S
TANDING IN P
4
’S STAR CHAMBER,
tears flowing down her cheeks, Serena watched the geodesic ceiling spin. The noise of the grinding, whirling dome was deafening, and she couldn’t hear what Conrad was saying. He was standing by the altar, motioning her to come over.
“Put the scepter in the stand,” he shouted.
She looked at the Scepter of Osiris in her hands and once again read the inscription to herself:
Only he who stands before the Shining Ones in the time and place of the most worthy can remove the Scepter of Osiris without tearing Heaven and Earth apart.
Was there ever such a “most worthy” moment in human history? Or was the Hebrew prophet Isaiah right when he said human acts of righteousness were like “filthy rags” before the holiness of God?
“Yeats was right, Conrad,” she said as she felt her heart sinking. “The Atlanteans were too advanced for our level of thinking. We can’t win.”
“I thought we agreed that the gods of Egypt were defeated once before,” Conrad said. He started talking faster, his voice rising. “Well, just when was that?”
Serena paused. “During the Exodus, when Moses led the Israelites out of Egypt.”
“Exactly,” Conrad said. “It was one of those cosmic events that changes cultural history, like a colliding meteorite changes natural history. If no Exodus, then no epiphany at Sinai. And
if no Sinai, then no Moses, Jesus Christ, or Mohammed. Osiris and Isis would reign supreme, pyramids would dot Manhattan’s skyline, and we’d be drinking fermented barley water instead of cafe lattes.”
Serena felt her blood pumping. Conrad was onto something.
“The question is,” Conrad continued, eyes gleaming as if on the verge of a great discovery, “what was the straw that broke Pharaoh’s back and led him to release the Israelites?”
“Passover,” Serena said. “When the God of the Israelites struck down the firstborn of every Egyptian but ‘passed over’ the houses of those Israelite slaves who coated their doorposts with the blood of a lamb.”
“OK,” said Conrad. “Now if only there was a way to be more inclusive and extend the Passover to all races.”
But there was, she suddenly realized, and blurted out, “The Lamb of God!”
“Jesus Christ, you’re right!”
Conrad’s hands flew as he began to reset the stars on the dome of the chamber to re-create the skies over Jerusalem.
Suddenly the entire chamber seemed to turn upside down. But it was an optical illusion, she realized, as the heavens of the Northern Hemisphere suddenly flipped places with the Southern Hemisphere.
“OK, we’ve got a place on earth,” Conrad said. “We need a year.”
That was harder, Serena thought. “Tradition says Jesus died when he was about thirty-three, which would place the crucifixion between
A.D.
30 and 33.”
“You’ve got to do better than that.” Conrad looked impatient. “Give me a year.”
Serena fought the panic inside. The Christian calendar was based on faulty calculations made by a sixth-century monk—Dionysius Exiguus. Latin for “Dennis the Short.” Appropriate, considering that Dionysius’s estimates for the date of Christ’s birth fell short by several years. Church scholars now placed the Nativity no later than the year King Herod died—4
B.C.
“
A.D.
29,” she finally said. “Try
A.D.
29.”
Conrad adjusted the scepter in its altar, and the dome overhead
spun around. The rumble was deafening. “I need a date,” he shouted. “And I need it now.”
Serena nodded. The Catholic Church celebrated Easter at a different time each spring. But the Eastern Orthodox Church kept the historical date with astronomical precision. The Council of Nicaea in
A.D.
325 decreed Easter must be celebrated on the Sunday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox, but always after the Jewish Passover, in order to maintain the biblical sequence of events of the Crucifixion and Resurrection.
She shouted, “Friday after the first full moon of the vernal equinox.”
“Friday?” There was doubt in his eyes. “Not Sunday?”
“Friday.” She was firm. “The resurrection was a demonstration of victory over death. But the most noble time had to be when Jesus was dying on the cross for the sins of humanity and forgave his enemies.”
“OK,” he said. “I need the hour.”
“Scripture says it was the ninth hour,” she said.
He looked at her funny. “Huh?”
“Three o’clock.”
Conrad nodded, made the final setting and stepped back. “Say a prayer, Sister Serghetti.”
The geodesic dome spun round and locked into place, re-creating the skies over Jerusalem circa
A.D.
29 at the ninth hour of daylight on the fifth day after the first full moon of the vernal equinox.
“But now a righteousness from heaven, apart from the law, is revealed,” she prayed under her breath, repeating the words of St. Paul to the Romans.
A sharp jolt rocked the chamber and she jumped back as the floor split open and the altar containing the scepter dropped down a shaft and disappeared. Before she could peer over the ledge, the shaft closed up into a cartouche bearing the symbol of Osiris. And she could hear something like the peal of thunder rumble below.
Suddenly it was eerily quiet. Serena could hear someone sobbing. It sounded like a young girl. She felt a tear roll down her cheek and realized it was her. For some reason she felt clean inside, as if all her worries and fears and guilt had been washed away.
“You did it,” she said, embracing Conrad. “Thank God.”
“How about when we get out of here?” he said when a deep, disturbing rumble echoed all around, inside and out.
Serena grew very still. “What’s happening, Conrad?”
“I think we’re about to be buried under two miles of ice.”
Z
AWAS AND HIS MEN
were watching the Solar Bark disappear into the sky from their camp on the promontory of the Temple of the Water Bearer when the first big shock wave hit. Tents began to collapse, and Zawas panicked as he watched his only working Z-9A jet helicopter skid across the helipad to the ledge.
“Secure the chopper!” he shouted, and five Egyptians raced to tie it down.
No matter what may befall the rest of the world, Zawas told himself, no matter how many coastline cities should be swallowed up by the sea, there was no safer place on earth than where his team was established at that very moment. For should it take a day or a week, once the earth-crust displacement had run its violent course, the ground on which they were standing would be the center of the new world.
This is what he kept telling himself as his thoughts drifted to his extended family back in Cairo, most living in substandard “luxury” high-rise apartments that were bound to crumble in any major quake.
The air suddenly felt very warm, and the shocks grew more violent.
They were becoming so jarring, in fact, that he began to reconsider his strategy of encamping inside the Temple of the Water Bearer and wondered if an open area away from any monuments or shrines would be more prudent.
Zawas stepped inside his chamber off the promontory, found the Sonchis map on his desk, and rolled it up inside the nun’s green thermos along with the American blueprints to the Solar Bark.
Another shock nearly threw Zawas from his chair. He gripped his desk to steady himself. But it too began to move. He screwed the outer shell of the thermos into place and threw it in his pack before the shouts of his men brought him outside. What he saw made him shrink back in terror.
The sky seemed to be falling.
Zawas grabbed a pair of binoculars and scanned the mountains of ice that formed a ring around the city. And then it hit him: the sky wasn’t falling. Rather, it was the cliffs of ice surrounding the city that were falling.
An avalanche of ice from all sides was about to bury them all.
“Into the chopper!” Zawas shouted, waving his men in as he climbed inside the Z-9A and started the motor in a frantic bid to get airborne before impact. The blades started to move but then sputtered. The chopper was designed by the French but built under special license by the Chinese, who had supplied the Egyptians with several models. “Damn those infidels in Beijing!”
He tried to get the blades moving again while a dozen Egyptians piled inside. As the pilot took the controls, Zawas adjusted his binoculars to make a quick estimate of how much time they had until impact.
A wall of ice jumped into focus, and it was on course to slam the chopper and crumple them all into a bloody pulp of twisted metal and flesh. Zawas felt his heart stop beating as the foaming avalanche swept under the temple and began to rise toward the promontory. Then he could feel the chopper being lifted up toward the sky.
Inside P4’s star chamber, Serena felt hot as she climbed up the southern shaft using the line Conrad had taken with him when he first surveyed the city. But when she looked back, Conrad was still in the chamber below, trying to pull himself up with one hand, the other dangling uselessly to the side in the bloody tourniquet. She could see water bubbling around his ankles and began to panic.
“Conrad!” she shouted.
She braced her boots against the sides of the shaft and stretched out her hand to grasp his right arm. She pulled with a grunt but felt his hand slip away and heard a splash.
“Use this,” he shouted, waving what looked like a long scarlet bandanna. It was his tourniquet. He had untied it.
She wrapped one corner around her wrist and lowered her arm so Conrad could wrap the other around his wrist. She pulled so hard she could feel her back spasm in pain, and she cried out as she pulled harder until he finally climbed up in the shaft.
“Thanks,” he said, breathing hard. “Now let’s go.”
Serena looked up the shaft at the square of blue sky. “Why bother?” she said, out of breath. “There’s nothing out there. No radio, no way to signal anybody.”
“It’s our only shot,” he said. “The subterranean geothermal vent is powering down. The last blast of heat it’s giving off is probably melting everything around us, pumping the water through its hydraulic system. But the water is about to turn to ice. Everything’s going to freeze.”
Serena understood. “The girl in the ice. That’s going to be us.”
“Not if I can help it. Take this.” He gave her the bloody tourniquet strip. “Use it like a flag. Now move! I’ll be right behind you.”
Reluctantly, she took the bloody rag and made her way up the shaft, aware of Conrad falling behind. Occasionally she’d call back and hear him reply, but each time the echo grew fainter.
Finally, she reached the square of the shaft, her fingers turning cold as they clawed the edge. The wind was howling, and the temperature was dropping just as suddenly as it had risen. She pulled herself up to look out and beheld a fantastic sight that took her breath away.
The entire bowl of ice surrounding the city was crumbling, the melting snow turning into a huge lake that was drowning the city a mile below. Already only the tops of the taller temples and obelisks were visible. And the waterline was rising against the pyramid below. It would be only minutes before it reached her.
“No, God, please,” she said and looked back to Conrad.
But he was gone.
Filled with panic, she screamed, “Conrad!”
There was no answer.
She peered down the darkened shaft and saw something flicker. It was water, rising her way. And there was no sign of Conrad.
Conrad, unable to hold on any longer, slipped down the shaft into P4’s star chamber, which was filled to the ceiling with water. Desperate for air, he clawed at the stone ceiling in the dark to find a shaft opening again. But all he felt was the water closing in on him.
Then a powerful suction from below grabbed his legs and pulled him down the pyramid’s Great Gallery into some sort of pipe. Unable to hold his breath any longer, he let go and felt the water fill his lungs.
He was sinking into blackness when his body slammed against a stone grating. The water suddenly washed over him and receded down the drain.
Soaked and gasping for breath, he put his hands on the grating and pushed himself up. Then he ran wildly down the tunnel, trying to get his bearings, knowing he was totally lost. He was confused and more than a little worried about Serena. His body ached all over as he slogged through the water, which was ankle deep and getting deeper. Then he heard a rumble from behind.
He didn’t need to turn around to know what was coming. He simply braced his body and took a deep breath. A wall of water slammed into him and swept him down a smaller tunnel. He gulped in some water as he was sucked in, tumbling over and over beneath the current.
Conrad held on as long as he could but felt his consciousness slowly slipping away. Unable to cling to anything, he let go. A blackness overwhelmed him and he felt himself whooshing through a tunnel.
Suddenly he was pushed into daylight and thrown almost fifty feet into the air by a geyser of water blasting out of the drain. He landed with a heavy thud on the trembling ground, the wind and water knocked out of him.
Unable to move for a few minutes, he was shaken by the earth tremors and deafening rumble of the ice mountains tumbling down into the city valley.
A trickle of water ran past his ear, and he realized there was no
place to hide: above or below ground, anything under an altitude of two miles from the subglacial surface was about to be deluged and frozen. With dread he recalled the people in the ice he had seen during the descent to P4 and decided he did not want to be one of them.
Somehow he managed to get on all fours and crawl through the rising water. Within a few paces he could feel the temperature dropping as the winds whipped. He shivered in the cold, damp air.
He slowed down for a second when he saw a body floating his way, bloated and blue. As it passed by, Conrad recognized the face of Colonel O’Dell from Ice Base Orion. The expression of horror on the corpse’s face motivated Conrad to pick up his pace.
The water was up to his knees now, and the bowl of mountains around the city was beginning to collapse like a tin can under the tremendous pressure. His shoulder hurt more than ever, the stabs of pain unbearable. He applied more pressure with his other hand as he rose to his feet and staggered. Then he saw a flash of color through the water.
It was a smashed red Hagglunds, a relic from Ice Base Orion. It was useless for travel, but the forward cab might provide a cocoon of shelter and life support.
Suddenly the ground pitched violently and Conrad was thrown facedown. He looked up to see a fifty-foot wall of water and ice thundering down on him. His jaw dropped in surrender at the spectacle. There was simply no place to hide from such a force of nature, and he knew then it was time for him to die. But he thought of Serena and with one last push reached up to the door of the Hagglunds and twisted the black handle until the hatch opened.
Then the water came. First a few droplets on his head. Then a spray.
He hoisted himself inside and barely managed to snap the seat belt in place and shut the door before the wall slammed into the Hagglunds and it was lost in a cauldron of churning water and ice.