“Hmm. An attractive idea, Ski. Unfortunately, the government frowns on close collaborations with the enemy. I imagine they’ll be shipping Dr. Billaud and his colleagues back to Earth on the first available transport.”
“What’ll happen to them then? They’re not gonna get sent back to France.”
“No. I’m afraid that’s most unlikely. Especially considering what they know.”
“Is what they found here really that important? I mean, it’s just more alien shit, like we found on Mars, right?”
Kaminski heard David’s sigh, a blast of air across his helmet microphone. “What we’re finding on Mars—and here—is completely changing everything we thought we understood about human origins, about who and what we are. The artifacts, the bodies and so on we found on Mars suggests that someone was tinkering with our DNA half a million years back. That’s momentous enough. But what Billaud and his people have found here on the Moon is a lot closer to our historical origins. It tells us, not about our biology, but about our culture, our civilization. I’m afraid this is going to upset people even more than the news from Mars did.”
“You mean the ancient-astronaut stuff? The stuff we found on Mars is already really stirring people up. All those cults and things.”
“Yes.” That one word sounded almost sad.
“’Course, doesn’t this all just go to show the ancient-alien people are right?”
“Not the part about the ETs being God, or us being created in their image, or any of that. No.”
“You were telling the Army guys about what Billaud told you. Something about the Sumerians?”
“Sumer was one of Earth’s earliest true civilizations. Dates back to about 4,000 B.C., though they probably had their start well before that. They established quite a remarkable culture at the head of the Persian Gulf, one that literally seemed to spring up overnight, out of nowhere.”
“The Fertile Crescent? Tigris and Euphrates Rivers?”
“That’s right, Ski! Very good!”
He shrugged inside his suit. “Okay, so I did remember something from high-school history class. And you guys think these aliens got the Sumerians off to a civilized start, is that it?”
“The amusing thing is that the Sumerians themselves claimed—in their myths and legends—that the gods were people much like themselves who came down from the heavens and taught them everything they needed to know, agriculture, writing, building cities, working gold, numbers, medicine…” He stopped, then bent over, hands on knees, as he intently studied a patch of boot-trammeled Lunar soil.
“Yeah, but don’t all those ancient civilizations claim they got their start from the gods? Kind of like a good public-relations campaign, y’know? My civilization is better than your civilization, ’cause it was started by the gods. I’m king, ’cause God said that’s the way it is.”
“You’re absolutely right. Still, that doesn’t mean that the first people to claim that distinction weren’t telling the exact and literal truth.” He stooped and began scraping at the ground with his gloved hands. The regolith was soft and powdery, but firmly packed, with the consistency of damp beach sand.
“So…what were they doin’ here?” Kaminski asked after a long moment. “The aliens, I mean. Why would they come all the way here to give us writing and stuff. What was in it for them?”
“Excellent question. Let me have that bag, will you?”
Kaminski let the massive satchel slide from his shoulder, and David unsnapped the cover and opened it up. Inside was a variety of tools, including hammers, a whisk broom, mirrors with handles, small shovels, and numerous pry bars, from a half-meter-long crowbar down to probes the size of a nutpick. The archeologist selected one of the latter, picking it up clumsily in his heavy gloves.
“According to Dr. Billaud,” David went on, scraping at the ground with the tool, “there was an alien ship flying over Picard a few thousand years ago. It…well, it didn’t explode. But it apparently tore open, just like a seagoing ship getting ripped open by an iceberg. The loot inside spilled out.”
“Loot?”
“Statues. Gold plates or tablets with writing on them. Objets d’art. A lot of the stuff landed here, inside this crater, in an enormous footprint. The heavier pieces were moving fast enough to plow down into the regolith a ways, like bullets. The lighter, flimsier stuff ended up on the surface.”
“I don’t see nothing like that up here.”
“Our UN counterparts have already cleaned the area out pretty well, Ski.” He began prying something shiny up out of the clinging dust. “They were in the process of sinking these trenches to try to find and recover the heavier things. Like…this.”