Decipher, page 23
“We still use it,” Matheson added, “for measuring time. Hours, minutes, seconds. Base 60 is the perfect system for measuring fractions and proportions.” It had eleven factors. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 10, 12, 15, 20 and 30.
“Why didn’t I think of it before?” Hackett snapped. “I gotta call Richard.”
Harvey jerked his head up from the screen. “Shit!” Everyone gathered around. Numbers were amassing on the screen.
“What the hell is that?!”
“I dunno … but it’s in your crystal, Jon. Written at the atomic level.”
“Jesus Christ, I’ve really gotta call Scott,” he gasped.
But the line was busy.
BERTIE’S HOTEL ROOM 101
“Who is Thoth?”
Scott rubbed his face. Trying to wake up. There was the sound of a cigarette being lit on the other end of the line. A puff.
“Be right with you!” he said, and swung his legs out from under the warm duvet and pressed his naked feet onto the cold carpet. Slipped on a white cotton T-shirt. Licked his hand, smoothed his hair down. Picked sleep out of one eye and thumbed the video portion of the phone-call to kick in on the terminal on his bedside.
Scott didn’t really know what to expect, but finding an absolutely stunning brunette on the other end of the line, with a smile to die for, and an attitude that said: It doesn’t matter what I do, you’re still gonna fall in love with me, just wasn’t on his checklist. He swore his heart missed a beat. Felt foolish. Could she sense that over the vid-phone? He coughed and sniffed. Tried to wake up with some dignity.
She let the moment settle. “Good morning, Dr. Scott. I’m Sarah Kelsey.”
“Good morning, Miss Kelsey.” Well, she certainly appeared warmer than when they spoke earlier.
She smiled and seemed to relax a little. “I think I’d prefer it if you called me Sarah.”
“Okay, Sarah,” he said, trying to focus. “What was the question?”
Sarah smoked her cigarette. Cautious. “I got your fax—the translation of that inscription. Who is Thoth, exactly? I know he’s an Egyptian god, but I don’t have time to read a book.”
Scott shook his head. More alive now than he had been. “You got the plug out, didn’t you!”
“Among other things.”
Scott switched the bedside lamp on. Collected his thoughts and plowed on in. “Thoth,” he told her, “is the Greek name for the Egyptian god Tehuti, or Djewty. He looked like an Ibis bird, or sometimes a baboon. Thoth was the god of wisdom and learning; the keeper of the sacred archives and repository of all knowledge and creative intelligence. He was custodian of the truth. Legend has it he taught art, the sciences, arithmetic, geometry, surveying, surgery, medicine, music and writing.”
“Smart guy.”
“Well, he was a god,” Scott joked right back at her. “He was the oldest son of Ra, the sun god, and was associated with the moon and time. He could cure illness through the power of speech which he did when Horus was a child and got bitten by a scorpion. It is said he had knowledge of divine speech and knew the ‘hekau.’” Sarah frowned. “Words of Power,” Scott explained quickly. “He hatched the world egg by the sound of his voice alone.”
Sarah took another drag on her cigarette. “I see.”
He sat back on the bed. “Some of the legends might sound familiar to you because there’s a lot of stuff that was taken and put into the Bible by people who knew ancient Egyptian better than we do. The Ten Commandments come directly from the Book of the Dead, from The Purging of the Guilt. Only in that, it’s a series of confessions: ‘I have not committed murder … I am pure.’ But in the Old Testament it’s a series of orders: ‘Thou shalt not commit murder.’ It’s essentially the same stuff.”
Behind Sarah, flashlight beams were slicing up the darkness, making Scott peer forward for a better look as she asked him: “Is Thoth a solitary kinda guy? Or was he ever seen in a pairing with someone else?”
Scott thought for a moment, still intrigued by what was going on in the background. “Well, uh, he sometimes had a wife, Seshat, or Seshata, goddess of writing and history. Other texts say he had a consort, Maat, the goddess of truth. Where are you?”
“And what did they look like?”
“Maat was either a seated woman with an ostrich feather. Or just the feather itself.”
“What about the other one?”
“Seshat? She was a woman in a panther skin, with a seven-pointed star headband and bow. She was involved in the foundation ritual of ‘Stretching the Cord.’”
“Which was?”
“Beats me. Some astronomy ritual, I don’t know.” He was really distracted now. The lights were busy. He could see glints of blue, and sandstone. Tunnels and figures. “Look, I hate to—”
“That’s really odd then,” Sarah revealed. “He’s never been seen with some lion woman?”
“Never.”
“Then who the hell is this?” She shifted the camera on her end of the line and focused it on a towering statue of a lioness-headed woman, with a huge sun disk on her head.
Scott recognized instantly what he was being shown, though she wasn’t seated. She clasped a feather in one hand, a bow in the other. A reminder of Thoth’s real romantic links. But this was a new woman in his life. This was Sekhemet.
“Who?”
“That’s Sekhemet,” Scott said clearly. “Her name means ‘She who is powerful.’ She represents all that is aggressive in the female. She was the daughter of Ra, the sun god. She’s Thoth’s sister. She is war. Violence. Destruction. The goddess of demolition and renewal.”
“Must be a real party when this family gets together.”
“In tomb scenes Sekhemet is seen spitting fire, a fiery glow around her body. As the daughter of Ra she is the ‘udjaut’—‘The Eye of Ra’ literally—she represents the scorching destructive power of the sun,” he said. “But I’ve never seen her depicted like that before. Sarah, where are you?”
“Would you believe, under the Sphinx?”
“Actually,” Scott said, rubbing the back of his neck, “yes, I would.” A roar erupted on the screen coming from somewhere behind Sarah. For a moment it sounded like a chainsaw. “What the hell is that?”
“Motorbikes,” she said simply.
Headlights dipped, illuminating the rippling water. Throttles revved and pumped every so often with the flick of a wrist as the three beat-up dirt-bikes sat poised for take-off. Clemmens secured the last of the fastenings on his black crash helmet before rolling the bike off its stand. As he waited for the large box of tricks he was taking along to be fastened securely to the back, nothing could hide his impatience, especially the familiar throttle action of a man waiting at a set of red lights.
Sarah waded on over with some trepidation, careful not to trip on the irregular flooring. Up ahead, Rola Corp. employees carried out their duties in hushed astonishment. They’d found extra cabling and run lights down as their first priority, which helped Sarah as she picked her way across.
“Eric!” she called out in an effort to compete with the din. “You all set?”
Eric pulled his gloves on. Nodded. “We got a signal. Looks like a huge C60 deposit on the edge of our range.”
“What are you doing?”
Eric looked around, confused. “Who said that?”
Sarah indicated the head-mounted vid-phone she was wearing, like a pair of spectacles with the arms protruding from behind her ears, but no lenses. Two tiny bulbs at each end of the arms did the business. One projected Scott’s image directly onto the retina of Sarah’s left eye, while the other served both as a microphone and a camera, able to watch Sarah, while tracking her eye movements and zeroing in on what she was seeing as well.
“Say hello to Dr. Scott!” Sarah said. “He’s working over in Switzerland!”
He leaned in close to Sarah’s face and waved. “Hello!” he cried.
Sarah rang her ear out. “Eric!”
“Oh, sorry.”
“Are you sure riding motorcycles up the inside of those tunnels is a good idea?” Scott inquired. “Those are ancient structures. They might be weakened. All it takes is one slab of limestone falling on your head and that’ll end your trip real quick.”
“He’ll be careful,” Sarah said, watching Clemmens’s tired red eyes and knowing that natural enthusiasm had its limits. “Won’t you?”
Clemmens mapped out his plan, having to shout over the din of the engine. “We looked at the data again. This tunnel follows the natural curvature of the earth. Our natural horizon on flat ground is 11 to 11.5 miles.”
“So you think the tunnel continues on past the radar data?”
“That’s about the size of it. If we get to the eleven-mile marker and get a reading of another eleven miles dead ahead, then we know we’re dealing with one hell of a tunnel!”
“If that’s the case,” Scott advised, “the ground is going to dip out from under the tunnel. There are hills, and there are valleys. At some point you should find the tunnel opening out to the surface.”
“That’s what we figured too,” Clemmens agreed.
He checked his equipment and pulled his visor down. Gave Sarah a nod and eased the throttle out. With a roar he led the other two bikes off into the darkness, bumping unceremoniously over the alternating limestone ridges and splashing up water.
Sarah watched them go, watched their lights grow smaller as the bikes plowed on. All the while she saw those lights she knew they were safe. She turned her attention back to Scott, who appeared eager to learn more about what she was up to. “You got a pencil and paper ready?”
The epigraphist looked inquisitive, like a little boy lost. He was idealistic and innocent in many ways, this Richard Scott character, but by the same token he had an underlying maleness. He was the type of guy you fell in love with at college, then shat upon, for a moment of wow with some worthless toad. He was the type of guy Sarah always regretted not dedicating more time and effort to.
“You might want to start taking notes,” she suggested thoughtfully.
“Woah, woah, woah! Back up! Back up!” Scott yelped, realizing a little belatedly that it was going to penetrate deep into Sarah’s ear.
She was making her way along the edge of the walls of the tunnel, where the interconnecting spirals of limestone and Carbon 60 were covered in hieroglyphs. She ran the camera along the glyphs as slowly as possible, but still it was too fast for Scott at times.
“This is incredible,” he gasped. “It’s like finding the Rosetta Stone all over again!”
“What does it say?”
He scribbled frantically with a pencil. “I have absolutely no idea,” he admitted. “This isn’t like picking up a newspaper for me. I’ve been dealing with Aramaic for the past two years and I’m gonna need to doublecheck some phrases. The Egyptian stuff, at any rate.”
“Is it a translation of what’s written in this other language?”
“Could be. Hey, stop, stop, stop! Right there!”
“Where?”
“Just—just stay where you are. Okay. That’s good. Give me a moment to jot it down—”
Suddenly the connecting bedroom door burst wide open and November Dryden marched in, looking resentful. Dressed in a long cotton night-shirt, she carried a vid-phone, similar to Scott’s, over to his table and dumped it next to the other one.
“Did I wake you?” he asked sheepishly.
“No,” November growled. “He woke me.” She flipped the vid-phone on and the anxious face of Jon Hackett popped onto the screen. His expression lit up when he saw Scott on the line.
“Richard, Richard! I’ve been trying to call you—”
“I’ve been busy.”
“I can see. I can tell. We’ve all been very, uh, busy.”
“Hello?” It was Sarah, Scott realized, on the end of the other vid-phone. She’d moved. Damn.
“I was just trying to write that down!”
“You can do it later,” Sarah said impatiently. “We got it all on video. I’ll upload it to you. Is that the Amazon team on the other line?” she asked innocently.
Scott was caught for a moment, genuinely puzzled, while Hackett started conferring with the others on his end of the line. There was genuine bafflement. “Sarah, I’m sorry,” Scott said. “Did you say there’s a team in the Amazon too?”
Sarah smirked, as if to say, “that old trick.” “I’m sorry,” Scott said earnestly, “I have absolutely no idea what you’re talking about. This is the first I’ve heard of this, and frankly I’m annoyed.”
She could hear someone else in the background demanding to know about this other site. Scott never flinched, never gave that customary tell-tale sign she was used to seeing from men like Thorne.
Not quite sure what to do, Sarah was on the move. “We need to talk,” she murmured.
Hackett tapped his camera for attention. Scott looked to November. She was always good in these sorts of situations. “Do you have any idea how to connect everyone up into a conference call?”
November rolled her eyes. Like that was the dumbest thing she’d ever heard. “Of course,” she said, and began to fiddle with the equipment.
Sarah stopped in her tracks. She had to steady herself as the image on her retina changed. “What’s going on?” she demanded. “Goddamn, I wish you’d given me some warning.”
Floating translucently at eye-level now, right in front of her were two images. Richard Scott in a hotel bedroom, and a darker guy, with curling lips.
“Well, hello again,” the darker guy said smoothly, oozing overwhelming charm. “This is a pleasant surprise.” His voice had a little reverb to it. A by-product of the conference call.
“For you maybe,” Sarah replied, checking her position a few short steps away from the rise up to the chamber that housed the tools and megalithic crystal. But she had no desire to go there just yet. Carefully, patiently, always alert to the possibility she may have been led into a loyalty trap, Sarah explained what she knew about the Amazon, about China, and about seismic activity.
What she didn’t expect was to find unity in her thesis, with the physicist.
“So it is possible,” Sarah reiterated, “the sun’s been pulsing out gravity waves for years?”
“It’s not only possible,” Hackett warned, “it’s the likeliest scenario. Gravity-wave detection is a totally new science. It demands refinement. I’m sure gravity-wave detectors a hundred years from now will be like our communications are to valve-operated wirelesses a hundred years ago.”
“If there’ll even be a hundred years from now.” Hackett didn’t comment. “So how big would a detector need to be to measure tiny gravity waves? Would, say, the size of a planet be about right?”
“At least. The earth’s the greatest measuring tool we have for studying its effects.”
“Have you heard of an oscillation phenomenon known as the Tesla Effect?” Hackett thought for a moment. Yes, he had. “I have earthquake data which may tell us how long this has been building up here on earth,” Sarah revealed, solemnly explaining about all five ancient sites being the focus for the low-frequency seismic waves. “I think it gives a pretty accurate picture,” she said.
“Of what?” Scott asked, finally managing to get a word back into the conversation.
“Of how much time we really have left,” Sarah said flatly.
Hackett was back in the NMRS lab at CERN. Matheson and Pearce were close by, poring over the raw data that was being pumped into their workstation direct from the light computer center. The other chemists had gathered around to watch while Hackett shifted in his chair to accommodate them, all the while doing his best not to gawk at Sarah.
Matheson sketched out what he’d been told on a scrap of paper, and didn’t like what he saw. He looked around, snapped his fingers. “Anybody here got a globe?” No reply. “An orange?” Somebody loaned him a lemon. Matheson didn’t like to ask, just went to work with a magic marker and sketched on a map of the world over its surface. Then marked in the five sites with thick black dots. There was a definite geodesic design. He showed it to Pearce.
“Richard, you asked me before, what is the use of quantum mechanics? Well, this is it,” Hackett said to Scott in the meantime. “This is what quantum mechanics just did for us. Unlocked quantum cryptography. Code. Language. Information. Encoded at the atomic scale. It’s all right here. I’ve found it! Written in base 60 mathematics, within the Carbon 60 crystals.”
“You’re telling me there’s computer code? Etched into the crystal?”
Matheson leaned and hi-jacked the call. “A whole lot of it,” he said, holding up the fruit for all to see. “I really gotta get a globe,” he complained.
Scott jerked his eyes off the screen. Was this some kind of sick joke? The only linguist on the team and when two pieces of the puzzle had just surfaced—he wasn’t within arm’s reach of studying either of them?
“Sarah? Did you hear that?”
“Yeah. Hold on, will ya?”
Scott looked to November for a reality check. Were things moving fast, or what? He went back to the phones. “Jon, can you give me more—Jon … ?” But Hackett was looking at something off screen. Off screen meant the other screen. Sarah. She was climbing up into some sort of room and—
Hackett saw it first. “That’s one hell of a paperweight.”
There were packing crates littered around the chamber, wooden and sturdy. Reference numbers were daubed on the sides with stencils and black paint. Straw filled each container, making them appear rustic and somehow out of place. In each one were being placed the hand-sized artifacts that once sat in the alcoves dotted along the walls. Lids were hammered into place with severe blows.
Sarah checked one of the containers, picking up one of the artifacts, which was like a tool of some kind. Untried and untested. She checked the documentation that went with it, trying to drown out for a moment the excited scientists on the other end of the line.
“What was that?” Hackett was saying.
“I don’t know. I can’t see. She keeps looking at those—things. What are they?”
“It doesn’t matter,” Sarah mumbled. She checked the docket in a sealed plastic bag on the side. It was bar-coded, like a Federal Express pouch. Everything was being shipped to Texas.
