The Covenant of Genesis

the noise, they clearly heard something emerge from the improvised loudspeaker.

A voice. But like nothing they had ever heard before.

‘Fuck me,’ said Chase, suppressing an unexpected shiver. ‘Are you sure that’s not an alien?’

Nina had a similar response to the unnatural sound, a low, almost sinister moaning - but the sensation running up her spine was as much a tingle of excitement as it was the shock of the unknown. ‘It’s not at the right speed,’ she realised, stopping the motor and adjusting the settings before moving the needle back to the starting point. ‘Let’s try again.’

This time, the voice sounded more like the product of a human larynx, though still slurred. It formed four distinct sounds - words, Nina assumed - before pausing, then speaking again.

‘It’s still not at the right speed,’ said Sophia, now fascinated. ‘It needs to go faster.’

Nina increased the screwdriver’s speed and restarted the motor. The voice spoke again, now revealed as male - though with a strange sonorous reverberation to it. She strained to listen, picking out another sound beneath the speech, a faint, almost mechanical squeaking or groaning.

The speech lasted for a minute before the needle finally reached the end of the groove and scraped across the cylinder’s base. Nina hurriedly switched off the screwdriver.

‘What was he was saying?’ Chase wondered.

‘Hopefully I’ll be able to figure that out - and that it’ll be something useful,’ Nina told him as she delicately lifted the cylinder from its makeshift spindle. ‘Give me the other one.’

The recording on the second cylinder lasted slightly longer, recorded by a different man with a faster pattern of speech - though still with the same odd, throaty echo to his words. It began with three words rather than four, followed by a pause before the speaker continued.

Nina played the beginning back, then regarded the cylinder thoughtfully. Inscribed around its top were three words in the ancient language. ‘What if . . . what if the first words on each recording are like a title?’ she thought out loud, removing it from the screwdriver and laying it beside the first. ‘So that whoever’s listening knows they’ve got the right cylinder?’ She thought back to the chamber. ‘Ribbsley knew what these symbols were; he translated them. What did he say?’

Chase tried to remember. ‘Something about the sea. And wind.’

‘Sea of wind,’ said Nina, Ribbsley’s words coming back to her. She examined the first cylinder more closely. ‘Wind! Damn it, I should have figured that out already. Look!’ She pointed. ‘This symbol, the three horizontal lines with the top one curling back on itself - it’s a representation of the wind!’

Sophia was dubious. ‘In a cartoon, perhaps.’

‘Maybe, but that visual shorthand came from real life originally - it’s how dust or sand look if they’re being blown along a plain. Or a beach, and we know these people lived along the sea. Which means that this wavy line is, well . . . wavy! It’s their symbol for the sea. Wind and sea, together - sea of wind.’ She examined the remaining characters. ‘The last one is also wind, and the third one’s not symbolic, it’s a word.’ She tried to recall what Ribbsley had said. ‘Seasons! “Sea of wind, seasons, wind.” Whatever that means.’

‘Maybe it’s a weather report,’ Chase suggested. ‘The prevailing winds’ll be different depending on the time of year. Useful thing to know if you’re planning on sailing across the Indian Ocean.’ Both women looked at him, impressed. ‘Yeah, that’s right. I’m not just an awesome sex machine.’ Now they exchanged knowing looks. ‘Oi!’

‘What does the other cylinder say?’ Sophia asked.

‘Something similar - “fish of the sea of wind”, I think. Although the sentence structure’s reversed from English. It’s literally “wind sea, fish”. Like the way the first cylinder uses a hierarchical structure almost like database cataloguing. The main subject is “sea of wind”, category “seasons”, subcategory “wind”. For an ancient language it’s actually very efficient.’

‘They’re not the same,’ Chase remarked.

‘What?’

‘The words for “wind”. They weren’t the same. Not the way Captain Caveman pronounced them.’

Nina replayed the start of the recording. Chase was right. Though the first and last words were written identically, the intonation of each was different. She played the second recording again. The pronunciation of the word matching the symbol for ‘wind’ was the same as its first use on the other cylinder.

‘Is it significant?’ Sophia wondered.

‘It could be,’ said Nina. ‘Some languages like Mandarin put a lot of emphasis on intonation.’ She turned the first cylinder in her hands, comparing the first and last inscribed symbols. ‘They look exactly the same, but have different pronunciations . . .’ Her face lit up. ‘Of course! They’re heterophones!’

Chase lifted a questioning eyebrow. ‘Ways for straight men to talk to each other?’

‘No, Eddie. It’s from Greek, it literally means “different sound”. Like “wind” as in blowing air, and “wind” as in winding up a watch - the written words look the same, but the meaning changes in speech depending on pronunciation. So one of the symbols here does mean “wind” in the weather sense, but the other’s something else.’ Nina held the two cylinders next to each other, the wind symbols almost touching. ‘Maybe the word that appears with “sea” is a modifier. It’s not literally “the sea of wind”, but something the Veteres would know from the context.’

‘Stormy sea?’ Sophia suggested.

Nina considered it, then shook her head. ‘It’s too transitory. I dunno, it seems more like a name, something descriptive, like the Yellow Sea.’

‘It must be something connected to wind, though,’ Chase pointed out. ‘Otherwise why would they use the same symbol?’

She nodded. ‘So what else would the wind have meant to an ancient civilisation? Apart from allowing them to sail, what does the wind do to them?’

‘Same thing it does to us,’ said Chase. ‘Makes you cold.’

‘Cold,’ said Nina, mulling it over. ‘The Sea of Cold, a cold sea.’

‘But all seas are cold if you’re in open water and the wind’s blowing, even in the tropics,’ said Sophia. ‘There must be more to it than that.’

‘There is.’ Nina sat upright as the answer struck her. ‘They lived in the tropics. It never gets cold - even during an ice age, the temperature at the equator would still be in the mid-sixties. But when the Veteres left Indonesia, they headed south, to Australia - and according to the inscription, they went on to somewhere else to build their city. “The land of wind and sand”, Ribbsley said. But since he didn’t know about the heterophones, he got it wrong. If the alternative pronunciation does mean “cold”, then they went to a land of cold and sand. A cold land.’ She smiled. ‘We’re in the southern hemisphere - what’s the coldest land you can think of ?’

‘Antarctica,’ Chase and Sophia said simultaneously.

‘Right! And if you go back a hundred and thirty thousand years, temperatures were several degrees higher than today. Antarctica would still have been cold - but habitable along the coasts. It’d be like living in Alaska, or Siberia. Tough - but survivable.’

‘Where does the sand come into it, though?’ Chase asked. ‘I mean, Antarctica’s not exactly famous for its beaches.’

‘It’s another mistranslation,’ said Sophia. ‘Or rather, a misinterpretation - not by us, but by the Veteres.’

‘What do you mean?’ Nina asked.

‘Think about it. If you’ve lived your entire life in a hot, coastal climate, and then you move to Antarctica, you’re going to experience a certain amount of culture shock. Everything is different. And one thing you will certainly never have seen before is snow. It’s made of fine grains, it covers the ground, the wind picks it up and blows it . . . so you’re going to compare it to something with which you’re familiar.’

‘Sand!’ said Chase. ‘The land of cold sand . . . that’s what they called snow. Cold sand!’

‘So they did go to Antarctica,’ Nina said excitedly. ‘They left Australia and headed south, across what they called the Cold Sea . . . and built a new city there, away from the “beasts”.’

Sophia looked surprised. ‘What beasts?’

‘Dunno,’ said Chase. ‘And your boyfriend didn’t know either. But they sounded pretty nasty.’

‘Some sort of predators,’ Nina added. ‘Ribbsley thought they wiped out the Veteres who returned to Australia after leaving their city . . . which would definitely fit with Antarctica’s being its location,’ she realised. ‘The higher