Moon Mask

by James Richardson

  “Has the science team attempted to recreate this effect with the ‘fake’ mask?” the Australian representative asked.

  “They have, but to no avail. The current they applied to the fake mask is self-sustaining itself, in that the energy flow is not dissipating, however it is not emitting tachyons.”

  “This is all very interesting, Mister Ambassador,” the president cut in. “But I’m not sure what the point you are making is.”

  “We’re all aware of the danger a tachyon bomb poses to world peace. Just the promise of it has claimed too many lives already. No one nation must have that type of power.”

  “I agree. So, what is it that you are suggesting?”

  Langley turned to look at the little man, and then scanned his calculating eyes across every man and woman seated in the immense, circular hall.

  Crunch time.

  “A joint mission, Mister President,” he said. “Under the control and the authority of the United Nations, I propose that we send Doctors Benjamin King, Alysya Siddiqa and Nadia Yashina in search of the other pieces of the Moon Mask.”

  “Doctor King hardly has the soundest reputation in the academic world,” the British representative protested.

  “And what about protection?” his old opponent, Sergei Dityatev, the Russian representative, spoke up, casting an accusing eye at his Chinese counterpart.

  This is going to hurt. “I propose that the scientific team will be protected by the same Unite States Special Forces team that retrieved them from Venezuela three days ago.”

  The uproar of indignant voices was even louder than he had anticipated, yet he nevertheless stood his ground in the centre of the council chamber. The torrent of voices hurled everything from laughter to outright obscenities, in a veiled, politician’s way, at him. Sergei’s voice was the loudest, however, the powerfully built Russian rising to his feet.

  “An American military force?” he scoffed. “Now, that really is convenient Mister Representative.”

  Langley knew the implication behind his sparring partner’s words. Over the last few years, the two men had developed a mutual respect and mistrust of one another that had seen them share a few shots of vodka between locking antlers in the council chamber.

  He knew how it looked, and he would have acted in an identical manner if Sergei had proposed sending the Spetsnaz to protect the team.

  It looked like he was putting the interests of the United States before his obligation to the United Nations.

  “What is convenient, Mister Ambassador,” he raised his voice to be heard, nevertheless retaining that infuriating sense of calm and self-righteousness that had seen him through battlefields. “What is convenient is not alerting even more people to a potentially disastrous situation.”

  The tirade of voices quietened down as outraged delegates tuned into his words.

  “We have worked very hard to contain a very delicate situation,” he continued, capturing their attention. “We have all agreed that the fewer people who know about this, the better.”

  He turned his attention to the British representative. “We could assemble a new team,” he agreed. “Of course we could. Totally independent. Fresh faced. And in so doing, we would be alerting yet more people to the existence of the Moon Mask, and more importantly, tachyons. Not to mention, we would be wasting valuable time bringing them up to speed on the events of the past days, the history of the Moon Mask, of Kha’um and Edward Pryce.” He paused, allowing his words to hang there.

  “Benjamin King,” he continued, “may not have the best reputation among British scholars, but the fact remains: he was right, everyone else was wrong.”

  The ambassador was about to object but Langley talked right over him. “King is the world’s only expert on the Moon Mask. Doctor Siddiqa is a distinguished archaeologist in her own right and will provide valuable, and I believe after talking to her, unbiased opinions to King’s work. In short, she’ll keep some of his more outlandish ideas in check.”

  He looked now at Sergei Dityatev. “Doctor Nadia Yashina is widely considered to be one of the most intelligent people on this planet. As well as her archaeological credentials, she is a recognised expert in the field of theoretical quantum physics. It was she who, with limited resources in a field base on a mountain-top, detected the tachyon emissions in a matter of hours. It took the staff at John Hopkins hospital days to discover the same thing.”

  He turned in a full circle, making eye contact with his audience, daring them to object. “They are the team of scientists to send. And, it makes sense for the U.S. Special Forces team which has already become embroiled in this problem to be the ones to accompany them. They’ve already been briefed on the dangers of tachyon emissions, and the potential threat of a tachyon bomb. They’ve already had contact with the Moon Mask, they know what it looks like, the type of environment it might be kept in. And, they’re here. It will take days to assemble a multi-national team of trusted Special Forces operatives from the various countries represented here, in this council. It will take more time for them to butt heads, for the egos of men and women from different nations to decide who is the boss, who is in charge. Believe me, I know. I was one of those men once.”

  No one could offer a strong argument to his reasoning and he knew it. Nevertheless, he concluded; “The United Nations will be in charge of this mission. The Special Forces team will report to me, direct, not the White House, not the Pentagon. And, I welcome any oversight from any of my esteemed colleagues here,” he encompassed the entire chamber. “Breathe down my neck, read every report, shadow my every move. So long as you don’t stop me from doing my job, in the best interests of the U.N. and all of our nations, then I and this mission will be an open book to you.”

  No one said anything. He could see the entire assembly contemplating his words, mulling them over, seeking any way to pick apart the logic of what he was saying.

  But, he knew, there was no way. His logic was sound.

  Eventually, the president rose to his feet. “We shall take a vote,” he said.

  22:

  Reunion

  United Nations Headquarters,

  New York City,

  U.S.A.,

  “So, this meteorite crashes into the rainforest near to Sarisariñama,” Sid repeated her boyfriend’s hypothesis, mulling the information over in her head. “The residents of the city of Xibalba - a bright, prospering subterranean city – fashion it into a mask and it becomes a central idol in their faith.”

  “That’s right,” King said excitedly.

  They stood inside one of two suites in the Secretariat Building which had been morphed into impromptu science labs. While the adjoining room had become a sterile-as-possible environment in which Nadia was studying the human remains of Kha’um and Edward Pryce, this one was a disorganised shambles. Open books littered the sofas and beds, crinkled maps were pinned to the walls, computer screens were open on dozens of different web pages.

  It was the result of their manic twelve hour hunt for the remains of the Moon Mask.

  After Langley had left King, he had been reunited with Sid and Nadia. He had embraced his girlfriend tightly but, even as her emotions, pent up for the last few days, spilled out, his mind had been focussing on the puzzle of the mask.

  He had forced the two women to get to work immediately. While both the Moon Mask and the Fake Mask were stored in a lead-lined concrete bunker beneath U.N. Headquarters, Langley had provided them with all the material they needed. For the first few hours they had scoured through the NASA report, Nadia’s knowledge filling in any blanks and irritably giving King and Sid a crash course in quantum physics.

  Then they had split up. Their goal was to locate the missing pieces of the mask which King was convinced Kha’um had already found and assembled for them. Despite having a starting place in mind, to do that, they needed to look at the giant puzzle from every angle.

  Nadia got to work on the human rem
ains. Although she had already studied what King suspected to be Pryce’s body, she wanted to conduct a more thorough investigation, particularly on the skull deformity which she had suggested may have been the result of a tumour or some other growth. King remembered her saying as much during their discussions in her lab several nights ago before Professor McKinney had cut her off.

  Sid, meanwhile, focussed her attention on the ‘map’ which he and Raine had found with Kha’um. She had scanned a high resolution image of the piece of bone into the computer and was running a program, searching for any correlation between it and any coastline. Without knowing where to start, however, it was like looking for a needle in a haystack.

  An awkward distance had settled between the two lovers as they’d worked. Very little had been said, and all that was communicated between them related to the mission. As the hours had passed, that expanse, an expanse that had opened the moment King had stumbled into the chamber and found the Xibalban mask, had only grown.

  King himself had devoted his time to reviewing all his and his father’s work on everything to do with the Moon Mask, the Bouda and the Progenitors. The awkwardness between him and his girlfriend drifted from his mind. He could barely contain his excitement as another piece of the thousand year-old puzzle fell into place.

  “Then,” Sid continued, “a piece of another, broken mask is brought to the city by one of your . . . Progenitors. But, instead of the harmless lump of space metal they used to make the first mask, this one emits tachyon radiation. The inhabitants of Xibalba quickly succumb to the deadly effects of it. Most of them perish, their flesh seemingly devoured, giving rise to the local legend of the flesh devouring Evil Spirit that lives on the mountain.”

  “But, just as some of our expedition demonstrated a greater resistance to the radiation than others, some of the Xibalbans hung on to life.”

  “But their society was changed drastically by the events,” Sid concluded.

  “All social order collapsed,” King said, his mind drifting. He could picture the great subterranean city in his mind, a wondrous place where possibly one of the world’s very first civilisations had arisen. But a dark shadow had fallen upon the city.

  “The citizens saw the terrible affliction, a plague it must have seemed to them, as the wrath of the gods. There was rioting in the streets, chaos everywhere as the monarchy lost control of its populace. Agriculture on the terraces grew to a halt, starvation set in. Dead bodies littered the streets, poisoning the water supply. Total anarchy reigned.”

  Sid studied her boyfriend as his eyes grew distant, staring off into the space behind her, as if he was reliving a memory.

  A nightmare.

  “It became a hellish place,” he continued. “In an attempt to appease the gods, they fashioned the shard of the mask into a new, complete construction, but the curse continued. For years, the survivors struggled to survive, the radiation, now locked in the temple we found the mask in, slowly killing them. To try and maintain some sense of order, the Lords of Xibalba became a brutal entity, a state controlled by fear and brutality. They came to worship the mask, and even the death it brought them, sacrificing their own survivors. Sometime before the end, a few of them escaped, fleeing west towards the Andes, and north into Central America where their tales of their cursed city became ingrained in the local mythology.”

  He looked at the battered photograph of the Gambian cave paintings he had taken many years ago which was now pinned to a cork-board.

  “Just as the Bouda were the first great civilisation of Africa,” he realised, “the Xibalbans were the first of the Americas. The Progenitors spread to them both, teaching them agriculture, metal and stone-work. Civilisation. When the Xibalbans fled their doomed city, they took with them not just legends of the Underworld, but knowledge of how to build vast pyramids, temples and cities out of stone; how to terrace mountainsides to be used for farming; how to construct networks of sophisticated irrigation canals.”

  He thought again about the Progenitors. They still drifted at the back of King’s mind as little more than a ghost, merely a theory that his father had developed to explain the similarities in world mythology. Hinted at in cultures both modern and extinct from countries across the globe, a unified image of a vast civilising race had begun to identify itself in Reginald King’s research.

  When the Spanish Conquistadors had arrived in the land of the Incas, they had been greeted as gods, as Viracochas, a word literally meaning ‘Foam of the Sea.’ Portrayed as a tall, bearded white man, the god Viracocha was a creator deity, often described in the plural sense, suggesting more than one existed. According to legend, Viracocha came to the Andean region from across the sea sometime after a great flood. After bringing the fruits of civilisation to the Incas’ predecessors, he once again returned to the ocean.

  Kukulkan of the Maya and Quetzalcoatl of the Aztecs, the great Feathered Serpent, was likewise a civilising god, a bearded white man who returned to the sea from where he had originated.

  As he delved deeper, he had found this corresponding theme littering mythology, tying in legends from Peru and Mexico to Egypt and Sumer, India and China. Osiris and Thoth, Vishnu and Enki, Oannes and Odin, to name but a few of these God-Men.

  He hadn’t been the first to suggest such a link in the theology of the ancient world. Pseudo-scientists and often described ‘pyrimidiots’ who believed the Giza pyramids had been built by extra-terrestrials or descendants from Atlantis had seen the connection years ago. But Reginald King was one of the few recognised scholars to partake in a serious study of a global civilisation, much to his own ridicule. He had never believed in E.T. but had come to the conclusion that hundreds of years before the rise of Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia, long before the recognised beginning of history, another civilisation existed. A civilisation with the knowledge and technology to teach developing cultures across the globe the art of civilisation.

  Yet, despite the links he had identified, the similarities, the near-identical myths in ancient cultures that had never met, the Progenitors had remained always a phantom. Never had there existed any tangible, indisputable evidence for their existence.

  Until now.

  “Okay, say you’re right,” Sid said carefully. “Say the Xibalbans are in fact the progenitor race of other South and Central American cultures, and that they were in fact influenced by an even greater civilisation. How did the Progenitors survive carrying the pieces of the Moon Mask on their global journeys? And why, if they were in fact this incredible, benevolent race of ancient humans, why would they transplant something they knew to be harmful, deadly, to a developing culture. Surely they knew it would mean death to the Xibalbans.”

  “Maybe they didn’t know,” King suggested. “Nate and I have some sort of immunity to the tachyon radiation. Maybe so too did the Progenitors. And if they weren’t harmed by the mask, then they wouldn’t have known the harm they were doing to the Xibalbans, or any other culture they entrusted with a piece of it.”

  Sid’s pretty face screwed up, unconvinced. “I don’t know, Ben. Something just doesn’t fit. I mean, I’m not disputing the Moon Mask theory, nor the idea of the survivors transplanting the myth or Xibalba, or even their technology and knowledge. But I think pursuing the Progenitor connection between the Bouda and Xibalba is barking up the wrong tree.”

  King frowned at her, a jolting sense of betrayal rushing through him. “No,” he argued. “The mask’s presence in the New World proves it was transplanted from the old by a race of advanced seafarers in prehistory.”

  “But that conflicts with the legends of the Moon Mask,” Sid protested. She knew she was treading on thin ice. Her boyfriend was sensitive about his theory, even more so since his father’s death. Nevertheless, Ambassador Langley had wanted her involved in the mission as a ‘level head’, to keep King on track. The priority wasn’t proving the existence of the Progenitors; it was finding the rest of the mask.

  “Remember what R
aphael del Vega told us about the Sanumá legend,” she said to him. “He said that the Evil Spirit on Sarisariñama manifested itself into the form of a face so that its mouth could devour the humans who lived on the mountain. And nowhere in the Bouda legends does it mention that they were actually given their shard of the mask by any particular person.”

  King grew agitated. He turned from the picture board they had assembled and glowered at Sid. “They believed that the gods divided it up and entrusted one piece to them. Any significantly advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” he quoted. “To the primitive tribe that they were before being given the Moon Mask, the Progenitor’s level of technology would have seemed advanced. Magical. Godly.”

  “Ben,” she replied, her own frustration starting to boil over. “We’ve been tasked by the United Nations with finding the rest of the Moon Mask. Yes, it was broken and scattered across the earth. Yes, somehow one piece made it to the New World, but that doesn’t prove the existence of the Progenitors.” King tried to cut in but she continued to speak over him, determined to get her point across. “For all we know, Christopher Columbus himself might have taken it there! Or Hernan Cortes or Francisco Pizarro-”

  “I thought you were supposed to be supportive?” King snarled angrily.

  “No!” Sid snapped. Her lower jaw trembled as her emotions, pent-up for days, erupted. “I’m a scientist, Ben. I’m not just going to blindly go along with your theory if I don’t think it’s right.”