The Anomaly(41)

They nodded distantly—Gemma still tracing her fingers over the carvings; Ken standing with hands on hips, glaring at the stones as though hoping to intimidate them into confessing their purpose. I’ve seen a similar look work immediately on barmen and hotel clerks and very senior people in the film and TV industry, but the stone balls weren’t talking.

I stepped down off the ledge into the water, not bothering to be gentle about it.

“Christ, Nolan!” Gemma yelled as she took a big splash up her back.

I pushed away from the edge, deciding the hell with it and going fully under the surface. When I surfaced I tentatively licked my lips. They tasted fine. A little metallic, like mineral water—and who knows, maybe that’s what it was, sourced out of a hidden spring rather than drips from above—but perfectly drinkable.

“Come on in,” I said. “The water’s lovely.”

Ken stepped back in, and Gemma followed, and for a while we swam back and forth, silent but for quiet lapping sounds, in a pool of water a thousand feet underground.





Chapter

24



When are you going to say it?”

“Say what?”

We’d been back in the main room for a couple hours. Investigations into two of the other passages had revealed similar nondescript rooms. Pierre had now gone to scout up one of the remaining passages by himself. The rest of us were sitting in a circle. I’d taken two small mouthfuls of the remaining half of my sandwich. I’d left my water bottle alone for now, and was monitoring my guts for signs of unruliness after ingesting liquid from the pool.

“The bleeding obvious,” Ken said. “Look, Nolan. I yield to no one in my respect for the red-skinned man—both in his achievements in wiseness and his or her rights of precedence in your chaotic farce of a so-called country—but there’s no way Native Americans built this place.”

“I know.”

“So? Who did?”

Everybody looked at me. And it’s a curious thing. You think it’d be awesome to be the guy who gets to intone, “Maybe it was aliens…” You think that’d be cool, especially if you’re right there on-site, one of the people who’s discovered the evidence. But in reality it’s not something you want to say. It says all bets are off. The walls of reality come down. It’s like someone asking, “Hey—did you just hear a disconcerting sound from the cellar of this abandoned house deep in the woods?”—and having to answer: “Uh, yes. Yes I did.”

But also, as I have said countless times on camera, aliens are never the answer to any sensible question. There is nothing on Earth that can’t be explained by the actions (however surprising and anomalous) of Earthlings. If you look back through the history of the idea of extraterrestrial contact, with few exceptions it’s always proffered by an opportunist, a lunatic, a religious nut, or some magic-is-just-science evangelist one step away from a padded cell. Where once we reached for God and his angels, now we grasp for beings in spaceships. Both are merely attempts to explain that which we cannot explain, by bailing preemptively from the discussion by means of the magical other or an unverifiable deus ex machina.

“This structure does not,” I agreed carefully, “seem likely to be the work of local tribes. Even the Anasazi, who did some pretty zany stuff.”

“And so?”

“I’m wondering about the Romans.”

“The Romans? Seriously?”

“It’s not as dumb as it sounds. People have this picture in their head of America as a young place. The ‘New World.’ But it’s as old as anywhere else. It’s been here as long as Europe or Africa. It’s a contentious subject but there’s people who think there were populations here before anybody made it over the land bridge. And others have asked how the Romans could have failed to make it to North America.”

“Because it’s a long way from Rome, you tool. You’re not telling me they sailed right across the Atlantic.”

“They wouldn’t need to. They were in your neck of the woods for nearly four hundred years. Ran the place, as I recall. From the United Kingdom you can make a series of shorter hops around the top of the North Atlantic, via Iceland and Greenland and Newfoundland, each of which was well within the capabilities of the Roman navy. If they chained those together they could totally have gotten here.”

“Coulda, sure,” Gemma said. “Any evidence they did?”

“Some, perhaps. A very Roman-like sword found off Oak Island in Nova Scotia. Coin hoards here and there. It’s said the Micmac language includes maritime terms that are remarkably similar to vernacular Roman equivalents, and the tribe carries a rare DNA marker that’s been tentatively traced to the Eastern Mediterranean. And no, Gemma, I can’t point you to officially sanctioned documentation. Certainly not in the current circumstances.”

“But even if you could, even if we buy that—Nova Scotia is thousands of miles from here.”

“Right—but this is the Romans we’re talking about. The most can-do nation of all time. Their soldiers routinely marched well over twenty miles, day after day, in full armor. At that rate they could have come this far in, what—four, five months? It would have taken longer in reality, of course, because they wouldn’t have come in a straight line and would have been exploring the unknown rather than heading for somewhere in particular. But they were tough, resilient guys who knew how to live off the land and find or make everything they needed to survive—backed up with the experience of having conquered most of the known world already. These are people who brought not only food crops with them to new environments but medicinal plants, too, so they’d have their traditional remedies and salves on hand after taking the place over. They had serious colonizing game. Like a team of a hundred Rambos, without the colorful psychological issues. It’s not out of the question that an exploratory force could have made it this far.”