‘And so you went to live in a damp cottage in Scotland?’
Ethan looked sharply at Jarvis. ‘You’ve been watching me?’
Jarvis shook his head. ‘Not watching, but I made it my business to find out where you’d gone after you quit. I never know when I might need to call on somebody for difficult work.’
‘I don’t do that kind of work anymore.’
‘And yet here you are.’
‘This is different.’
‘This is exactly the same,’ Jarvis insisted. ‘You may be working for a different cause but you’re working nonetheless, looking for things that nobody else can find, travelling to the ends of the earth for somebody you’ve never even met.’
Ethan said nothing, shoving his hands in his pockets as they trudged ever upward. Jarvis sighed as he took another pull on his oxygen mask and gestured to the barren wilderness around them.
‘I’m retired too,’ he pointed out. ‘And yet here I am marching up a damned volcano because the powers that be in Washington DC suggested that it might be helpful to them. You and I are much the same, Ethan. We have an unquenchable thirst to discover, to solve problems, to find solutions to things that others would not have even started a quest to find yet alone achieved their goal. You’re here because you want to be here.’
‘I’m here because a three-year-old girl will die if we don’t find what Lucy is looking for,’ Ethan snapped back. ‘I consider that a good enough reason to take a trip halfway round the globe. If you’re trying to suggest that you can get me working for the DIA again because you think that I somehow need to, you’re pulling the wrong chain.’
‘Who said anything about working for the DIA?’
‘You’re a government man Doug, and you have been ever since you transferred from the Marine Corps. Even if I was working for you directly, I have absolutely no doubt that you would be on the pay check of one government agency one other.’
Jarvis shrugged and chuckled. ‘You’re probably right, but we all have to pay the bills Ethan. What would you rather be doing? Marching up a volcano in pursuit of alien remains while being chased by Russians, or shivering in a damp foxhole in the Scottish Highlands hoping you won’t be found by a bunch of British infantry recruits?’
Ethan did not reply. Instead he quickened his pace and left Jarvis floundering behind him as the old man struggled with the steep incline and the thin air. He caught up with Lucy and fell into step alongside her as they traversed a wide patch of snow that had been frozen solid, possibly for decades.
‘Why on earth would the Inca bring children out here so far from their empire just to sacrifice them, and to whom?’
‘Nobody knows for sure,’ Lucy replied. ‘Like so many ancient cultures The Inca worshipped the heavens above them, and so the sun was a major factor in their lives along with the seasons and such like. Poor harvests or perhaps conflict with other civilizations might have compelled them to sacrifice their young in order to gain support from their gods in return. Almost all ancient cultures have some evidence of blood sacrifice in their history, despite being separated by many thousands of miles.’
‘More evidence of you believing them to be linked,’ Ethan surmised. ‘Isn’t it possible that they simply developed the same habits as each other despite having no contact at all? I heard that the reason that pyramids that are so similar in cultures around the world is simply due to the fact that the pyramid is a stable structure and easy to build, so would be a natural choice for early civilizations.’
‘Entirely true,’ Lucy replied. ‘But then would they have the same legends, the same references to unusual events in the sky and visitations by unusual gods with bizarre properties that taught them how to live, how to manipulate the world around them in more complex ways? How on earth could it be that such widely separated cultures could all simultaneously develop the ability to smelt copper seven thousand years ago, or start erecting superstructures on differing continents in the same centuries?’
‘But blood sacrifice of children?’ Ethan persisted.
‘Children were considered pure,’ Lucy explained, ‘unstained by the foibles of adults. Most were prepared for sacrifice for years. Biological analysis of the mummies found on this mountain during Reinhard‘s surveys found significant lifestyle and dietary evidence, which included increased coca and alcohol consumption in the year prior to their sacrifice. We see these children as victims but they were feted by their people, worshipped in some ways like the gods themselves, perhaps as a direct link to the deities in whom these people placed so much faith. If those supposed deities had instead been a species not of this earth, then perhaps the sacrifices meant more to the Incas than just ceremonial or traditional events. Maybe they really believed that their powerful benefactors would return to save them, perhaps from disease or from the wars waged against them by the conquistadores.’
‘But why would an alien species start tinkering with our DNA anyway? What’s to gain?’
‘Survival,’ Lucy explained. ‘That’s all life really is, when you think about it. All species procreate in order to pass on their genes, their DNA, to keep their family line alive. A suitably advanced species may have found a way to keep their DNA alive by means other than procreation, perhaps using human beings as a living storage facility. Viruses inject their DNA into cells in order to hijack those cells and proliferate through a victim, so a viable process already exists in nature.’
‘You think that we being used as victims in some way, that this is some kind of infection?’
‘No,’ Lucy replied. ‘If an alien species had wanted to infect us with a disease they could have done so easily. It’s my hypothesis that they were in fact using cross-breeding in order to preserve elements of their DNA in our own bloodline for reasons that we don’t really know anything about. The unfortunate consequence of this is that those strands of DNA may be the cause of many of the more bizarre genetic illnesses that afflict a small number of our population. Put simply, there are people suffering from illnesses today that have no apparent explanation other than to be described as random genetic mutation. While random mutation is one of the means through which evolution operates, and can sometimes produce bizarre deformities that are quickly removed from the gene pool through the death of the carrier, some afflictions seem to continue on from generation to generation. The genes responsible often seem out of place, much in the same way as we find out of place artefacts in the archaeological record that suggest levels of intelligence far beyond the means of the civilizations who supposedly placed them there.’
Ethan peered ahead at the ridgeline of the volcano’s flank and saw a large flat area appearing, a plateau close to the mountain summit.
‘We’re almost at the peak,’ he observed.
In one gloved hand Lucy again produced the quipu that she had carried up the mountainside, and she nodded as she rubbed a gloved thumb over one of the knots in the quipu.
‘Remarkable, that even after all these hundreds of years such a simple device can prove so accurate. If I’m right, the plateau ahead is where the quipu says the remains should be buried.’
Ethan forged on at Lucy’s side across the treacherous ice, and together they worked their way to the summit and clambered onto the plateau to see a remarkable vista appear before them. The mountainside dropped away on the far side of the volcano to reveal rolling rocky valleys plunging to immense depths beneath a layer of broken cloud that tumbled and rolled in the sunlight like an ethereal veil. Before them on the plateau was nothing more than a few scattered rocks, dark material as black as coal that stood out against a layer of snow frosting the surface.