Decipher, p.32
Decipher, page 32
Gathered around the workstation with Matheson, the team watched as he operated the controls on the system and a three-dimensional model of the Giza tunnel system rotated about an axis.
“I’ve run it three different ways,” Matheson said, “and I get this every time. It’s from this data Sarah brought with her.” He patted one of the little data pods carefully. “This is the tunnel system. Some of it’s really deep, ten miles down. You could mine for just about anything there—coal, copper, diamonds—and never go deep enough to realize these things were also down here.”
Scott was puzzled. “That’s a lot of detail. You got all that from radar data?”
“No.” Matheson tapped a button. More views of the tunnel system popped up in various shades of fluctuating orange. He knew his software and he flew around the system at lightning speed. “There was more than just radar data being recorded on these things,” he said. “I measured the resistance of the electricity flow in the Carbon 60.”
“I didn’t know you could do that. How could you do that?”
“I designed these little units,” Matheson said modestly. “I know what they can do. The flow gave me not only a rough estimate of tunnel length, but told me whether the flow was singular. Whether it split off, diverged or converged with other electrical flows.”
“You’re describing a power grid,” Hackett commented.
“That’s what it is,” Matheson agreed. “All the data combined—radar, electrical, seismic—gives me enough information to build up a rough picture of the real layout of the tunnel system beyond Giza. That place where this Eric guy frazzled? That acted like a transformer on a power grid, but different. The closest analogy would be a Tesla Coil. Whatever, the point is it was drawing current. And Sarah’s right, it’s converting earthquake energy, then stepping the electrical current up to a level capable of traveling great distances. A modern level—”
“What do you mean, modern?” November asked.
“We’re talking about regular AC current running at 60 cycles per second,” Matheson told her. “You could easily take your TV down there and hook it up. Modern, November, modern.”
“Sixty,” Pearce wondered. “There’s that magic number again.”
“I don’t get it,” Sarah said. “Why would they need to shunt so much energy around to just blast it off up into space?”
“Because by blasting it off into space, the pyramids act like a release valve on a steam pressure cooker, diverting energy away from us. In effect, saving our damn lives. That Chad earthquake was real powerful. It should have done a lot more damage than it did.”
“You think this is what’s happening in Atlantis as well?” November queried.
“Why not?” Matheson replied. “We can’t get in touch with the Chinese base, can we? What if they were sitting right on top of something that acted in just the same way this acted?”
Pearce was nodding. “And blasted a beam straight through the ice and destroyed them. That’s what I saw. Yes!”
“That Atlantis is sucking solar flare energy down into itself, we’ve seen. Now we’re expected to believe that it’s also blasting energy back up into space again. Why? It’s a contradiction. Why would it do that?” Hackett demanded.
“Have these energy blasts been registered at any of the other sites?” Sarah asked.
“Not that I’m aware of,” Matheson replied, “but Giza and Atlantis are the only sites we can be sure have been tampered with excessively by man. Maybe you inadvertently switched something on.”
“But how are these sites connected?” Hackett wanted to know.
Matheson eyed Pearce sympathetically. “Scientifically speaking … ? That’s what I gotta figure out.”
“Well, y’all, I’m done here,” November cut in. She’d been working on the video images all afternoon. Capturing all data on the language written on the C60 in the Giza tunnel system and the footage Sarah had recorded especially for Scott. She’d compared the glyphs with those they had studied in Geneva, and she had compiled the results as best she knew how.
Scott jumped to his feet. “What have we got?” he asked excitedly.
Proudly, she announced: “We’ve got an alphabet.”
the first protocol
[In Ancient Chinese Culture] a man absorbed with writing was absorbed not just with words but with symbols and, through the art of writing with the brush, with a form of painting and thus with the world itself. To the lover of high culture, the way in which something was written could be as important as its content.
David N. Keightley, “The Origins of Writing in China”
An essay in: The Origins of Writing,
Edited by Wayne M. Senner, 1989
RETRIEVAL STAGE I
Hieroglyphics, from the Greek word ierolyphika, meaning “sacred carved letters.”
Across November’s screen were displayed a series of glyphs that seemed to defy understanding. This was the earliest known system of writing ever discovered: the first protocol. It dated even from before the time of Babel, when the divine speech of Adam was smashed into a thousand tongues by God, made all the more confusing by the fact that there were only sixteen symbols.
“That’s it?” Sarah was amazed. “That’s not much of an alphabet. Is that enough to cover all sounds in a language?”
“Not our language,” Scott agreed, “but some languages? Sure. Scandinavian Runes only had sixteen symbols. That was enough for them. The Old Germanic Runes used twenty-four. Rune, by the way, does not mean ‘mystery’ or ‘secret,’ as the mystics seem to think. It means to scratch, to dig, or to make grooves.”
“How dull,” Hackett remarked.
“Do you think this language might be related to Runes?” November asked.
“No,” he said confidently. “Runes evolved from Latin letters anyway—the same letters we still use today.”
“Runes are too modern. I get it.”
“Right. And the reason they look so different is because of the medium they used. Look.” He grabbed a pen and his notebook. Scrawled out a few letters. “Y’see, these are Runes. This is Futhark writing:
That’s nothing like what we’re seeing on the screen. Runes are all straight lines because everything was scratched into wood or stone. It’s simply too cumbersome to try and even attempt curves. Ogham, the Old Irish language from about two thousand years ago, is the same. It consisted of lines and dots, mostly etched into the corners of standing stones.” He drew a few of those symbols too.
“That vertical line you see is usually drawn first, and all the side lines are drawn going vertically down a continuous mid-line. It’s usually up to groups of five lines on any one side because it evolved from a finger language. Which side of the line denoted the left or the right hand. It was also adopted by the Picts on the British Isles. But their language is totally unknown so their Ogham texts, even though we can make out some of the letters, are still undeciphered.”
“But this C60 is crystal. It’s hard. So why has this writing got curves, if it’s so difficult to make?” November asked reasonably.
Hackett tried his best not to sound brusque. “That’s what I was saying, back in the lab! This writing shows no signs of having been etched into the crystal. In fact, it seems to be a natural side effect of the way in which this crystal was manufactured. Like it’s part of the design.”
“Is that possible,” she asked, “to grow a crystal to a certain shape by design?”
“Sure,” Sarah interjected. “Airline manufacturers do it all the time. The rotary blade of a jet engine is grown out of a single crystal of metal. It’s designed that way because it’s stronger. More able to take the pressure …” Sarah went quiet as she realized what she was saying. “Hey, could all those C60 structures we’ve found be single crystals?”
“That would go a long way to explain how they survived thousands of years, some of them, miles under the ice,” Hackett nodded.
But Scott was elsewhere, completely absorbed in the writing.
“So I guess, if you want curves any other way you’ve gotta paint ’em on,” November prodded.
“Huh? Oh, yeah. That’s what the Chinese did. Demotic, the shorthand version of hieroglyphics—that was painted. Once you painted it you could use curves, pictures, all sorts.”
“Hey, they used curves and pictures in Egypt, all over their monuments,” Sarah corrected. “Remember? I’ve just been there.”
“Yes. But they’re ornamental. They’re big. By that reckoning, if you wanted to read the latest novel you’d have to literally wait to read the library from wall to wall. You wouldn’t write that large in everyday living. Any Egyptian writing the size of your handwriting is painted, whether it’s on a wall or parchment. It’s just too intricate to be cast in stone. And in fact, in Chinese, the earliest known writing isn’t painted at all. It’s scratched into pottery and consists entirely of straight lines.”
“How many characters did that have?”
“Thirty. Written mostly on pottery in Pan-p’o Village, Sian, Shens, about 5000 B.C.E. Some epigraphers have dismissed them because they’re not pictograms. They’re abstract.”
“They’re saying early man wasn’t capable of abstract thought?” Sarah chided. “If they’re not pictograms then they’re not writing. Isn’t that a little arrogant? Didn’t they ever stop to consider maybe their theory was wrong, and not the facts?”
Scott agreed with her warmly.
“Dr. Scott,” November said, “didn’t you say early cuneiform was more complicated and abstract than later cuneiform? As if humans were advanced but seemed to be forgetting their knowledge base?”
“Yup. And the same thing’s going on in China. The trouble is, there’s little evidence that Chinese writing was ever pictographic, so they can’t just dismiss it on that score. Except for what they found in the Shantung region, by a group known as the Yi, who settled in the Lower Yangtze,” he revealed. “Totemism. Pictorial designs thousands of years old—of the sun and a bird, together. Read as: yeng niao. Sunbirds.”
“The Phoenix again,” November remarked.
Scott nodded. “Anyway,” he said, “Chinese is logographic. Started out in a similar fashion to hieroglyphics. They used pictures based on sounds denoting what they wanted to say. For example, it’s like you might draw a pear fruit for the word ‘pair,’ even though it has an entirely different meaning. It’s the sound that’s important.”
As Scott said all this, his eyes never left the screen. Never wavered from the symbols in his hunt for their meaning. It was like the spew of information was really an autopilot response, something for his mouth to do while his mind went into overdrive.
“It’s also called the rebus principle,” he went on, “where pictograms spell out the word in a similar fashion to letters. It was the same in Egyptian hieroglyphics, but it scaled new heights there. You could spell the same word in any number of ways.”
“That must have caused problems,” Hackett suggested.
“Not for them. Just us. We ended up building a whole mystical world around hieroglyphs for a while because we couldn’t read them. Stuff like assuming the Egyptians used the symbol of a goose when they wanted to say ‘son’ because they believed the goose was the only bird that loved and nurtured its offspring. When in fact it was just that they’re phonetic. The two words sound the same.”
Sarah moved in close to the linguist, equally intrigued by the writing. Asked gently: “So did you get around to figuring out what the hieroglyphics in my tunnel actually spell out?”
Scott said that he had and picked up the notebook he’d left by November’s computer. He flipped to the right page and announced: “Behold! The language of Thoth! The books of wisdom of the Great Ennead—”
“Great Ennead?”
“All the gods together. Kinda like Congress. Behold!” Scott continued. “What secrets lie here! Despair, for they are not to be known by men!”
Hackett was disturbed. “That’s it?”
“That’s it. Oh, and then it just repeats it over and over—for two miles. Interspersed with heroic tales of kings who tried to have it decoded and failed.”
“Great,” Hackett moaned. “That’s not what I expected to hear.”
Suddenly, the epigraphist sat bolt upright. “That’s it!” he proclaimed. “At least—that’s what it’s not!” He ran his finger across the monitor glass. Remembered his studies from when he was an undergrad. “As Sol Worth said in 1975: ‘Pictures can’t say ain’t!’”
“What are you talking about?”
“Pictograms and iconograms. Pictures. They can’t effectively represent verb tenses, adverbs or prepositions. And what they definitely can’t do is assert the non-existence of what it is they depict. If you wanted to try and communicate with people in the future, you wouldn’t use pictograms.” He put his thumb over the symbol of the circle with the cross. “Forget this one. It’s the exception. But look at the rest of these. What do they remind you of? A table? A chair? A sack of potatoes?”
November shook her head. “Nothing. They don’t look like anything I’ve ever seen.”
“Exactly,” Scott exclaimed. “They’re abstract. That means they’re either letters—A,B,C—or syllables—ch, th, ph.”
Hackett leaned into the screen. “Or they could be numbers,” he suggested.
“They’re not numbers,” Scott replied confidently.
“How do you know?”
“I just do.”
“Asking the right types of questions, huh?”
Scott let it pass. Turned to November. “Can this thing give me percentages? Tell me how many times each one of these symbols is used in the texts?”
“Sure,” November said, getting to work on the problem. “You mean like a frequency chart? What will that achieve?”
“Different letters in our own language are used more often than others. The letter E is used far more than, say, the letter Z.” He shared a look with Sarah. For a brief moment it looked like she might even kiss him.
Instead, she rested a hand on his shoulder. “You’re a clever man, Richard Scott.”
“Thanks,” Scott replied proudly. But as he returned his attention to the computer screen he caught November scowling at him.
“What is it?” Scott asked innocently.
November went back to her work. “Never mind,” she grumbled.
“What?” Scott insisted. But November refused to answer.
Scott pushed his chair back from the computer, looked to Hackett for support. But the amused physicist simply shook his head and tutted. “Playing with fire,” he whispered. “Playing with fire.”
The beeping was insistent. Annoying. November’s computer had completed its frequency distribution calculations.
“Ah-ha,” Scott enthused, following the young student’s every movement as she punched up the data.
There was a spread of figures, ranging from 6.17 percent at the low end for one glyph to 6.36 percent at the high end. The mean was 6.25 percent. Which, as it happened, was exactly the product of 100 divided by 16. In other words, the frequency of each glyph’s appearance within the combined texts was equal. No one glyph was more dominant than the next. So it was impossible to tell from the spread of figures just which glyph might be a consonant, and which might be a vowel.
“Damn it!” Scott spat in frustration. “Goddamnit!” Sarah gave him a sympathetic look. Though he appreciated it, he couldn’t quite bring himself to make an acknowledgment.
“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.”
SEAS: ROUGH WEATHER: GALE FORCE 4— RISING SHARPLY
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.’”
