"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.
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."