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Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
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“I'm sorry I'm late,” the smooth deep voice cut in.
Sarah instinctively stuffed the envelope into her purse before she turned to see him.
He wasn't any fatter. He hadn't lost any hair. He still had
all his own teeth. He didn't appear to be any older. Rip Thorne was still a striking forty-five-year-old. Nothing had changed. He still had those piercing eyes, like a shark looking for a weak spot. Probing. He was still a bastard.
“Rip … Oh, hi,” Sarah replied, regretting the hesitation. Thoughts were brewing but she told herself she knew how to keep them in check.
Thorne kissed her on the cheek, eyed Ellen Paris warily. “Who's your friend?”
“I was just leaving,” Ellen explained graciously. She shared a look with Sarah, one that told her to remember what had been said, and was gone.
Thorne took Sarah by the arm. “Shall we?” he said. “I was, looking for you in the foyer. I should have known you'd be at the bar.”
Outside, a car was waiting.
“What the hell is that?” Ralph Matheson asked, stunned as he watched the bank of monitors.
They were two research blocks over, a five-minute walk down the corridor from the Nuclear Magnetic Resonance Spectroscopy. Solar observatories all over the planet and beyond were pumping in data, some of them completely unaware of the urgency with which it was being received.
Hackett adjusted the computer settings. This was the signal relay center. There were no other scientists to clash with over theory here, just technicians, who scowled. “You're looking at the spectacular phenomenon of thermal convection within the sun,” he explained.
On the workstation screen a graphic showed circles of motion rising and falling between the central core and the surface of the sun. The motions were many, and the overall pattern resembled half an orange.
“Pretty,” Matheson said.
“I think the term you're reaching for is ‘pretty important,'” Hackett corrected. “Thermal convection controls the circulation of the atmosphere and oceans. Determines the short- and medium-term weather change of the earth. Contributes to the motion of the continental tectonic plates by inducing large-scale movements of magma within the mantle, the earth's core. It also cooks soup. It's the process by which heat rises.”
“Neat.”
“How's our little expedition shaping up, anyway?”
“Great, for the middle of a war zone. They fly in half our equipment tonight. The rest we take with us. You ever fired a gun?”
“Does the photon gun in a TV tube count?”
“Nope.”
“Then no.”
“Me either. But they want us armed. For our own protection, you understand. Don't you, Admiral?”
Dower ignored the engineer.
“No, I don't understand. But what the hell. So long as I don't shoot my own toe off, what do I care?” Hackett replied, focused on the raw data as it spewed down the screens.
Matheson eyed the screen, then the physicist. Gant and Dower stood with them. It was Gant who asked quietly: “What're you looking for?”
“The perturbation event.” Gant was none the wiser. “The initial causation. That event which affects a system and creates instability. If it's fairly recent and the perturbation dies out quickly we call that system asymptotically stable.”
“And in English?”
“It means what I'm looking for is evidence on the sun that suggests it's a brief fluctuation. That it will dissipate soon. That these massive sun storms will go away.”
“And?”
“And I haven't found it,” Hackett admitted. “And I don't think I ever
will
find it. Because it isn't there.”
“Well, something's gotta be causing this. It can't just happen all by itself.”
“Actually,” Hackett warned, “it can.”
 
“The sun is classified as a subject for non-equilibrium physics, because of the wild fluctuations we see. Sunspots
come in linked pairs of opposing magnetic polarity. Flares. Tornadoes the size of the earth that travel at thousands of miles an hour. Vast seismic sunquakes with waves 40,000 times the power of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, with a two-mile-high ripple that travels outward at up to 250,000 mph. They're regularly magnitude 11.3 or higher. That never happens here on earth. The biggest ever recorded earthquake we've had was 8.6, in Gansu, China, in 1920.
“These are spectacular events. But they're just events. The sun is also a system of large-scale regularities. Its central mass is subjected to hundreds of thousands of varying frequency sound waves pulsating throughout it at any one time. Imagine a thousand drummers each beating out a different rhythm on the same drum skin. It has a sunspot
cycle
of roughly eleven years. It's an ordered system.”
“It's a mass of nuclear explosions,” Matheson objected. “You said that yourself. There's nothing ordered about that.”
“But that's just it,” Hackett replied. “Look at it this way. What is, and isn't ordered is a matter of relativity. One nuclear explosion here on earth is so out of the ordinary, it can be nothing
but
destructive. But on the sun, where there's nothing but constant nuclear fusion reactions, it's you and I who'd be out of the ordinary. On the sun,
one
nuclear event is equivalent to, say, one of the cells that make up the human body. Its environment is like nothing we're used to and has its own kind of order. Real order. After all, we get up every morning and it's still there. Doing its sunlike thing. Has done for millions of years. Will continue to do so for many more. It's what we call a steady state. You've heard of entropy? The second law of thermo-dynamics?”
“Yeah. It's the amount of disorder in a system. Everything must break down. It's why if you drop a cup on the floor it breaks. It won't then put itself back together again.”
“Right. So everything breaks down. Scientists call it disorder. The rest of the population calls it ‘turning to crap.'”
“Yeah.”
“So why are
we
here?”
“Uh?”
“Life. Trees. Us. Heck, even clouds. If there's so much disorder, and that's the natural tendency of things, to turn to
crap, how come we made it? Order must be born out of chaos. It's an oscillation. Order—chaos—order—chaos.”
“That's why crystals form out of a chaotic liquid. Something changes and order is born?” Matheson suggested.
“In essence, yes.”
Matheson kicked back a moment, realizing Hackett wasn't all that ecstatic with the situation. “So why is it you look like you've seen a ghost, Jon?”
“What happens when a violent but ordered system suddenly turns chaotic? What happens when violence meets chaos?”
Matheson gulped. “Shit, I don't know.”
“There's a mathematical condition called the Hopf bifurcation, named after Eberhard Hopf, the German mathematician who discovered it. It guarantees that oscillations will occur in steady states. It'll start very small, but get bigger and bigger. In essence, absolutely nothing will trigger it, but a steady state will, for no real reason, become unstable and start to wobble.”
“Then it returns to its steady state?”
“Eventually. Yes. But there's also this physico-chemical phenomenon, the Belousov-Zhabotinski, or BZ phenomenon that occurs in certain liquids under certain circumstances. After the initial and imperceptible irregularity at an atomic level, which is the trigger, it turns into a chemical clock. The liquid turns from yellow, to colorless, to yellow, in perfect regular timing. The oscillation is an internal dynamic. It has nothing to do with any outside force. These events are the cornerstone of complexity theory.”
“So … ?”
“Certain stars display just these properties. They're called cepheid variables. Pulsars, Ralph. Pulsars. They blast out matter at different rates, but they're violent stars. Some pulse once every second. Some once every few weeks. You look into the sky any night and you'll find one. Well,” he bit his lower lip anxiously, “I think our sun is a pulsar.”
“What?”
“What I'm seeing fits the Hopf bifurcation and the BZ phenomenon. The sun could be much older than we thought and a slow-burn pulsar. So slow it only pulses once every
twelve thousand years. These gravity waves could be the prelude to a massive jettison of a coronal shell.”
Dower wanted to be very clear about this. “Are we talking about solar flares larger than previously projected?”
“Imagine,” Hackett explained, “the entire surface of the sun boiling off in a cloud. Like a shell. It would be the mother of all solar flares, just blown straight off. Everything in the entire solar system would be hit. Nothing would escape.” He turned to Matheson. “Didn't Richard say something about burning in those ancient myths? That not only were there earthquakes and floods, but that the earth burned? Admiral, it doesn't matter what the magnetic polarity is of a plasma cloud of that magnitude. It's gonna hit both Poles at the same time. And one of 'em's gonna suck that thing straight in. Be it North or South.”
“That's bad,” Matheson said, acutely aware of the implications of the problem.
“That's very fucking bad.” Hackett shifted in his seat as he leaned forward and hit a button on the screen. “It would eventually wipe out all life.” The image began to descend into chaos. “Either way, both oscillations are mathematically predictable. I can't tell you which one it is, but right now, I can tell you precisely when the fun's about to start.”
Dower was stunned. “You can
what?
How long have we got?”
“The solar ‘event' begins at six P.M.—this Thursday. And peaks around midnight Saturday,” Hackett revealed. “On Sunday … God rests.”
“Jesus Christ.”
Hackett shot a look up to see Gant standing on the other side of his monitor with a coffee in his hand. “Are there any other expected fluctuations?” the Admiral asked.
“A couple,” said Hackett. “The timing's a little off, but there may be one tonight. A big one. One we will feel this time.”
“What kind of machine, d'you think, would they want to make out of pure carbon crystal?” Scott mused as he methodically analyzed each piece on the table. Where he could, he fitted the stones together like a jigsaw. He sketched the glyphs and made notes of their characteristics, marveled at their intricate detail. “What kind of machine has no moving parts?”
“We don't know that it doesn't,” November observed. “And besides, solar panels have no moving parts.” Something was troubling her, Scott could tell. She'd just called her dad back home and cussed him out for not tidying the house. And it didn't seem to be related to the fact that he had a date tonight.
Scott said: “Good point,” and turned his attention to one of his many crumpled notebooks. He started drawing up lists of words. She gave him a look. Wanting to know what he'd found. “I just got to thinking about similar words that some languages share,” he confided. “Common denominators. I was thinking, if I can see a pattern in the comparisons, then I might be able to see a pattern in the stones.”
She asked him to go on.
“The ancient Aztecs spoke Nahuatl,” Scott said. “And when they wanted to say ‘House of God,' they said ‘teocalli.' Whereas in Greek, this side of the Atlantic, they say ‘theou kalia,' ‘God's House.' In Quechua, they say ‘llake llake,” when they want to say ‘heron.' And they say ‘llu llu' when they mean ‘lie.' While the Sumerians said ‘lak lak,' for ‘heron.' And ‘lul' for ‘lie.'”
“They're virtually identical.”
“Virtually. Unfortunately it's not very scientific. As a linguist my instinct is to compare
one
language with another language, not continent with continent. On-off similarities are frowned on, but a few things keep cropping up. Like ‘atl.'”
“Atl?”
“Or just ‘tl.' As a combination of consonants it's pretty rare in a lot of European languages. We use it in the words Atlantic, Atlas, and Atlantis. But in South and Central America
it's fairly common. ‘Atl' is the Nahuatl word for water. Atlaua was the god of, and master over, water. Aztlan was the mythical homeland that the Aztecs claimed to have descended from. It meant ‘The land of the Sun,' but with ‘tl' in the word it had a water connotation. Though what the word ‘atlatl' had to do with water I'm not sure.” He chewed on a thumbnail as November pulled up a chair. “Atlatl means ‘arrow.'”
“Arrow? That's interesting. On maps they always use arrows to show which way is north. With Atlantis being at the South Pole, that might be important,” she offered.
Scott narrowed his eyes. “I have no idea why that's important,” he said, “but keep it in mind.”
“Sure,” November beamed, pleased with herself. “So does ‘atlatl' have any link to a European language?”
“Well,” Scott replied, tongue in cheek, “there's ‘arrow,' but apart from that, nothing really. Except maybe in Old High German. ‘Tulli' meant ‘arrow-head.' And Thule was a legendary North Atlantic Island first mentioned by Pytheas in the fourth century B.C.E.” He drummed his fingers on the table, his leg twitching in unison as his mind worked overtime. “In fact … In fact!” Rifling through papers he pulled out a notepad, flicked through and found the right crumpled page. “Yeah … Tlalocan was the southern home of Tlaloc, the rain god. He was also known as, wait for it … Tlahuizpantechutli—the god of ice. And his girlfriend was Chalchiuitlicue, goddess of water.”
“They had gods for the weather?”
“Oh, sure. Ehacatl was the god of wind, for instance. Now, he was an interesting character because he was also known as Quetzalcoatl, the man it's said brought civilization to Central and South America. He was the feathered serpent. The Good God, inventor of writing, painting and the calendar.”
“Just like Thoth.”
“Yes, and in the ancient Mexican pinturas, or paintings, Quetzalcoatl, the one I said wore the long black gown fringed with the white crosses? He was also god of the West, one of four Tezcatlipocas …”
“The others being, East, North and South, huh?” November asked, leading the linguist on. “He's got crosses all over his clothes,
and
he's linked to the points of the compass?”
“There's definitely a pattern here. A logic.” He eyed her closely. “It just isn't funny anymore.”
It was November's turn to smirk. “It's complex … isn't it?”
“Don't
you
start.”
“What made you start looking at South American languages, anyway? I thought you were looking at cuneiform. That's in the Middle East.”
“It occurred to me,” Scott explained, “that when Antarctica experienced the flood, there was no one single route of escape. The three closest land masses were South America, South Africa and the Indian peninsula. But since it was a flood, land at the same altitude would be underwater. So you have to go further north before you hit mountains, and so dry land. The Andes, in Peru. Mount Ararat in Turkey, near to Egypt. And the Himalayas in the north of India and the border of China. The same three places where religion and writing were born.”
“Oh my God, that's incredible.”
“Maybe. I don't know. Anyway, I remembered something I read about a language called Aymara. It's part of the Amerind language family. One of the families we kept on that board.”
“I remember. Yeah, there it is.”
“The thing about it is, it appears to have been
invented
.”
“Is that possible? I thought languages just … evolved.”
“Most do. But it's not impossible. Hangul, the alphabet they use in Korea Province, China, was invented by King Sejong in 1446. He designed twenty-eight new letters for vowels and consonants because a thousand years of using Chinese had been a disaster for his people,” Scott said. “But Aymara's different because we just don't know how old it really is. What we do know is it uses entirely different logic from our own. We use opposites. The syntax of our language is based on the notion of yes or no. Aymara has a third kind, like a ‘maybe' mode. What in computer speak they call fuzzy logic.”
November went to open her mouth, but Scott cut her short.
“I don't know—ask Hackett. The point is, Ivan Guzman de Rojas, a Bolivian computer scientist studied the language in the 1980s and discovered that Aymara worked like an algorithm.
It could be used as a bridging language. If you translated a foreign language into Aymara, you could then translate the Aymara into any other language—precisely, keeping the exact original sense of what the first language was trying to say without getting anything jumbled up or lost in the translation. It's so useful they use it in all kinds of translation programs even today.”
“Aymara? Where did they use that?”
Scott raised an eyebrow. “Tiahuanaco,” he said. “And some people still use it.”
“Where's Tiahuanaco?”
“In the Andes. Way up high, by the shores of Lake Titicaca.”
November was stunned. “It's like all the clues to Atlantis have always been here. We just didn't listen.”
Scott surveyed the row of crystals on the table and took a long hard look at his research. “Well, we know it's here now. And it's trying to tell us something.”
It was an intense feeling. So much so, he felt like a kid again. Everything he'd ever learned just felt so new right now. He could sense a pattern. A logic. But what was it?
November seemed tense. Knowing he should leave well enough alone, tentatively he asked, “How's life back home? They miss you already?”
“Are you frightened?” she asked suddenly.
“Sure.”
“What frightens you most about all this?”
“That I'll never see my daughter again. That if this second flood does hit I won't be able to do a thing about it and she'll suffer.”
November was subdued. “I didn't realize you had a daughter. How old is she?”
“Seven. Her name's Emily.”
“That's a pretty name.” November picked up a stone gently. She could feel that customary tingle on her skin again, almost prickly. Nervously, she said: “Dad says the Mississippi's starting to flood. They issued a state of emergency in the delta.”
“I see.”
“It's starting …”
“I think so,” Scott nodded, with just the barest hint of uncertainty.
“What did you want me to do with this?” she asked, tapping the rock. “Sketch it again?”
“Please.”
November stood. “I'm hungry. And I'm sick of coffee. Care for a Coke or something?”
“I'm fine.”
 
The kitchenette against the far wall to one side was pretty well stocked to capacity. Clean and white, it had a sink and a microwave. It was all contained within an enclosed mobile unit to keep steam and stray radiation out of the working environment.
A radio stood to one side. Absently, November heard a tune she recognized and turned the volume up. Setting the Carbon 60 down in front of it she pulled the refrigerator open and grabbed the two-liter bottle of Coke from inside and poured herself a drink. Found a fresh filter, went to work on more coffee. No matter what Dr. Scott said, he was bound to want more coffee. And it was then that she was brought up short by a high-pitched whine, almost out of her hearing range. At first she thought she had a ringing in her ears until she realized it was coming from a specific direction. It was coming from her glass of Coke.
She stopped what she was doing, drawn to her glass like a moth to a flame. The sound had gone higher now. Way beyond her range.
She crouched down to take a closer look, and couldn't believe what she was seeing. The carbonated bubbles that usually fizzed to the surface were slowing. As if the Coke was becoming viscous, like treacle.
A cracking sound shot out from the glass. Yet there was no visible sign of any damage.
And then the bubbles stopped. Caught in mid-flow.
She could feel the whole kitchenette units vibrate. Could see the faint oscillating movement. What the hell was going on?
Her eyes darted from object to object. Radio—speaker—sound—Carbon 60—Coke in a glass.
There was a box of assorted odds and ends in a drawer. A steel ball bearing.
Cautiously she held the steel ball over the glass. Paused, then dropped it.
Clank.
The ball hit the Coke like it was ice and stayed motionless on the surface.
“Oh my God,” she murmured. Somebody had to come see this! This was incredible! She leapt to her feet. “Dr. Scott!” she yelled. “Dr. Scott, you have to come see this!”
Instinctively she reached out and grabbed the glass of Coke.
 
By the time Scott arrived, November Dryden was screaming.

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