“Some of those might also be nonterrestrial in origin!”
She knew that one such formerly “junk” element was involved in adenosine-to-inosine editing of RNA transcripts. These “editor” components overwhelmingly occurred in repeat sequences, called Alu elements, within noncoding RNA sequences.
Alu elements were found only in primates, and A-to-I editing was particularly important in brain activity.
The colonization of the primate line by Alu elements made possible the development of a new level of complexity in RNA processing, allowed more flexible and dynamic programming of neural circuitry, and laid the foundation for memory and higher-order cognition.
She wondered again at that old space movie, with its black monolith from space, and ancient primates embarking on the long journey to becoming human.
“Doc, do you think maybe the repetitive prebiotic material and what looks like nucleic acid junk we’ve found in the tepui stone…do you think that might not be junk after all?”
Darla pondered it, possibilities flashing through her mind.
“Far from being just junk, it might be a sample of a vastly expanded and highly sophisticated regulatory architecture. One that, in bits and pieces, has been manifesting itself throughout life on earth for a billion years.”
Barry whistled softly, but Darla barely heard him. Caught up in her thoughts, she was not inclined to further discussion. Barry seemed caught up in his own thoughts too, but eventually he turned on the seatback screen in front of him and watched the reports and bulletins on Jerusalem for a time.
Someone knows about all this, Darla thought.
Someone who knows that explosions in complexity occur as a result of advanced controls and embedded networking.
Scattered throughout the meteorites of the world, there just might be the whole code of a most important program, a design system not only for the generation and control of higher levels of complexity, but also for self-reproduction and self-programming of complex systems generally. The full unveiling of such a code could have tremendous implications, not only for General Retticker’s search for chemically reactive armor or performance-enhancing drugs, but perhaps for all life on the planet.
She thought of the stories of the Nuhus, of the yahui-priests, and of the abundance of food and wealth hidden in the caves associated with them. That jogged in her mind the old tales of the Grail as lapis ex coelis, the stone from the heavens, which also provided food and wealth in many of the stories of the medieval Arthurian romancers.
Scattered across time and space in new world and old, might those images of abundant food and wealth stand for something else in those stories—something far more than mundane, that could only be described in mundane terms? Was that “something else” the reason why someone (or more than one someone) was going after all the pieces? A new kind of philosopher’s stone—a black stone, exiled from the sky, which nonetheless enabled a transformation far more important than that which turned base metals into gold?
Near her, Barry snorted. Startled, Darla stared at him.
“Sorry. I was just watching these news reports on the Temple Mount mess. I wonder if the physicists’ talk of all their alternate worlds and parallel universes would have made a difference in that nightmare.”
“I don’t follow you.”
“What if, in infinite universes of infinite possibilities, there might be an earth somewhere where Moses never lived, and Jesus never lived, and Muhammad never lived? Would it make any difference? Would there be no religious relics or monuments for people to build up or tear down? Or would people still be blowing things up in Jerusalem?”
“If not there, probably somewhere else,” Darla said, fighting the slide into glumness as she thought again of Avigdor Fox and the Temple Mount. “I guess if all the religious impedimenta—the relics, the shrines disappeared, it might give everybody pause, for a while. But people and monuments are easier to get rid of than ideas. Might as well throw in Buddha, Hitler, and Einstein never existing, while you’re at it.”
“Okay, done. Go on.”
“I think ideas like theirs would still probably pop up one way or another, with or without them.”
Barry gave her a skeptical look.
“Ideas floating around in the ether, destined to manifest themselves independent of particular individuals?
That’s too Platonic and too fatalistic for me.” Barry switched off the seatback screen in front of him and turned over in an attempt to get back to sleep. “G’night.”
“Have a good sleep,” Darla said, wishing Barry what she was unlikely to experience herself. She stared out the window again, wondering about things to say to General Retticker and things not to say to Yamada. She wondered, too, about what had happened between her and Miskulin—once again, for a very brief moment, after that brief interview.
Odd. She supposed she could write it off to her feeling low at the time—and any port in a storm, as the saying went. Michael really wasn’t her type, she knew that. Had known it, for years.
Certainly Freud would have had something to say about the fact that she’d always preferred stronger, quieter, older men to those of her own age or younger. Men like the general, if he had thrown her a sign in that direction. Or if she had had time to throw him one.
Staring into the night she almost hoped she might see out there the faintly glimmering outlines of some architecture of infinite possibility, a constellation of fate or destiny. All she managed to see were a few distant stars, fading as the earth turned this side of itself into the light of a star much nearer.
BRIGHT MENISCUS
“Welcome to Temple Mount,” Victor Fremdkunst said, shifting something that looked rather like a large video camera onto his left side in order to shake hands with Retticker. “Thirty-five acres of the hottest real estate on the planet—or at least the most contested.”
Joe Retticker nodded as he looked at the heavily guarded precincts around them.
“I know how zealous the parties are about defending their turf here,” Retticker said. “Things must have reached a pretty pass for them to be willing to ‘reassign’ the management of this crisis to multinational forces.”
Fremdkunst led Retticker through the late afternoon light, away from the desert-painted Humvee in which he’d arrived.
“Both the Israelis and Wakf, the Islamic Trust that oversees the Dome, were more than happy to turn this situation over to the UN,” Fremdkunst said. “The ‘Dome intifada’ this whole thing has caused is putting all previous uprisings in the shade.”
Retticker nodded. He had seen the reports. The Muslim world was up in arms. Riots in Pakistan and the Arabian port city of Qatif. Massive street protests from Morocco to Syria to Iran. Not a good time to be a a blue-helmeted peacekeeper in this neighborhood.
Tools jangling on his tool belt, Fremdkunst in full meteorite-hunter mode led the way along a cypress-bordered allée toward a broad plaza, paved in slabs of pale stone, surrounded by pillared and colonnaded structures.
“What’s that gadget you’re carrying?” Retticker asked.
“Netsonde side-scanning earth-penetrating sonar unit,” Fremdkunst replied. “The latest tool of the trade.”
Retticker was going to ask what trade, but then he saw, dead ahead, the vault of the Dome of the Rock, blackened on one side. The portico leading to the nearest entrance of the Muslim pilgrimage site was gutted and broken.
“Thar she blows,” Fremdkunst said. “The Dome itself. Over that way is the Western Wall plaza, where the Jewish First and Second Temple once stood. The center of spiritual life for the Jews in Israel. The Second Temple is where Jesus taught and overturned the moneychangers’ tables, where he was tempted by Satan while floating in the air. Beyond the Dome that way is the Al-Aqsa Mosque. The Stables of Solomon, or what’s left of them, are over that way, and the Mount’s Golden Gate is off there, too.”
Around the shrine of the Dome stood a sea of blue-helmeted soldiers. Fremdkunst and Retticker fla
shed their credentials and the blue sea parted for them. As they got closer to the shrine, Retticker thought he recognized some of the troops in the innermost rings as enhanced warfighters. Beyond them, amid the rubble of the nearest shrine entrance, stood a man in what looked like a desert-camo business suit.
“There’s the gent who got you assigned as an adviser to the multinational force,” Fremdkunst said, nodding his head in the man’s direction. “He must have pulled a lot of strings. I believe you’ve met before, aboard my boat Sky Miner?”
In the midst of what Retticker was now sure was a contingent of MERC supertroops, there stood George Otis himself, a corporate emperor surrounded by his praetorian guard.
Unlike all the grim-faced troops and officials they’d encountered, the silver-haired power broker was smiling broadly. Retticker got the distinct impression that Otis would have been practically skipping with happiness if the rubble and debris he was walking through offered more solid footing. Fremdkunst reintroduced the two of them.
“So, Mister Otis,” Fremdkunst said as they surveyed the damage, “what do you think?”
“Splendid, splendid!” Otis said, beaming. “What with the blast at the Western Wall, some of my friends in the Knesset are calling for the annihilation of the ‘House of Esau’ and the ‘Amalekites,’ biblical names for the Palestinians!”
“Annihilation?” Retticker asked. “How?”
“Surgical fuel-air bombing strikes. It’ll be like hitting them with mininukes but without the downside of radiation overspray. The Israelis are at last realizing that the two-state solution is not final enough.
Obadiah fifteen to eighteen may very soon be fulfilled!”
Although he didn’t recall the scripture verse, Retticker knew well the power of fuel-air bombs. They were more appropriately known as MAD FAE, for “mass air delivery fuel-air explosives.” He had seen them in action on the battlefield—big canisters filled with ethylene oxide or aqueous ammonium nitrate mixtures, descending by parachute and detonating just above the ground, producing blast overpressures of hundreds or even thousands of pounds per square inch, disintegrating everything within tens to hundreds of yards. They were nothing to be toyed with, especially if one were considering effective tools for a civilian genocide.
Some of Retticker’s misgivings must have shown themselves in his face, for Otis quickly qualified his enthusiasm.
“I’m sure no one takes any pleasure in such pronouncements of extermination. I know I don’t. As the Bible says in Ezekiel eighteen thirty-two, ‘For I have no pleasure in the death of him that dieth, saith the Lord God.’ This isn’t about some simpleminded hatred of the Palestinians or of Islam. This is about God’s Plan. Believers can rejoice in the hope that the unchurched, seeing such calamities and catastrophes breaking out, will realize all this as prophetic fulfillment of a twentyfive-hundred-year-old verdict from a judging God—and will turn to Jesus Christ for salvation in the face of it!”
Blindsided by Otis’s smugly smiling self-righteousness, Retticker could only nod. Flanked by his MERC supersoldiers, Otis turned on his heel as Fremdkunst led them into the damaged shrine.
With the sun declining outside, it was cool and damp and rather gloomy inside the structure. Retticker looked about them, but many of the finer details of the structure—its ornamentation and calligraphy—were becoming lost in shadow.
That sensation of cool dampness only grew as they approached the spot where naked rock protruded out of the shrine’s floor. As the three of them stood looking down at the stone, the troops fanned out into defensive positions around them. With the troops deployed, the gloom of the damaged shrine took on a surreal air.
“The sacred stone of Mount Moriah itself,” Fremdkunst said quietly. “The presence of a town on the south side of the Mount goes back to at least the late Chalcolithic and Early Bronze Ages. A heckuva lot of human history and prehistory dial down right to this spot. Five thousand years’ worth, at least.”
“The town was originally called Urusalim,” Otis said, nodding as he knelt down and reverently touched the exposed rock. “A Semitic word meaning ‘Foundation of Shalem’ or ‘Foundation of God.’ Jewish tradition says the rock here at the top of the Temple Mount was the first rock laid down as the foundation of the rest of creation. The rock where the world began, and also where it will end.”
Otis stood and walked to another part of the rock before kneeling and touching it again.
“When King David captured the city from the Jebusites about three thousand years ago,” he continued, “he made it the capital of the Jewish kingdom and changed its name to Jerusalem, ‘City of Peace.’ The Ark of the Covenant was brought to the Mount around 950 BC, but it was also here, much earlier, that Abraham built the sacred stone altar for the sacrifice, in faith, of his only son Isaac. Also where Jacob used one of the stones as a pillow and had his great dream-vision of angels going up and down a ladder or stairway to heaven. The same stone later became the foundation stone, the Even ha-Shetiyah, of Solomon’s temple. It was on that same stone that they set the Ark of the Covenant.
“According to one Kings eight, the Shekinah, the Divine Presence, descended onto this place. Ezekiel eight four and eleven twenty-three tells us it was from this same place that the Divine Presence departed.
Ezekiel forty-three, lines one to seven, says it will be to this same place that the Divine Presence will return.”
Barraged by the biblical sound bites of such proof-texting, Retticker could say nothing in reply. The light continued to fade inside the shrine. To Retticker, the gloom seemed filled with both the promise and the menace of long history. A small electromechanical whirring began as Fremdkunst powered up his earth-penetrating sonar device.
“Where do people pray in here?” Retticker asked at last, looking about them.
“Anywhere they like, I suppose,” Fremdkunst said, bringing the screen of his sonar-scanner up to his face and panning the device slowly over the stone. “This isn’t a mosque or a temple. It’s a Mashhad, a shrine for pilgrims. First this was a Jebusite holy place, then it was the site of the two Jewish Temples.
“Under the Romans it was a sanctuary dedicated to the Roman god Jupiter. Then it became sacred to the Muslims because Muhammad stopped here during his Night Journey. From this stone, the As-Sakhra, the Prophet ascended to heaven on a ladder of golden light. That’s why the Muslims capped it with the Dome of the Rock—Qubbat As-Sakhra, in Arabic.”
Fremdkunst changed the direction of his sonar scan, then began slowly panning over the rock from a different angle before he took up his history again.
“For a few years it was the primary sacred site of Islam, until Muhammad quarreled with the Jews of Medina and Allah directed him to shift the still-point of the turning world to Mecca. When the Christians controlled the city, they turned this place into a shrine called the Templum Domini. Then it went back to being the Qubbat As-Sakhra after the Muslims regained control of it.”
Retticker and Otis watched Fremdkunst perform his sonar-scan ritual. It was getting dark inside the shrine. They would need to use flashlights or headlamps before long.
“Beneath the sacred stone is a cavelike crypt called the Well of Souls,” Fremdkunst said. “According to ancient folklore, you can sometimes hear the voices of the dead and the rushing of the rivers of paradise in the crypt.”
“Sounds like everyone has wanted to own a piece of this rock,” Retticker said. “Whose turn is it now, science’s?”
“Perhaps,” Fremdkunst replied. “Wait a minute. I’ve got something here.”
The meteorite hunter stepped onto the rock and, after a brief zigzag of misdirection, narrowed in on his target. To Retticker it looked as if Fremdkunst was paying more attention to his scan readout than to where he was placing his feet. With considerably more care and caution, Otis and Retticker followed.
Standing over the spot on the stone the screen had led him to, Fremdkunst pulled the sonar scan away from his face and looked down.
>
“This is where Fox was working,” he said. “The stone’s newly broken here, see? According to my scanner, he was only centimeters away from reaching the embedded stone when his work was interrupted.”
Fremdkunst handed Retticker a small LED keyfob light.
“Here. Press the button on this and keep the light focused on this hole here.”
Retticker did as he was told. Fremdkunst grabbed a hammer, chisel, and small miner’s pick from his tool belt. Taking up and putting down the tools as needed, he widened and deepened the hole in the sacred stone. His pick at last made a hollow sound, as if he’d struck the rock wrong.
Immediately a scent filled the air around them, a fragrance like incense or perfume but with an earthy organic undertone like mildew or mushroom. Fremdkunst stopped digging but Retticker kept the light shining on the darker stone embedded within the rock outcrop before them.
Abruptly something seemed to twist the LED beam, to make the brightness lenticular above the hole itself, like a meniscus of surface tension between oil and vinegar, like a lens-shaped bubble rising through water or a fingernail sliver of moon coming over the horizon. Ghostly as a glowing mushroom cap, the bright meniscus rose a foot or so into the air. Abruptly it burst, leaving a smear of wetness on the stone as its only trace.
“Jacob’s stone and the oil of heaven!” Otis said, a bit too enthusiastically for Retticker’s taste. “This is a sign from God, that He is well-pleased with our work!”
“Maybe,” Fremdkunst said, “but I think the jury’s still out. We can each make up our own minds about this, and each make up our own opinions about it, but I don’t think we can each make up our own facts.
I’m going to look for a scientific explanation.”
“What about contamination?” Retticker asked.
“Us by it? Or it by us?” Fremdkunst said, smiling as he scraped up samples of the smeared stone. “This rock’s been here a long time. Many other people have likely been exposed to it—without recorded harm.”
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