Cutchen nodded. “I’ll buy that. Makes sense. And maybe as they unthaw, those minds become stronger. Maybe that’s what got to Meiner and St. Ours.”
“They may have been more sensitive to it than others. Same way I think Hayes is. Gates had another theory on that. He thought that maybe those dead minds were being energized not only by us, but amplified by that huge and overpowering central consciousness down in the lake. That the living ones might be acting as sort of a generator.”
“He’s guessing, though.”
“Of course he’s guessing. There’s no way to know.” Sharkey scrolled through a few pages on the screen. “Did Hayes tell you about his experiences? Out in the hut and on the tractor?”
“Yeah. Those minds almost did to him what they did to Meiner and St. Ours,” Cutchen said.
“Did he tell you about his telepathic link with Lind after the events in the hut?” She could see that he hadn’t, so she filled him in on it. “Lind was seeing things millions of years old. A city here at the Pole before the glaciers swallowed the continent. And just before he died, well . . . “
“Possessed.” Cutchen said the word so she didn’t have to. “That’s what everyone’s saying. That Lind was possessed by those things.”
“Yes, at least what we could call diabolical possession. He manifested all the signs you hear about in those cases . . . telepathy and telekinesis, that sort of thing. He described to us the original colonization of this world and we were able to smell and feel what he was smelling and feeling. The thick poisonous atmosphere of another world, the heat there, then the freezing cold of deep space.”
“Did Gates confirm that they are alien? I mean we’ve all been tossing the word around, but — “
“Yes, he was certain. You see, he unlocked the code of their writings, their glyphs and bas-reliefs. That ancient city he found, it was scrawled with writings which were essentially a written history of who the Old Ones were, where they came from, what they planned to do . . . and had done.”
“He unlocked all that? In just a month or so?”
Sharkey nodded. “Yes, because he found something akin to the Rosetta Stone, except this one was a key to their language and symbols. He called it the Dyer Stone after Professor Dyer of the Pabodie Expedition. A soapstone about the size of a tabletop . . . with it, he was able to translate those writings.”
“And . . . and what did he find out?”
“There are carvings in those ruins, Cutchy. Ancient maps of our solar system and other systems as well. Dozens and dozens of them. Firm evidence, Gates said, of interplanetary and interstellar travel and this probably before our planet was even cool. Dyer mentioned certain ancient books and legends that hinted at Pluto as the Old Ones’ first outpost in this star system, but according to the maps Gates found, they came here from either Uranus or Neptune . . . but before that, who can say?”
“Uranus? Neptune?” Cutchen shook his head. “Those are dead worlds, Elaine.”
“Sure, now they are . . . but what about 500 million years ago? A billion? Maybe that’s why they came here, because they knew their world . . . Uranus or Neptune . . . was doomed. And maybe they just came seeking our warm oceans. Gates thinks that they are originally marine organisms, but given their durability, they can adapt themselves to just about any environment. Gates thinks that myths and legends concerning winged demons and flying monsters might be race memories of them, impressions from the dawn of our race that survived in the form of folktale and legend. Regardless, they’ve been here since the beginning. Our beginning and the beginning of all life on this world.”
“I was hoping you weren’t going to go there,” Cutchen said.
“I have to. Because that’s what this is all about: life. The creation of it, the continuation of it, the modification of it. When Lind was . . . well, possessed, he started ranting on about the helix. There was no doubt he was talking about DNA . . . the plan of all life on this planet. He was uplinked with those dead minds and telling us about the helix, that they were the farmers of the helix. That they created the helix and seeded it, world to world to world.”
“That’s kind of what Hayes was saying,” Cutchen said, looking beaten and cramped from the weight of it all. “That they started life here, they started it and they would harvest it.”
“Yes. It almost sounded like to the Old Ones, the helix was God. Which, I suppose, fits in with what certain evolutionary biologists have been saying. That life, all life, is merely a host, a vessel to ensure the propagation and continuation of the genetic material.”
“That’s pleasant.”
Sharkey nodded. “Remember what Gates told us that day? Lake, the biologist in the Pabodie Expedition, had found fossilized prints in Precambrian rock that had to be at least a billion years old. The prints of the Old Ones. Probably from one of the earliest of their earth colonies. Some time later, Gates wrote, there would have been a mass migration that went on for millions of years. Their original outposts were doomed and unsuitable, so they came here. They came to earth en masse to colonize and found our planet to be dead, so they engineered a highly ambitious blueprint to bring forth not only life on this world, but intelligent life.”
“But that’s insane,” Cutchen said. “I’m sorry, but it is. That the human race is the end result of something they started into motion a billion years ago. That’s crazy.”
“Is it? Think about it. These things have been seeding life on dozens and dozens of planets probably since before our sun was born. And they’ve been doing it with a very specific agenda: to bring forth intelligence. Intelligent minds that they could master, that they could modify and subvert. And since none existed here, they created them. God knows how many colonies they’ve created. Maybe hundreds if not thousands spread across space, outposts on countless alien worlds. Out in our own solar system there are probably ruins of ancient cities much like the ones Gates found. And probably on the planets orbiting a hundred stars, if not a thousand.” She stopped, maybe to catch her own mental breath or to let Cutchen catch his. “It’s fantastic, heady stuff, I know. That city Gates found . . . it was probably on a plain or in a valley originally that became a mountain millions upon millions of years later. Gates said that, according to ancient legend, there were other cities . . . in Asia, the Australian desert, a certain sunken continent in the Pacific. Maybe our tales of Atlantis, Lemuria, and Mu are, again, just ancestral memories of these places . . . “
Cutchen was looking for a hole in her logic . . . or Gates’ . . . and Sharkey knew it. He was looking at it from all sides and trying to find the hole in it. Either he couldn’t find one or it was so big he’d already been sucked down into it without knowing. “Okay,” he said. “How is it these things got here? Not in ships as we understand them, I’m guessing.”