Dura

Part 5

At the end of the hallway, there was a door that led into a room of greater importance than the other rooms. There was some text next to the door. I couldn't tell if the characters were phonetic or logographic, but at least they didn't look like hieroglyphs. One of the women pressed a button in the middle of the door. It didn't make any sound but was probably some sort of doorbell. While we waited for the door to open, a faint alarm could be heard from somewhere nearby – probably outside – and one minute later the building began to shake a little. I looked at Alex who looked back at me, but it didn't seem to faze the Neanderthals.

The door opened automatically. We were pushed inside the room. It was big, just like everything else. A black carpet – the skin of some animal – covered the floor and a heavy desk stood in front of us. Behind it, another woman was sitting. Unlike the others, she didn't cover her face. Her hair was red and her eyes were blue. She wore something similar to a jumpsuit, not black but light gray.

She inhaled the smoke of a wooden pipe, rather than from one of those cigarettes, and as she exhaled I could smell that she was smoking a mix of tobacco and marijuana.

Behind her, there was a large window, but nothing but darkness could be seen outside. There were no electric lights, which meant we weren't in a city. Perhaps, I thought, they didn't even have cities.

The women who brought us here placed their batons at the fold of our knees, giving us an electric shock so that we fell in front of the massive desk. Alex yelled out in pain but didn't look as scared as I was. My body trembled with fear. The woman sitting behind the desk got up from her chair and walked over to us. They spoke over our heads while we remained silent. They wouldn't understand us anyway.

"They won't harm us," Alex said. "We're too valuable for them."

"I don't want to be locked up in a laboratory!" I said.

"We will find a way—" Alex began, but was interrupted by the woman that seemed to be in charge.

She gestured toward us in a way that made it clear she wanted us to stand up. Alex got up, but for some reason, I couldn't move. One of the women grabbed my arm and more or less lifted me up on my feet in one swift moment. Their commander, or whatever she was to them, said something. The context didn't allow us to figure out what it was, other than maybe a question.

She led us to one of the walls. Between two bookshelves – filled with what looked like screw bound books – there was a world map. At first glance, it didn't look like Earth. Alex took a hesitant step forward and when the woman didn't seem to mind I did too.

"I don't get it," I said, way too stressed to think clearly.

The woman said something to us again, but this time it sounded more like a command. She probably wanted to know where we came from. Alex put his finger on the map.

"This is Africa," he said.

It wasn't until he said that that I saw it. The map had a completely different orientation. Firstly, it was a south-up map, meaning upside down from our perspective, secondly it was a little bit off-center – putting central Europe right in the middle – and thirdly the sizes of the landmasses were displayed a bit differently.

Since we couldn't explain where we came from, Alex tried to give the woman the location of our species origin instead. By the look of her face, she didn't seem to believe us. Still, she let us study the map while she studied us.

"Look," Alex said. "There are no borders."

"They don't have countries," I said. "But what about these... these pictograms?" Small black skulls, displayed from the side, was spread all over the map. Dotted circles of different sizes surrounded them. "Are they some kind of dead zones?"

"You're anthropomorphizing... I don't think they symbolize death here, but rather themselves. Maybe they're cities or some kind of city-states. And look there..." He pointed at what would have been Russia in our world. "Those skulls are red, and... Wow. They're different, you see?"

"What does it mean? Are you suggesting..." I asked.

"Denisovans! It makes sense if you think about it. With a smaller population, the Neanderthals never drove the other hominid species to extinction. This is unreal." Alex's fascination overshadowed all of his fear. "Look, there's a red line going alongside the Ural Mountains and behind it, the Denisovans live."

"All the way to Australia," I said.

"But look here," Alex said without listening to me. He placed his finger at Indonesia. "This blue region... The skulls there are different too. Can you see it?"

"Homo floresiensis," I whispered.

"You bet!"

The black skulls, the Neanderthals, dominated Europe, Africa and most of the New World, while the Denisovans seemed to rule Asia (and some parts of the west side of South America) together with the small area dominated by Homo floresiensis. The ice caps were, as expected, larger than in our world but it didn't seem to prevent the Neanderthals from living close to the North Pole. They even had cities in Greenland, although their total amount of cities was smaller than the amount in most countries in our world.

The woman, watching us carefully while we inspected the map, took a puff of her pipe and blew the smoke in our faces, then she returned to her desk and picked up what looked like a mouthpiece and made a call with the device it was connected to. She spoke aggressively to the person at the other end of the call.

The alarm from outside that we had heard earlier – sounding like a mechanical Swedish cowhorn – came back again. This time it sounded louder, probably because we stood so close to a window. The woman didn't seem to care about it, but she raised her voice a little to compensate for the noise. Some electric lights turned on outside, but they didn't reveal much. About a minute or two later, huge flames erupted a couple of hundred meters away, and a few seconds later a rumble reached us.

"A rocket!" Alex exclaimed.

We couldn't see the body of it in the darkness, but the flame beneath it indicated a launch.

"The question is," I said, "is it headed for space or the Denisovans?"