‘How big were these cities?’ Vladimir dutifully asked.
‘They were home to up to forty thousand people,’ Yuri replied. ‘They had domestic bathrooms, flushing toilets and drains built using burnt and glazed bricks. They had public basins with two layers of bricks with gypsum mortar and sealed by a layer of bitumen. The Mesopotamians built docks, seaworthy vessels for trade and developed extensive irrigation comparable to modern agriculture. The Egyptians rose at about the same time. Egypt’s first King, Menes, ruled some five thousand years ago in its capital Memphis, but the kingdom was ancient even then and had already developed its hieroglyphic script, again apparently out of nowhere.’
‘And you don’t think that this could have happened naturally?’ Vladimir asked.
‘It’s possible,’ Yuri conceded, ‘but it should have taken longer than it did, and it seems that the ancients suddenly acquired knowledge sufficiently advanced to still be used today.’
The Babylonians, Yuri explained, were descended from the Sumerians, and their mathematics was written using a sexagesimal numeral system: one which has as its base the number sixty. From this derived the modern day usage of sixty seconds in a minute, sixty minutes in an hour and three hundred and sixty degrees in a circle.
‘So what’s the issue here?’ Vladimir asked. ‘If this is all well known, why are we chasing Doctor Morgan half way around the globe?’
‘Because Lucy is on the trail of something far, far bigger,’ Yuri explained. ‘She may be on her way to finding fresh remains that contain not just proof of extra-terrestrial influence on both human development and even evolution, but that they left us a message in those remains.’
Vladimir stared at his father silently for a few moments. ‘A message?’
‘A message,’ Yuri repeated, ‘one that has long been rumoured through the religions of mankind, the divine word of gods. But we are now talking about real historical events that match the supposed myths of a thousand religions. We are familiar only with the religious histories that survive to this day, but they have existed in many differing forms for millennia. Oral tradition was the only way for ancient civilizations to record their past until scripts suddenly appeared simultaneously around the world: the Neolithic script, Indus script, Sumerian and Bronze Age phonetics all appear around six thousand years ago. In all of their creation myths, these early civilizations almost identically describe Gods who came down from the skies and passed to them great knowledge.’
Vladimir himself had read of the legends of the Sumerians, Egyptians, Amerindians and Japanese, describing such visitors as traveling in fiery chariots, flaming dragons or giant glowing birds that descended noisily from the sky. Encouraged by his father, he had been required to digest vast volumes of material that to him was being spouted by pseudo-scientists and fringe fanatics.
‘That’s crazy,’ Vladimir said. ‘Surely our ancestors would have recorded such things in greater detail?’
‘What makes you think that they didn’t?’ Yuri asked. ‘The fingerprints of such events are found in almost every religious text on Earth.’
‘Where?’ Vladimir uttered, baffled.
‘Ezekiel speaks of such events in the Bible,’ Yuri said. ‘And I looked, and, behold, a whirlwind came out of the north, a great cloud, and a fire infolding itself, and a brightness was about it, and out of the midst thereof as the color of amber, out of the midst of the fire.
Also out of the midst thereof came the likeness of four living creatures, and this was their appearance: they had the likeness of a man.’
‘I don’t suppose that a passage in the Bible is going to alter the future of humanity, papa,’ Vladimir smiled. ‘We all know that it’s not a historical document.’
‘True, but real historical documents and evidence?’ Yuri challenged. ‘NASA launched its Voyager space probes in the seventies with solid gold discs aboard, bearing greetings in fifty-five different languages. One of those was ancient Sumerian. Why would they include a script that is several thousand years old and no longer used by humanity?’
Vladimir rubbed his temples in a sign of weariness and Yuri fought to control the outrage surging through his veins. His son thought him a fool. Yet Yuri’s journey was the purest that he had ever conceived. For once, for the first time since his youth, Yuri was seeking a noble path, one that would secure his legacy for millennia to come. He would be ever remembered as the truth, the light, he who had heralded the new enlightenment.
‘Our purpose is the eradication of blind faith,’ Yuri said finally. ‘The exposure of the remains that Lucy Morgan discovered in Israel or similar artefacts will finally bring about an awakening among the so-called faithful. How many thousands of years have human beings murdered each other, oppressed each other, hounded and tortured and exiled each other on the basis of nothing more than blind faith?’
Yuri spat the word as though it tasted foul. Vladimir raised an eyebrow.
‘You can lead a horse to water…’ he replied.
‘Pah!’ Yuri snorted. ‘Faith is nothing. The very word describes an inability to trust one’s own beliefs, that faith is required. Around the world, Islamic militants murder school children for wanting to go to school, mutilate female genitalia, punish women for being raped and burn the flags of other nations in the name of faith. The Catholic Church opposes contraception and abortion, spreading lies and disinformation to do so, hoards a fortune worth hundreds of billions of dollars while lamenting poverty, and has routinely avoided prosecuting members of the church who have abused children in their care. What part of all that is the light or the truth? Religion, in all of its guises, is the darkness my son, it is the evil that it claims to stand against. Lucy’s work, properly exposed to the world, will crush religion in an instant.’
‘Or strengthen it,’ Vladimir murmured in reply. ‘What do you want me to do next?’
‘Have a little faith,’ Yuri replied with a cold smile. ‘Lucy Morgan first got into all of this while searching for alien remains in Israel, as you know. Israel is part of the Levant, the cradle of civilization. Twelve thousand years ago the Levant was a very different place, a lush and fertile land, and the Sumerian legends describe the origins of their civilization there through unusual means.’
‘Like the Bible?’ Vladimir asked.
‘Sumerian legends tell of a god named Oannes,’ Yuri explained. ‘Oannes rose out of the Persian Gulf in what is described as a diving suit, and is depicted as an amphibious being. Many legends in the region also state unequivocally that Oannes came from under the sea. Oannes is the culture bearer for the Sumerian civilization, who is said to have brought them the arts of writing, agriculture and tool making.’
‘And you think that perhaps Lucy, having seen the first set of remains she founds taken away from above the United States government, is now hot on the trail of something else?’
‘Yes,’ Yuri replied, ‘but more than that I think she was able to study the remains before the government took them away. I think that she discovered a link, a trail that may lead her to something more. The United States government presumably does not have that link or has not yet discovered it. Given Lucy Morgan’s tenacity and expertise in her field it would not surprise me if she had got the jump on the government.’
Vladimir frowned. ‘Then what do we have that makes this all worthwhile? Lucy Morgan may be following a wild-goose-chase, as I think the Americans call it?’