“So here’s your so-called Shrine of the First Sun,” Yeats said, staring straight up.
“It’s like being inside a bronze coffee filter,” Conrad said, looking around and feeling very small. A halo of mist clung to the glowing pillars, which seemed to come together like a funnel at their apex high above. And the air definitely smelled greasy. Conrad looked down and wondered just how deep into the earth this Shrine of the First Sun descended, and how much farther must they go to discover the Secret of First Time. He was in awe of how much there was for him to absorb and painfully aware of the limited time.
“Look at this.” Yeats guided the lighter close to a smooth, shiny pillar. The mirrorlike surface not only seemed to magnify the brightness a hundredfold but also seemed to tremble. “I bet this surface has a reflectance of greater than a hundred percent.”
“That’s significant?”
“The best we’ve been able to come up with is eighty-eight percent using aluminum.”
“These columns aren’t made of aluminum.”
“No.” Yeats ran his hand over the surface of the column. “They’re made of something much lighter.”
“Lighter?” Conrad touched the column. The surface was slick, almost liquid. Yet he could sense some kind of indefinable texture to it. “It feels as soft as a cobweb and as strong as steel. Like some sort of lighter-than-air silk.”
“That’s because the fabric is perforated with holes smaller than the wavelength of light.” Yeats sounded almost excited. “I’d say somewhere between one micron or four hundredths of a mil thick. So what now? Do we go up or down this thing?”
Fabric. That’s just the word he was looking for, Conrad realized. The surprise was that it was Yeats who came up with it. But he was right. These columns were like giant rolls of some thin, lightweight, and mirrorlike fabric so shiny they could be mistaken for the light they so brilliantly reflected.
“Up or down, son?” Yeats repeated.
“Up,” Conrad said, surprising himself. Because in reality he didn’t know. He had never come across anything like this shrine in the ancient pyramid texts of the Egyptians or in the tales of Meso-American lore. And he couldn’t recall it from any childhood nightmares or memories. Its sole significance, so far as he could tell, was to serve as a live-scale projection of the obelisk he had taken from P4. But somewhere in this obelisk was the so-called Seat of Osiris, the final resting place of the scepter and the Secret of First Time. The only question was whether he would recognize it when he saw it, much less know what to do. “We’re going up.”
And so they were. The platform they were standing on began to lift like an elevator, carrying them up between the columns of light. Conrad looked up to see the columns funnel toward an apex.
“Hang tight,” he said, tense but determined. He realized he had never been more excited about anything in his life.
They must have passed through several levels of compartments, Conrad figured, when he looked up to see a pinprick of light at the end. A minute later they emerged into a cool chamber. Suddenly the platform locked with a thud. Conrad stumbled backward toward the edge of the platform. Yeats caught his arm with a viselike grip.
“End of the line,” he said.
Conrad paused to get his bearings. It felt cramped up here compared to the soaring spaces below. Their voices had stopped echoing, and the air felt cooler. Conrad removed his sunglasses and switched on his halogen lamp. This time there was no blinding reflection. The beam stabbed out and bathed the nearest wall in light.
A quick survey revealed one corridor on either side of them. Conrad entered the corridor to their right.
“This way,” he said, his impatience hanging thick in the air, pushing them forward.
“Now how would you know?”
“According to you, I’m an Atlantean, remember?”
Conrad led him along the dark tunnel for a minute. At the end was a cryptlike door, about six feet tall. Next to it was a square pad much like the one at the outside entrance. Conrad focused his light on the door. Carved into its metallic surface were unusual engravings that at first defied comprehension. Only when Conrad ran his fingers across them did their meaning register.
“It’s a constellation,” he said flatly.
Yeats nodded. “That star right there is Sirius.”
“The goddess Isis in her astral form.” Conrad placed his hand on the cold metallic door, overcome with awe. His throat constricted and his heart beat faster. He could barely manage a whisper. “We found the queen’s crypt.”
“I was looking for the king’s.” Yeats sounded detached, businesslike. “How much you want to bet we’ll find that bastard Osiris down the opposite corridor?”
And the Seat of Osiris and the Secret of First Time, Conrad thought, when he saw a red dot on the back of his hand and spun around. Yeats was pointing his AK-47 at the door, the laser-sighting on.
Conrad jumped back. “What the hell are you doing?”
“You’re going to open this door so we can see if the bitch is still in there.”
Conrad, his pulse pounding, put his hand on the square pad, and he could feel a surge of energy. He pulled his hand back and the door slid open. A cool mist escaped from the chamber.
“You didn’t even need the obelisk for that,” Yeats said, almost in awe.
“Maybe once you use it, the system remembers,” Conrad said.
“Or maybe your ID is already in the system.”
They stepped through the cloud and into the small chamber. The red beam from Yeats’s laser sight crisscrossed the cell and locked onto an intricate alcove of some kind. It was contoured for a human being no taller than two meters. Based on the shape, it was clearly a woman. She had two arms, two legs, ten fingers and ten toes, and an hourglass figure.
“Mama.” Conrad looked at the display and let out a whistle. “Are you happy now, Yeats? You’ve met the enemy and she looks like us. Maybe it’s not just me. Maybe we’re all Atlanteans.”
“Let’s hope not. Not unless you want us to suffer the same fate. Now let’s check out Papa.”
Down the hall, the door to the Osiris crypt bore the markings of the Orion constellation on its surface. And this time Conrad didn’t hesitate. He put his hand on the door and it split open. Again, a fine cool mist escaped. Yeats climbed through with his AK-47 with Conrad close behind. Conrad shined his light up on the far wall and caught his breath.
“Say hello to Daddy, Conrad,” said Yeats.
This crypt was clearly contoured for a vertically standing creature that stood much taller than a human. Inside was an impressive harness or exoskeleton that appeared as mysteriously complex as the being it was designed for. A translucent bandolier crisscrossed the center ring and boasted an awesome array of instruments, gear, and, perhaps, weapons.
“Holy God,” Conrad murmured.
“Not so holy if Mother Earth is right,” Yeats said. “This one’s about three meters high.”
Conrad flicked on the Zippo and held it close to the edge of the harness. Whatever it was made of was fireproof and perhaps even indestructible for all intents and purposes. But it clearly supplied its bearer with only partial protection. Judging by the size of it, Conrad could only assume the rest of such a creature required little else.
Creature, he thought. Is that what his true father was? Is that what he was? He had more in common with the man next to him than whatever creature used that harness.
“There is no way in hell I’m related to the thing that belongs here,” Conrad told Yeats. “It would have shown up in my DNA tests or something.”
“If Serena is right and the Atlanteans are the so-called sons of God from Genesis,” Yeats said, “then your biological father was a generation or two removed from the first coupling and more or less human.”
“More or less human?” Conrad repeated. “That sounds even more—”
“Show me the goddamn Seat of Osiris, son. We’re running out of time.”
Conrad no
dded. “It’s got to be somewhere in here, closer than we think,” he said. “If we split up, we’ll double our coverage in half the time.”
“Then you can hold on to this.”
Yeats tossed over the Scepter of Osiris, which Conrad caught in one hand. The thing was practically vibrating with raw energy.
“Now switch your headset to our backup frequency,” Yeats said. “It’s marked with that little blue tape on the back. Blue is for backup.”
“I get it. I get it.” Conrad switched to frequency B. “Check.”
“Check.”
For a minute or two Conrad could hear Yeats’s gravelly voice in his right ear as they continued exploring. But it didn’t take long for Yeats to move out of range. By the time Conrad was satisfied he had explored every surface of the top story of the obelisk and returned to the central platform, Yeats had disappeared. Conrad was alone and disappointed. He had found nothing and wondered where Yeats went and what he had found.
Conrad stood there on the platform, inside the top chamber of the obelisk, and pondered the alien nature of the obelisk’s interior. For all its strangeness there was something about this place that persuaded him to believe he had been here before. Or somewhere like here. An inner urge prompted him to look up at the ceiling. Something about it had bothered him. Now as he flashed his light on it he could see what he had missed before: a small square pad, just like the earlier one.
There was one more, hidden chamber above him, he realized with a surge of excitement.
It was also two meters beyond his reach.
Conrad managed to use the control lever to nudge the platform up half a level, careful not to squash himself against the ceiling, and placed his hand on the square pad. Suddenly the outer ring of some sort of hatch appeared before it split open to reveal another chamber above him with a cathedral ceiling—clearly the very top chamber of the shrine.
Conrad rode the platform up to the top level. His light scanned the chamber, revealing a large high-backed seat that lay horizontally on a kind of altar and pointed to the apex of the cathedral ceiling overhead.
Eureka, Conrad thought. The Seat of Osiris.
“Yes!” Conrad exclaimed out loud. He fumbled anxiously for his radio. “Yeats, I found it.”
But there was no response. Where the hell was he?
“Yeats.” The silence was eerie, unsettling.
He cranked his ear full of static until it hurt and still he heard nothing. So he switched it off. He wondered what Yeats could be up to, if he was OK. He felt a sick knot forming in his stomach. Well, he couldn’t wait.
Slowly he circled the empty chair and surveyed the scene. His flashlight showed nothing else in the chamber. No artifacts, markings, or any evidence this room had ever been used before. But it all felt very familiar.
It was as if he had stepped into an ancient hieroglyph come to life. Ancient Egyptian reliefs of Osiris often showed the Lord of Eternity sitting in his chair and wearing his Atef crown, like the one inside the Seti I Temple at Abydos. Conrad also recalled the Man in the Serpent sculpture from the ancient Olmec site of La Venta, Mexico, which depicted a man seated inside a mechanical-looking device much like the chair before him. Then there was the sarcophagus lid inside the Temple of the Inscriptions at the Mayan site of Palenque in Chiapas, Mexico. That, too, revealed a mechanical design involving a man who appeared to be seated inside some kind of device.
Yes, he had been here before, he thought, feeling sweat begin to bead on his forehead. His hands felt heavy and clammy. Only this time the chair was real, the very Seat of Osiris. And so was the small altarlike base next to it, clearly the receptacle for the Scepter of Osiris. The only thing left to the imagination was for him to take the scepter, sit in that seat, and behold the Secret of First Time.
Conrad ran his hand over the smooth contours of the chair. It was like an empty eggshell. Conrad pressed the surface, felt it bend to his touch. He wanted to sit in it. But he remembered what had happened with the scepter in P4 and paused.
This time was different, he rationalized. The first time was a mistake. He knew that all too well. This time he was trying to correct that mistake, and if he didn’t try, billions of lives could perish. Yes, he concluded, whatever his own shortcomings, however unworthy, he had to sit in the chair, if not for himself, then for humanity.
Conrad slipped into the Seat of Osiris, inserted the Scepter of Osiris into its receptacle, and looked straight up at the pyramidlike ceiling. This is interesting, he thought, feeling like one of his students on the Nazca Lines tour, waiting for some great revelation to materialize that never does.
“Sure, Conrad,” he said out loud, just to hear the sound of his voice. “You’ve finally made something of yourself. You’ve self-actualized yourself and become your astral projection. You are the Sun King.”
He laughed nervously. If Mercedes could see him now, she’d be taping everything. He could picture the ads on TV: “Live from the Shrine of the First Sun! The Secrets of Atlantis Revealed! Witness the End of the World!” The way things were going, unfortunately, he soon would.
A wave of depression suddenly washed over Conrad as he sat in the Seat of Osiris. Had he traveled so far, and would humanity have to suffer so much, only to discover this was all some cosmic joke? What if the Secret of First Time was that there was no secret?
No, Conrad decided. Somebody went to too much trouble to build all this. And there were clearly some astronomical correlations he was missing. There must be a way to stop the earth-crust displacement. Perhaps he was simply the wrong man to find that way. He felt overwhelmed by a sense of helplessness. He had failed Serena. He had failed humanity. He had failed himself, period. What more could he do? This was indeed the end of the line.
Conrad leaned back in the seat, closed his eyes, and prayed: God of Noah, Moses, Jesus, and Serena. If you’re there, if you care at all for Serena and all she cares for, then help me figure this thing out before Osiris and his kind screw your kind over for good.
Conrad opened his eyes. Nothing happened.
Again Conrad leaned back in the seat, and as soon as he did, he realized it had settled into a pocket and locked in with a click. Conrad tried to lean forward to look. But the egglike capsule, while comfortable, held him back.
He felt a sequence of vibrations shoot up his spine.
The chair was squeezing him, tightening around his waist and pushing down on his shoulders, devouring him. A metallic console telescoped itself beyond his forehead.
“Yeats!”
Suddenly the console overhead came to life with a beep. It glowed an eerie blue and a panel of instruments lit up. A tremendous shudder reverberated throughout the obelisk and Conrad could feel vibrations building in the back of his chair.
“Yeats!”
A single shaft of intense white light from above blinded him.
“Yeats!”
Then another flash shot up from below, imbuing the entire chamber in light. Conrad realized it was sunlight through two shafts above and below his reclined seat. Just like the star shaft in P4. Sunlight? Where did that come from?
Conrad managed to put on his sunglasses and gaze out the shafts. They were windows and framed a lightening sky. He had opened the doors of the silo.
Another shudder, and suddenly all became clear.
This obelisk isn’t a shrine, he thought. It’s a ship. A starship.
“Dad!”
Conrad tried to pull himself out of the seat. It wouldn’t give. He tried twisting to the right. No. To the left. Yes. Now he hurled himself forward with everything he had and came out with a spark like an electrical cord from a socket. The console went dead and disappeared into the chair, the vibrations stopped, and the chair snapped forward and released its grip on him. Conrad, breathing heavily, collected himself.
For several moments he sat there on the floor, numb. But his mind was racing. He had no references for this experience in his past. Or did he? Ancient Egyptian funeral texts referre
d to a number of cosmic vessels intended to take the dead on celestial voyages to heaven. There was the “bark of Osiris,” for example, and the “boat of millions of years.” Egyptologists dubbed them “solar boats.” There was also Kamal el-Mallakh’s 1954 discovery of a 143-foot cedarwood boat buried in a pit on the south side of the Great Pyramid. Subsequent digging turned up similar boats in the same area—symbolic of the solar boats in which the souls of deceased kings could sail into the afterlife.
This silo, he realized, was on the south face of P4.
He remembered the markings of the three zodiac signs on the obelisk. He recalled the pyramid texts in Giza said the Sun King would ride his “Solar Bark” across the Milky Way toward First Time. To astro-archaeologists such as Conrad, the “solar bark” was a metaphor for the sun, specifically its ecliptic path through the twelve constellations of the zodiac in the course of a year. But what if it was more than a metaphor?
This is the actual Solar Bark, Conrad thought, the celestial ship built to take the would-be Sun King across the stars to First Time. He felt a shock wave of euphoria exploding within him.
But then the stark reality of his discovery suddenly sapped his hope: the Secret of First Time lay waiting at the end of the Solar Bark’s intended destination. Yet the earth-crust displacement was only hours if not minutes away. There was no way to reset the star chamber in P4 to the date of First Time without completing the journey. The best he could do was guess the date of First Time based on the estimated light-years it would take to get to the Solar Bark’s destination. And that information was beyond his grasp.
His radio headset squawked. Conrad said, “Yeats. Where the hell have you been?”
The voice that came over was Serena’s. “Conrad.”
“Serena?” he said. “Where are you?”
“Look out your cockpit window.”
Conrad looked up and saw the silhouettes of Egyptian soldiers circled along the rim of the silo, guns and SAMs pointed in his direction. But what caught his eye was the outstretched arm of Zawas holding a gun to Serena’s head.
Serena said, “Colonel Zawas wants you to know that unless you meet us at the base of the shrine in ten minutes and hand over the scepter, he’s going to kill me. I told him you wouldn’t do it. I’m not worth it and you’re not that stupid.”
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