Luna Marine(54)

“Well, if you can’t trust the machine, can you trust me? I hope you don’t keep me around here just because I’m good in bed!”

“Of course not!” Technically, Teri was on loan to the Institute from the Field Museum’s Oriental Department. The Cydonian Research Foundation had paid a lot of money to hire her general archeological expertise, but when the Lunar tablets turned out to be partly written in ancient Sumerian, she’d proven herself absolutely invaluable.

“Your translations have all agreed with Howard’s and mine.” She made a face. “Admit it, David. You’re good, and that’s all there is to it.”

“Maybe. But that’s not going to be enough for…them.”

“‘Them’?”

“This could be Egypt all over again,” he told her. “Worse than Egypt. And here I’m just on the point of gaining my reputation back.”

She knew that story, of course. He’d told her about it the first time they’d slept together, in a hotel in Los Angeles during one of his public-relations appearances for the government upon his return from Mars. David Alexander had been an authority on Egypt before the war, an expert in sonic-imaging tomography, an expertise that had landed him that billet in a cycler to Mars. His discovery of confirmation that the Sphinx went back long before the Fourth Dynasty had ended with him being evicted from Egypt and his reputation being called into question; some lies, he’d discovered, were too well established—and too important politically—to be challenged. The Egyptian government had a vested interest in maintaining the myth that Egyptians had raised the Great Pyramids, not some unknown civilization from eight thousand years before.

Things were far worse, with the dawning realization that extraterrestrials had been responsible for shaping human culture millennia ago. With the discoveries on Mars and, now, on the Moon, there could be no doubting their reality, or the fact that they’d visited Earth more than once and for long periods of time. The argument came down to how much, if at all, they’d actually interacted with humanity.

Belief was fast polarizing into absolute and unshakable opposites. On the one side were the ancient astronuts, with their cosmic-awareness sessions, their churches of universal life, and the conviction that ETs had done everything notable in human history, from building the pyramids to establishing each of the world’s major religions. On the other side were the diehard conservatives within the archeological, anthropological, and historical-academic communities, who admitted—most of them, anyway—that, yes, extraterrestrials might have visited Earth, Mars, and the Moon in the remote past, but who stated point-blank that even open contact could have affected no more than a handful of individual humans…and human culture not at all.

The truth, as usual, lay somewhere between the two extremes. Establishing exactly where could well destroy his professional reputation for a second time.

“Are you saying,” Teri said carefully, “that you want Howard to be prejudiced? As political as Tom Leonard?”

He grimaced at the name. Leonard was one of his most outspoken critics, the author of several prominent papers attacking the cultural-intervention theory.

“It might help.” He gestured at the replica on the desk. “Leonard and his bunch are going to be all over this. All over our translations. If there is any possibility that we’re missing something, missing some nuance or shade of meaning, or misinterpreting what was being said, we have to know.”

“I’d say our identification of this one name alone, An, with the eight-pointed star as their symbol, makes any of their quibbles pretty irrelevant. The Sumerian tie-in is perfect.”

“Which is exactly the problem, Teri. It’s too perfect. The astronuts are going to grab this and run with it. I…I don’t think we’ll be able to keep a lid on it after this.”

“So…what’s worrying you? That your work is going to get lost in all the shouting and yelling? Or that people are going to call you dirty names? Damn it, it’s the truth that’s important.”

“I’m beginning to think that there is truth…and more important truth….” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m not even sure what I believe anymore.”

The reproduction on his desk was a resin faxcasting of the first of the seventeen gold, silver, and electrum artifacts he’d uncovered on the floor of Picard. His desk’s computer screen was open, displaying long columns of symbols, Proto-Sumerian characters and English words, the beginning of a translation of the artifact’s dual text.