Figure 1
Juanita put in, “The Egyptians were lavish at decorating everything they did—with hieroglyphics, figures, inscriptions, ornamentation. But these structures are bare and built with precision. They suggest more, instruments or machines of some kind rather than monuments. It’s incredibly difficult to get the face angles of a construction that big and massive sufficiently accurate for the apex to be over the center. But they did it exactly. The corners are square to within a few arc minutes. I could go on.”
Kieran stared up at Trevany’s drawing and reflected on what he had heard. “But you did say there’s a piece of evidence that the orthodox case rests on,” he said.
Trevany smiled thinly. “If you can call it that. In—” He looked at Juanita. “When did Davison find the first relieving chamber?”
“1765,” she supplied.
Trevany turned back toward Kieran. “An Englishman. He found a chamber above the King’s—apparently there to relieve and redirect stress from the overbearing structure. Again it was empty and bare.”
“Advanced engineering,” Juanita commented.
Trevany went on, “About seventy years later, another Englishman, Colonel Vyse, was ending a costly and fruitless archeological season, and getting a lot of flak from back home. He needed a major find to justify it all. And guess what.”
Kieran smiled. “Don’t tell me. Just too convenient?”
“You be the judge. He cut his way into four more relieving chambers above the one that Davison had found. . . . And there, and nowhere else in the entire Great Pyramid, were hieroglyphics claimed to be `quarry marks,’ indicating Khufu to have been the builder. It was greeted as one of the greatest finds for years—exactly what the experts had been waiting for.” Trevany gave Kieran a moment to think about it. “As you say, just too convenient, eh?”
Kieran was astounded. “And that’s it? It became an article of faith? Nobody’s questioned it since?”
“Not in the official halls of academia . . . And never mind when it was later shown that several of the hieroglyphics had been painted upside down, and others used ungrammatically. It didn’t matter. The theory had been proved.”
“So you’re saying they go back much further, to the Technolithic culture,” Kieran concluded.
“Yes—way, way back.”
“And in America,” Juanita said. “Peoples like the Inca and the Maya, they didn’t build the huge megaliths there. They told the Spaniards that they found them, sometimes buried in jungle. They’re all from the same lost race.”
Kieran wondered if they were getting back to the thread they had started with. “So what does that have to do with your being here on Mars?” he asked them. “What have they found out at Tharsis? Are you saying there are signs of the same race here too?”
“We’re not sure,” Trevany said. “Whatever it is, Hamil out at Troy is excited.” Hamil Hashikar was the archeologist in charge of the expedition. “But let’s not make the same mistake of jumping to what fits our expectations, and wait and see.” His eyes were gleaming, all the same. Kieran had the feeling Trevany knew more than he was letting on. But he would just have to be patient, he supposed.
Just then, his phone beeped. He took it out and answered. The caller was Mahom Alazahad. “I’ll be a minute,” Kieran told the other two.
Juanita moved forward to show Trevany the list she was holding. “Some of the attachments are missing from the kit for the small drill. I think we should turn them in and get another set. I’ll do it this afternoon. . . .”
“What is it, Mahom?” Kieran asked into the phone.
“I just wanted to let you know. Three guys were here asking about you. Showed up in a big Metrosine—suits and rings, cool daddy-os, heavy with the juice. They knew about your dog, described you as a lawyer type. Sounded to me like it could have been from when we snatched that guy at the Wuhan terminal. Just so’s you know, Knight. You take it easy wherever you’re at. And watch out. Okay?”
5
Fractal patterns. Structures similar to themselves over a wide range of scales, making it impossible to tell if a coastline is that of a driveway puddle or a continent; a forking discharge that of a laboratory spark or a lightning bolt.