They Who from the Heavens Came (The Wisdom, #1)

Quetzal was hiding something. Horace could sense it. It was in the way he avoided eye contact when he was forced to answer one of Horace’s questions. It was in the nervousness that had sprung up in his movements, his hands not quite as steady as they passed over that black cube of his. Since when was Quetzal nervous? What would Director Charon think if she could see her precious favourite now?

‘Where did they go?’ Quetzal demanded. He turned around in a circle as if perhaps the Halflings were standing behind him. He looked stricken, like the very laws of nature had been inverted and everyone else had been told, except him.

‘Why would I know?’ asked Horace.

He had arrived on the scene after they had already left, in response to Quetzal’s distress call. He had assumed anything that merited calling him back would be something important. Now that he was there, though, Horace wasn’t so sure. Maybe Quetzal was losing his mind. Too much Earth air, perhaps.

‘It just doesn’t make sense,’ Quetzal went on speaking, more to himself than to his companion. ‘I tell you, they were right there.’ He pointed to the memory of Itzy’s front doorstep. He stamped his foot, creating a clamour of metal buckles slamming against their catches. ‘Then they started walking,’ he continued his narrative. He walked too, enacting what he had witnessed. ‘They reached this field, and then –’ He struck one of his hands against the other to indicate that they had vanished.

‘They have powers,’ Horace reminded him, unable to keep the disgust out of his voice. ‘Perhaps they’ve mastered invisibility, too.’

‘Not possible,’ Quetzal said. His voice was breathy and unstable. ‘None of this is possible.’ Horace wondered if Quetzal thought he could make this true by saying it enough times.

But Horace could understand his disbelief. This wasn’t what they’d expected when they’d descended to Earth. It was unheard of for Halflings to have such magic in them. They lacked the mental discipline. They didn’t believe in their own power.

At least, they hadn’t the last time he’d seen their kind. He had been the servant of a great Egyptian pharaoh. Horace was old enough to remember when Egypt was not a desert, but was covered in water, replenished by regular rainfall that swept down the flanks of the Sphinx. He was old enough to remember the Sphinx’s first face. And he was old enough to know why it had been built.

He had left Earth because of the Halflings. He’d never approved of their creation. That was how he thought of it, not as a natural evolution but a mutation that never should have happened. He couldn’t understand what had attracted so many Ancients to the humans, who were weak and smelled so strongly of death.

And now Quetzal seemed enamoured with a Halfling himself. It wasn’t right.

While Quetzal had been busy stalking the girl, Horace, cloaked in magical disguise, had taken the opportunity to seek out the local library. It had turned out to be a grey industrial-looking block that might have been the least likely building ever constructed to inspire learning. Horace had once been to the great library at Alexandria, before it was burned to the ground. That had been inspiring. Like Quetzal, he mourned the future that could have been.

The modern library had been populated by only a smattering of people, something Horace took as a sign of dwindling human intelligence. On the other hand, he’d been relieved there weren’t more of them, for even the few who were there had stood dangerously close to him. He had inched himself away, as if their human condition were catching.

Horace had found a table where he could be alone and then sat for hours reading through what history books he could find. He wasn’t pleased with his discoveries. For instance, the humans had turned his people into a myth, relegated to the realms of fantasy. No one, it seemed, believed in them any longer. Any reference to Nibiru could only be found in off-beat publications, evidently not regarded as ‘real science’.

As Quetzal continued to pace around the field, searching for clues, tracks perhaps, Horace mused out loud, ‘If we were to reveal ourselves for what we are…do you think the humans would be able to see us?’

Quetzal knelt on the grass to examine one of the blades. He glanced intermittently at his ubiquitous cube. ‘We’re not invisible right now,’ he answered absently, not catching Horace’s point. ‘They would know we were here.’

‘No,’ said Horace. ‘I mean, would they see us for what we really are? Or would it be beyond their comprehension?’ He knelt beside his companion. ‘I was reading something today,’ he went on. ‘It was about a race of people who came after you. The Aztecs. There’s a country not far from here known as Spain, and five Earth centuries ago fleets of Spaniards sailed over the ocean on great ships and landed in what they now refer to as Central America. The Spanish conquered the Aztec peoples and annihilated their empire.’

‘Nations change hands every day,’ Quetzal muttered. His eyes were still trained on the blade of grass, as though it were vital to the structure of the universe.

‘Yes,’ Horace agreed, ‘but that wasn’t what was so interesting.’ He drew closer to his companion and inspected the grass himself. There was nothing special about it, as far as he could tell. ‘You see, when the ships appeared on the horizon, the Aztecs didn’t see them.’

He paused to let this information sink in.

At last, Quetzal lifted his head to meet Horace’s eyes with interest. ‘You mean they physically couldn’t see them, don’t you?’

Horace nodded slowly. ‘The human brain selectively blocks out information it can’t process. If you have no frame of reference for something –’

‘You don’t know it exists,’ Quetzal finished for him. Then, in a dry voice, he asked, ‘What makes you think that’s restricted to humans?’ He glanced meaningfully at the grass, as if that too held something to be seen, if the eyes were so trained.

Horace lowered his head, as if conceding a point, though he didn’t agree with Quetzal’s suggestion. When he raised his head once more, he said, ‘I ask you again: would the humans be able to see us? Or would we look like something else, something they could understand? Or would we not be there at all?’

Quetzal considered the question. ‘I don’t think they’d know we were there,’ he decided. ‘It’s not an idea that’s unfamiliar to me. I’ve often wondered how much of the universe we miss through our own limited understanding. It’s true we know more than humans, for the simple fact that we’ve lived longer and travelled further. But we’re all united in forgetting the Wisdom.’

Horace ripped the grass out of Quetzal’s hand angrily. ‘I’ve had enough of your Wisdom,’ he snarled. ‘We found our target, and yet you’re chasing this Halfling as if she were buried treasure – all in the name of something you happen to believe in, but I’m not so certain it exists.’

Quetzal was irritatingly calm about this. He lifted one of his golden hands and placed it heavily on Horace’s hard shoulder. ‘That,’ he said gravely, ‘is precisely why we’re dying. Because of the uncertainty. The moment you stop believing in something, the harder it is to realise it. It’s simple logic.’

Horace shook himself free and rose to his feet. He looked down at Quetzal and said, ‘That implies faith is what keeps things alive.’

Quetzal smiled and stood too. ‘It doesn’t just imply it. That’s the most fundamental law of existence.’ He returned his attention to the cube. His eyes widened. ‘I think they’re going to reappear,’ he announced.

‘Shall I cheer now or later?’ said Horace. He felt weary of his own sarcasm.

‘They wouldn’t hear you anyway,’ Quetzal said. He turned the cube in his hands and held two of his fingers just millimetres away from it, for a long time. ‘I’ve ported us into a dimensional bubble, so we may observe them, but they won’t know we’re here. A little like what they’ve done. Only I still can’t fathom how they managed it. I’ve only done it by copying the energy traces they left behind in doing it first.’ His initial shock and horror at this fact had now left his voice, leaving only awe.

Alarmingly, Quetzal seemed to admire the Halflings. Had they really fallen to this point?

‘Quetzal!’ Horace commanded fiercely. ‘You are more than this. You’ve seen more than these children could even dream about. You predate all their reachable history. They didn’t even start time until after you left them. How can one Earth girl have changed you so much?’

Quetzal seemed to draw all the strength he could from whatever reserves rested inside his vast chest. ‘She’s not one Earth girl,’ he said. ‘She’s more. I don’t know why, but…I’m the scientist. I wouldn’t pursue this if it didn’t carry import. You must trust me on that.’

Horace’s slit eyes elongated. He glowered at the other giant. ‘I mustn’t anything. Our task was to find the boy, and we accomplished that. But you seem to have changed the mission.’ He put up his hands. ‘I don’t think you care about the boy at all, now. And I didn’t get pulled down here for that. I don’t care that the Halflings have changed. There’s not a part of me that’s interested in studying this. I came in my capacity as a warrior.’

Quetzal looked at him for a long, long time, as if trying to decide what to do with this speech. At last, he said, ‘Then go.’

Horace’s mouth fell open. ‘What did you say?’

‘Go,’ Quetzal told him once more, this time more firmly. ‘You’re right. You don’t understand why this is so important, and if I tried to explain, you wouldn’t listen. So go. Leave me be.’

Horace hadn’t expected to be dismissed this way. He had thought Quetzal might see reason, see how he was behaving and check himself. But he was determined to pursue this Halfling as though she were a new religion. That was Quetzal’s faith: quirks of nature, waiting to be studied and explained.

Well, fine. If that was how Quetzal was going to be, maybe Horace would call his bluff and go.

Without saying goodbye, Horace turned on his booted heel and walked heavily away. He waited for Quetzal to call him back, but that never happened. Instead, he felt himself being released from the dimensional bubble Quetzal had placed around them.

The final tie between them had been cut.

It couldn’t go on like this, Horace decided as he picked up speed. When a Halfling got the best of a man like Quetzal – a man whom Horace had always begrudgingly admired – things were very wrong indeed.

He had to show them. He had to teach these Earthlings the truth, make them see what was out there. He couldn’t allow them to forget the Ancients, the race who had taught them everything they knew. All their astronomy, their science, their philosophy, their rites, their old stories – they had all been gifts from the Ancients. But they didn’t believe it. They gave themselves the credit, as if humanity had ever been able to achieve such greatness on their own.

But he would make them remember.