22nd May
Helen, Angela, Jenny and I stood looking at Starcruiser One while Starcruiser Two hovered about three metres in the air behind us.
Helen adjusted her mobile to put the conversation with Amy on loudspeaker. ‘What can you tell us about the condition of Starcruiser One, Amy?’ Helen asked.
‘The structure of the craft is damaged but is reparable with the on-board nanotechnology.’
‘Do you mean it will fix itself?’ I said.
‘In approximately ten hours,’ Amy replied.
‘Can we fly it after that?’ asked Helen.
‘It can be flown after that,’ Amy replied, ‘but only by designated pilots. This is for the same reason that you could not re-designate pilots for Starcruiser Two.’
‘Is there any way around that?’ asked Jenny.
‘I could overwrite the pilot interface program for Starcruiser One with that of Starcruiser Two.’
‘So both ships would be you,’ I said to Amy.
‘In a sense,’ Amy replied. ‘The pilot interface of Starcruiser One is currently referred to as Wendy. That would remain the same. The problem would be in relation to pilots.’
‘You mean that only I could fly it?’ said Helen.
‘You and Mr. Leadbetter.’
Helen paused to think. ‘Can you bury Starcruiser One while the repairs are occurring please, Amy?’
We watched as the surface of Starcruiser One began to vibrate, emitting a high frequency tone. This caused the sand underneath the craft to act as if it were a liquid.
It slowly sank into the desert.
‘We need to talk to Joan,’ said Helen, climbing the steps back into Starcruiser Two.
Angela, Jenny and I followed.
~*~*~*~*~
The arrival of Starcruiser One had deflected the attention of us all away from our vigil – awaiting the sign, the harbinger, which had been predicted for today in the ancient texts.
Had we waited all day, however, we would have been disappointed.
Because the ancients based so much of their cultures and beliefs on the patterns and movements of the stars, there is a tendency to believe that that their astronomy was quite sophisticated. In reality, however, they simply noted patterns in space and time, created structures to register these and invented myths to interpret and interrelate them.
They were certainly expecting the harbinger to appear on the twenty-second of May. They had assumed, however, that because it had been observed by them at Gobekli Tepe, it would subsequently be visible there.
In fact, the seventeen metre wide meteor exploded shortly after two in the afternoon local time – twenty five kilometres up in the air above Hawaii.