Guardians of the Gates - Part 3, The Osiris Gate by Jeff Schanz (best book club books for discussion .TXT) 📖

have a kind of crazy hypothesis because the whole damned thing is crazy. But I don’t know. It’s stupid. I only knew that little bit about Dr. Bar, and I wanted to get a rise out of you guys. Sorry, I didn’t mean to carry it so far. I don’t have an answer. Not a real answer.”

Bill continued playing the good cop. “None of us here deal in certainty, Valentine. You get as certain as you can, then dig in.”

“I’m really not sure,” said Valentine, making the final transition from his earlier smug demeanor to a sheepish one. Neither personality fit his normal attitude. “Sorry. I don’t want to screw it up any farther than I have.”

“Screw what up?” said Justin. “Just say whatever is on your mind and let us debate it. It’s ok to debate things.”

Valentine examined his shoes for a moment. Justin knew Valentine pretty well, and knew he wasn’t used to debates. He was used to being right, or not trying. Despite his attempts to shame everyone earlier, Valentine looked embarrassed.

“Alright,” he said, his voice meeker than even a minute ago. “Listen, I’m really sorry about being an ass before. I just was… never mind. I guess I’m scared and I show it differently than most people.”

“Valentine, don’t blubber all over us,” said Jude. “We’ve all had theories we thought were stupid. Maybe it’s not. Just spit it out.”

“Fine. Ok, then. Here goes. Um, the network was built to pull something from ground zero, whether it’s the dimensional energy, or whatever, I don’t understand it. But if it’s just radiation, something that just poisons people, that would be a waste of resources. A dirty bomb, or some shit like that, would be easier to come up with if all he wanted to do was radiate people. This is something bigger. And if the diagram is right, then the convex-concave snap would fit the design and would make the most sense. If it is something like dimensional planes overlapping, then I would think that he expects only living things would be affected, or he would’ve spent his money building a space station or something to survive the physical destruction of the world. So, he expects the ground to stay underneath him, with just people and maybe animals being affected. Or morph. Or disintegrate, or whatever. The drugs are like personal shields to stabilize certain folks against the effect. Why cancer survivors? I don’t know other than maybe it was convenient. Maybe he just needs slaves, and since they’re so damned grateful to be alive at all, they would worship him as a god, or leader, or some shit. So, maybe regular people get screwed up and his personally chosen people stay safe. The privileged ones are the monsters, and the underprivileged ones just function like serfs or worker bees. But what doesn’t make sense to me is if only living stuff gets whacked, there’d be a lot of technology still left to overrun Ashe at some point. Maybe he blows up an EMP later on, or something. Maybe this dimensional thing affects electronics too. But if what you guys said is true, then it shouldn’t. The initial part of the plan I can sort of understand, but holding onto his power seems impossible. To me, the plan is pretty doomed, so I figured I missed something. Sorry. That’s all I got.”

Justin swallowed hard. He was still trying to catch up to Valentine’s discourse, but he hadn’t found a glaring flaw with Valentine’s reasoning yet. Perhaps that’s what surprised him so much? How could Valentine, the poster child for the “talented but not living up to his potential” slacker/hacker/pervert/gamer have just rattled off a cohesive explanation of the doom they faced? It was no crazier than any of the ideas they had been discussing so far. And it even summed up the same flaw that everyone had been mulling, believing that Ashe’s plan was broken even if it worked. Could Valentine possibly be right?

The other scientists murmured amongst themselves. Nobody was crying out for Valentine’s head. Nobody was barking about how crazy that explanation was. Unfathomably, in the company of distinguished professors and professional scientific minds, Valentine had somehow just thrown a knee-buckling curveball right into the strike zone. It didn’t seem possible that the weird things they had all been discussing had come down to this insane scenario. And yet, here they all were discussing the insane as if it were the apple that bonked Isaac Newton on his noggin, and now they had to validate gravity. Two scientists had alterations to offer, two others were ready to support the theory as is. One thing everyone agreed on was the inescapable issue that regardless of the validity of anyone’s theory, nobody still knew the precise location of Ashe’s dimensional gate. The only geographical clue about the source was that it seemed to be in Arizona, somewhere around the Grand Canyon, a pretty massive area.

Meanwhile, Justin hadn’t been paying attention to the scientists’ debate over Valentine’s hypothesis. Though Justin’s mind was spinning, it was also calculating. Cogs turning other cogs and flywheels. He had been close to epiphany earlier and it had slipped away. Now, whatever had been teasing his mind was coming back. Slowly creeping thoughts and ideas snuck up on one another, rolling around in his head until they were a ball of something substantive. The conversation around him was background noise. He was deep inside his mind, hearing nothing anyone said except his own desperate inner voice trying to explain what was rumbling around in his brain. The voice was just not making sense. Too many words, no structure. Then it seemed to change to a simpler solution. It said one word. The word repeated. It became a chant. One word to sum up his missing piece to the grand puzzle.

Egyptians.

Justin was expecting a revelation. Instead, he got some random geography.

Really? That’s all you got, brain?

Egyptians.

Need more, brain.

Egyptians. Pharaohs. Sphinx. Pyramids.

The last several words were mashed together at the same time, but for some reason, Justin caught the gist of each one. He was about to sigh and curse his brain for babbling on about ancient Egypt like a travel agent pushing a cultural holiday. Then he suddenly got it. All the things that had been toying with his memory were highlighted like a neon marker.

The Colorado River; the Grand Canyon; an intersection of an ancient earth thousands of years younger; a rift hole that was big enough to travel through. These previously jumbled up thoughts were coming together as a strange hypothesis.

The first poke at Justin’s subconscious came from the mention of Valentine’s TV show on Dr. Bar. On that same channel, Justin had watched a TV show on an old mystery about a turn of the century explorer claiming he found ancient Egyptian relics in a cave on the Colorado River gorge in the Grand Canyon. At the time, the hypothesis seemed silly. Just another baseless controversy to spawn ridiculous TV fodder. But now? If there was a real bridge to an ancient, alternate earth located in the Grand Canyon, why couldn’t the explorer have been telling the truth? Ancient Egyptians. They had really been here. Nobody had believed it. The evidence was debunked, the hypothesis was preposterous. How could ancient Egyptians have wound up in a cave in Arizona? And even allowing for that insane notion, why had they not moved on, spread out, and settled a town? Only a heap of handcrafted artifacts that resembled Egyptian work were left as testament to their supposed existence. And the artifacts had been officially deemed a fraud. But – what if they weren’t? As stupid as it might sound, it was suddenly not only a valid explanation but the only explanation.

“Holy shit!” said Justin.

“What?” said Valentine and Bill in tandem.

“Egyptians!” said Justin.

Now it was everyone else’s turn to be argumentative with Justin. They replied with confused glances to each other, then pinched their faces to express concern without words.

Doug decided to poke Justin. “Perhaps you’d care to elaborate on that, uh, hypothesis?”

“Huh? Oh, yeah,” said Justin with sudden enthusiasm and near glee. “Like a century ago, someone found a cache of ancient Egyptian artifacts in a cave in the Grand Canyon. Nobody knew what to think. Some of them got tested, some got taken to museum basements. Then later, a bunch of people stole the rest, and some got sold. Sebastian’s brother even checked out one of the sellers. A bunch now are forgeries.”

“Riveting,” said Doug. “Can we get to the point?”

“Getting there. The artifacts were tested and found to be frauds. They were carved by hand, and not bad craftsmanship, the style was just a departure from the known designs of ancient Egypt. The carved rock ones they couldn’t date, but they did notice that the rock was the same kind of rock from the Grand Canyon. That wasn’t even the big thing. The big thing was the pottery. They were less than three hundred years old. All of them, roughly the same date. Definitely not ancient, and not made in Egypt. Seemed like a fraud, right? At best, a bunch of old Indians or settlers making facsimiles.”

Doug sighed loudly and hung his head.

“That’s rude, bro,” said Valentine to Doug. To Justin, he whispered, “You going somewhere, dude?”

Justin nearly laughed. “You were drunk and asleep when it was on. Couple years ago, same channel as your show about Dr. Bar.”

Valentine’s brows flew up. “No shit?”

Justin nodded. “I was half asleep, myself. Barely cared. It sounded stupid. But Marcellus took a trip there not that long ago. Told me about it. It jogged my memory. I just couldn’t wrap my head around it then. But I think I got it now.”

“And you’ll share it with us before we die?” said Doug.

Unfazed, Justin continued, “The cave was supposedly found in the Marble Canyon area, in Arizona. And that’s the general area everyone thinks Ashe’s network source is.”

Doug was also unfazed. “So?”

“Don’t you see? Even if there was a bunch of Indians making copycat Egyptian trinkets, how the hell would they even know what they looked like? No photographs back then. Indians didn’t have any reference of Middle Eastern art. What were they copying from?”

“Ok, so it’s weird. I’ll agree to that. But…” Doug wasn’t able to finish his sentence.

“But it wasn’t Indians. It wasn’t Vikings or Mongolians. And it wasn’t a fraud either. What if they were created by actual Egyptians? Real ancient Egyptians. The only thing is they weren’t actually in ancient Egypt anymore. Or in ancient times anymore.”

Doug blinked slowly and mashed his lips together. It was an expression somewhere between annoyed and bored.

Justin plowed on. “And they didn’t sail over here. They walked. Right through a hole in a dimensional wall. The same hole we’re talking about here.”

Doug wasn’t immediately respectful hearing Justin’s other shoe drop, but he did, at least, force his professional façade back. Bill’s jaw slipped open and he straightened up.

Justin addressed Bill. “You said similar worlds aren’t next to each other. At least, not in a similar timeline. But a few thousand years could make a difference, maybe, right?”

“Uh, well – of course, I don’t – um, it’s a possibility,” stammered Bill.

“Right. A possibility. Like all the other crazy stuff we’re running with. So, the other earth is thousands of years older, but that’s not when the Egyptians came here in our timeline. Had to have been more recent. So maybe a few hundred years ago they came through, who knows why, and got stuck. They made the best of it and died here.”

Valentine came to life like he just remembered a hot girl’s phone number. “Damn, dude. I think I remember hearing something about that cave. But…” Valentine went pale and hung his head. “Uh, I remember it being thoroughly searched. Crazy conspiracy people have made treks to that area. Nobody’s ever found anything like – you know, a gate to another world.”

“Of course not,” said Justin.