Decipher (47 page)

Read Decipher Online

Authors: Stel Pavlou

BOOK: Decipher
4.81Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Yun appeared incensed. “Master Sun explained that the rule of military operation is not to count on the opponent not coming, but to rely on ways of dealing with them.”
“Yes,” Scott agreed. He knew the passage well. “And he also advised not to count on opponents
not
attacking, but to rely on having what cannot be attacked. We have breached your defenses and are now on our way down to what could not be attacked.”
“How do you know we have not already fortified the city?”
Scott smiled, slow and purposeful, catching Gant's eye in the process. He stood. “Thank you, Yun. You have told me what I needed to know.”
Yun leapt up, almost slipping on the ice. “I have told you nothing!”
“You have told me everything. You are the last line of Chinese defense here. We have nothing to fear down there but fear itself.”
“There are creatures!”
“I'm sure. But they're not Chinese soldiers. And as a consequence we know to prepare for the unknown.”
“Going down there will be suicide.”
“But we will control what cannot be attacked. We will have the advantage. Now, if you keep your enemies close by … maybe you can twist the situation to your advantage later.”
Yun seemed to be struggling with some internal dilemma before he acquiesced. “I have provisions on the surface,” he spat gruffly. “I must collect them before we proceed.” Scott pressed him for more information. “Like new boots,” Yun indicated. “Or I will be useless.”
Gant nodded at Hackett as he moved up next to Scott. “Go with him.”
Hackett led the soldier off to his supplies. “Not bad, Dr. Scott. Sun Tzu? I think you missed your calling. Ever worn a uniform?”
“I don't know shit about warfare,” Scott confessed. “They're just words written on a piece of paper. I can twist 'em to argue any damn thing.”
“Well, we got our scout. Pump him for information. We gotta get down there fast. But tell me something, Professor: how d'you know he's not gonna lead us off on a wild-goose chase?”
“I don't,” Scott admitted, securing the fastenings on his boots.
“This is all wrong,” Matheson moaned quietly to himself as they made their way through the descending ice passage. He was positioned directly behind Gant, and it was clear he was getting under the major's skin.
“I'm not here to ask questions. I'm here to carry out orders.”
“Well, maybe you might want to
start
asking questions,” the engineer suggested provocatively. “Maybe we might live longer.”
“Maybe we're not destined to survive at all,” Gant replied chillingly.
The rest of the party tried to ignore the comment as it echoed in and out of the undulating ice bowls along the walls of the passage.
“I know there's another solution,” Matheson nagged. Then, in spite of the spikes on the underside of his boots digging into the hard ice, his feet slid right out from under him and he collapsed in a waterlogged heap in the middle of the tunnel, forcing everyone to come to a halt.
“Jesus H. Christ! The ice is blue!” he cried. “The water's blue! I can't make out a puddle from all the ice!”
Gant glanced back at the party he was leading. They weren't used to this. Hackett and Pearce seemed to be having considerable difficulty while Yun and November, who were much younger and fitter, did not.
The passage through the ice was around nine feet in diameter, with a constant trickling brook along its floor, eating its way farther down, centimeter by centimeter. Given time, the water would have eroded this simple tunnel into a chasm.
“All right. I don't have many of these, but I guess I'll have to use them.” He fished around in one of his leg pouches and pulled out a small silver canister as Matheson extracted himself from the relentless though almost invisible torrent of melt water rushing down the frozen passage.
Gant tipped the canister upside down and twisted its base like a pepper grinder. He slid out the long silver screw at the same end and twisted the whole device down into the floor by his foot.
The effect was immediate. An effervescent spring of glowing greenish dye began to mix with the stream on contact, clearly defining the water; its phosphorescence illuminated the way ahead.
Matheson jabbed his feet into the ice and let it be known. he was ready to continue. “I'll be okay now,” was all he said.
Gant barely disguised his impatience. “Michaels and Hillman are already way ahead of us,” he said, “carrying the warhead. And they didn't need dye markers.”
“Well, bully for them,” Matheson shot back.
 
“What are you thinking?” Sarah asked the anthropologist quietly. She reached for a cigarette, the packet wedged inside her parka somewhere, and sparked up, saying: “You've hardly said a word.”
“I'm thinking about Leibniz's ‘Lingua Generalis,'” Scott revealed.
“Of course you are,” she commented dryly.
He caught her eye, spying the cigarette and for a moment seemed faintly aghast.
“I know,” she said. “These things'll kill you. Thank God it's the end of the world and I don't have to wait around for cancer.”
Scott wasn't so amused. “You think you're so tough, don't you?”
Sarah was unnerved. “What?”
“You have this whole act going on,” he observed. “Y'know, you're smart but tough. Men can't get to you. And you're in total control. Yet every now and again you slip up, and that human being that's buried deep inside comes out. And you ask things like: What are you thinking?”
He was so intense. So uptight. Normally men like that bugged the shit out of her and she let them get on with it. But there was something about Richard that just made her want to reach out to him. Or maybe it was just her raging hormones. Either way, what he had said had stung. And it was like he could see it in her eyes.
“And you think you know everything,” she retaliated.
“That's the problem right there,” Scott replied, equally stung. “I don't. But I'd like to.”
“I'll make you a deal,” Sarah offered. “I bet you can figure this language out before you figure me out.”
“You're on,” he said.
He lashed out with his small hand-pick and hooked into the ice wall as he negotiated his way around the descending S-bend dropping down sharply before them. Shards of ice sprayed out in all directions.
The walls of the tunnel undulated in and out over uneven intervals. The edges in places were sharp and crisp, like razor blades. The blues and whites were multiple. Exotic. Sometimes it was hard to believe they were looking at ice at all. Lit up by the sunlight above, which refracted down to incredible depths, Sarah explained, if they were lucky, it would probably be daylight up to a mile down.
Having followed Scott's lead, she asked: “Leibniz—the philosopher, right? Seventeenth century.” Scott nodded. “So what's the deal?”
“He assigned numbers to letters.”
“Uh-huh?”
“He broke down all of human knowledge as he saw it into simple ideas. These ideas were represented by a number. He then proposed a system whereby consonants stood for integers, and vowels for units of ten and powers of ten.”
“Which meant what?”
“Well, say the number 81,374—that would get transcribed as ‘mubodilefa,'” he explained.
“Okay, you're losing me. That was supposed to make sense?”
“The point is,” Scott explained, skipping the minutiae, “Leibniz wasn't looking for a universal language, or the genesis language. He was looking for truth through a scientific language. Strip preconceived notions of meaning out of language and distill basic themes and ideas down to a language of their own.”
“So you've definitely decided the Atlantis glyphs are a scientific language?”
“The more I think about it, the more I'm forced to conclude, why not?” Scott wobbled as he lost his footing slightly. He flailed for a moment before planting his foot firmly down. A satisfying crunch signified he'd managed to get his spikes to penetrate the surface of the ice.
“These people,” he went on, “were masters of engineering, astronomy, physics, and acoustics. It seems only natural they would try and communicate in a scientific way. Leibniz was concerned with a language that in itself was concerned only with trying to communicate ideas. Sixty distinct and separate types of sound pretty much cover the range of human vocal abilities. So I'm guessing, and it's just a guess … that if the Atlantis glyphs wanted to communicate ideas, the language would take into account all other languages that existed at that time.”
“That's a tall order.”
“So is building a city out of Carbon 60 crystal, but if the satellite imagery's to be believed, that's what they've done.”
He concentrated on putting one foot in front of the other. Step by step. Step by step. He watched the others up in front. All wobbling, but managing to move forward. Gant, Matheson, Hackett, Pearce, Yun and November … Four Americans, then a Chinese. Then three Americans all stepping in sequence … Hey, four spoke English. Then it switched to Chinese. Then back to English and—
“It's a step sequence,” Scott realized. “That's it! That's how this works! It's a step sequence based on switching languages!”
 
Sarah excitedly kept pace with Scott as they discussed the idea. “I thought we'd already ruled that out on the plane?”
“The classical idea of a step sequence, yes,” Scott agreed. “When spies wanted to hide messages before the advent of the computer they sometimes had them inserted into texts. To all intents and purposes it would just look like a story, for example, or a letter. But in the hands of the decoder, he or she knew that if you took that story, and noted down every, say, fourth letter—in sequence—you found a hidden message.”
“But that didn't work with this language,” Sarah reminded. “We tried. It failed.”
“That's right—because we were trying a classical step sequence. The principle was correct, we just hadn't hit on the correct type of sequence. The key is that number stream. It has everything to do with that number stream. I'd bet my life on it.”
Hackett's ears pricked up. “Richard, that's very noble. But in this instance, if you're working on a dead-end theory—you'll be betting on
all
our lives.”
“I'm right,” Scott insisted.
“So how does it work?” Gant demanded from the head of the line.
“Each number in the number stream corresponds to a known language. So take the number four—that would be English. Five might be Arabic and six, Russian. Every language uses basically the same kinds of sounds with their own personal variations. So there will be some overlap in sound usage. That's why certain numbers might each be associated with the same glyph. But I'm getting ahead of myself—
“How I think this works is that you write down the number stream. And above it, you write down the Atlantis glyphs, however they appear on the monuments. Then you pick your language, take its assigned number, and you work your way along the number stream. Each time you find, say, the number four—you note down the glyph that appears above it. In this way the text is deciphered into your chosen language. What you're doing is a step-sequence calculation.”
“So how many different languages do you think are embedded in the glyphs, and why?” Pearce asked. “It seems an awfully complicated way of doing things.”
Scott looked at the back of Hackett's head as the physicist negotiated the treacherous pass. “Complex would be a better way of describing it,” he said. “Not complicated.”
Hackett cocked his head as confirmation he had picked up on the compliment.
“Think about it. We're talking about a civilization that lived twelve thousand years ago, speaking a language totally alien to our own. Like today, there were many other languages being spoken. They had no way of knowing which languages would survive and which would perish. So they selected sixty that held the most promise, and intertwined them into a system that we could decipher at some point in the future.”
“But a number stream we could only detect by computer?” November remarked.
“These people knew science better than we know it today,”
Hackett commented soberly. “I guess they figured what they have to tell us is of such sophistication it was pointless imparting it unless we had the mindset and wherewithal to be able to comprehend its meaning. After all, stick a Neanderthal in a 767 and his first instinct is going to be to eat the chairs. Not fly the plane.” He glanced back at the others. “Guess they didn't want us to eat the chairs.”
“Sixty different numbers,” Scott marveled. “Written in base sixty, representing sixty different languages corresponding to sixty different glyphs. That, to any mind worthy of saving, is a puzzle that needs solving.”
“All we need to figure out now is what languages they chose.”
“Well, it ain't gonna be English,” November advised knowledgeably. “That's only been around a few hundred years. We're talking about languages which go back thousands. Ancient Egyptian lasted a couple thousand.”
“It also, despite current theories, seems to have just popped up out of nowhere,” Scott agreed. “But it's still too young a language. Maybe an ancestor of Egyptian's what we're looking for. Old languages. Think really old.”
“What about Phoenician?” Pearce suggested.
“Most of our modern languages today like Hebrew and Arabic derive from Aramaic, which is a direct descendent of Phoenician,” Scott noted. “That's true. But there's an older language that Phoenician derived from and that's Proto-Canaanite. And that's a language which could be written and read multi-directionally.”
“Doesn't it strike you as odd,” Hackett chipped in thoughtfully, struggling with the torrent of phosphorescent water that seemed to be growing stronger as the incline grew steeper, “that each language was assigned a number on an arbitrary basis? Why assign one language the number four, when it could just as easily be twenty-four, or sixteen? What differentiates each language and its number assignment?”
“Maybe the clues are in our myths and legends,” Gant threw in from up ahead.
“Interesting idea,” Scott called out. “You got anything to back that up, Major?”
“I was thinking of the Bible,” he replied, unsteadily.
“Y'know, the world was created in seven days. The walls of Jericho fell after the trumpets were sounded seven times.”
“But Noah's boat was at sea for forty days and forty nights,” November warned. “It could just as easily be the number forty.”
“The Mayans revered the number nine, as in the nine lords of the night,” Pearce added eagerly. “That's a possibility.”

Other books

Playing the Game by Simon Gould
Goodbye, Columbus by Philip Roth
Cowboy at Midnight by Ann Major
What the Heart Haunts by Sadie Hart
Una Princesa De Marte by Edgar Rice Burroughs
The Princess of Cortova by Diane Stanley
Last Ghost at Gettysburg by Paul Ferrante