Genetic Bullets: A Thriller (A Rossler Foundation Mystery Book 3)

by JC Ryan

  When that didn’t bring any enlightenment, he then tried reading in columns, from top to bottom and bottom to top. It was plain from the top-down direction that columns weren’t applicable. This language had to be read right to left, left to right, or in alternating rows like the 10th Cycle language. Or, it wasn’t Arabic at all, merely resembled it. This was going to require some computer manipulation. Sinclair missed Raj for that task, but he understood Cyndi had been studying with Raj for months. He would see what she could do with his request. He didn’t consider that the language he was looking at might be in a code of any kind. That would have been very unusual on a public monument.

  They began by taking photos of the script, using shade devices and more sophisticated lighting to bring out the stone-on-stone letters. They photographed both the stele and back in the cave, where the tunneling project had carefully preserved the script that was there. It was plain to Sinclair that the scripts weren’t the same, though they bore enough superficial resemblance to fool a layperson. Cyndi, with some online help from Raj, did her best to divide the individual words by manipulating the photos, cutting each apparently separate word away from the whole photo and saving them in individual images. When she had done that, she called Sinclair into her office and showed him on the computer monitor what she had. Martha had come in, too, as she was interested in everything that was going on in this microcosm of scientific inquiry. She was deep in the memory of the time Sinclair had broken the 10th Cycle code and thinking fondly of her late husband Mark as she watched Sinclair’s efforts absently. Both women jumped in alarm when Sinclair slapped himself on the forehead and shouted.

  “I can’t believe I didn’t see that before! That isn’t Arabic, it’s Aramaic!” He rushed from the office, barely remembering to put on his outdoor gear, before dashing away from the building toward the cave.

  Martha and Cyndi looked at each other in confusion before following, catching Sinclair as he ran down the tunnel where the rail line was almost complete.

  “Honey! Wait, slow down,” Martha called. “What in the world!”

  “I have to see the original. Hurry.” With that, he turned and began jogging again. Cyndi caught him easily, but Martha lagged behind as she was a little winded. By the time she reached the final destination, the stele, she was seriously annoyed with her new husband. However, the look on his face as he read the stele, his lips moving, washed away her pique.

  “What is it, honey?” she ventured.

  “It’s a directional sign,” he breathed. “This is so close to ancient Aramaic that I’m certain I’m getting it right. Look here, this should be ‘library’, and this has to be ‘hospital’. He pointed at the words as he spoke the English translation. Then he turned to Martha with a comical look of consternation on his face.

  “I’m slipping, dearest. I let the preconceived notion that this was like the 10th Cycle script in the cave blind me to the very obvious resemblance to Aramaic.”

  “It looks like Arabic to me,” Martha said sturdily, as if to comfort him for the mistake.

  “About the only resemblance is the diacritical marks, and they don’t even mean the same thing. Don’t try to comfort me, dearest. I screwed up.”

  “Well, it’s all settled now. But what does it mean?”

  Summers spoke behind her, startling all of them, who hadn’t heard him arrive. “It means that we now know where the most important excavations should be, what to focus on first. Sinclair, did I hear you say ‘library’ and ‘hospital’?”

  “You did indeed.”

  Cyndi, watching from the sidelines, and Summers too, separately thought that it would be hard to say Sinclair had screwed up, when he turned and read the stele with ease right then. Both had of course heard the story about when he did the same thing with the 10th Cycle greeting. Watching it happen before their eyes was an awe-inspiring experience. Cyndi, especially, who wasn’t accustomed to being in the midst of people who spoke multiple languages, much less those who could read several alphabets, was fascinated by the old man. She didn’t care what they said back at home about how eccentric he was; in her eyes he was a genius.

  “I’m going to redirect a couple of crews,” said Summers. “Would you like to be on hand when they uncover the library? I think you can make the most of that. I’ll get Rebecca and supervise the excavation of the hospital. I’ll be in touch with Hakim, your foreman, when we find anything that requires translation. And you can have him let us know when your crew turns up anything. Fair enough?”

  “More than, Charles. Thanks for inviting me down,” Sinclair said, genuinely grateful to be in on this discovery. He would divide his time between fully translating the words on the stele and watching the progress of the excavation of the library. What a wonderful adventure! “Martha, my love, how are you enjoying our honeymoon?” he asked, his eyes sparkling.

  “Very much, dear. I certainly couldn’t ask for a more exotic or exciting one,” she responded, lifting her eyebrow as she said ‘exciting’, so he’d know she wasn’t only referring to his success in reading the script. Sinclair happened to be quite virile for a man just past his seventieth year, and she didn’t care who knew it.

  ~~~

  Once again, the expedition made world news as the report of the progress in determining exactly what the ruins contained was reported. By now, people who were interested in such things were watching for new discoveries daily, eager to be among the first to know of the wonders being uncovered. Daniel got a kick out of Sinclair’s version of his early mistake, which of course Sinclair embellished, coming as he did from a long line of Irish storytellers. That didn’t go into the press release, of course, though Harper heard it, mostly because Daniel understood that his friend loved a good joke—especially if it were on someone else.

  The excavation efforts were stepped up, naturally.

  ~~~

  Robert had confirmed that the soil on the valley floor was composed mainly of ash, with decomposing plant matter enriching it. The fact that it had nearly buried the buildings in the central square over the millennia spoke to ongoing volcanism of some sort, but he hadn’t yet located a source for the ash. It certainly wasn’t falling now. The latter fact made JR feel better, but Robert knew it meant nothing. However, what tests he’d been able to run led him to believe that the magmas beneath their feet were stable and unlikely to seek the surface. Nevertheless, he planted permanent seismograph stations throughout the valley at regular intervals. If the mountain started to rumble or the dome started to rise, immediate evacuation would be called for.

  On the day after Sinclair’s breakthrough in reading the stele, he sauntered into the central square looking for a break from his work and a chat with the others to see what might be new and exciting. He found Robert outside the hospital site excavation, watching as the workers brushed away thousands of years of ash and dirt.

  “Do you think they were more or less advanced than the 10th Cyclers?” Robert asked.

  “From what we’ve seen, probably less. But remember, we have no context for when in their cycle they inhabited this valley. If we assume that our cycle is only six thousand years old, and add that to the twenty-six thousand years of the 10th Cycle, this city has to be at least thirty-five thousand years old. But it could be as much as twenty thousand years or so older than that. It boggles the mind, doesn’t it?”

  “Not when your field works in millions of years, instead of thousands,” returned the geologist. “But it does make my head hurt, trying to think of the 10th Cycler’s as so much more advanced than we are, despite living so many thousands of years in the past. Do you think we’ll ever find the answers to where we are in our cycle? Or whether there were others in between, that didn’t leave any trace?”

  “Maybe, maybe not. But I do think we’ll be able to get a feel for how far these guys had gotten before they abandoned the city. Do you think it was because the volcano erupted?”

  “I doubt it. We’d be seeing the city covered by lava flow
instead of ash if it had actually erupted. But ash is just as dangerous in great quantities. Were you aware that when Vesuvius killed Pompeii, it was clouds of ash that overcame most of the people? Everyone seems to know that Pompeii was destroyed by a volcano, but most are remarkably ignorant of how it went down.”

  “Actually, I’ve been there. Eerie,” said Sinclair, with a shiver. Summers had noticed them and climbed up the terraces of the excavation to join them.

  The three sat in companionable silence until a worker gave a short exclamation and held up what looked like a primitive surgical instrument.

  “Ah,” said Summers. “Now we’re getting somewhere.” He raised his walkie-talkie and called JR and Rebecca to join them at the hospital site. This should prove to be very interesting.

  Not to be outdone, Sinclair returned to the library site and was reading several clay tablets that his crew had unearthed and brought to him with reverence. Martha sat beside him, incongruously knitting as he studied the ancient tablets. He wondered if the library were actually a museum of written artifacts as well, or if the people who’d lived here were no more advanced than the ancient Egyptians of the current cycle. The tablet he had in his hands seemed to be a poem or at least a series of couplets. He began to read, idly, and attempt to put it in a poetic meter as he translated.

  Oh, children of [unknown],

  Heed our sorrow.

  We knew not the answer.

  We could not help you.

  Forgive us,

  For we remain.

  And you are all gone.

  Gone from this place.

  All of your blood.

  Our children, too.

  Those of our unions with you,

  The ill-fated.

  Woe is our companion.

  We will not forget.

  Martha spoke quietly beside him, tears in her eyes and her voice choked. “How sad! What do you think it means?”

  “I don’t know,” he answered. “It sounds like an illness or something.”

  “It sounds like a tragic epidemic.”

  “Maybe. I wonder if there’s more of the story somewhere here. Can you record it in my laptop t as I read? I can go through it faster that way.”

  “Of course! I’ve been wishing I could make myself useful.”

  Sinclair and Martha went through quite a few more clay tablets before it was time to break for the day. They didn’t find any other references to the mystery that the poem presented, except for one tablet that referred to a plague that had reduced the population of the city greatly. The same word Sinclair couldn’t translate that had appeared in the poem appeared in that tablet also. Perhaps the poem was about that plague. He set those two aside, intending to ask Summers’ permission to carry them out so that he could do more research online to try to find the meaning of the word.

  There was to be a celebration of sorts out in the canyon tonight, as the workers who’d been here for the past two weeks were to rotate out for their two-week break at home with their families, while the new set, all from South America, had presumably arrived on schedule and would start working tomorrow. JR had called for the cook to put on a feast to welcome the new workers, while sending the first crew off in style.

  ~~~

  The change from the Middle Eastern workers to the South American crew wasn’t as smooth as JR had hoped, but it couldn’t be helped. He and Summers had combed both areas for a full one hundred qualified diggers, but they were competing with other projects and they couldn’t very well mix two groups with such different cultural norms and languages. That there would be a language difference to adjust to each time the shift changed was a given. They hadn’t thought much about the cultural differences, but they were there. The first group, most of them Muslim, insisted on observing daily prayer times. The scientists couldn’t object. In addition to being heartless, it would have created quite a political stir.

  Now, however, the South Americans wanted a siesta after lunch. As far as the work was concerned, it wouldn’t have mattered. The light was uniform, day and night. However, it left the scientists to either work on without digger support and made for a long day by the time the diggers were through with their afternoon shift, or they would have to observe the tradition themselves. It came down to a challenge of sorts. Out of pride, several of the science group refused to succumb to the mid-day nap, while the others, who would have liked to take a siesta, instead pushed through their post-lunch grogginess and worked longer hours like the rest.

  Thank goodness it was for only two weeks, JR thought. He would have been one of the nappers, given the choice. His work ethic had more to do with getting things done right in whatever time he had to do them, and less with watching a time clock. The irony was that clocks and watches wouldn’t work inside the valley anyway. Robert said it had to do with the amount of iron in the layers below them, or maybe even within the surrounding cliffs. The magnetic qualities interfered with the electronics in watches, as well as with some of the scientific equipment. Other equipment was unaffected, but JR didn’t bother with the explanation. Who cared why?

  By the third day or so, work had begun to flow as normal, and the next two weeks went even faster than the first two. Summers and JR both thought that the transition wouldn’t be as disrupting after the first time. Both crews now knew to whom they were assigned to direct their work, where they should be each day and what they were expected to do. Aside from the fact that progress in the excavation would have taken place when the first crew returned, they should be up to speed and ready to work.

  Chapter 11 - What is it, Traci?”

  Sinclair and Martha were to rotate out when the crew changed again, since no evidence had been found to indicate that any other language was represented in the ruins but the one similar to Aramaic that he’d first seen on the stele in the square. Translation of whatever was excavated in the library could wait until the artifacts or photos of them could be transported to his lab in Boulder.

  Sinclair was thinking seriously of laying over for a couple of weeks in Hawaii on their way back to Boulder, to give Martha the kind of honeymoon she truly deserved. He had translated the entire first batch of tablets that the original work crew had brought him, and was waiting for Summers to decide whether they would be left here, where being kept in their long-time environment may preserve them better than removing them from it. The electronic records, of course, had already been transmitted back to the Foundation building in Boulder, and Sinclair had a copy on his laptop that he’d carried with him.

  The mystery hinted at in the poem he found had been set aside when a tablet commemorating the arrival in the valley was unearthed. Piecing together the history as best he could with an incomplete record, it appeared that the armful of tablets were more or less contemporary with each other, and that they had all been inscribed about fifty years after the inhabitants had first found this paradise and built the city. A terrible plague of some sort had decimated their numbers, eventually running its course without the inhabitants ever learning how to cure it. How long the city had lasted thereafter hadn’t yet been determined, nor what had caused the 9th Cyclers, if that’s who they were, to abandon it.

  It seemed like no time at all when JR came to their room and asked if they were ready to be picked up the following day. The crews were about to change, and this would be their last chance to catch a flight out until the next two-week rotation. They chatted for a while, and JR gave them letters to hand to his brother and sister-in-law in person; eyes-only reports about how the group was getting along. So far, so good, actually. Rebecca’s team-building exercise seemed to have borne fruit.

  Sinclair and Martha didn’t know, because there hadn’t been a head count of the incoming workers when the chopper lifted off, that they were leaving just as a problem developed for the expedition. They went on to Hawaii and had a more traditional honeymoon, before returning to chaos in Boulder two weeks later.

  Meanwhile, at base camp, JR looked on in dismay as t
he group of workers sorted themselves into the same five-man crews as before. An entire crew was missing. He sent for el-Amin, his own Arabic not up to the job of getting a coherent explanation. When he had the story straight, he went to Summers.

  “We’re short five men,” he explained. “Apparently they were too sick to get on the plane when it was time to leave, so the others left them behind. They say they will come along in a few days. Looks like we’ll have to budget in an extra chopper run to get them here.”

  “Either that, or tell them to stay home and they can come the next time. We can stretch the workers we have here, without going to the expense of bringing just five in from McMurdo in the middle of a shift. Who’s missing?”

  JR turned the list of missing workers over to Summers and went to settle another issue on the railway construction, now nearing completion. He would be glad to get rid of this contentious crew, who could not seem to get anything done without a fight. JR was tired of sorting them out and frequently told Rebecca he’d like to just wade in and knock their heads together. Too bad they hadn’t been in on the team-building exercise.

  By the end of the week, they had decided firmly that the missing five could just return for the next shift, as their presence wasn’t worth the hassle of getting them to the valley for just the remaining week of the shift. Now that everyone was returning on the rail line at the end of each ‘day’, they were all well-rested from sleeping in a real bed in the dorm and eating the good food that the chef prepared each evening. On the Friday, the acknowledged weekend day for this crew, JR and Rebecca made a good-will tour of the dormitories to greet the workers and ask if they had any needs that weren’t being met. They found many of the rooms empty, the occupants engaged in the day of prayer in the prayer room. In others, they found non-observant crew members relaxing, playing chess, and in some cases using Skype to communicate with their families.