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Authors: Stel Pavlou

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BOOK: Decipher
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“If it makes you feel any better,” Hackett observed, “it proves the language was designed that way.”
Scott shot him a puzzled look. “You're suggesting this language was a constructed one? Not evolved naturally, like Aymara?”
“Clearly,” Hackett said. “If those glyphs were random you'd still get an unequal frequency distribution. Not in the same way as you'd get from the distribution of letters in a naturally evolved language, otherwise you'd detect a pattern and crack the code. But you'd get an uneven spread just the same. For random letters to come out spread evenly, you'd need an infinite numbers of letters, which you just don't have. Clearly, whoever designed that language intended it to be equal.”
“The problem,” Scott said, “is what kind of language uses letters on a totally even basis, with as many Zs as there are As or Es? None that I'm aware of.”
They broke for dinner at 7:30 P.M., but the motion of the boat meant the landlubbers didn't feel much like eating, in spite of the medication.
Hackett worked on the base 60 number stream they had found encoded in the crystal, but try as he might he just couldn't make sense of it. It literally was just a stream of numbers—there seemed to be no pattern to it. True, pi had been worked out to 8 billion decimal places and still made no sense, but as a number it was essential to measurement and construction. Could this number stream simply be pi in base 60? A quick conversion by the computer proved it was not. Neither was it any other special mathematical number that might be recognized in standard decimal.
The thing about numbers was they were independent of people. Aliens would be able to count in the same way. Numbers were embedded in the fabric of space and time. Two was always going to be two, even if another culture gave it another name. Hackett figured it was just a question of looking long enough and hard enough before he worked out what these numbers represented.
But there were other problems to be solved. He turned his attention to gravity waves, and found, disturbingly, that he was predicting a fairly accurate timetable for events over the next two days.
He passed the information on to Gant, warning him that the figures needed to be confirmed. Then he went out on deck for some air, and found Scott in a thick yellow yachting jacket, watching the bow of the ship crash through unbelievably sized waves. The linguist was sympathetic to his plight.
“The Mayans measured time with special numbers,” Scott told him. “A hundred and forty-four thousand, seven thousand two hundred, three hundred and sixty, two-hundred and sixty and twenty. But their most important number was nine. The scripture speaks of the cycles of the ‘nine lords of the night.'”
“The planets?”
“Maybe. But I wouldn't go shouting about it or someone's gonna want to see some proof,” Scott said dryly. “The number a hundred and forty-four thousand crops up in the Book of Revelation linked to time. Seven is one of those numbers that just about pops up everywhere. Seven Seals. Seven Deadly Sins. Seven trumpets being sounded seven times. Walls tumble, the world is created. Eight is associated with reincarnation, while twelve has all sorts of links—the Twelve tribes of Israel, the Twelve Apostles, the number of Chinese ‘Years.' A hundred and fifty-three crops up in connection with the ‘enlightened ones.' The disciples caught a hundred and fifty-three fishes, which in numerology is the sum of one to seventeen. Also, one plus five plus three equals nine.”
“Numerology,” Hackett repeated as the ship lurched awkwardly. “What is that? Linking letters to numbers, jumbling them up and coming up with some hidden answer—is that it?”
“People will always be attracted to the hidden.”
“Nature has its special numbers too,” the physicist said. “Three, five, eight, thirteen, twenty-one, thirty-four, fifty-five and eighty-nine, for example. Lilies have three, buttercups five, delphiniums eight and marigolds thirteen. Asters, of course have twenty-one.”
“What are you talking about?”
“Petals on flowers.”
“There's a pattern in those numbers?”
“Sure. Just add the preceding two numbers together and you get the next number in the sequence. Three plus five equals eight, and so on. It's called the Fibonacci scale, after Leonardo Fibonacci who discovered it in the thirteenth century when he studied rabbit populations. The scale reveals phi, not to be confused with pi. Phi helps you calculate proportion, from the proportion of the human body, to plant-seed spirals on sunflowers.”
A staggeringly ferocious blast of spray suddenly pelted the two men as the
Polar
Star crashed through another heavy wave.
“Jesus Christ!” Scott yelped, trying to get his breath back. He wiped his face down.
Hackett shuddered. Pointing to the horizon. “Look,” he said. “Our first iceberg.”
They watched the looming white jagged mountain of frozen water for a while before Hackett said: “I think maybe we should head back inside.”
Scott agreed, spitting out seawater. “I dunno,” he said. “What do you think? Reckon maybe we'll get this all figured out in time? Honestly?”
Hackett dug his hands into his pockets. “Honestly? I don't know.”
Scott nodded, taking it all in stoically. “I must confess,” he added mildly, “I'm starting to like you, Professor Hackett. You're a challenging man.”
Hackett seemed genuinely taken aback. “Well, I'm, uh, starting to like you too, Professor Scott. What do you say, when this is all over we do this again some time?”
“Not a chance.”
 
When the two men stepped back into the lab they found Sarah sitting behind a computer with November. They were studying the Atlantis glyphs and appeared embarrassed at being caught.
November prodded the geologist. “Are you gonna tell him?”
“Tell me what?”
Sarah glanced furtively at her coffee before taking a gulp. “Aw … shit.” She looked up after a moment and confronted the men squarely. “Are you gonna get all male on me and be offended if a woman offered to help you out here?”
Scott smirked. “It's not like stopping and asking for directions. Sure, go ahead.”
Matheson turned from his own computer to listen. Even Pearce, who looked exhausted and disheveled, wrapped up in a blanket and sitting in a corner, seemed to perk up.
Okay, Sarah seemed to be saying as she got to her feet. She ran her finger over the screen. “Ralph, could you punch up that overhead schematic of the Giza site you were working on?”
Matheson did as he was told. Angled the monitor for everyone to see. Sarah went back to the screen. “Right, y'see here, this glyph? Simplified and stylized, it's similar to the
layout of Giza. I didn't think much of it until November mentioned that you thought this glyph right here didn't just represent the sun, but also resembled Atlantis.”
Hackett shrugged. “Coincidence?” But it was clear he didn't mean it.
Sarah took a breath. “I would have said so too, but
this
glyph resembles the layout of the series of pyramids in Peru.”
Scott narrowed his eyes thoughtfully. “Interesting.”
“I never did visit Peru,” Pearce commented bleakly.
“Tell me something,” Scott asked quietly, blowing a whisper of steam from a fresh cup of coffee and confronting Pearce. “How do you do it?”
Pearce pulled the blanket in tighter around his shoulders. He looked so tired. So drained, emotionally and physically. “Remote viewing? I dunno,” he confessed. “I just go there.”
“You have to concentrate, right?”
“I have to stay focused, but not really concentrate. Not in the sense you mean. I just get a feel for everything all around me, all at once. And I have to pick my way through it. Some call it entering the spirit plane—kind of a dimensional shortcut—but I always found that a little silly. I mean, who's to say that it's not all in my head, right? The point is … uh, how would you describe it?” He thought for a moment. “Okay. There are two ways you can read a page in a book. You can read it a word at a time, and follow the narrative from start to finish in a linear fashion. Or you can rip out all the pages, lay them side by side and take a snapshot of the whole thing. And understand it all in one go. See where it starts. See where it ends. You can refer back to it. Or dive in and out at any point—”
“I see,” Hackett realized earnestly. “You're describing a photographic memory.”
“Yeah,” Pearce agreed, growing more confident with that notion. “Yeah, I guess I am. That's a good way of putting it. It's just a different way of thinking, is all. A different way of accessing knowledge. Our modern knowledge system is fragmentary. It actively hinders us from seeing the whole book. We're taught to think in terms of words and concepts, to specialize in areas. To restrict ourselves to fields instead of paying attention to an entire science, or an entire art. I believe
ancient civilizations thought very differently from the way we think now.”
“Could be true,” Scott agreed. “Even today, linguists can't even agree on a definition of what a word actually is. Is it a sound? A string of sounds? Is it a combination of both? Or something else? Sounds pathetic but it has very real, practical consequences.
“For instance, when epigraphers cracked Linear C, the early Greek-syllable-based script, on the island of Cyprus, they found they couldn't rely on the modern, everyday notion of suffixes and prefixes to explain away the patterns they detected in the glyph texts. In other words, blocks of letters at the front of words, like ‘in,' as in ‘inaction,' or at the ends of words, like ‘less' as in ‘motionless' were prefixes and suffixes. ‘Less' was a determinative. When the object is without motion, it is motion
less.
This determinative could in turn be applied to any other word. Even a pronoun. If Peter doesn't go to church, the church can be said to be Peter
less.
“In either case,” Scott said, “the addition of the determinative does not create two words. It fuses to the initial word, creating a new singular word. But in Linear C the prefixes and suffixes weren't determinatives. They were articles. Words like ‘a' and ‘the.' So linguists found words like ‘theking,' ‘thetown' and ‘agift'—the mark of a very different way of thinking. The only linguist ever to crack two ancient scripts, Easter Island's Rongorongo script and Crete's Phaistos Disk was Dr. Steven Roger Fischer. He pointed out that our ancestors tended to think in terms of ‘units of utterance.' That their approach to language was very different.”
To Scott it seemed clear. “The further back in time you look, the more holistic the approach is to language.”
“Holistic thought? The whole idea in one symbol? Does that mean you think my idea might have some merit?” Sarah asked, directing Scott's attention back to the glyphs.
“It's possible,” he told her. “When Sir Arthur Evans tried and failed to decode Linear B and the Phaistos Disk in the early 1900s he hypothesized the glyphs had a double meaning. That each glyph was phonetic, but that each glyph also in and of itself had a religious meaning.”
“Was he ever proved right?”
“About the first part of his theory, yes. But the second?
No. That doesn't mean you're wrong though. It's just, why would the inventors of this language want to draw our attention to certain cities? It would have to be something somehow obvious to us. But the problem is—what? It's like, if we drew a picture of Moscow, what would you immediately think of?”
“Vodka.”
“Potatoes,” Matheson chipped in. He was met with some puzzled looks all around. Sheepishly the engineer shrugged back at them.
“Lenin,” November said.
“Stalin. Communism. Anastasia. Red Square. Y'see, the list goes on and on. But it's entirely socially and culturally related. It's in our consciousness fed by the mass media. It represents an idea that fills literally volumes. So to us it has context. But in a thousand years what's built up around that image will be forgotten. So if that's how they're trying to communicate with us, it's useless. And I hope that's not the case.”
Sarah was confused. “What are you saying?”
“In my own, roundabout kinda academic way, I'm saying that I think you're onto something. That these cities
are
linked, like some part of a global machine. But to do what? You're more than likely correct. This glyph may represent Peru, just as this one represents Atlantis. But I need more. I need the ‘why.'”
“What's the Phaistos Disk?” November asked.
“A flat round clay tablet the size of a saucer found by the thirty-four-year-old Italian archeologist Luigi Pernier in the Phaistos Temple on Crete, Building 40/101, northwest of the Grand Central Court, July third, 1908,” Pearce announced in a monotonous dirge.
Scott was surprised. Blinked. “Thanks.”
“Photographic memory,” Pearce quipped, slugging back his coffee. He still looked depressed.
“There were forty-five individual pictograms, pressed into the clay two hundred and forty-one times, making up sixty-one groupings or ‘words.' One hundred and twenty-two glyphs on side A. One hundred and nineteen on side B. The interesting thing is, the writing was written in a spiral,
starting on the outer edge and working its way into the center,” said Scott.
“A spiral?” Hackett tensed. “I hate to state the obvious but the writing in Egypt was written in a spiral. Albeit a large one.”
“True,” Scott agreed. “But the Phaistos Disk glyphs had marker lines subdividing units of utterance. The Atlantis glyphs are in a continuous string, with no real structure. It's like English if you took out all spaces and punctuation and printed it all in either upper or lower case.”
BOOK: Decipher
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