“Have you heard of the church of Bet Giyorgis?”
Lago indicated he hadn’t.
Mualama pointed at the canteen hanging from Lago’s shoulder. The young man passed it across, and Mualama drank deeply before continuing.
“Legend has it that one night King Lalibela of Axum was taken up to heaven while he was asleep and ordered to build a temple, a place of worship. It was said that when he came back he ordered construction begun on Bet Giyorgis and that the workers were aided by ‘angels.’
“The church is very strange. Certainly given the tools and level of technology of the time, the temple would have been impossible to make. It is constructed inside of solid rock. In a way, you could call the entire church a sculpture cut into the rock. A most intriguing mystery that has begged to be answered for centuries.”
“The Airlia built it?” Lago guessed.
Mualama nodded. “Perhaps. The entire perimeter of the church is a trench cut into rock four stories deep. Then the remaining large square of stone in the center was made into the temple. The central church was shaped in the shape of a cross, but you can get to it only through passageways cut through the stone. Then the center of that cross shape was hollowed out of solid rock. There are numerous paintings and frescoes on the walls throughout. On one of those I found drawings that led me to question the monks.
“A couple in particular interested me as they would have interested an explorer like Burton. One showed two snow-covered peaks. Another showed only one such peak. The peak in both panels I recognized as Mount Kilimanjaro.”
“But you said two peaks in the first drawing?” Lago was confused.
“This was the other peak. The sister of Kilimanjaro.”
“But this has been a crater for ages,” Lago said.
“Perhaps,” Mualama said. “Perhaps not.”
“There’s no indication the volcano has been active for over twenty thousand years,” Lago argued.
At least the student had done his geological homework while in school, Mualama granted. “Perhaps the top of the mountain was destroyed in some other manner.”
To that, Lago had no answer. The thought of something powerful enough to shear off the top of a mountain as large as Kilimanjaro and leave this crater behind was beyond his ability to comprehend.
“Why did you go to the church in the first place? Why did you start following this dead man’s trail?”
“That is a long and complex story that began when I was a young man… about your age… studying in England. What do you know of Sir Richard Francis Burton?”
“Only what you have told me so far.”
“Your education is lacking,” Mualama said. “Sir Burton translated the Book of the Thousand and One Nights and the Kama Sutra. He was quite a linguist, with a mastery of many languages. It was because of one of his trips here to Africa and an unpublished letter he left written in a tongue that no one else could read… like his manuscript, but a different language… that I was first directed to this location. At first I thought it was a work of fiction, but now I know it was not.”
“But…” Lago paused as his uncle picked up his shovel.
“We must work,” Mualama said. “It is all speculation so far.”
Lago reluctantly picked up his tool and got back to work.
Two hours later, Mualama struck down into the soft earth with his spade and was startled when it reverberated in his hands, hitting something solid. He blinked away the sweat in his eyes and stood perfectly still for a seconds, his heart racing.
He knelt and scraped with his hands, pushing the loose dirt aside. His fingers touched stone. A flat stone, with something etched on the surface.
“Stop.” Mualama said it so quietly that Lago at first didn’t understand.
“Did you find something?”
“Yes.” Mualama pointed at the aged Land Rover. “Bring the brush and the hand trowels.”
Lago did as ordered. “What is it?”
Mualama didn’t answer. He lightly scraped with a hand trowel, removing dirt, tossing it to the side. Red stone appeared, inch by inch, foot by foot. He used the trowel and hand brush to clear off the top. When he was done, he stepped back up on the lip of the hole. The stone was nine feet long by four wide. The top was smooth except where markings were etched in it. It was a dark, almost blood red. Mualama knew a thing or two about stones, and he had never seen this kind.
Mualama did recognize the markings, though… high runes. The language of the aliens.
Easter Island fell under the jurisdiction of the government of Chile, but the events of the past month had superseded that rule, and frankly, the rulers in Santiago were quite happy to wash their hands of the island. They had ceded any action to be done about it to UNAOC… the United Nations Alien Oversight Committee.
Chileans weren’t too concerned about losing control of the island, for two reasons. One was that it was over two thousand miles away from their shoreline, making it the most isolated piece of terrain on the planet. The second reason was that UNAOC’s forces… primarily the United States Navy… couldn’t pierce the opaque shield that now surrounded the entire island. It was anyone’s guess what was happening inside the shield.
The last attempt to penetrate the shield, using a remote sensing torpedo from the USS Springfield, had resulted in the submarine’s being trapped on the bottom of the ocean floor offshore of the island by several foo fighters… small golden spheres that wielded tremendous power and focused their energy on electromagnetic sources. As long as the submarine didn’t move, it was safe. Of course, there was a limit to the amount of air, food, and water on the submarine, and when one of those three vitals ran out, the crisis would escalate, but that was several weeks off and UNAOC’s decision had been to withhold taking any further drastic action, a decision greatly influenced by the growing planet-wide isolationist movement.
Before the discovery of the guardian computer underneath the island, the only distinction Easter Island had was the massive statues that dotted its shoreline. With no one left alive on the island… with the possible exception of Kelly Reynolds, and her latest communiqué indicated she supported the new isolationist line… there seemed little justification in taking further action.
Easter Island was shaped like a triangle, with a volcano at each corner. Its landmass totaled only sixty-two square miles, but despite its small size it had once boasted a bustling civilization, one advanced enough to have built the moai, the giant stone monoliths that peered out to sea. There was no doubt now that the moai were representative of the Airlia… the red stone caps like the red hair of the aliens, the long earlobes similar to what had been seen on the holograph of the Airlia under Qian-Ling.
The island had been called Rapa Nui by the few surviving natives, but to the rest of the world Easter Island had been its name since its discovery by Europeans on Easter Day in 1722.
It was below the Rano Kau volcano that the guardian had been secreted. Deep underneath the dormant volcano, Kelly Reynolds’s body was pressed up against the side of the twenty-foot-high golden pyramid that housed the alien computer. The golden glow that surrounded her body kept it in a stasis field. The mental field had been supplemented by a metal probe that came from the guardian and ended in the back of Kelly’s neck.
The line between Kelly Reynolds’s mind and the guardian machine was a thin one. It was more of a spiritual separation than a physical one, as the guardian invaded her with machinery and quantum waves.