He glances down at the Arachna Majora Codex in front of him. Next, he leans back in his chair as if lounging on the beach and puts his hands behind his head.
“From where I come from,” Saddlebirch sneers, “this is all nothing more than an elaborate hoax! Reverse our roles and I present this to you: What would you think?”
With a self-congratulatory nod to himself, he takes in the blank faces of the other scientists. The proof from my presentation in plain view, they simply let our favorite babbling idiot continue to play the fool. No one else says a word. Curiously, Chance keeps his gaze away from the fidgeting Admiral. As I begged of him earlier, Admiral Vanderbilt is letting me handle Saddlebirch no matter how much it burns him up to do so. I feel a sly grin, forced forward by a mind eager to engage the cowboy out in the open, creep across my face. Ready to respond, but biting my tongue to keep it still, he finishes with a bang.
“You may have tricked the others, but you can’t trick me – these are fakes!”
The Admiral growls something through gritted teeth I cannot make out. His tone as deep as an abyss, I am not sure anyone else even heard it. The others ready to rip into Saddlebirch as if they are piranhas and he a clueless cow bathing in the Amazon ––
“And you are quite right for suggesting such!” I answer back cheerily. This no doubt catches the others off guard. I step to the right and start to make my way around the conference room table. “In a way, you have a very good point, Dr. Saddlebirch. You should question what I show you as well as my motivations for doing so. To be perfectly honest, I am a bit disappointed in the rest of you. Not one challenge, simply taking in what I say as truth – men of science rarely do this, am I right?” I stop at the far end of the table directly across from Admiral Vanderbilt. “Grand men of science cloaked in an illusion they can see, touch, and admire – how do we determine what is real, what is not?”
Hungrily, greedily, I watch bulging eyes gaze at the four codices and try to imagine what is going through their minds. These ancient pillars of gleaming brilliance having stuffed a bevy of explosive thoughts inside the scientists’ swelling brains, my hand halfway into my pocket….
Do I dare light the fuse?
“Three with direct knowledge of at least one codex, three with none – perhaps this other treasure can cast our deciding vote.”
I let the blood red gem with the handsome, thick necklace slip off my fingertips and onto the gleaming table. With a gentle push, the jewel glides across the table in Saddlebirch’s direction. The polished surface as smooth as ice, it bumps softly into the bottom of the vault holding the Arachna Majora Codex and is still.
“Tell me, cowboy, do you see any jewelers in this room? Take a good look. Does this appear to be a hoax?”
Saddlebirch’s face turns hard. “A big ol’ ruby on a pretty gold chain – so what? I have never seen one that big, but know they exist.”
“That is no ruby.…” Dr. Leitz gasps.
“It’s a diamond.” Dr. Ravensdale slowly rises from his chair and leans over the table for a closer look. “A red diamond easily larger than any I know of, such a diamond would be worth untold millions!” He peeks up at me and shakes his head in disbelief. “Where did you find this?”
“In the world that existed before the one we now know,” I answer dreamily, as if in a trance.
“That jewel was buried with the Sapien Codex,” the Admiral adds quickly. “Up against one of the granite walls of the vault, it could not be seen by the cameras we watched through.”
As do the others, Saddlebirch gawks at the crimson gem barely a hand away from his own. His fingers look as if they wish to grasp it, but hold back in the fear that to do so would suddenly make truthful all I have said to this point.
“Not only is this no hoax,” Alistair says breathlessly as he sits back down, “but only two conclusions can be made. Either the authors of these five codices came from around the world and settled here, beneath us, or they were here first and, for whatever reason, left and scattered about the globe. If only one, maybe two, of the codices existed, I would very much be on Dr. Saddlebirch’s side. But of what I see, I believe this is all very real.”
As if he speaks these words himself, Alfred nods the entire time. A bead of sweat now running down the side of the cowboy’s face ––
Is his frosted glare starting to melt a bit?
“I do not have all the answers, my friends, and have just as many questions as do all of you. Having poured over these four codices for countless hours, I can only tell you that they were written in three distinct languages. The Mermaid and Centaur codices share the same language, but the Arachna Majora and Gryphon ones each have their own. I have tried in vain to decipher them, but to this point, know so little. I can read what the covers tell us only because they all request the same. ‘Find our siblings’, ‘learn our secrets’ – we have done this. The Sapien Codex our last hope; could this just be some wicked taunt, or will it help us unlock a hidden door to the past?”
“I want to know,” Dr. Korzhak blurts. His starry-eyed look tells me he is just as excited as I am to translate the codices. “Please, please do what you can to discover what they say. I have faith this is real too.”
“Still … there is the matter of the ancient ice below,” Dr. Leitz ponders aloud. If Antarctica has been under an ice sheet for millions of years, do you suggest that this world we are searching for existed before then?”
I quickly recall my many philosophical discussions with Dr. Ravensdale and immediately shake my head. “No, not at all. I simply refuse to accept blindly what a few geologists say is truth, despite evidence to the contrary.”
The word ‘geologist’ spoken, Alistair springs into action. “Western Antarctica, where we are now,” he begins, “is much different than its eastern brother. The west is much younger, much more unstable. This land – this bedrock – beneath us is actually an island approximately 640 kilometers long by 320 kilometers wide. In terms of miles …” he looks to be thinking hard for a moment, “400 by 200. The massive weight of the ice sheet above the bedrock currently pushes it down into the sea about a kilometer. The ice cores do indeed suggest the ice is very old – many hundreds of thousands of years at least. However, let us remember what an ice sheet is: a moving glacier. Constantly in motion, ice cores say one thing, so close to the coast as we are, I will suggest another – the frozen ice we stand upon arrived at this point much more recently than thought.”
“Just how recently are we talkin’?” Saddlebirch’s tone still owns a mocking tilt to it, but at least he now engages the conversation with a hint of sincerity. “I mean, massive amounts of ice don’t just come and go.”
“Oh, but they very much do!” I shoot back excitedly. “They have before and can do so again! Consider the Last Glacial Maximum[8]. Ice sheets even thicker than the one below us had spread across northern Europe and North America – swallowing Canada whole. Yet here we are today; do you see ice sheets covering London? Oslo? How about Toronto or New York? In the case of the last Ice Age, those massive glaciers both came and went within a few thousand years. We know this as truth, yet accept as pure fact – untainted, undeniable – that this ice sheet here has been just as it is now for millions of years.”
“Dr. Rothschild and I have discussed this on many occasions,” Alistair breaks in. “The Last Glacial Maximum came and went within the geological blink of an eye, yet time stood still here?”
No one offers an answer so I steal the conversation back. “Another issue that is as if gospel, yet utterly ridiculous, is this fantasy many historians have in regards to history itself. Knowledge and progress of humankind as some curve that always slopes upward – I say to you all, impossible! Take a second century Roman and drop him into his home city in the 12th century – he will curse you until his end! Marbled glory and the majesty of Rome little more than ruins and filth a thousand years later – where is our upward progress now? The Necropolis at Giza, home of the Great Pyramid and from w
here the Gryphon Codex was recovered; more upward progress, yes?”
I look at them all individually and receive five firmly shaken heads. Saddlebirch’s resistance bloodied and beaten, I move in for the kill.
“Exactly, my friends. After the Egyptians built the pyramids, we should have witnessed even greater structures, yet none exist. Look around the world – we see this everywhere! For centuries, Troy was just a mythical city. Today, we have ten layers of the Trojan city built on top of itself. The Antikythera Mechanism, Baghdad batteries, giant stone balls of Costa Rica, buildings with interlocking segments in South America, need I go on? Our world stuffed with finds created hundreds of years before those in the area should have known how – these came to be because …?” I pause after asking this question just begging for an answer none of us knows.
“A great number of mysteries that have little to do with the physical exist as well,” Dr. Leitz adds excitedly. “How is it that every advanced civilization has its own flood myth similar to others half a world away? What was formerly believed to be tales both in the Bible and in other ancient works, with each passing year, we find proof that more and more ‘myths’ are indeed true history.”
As the four of us take turns speaking, Admiral Vanderbilt and Dr. Korzhak simply swivel their heads back and forth.
“Indeed. My codices, that gem and its necklace – none of this is a hoax. Those creatures we see on the covers were real and walked the ground beneath us. I do not know how, I do not know when, I just know. I can only pray that the Sapien Codex they left behind deems us worthy to tell its story in a deciphered manner we can all understand.”
Can we please stop talking and start translating!
“These words,” Saddlebirch drawls, “hope – believe – pray, for scientists, y’all seem to own a surprising amount of faith.” He speaks to us all, but looks directly at me.
“And for a learned man who has had a mountain of evidence shoved in his face,” I snap back, “you seem to own a serious lack of it.”
That he smiles – gingerly, but he does – right after I say this gives me confidence that the mush inside his thick as crystal skull is finally moving in the right direction. In turn, I smile back my appreciation. I walk toward Admiral Vanderbilt and now stand between him and Dr. Ravensdale.
“The miracle in all this is not so much what others wrote inside them,” Dr. Leitz muses, “but that the codices themselves survived. Made of gold and overlaid with precious gems, had any of them landed in anything but learned hands, who knows what their fate would have been?”
“If you really think about it,” the Admiral chimes in, “the true miracle is that none of these codices became some dead broad’s jewelry collection.”
The entire room chuckles at this. Even Chance.
“Well said, Grandfather.” I take in a deep breath. “Faith, the greatest paradox among many we meet each day, you believe what your eyes cannot see. Yet right here in front of us, our eyes do see! In less than a day, any in the past who owned a codex could have scraped off its jewels and melted down the gold. Yet none ever did. Something led the men who collected these codices to believe they owned a greater purpose than their eyes could see, could ever hope to see. Greed led such men to hide these treasures, yet each tempered his greed enough to keep them as originally molded – for just a moment, consider this! Easy to corrupt, wealth-loving men hid them. This is true, yet each believed that the codex in his care held an unknown, but near-perfect purpose.” I throw my hands into the air. “Irony bathes itself in these waters.”
Dr. Saddlebirch keeps his eyes on me as I speak. The others might be watching me as well, but for the moment, they do not concern me. Whether he realizes it or not, his gloved fingers wander along the bottom edge of the Arachna Majora Codex in front of him.
“Please, Chance, I beg of you, stop looking at the world through an analytical prism that acts as a prison for free-flowing ideas. Science learned over a lifetime is not itself wisdom, but how you apply that science is. Look around you! Fate twisting itself around destiny as if a serpent with the power to both awe and terrify – if you wish to call this faith then so be it. Our quest, our search for a great purpose is the same as the beliefs of those who ran their fingers along the codices as you do now. We care not for valuables, but invaluables.”
“It very much appears,” Saddlebirch drawls softly as he stands up, “that you wish for me to share in the faith y’all already have. Not exactly my comfort zone, if you know what I mean.” He sighs and removes his gloves. “But I want to uncover the truth as much as anyone here and will help in any way I can.”
“Well that’s a relief,” the Admiral blurts out as he pushes himself away from the table. This dripping sarcasm is as perfect as the wide smile he flashes the no longer so reluctant cowboy. “1830 hours – it’s time for dinner!”
As we shuffle out of the conference room, I motion to the four soldiers awaiting our exit. These same four had earlier delivered the codices to us.
“Each codex needs to go back into its vault,” I order. “They do not leave the CIC, of course.” Three of the four off to do this, I lean in close to Major Sinclair. “You will also find a red gem with a gold necklace. It does not leave your sight.” With a nod, he follows his fellow soldiers in one direction and I chase down my fellow scientists in the other.
*****
The cafeteria I have yet to see sits inside the largest dome, the red one. A cleverly walled off area; this cozy space hides well the large building it is a part of. A cafeteria in name only, it is really a well-appointed restaurant. Sturdy wood tables, handsome chairs, surprisingly good food; thinking of my barracks as well, I become quite cheery as I consider such comforts. Upon first seeing the Antarctic wasteland, I feared my living conditions would be little more than camping.
In an attempt to make Dr. Saddlebirch more comfortable around me, I purposely sit next to him. On purpose as well, I engage him in conversation that has nothing to do with anything important. Everyone else around us does just the opposite. Our relaxing dinner finished, the six of us begin our walk back to the CIC. Now about 2030 hours, my tablet rings.
“Yes, Major?” I ask into the image onscreen.
“Your equipment is set up. All tests complete, all systems functioning correctly.”
“Merci beaucoup!” I practically shout back. Now even giddier than before, I quicken my pace. The others – not in the best of shape – struggle to keep up.
“Wow – a hacker’s paradise!” Chance howls with wide eyes as we enter the translation room from the CIC. He takes a few minutes to wander about the room and touches near everything within reach. “Half of it I recognize, the other half not so much – that most of this equipment is illegal is probably why.” I give him a questioning look. “I head Mesoamerican studies at the university and see this stuff all the time. The students I teach, some want to be archeologists, others linguists – at heart they all really just wanna be computer hackers.”
“It is not much,” I return with fake humility. “Only what we could fit into the C-17, but it will have to do.”
Many of the same tools data hackers use to reveal passwords and read encrypted transmissions do indeed dominate the translation room. As for which tools are legal and which are not, I have never cared before and care even less now. Work so purposeful seldom does. From the floor to the ceiling, banks of servers and monitors line the walls. A number of glowing lights provide a comforting brightness to what would normally be a dark room. In the middle of it all sits a large marble table. Nothing sloppy or out of place, as always, my men surpass every expectation.
As the others separate a bit to inspect, I continue to tail Dr. Saddlebirch. He slowly makes his way to a most spectacular device I treasure above any in the room. That it captures the fancy of my fellow linguist comforts me; above any other, this tool will be most important.
“A scanner of some kind, but not really,” he whispers breathlessly. Victor and Alfred join us.
“Designed and built under the watchful eyes of Dr. Leitz – it does that and much more. This most sophisticated of machines can scan copper plates in not just two dimensions … but three,” I finish in barely a whisper. “Characters, scripts, engravings, hieroglyphs – it scans them into a modeling program that analyzes everything. Almost as if it is learning – amongst countless other things – this program remembers images and pulls them into suggested groups. If proven wrong with another scan, it moves them out and then looks for other characters that may be the same or very close. Pure brilliance, pure genius, we are lucky to have such computers and their devices at the ready. As for the scanner you hold; thankfully, I brought along two more.”
“Wow,” Chance drawls once more, but with an equally drawn out whistle this time. “You better not show this stuff to the other Russians. They just might lock the doors and never let you back in!”
In all seriousness, Dr. Korzhak nods his agreement.
Chapter Eight
I SEE DEAD PEOPLE
“And that should just about do it!” I proclaim as we walk triumphantly out of the translation room and into the CIC. This worthy conqueror flanked by her four generals now stands before Admiral Vanderbilt. He swivels around in his black leather chair to face the five of us and smiles. “The translation room is all set up and ready to go. Going forward, we just have to ––”
“Good! Now get out of here,” he tells us in all seriousness. “All of you to bed!”
This conqueror and her generals are now suddenly nothing more than children?
“No, no, no!” the spoiled child in me protests. The others behind me groan and growl at the Admiral to show their support. “There are plates to separate and scan, texts to translate ––”
The Fifth Codex Page 7
