Che Lu reached into the old straw bag next to her and pulled out a leather sack. She emptied the contents onto the floor with a clatter. Four pieces of bone lay there.
“Did you ever figure out what those are?” the old man next to her asked. Che Lu had known Lo Fa for most of her life. He had been branded a thief a long time before by the government, but now she supposed he might be called a freedom fighter. He wore a faded blue shirt and black pants. His AK-47 lay next to him. He had found the bones near the tomb and sent them to her in Beijing, prompting the beginning of her journey here.
She picked up one of the bones and handed it to him. The bone was from the hip of some animal, perhaps a deer, triangular in shape, with two long fiat sides that had markings etched into them.
“They’re oracle bones.”
Lo Fa turned it in his hands, then tossed it back. “Are you a witch who throws bones to read the future now? I thought you were an educated person.” He spit to the side. “I can read yours and my future without using those… we’re going to die in this tomb along with that alien creature.” He nodded his head toward the tall figure of Elek, wandering through the stacks of equipment and large containers that filled the floor of the cavern.
Che Lu agreed that Elek was not completely human… the red, elongated eyes confirmed that. But he also wasn’t Airlia, as he was shorter than the projection of the Airlia sentinel in the upper-level passageway had shown and some of his other features were different. Some sort of hybrid between human and alien, Che Lu had decided, a bastard designed to do the bidding of hidden alien masters. Ever since Lo Fa had found the oracle bones and sent them to her, her beliefs had experienced more change than in the previous seven decades.
“You must have hope,” she told Lo Fa.
He snorted. “Hope is a bad thing. Hope is what children have before they know any better. I am too old for hope.”
Che Lu pointed at Elek. “They… and the aliens they work for… came to Earth a long time ago. Many, many generations before you were born. But we… humans… are still here. You have lived a long life. We must work to ensure that our children’s children also have the same opportunity.
“They are not all-powerful. Look how he searches the cavern. And he cannot get into the lowest level, which is where he wants to go. He is as weak as we are.”
“And as trapped,” Lo Fa noted.
Che Lu indicated the oracle bones. “I could not read those at first.” She reached into her bag and pulled out a leather notebook. It was battered, with burn marks on it. “This is Professor Nabinger’s, the man who deciphered the high rune language. I have been using it to read the writing on the bones and on the walls of the upper levels of this tomb, since we have had nothing else to do since being sealed in.
“I always thought our civilization was the first to develop writing. In fact, the Chinese word for ‘civilization,’ wenha, means the transforming influence of writing. But the language on these bones is older than ours.”
“Spare me the lecture,” Lo Fa said. “You are not at the university now. What do the bones and the walls say?”
“You have something else to do?” Che Lu asked. “Perhaps a lecture will open your mind up, old man, keep it from turning into a rock.”
Lo Fa laughed. “Go ahead, Mother-Professor.”
The latter term was what her students at the university in Beijing had called her. Che Lu felt a pang for those she had left in the capital. She had no doubt the upcoming turmoil would make the Tiananmen Square massacre look mild in comparison. Always blood had to be spilled to grease the wheels of change. She wished it were not so, but her long life had shown her that it was the way of reality.
She rested a hand on the battered leather notebook. “Professor Nabinger was a very smart man. His mind was open, unlike yours.” She picked up one of the oracle bones. “The writing on this was dismissed as gibberish by most scholars I showed them to. The same as similar writing all around the world. What we do not understand, we choose to ignore.
“Nabinger was an Egyptologist. He didn’t ignore the markings that didn’t fit with standard hieroglyphics. He searched around the planet and found similar writing in other places. Dating those sites, he was amazed to discover that this strange runic writing predated the oldest recorded language that was generally accepted by historians.
“The problem he had was explaining how a similar written language could be in places as far apart as Egypt and South America. Remember, old man, this was in an age when man would rarely sail out of sight of shore. Despite not being able to explain the why, he decided to study the what he did have. He gathered as many examples of what he dubbed the high rune language and tried to decipher it.”
“I am more interested in the why,” Lo Fa said. “Why was this same language in such diverse places? Did the Airlia leave the writing?”
Che Lu shrugged. “Some of it, maybe. But most examples Nabinger found had slight, sometimes major, differences in style and syntax from place to place, which indicated to him that they all came from a root language, and then, as people who had learned this root language spread across the planet, they made changes to it as their own societies developed.
“My fellow anthropologists at the university always argued that civilization began in such diverse places as Egypt, China, Southeast Asia, and Central America, all at roughly the same time period. They called this the isolationist theory of civilization. Isolationists believe that the ancient civilizations all developed independent of each other. These isolated groups of people all crossed a threshold into civilization about the third or fourth century before the birth of Christ. Isolationists explained the timing with natural evolution. We particularly like that theory here in China because we believed our early civilization was much more advanced than the others. After all, we believed we were the first to have a written language, the first to invent gunpowder, the printing press… all those things we were so proud of for so long.”
Che Lu rubbed her wrinkled fingers across the bone. “Now we know this isn’t true. We weren’t the first to invent writing, and we were not the first to invent civilization. Indeed, the earliest dynasties here and in the other places were probably just shadows of the civilization our forefathers had to abandon at Atlantis. Even if the humans were just servants to the Airlia there, they probably lived in a style greater than even our current level.
“When Artad destroyed Atlantis to stop Aspasia and his rebels, some humans escaped. They not only seeded the myth of Atlantis and the Great Flood wherever they went, they also started to rebuild civilization. This is the diffusionist theory of the birth of civilization, which we now know to be correct.”
“And the aliens who survived?” Lo Fa asked. “Where did they go?”
“We believe that Aspasia and his followers went to the Airlia base on Mars. And now we think he is dead, killed by Captain Turcotte during the destruction of the Airlia talon ship fleet. Artad”… she waved her hands around the cavern… “perhaps he sleeps below us like Aspasia slept on Mars. I think that is the reason Elek desperately wants the key for the lower level.”
“Waking Aspasia was a bad thing,” Lo Fa said simply. “Why should waking Artad be any better?”
“I cannot answer that,” Che Lu said.
“Something else,” Lo Fa said. “If they used Gao-zong’s tomb to hide Artad, then maybe the Airlia had much more to do with our country’s growth than we could even imagine.”
“True,” Che Lu conceded. “Nabinger did determine that the high rune symbol for ‘help’ was built into the very shape of the Great Wall in western China, north of the city of Lanzhou. It is the only man-made object that can currently be seen from space with the naked eye. There is no way the people who built the Great Wall could have known the shape they were building was more than just protection against the barbarians.”