This obelisk isn’t a shrine, he thought. It’s a ship. A starship.
“Dad!”
Conrad tried to pull himself out of the seat. It wouldn’t give. He tried twisting to the right. No. To the left. Yes. Now he hurled himself forward with everything he had and came out with a spark like an electrical cord from a socket. The console went dead and disappeared into the chair, the vibrations stopped, and the chair snapped forward and released its grip on him. Conrad, breathing heavily, collected himself.
For several moments he sat there on the floor, numb. But his mind was racing. He had no references for this experience in his past. Or did he? Ancient Egyptian funeral texts referred to a number of cosmic vessels intended to take the dead on celestial voyages to heaven. There was the “bark of Osiris,” for example, and the “boat of millions of years.” Egyptologists dubbed them “solar boats.” There was also Kamal el-Mallakh’s 1954 discovery of a 143-foot cedar wood boat buried in a pit on the south side of the Great Pyramid. Subsequent digging turned up similar boats in the same area-symbolic of the solar boats in which the souls of deceased kings could sail into the afterlife.
This silo, he realized, was on the south face of P4.
He remembered the markings of the three zodiac signs on the obelisk. He recalled the pyramid texts in Giza said the Sun King would ride his “Solar Bark” across the Milky Way toward First Time. To astro-archaeologists such as Conrad, the “solar bark” was a metaphor for the sun, specifically its ecliptic path through the twelve constellations of the zodiac in the course of a year. But what if it was more than a metaphor?
This is the actual Solar Bark, Conrad thought, the celestial ship built to take the would-be Sun King across the stars to First Time. He felt a shock wave of euphoria exploding within him.
But then the stark reality of his discovery suddenly sapped his hope: the Secret of First Time lay waiting at the end of the Solar Bark’s intended destination. Yet the earth-crust displacement was only hours if not minutes away. There was no way to reset the star chamber in P4 to the date of First Time without completing the journey. The best he could do was guess the date of First Time based on the estimated light-years it would take to get to the Solar Bark’s destination. And that information was beyond his grasp.
His radio headset squawked. Conrad said, “Yeats. Where the hell have you been?”
The voice that came over was Serena’s. “Conrad.”
“Serena?” he said. “Where are you?”
“Look out your cockpit window.”
Conrad looked up and saw the silhouettes of Egyptian soldiers circled along the rim of the silo, guns and SAMs pointed in his direction. But what caught his eye was the outstretched arm of Zawas holding a gun to Serena’s head.
Serena said, “Colonel Zawas wants you to know that unless you meet us at the base of the shrine in ten minutes and hand over the scepter, he’s going to kill me. I told him you wouldn’t do it. I’m not worth it and you’re not that stupid.”
Conrad spoke into the radio. “Tell Zawas I’m coming down.”
32
Conrad headed down through the vast ship to the rotunda base. Along the way, it all made sense-the crypts were some sort of cryogenic chambers for the long interstellar flight, the towers of light some sort of propulsion system.
Conrad emerged from the Solar Bark to find the entire silo imbued with the first rays of dawn. Then he looked up and noted that the dome had split open. He shaded his eyes and felt a sharp poke at his back.
“Move it,” said a voice from behind with an Arab accent.
Conrad, still blinking in the brightness, craned his neck to take a look. His curiosity was rewarded by a knock on the side of his head with the butt of an AK-47.
“Idiot!”
His head throbbing, Conrad stumbled forward beyond the rotunda.
Serena and Zawas were waiting for him. As Zawas took the scepter from his hands, Conrad looked over at Serena and swallowed hard. There was sadness in her eyes, but everything else about her was cool as ice.
“Tell me what these bastards did to you,” Conrad said.
Serena said, “Not much compared to what the world is going to suffer, thanks to you.”
“Doctor Yeats.” Zawas studied him carefully. “Your reputation is well deserved. You’ve led us to the Shrine of the First Sun.”
“A lot of good it will do you.”
“I will be the judge of that.” Zawas then held up the Scepter of Osiris before his men like some idol. There were no oohs and aahhs. These were professional soldiers Zawas had brought along for backup, Conrad thought, not mere fanatics. To them the obelisk might as well have been the head of an assassinated enemy, or a torched American flag, or a nuclear warhead. Their possession of such a symbol only confirmed their power in their own eyes.
Zawas then looked at him and said, “Now you will tell me the Secret of First Time, Doctor Yeats.”
“I don’t know. It’s not there. And it may be impossible for us to discover.”
Zawas narrowed his eyes. “Why is that?”
“The shrine, as you call it, is really a starship, intended to take the seeker to the place of First Time-the actual First Sun, as far as the Atlanteans are concerned.”
“A starship?” Zawas repeated.
“Which is why we’ll probably never know the Secret of First Time.” He stole a glance at Serena, whose sad eyes told him she had concluded as much. “The existence of the Solar Bark implies the secret is not of this earth but at its intended destination, which from what I’ve gathered is somewhere beyond the constellation of Orion.”
Serena’s voice was scarcely stronger than a whisper. “So there’s no way to stop the earth-crust displacement.”
Conrad shook his head but fixed his eyes on hers. “Nothing I can come up with.”
Zawas stepped up to Conrad and put his face within an inch of his. “You say this shrine is a starship, Doctor Yeats. You say there is no hope for the world. Then why didn’t you take off?”
Conrad looked over Zawas’s shoulder at Serena.
Serena could only shake her head in disbelief. “You’re such a fool, Conrad.”
A voice said, “Well, we finally agree on something, Sister.”
Conrad turned around as Yeats emerged from behind a pillar in the rotunda, as grim as Conrad had ever seen him.
“Give me the obelisk, and the girl, Zawas,” Yeats demanded. “And we’ll be on our way.”
Conrad, dumbfounded, stared at Yeats. “On our way where? You’re just going to hop on a spaceship and go?”
“Damn straight I am.”
Conrad realized that Yeats didn’t necessarily care where he was going so long as he went somewhere. He was hellbent on completing the space mission he had been denied in his youth.
“Look, if we don’t go, son, then we’ll just perish with the rest of them,” Yeats said.
“You can rationalize it all you want, but I’m not biting.”
Zawas tightened his grip on the scepter and gave a cool nod to his men, who circled Yeats with their AK- 47s.
“You destroyed much of my base and cost me many good men,” Zawas said. “Now you insult my intelligence.”
Conrad shifted his gaze back and forth between Yeats and Zawas, their eyes locked on each other.
“You were never interested in finding a weapon or disabling some alien booby trap, Yeats, were you?” Conrad said, incensed at Yeats’s desertion. “And you weren’t interested in helping me find my destiny. You pulled that
