Lemuria

by Burt Clinchandhill

  “Now, there’s a name,” Bishop replied. “If someone could help you with your communication problem, I suspect it’ll be Jennifer. She studied linguistic anthropology and has a particular interest in evolution. So, why ask me about her?”

  “When was the last time you spoke with her?” Lindsey repeated.

  “It’s been a few months, I guess. Maybe more. Come to think of it. It was at her dissertation, I think. You?” he addressed Monroe.

  “Probably at the same opportunity,” Monroe replied.

  “Why?” Bishop asked, now suspecting more behind the question.

  “You’re not the first one we contacted for help with this,” Lindsey admitted. “I cannot give you all the details, but we suspect Jennifer is somehow connected to the disappearing tribes.”

  “What do you mean ‘connected?’” Bishop asked. “You think she’s somehow responsible?”

  “I didn’t say that,” Lindsey replied. “As I said, we can’t give you the details, but trust me when I say there is evidence linking her to it all.”

  “So, I figure you asked her,” Bishop said. “What did she have to say about it?”

  “We tried.” Ignatowski rubbed his chin. “We tried to contact her, first at her home, then at the university. We even had her tracked down by our agency. She’s nowhere to be found.”

  “No one has seen or heard from her in over three months,” Lindsey added.

  Bishop stayed silent for a long moment, then squinted his eyes and shook his head profoundly. “From what I know, that’s not unheard of. During the research for her dissertation, Jennifer was known to disappear for weeks at a time, researching some third world country. Listen, even if I believed you, I could not leave the university now. I have classes the day after tomorrow.”

  “That has been arranged,” Ignatowski said. “Your schedule has been cleared. It’s only a four-day trip. One day to fly there, two researching the location and one to get back.”

  It was quiet around the table for a long moment before Bishop broke the silence. “When would we leave?” he asked, still shaking his head slowly.

  “Now,” Lindsey said. “We have a private plane standing by. We would very much appreciate your help.”

  Bishop took a deep breath and looked at Monroe.

  “Like I said,” Monroe said, “I guess that was the shortest fishing trip ever.”

  Bishop smiled. “As if you mind. Can I ask you to drive my car back?”

  Chapter 5 – Specola Vaticana

  Rome, Italy, The Present

  A tall man, dressed in a cassock and clearly in a hurry, steered his bike along the Anfiteatro Saveriano, the amphitheater built in AD 315 by Emperor Septimus Severus’s Legio Secunda Parthica, the Imperial Roman legion. After a quick look left and right, he sped his bike onto the Via del Cimiterio.

  “Good morning.” The priest turned his head to the cemetery on the left as he had done so many days before. In 1995, Lamberto Natale De Cremonese moved to Rome after working as an assistant professor at the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the University of Bologna. After entering the Society of Jesus in 1996 and taking his vows as a brother, he was assigned the function of astronomer to the Vatican Observatory, the Specola Vaticana. After fifteen years, De Cremonese was named Director of the Vatican Observatory by Pope Benedict XVI, giving him the unofficial title, the Pope’s astronomer.

  In his late fifties, with a boyish smile and beady eyes, he had been able to unite science and faith to the masses. His TED Talks made him even more popular with both scientists and men of the cloth. With his square gray beard and a full head of equally colored hair waving in the wind, he turned onto the narrow Viale PioXI, not noticing the old model gray Fiat Regatta. De Cremonese’s back wheel almost slipped from under him as he braked, startled by the car’s horn.

  “Porca miseria!” the man in the car shouted from the open window as De Cremonese regained his balance.

  “Mi dispiace,” De Cremonese apologized, shouting back after the car that steered away.

  Now standing on his pedals, he picked up the pace, swinging his weight from left to right and back on every turn of his legs. As a kid on a bike in the streets of Bologna, his parents were called to the hospital on more than one occasion because the young Lamberto broke another bone crashing his bike into the road, another bike, a car or a wall. A mile down the road, breathing heavily, he turned right and passed through a tunnel just wide enough for one bike, and exited onto the Piazza Della Liberta. He put some extra weight on the pedals to steer up the slight incline of paving stones.

  Some thirty miles south of Vatican City, Castel Gandolfo, in Rome, was built as a ‘Palazzo Papale.’ The palace lay next to the Lago Albano, a spring-fed lake whose origin is a gigantic volcanic crater, two and a half miles long. The 1.4-mile wide and 560-foot deep lake was the deepest in Italy. The Vatican acquired the palace in 1596 from the Savelli family when they couldn’t pay their debt to the Papacy. Maffeo Barberini, cardinal and son of a Florentine nobleman, was assigned by the Vatican to modernize the place and had Swiss-Italian architect Carlo Maderno design it into a modern palace worthy as a Papal summer vacation house. In 1623, Maffeo Barberini himself became Pope Urban VIII, who spent his summers at the palace. Since then, many popes spent their summers at the Castel Gandolfo, and some had even died there. Ironically, the entire area, at some point, was the palace of the Roman Emperor Domitian, who ruled from AD 81 until AD 96 and was the first emperor who systematically persecuted the Christians. As the palace and the grounds lay beyond the borders of Vatican City, they’re afforded the extraterritorial status as one of the properties of the Holy See. Much like embassies have in foreign countries.

  “Buongiorno.” De Cremonese greeted two guards as he passed the arched doorway of Castel Gandolfo and drove his bike onto the square courtyard of the Papal Palace. De Cremonese jumped off his bike and parked it against the bright yellow wall next to two large black wooden doors. He grabbed the iron door handles and swung them open. Behind the doors, a man sat on a stool reading La Gazzetta dello Sport.

  “Where is he?”

  Startled, the man looked up from his newspaper. “Who?”

  De Cremonese waved a hand in the air. “Brother Matteo.”

  “Sorry. Of course,” the man stammered. “He asked me to tell you he was on the roof terrace.”

  In a few steps, De Cremonese reached the back of the hallway, where he opened the carved white door. With big steps, he went through it and walked into the central corridor. Usually part of the museum tour but now closed for renovations, the central hallway was a loved tourist attraction in itself. The multi-colored shining marble floors of the 15-foot wide, one hundred-foot-long hallway reflected the walls decorated with graceful pastoral scenes by the eighteenth-century painter Pier Leone Ghezzi below the baroque stucco arched ceilings. Leaving the echo of his heals behind, De Cremonese dashed onto the stairs to the second floor, passing the historical museum with the portraits of popes, liturgical furniture and papal guard costumes and past the bedroom where Pius XII and Paul VI had died long ago. There, he took a shortcut to the terrace by entering another stairwell that took him to, and then through, one of the two telescope rooms.

  On top of the Papal Palace—dating back to the reforming of the Gregorian calendar by Pope Gregory XIII and built under the advisement of astronomer Christopher Clavius—one of the oldest observatories in the world was created. The more modern telescopes of the “Specola Vaticana” in the observatories dated from 1935.

  Back then, the Vatican was eager to show that science and religion go well together. At the end of the nineteenth century, an anti-scientific movement started that claimed that the church was anti-intellectual. Therefore, Pope Leo XII wanted to show the world that the Vatican supported science and, in 1891, officially attracted astronomers to do research for the church. Since the founding, they produced many important scientific papers and made several significant discoveries at the observatory. One of them being
the delivery of photographic proof of ‘the green flash.’ The green flash was a rare atmospheric phenomenon that occurs immediately after sunset or just before sunrise. Basically, it’s a mirage of the Sun, where refracted sunlight delivers a green spot at the top of the Sun, lasting never more than a second or two. Daniel O’Connell, a Jesuit priest at the Specola Vaticana, took the first color picture proof of the phenomenon.

  In 1935, the then state-of-the-art telescopes were placed on the roof of the summer palace. It was situated just outside of Rome, to have a free line of sight and not be bothered by the city lights. Unfortunately, in the 1980s, the light pollution moved beyond the southern borders of Rome all the way beyond the palace, rendering the telescope virtually unusable for serious discovery.

  De Cremonese opened the door and walked onto the roof terrace. On a small bench, looking out over the Lago Albano, a young priest worked on his laptop.

  “Morning, Matteo.”

  The young man opened his mouth to answer, but De Cremonese didn’t wait for a response. “When did they first report it?”

  “The report came in this morning, at around eleven, but the original sighting was at twelve, local time, so eight this morning.”

  De Cremonese looked at his watch and counted mumbling. “It took them three hours to call us?”

  Matteo didn’t react

  “Show me.” De Cremonese joined him on the bench.

  Matteo handed him the laptop.

  “What am I looking at?”

  Matteo leaned over De Cremonese and punched a few keys. On the screen, a black and white image of two bright spots against a starry sky appeared. “This was the first observation over the southern night sky.”

  De Cremonese put his fingers on the screen and enlarged the two bright objects until they became two big bright blobs against a black screen. He took another close look and shook his head. “Do we know where they originated?”

  “No. The trajectory suggests somewhere south of there, in the western hemisphere, but that’s all we know.”

  “And what about their trajectory?”

  Matteo again worked the laptop, and another black and white screen appeared, this time displaying a ten-second clip that repeated. On the screen, the two bright objects became smaller, and while next to each other, they found their way to the top of the screen, where they slowly separated from each other and disappeared.

  De Cremonese rubbed his eyes. “I take it we’re still tracking them.”

  “As you ordered on the phone.”

  De Cremonese gave Matteo the laptop back and paced the rooftop. On the edge, he stopped overlooking the lake and looked up to the skies. Then he shook his head, searched his cassock and took out his cellphone. He dialed and looked behind him at Matteo before moving away to add more distance between them.

  “I got a disturbing call this morning,” he half-whispered into the phone. “And now I’m looking at even more disturbing telescope images.”

  He listened to the voice on the other end for a minute or two. “I’m sure he must have had his reasons, but you said you were in control of him, that you thought he would wait.”

  The woman’s voice on the other end of the line grew louder. The more he continued, the more disturbed she sounded. De Cremonese took another few steps away from Matteo, preventing him from overhearing the conversation.

  “Listen, do you have any idea what he’s up to? ... So, we don’t know what he’s planning or even why? ... Are we even sure it’s him? ... I understand your position, but I’ve got to say, this is all very disappointing. Let me think about it, and I’ll get back to you.”

  He placed his cellphone back in his cassock. He realized he’d been naive to think he could control the situation. Some people simply cannot be controlled—or trusted, for that matter. What now? He raised his head to the sky for another moment as if looking for divine intervention that didn’t come.

  “What do you want me to do?” Matteo was suddenly beside him at the ledge.

  De Cremonese turned and looked straight at, and through, Matteo. For a long moment, they both stayed silent.

  “Brother De Cremonese?” Matteo asked.

  At the sound of his name, De Cremonese snapped out of his reverie and took a deep breath before walking to the door of the telescope room. “Follow me. I want you to help me pack. I’m going to the VATT.”

  Chapter 6 – Kajaq

  Reserva Indígena Mashco-Piro, Peru, The Present

  “From here, we follow the Purus River to the village,” the officer in the Bell UH-1 helicopter called. “It’s about ten minutes now.”

  Lindsey sat across from Bishop and Ignatowski. “What do you know about the Mashco-Piro?” she asked Bishop through the headset.

  “Nothing more than I read online on the way up, and saw in the movie Fitzgeraldo, thirty-five years ago. It took me until today to understand they spelled his name wrong in that movie.” He smiled. “Any way, they are a tribe that once had contact with the modern world around the turn of the twentieth century. Fitzcarraldo’s expeditions to the inlands, where he subjugated the Mashco-Piro people as his personal slave-like workforce, are considered to be the reason the Mashco-Piro drew back to the inlands and disconnect from modern-day men. What I don’t understand is why the couple and the child were left.”

  “Not a clue,” Lindsey said, while Ignatowski shook his head.

  Bishop looked outside the wide-open helicopter door, leaned back and fiddled a bit with his seatbelt.

  “Excited?” Lindsey asked.

  Bishop nodded. “A bit. I’m not fond of helicopters. Especially the ones with open doors.”

  “Let me say this,” she replied. “If you fall out, you’ll fall out a handsome man. Those camouflage coveralls look really good on you.” Bishop looked down at his green-speckled coveralls. All of them wore the same clothing, including army boots. The Policía Nacional del Perú and the U.S. Embassy in Lima had agreed to let them leave for the location, but only dressed in those army coveralls, claiming it was for their safety. Poachers had been extraordinarily active in the area recently. The only thing the poachers more or less respected was the army. Once they saw or in any other way came in contact with soldiers, they would run like hell or risk getting shot, or worse, killed.

  “You have a lot of trouble with poachers?” Bishop asked the officer who accompanied them.

  The man answered in a heavy Spanish accent. “Only yesterday, some three hundred vicuñas were killed by poachers.”

  “Vicuñas?” Bishop asked.

  “They are the national animal of Peru. They look a bit like a llama,” the officer answered. “Only much scarcer. Almost endangered. They are hunted for their valuable wool. Poachers kill them all—males, females, even newborns. One pound of fiber sells for $400 on the local market and more than $2,000 on international markets. Each animal delivers about half a pound of wool. Howler monkeys, Goeldi monkeys, Tumbes crocodiles, Andean mountain cats, jaguars and many other animals are also hunted. We are a poor country, you know.”

  “What would you do if you didn’t have anything to eat?” Lindsey asked.

  Bishop and Ignatowski nodded.

  “So, what can you tell us about Ernst Haeckel, and the drawing, the Tree of Life, you called it?” Lindsey asked.

  “Well, I’m not a specialist on Haeckel per se. You already know I wrote the paper, ‘Evolution, the mathematical probabilities and philosophical implications of proof.’”

  “It’s still a mouthful,” Ignatowski interrupted.

  “Sure, but basically my paper said that if Darwin was more or less right, you know, sexual selection, survival of the fittest, the descent of man as he called it himself, could we prove it through mathematics? And if we could prove it, what would that mean in the philosophical sense? It would be grounds for all kinds of new debates about the creation of the universe. Belief systems all over the world would be debated and questioned. In my paper, I suggested that, theoretically, evidence of evolution—re
al hard evidence—could lead to one or more new world wars.”

  “But what does Haeckel have to do with that?” Lindsey asked.

  “Nothing in itself,” Bishop answered. “But, where I tried to suggest mathematical proof, Haeckel, a contemporary of Darwin, tried to prove Darwin’s evolution by finding physical evidence.”

  “There,” the officer called out as he pointed to the riverbank, where Lindsey and Ignatowski were dropped off last time.

  “We’ll come back to it later,” Bishop promised. “We’ll have time during our hike.”

  “Or over a campfire later this evening.” Lindsey smiled as the helicopter landed.

  They all got out.

  “So, you’re sure? I will pick you up tomorrow same time?” the officer asked one more time.

  Lindsey nodded, looking at the three large backpacks that were unloaded. “We have everything we need to spend one night. No problem. Thank you.”

  The officer stepped back into the helicopter and waved his beret out of the side door. “I wish you all the best, and I’ll see you again tomorrow, same time.” The helicopter blades whirred louder, and after a short moment, the helicopter lifted into the air.

  Bishop felt his sweaty forehead.

  “We better get going,” said Lindsey. “Once below the trees, it’ll be cooler.”

  They picked up their backpacks and disappeared from the riverbank into the rainforest.

  “We’ll be there in about forty minutes.” Ignatowski clearly felt more comfortable the second time around, and this time in his army clothing.

  “One thing I don’t understand,” Bishop said, rushing into the shadow. “Those satellites at the NRO don’t have infrared or heat signature capabilities? I mean, you said the tribe disappeared overnight. With those capabilities, you surely must have been able to track them.”