Lord of All Things (37 page)

From at least 130 thousand years ago.

Charlotte had been able to establish that the hole expanded on the inward side of the skull—typical of bullet entry wounds—and that even in its fossilized state the bone showed the characteristic network of fracture lines radiating out from the hole itself. Furthermore—and this was something the published photographs usually did not show—a large part of the skull was missing on the opposite side. This wasn’t unusual for a skull find; since skulls are hollow and are often found buried in stone, it was almost inevitable that the bone would be further crushed at some point after death. But at several points along the edge of this larger hole, Charlotte had spotted marks that would make any criminologist swear on the stand that this skull had been broken open
from the inside
. For instance, by a projectile exiting at high speed, taking a mass of mangled brain tissue along with it. A gunshot wound, in other words.

It was impossible to publish such findings in a reputable academic journal. And this was just one of several dozen finds she had cast doubt upon in the last few years. Of course, she had used her own particular talent to help her examinations, but it had never served as a substitute for proof. At most, she used it to get pointers as to what she should be looking for next. But no matter what she found, no matter how carefully she framed her arguments, she couldn’t get a foot in the door in the academic world. Which was why she had ended up at this conference, where she needed no more qualifications than “Charlotte Malroux, student of paleoanthropology at Harvard.”

She stopped in front of a bulletin board showing the day’s events. Perhaps she should go listen to another lecture. That would keep her mind occupied until her own session. She noticed that a Prof. Diego Fernando Andrade, from Ecuador, was giving a lecture that day. Charlotte had chatted with him briefly at the speakers’ reception on the first evening. Prof. Andrade was a prim, fussy old gentleman who taught at the Pontifical Catholic University of Ecuador in Quito and was visibly taken aback by the more colorful side of the conference. He wasn’t used to this sort of thing, he told her. He also told her what he would be lecturing on: a set of pre-Columbian ceramic artifacts that were held in the Museum of Quito and which had been a headache for historians for years. They were small figurines, each of which seemed to be wearing a space suit. The trouble was that these figures were at least twelve hundred years old and must have been made well before anyone on Earth had ever seen a space suit. Some of the sculptures were featured on the official program for the conference, and they did indeed look like designs taken from the latest science-fiction movie.

He told her the theory that the figurines were linked to folk legends considerably older than the artifacts themselves. He was most put out by the way his lecture had been announced. The casual reader got the misleading impression he would be advancing claims that mankind had not only been visited by aliens in the dim and distant past but also had been caught up in some kind of galactic war.

He sighed. “I can only hope nobody back home will ever see the program,” he said. “My superiors would not approve in the least. We have all taken an oath to teach nothing that contradicts the Catholic faith.”

Charlotte was still undecided as she went down the broad staircase to the main hall. What if Prof. Andrade turned out to be such a wonderful speaker that she ended up with an inferiority complex? That couldn’t be ruled out; after all, the man had been through seminary, and the Jesuits were well-known for their public-speaking skills. Perhaps she’d do better just to sneak off to the cafeteria and nurse a large latte macchiato. Or maybe she should lock herself in the restroom.

Standing by the door to the lecture hall was a hideous plaster cast that had been in the entrance lobby up until now. Someone had moved it. It was a cast of a stele from Guatemala showing a weird fire-breathing monster that also seemed to be wearing a space suit. The audience was already beginning to stream into the hall, visibly excited about what they might learn. Charlotte had to stop for a moment and take a deep breath. Did she really want to do this? She looked at the label and read the inscription. “El Baúl Stele, copy of the original at Santa Luc
í
a Cozumalhuapa, Guatemala, probably Mayan.”

“So what do you think?” asked a voice next to her. “Did fire-breathing beasties wage war against mankind?”

Charlotte spun round. “Hiroshi!”

There he was. Standing there chatting to her as though it hadn’t been six years since they’d last seen each other.

“Hello, Charlotte,” he said. His eyes lit up. He looked good, really good. Lean, in a simple white linen suit with an achingly cool pair of sunglasses perched on his nose.

Charlotte shook her head in amazement. “That’s just…I mean really, this is some surprise. What in the world are you doing here?”

He raised an eyebrow and rubbed the side of his nose with his thumb. “Just between you and me, I give this group a little money. So I thought I’d drop by and see what they do with it all.”

“You sponsor this event?” She knew he had made money. Brenda had once saved a newspaper article about young inventors for her, part of which had been about Hiroshi Kato and the successful company he had founded in California.

He nodded briefly. “Yes. I do that kind of thing from time to time. I’ve also given some money to the Science Heritage Foundation, and before that I supported the Explorer Travel Trust.”

It took Charlotte a moment to understand what he was saying: he didn’t sponsor these organizations, he’d been sponsoring her! The ETT at Harvard had given her a grant for her first trips to examine the finds she wanted to look at. Once someone in the trust had read her reports, however, they declined any further grants on the grounds her work was not compatible with the basic principles of Harvard research. After that the Science Heritage Foundation had financed her research for a while, but then they had raised their own doubts about her academic conduct and cut her support.

Hiroshi smiled. Evidently, he could see that she had understood. “I’m also funding SETI,” he added. “For Rodney’s sake. I have to do something with all the money.”

“You could come and listen to my lecture,” Charlotte suggested. “That way at least I’d have one person in the audience.”

“If you’re okay with that,” Hiroshi said. “In fact, it’s the other reason I came.”

After the lecture—which went much better than she had feared, drawing a bigger crowd than she’d expected, and leading to an interesting discussion—they just had time for a glass of wine in the cafeteria before Hiroshi caught his flight that evening.

“It was a good lecture,” he said. “You should write a book on the subject.”

“Oh Lord!” she groaned. “Everybody says that.”

“I’m not surprised.”

Write a book. Easier said than done. She had started to take a few notes and to rework her academic articles, given that the specialist journals hadn’t taken much interest in them, but she still wasn’t sure. She didn’t want to make the same mistake she had had to point out in so many of her fellow researchers: she didn’t want to jump to any conclusions without having considered all possible alternatives. She didn’t want to follow the obvious implications blindly, and she felt the danger of doing so was much greater when writing a book, putting down her thoughts in black and white for all time. It was different in a lecture or a discussion, when she could tell by people’s reactions whether she had made herself clear. It gave her the chance to rephrase things if need be. Even the chance to change her mind.

She looked down into her glass of disappointing white wine. “So you’ve been following what I’ve been doing all these years,” she stated.

“From time to time,” he said evasively.

“And you? What have you been up to?”

“I imagine you can probably guess.”

She looked at him. Yes, she could quite easily guess. “You’re still working on your project. You never give up.”

He glanced around as though worried they might be overheard, then leaned toward her and said in a conspiratorial tone, “I’m just about to crack it. Just about to. It’s merely a matter of decades.”

“Decades!”

“Well, perhaps centuries.”

She couldn’t help but laugh. “Is it really as bad as all that?”

“It’s like I’m a donkey with a carrot dangling in front of my nose.” He lifted his hand and brought his finger and thumb close together, less than a quarter of an inch apart. “So close. Just beyond reach.” He sighed and put his hand down. “It gets frustrating sometimes.”

She took a sip of her wine and then put it down, determined to leave the rest undrunk. Sour wine they made hereabouts. “Whatever happened to the machine you made back then? The complex?”

He leaned back in his chair. “Well, that’s an odd story. We struck camp and shipped everything off, but by the time the ship got back to Hong Kong the crate with the complex in it had vanished.”

“Somebody stole it, then.”

“That’s the official version at least.” He smiled ever so slightly. “Although some people claim in all seriousness that the complex still had a program running. Supposedly, it turned the crate into sawdust and then jumped into the sea…”

She grinned as well. “The things people say.”

“Crazy, isn’t it?” Then he turned serious again. “Anyway, it’s just as well it went missing. Otherwise, the Chinese military might have found some way to weaponize it. It’s always easier to build weapons than to make something constructive. Destruction is fundamentally easier after all.”

“Besides,” Charlotte added, “you wouldn’t want anyone building on your research and possibly beating you to it.”

She had clearly struck a nerve with that. “Merely a fortuitous side effect,” he spluttered, then hastily changed the subject. “Listen, come visit me if you like. I can show you some of what I’m doing.” He took a card from his pocket and passed it across to her. “Here, this is my address. It’s outside of town, up in the mountains. Quite remote. But you can ask anyone in the area how to get there; they all know the house. It used to belong to a famous country singer they’re still mighty proud of.”

“And now you live in the famous house,” Charlotte said. “All on your own.”

He looked at her without expression. “Not quite. I live with a woman.”

That gave her a pang. Of course, he had every right to…of course. She had always fended him off. She had done everything in her power to show him that he had no hope with her. Of course. All the same…

“Well that’s nice,” she said brightly, nodding and smiling, though her face had frozen into a mask. “I’m happy for you.”

When Adrian Cazar called that evening, she agreed to meet him in Boston and seriously consider his proposal that she join him on an expedition to a Russian island in the Arctic Ocean.

It was true: Hiroshi Kato lived with a woman. Her name was Patricia Steel, she came from Kentucky, she was 53 years old, and she was his housekeeper. She lived in a cozy three-room apartment in an annex and shook her head every morning when she came to work at the estate itself. The house had six bathrooms and twenty-one rooms, some of them the size of ballrooms, all with floors of tropical hardwood polished till it was almost black and enormous windows offering breathtaking views over the Cascade Mountains. And almost all of the rooms were empty. There was a bedroom the size of a small gym hall where the only item of furniture was a futon in the middle of the floor with a snow-white cover over it.

In one of the biggest halls, down a few steps from the rest of the house, a large basket chair stood on its own. Standing there on the dark, polished floor, it looked like an island in a sea of dark water. Patricia Steel’s eccentric employer would sometimes spend whole days at a time sitting there, motionless, sunk in strange seas of thought, staring out over the mountain peaks and valleys beyond the windows. She was not permitted to speak to him on those days. All she was allowed to do was bring him food and drink on a tray that she put down beside him on the floor. Often, though, it was still there the next day, untouched.

The study was not quite so empty. Five long conference tables were laid out in a huge U shape with a total of twenty-one computers lined up on them, working day and night. They made a noise like a squadron of helicopters approaching from somewhere over the horizon. Patricia Steel was not even allowed to vacuum in there (that was done instead by a little robot that looked like a large drop of mercury when there was nobody in the room) and never even went into the study anymore. Nor did Patricia Steel know there was a fully equipped laboratory in the basement. The only way in was through a secret door with a high-security dial lock, and the lab had not a single window.

Hiroshi Kato spent several days after his return from Mexico sitting in the chair. He looked out over the valley that had inspired the singer to write love songs people still sang today, but for once he was not pondering some deep problem of nanotechnology. He was pondering his own nature and motives. Why had he said that? Why had he let Charlotte think he had somebody? She was unattached at the moment, he knew that. And she had clearly been pleased to see him. She had been relaxed around him, no question. He thought of how they had strolled through the exhibition of curiosities and anomalies to fill the time until she was due to speak. Charlotte had been worrying over her lecture, so at first they simply reminisced, but she had gradually unwound and become more confident, more self-assured. She had obviously enjoyed those hours together. It would have been the perfect opportunity to let one thing lead to another, to give them another chance. Instead, he had made a mess of it all. And not even by his own stupidity—he had done it deliberately. Why? Did he still feel she was too good for him? That was nonsense. By now he was richer than her parents had ever been, and he had done it all on his own. And there was nobody around now who could tell them what not to do.

Well, it might not have worked out. Relationships were no simple matter, and he certainly didn’t have much of a track record himself. But a chance—it would have been a chance.…He hadn’t wanted to take it. That was why. He was so close to solving his riddle, so close to building his universal machine for real that he couldn’t allow any distractions. And a love affair would have been a distraction, no matter how it worked out—what a distraction. Love was always an adventure leading who knew where; he saw that all around him. He had spent so many years concentrating all his powers to one purpose alone that he was ready to sacrifice everything he had for his fated task, his one and only goal. Even in the best case, a love affair would have irreparably shattered his concentration, scattered his focus, and could easily stop him from making the decisive breakthrough. And he couldn’t risk that. Never before had one man been so close to changing the world for the better, so close to rewriting destiny, and never before had the world been in such urgent need of change. All modesty aside, it was the truth. He owed it to himself not to make a mess of this. And if loneliness was the price he had to pay, then he would have to take that burden upon himself.