“True, but your analysis of Bosch’s style is impeccable. And! And, add to that, for the first time we can understand the Voynichese language.”
“The dictionary and the grammar are good, but the transcribed text makes little sense,” she regretfully retorted.
“Oh, allow me to disagree! The sentences make sense; it’s just what they tell us may be too incomprehensible. But so was Bosch’s art, if you ask me. I’d play it to his overactive imagination.” For a few seconds the friends eyed the reproduction of the Garden of Earthly Delights that decorated the wall above Anika’s bunk. Incomprehensible - that’s the word that suited Bosch’s work the best. A triptych that used to be considered a depiction of Earth, heaven, and hell on three wooden boards was filled with creatures that could only be produced by a mad bioengineer or the fictional Dr. Frankenstein. Even more bizarre were the buildings on the painting. Various spheres that resembled spacecrafts, spheres floating on the water, towers resembling maybe even power stations. In any event, these structures departed from anything in the Dutch architectural or painting traditions.
“Alright. Bosch was an eccentric man; nobody can argue against it. But who is the author of the language?” Anika persisted.
“Bosch. He made it up,” matter-of-factly pointed Broner.
“Wrong. This is where the problem comes in. The language is too complex, the grammar is way beyond any human language, or machine language for that matter. To come up with a language of such complexity Bosch would have to possess our level of technology. I mean quantum computing, Broner. We are talking about the Middle Ages here! At that point, they hadn’t invented a microscope yet.”
“Something definitely happened in the Middle Ages. It’s as if overnight humanity made a quantum leap…”
Quantum leap did not come close to describing what had Anika uncovered in what she believed was a childhood diary of the scandalously famous fifteenth-century painter, Hieronymus Bosch. This diary, the infamous Voynich Manuscript, whose authorship was lost in history, had tormented curious minds for almost a millennium. Nobody could decipher the text, and whoever tried, had tarnished their career beyond repair. Anika hugged her cohort mate and insisted on some rest before her big day. Broner begrudgingly had to agree, realizing that his plans to ask Anika out once again were poorly timed.
When Broner had left, Anika took a steamy shower, draped herself in an oversized shirt, and lay in her bed staring at the ceiling, unable to stop thinking about the upcoming presentation. Sleepless, she propped herself up in bed, pulled up a 3D rendering of the ancient book and started flipping through the pages. Spread by spread, she eyed the all-too-familiar yellowed and stained pages with cryptic, but nearly perfect handwriting of an unknown origin, starkly contrasted with primitive drawings of mysterious herbs and flowers. She photographically memorized each stain and each curve of the letter, as anyone on the Fourth would. Genetically enhanced memory was a mandatory pre-birth alteration for each citizen of this human colony.
But it was not the memory about the book she was looking for this time; it was the feel of it. Like so many cryptographers and linguists before her, she wanted to get into the author’s mind. What made him write this book? Was he mad? Was he writing a fantasy tale? Was he afraid of persecution from the church? Each and every one of these hypotheses could be valid, if not only for one thing. A man in the fifteenth century could not possibly have single-handedly created a whole coherent language of this complexity. Let alone a teenage boy. Another problem nestled in the content of the writing itself. How was she going to explain to the panel tomorrow that in the fifteenth century Bosch was writing about galaxies, quantum phenomena, neurons, and genetic experiments? Most certainly the panel would come to the conclusion that her process of decoding was contaminated with modern terminology.
It must have been, because there was no reasonable explanation otherwise. The board would ask Anika one question, and it would be over. Did she limit the linguistic pool of words for cross-references to the words that only reasonably could have existed in the fifteenth century? Why, yes, she would respond. And then she would say that that strategy spectacularly failed. That was why she decided to go against common sense and include the linguistic data all the way through to the present day. All the words for cutting-edge technology, abstract concepts, astronomy, science; all the words that no way could have existed in fifteenth-century Europe, were fed into Anika’s gargantuan analytical program. Initiating the analysis, she forgot about it for two months, waiting until the data was processed. One morning she received a ping on her MOD - the analysis was complete. Without much enthusiasm, Anika opened the results, preparing for another round of analysis, but apparently she had succeeded. She ran the analysis for the second time, to be sure, but the result was identical.
Without a doubt, she had translated the Voynich Manuscript. Anika knew that there were probably only two explanations. And among the two, the logical one was that her translation method was contaminated. As for the second one, Bosch had to be a time traveler.
YEAR 1463.
S-HERTOGENBOSCH CITY, NETHERLANDS
It was Jeroen’s thirteenth birthday. That morning he firmly decided that he should put childish things behind him and behave like the man of the family. It was a fine day, the fields of wheat looked like a silky Persian rug, with intricate ornaments from red poppies and white chamomile flowers tucked into the threads. It would be past lunchtime when Jeroen arrived at the next village where his grandma lived. Mom sent him with a message and a gift of a fresh loaf of bread and a head of cheese, which were tormenting Jeroen with delicious smells emitted from his canvas bag. In order to distract himself, Jeroen continued to make the list of grown-up things he should do, among which most definitely was getting married. This last one was difficult. Who should he marry?
His older cousin Greta scared him to the bones, especially when her bread wouldn’t rise or a cat would walk the cleaned floor with muddy paws, or, or… pretty much all the time. Greta was probably out of the question. On the other hand, Silvia was always nice to him. She lived a little distance from his family, but she loved to visit his mom on Sundays after morning church. There was one problem. Silvia was a widow, and she was old. Jeroen reckoned she must be twenty by now, and he was wondering how much longer she would live. The last thing he wanted was to be widowed with children. Children scared Jeroen as well. They were fragile, smelled bad, and had a tendency to die. Like his youngest brother, for example. Last winter, Anri was born and did not stay around for too long. Mom said that he was born with a soul too big for this world, and God took him to heaven. Jeroen suspected that Anri was born with too small of a body for this world. Jeroen watched his father tenderly nurse that baby at night when mom was exhausted, but the baby kept crying. They tried everything: poppy sleeping potion, mixed beer with milk, even called the doctor from the big city, but nothing helped.
Anri was not made well enough to last. Thoughts about grown-up responsibilities made Jeroen hungry, and he crawled into the tall wheat grasses, opened the canvas bag, and pinched a small piece of the side of the bread. The bread was so fresh it was a shame to eat it. He just wanted to smell it and look at it, studying the patterns the white flour created on the dark brown crust. Then he said a quick praise to the Lord and threw a piece of the bread in his mouth. Stretched on the cool ground, he looked at the intricate shapes of the clouds in the blue sky. They looked like exotic animals and cities and so many other things whose purpose he could not even begin to imagine. So he retrieved a leather-bound parchment notebook from his canvas bag, and a canvas scroll with a nib, a feather, a few brushes, and a few small vials with the pigment powders - yellow ochre, azure, cayenne, and viridian green. This was Jeroen’s first adult treasure - a gift from grandpa, a known painter in the city. Grandpa said that if Jeroen worked hard and practiced, he would someday take his place in the art shop that had been in the family for generations. The book and pa
ints were not to be treated carelessly, explained grandpa. They were worth a small fortune: grandpa spent his entire commission from the mayor’s wife, who ordered a portrait of her two young girls.
Jeroen wanted to draw the clouds in the sky, but remembering the words of grandpa, he laid his gifts on the ground and lovingly caressed them one by one, until he committed each detail to his memory. Then he smelled the animal skin on the cover of the notebook. He took a deep indulgent breath and held it for as long as he could, and then placed all the treasures back into his canvas bag. It was time to continue his journey. Suddenly, a thick shadow rolled over him, and Jeroen thought it was a rain cloud. He lifted his gaze to the sky, but instead of a rain cloud he saw something that he could barely put to words - a glass sphere hung in the air right above him. And then a ray of light fell straight on him, as if someone had lit thousands of candles inside the sphere. Fear penetrated Jeroen’s body, as the light enveloped him and lifted his body from the ground. He grabbed the canvas bag, as his feet were lifted from the ground.
Jeroen realized that it was God taking him to heaven. Instantly he regretted that his grown-up list of things would never be fulfilled, and that he probably would have to take care of little Anri, who God had taken to heaven earlier. That made everything even worse. “God! If you will, please don’t take me yet!” cried Jeroen as the wheat fields turned into a wash of color beneath him. But God had different plans. In an instant Jeroen was whisked away so fast that he lost consciousness.
YEAR 2274.
FOURTH ORBITAL
Anika stood in front of a panel of distinguished linguists, who had assembled for her doctorate presentation. The white overhead lights were blinding. A holographic emitter displayed a rendering of the Voynich Manuscript next to the rendering of the Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymus Bosch. The panel did not look particularly enthusiastic. It was an ad hoc meeting - academia was known for its love of schedules. However, Anika’s curator, Professor Mirtu, insisted that her finding deserved to bend some rules.
“Whenever you are ready, colleague,” dryly suggested the chair of the panel, the dean of the college of cyber-cryptology. The room was large, but there was no one in the audience. The decision was made to not alert the public to the matter just yet, in case the announcement of the Voynich’s translation turned out to be another hoax. Anika looked outside the panoramic window. There, in the vast darkness of space, she could see a glimpse of the Earth - a rare and coveted view on the orbital station. Centuries ago, Earth had been called a blue planet. Now it was more or less white, ever since the Big Ice had covered 80 percent of its surface due to the misguided attempt at reversing the effects of global warming.
There, buried under the ice, lay Europe, a once sophisticated and cultured continent that had given birth to Renaissance and rock-n-roll, and, among other things, to a profound linguistic enigma - the Voynich Manuscript. Over the centuries of researching the origins of this book, the trace had led to numerous owners in the Middle Ages, but its Italian origin was rarely disputed. Anika was going to challenge that assumption as well. See, she did not doubt that the diary was discovered in Italy. She challenged that it was created there. Her careful research had led to an unlikely suspect for the author of the manuscript—a scandalous Dutch artist Hieronymous Bosch. How the manuscript had made its way from the Netherlands to Italy she had no idea, and probably this would remain a mystery forever. What she knew was that the author of it was Bosch, just as she what was written in the manuscript.
Seeing her student’s hesitation, Professor Mirtu stepped in. “Colleagues, let me introduce Anika’s research. I call for your open-mindedness in the matter, because it is not every day that we get a shot at solving the world’s best kept secret. Let me introduce doctoral candidate Anika Borgess. I personally reviewed her application two years ago. Her ability to write truly intuitive code is legendary among the doctorate cohort, as is her passion for art and mystery. You may be assured that Anika is an exemplary citizen of the Fourth and an academic of global proportions.” Mirtu’s complements made Anika blush. Obviously hearing such unapologetic praise would make anyone blush, but there was more to Anika’s shyness.
A part of her doubted that she could be worthy of such high praise as an exemplary Fourther, because deep in her heart she harbored one renegade thought - someday she wanted to walk on Earth. It had been two decades since the Fourth had permanently suspended any interpersonal contact between the planet-siders and other orbital colonies. The reasons were too many, but they meant that Anika would never be able to participate in an archaeological dig on Earth, or swim in the ocean of the surviving tropical zone. There, on Earth, lay the clues to so many mysteries of the past, but they would be forever shielded from her reach unless she dared one day to break ties with the Fourth.
YEAR 1463.
LENAURI
Jeroen woke up in a dark cold room, trying to remember what had happened to him. He was walking to see grandma in the near village. He took a break and rested in the wheat field. It was going to rain. The clouds rolled in. And then, the painful memory came back to him. Those were not rainy clouds that had darkened the sky. It was God’s wrath. Poor Jeroen was stricken to the core, realizing that if it that was God who had taken him, he must have ended up in hell. “Why, God, why hell? What did I do? Was it because I lied last Christmas about eating the roast? I am sorry, Lord! Please forgive me, I want to go to heaven. I promise I’ll take a good care of little Anri…”
Jeroen cried hysterically and hammered on the wall. All of a sudden, he realized that someone else was in the room. A small person in the corner got up from the bare floor and slowly moved towards him, speaking in a foreign language: “Andrà tutto bene. Non piangere.”
Jeroen had no idea what the person was saying, but the voice was so soft and comforting, he immediately stopped sobbing and tried to catch a glimpse of the person’s face. The person was a boy of his age. Blond curls adorned his pretty face.
“Sorry, boy, I don’t understand what are you saying.”
“Andrà tutto bene. Andrà tutto bene. Il mio nome è Leo,” said the boy, pressing his hand to his chest. “Come ti chiami?” This time the boy pressed his hand to Jeroen’s chest.
“My name is Jeroen,” he understood.
“Mi piace. Bello,” smiled Leo.
“I wish you could tell me, Leo, what is going on. Are we in hell?”
This time Leo shrugged his shoulders and bitterly smiled. “Lo non ti capisco.”
“I known you don’t understand me. I don’t understand you either. We need to find someone who we can talk to.” Leo gave Jeroen the same confused look. Then he glanced at the canvas bag by Jeroen’s side. “Ah, this? This is my birthday gift. I turned thirteen today. It’s from my grandpa. What am I talking to you, I’ll just show it all.” Jeroen dragged out all the treasured possessions from his bag and laid them on the floor. Leo smacked his forehead as if remembering something important.
”Perdonami amico,” and with these words he returned to the corner where he came from and came back with a thin stick, like the handle of an artist’s brush. It was smooth and silvery. Excitedly Leo demonstrated the stick to Jeroen who failed to realize what was so exciting about it. Then Leo lightly tapped it on the inside of his palm, and the stick emitted white light, just slightly brighter than that of a candle.
“Oh, you’ve got a candle! That’s nice. I’d like to know what your candle is made of. Maybe someday you can tell me.”
“Hai pane!” replied Leo, pointing at the loaf of bread in his bag.
“Oh, you want some? I can share. I think under these circumstances grandma wouldn’t mind.”
***
A year later, Jeroen and Leo were the best of friends. They still didn’t speak each other’s native languages, but they fluently spoke the language of their captors - the Unkari.
“What are you writing in there?�
� asked Leo, looking over Jeroen’s shoulder. For the past few months, Jeroen had filled half of the notebook that he received as a gift the day before his abduction.
“These are some of the plants I saw on this planet. I am making notes so that when I return home, I have a proof of where I have been.”
Leo bitterly smiled at the thought of explaining to his family about planets, aliens, and space travels.
“They will think you are crazy, my friend.”
“They may. But I will show them the notes!”
“Jeroen, you are writing in the language that they will not understand.” This had not occurred to Jeroen before. When he had left his home, he still couldn’t read or write. Jeroen was a sickly child, and could not walk for miles every day to school like other kids of his age. When he turned thirteen, his parents probably felt more confident that he would live and that spending money on his education would not be a waste. That year, grandpa was about to send him to school, but the Unkari had intervened in those plans.
“What do you think they will be doing to us today?” asked Leo. “Oh Lord, you never know. Yesterday they were filling my head with knowledge about space. They hooked me up to this weird-looking hat knit of lit up threads. I felt so sick afterwards.”
“But we are learning amazing things. They are saying we are special, the chosen ones, from whom our entire species will evolve.”
“That’s a big responsibility, Leo. I don’t know if I am ready for it. It means having babies of our own. I’m not too good with babies.”
“I know what you mean,” sadly agreed Leo, but kept the true reason for his sadness to himself. To him, it was not the babies themselves that presented a problem. It was the women that were involved in the process of making babies. Prior to the abduction, Leo had given no thought to women. That sort of thing did not interest him in the slightest. When he had first arrived on Lenauri, he had been placed in a reservation of women. Apparently the Unkari had been taking people from their homes for a long time now. Many generations of humans had been born in captivity, and had no knowledge of the way humans lived on Earth. The first day of his abduction, Leo had been placed in a big camp, where thousands of women lived separately from the men. Occasionally they were taken to the breeding rooms and mated with the men chosen by the captors. Then they returned to their camp and raised children until the Unkari decided that it was time to separate them.
329 Years Awake Page 4
