01-01-00

by R. J. Pineiro

  “Do you really think that would have been possible?”

  “Absolutely. Look at our own civilization. Four hundred years ago we had very little in terms of technology, medicine, communications. Look at us now, just four centuries later, or one baktun. We evolved quite rapidly, and the evolution has taken an exponential form. We have accomplished more in the past one hundred years than in the last millennium—as measured by our ability to create an incredible array of creature comforts. But the Maya did nothing of the kind with their science, and then, in their glory, at the peak of their scientific accomplishments, they suddenly regressed to a very primitive society, starting around A.D. 830, the beginning of the eleventh baktun. By A.D. 900, they had declined so much that it marked the official end of the Classic Period.”

  “What’s a baktun?”

  “A measure of time in Maya. About 395 of our years. The theory is complicated, but you’ll understand its concept shortly.”

  “All right. Go on.”

  “The Maya, this theory offers, had a different reason for being on this Earth. In simple terms, there’s been enough evidence to theorize that their mission was to place the Earth and its Solar System in synchronization with a larger galactic community. Once that purpose was achieved, around 830 A.D., the Maya departed. Some remained here as caretakers, overseers of the code left behind by the Classic Maya to describe their purpose and their science. That’s the Tzolkin, the harmonic matrix used by the Maya to achieve galactic synchronization.”

  Susan regarded him long and hard. “And you really believe this?”

  Slater smiled graciously, obviously used to getting such a reaction. He continued. “Like I said at the beginning, Susan, I’m just a scholar who is providing suppositions that may or may not help explain the phenomena that we’ve experienced in the past few days. Think of this as a free lecture. The Maya do challenge our science, requiring us to open our minds to a new level of thinking. When you heard me say, ‘Has it started?’ I was referring to the beginning of a new Mayan Great Creation Cycle. Like us, the Maya measured time in intervals of ever-increasing size, like our seconds, minutes, hours, and days. Western civilization measures time according to the Gregorian calendar, which has 365 days per year, marking one circle around the Sun. After that, it follows our decimal system: 10 years per decade, 10 decades per century, 10 centuries per millennium, and so on. The Long Count Mayan calendar is different only because it’s based on the vigesimal system. A kin represents one day, measured just as we do, a complete revolution of the Earth. A uinal represents their month, made up of 20 kins. A tun is their year, made up of 18 uinals or 360 kins, quite close to our 365 days. A katun is equivalent to our decade, only twice as long because their system, again, is vigesimal. Twenty tuns form a katun, which is around 19.7 years. A baktun is made up of 20 katuns, or close to 394.5 years. The start of the last Great Creation Cycle, according to Mayan scribes, who kept a record of time with good accuracy, is around 3129 B.C. These cycles last 13 baktuns, or 5129 Gregorian years. The ninth baktun ended around A.D. 830, when the decline began. The thirteenth baktun comes to a close at the end of the year 1999, if you assume the year 3129 B.C. as your starting point.”

  “Are there any other starting points?”

  He grinned. “Now you’re getting to some controversy. Some scholars feel that the end of the thirteenth baktun is more around 2012 because of evidence that the cycle started around 3116 B.C. instead of 3129 B.C.”

  “But you seem to believe otherwise.”

  “It seems like an incredible coincidence that after 5129 Gregorian years the two calendars would miss each other by a mere thirteen years. My theory, which is 99.766 percent accurate, is also more exciting, more intriguing, more Mayan than my colleague’s stolid and narrow-minded views. That also means that my translation of dates from Mayan Long Count to Gregorian differs from my colleagues’ by thirteen years, something that drives some of my friends crazy, but so do some of my other theories.”

  “Well, there seems to be some validity to your suppositions.”

  “I was actually beginning to wonder the other day if we would indeed start seeing any signs that marked the conclusion of this cycle. The daily computer events, all at the exact same time, one minute after eight in the evening local time, and starting on the first day of the last uinal—month—of the last tun, of the last katun of the last baktun, suggests that we are being contacted.”

  Susan shook her head and stood. “Contacted? This is…”

  “Bizarre? I know how it sounds, believe me. Problem is, as an archaeologist, I must consider all of the evidence and try to piece together a reasonable theory. This one, as crazy as it may sound, does fit the observations.”

  “Well,” she said, “I’m having one hell of a time not only understanding everything that you’re telling me, but also trying to digest it, to make some sense of it.”

  He smiled again, his dark eyes regarding her warmly. She felt something stirring inside again and quickly looked away. “I’m having difficulty visualizing the relationship between the Mayan calendar, our own, and this Great Creation Cycle.”

  “It’s all actually quite simple, once you write it down. Here, let me show you.” Ripping a piece of paper from a pad, Slater wrote:

  “Okay,” he said, “we are close to completing one entire Mayan cycle, from the first baktun to the thirteenth, and those are the periods as measured in our own calendar.”

  “How do you read this?” She tapped a finger on the rows of numbers separated by periods.

  “To read the Mayan Long Count, look at the five numbers separated by periods. Each number represents one time interval, as follows.” He wrote beneath the table:

  BATKUN.KATUN.TUN.UINAL.KIN

  KIN = 1 DAY

  UINAL = 20 KINS

  TUN = 360 KINS

  KATUN = 20 TUNS (7200 KINS)

  BAKTUN = 20 KATUNS (144,000 KINS)

  “With that you can simply multiply the number in the date times its respective time interval and come up with the actual number of days. You then add that number of days to your reference of 3129 B.C. and you have your Gregorian calendar equivalent date.”

  The information was pouring in too fast for Susan to keep up with it. “Wait,” she said, also sitting on the floor next to him, placing her elbows on the cocktail table. “You’re telling me that we have gone through this cycle, and its end coincides with midnight on January first?”

  “The event is even more significant than that. It will be the first time in history that both the Mayan and the Gregorian calendars line up at the baktun-millennium level. In addition, there are two other significant observations that tie into this theory. The first is the decimal equivalent of zero one, zero one, zero zero. Do you know what that is?”

  Susan stared into his dark eyes, gleaming with bold intelligence. A part of her felt intimidated by his knowledge and the ease with which he recalled specific events and dates. The rest of her felt annoyed that he had just given her a test.

  “All right,” she said. “The binary system is based on the number two, just like the decimal system is based on ten. I need a pen and paper, please.”

  Amusement softening his features, Cameron Slater gave her the notepad and his pen.

  “Each numeral one in the binary sequence indicates a place where the number two has to be multiplied by as many times as the position of the one in the binary sequence, with zero being on the right-most position. Then each number is simply added, yielding the decimal equivalent of the binary number.”

  She wrote:

  Susan didn’t say anything. She stared at her results for several seconds, almost in denial, amazed at the parallels. The damned number twenty seemed to be everywhere.

  She turned to Slater, who wore a pensive mask. Her eyes drifted to the hundreds of ancient artifacts crowding the shelves covering the walls of the living area. They seemed to look down upon her. She studied their faces, the pronounced features, their ornate headdresses,
the glyphs carved in stone, etched in wood, painted on molded clay vessels. Could this be true after all? The coincidences were simply too many for Susan to ignore, to push aside to consider a more plausible theory. She suddenly found it difficult to breathe.

  “There is yet another observation,” Slater said.

  “I don’t know how many more I can actually take tonight, Cameron.”

  “The time of the events.”

  She rubbed her chin. “One minute after eight every evening?”

  “Local time, yes. But as a planet, we have one central time, from which all time zones are referenced.”

  “Greenwich Mean Time?”

  “Correct. The events occur at exactly one minute and zero seconds after one in the morning, Greenwich Mean Time.”

  “Or zero one, zero one, zero zero,” she added in marvel.

  “Or twenty. It’s actually quite remarkable how everything is just falling into place, just as the theory suggests.”

  She stood, crossing her arms, walking to the French doors, absently inspecting the small courtyard, turning to look at one of the bookshelves. “This is…” She shook her head. “Everything so far fits this theory of yours. In fact, everything fits it too well, almost as if it has been planned that way.” She crossed her arms and stared into the distance. “The Maya were from outer space. They came to this world thousands of years ago to do some kind of galactic synchronization of the Earth and the Solar System for a purpose that you have yet to propose. Do you realize how far-fetched that sounds? Do you really believe this?”

  “Susan, you’re getting me all wrong here. This is just a theory. I have many others I could share with you, but none fit the observations as well. Remember, we’re just detectives at the scene, gathering information, making stipulations, seeing how those theories match up with the observations. We still have a lot more digging to do before we can go down any path with a reasonable degree of confidence.”

  She returned to the sofa. “All right, then. Tell me, how do you propose the aliens arrived? Aboard a vessel? Is there any indication of space travel in the physical evidence left behind by the Classic Maya?”

  Cameron Slater calmly flipped a few pages of his tome and pointed at a drawing of the Earth at the bottom and the cosmos at the top. The Sun was in the middle. A row of squares, each with a Mayan number in it, projected from the Earth, through the Sun, and into the center of this cosmos. “There are two terms that you want to become familiar with. The first is Hunab Ku. Translated literally, it means One Giver of Movement and Measure. It is the principle of life beyond the Sun, the galactic core, from where all things come. The second term is Kuxan Suum, which means the Road to the Sky Leading to the Galactic Core, or the Hunab Ku.” He pointed to the center of the cosmos on the drawing, where the row of squares formed a path through the Sun and into the stars. “This is where the Hunab Ku is located. In modern astronomical terms, the Hunab Ku is a point in space between HR4390A and HR4390B, two stars of the southern constellation Centaur, 139 light-years away. The connection between Earth and this distant galaxy is the Kuxan Suum. In modern astronomy, however, the term “galactic core” is used in reference to the center of our own Milky Way Galaxy, which is much further away. But the Maya use this term in reference to the point in space between those two stars.”

  “So is the Kuxan Suum how they came and left?”

  He shrugged. “If you believe in this theory. Let me show you another drawing.” He flipped through dozens of pages, stopping at a drawing of a Maya, wearing a colorful skirt and a feathery headdress, sitting in what appeared to be the seat of an object shaped like a space capsule. His hands operated the controls inside the vessel. Fire came out from the bottom, propelling him skyward.

  Susan examined the incredible detail of the pre-Columbian drawing. “Is this real?”

  He nodded, staring directly at her. “Susan Garnett, meet Pacal Votan, the greatest Mayan chief that ever lived. The Mayan Classic Period reached its peak during his reign. He died in A.D. 683. This drawing is an exact copy of the reliefs on the lid of his sarcophagus, discovered in 1952 in an ornately decorated tomb inside the Temple of the Inscriptions at Palenque, in Chiapas, Mexico. Some scholars call Pacal a galactic agent, who used the Kuxan Suum to reach the Hunab Ku after completing his work here.”

  “What do you think?” she asked him.

  He grinned. “I think it makes for an interesting debate at seminars and banquets.”

  “Why the Maya, Cameron? Why not the Egyptians? Or the Greeks? Or one of the early civilizations from the Orient? Why is the origin of the virus pointing to the Maya?”

  “All I can offer here is the fact that the Maya appear to have influenced other civilizations, even those on the other side of the globe.”

  “How?”

  “Well, Maya, for example, is a key Hindu philosophical term meaning Origin of the World. The word Maya in Sanskrit relates to concepts meaning Mind, Magic, and Mother. Maya is the name of the mother of the Buddha. In the Vedic classic, The Mahabharata, Maya was the name of their most noted astronomer and magician. The treasurer of the renowned boy-king of Egypt, Tutankhamen, was named Maya, while in Egyptian philosophy the term Mayet means universal order. In Greek mythology, the seven Pleiades, daughters of Atlas and Pleione and sisters of the Hyades, number among them one called Maia, also known as the brightest star of the constellation Pleiades. Finally, the month of May is derived from the name of the Roman goddess, Maia, the Great One.”

  Susan took a deep breath, running a hand through her short auburn hair, her engineering mind absorbing every bit of information and cataloguing it to find its place in this puzzle she was trying to piece together. “One thing I don’t understand, though, is what did you mean by galactic synchronization? We’ve talked a lot about the significance of the observations and how they fit into this theory, but what did the Maya accomplish, or try to accomplish?”

  “Galactic synchronization is subject to many interpretations. One of them suggests that the term is not associated with a historical event, but with a state of mind. It implies a mental attitude that makes people want to live in harmony with the environment, with those around you, just as the Maya and other ancient civilizations did, without the waste and pollution created by our modern world, by technology. Under this theory, the Maya came here to teach us how to live in peace, in harmony with nature, how to achieve a perfect society, how to use science to advance the human spirit without the waste created by our industrial world. Only then, after we transform our way of thinking from one of material gain to one of harmony and spiritual gain, would the human race be ready to take the next step in the transformation: the development of the power to connect directly with the energy of this beam called the Kuxan Suum, emanating from the Hunab Ku, the Galactic Core.”

  Susan grabbed one of the apples in the basket and took a hearty bite, holding it up in the air, her elbow tucked in. “This energy beam … how do you know it exists at all? What proof is there beyond the drawings you showed me?”

  “The proof is everywhere, in scientific journals, even in the newspapers. For some time now physicists have been able to detect density beams sweeping through the galaxy. Many of them, scientists claim, influenced our own evolution. These density waves at some point in time ignited a giant star, creating our Sun, and therefore our Solar System. Do you see how we are all connected here? So the Maya calls it Kuxan Suum and a professor from Harvard labels it a density beam that dominates the galaxy’s dynamics. This theory proposes that both are the same, Susan. These beams of energy, which astrophysicists claim have swept through the cosmos for the Sun’s entire existence of some 4.5 billion years, pass through the Sun, which alters their dynamics, changing their composition as they bathe the Earth with radiant energy, bringing life beyond that which can be measured by today’s science. The Maya believed that this beam of energy sparked new ideas, convictions, visions. Where scientists of today focus on measuring the composition of materials, breaking them
down into its basic elements, the Maya focused on qualities that are dismissed in today’s physics, like emotions and feelings. Where scientists detect energy beams that influence the birth of stars and entire galaxies, the Maya detected energy beams that triggered the birth of ideas. The beams are the same, only interpreted differently. For example, music is nothing but sound waves propagating through space. A machine can detect those signals and display the music in the form of a number of waves on a screen. A human, however, can hear that same music and experience an emotional change because of it. There’re two very different reactions to the same wave forms. You asked for proof of the Mayan claims? I challenge you to open your mind, like listening to music, and see the proof that has always been there, in front of you, only you didn’t know how to recognize it for what it was.”

  Cameron Slater closed the books. “And that, my dear Susan, I’m afraid wraps up your first lesson in Ancient Maya 101. Remember that there will be a test on Friday.” He grinned and returned to the kitchen to replace the books on the shelves.

  She blinked, a bit dazzled by his eloquent explanations, and also by his innate ability to go up on a podium and deliver such revolutionary thoughts and then mix in the right amount of humor.

  She checked the time. It was almost midnight. “I didn’t realize it was this late. I do have one more question, then I’ll leave you alone.”

  “Not a problem. Shoot.”

  “What do you think is going to happen on zero one, zero one, zero zero?”

  Slater dropped his gaze to the floor, frowning. “Good one. Some scholars believe that on the day of total alignment, when the Mayan Long Count calendar aligns with our Gregorian calendar at the baktun-millennium level, our eyes and hearts will recognize the distorted sensibilities under which we have been living during our fifty thousand years of Homo sapiens’ existence. We will become empathetic with a world that shouts out in anguish from all the abuse, all the death, all the suffering of past millenniums. That day we will all go through a new birth of spirit and awaken to the full gamut of human emotions.”