # 04
* * *
The terrible fate of the world is inextricably conjoined with my own story. For that reason I must focus this written account increasingly on myself, not for reasons of personal glory – for I deserve none whatsoever – but because only through my perspective can sense be made of this global catastrophe. And should my body breathe its last during my anecdotage, I have taken the precaution of dictating the final scroll first so that our descendants will at least know the nature of the danger that threatens them.
Hours before the revolution began, I was standing on a white stone balcony hardly bigger than myself, overlooking the spires and domes and solar panels of Tikal. Leaders were arriving in the chamber below. I gazed upon a mêlée of extravagant hats bobbing about like boats on a pond. The leaders were in a subdued mood, their voices failing to register above the squeaking and clattering of the cables that pulled the public transporters constantly up and down the street.
I stepped inside and opened the chocolate cupboard on the wall. I helped myself to a large chunk and let it melt on my tongue, relaxing as the liquid slid down my throat and the mild intoxicants sped to my brain. I shoved a smaller piece in my shoulder bag for later, put on my gold-trimmed hat and had started to descend the staircase when a muffled explosion threw me down the steps onto the body of my personal assistant.
In all the confusion, the thought occurred that I had always wanted to lie on top of her. As a member of the ruling class, selected in infancy for my intelligence and creativity, I was expected to be and to remain homosexual. Reproduction was left to the lower social classes, a chore deemed unsuitable for ‘thinkers’. I was famed, however, for my complete celibacy, and much admired during times of prosperity for judgements unimpaired by the euphoria of sex. However, the truth was that my heterosexual urges were in constant conflict with my expected bias.
The ebullient eyes of a former nuclear scientist looked down upon my terrified face. I knew of this man. Halford had been cast out when I ceased investing in new nuclear technologies. No longer able to pay his taxes, he was forced into exile. His time in the forests was not spent idly – his writings quickly made him famous and earned him free food and simple lodging from his numerous supporters, people who regarded him as their return ticket to the prosperity they had once known.
I didn’t know at the time whether Halford had started to train his followers as an army, but it was widely believed that the assassination of Hocol was the result of a lucky pot-shot by a Halford supporter. Now Halford had struck at me directly. Strengthened by the growing unrest following Hocol’s death, his supporters had been persuaded to attack.
He sneezed explosively, but I was too scared to move an arm to wipe the spit from my face. I had heard rumours that he had caught a recurrent sickness from living rough, a mild cold that had stayed with him since his initial exile.
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‘I know you, Jamel. You know me, I take it?’ asked Halford, brushing back his hair with one hand while keeping a weapon aimed at me with the other.
I wriggled, uncomfortable on my assistant’s body. I nodded in nervous recognition of the notorious rebel leader.
He sneezed again, making no effort to direct his germs anywhere other than at my face.
‘I don’t want to kill you,’ continued Halford with a sickly grin, gazing towards me without looking me in the eye. He picked up the shoulder bag that I had dropped. ‘Or do I? Not sure. What’s this? Chocolate? Is that what great leaders carry?’ He gave it to me, and I ate it gratefully. ‘I have a thousand armed men in Tikal today. The majority of the population is with me. One hundred of my best people are in this building. Any one of them would kill you for me. Why should I let them have the honour?’
His tone quickly changed from false joviality to bitterness.
‘Perhaps I want the honour. Maybe. I’ll see. I’m not yet sure about killing you.’
I squared my lips, about to respond, to try to sway Halford’s apparent indecision in my favour, but he didn’t give me the chance to speak.
‘Perhaps I should,’ continued Halford, pausing to cough. ‘Maya could have been great. We could have been the most powerful nation on Earth. We could have conquered lands that possess all the natural resources we need. You have failed your people. I’ve watched you failing until I could watch no more.’
‘Why couldn’t you talk to me? You’ve met leaders of other states, but not me.’ I felt betrayed by the rest of the world in my plight.
‘I was banned from the city. I couldn’t pay the taxes – a victim of the recession you created.’ He blew his nose on his sleeve. ‘This damn cold is your fault. It’s tough living amongst the trees. Anyway, you would have had me locked up the moment I was identified.’
‘Do you realise what you’re doing?’
‘I’m not a maniac. Don’t look on this as the destruction of old Maya.’
My bemusement must have been evident.
‘This is the birth of a new nation. Maya will again enjoy prosperity. We will become the most powerful nation on Earth. We –’
The Sphinx Scrolls Page 34
