Luna Marine(52)

Every time David had brought the subject of divorce up, she’d managed to change the subject…or else throw a crying fit emotional enough to make him back off. The law, at least, was on her side. If he walked out on her, she would get the house and half of their joint bank account, and that seemed to be holding him back.

As for her divorcing him, well, she wasn’t about to let him off the hook easily. She was certain that he was cheating on her—probably had been for a long time—and that was grounds for a divorce if she wanted one. The point was that she didn’t.

She sighed. The very word “cheating,” she knew, was a holdover from an earlier age of more formal and binding marriage contracts, but she simply couldn’t help that. For her, as for her mother, marriage was forever.

Besides, if she and David separated, she wouldn’t find things like…this!

A folder marked “Picard/Sumeria” opened to a scrolling page of notes, including some PAD-scanned images of what looked like gold or silver statues. She squinted at the pictures, trying to make sense of them, but there was little sense to be made. The figures were so stiff and cartoonish, somehow…and did not resemble her notion of the ancient astronaut-gods very closely.

Nonetheless, she made a copy of everything, transferring the duplicates to her own private files. Later she would uplink them to Pastor Blaine’s Net address, and the Church elders could make of them what they could.

Guilt nagged at her, but she angrily pushed the feeling aside. She’d given David his chance, just a short while ago when she’d driven him to the maglev station. Every morning she drove him to the Arlington Heights station so he could take the commuter maglev into town; every evening she picked him up again…at least on those days when he wasn’t gallivanting off around the country somewhere, giving talks, giving lectures. Did he have time for her and her church and her friends? No!

He could sleep with his goddamned secretary or assistant or whatever she was, but he couldn’t tell his own wife about what he’d discovered on the Moon, even if he knew how important the subject was to her.

This morning had been the worst. She’d asked him, yet again, if he could tell her about what he’d found on the Moon that obviously had him so concerned, asked him if there was anything there that she could share with the people at her church. “What, that bunch of idiots?” was what he’d said.

And, by implication, that was what he thought of her. There’d been more. A lot more, none of it pleasant. The part about “a bunch of losers who think God was a space-man, and that he’s going to come down and rescue them all from the evils of the world,” that had hurt, a lot.

Maybe because there was some truth in it. The First Church of the Divine Masters of the Cosmos did hold that there would be a final reckoning, when the Divine Masters returned—any day now!—and demanded an accounting for Man’s stewardship of the planet. And on that day, the faithful would board the great mother ships, to be carried in rapture into heaven, abandoning a world corrupted by greed and sin and Adam’s fallen nature, a wicked world already under judgment by global warming, a world about to face the nuclear destruction levied by the Masters on Sodom and Gomorrah….

And David simply couldn’t see….

She’d been skimming the material on the screen, looking for key words or phrases that might pop out at her, and finding nothing. Some of the sub files were cryptically named: Gab-Kur-Ra, Shu-Ha-Da-Ku, Shar-Tar-Bak. What in the Name of the Divine Masters were those?

She copied them faithfully, nonetheless.

Then, however, her eyes landed on a pair of concluding paragraphs, and she read them carefully.

“It seems obvious that the aliens, tentatively identified as ‘An’ or ‘Anu,’ and which from admittedly preliminary and scanty evidence quite possibly can be identified with Species Eighty-four, from the Cydonian visual data, did indeed have considerable direct contact with humans living at the head of the Persian Gulf, the peoples we know today as Sumerians. That contact, however, does not appear to have been a friendly one from the human perspective. The accounts translated so far speak of enslaving the ‘lu,’ a term used in ancient Sumerian to mean “human,” but which includes the connotation of ‘something herded,’ ‘something taken care of.’ Humans appear to have been useful to the An primarily in working mines, raising crops, forming military units for further conquests, and for attending the masters as personal servants.

“It remains to be seen whether human civilization was something bestowed on human slaves by the masters, or whether it was developed independently by primitive cultures attempting to emulate the godlike visitors in their midst.”