2041 Sanctuary (Let There Be Light)

by Robert Storey

  She sat up. ‘Angry? No. Furious? Yes. But I’m also worried out of my mind. In almost a matter of days you’ve lost touch with reality, chasing after shadows and ignoring your responsibilities.’

  ‘So you don’t want to encourage me, is that it?’

  ‘That’s not what I said. Are you even listening to what I’m saying?’

  ‘For God’s sake, Kara, JUST TELL ME!’

  She blinked at his ferocity, her eyes brimming in distress and turned away to hide under the covers once more.

  He looked heavenward, cursing himself. She’ll never tell me now.

  Deep within he wanted to snap out of his malady, to be who he was, to be the man she wanted, not the morose, ill-tempered monster he felt himself becoming. He lay down beside her, his thoughts in turmoil. Mistakes past and present ran through his mind, tormenting him. Everything seemed too much. Everything was too much. Whatever he did turned to pain and darkness. People are dying and I don’t even care. The thought horrified him and it was all he could think about until morning.

  Chapter Forty One

  An alarm woke Goodwin from his shallow slumber, his cumulative hours of sleep numbering just one. Kara was already up and dressed.

  She switched off the buzzer and gazed down at his bleary eyes before moving to the tent’s exit.

  ‘Kara—’

  ‘It’s a constellation.’

  He propped himself up on an elbow. ‘What?’

  ‘The symbols on your Anakim carvings, they match the constellation of Libra.’

  He leant over and peered at one of the photos he’d left on the floor. ‘Are you sure?’

  ‘Pretty sure, and the map spiral, it looks—’

  He blinked back his tiredness, trying to concentrate. ‘Looks like what?’

  ‘The Milky Way, the spiral arms match our galaxy.’

  Stunned, Goodwin could see she still held more information back. ‘There’s something else, isn’t there?’

  Her expression turned pensive. ‘If the carvings are truly ancient, then the stars would have altered positions. The constellation should look … different.’

  ‘How different?’

  ‘I don’t know. I’m not an astrophysicist and I have work to do, look it up.’

  The tent flap rustled and she was gone.

  He rolled out of bed, his fatigue forgotten and neurons firing.

  Fifteen minutes later Goodwin entered the civilian computer centre on the other side of the camp.

  A man with long hair and a beard shuffled around a desk towards him. ‘Director, we don’t normally see you in these parts.’

  ‘I need to use your netcube.’

  ‘Haven’t your Darklight chaps got one?’

  ‘They have, but it’s integrated into their control setup and I need it mobile.’

  The man grimaced and picked up a large square device by its carry handle. ‘People won’t be happy if you take away their only source of reference.’

  ‘I’ll get it back to you as soon as I can,’ Goodwin said, accepting the heavy computer, ‘I promise.’

  ‘I’ll hold you to that, Director!’ the man called after him as he left to return to his tent.

  By the time Goodwin reached his spartan dwelling, he’d had to swap the device from one hand to the other numerous times and his shoulders and arms ached with pain. He set the box down with relief and connected it to a power supply from the small water-powered generator Darklight had set up nearby. He then unfolded his mobile computer’s large screen and synced the netcube to it.

  A wonder of the modern age, even ten years ago the capacity of storage drives would have been nowhere capable of holding the vast amount of data of a modern day netcube. But when humanity had neared the fourth decade of the twenty-first century, the power of fluid drives had taken a leap forward and the possibility of storing – not the entire World Wide Web, but the majority of its mainstream data – had become a reality. Of course, the company that provided the webinabox, as they’d become known, could be told what sites and files to omit so valuable space for knowledge wasn’t taken up by videos of amusing kittens or unforeseen accidents starring the unfortunate.

  A search box popped up on-screen and Goodwin entered the term Libra Constellation. A myriad of entries spooled up, and he clicked on the first. The image shown was indeed similar to the stone carvings he’d found dotted around the city, except the carvings had one line omitted from the image. Unable to think of any reason why the Anakim had failed to link all the points, he switched his attention to the image of the galaxy. According to the sites he read, it seemed the actual number of major and minor arms in the Milky Way’s spiral – and their positions – had been hotly contested by the scientific community for decades. That was until more advanced deep space telescopes, probably designed with tracking the approaching asteroids in mind, had cleared up the ambiguities; which meant the Anakim had possessed technology sophisticated enough to realise complex cosmological structures.

  Kara was correct in her assumptions, however. It seemed – given a long enough period in time, say fifty thousand years – the constellations in the night sky would alter, which meant something was amiss if the symbols matched the current position of stars for the Libra collective. Unless, he reasoned, the symbols were carved much later. Although according to Corporal Walker, Sanctuary has been abandoned too long for that to be an option. So what does it mean? It means, he realised, that the Anakim designed the symbols to coincide with the position of the stars as they are today, or at least during the current duration of human civilisation.

  Rebecca’s biblical prophecy, Jude 1:6, once more came to the forefront of his mind … kept in eternal chains under gloomy darkness until the judgment of the great day. His eyes strayed to the photo of the unearthed frieze and the demonic nature of its sculpture. He shuddered and thought of the creature that roamed the darkness. It could easily be classed as some kind of ethereal being, but a fallen angel?

  He typed in the word Nephilim and read on. It seemed the term could mean a number of things, depending on what source of reference you listened to. The Bible indicated they were the offspring of the sons of God and female humans, as per Rebecca’s quotation from Genesis 6:4, although, according to other sources, specifically another passage from the Bible, Numbers 13:30-33, the Nephilim were giants who lived in a place called Canaan.

  But Caleb quieted the people before Moses and said, ‘Let us go up at once and occupy it, for we are well able to overcome it.’ Then the men who had gone up with him said, ‘We are not able to go up against the people, for they are stronger than we are.’ So they brought to the people of Israel a bad report of the land that they had spied out, saying, ‘The land, through which we have gone to spy it out, is a land that devours its inhabitants, and all the people that we saw in it are of great height. And there we saw the Nephilim (the sons of Anak, who come from the Nephilim), and we seemed to ourselves like grasshoppers, and so we seemed to them.’

  So, the Nephilim were not as he’d initially thought, fallen angels, but their half-human offspring, half human, half demon. More investigation revealed they could also be the children of Seth, the brother to Cain and Abel and the third son of Adam and Eve. Goodwin sipped some water, his lack of sleep catching up with him. This was confusing stuff in itself, but to then try and link that with far older Anakim sculptures made for a powerful headache. He needed some help. Collecting his photos, he stowed his personal computer, picked up the netcube and left his tent.

  A few minutes later he’d worked his way across the floor of the dark chamber and followed the camp’s sparse lighting rigs to Rebecca’s sprawling tent.

  He ducked his head inside to see all was quiet. Rebecca and the two other mental health carers, Julie and Arianna, sat on the ground in muted conversation, while their brood, including Joseph, slept in a mass huddle near the back of the tent. A pang of guilt for bringing these people here lanced through him. He’d saved them from the rioting after the asteroid
had hit, the streets of Albuquerque having turned to chaos, but he’d brought them here, to a pit of despair as barren as his own mind.

  Julie saw him and nudged Rebecca, who turned round to wave him over.

  ‘Richard, what brings you here?’

  He sat down opposite her while Julie and Arianna went to make themselves busy elsewhere.

  Rebecca caught his look. ‘It’s nothing personal; they needed to get the noon meal ready anyway.’

  ‘I need your help,’ – he held up the netcube – ‘I’ve had a breakthrough.’

  ♦

  ‘So, let me get this straight,’ Rebecca said, ‘the symbols are the Libra constellation, the spiral is the galaxy, and the frieze has a pentagram, which we also think mirrors, tenuously, passages from the Bible.’

  ‘Correct.’

  ‘And Kara says the constellation should be different if it’s as old as we think it is?

  ‘Yes.’

  She looked thoughtful. ‘Then we should go through it methodically; perhaps we need to find more links between the Anakim and the Nephilim.’

  Goodwin gave a nod, he was glad she could be rational, just having someone lay it out in simple terms was enough to get him back on track. He typed in the two words and looked at the results thrown up by the netcube.

  Rebecca touched a link and it popped up on-screen. ‘Deuteronomy 2:10,’ she said. ‘The Emim formerly lived there, a people great and many, and tall as the Anakim.’ She scrolled down the page and then went back to the first set of results.

  Time passed as she continued to sift through page after page of text. She went back over the same scripture, flicked through the same photos, and then went back to the beginning and started all over again. She asked him variations on questions he’d already answered and when she put to him another such ambiguity Goodwin slapped his knee in frustration. ‘This is getting us nowhere!’

  Rebecca glanced round to see her patients still slept.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said, dejected.

  She patted his leg and looked at the notes she’d been taking. ‘Don’t worry about it. And I disagree. It seems to me the Nephilim were one of four things: the children of fallen angels and human women, fallen angels who possessed men, the descendents of Adam who followed false gods, or ordinary men who rejected God and chose to be wicked. And what’s more the Bible and other ancient texts tell us giants were commonplace all over the world in the days before the great flood, although according to other scholars the term Nephilim literally means giants, a derivative of the Hebrew word naphil. And some say the giants referenced were just tall peoples from Africa or other distant states.’

  Goodwin rubbed his temples. ‘Didn’t mankind start in Africa?’

  Rebecca shrugged before looking it up. ‘Yes, South Africa. Bones of our distant ancestors were dug up in a place called the Cradle of Humanity.’

  ‘Then it stands to reason the Anakim could have evolved from there, too.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  Goodwin stared at the screen, wishing for something to jump out at him and make sense. Nothing did.

  Rebecca yawned. ‘Perhaps the flood drove the Anakim underground.’

  ‘What did you just say?’

  ‘The flood, perhaps the water drove them down here.’

  ‘Maybe. But—’ he gave a groan.

  ‘What’s wrong?’

  ‘All this, we’re beneath Mexico, none of this can be related. The Anakim from the Bible would have lived thousands of miles away.’

  ‘So?’

  He shoved the screen away. ‘So this is all pointless.’

  ‘How do you know there’s not another Sanctuary over there?’

  He blinked and then shook his head. ‘Corporal Walker said this is the only one.’

  ‘As far they know. Maybe they just haven’t found it yet.’

  The idea made him feel dizzy and he bent his head.

  ‘Are you okay?’

  ‘Yes, I’m—’ A figure on the frieze stared back him, its photo on top of the pile. He picked it up and then sorted through the rest with increasing speed. Behind all the figures, as clear as day, the forms of giant waves reared up to create the background. How could he have missed it? Then something else caught his eye. Two of the photos containing the Libra carvings had fallen one across the other. He picked them up. Each photo had been taken at a different location in the city and consisted of various carved lines and the constellation itself, and they matched up, the designs flowing seamlessly from one to the other. He spread the remaining photographs out on the floor and moved those of the frieze to one side.

  ‘What is it, Richard? Have you found something?’

  Goodwin didn’t reply. He scanned through the designs as he sought to match them together. One looked like it would connect to the first two. He folded it in half and the designs merged.

  Rebecca moved away and returned with some scissors and Goodwin cut up the first three photos, which enabled him to lay them down flat next to each other on the ground. In silence, they continued to find more photos which flowed on from the first three until the pattern ceased, with two thirds of the photos left over. An hour passed and they found that some of the remaining images also matched up to one another – two here, and three there – but none to the ten images they’d already aligned into a single whole.

  Sitting back, they assessed their handiwork.

  Rebecca prodded at a couple of the photos to move them closer together. ‘It doesn’t look like much.’

  Goodwin wasn’t so sure. He moved some of the smaller sections around the larger group, which he left in the centre. ‘I think the constellation is the key. Look,’ – he pointed to the corner of each image – ‘each depiction of Libra coincides with the corresponding piece next to it, creating a spiral pattern of the same symbol.’

  ‘Like the galaxy map?’

  ‘Exactly! And each representation of the constellation is just how it looks at different places in the night sky when viewed from Earth, at various locations and times of the year.’

  ‘Then it might be telling us how to get to the surface,’ she said.

  Goodwin’s eyes grew bright, but something else nagged at him. I’m missing something. He picked up his handheld computer and turned the large screen transparent, then held it over their newly created mosaic and took a photo. Not sure what to do next, he used the touchscreen to remove parts of the image he didn’t want, including all of the inscriptions and elaborate pictograms.

  He showed the image to Rebecca. ‘What does that look like to you?’

  ‘A bunch of squiggles?’

  ‘Look again.’

  She did so, but her expression remained confounded.

  ‘It’s the lake,’ he said, ‘the shoreline!’

  ‘Are you sure?’

  Goodwin was positive. He’d been in Hilt’s command post for months on end, watching as the Darklight reconnaissance teams pieced together a map of their surroundings, metre by metre and mile by mile. Even though it was incomplete and only showing the southern portion, there was no doubt in his mind it was the outline of the ancient aquifer that sustained them with both food and water. Knowing things always came in threes, he believed this revelation indicated a third resource lurked in its inky depths – a way out of Sanctuary itself!

  Chapter Forty Two

  Despite Goodwin’s excitement at cracking the code of the carvings and the possibility of a route to the surface, Rebecca had soon pointed out that they were unable to enter the lake to find out what lay within. Not only were there fierce, sharp-toothed creatures swimming in its near bottomless expanse, the twenty-seven square miles of surface might as well have been on the moon as they had no equipment with which to dive. And not only that, where in such a large body of water were they supposed to look? It could take years, decades, to locate something they knew not what.

  Now back in his own tent, Goodwin pondered on the tantalising nature of his discovery and ground his teeth in frustrated distract
ion. Getting to the surface of course would be second to finding the USSB. But even though the next wave of asteroids would soon be arriving, they would have time a plenty to relocate to another base – if, that was, Goodwin could contact the GMRC Directorate without Malcolm Joiner finding out about it first. No small feat, but one he felt he might be able to pull off, given the chance. He still had contacts he could call upon if needed, notably the Director of USSB Pelagic down in South America. If he’d have known the consequences of trying to enter Sanctuary at the time, he’d have continued their journey south.

  Full of expectation, later that evening Goodwin decided to raise his findings with Kara, who sat on the bed in subdued silence while reading a report on projected food stocks for the camp.

  Kara held his photographic collage and listened as Goodwin gave her his theory about a way to the surface.

  ‘And Rebecca’s been helping you with this?’

  ‘Yes.’ He pointed at the line that represented the lake’s edge. ‘Do you see it?’

  ‘And what else has she helped you discover?’

  Goodwin failed to notice the edge to his partner’s voice as he regaled her with their observations about the frieze and its connection to the Anakim, the Bible and even the Great Flood.

  Kara massaged her eyes. ‘Richard, can you hear yourself?’

  He didn’t understand what she meant and his wrist had started itching again. He scratched at it. ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘You’re quoting passages from the Bible, for God’s sake! The Nephilim, the apocalypse, the flood, this is all fantasy, don’t you see? Rebecca is a sweet woman, but she believes everything the book says is real, she’s detached from reality and she’s dragging you down with her. You’re vulnerable, willing to accept fiction as fact and fact as inconsequential.’

  ‘But the map of the lake, look!’ He pointed at it again and then showed her the photo of the frieze. ‘Can you see the waves in the background? It’s a foretelling of the great flood. I looked it up; every nation in the world has the same stories, passed down from generation to generation. It can’t be a coincidence.’