Gate of the Gods: Book 5 of The Windows of Heaven

by K. G. Powderly Jr.

  I broke free of the sensation when Stavenger spoke. “Dr. Isaiah, meet Dr. Hobbes, our archaeologist and anthropologist.”

  The odd little Yeti-man straightened up and offered me his hand. “Ah, the Information Theory guy. I hope you haven’t been dragged out to this God-forsaken place for nothing. I keep telling them the whole thing’s a clever hoax, but they keep paying me anyway.”

  Stavenger smiled. “Doctor Hobbes, let’s not prejudice our new arrival before he’s had a chance to make his own observations.”

  “Have it your way, Stavenger. If you don’t mind, I’d like to bow out of your little theater, and continue my survey of the Device.”

  “I’m sorry Dr. Hobbes, but we need the whole investigative team present. Norby has sharpened up the resolution and audio, and managed to pull further data from the damaged portion of the main crystal. There may be something for you to see this time.”

  Hobbes scowled. “Hmph—like pyramids of Styrofoam blocks and gizmos made in ‘ancient’ Taipei?”

  “Perhaps,” Stavenger said as he ushered us into the next bubble.

  I pushed through the hanging plastic divider strips after Hobbes, and found myself surrounded by jury-rigged computer hardware. A mess of flash drives and open-screen notepads covered every usable surface, rendering the idea of us being inside a cleanroom an oxymoron. A froggish young man clattered across the grated floor on a rolling lab chair. Thick coke-bottle glasses magnified his watery eyes. His toothy smile still dripped with some half-chewed salad green as he shot up to offer me a sweaty hand that should have been gloved, according to any clean-room protocol I’d ever heard of.

  Stavenger barely had time to introduce us. “Dr. Isaiah, this is Norby Skorbner, our computer specialist on loan from MIT.”

  “Ben Isaiah, I gutta tell you, it sure is an honor to meet you!” A fleck of what I hoped was un-chewed spinach flew from Norby’s teeth, landing on my bunny-suit boot. “I’ve practically memorized your SETI symposium paper! I think we gut the real deal here. Wait’ll you see it!”

  My smile nearly cracked as I shook his hand.

  “Let’s allow Dr. Isaiah to form his own conclusions, Norby.”

  “Yes, Dad. Now, if everyone can listen up, I’ve got it all set up to link into this screen over here.” Norby rattled his chair over to a large flat LCD monitor.

  Stavenger asked, “Where’s Dr. Chandragupta?”

  “Here,” said a heavily East Indian accented voice. A petite dark-faced young woman of medium build slid past me, into one of the lab chairs.

  “Dr. Isaiah, this is Dr. Vrishti Chandragupta, our physicist.”

  The woman stood up again. “I’m sorry, Doctor, I wasn’t aware you had arrived. Bunny-suits have a way of dehumanizing us so.”

  I smiled. “No problem. I’ve read your work on String Theory, found it elegant and clearly stated.”

  “Thank you.” Her teeth seemed whiter than the bunny-suit when she returned my smile. “And I yours on the nature of information. We must talk later.”

  I could not help noticing that she wore no wedding ring underneath her translucent latex glove. “I look forward to it.”

  “Can we run the program now?” Norby demanded.

  Stavenger said, “Proceed, Mr. Skorbner.”

  Norby handed out packets of plastic-sealed papers to each of us. “This package details how I was able to establish a translation matrix from the crystal’s quadratic code to a binary graphics program. It’s way tech, so read it on your own to save us all time. Some of you have already seen the raw graphic in an earlier version. This one’s cleaned-up and contains more footage. I’ve been able to adjust the tinting enough to determine that the colors you are about to see are within a percentage point of the actual color scheme at the time the recording was made.”

  Norby hit the play button with his mouse, and then brought the picture to an instant pause.

  A woman’s face appeared on the screen—a woman unlike any I had ever seen. She seemed somehow both ageless and young, with only the faintest wisps of silver in parts of her flowing, multicolored hair. Her unusually large eyes were a brighter green than I might have thought humanly possible—almost iridescent. Except for Norby’s word, I would have figured them fake or graphically enhanced in some way. I could have easily believed those eyes capable of staring right through a man’s soul.

  Her face had strange markings—what I first took to be tattooed spirals of leopard spots emerging from the center of her forehead, where a small cluster sat above the bridge of her nose. Closer examination made me wonder if the markings were not natural pigmentation, however. They were bilaterally symmetrical, but not perfectly so. Darker than her pale background complexion, the spots were well within the human skin pigmentation range. The shape of her head also seemed odd, yet elegant, larger proportionally to her body than usual for an adult, yet in a way that suggested no hydrocephalic or any other abnormal condition.

  “Look at her,” Norby said, as if he had a schoolboy crush on the Woman. “Say what you want, but she is not from this world.”

  Hobbes mumbled, “She’s straight from Planet Hollywood.”

  Chandragupta took them both to task. “It would not be the first time science was confronted with evidence that essentially modern humans are much older than previously believed. She may be an extinct racial phenotype—like the Neanderthals are. Sunken cities exist off the coasts of India and now Japan. Let us not presuppose that we know what we have no way to know yet. Our concept of prehistory is expanding in ways nobody could have predicted even ten years ago.”

  Norby un-paused the image as if he performed an act of devotion.

  Behind the woman, an unadorned block wall with a darkened, stone-rimmed doorway flickered in an orange light. She was outdoors, but the sky was not visible. It may have been sunset.

  Her voice carried a musical lilt even more enchanting than her face. A low rumble came through in the background, but I could not tell if it was an audio distortion or a noise the woman actually had to speak over. Her language was strange to me, but as I listened, I thought I heard certain nuanced sounds and consonant structures that suggested something familiar, too. “E’a pyr-rha goym khuvatam tzin neteru ut tiamtui nu se atuma rae…”

  The vague sense of familiarity grew, but not enough to place it.

  The Woman’s eyes captivated me across the gulf of time. “…anetur pan-duuraa ki epimeetui san…”

  A terrible sadness took hold of her; as if she pleaded across the ages for me to remember something hopelessly lost. I needed time to hear her words, her inflections, to determine… Names! I thought I heard names!

  “Sua enki’idu ta…

  “Pause the image,” I said.

  Norby mashed on the mouse.

  “I thought I heard familiar words—maybe names. Some seemed like they might be in an Indo-European tongue, others Semitic—possibly early Akkadian, and still others Sumerian, but the syntax is from none of these language groups. Play it again.”

  Norby replayed the sequence.

  The words seemed clearer. “Pyrrha!” I said. I listened again to make sure, before I said the rest. “Pan-duuraa—that could easily be Pandora, of Pandora’s Box fame. There’s also Enkidu, from the Epic of Gilgamesh.”

  “Wonderful!” Hobbes clapped. “Shall we call in Lara Croft, Tomb Raider, or perhaps the Stargate Atlantis team? She could be babbling anything! How can any language maintain even scraps of coherence for five million years? And even if it did, the etymology of those names would only make sense in the different languages they developed in.”

  I almost ignored him, but could not resist popping his bubble. “That assumes that the names are the product of the languages. It might be the other way around. Haven’t you heard of linguistic archaeology? Words, especially names and major worldview concept terms, often take on their meaning from the significance of the actions of key people during notable events. Each language has embedded in it the layers of history, encount
ers with other cultures, and shifting belief systems of the people that spoke it.”

  Chandragupta said, “I have heard of this. The Gypsies were traced back to their origins in India this way.”

  I smiled. “It’s also why Judas is an unpopular name for newborn babies—the name means ‘praise,’ but the significance of what one particular Judas did in history shifted its meaning so that it now carries the connotation of ‘betrayal’ in the West. Concept words like pan—for ‘all’—and dorea, which is Greek for ‘gift,’ may have come from earlier languages in a time when the human race was much smaller and more centrally located.”

  Hobbes snorted. “An Atlantean mother tongue? Oh please!”

  Stavenger said, “Bunny trails, people. Doctor Isaiah, did you hear any other possible names?”

  “Yes. Epimeetui, could be a form of Epimethius—one of the ancient Greek titans of Hesiod’s Theogeny. Hobbes could be right, though. Aside from the date question, that name should only make sense in Greek—I don’t think I can believably make a case that all Ionic prepositions came from an earlier mother tongue, though some may have.”

  Vrishti—I hoped soon to know Dr. Chandragupta on a first-name basis—said, “What do the names mean etymologically?”

  “Epimethius means hindsight; epi is a prefix for upon or above, in this sense, to see around and behind. But there are other familiar fragments also—as if this language dumped syllabic bits and pieces from several ancient tongues as linguistic building blocks into a bin, and reassembled them again along some totally unknown syntax structure. Neteru is the ancient Egyptian plural for mighty ones or gods, and atuma rae sounds like the early Egyptian sun god Atum Re. There are also Sanskrit-like syllables.”

  Hobbes was now in hysterics. “Syllables? Quick! We’d better get hold of von Daniken and tell him we’ve found his ancient astronauts!”

  Stavenger said, “Hobbes, can it! Are you sure, Dr. Isaiah?”

  I said, “We know all that we know of ancient languages from points far downstream from the Woman—down multiple streams, in fact. My building block analogy might easily have everything in reverse because of where we observe and hear language from.”

  Dr. Chandragupta asked, “Which language?”

  “All of them. I’m talking about language itself, as a construct of the human mind. Some linguistic neuropsychologists have a theory that language may be to the human mind something akin to what an operating system is to a computer—though that’s an oversimplification of their position. I’ll have to listen to the rest of the recording, but I find it odd that forms resembling these names from particularly the Greek mythology—names that are directly related to each other in the myths themselves—should be discernible.”

  “I never studied myth,” Stavenger said. “How are they related?”

  “On the Sumerian end, Enkidu was the wild man that Gilgamesh tamed with the help of a willing temple prostitute’s seduction. His name means ‘Child of Enki.’ Enki was the God of Earth and the Under-world—en being Sumerian for lord or god, and ki being their word for earth. On the Greek side, Pyrrha was the daughter of Epimethius and Pandora. Epimethius was brother of Prometheus, the titan that stole fire from the gods and gave it to humanity—his name means foresight.

  “Epimethius was tasked with the creation of man, and Prometheus was to oversee his work. Zeus sent Pandora—her name means all-gifts—to the brothers, with a box that Zeus commanded her never to open. He wanted her to ensnare them because of Prometheus’ rebellion. She gave in to curiosity, and opened the box. Out of it flew misfortunes that multiplied in such ways that she could no longer easily close the lid. The Greeks inherited many of their earliest myths from the Phoenicians and Phrygians, who got them from Mesopotamian sources. No one knows where they came from before that.”

  Hobbes shook his head. “From outer space, Isaiah—tell him, Norby. Tell him how the woman talks to you in your dreams. Tell him about her space ship, and how she wants to have your children!”

  Skorbner glared at Hobbes.

  I felt like a guest at some dysfunctional family reunion.

  I spoke softly. “Please play it again, Norby—all the way through.”

  We watched ten minutes of the Woman’s monologue; followed by a montage of other images of people and places recorded by the device. I could have easily believed, with Norby, that some of those places existed on another planet. The skies in several of the landscape frames were a peculiar gold, and some natural colors were off. The other people, however, seemed completely human—except for the aged ones, who had much heavier brow ridges than normal. I tried to identify names the Woman might be speaking when each of the other people appeared. I recognized only one: Iya-petui, which might be another name from Hesiod: Iyapetus. Then it hit me.

  “Mr. Stavenger, I think you may have spoken too soon when you said this device has nothing to do with the Bible—at least in part.”

  “How so?”

  “I’m not making any claims here, but I didn’t mention how the Pandora myth ends. It is also a key element of the Gilgamesh Epic.”

  “How do they end?”

  I did not feel like answering, not with Hobbes’ tufted brows arched my way. “The Greek myth has Zeus, angry about the evils from opening Pandora’s Box, and with the men made by Epimethius, sending a flood to destroy the world. Prometheus warns Pandora’s daughter, Pyrrha and her husband Deucalion, and puts them inside a giant box where they float above the waters. The Gilgamesh Epic has the hero visit the land of Dilmun, where he meets Utanapishtim—one of the Sumero-Babylonian ‘Noahs.’”

  Chandragupta said, “Many say that Genesis borrowed from Sumerian mythology. You don’t seem to think that, though, do you?”

  I blushed and hardly needed to imagine what Hobbes must have thought now. “More likely they both had some common sources. The woman also said ‘Iya-petui,’ which sounds like the Iyapetus in Hesiod’s Theogeny—the Greek counterpart of Japheth. It shows up in Celtic myth, and as Jupiter in Thracian, Etruscan, and later Roman legends. While characters in Greek mythology have little other direct similarity to the Hebrew, Japheth was a son of Noah—the one said to have fathered Greek, Celtic, Roman, Indus Valley, Thracian, and Germanic peoples in the Genesis ‘Table of Nations.’”

  We all turned in silence to the screen and its strange woman with the musical voice. As I stared into her deep eyes, I grew determined to hear her message, and discover what had become of her and her people.

  If I had known then where that would lead me, I would have checked myself into the nearest mental hospital. Either way, her musical voice and large green eyes would haunt me.

  They were but the beginning of nightmares.

  The hero secretly was not happy with these promises. Where he stood, he darkened and yellowed like a flood-storm. He contemplated great deeds and inwardly he was rebellious. He uttered a word which has no…[missing fragment] …The hero Ninurta set his sights on the whole world. He told no one and inwardly did not…[missing fragment]

  — “Ninurta and Enki,” Segment B, Lines 25-30

  Ancient Sumerian cuneiform tablet

  1

  Eridu

  1

  The Beast howled in the creeping marshland mists, its footfall thumping the river clay like a drumbeat crescendo toward hungry madness. The orange late afternoon sun cast menacing fingers of light and shadow that writhed through the upper foliage like the gnarled, grasping hands of a blind ghost.

  Old Qe’Nani knew the tammabukku dragon had caught his scent—that its spring-trap jaws would snap him up any second. He scrambled for the low bluff overlooking the river bend, while panic screamed that it was too far away, the clinging brush, too thick. Lugal Nimurta’s hunting hounds bayed wildly in the distance through the low palm trees, but Qe’Nani doubted they could reach him in time, and dared not cry out even if they could. Leaving a scent trail was one thing, announcing your exact position was nothing short of calling the dragon to dinner.

 
Qe’Nani’s foot struck an exposed root, tumbling him into darkness just as he heard the Beast break through the last clump of reeds behind him.

  His eyes took a moment to adjust to the sandy hollow beneath two huge stones, both of which doubtless washed down from distant highlands during Tiamatu’s last death throes. Something smooth, hard, and curiously flat lay under his fingers.

  Outside, the Beast’s titanic bird-like legs stomped before the stones, as it snuffed after its vanished prey in hot, volcanic puffs.

  Qe’Nani’s hands squirmed around his body in the cramped space to feel up and down the flat surface. Though water-worn, the object had glassy polished patches that contained tiny etched marks in rows too orderly to be anything but manmade. He bunched one arm up against his side and brushed the sand away to look at this strange thing.

  The Beast heard his shuffle, and bellowed, butting its head against one of the boulders above. Dirt fell onto Qe’Nani’s back, but he barely noticed the motion of the great rock that threatened to crush him. He only distantly heard the hounds surrounding their quarry, and the shouts from Nimurta’s hunting team as they engaged the dragon.

  Although Qe’Nani could barely read ancient phonetic, ideo-glyphs, or their current impression-rune counterparts, he could not take his eyes from the stone prism’s mysterious writing, almost worn away by erosion.

  Only when a loud thump hit the ground, and the fading light suddenly dimmed from something huge covering the tiny cave’s opening, did he remember where he was.

  “Lugal Nimurta, rescue your servant! I’m trapped in a hole beneath the Beast! I have found a mystic stone thing of the Ancients!”

  It took some time for Nimurta’s hunters to drag the gigantic tammabukku carcass from the cave’s mouth. As they worked, Qe’Nani’s meager word-hoard could decipher only two of the stone’s many symbols.

  One was a city name—possibly Erdu, Irdu, or Eridu; he could not tell which because the vowel marks were few and of a strange form. But even he knew that city names rendered in hieroglyphics were given in semi-phonetic form—‘Nani was glad, perhaps for the first time, that his father had forced him to learn to read enough for him not to be a total illiterate! The other symbol was the clan glyph for the House of Enukki—a glyph known even to the most illiterate slave of Khana’Ani’s spawn—which Qe’Nani almost was, since his mother was the Cursed One’s twin sister.