“What’s this?” Tiva said, as she pulled the slip free.
T’Qinna averted her eyes. “Don’t let me read it!”
Tiva laughed. “What! It’s just a little note somebody’s written you. If you want, I’ll read it to you.”
“Does it contain any unusual words?”
Tiva couldn’t understand T’Qinna’s panic and the role-reversal was beginning to wear thin. “It’s written in the Aztlan dialect, so I’m not sure—I don’t use some of these words, but they might be natural enough in Aztlan.”
“Read it to me out loud—slowly—and in your own voice.”
Tiva looked at her sideways. “Well, what other voice would I use? Go to, T’Qinna, You’re acting spookier than one of the Witchy-girls!”
“I’m sorry, Tiva. I know I must sound insane to you. But you have no idea what these people are capable of!”
“No. You’re wrong! I lived at Grove Hollow! Remember?”
T’Qinna hung her head. “Please don’t be offended. You’re right, of course. If anyone could understand, it would be you. But Tiva, you’ve got to realize that the capabilities for manipulation at the Hollow are primitive compared to what they can do in Aztlan!”
Tiva paused. Grove Hollow was not capable of world conquest. Aztlan had nearly accomplished that and still could. “You’re probably right, as usual! I’ll just read it in my own voice.”
T’Qinna nodded.
Tiva turned the note away, so that her sister-in-law would not accidentally see any of the syllabic ideogram writing. “The note says only this; ‘I’m sorry, Pyra darling. I do not ask forgiveness; that is too much for me to expect. I give you back the lost memories I stole from you. You were right to go with the Seer. You do me proud. With affection, Mnemosynae.’”
T’Qinna broke out into body-wrenching sobs. Tiva dropped the note and held her there for a long time.
When her tears began to subside, T’Qinna took the milky-looking crystal and placed it into an identically-shaped slot in the miniature orb’s base. They both watched as the glassy spheroid lit up, first with an ethereal blue light and then with the face of a late-middle-aged woman.
Tiva had never seen such deep violet eyes, or a woman who held herself with such poise and command as the one in the orb. Her gray-streaked dark hair flowed around her face, and seemed to mold itself into the wood grain of the box lid behind the odd device.
The Woman, whom Tiva supposed was the Mnemosynae that had written the note, spoke with the same musical accent as T’Qinna. “Pyra darling, I am deeply sorry for the pain I caused you—that I allowed to be caused in you. I offer no excuses, only that I will say a word at the end of this communing that will release any memories I had taken from you, or falsely implanted. I can only say how sorry I am again, since most of them pertain to events that happened around the death of your mother.
“I beg you, learn from these memories, darling, and do not repeat our mistakes. I have only ten—at most—twenty years left to live. It is a disease born in our own Temple—I won’t bore you with the details.
“Over the course of the past few decades, our magi and those of Lumekkor and its Alliance have met regularly at a place called Sa-Utar. While there, I made a series of discreet inquiries regarding the Clan of the Seer. Pandura knows nothing of this; otherwise, I would already be dead, and you, on your way back to Aztlan. That would be disastrous, since I’ve come to the realization that our civilization cannot possibly last much longer—though it will doubtless last just a little longer than I will.
“For that reason I am remaining where I am. I will quietly try to hamper Pandura and the Titans in as much of their mischief as I can, as opportunities arise. I will also mislead Pandura as to your whereabouts, should she ever show a mind to want to find you. Thus far, the only reason she has for doing so is spite. Since she is usually smart enough not to let that motivate her major decisions, and other things currently distract her mind greatly, you should be reasonably safe where you are.
“I arranged this delivery through diplomatic channels at Sa-Utar, and then erased the memories of each official I used when their guard was down. Even the delivery men will not recall anything, as I programmed each to forget everything once they are on the main road back to Sa-Utar. The one with the receipt scroll will deliver it directly to me and then forget that he did so. My skill has not lessened, though its only use now is to keep you safe. Had Prometu lived and known you; he would have warned you to go with the Seer. He saw much that I was too afraid to act on at the time. That is why he is dead and I soon will be.
“I now give you the implanted word to release all your lost memories. It is a nonsensical random set of syllables combined from the words new-wine, and sailor. Actually, not totally random. I thought the Seer’s son that you ran off with looked like a dashing sailor. Farewell, Pyra. This communing will end after I say the release word: Deukal’Uinne!”
Tiva felt T’Qinna buckle as she saw the orb go dim.
“Are you alright?”
T’Qinna lowered herself into a floor cushion. “The details are a bit clearer—and terrible. But the worst of it had already come back to me during my journey with A’Nu-Ahki and U’Sumi. E’Yahavah had already revealed the truth, so I’m done with it.”
“Who was she?”
“Mnemosynae was my mentor at the Temple Academy. I once loved her greatly. I suppose I still do, even after her betrayal—especially now that I know she’s sorry. And I do forgive you, Mnemosynae. I wish I could tell you somehow.”
“I don’t think that would be a very good idea,” Tiva said. “She wouldn’t want you to anyway—she’s risked a lot to keep your whereabouts hidden. I think that, deep down inside, she knows you forgive her.”
T’Qinna wiped her tears on her wrap. “I suppose you’re right. This reader-writer orb might even come in handy someday—look at all the blank crystals she sent with it!”
“You think she’s trying to tell you something?”
T’Qinna closed the box and locked it. “Yes; to remember and to see that others do not forget the terrible choices our generation has made.”
T
iva stood by Khumi on the scaffold overlooking the ship’s bow. The vessel’s forward conning shack window, and its huge dorsal wind-foil fin towered over them. A’Nu-Ahki had prayed over and studied the school of physics originated by Q’Enukki, and determined that since the waters of World-end would cover the whole earth that they and the winds would obey the laws of fluid motion on a rotating sphere unbroken by land. Although not commanded by E’Yahavah, he had designed the foil to help keep the ship in a “following sea,” with the prow in the wind’s shelter, aligned with the currents. At least that was how Khumi had explained it to her.
Today, A’Nu-Ahki had gathered his family for a big event. They even rolled Lumekki up the ramps in his wheeled chair.
Old Muhet’Usalaq tapped his foot on the plank, as if to say, “Get on with it, I’m late for my nap.”
Tiva felt her husband’s hand slip into hers. It seemed like their first physical contact in a long time.
“I’m sorry I’ve been so hard,” Khumi whispered for her ears alone.
She looked up at him and their eyes met.
For a second, he seemed again to be the boy she had first seen fire-dancing. “There’s never ever been any other girl. My father taught me.”
“I know.” She smiled for him. “It’s just nice to hear it more often.”
Khumi nodded. “I’ll try to remember that.”
A’Nu-Ahki signaled for everyone’s attention. He took position over the great bronzed bowsprit before he spoke. “After many years, we are finally close enough to completing this task that I feel some well-deserved rest is in order.”
Tiva could not have agreed more.
He continued, “The ship is complete, other than some minor fittings, which we have ten years to perfect. You’ve all worked hard, both laboring yourselves, and in supervising pools of hired w
orkers we’ve seen come and go over the years. There is no other vessel like this in the entire world. It has all the modern accessories—except an engine and effective helm control…”
Everybody laughed.
“No engine—hardly any steerage,” said Muhet’Usalaq. “I’m glad I’ll be safe and dead with Heh’Bul in the Comfort Fields before you all go!”
The laughter grew.
“Anyway,” said A’Nu-Ahki, “before we take our seven-month sabbatical, I’d like to use this opportunity to name the vessel. It will be the life raft of humanity to us, and our descendants, and stand for generations as a monument to E’Yahavah’s promise. Should New-world last a million years, this vessel will not decay, nor be lost to the memory of those to come.
“E’Yahavah could have had us make it from steel, like the great ironclads of the titans’ navies—but steel would rust and dissolve after a thousand years or so. Kapar wood, on the other hand, only grows more durable with the ages, as petrifaction continues. Therefore, our first work when we return from rest will be to inscribe this name on the starboard bow: “In E’Yahavah’s name, after the style of ancient verse, I dedicate this ship Barque of Aeons!”
Epilogue
Q’Enukki’s eyes widened as the creature he had once thought of as a “star chariot” slowed the fabric motion of the great void all around them. The planet Tiamatu —that fifth world in the Earth’s solar system, between red L’Mekku and the big gas giant planet of Khuva—passed close by.
He felt something akin to forward momentum straining against his seat harness—a mere fraction of the force he knew his body would have endured by the laws of motion if he were actually in a “star chariot” instead of a “gate-creature-whatever” situated between the different “heavens.” He had explored such laws only in theory during his life back on Earth. As a sage and seer, Q’Enukki had even written three hundred and sixty-six tablets on topics that ranged from prophecy and law, to the arts and sciences. Celestial mechanics had been more of a hobby.
The Watcher Samuille took him inside the “gate-creature” from that life only hours before—took him from that life many centuries before—it depended on where one counted the minutes from. Relative to the velocity at which the gate-creature moved space around itself, they had spent much of their “flight” near the speed of light. The world Q’Enukki had eaten breakfast on hardly existed any more.
Soon it would not exist at all.
The planet Tiamatu was not the only celestial body in the vicinity. Approaching it loomed the giant comet they had seen earlier.
Shortly before they had re-entered the solar system, Samuille had made both the gate-creature and Q’Enukki invisible. They now appeared to hurtle through the void like sentient meteors, with an unobstructed view in every direction. The Watcher had also increased Q’Enukki’s ability to see, opening vistas into two additional dimensions that human beings could not normally perceive.
If Q’Enukki became careless, the simultaneous futures playing out on the objects around him could be quite distracting. That was no problem where these two heavenly bodies were concerned. He rotated his transparent seat to take in the advance of the gigantic comet, as they passed between it and the planet. The distorted icy sphere was now close enough to the sun that a furious out-gassing of ionized nitrogen, hydrogen, water vapor, and dust erupted from its surface in tremendous plumes where the blast of solar wind struck it. These gases curled back around the icy planetoid in violent waves, driven into a diffusing tail that stretched almost perpendicular to its actual movement toward the planet.
The two bodies approached each other from near opposite directions in their suicide dance. The comet’s elliptical path intersected the planet’s orbit at an angle that would have them collide with a combined velocity roughly three times the orbital speed of the planet Earth.
“Are we not too close?” asked Q’Enukki. “The debris will explode outward at high speed!”
Samuille said, “We will be well ahead of the first wave.”
“What will be the results?”
“About a third of the rubble will continue in a wide belt just inside the planet’s orbit, at nearly Tiamatu’s current velocity. Another third will absorb the impact, and either spray outward toward Khuva’s orbit, fall in toward the sun, or scatter from the orbital plane on oblique trajectories.”
“What about the remaining third of the debris?”
Q’Enukki imagined Samuille’s whiteless eyes hardening to obsidian ice. “Those are E’Yahavah’s arrows of wrath against Earth. Two super-dense irradiated inner core fragments, with a spreading stream of outer core asteroids will intersect Earth’s orbit at nearly the same point as your world.”
Q’Enukki asked, “How many people will survive?”
“Eight.”
“Is that all—of over four billion people, only eight? I know that I prophesied a great winnowing before the end, but eight!”
“Have you also underestimated the situation? Even these eight are severely contaminated, and in need of total re-writing.”
Q’Enukki could only shake his head in horror, rotating his seat to watch as the “gate-creature” moved the comet and the planet rearward.
As the comet approached the planet, both began to bulge toward each other until they took the form of giant eggs floating in space. The plastic super-hot mantle of Tiamatu made the planet more fluid than the solid ice ball, which began to crumble. Hours before impact—moments for Q’Enukki—the spheres seemed as though they would spiral around each other in a death-dance, while horrendous quickfire discharges shot between them in a flickering celestial duel. Vastly different charge potentials on the two worlds equalized through arcs of current that ionized Tiamatu’s atmosphere, and caused great chunks of the comet to break off just before impact.
Q’Enukki held his breath as the heavenly bodies approached the last stage of their mutual annihilation.
Appendix
A Chronology of the World-That-Was
Note: This fictional timeline uses a hybrid of the Septuagint and Masoretic versions of the Genesis 5 chrono-genealogy, which have some differing numbers from each other in the ages of certain Patriarchs at birth of their sons and/or at their deaths. For example, the Masoretic Text (MT) has Seth born to Adam and Eve when Adam was 130 years old, while the Septuagint (LXX) text group has him born when Adam was 230. MT Lamech dies at age 777, while LXX Lamech dies at 741. This should not shake anyone’s faith in Genesis as a Divinely-inspired historic account.
The Christian Doctrine of Bible Inerrancy stipulates the original writings, and recognizes that minor deviations sometimes appear even in the extraordinarily accurate transmission of Bible texts—far fewer variants proportionally than in any other ancient literary collection of comparable size and age. What is more, the statistical science of text criticism (not to be confused with ideologically materialistic “higher criticism”) is remarkably efficient at sifting away deviant material. In the realm of certain numbers, we still may not have enough information to sift with, but this affects no teaching or event sequence described in the texts. We still have hard minimum and maximum limits for dating events. If that is all God considered it needful for us to have, then no one can justly accuse God of “error” here in the transmission.
What we have today in our Bibles accurately portrays a historical sequence of events that occurred within a limited timeframe that can be taken seriously. At worst, we may not have all the original numbers in a single text group, which may be providentially why several variants have survived. Jesus said in the Sermon on the Mount, “For assuredly, I say to you, till heaven and earth pass away, one jot or one tittle will by no means pass from the law till all is fulfilled.” (Matthew 5:18) Genesis, though a book of history, is also the first book of the Law of Moses.
Most modern Bible translations use the Masoretic Text almost exclusively for the Old Testament. My choice to make some use of the older (but not necessarily more accurate) Greek Septua
gint text group was made for literary, not doctrinal, or spiritual reasons. I wanted a mature U’Sumi featured in later books, and the Septuagint gave me a couple more centuries to work with. I preserved those features of the Masoretic chronology essential to the plot, and to the relative age at death of Methuselah in the year of the Deluge. The MT has Methuselah dying in the year of the Flood, which matches the meaning of his name.
I affirm the full historicity of the Genesis account in its original autographs, but reserve the remote possibility that both text groups may have preserved minor details of the original God-breathed account that maybe were lost or less prominent in the other. Since God has seen fit to preserve both text groups for us, and since the New Testament most often cites the Septuagint (though that does not necessarily mean it is always the better text), the “historical novelist” side of me sees benefit in this approach.
Of course, I likely will be proved wrong about some of the details in the end—which is fine in a speculative novel series. Readers should never let a novel shape their theology, especially their view of Biblical Inerrancy—even if they find in the story something of sound spiritual worth. (As I hope you all will in these books.) I ask readers who might be distressed at my use of this Masoretic-Septuagint hybrid to pardon me—no scholastic, doctrinal, or even necessarily historical statement was intended as to which Bible text group is better. This chronology’s version of events is fictional except inasmuch as it adheres to the framework described in the Book of Genesis.
Year Event
0 Creation: Atum and Ish’Hakka with E’Yahavah in Aeden.
C. 1-2 Ish’Hakka and Atum seduced by the Basilisk, and driven eastward from the Sacred Orchard, then south, to the Isle of the Dead at Paru’Ainu. The Great Curse changes the cosmos.
A Broken Paradise (The Windows of Heaven Book 3) Page 33