“He came to the New World a broken man, a peasant priest. But when he arrived here he saw hills that would bring good wine and flat lands that could be irrigated and turned into productive fields. But he also saw that the people who lived here were happy and peaceful even if they were not yet Christian. And so he lied. His reports to the diocese described a place no one would want to set foot in, teeming with mosquitoes and fever and swampland. Surrounded by the most unproductive soil.”
“And Philippe Don Pedro found this parchment?” McCarter asked.
“No,” Father Domingo said. “When the oldest man of the village lay dying, he called for Don Pedro. He said he had lived in other villages before fleeing to the mountains and that Don Pedro was the only honorable man he had seen among the new regime. He promised he would convert to the religion of the cross, if only Don Pedro would protect for all time the last words of the old man’s dying world. Words no longer written, barely spoken.”
“The hieroglyphics,” McCarter said.
Father Domingo nodded. “As the story goes, Don Pedro asked the old man if he knew what converting meant. His reply was that his people, the Maya, had always known that only sacrifice and blood could atone for sins. If Don Pedro would tell him that Christ had done this for all, then he would believe.”
McCarter nodded. For many Central American religions, the story of Christ sacrificing himself on the cross, his life and blood offered for salvation, made perfect sense. Their kings and priests gave blood sacrifices of their own, cutting themselves and passing barbed ropes and other serrated objects through earlobes, lips, and tongues.
And while most in the church saw no similarity whatsoever in these actions, it made many of the indigenous people of the region easy to convert. At least partially.
It seemed they could be inclusive and worship both Christ and their own gods in a side-by-side sense. Only when they were forced to give up all other trappings of their former religion did the resistance began to stiffen.
“So the old man converted and gave Don Pedro the parchment,” Danielle said.
“And Don Pedro promised to protect it,” Hawker guessed.
Father Domingo nodded. “He wrote on it in Spanish the words that the old man told him. It reads, En los últimos días antes del Sol Negro, ellos vendrán. Tres blancos y uno negro, tres hombres y una mujer, y tres viejos, uno joven, tres sin ira, uno sin paz. Ellos decidirán el destino del mundo.”
As McCarter listened to these words, he translated them roughly in his head.
He looked at Danielle, and then Hawker. Danielle spoke very good Spanish and by the look of shock on her face she’d clearly translated the words. Hawker looked suspicious but wasn’t as fluent.
“What does it mean?” he asked.
“In the last days before the Black Sun, they will come,” Father Domingo said, his voice resonating off the stone walls. “Three white, one black; three male, one female; three old, one young, three without anger, one without peace.”
As he heard the words, Hawker’s eyes narrowed and his square jaw clenched as if he were grinding his teeth to dust. He seemed more angered than awed by what they’d found and as McCarter studied his friend, he guessed that the final sentence would only make it worse.
He looked at Danielle; she knew. He returned his gaze to Father Domingo, who finished the translation, tracing his hand along the flowing lines of the Spanish script.
“Ellos decidirán el destino del mundo,” he said, once again. “And they shall determine the end of the world.”
CHAPTER 52
Hawker stared at the priest as he uttered the words. It was plainly evident that their little group matched the exact description on the parchment, but what did that tell them. Could it really have been meant to be them? Him, Danielle, Yuri, and McCarter?
He could see the gears in Danielle’s mind whirring. McCarter looked as if he’d just found some place of enlightenment himself, and Hawker could think of nothing more dangerous.
“Don’t get any ideas,” he warned. “It’s just a coincidence.”
“These are the last days, before the day of the Black Sun,” Father Domingo said. “When I saw the four of you, I must admit, my heart shook. With time growing short I have considered this parchment greatly and I wondered if anyone would appear. These words were written four hundred and ninety years ago.”
Hawker watched as Danielle moved to McCarter’s side and the two of them studied the parchment paper. There were several pages of Mayan hieroglyphics spread across its leaves and McCarter was instantly engrossed.
Danielle seemed to have caught her breath quickly. Her eyes were bright in the dimly lit wine cellar, and there was a sense of accomplishment about her, a sudden aura of success, as if the burden she carried had been lifted. He understood it: Their search had not been in vain. The pain, the suffering, the carnage all around them—most likely she felt as if there was some reason to it now. Some destiny beyond it. And that was what scared him.
Hawker didn’t believe in the concept of destiny. Certainly it had its value. There were occasions where it gave people the will to push on, to succeed against monumental odds. But more often than not, Hawker had seen the concept as a destructive one.
Those who thought they were on a mission from God—any god—were capable of horrendous things. All actions and atrocities could be rationalized if they were the will of some supreme being.
For the arrogant and power hungry there was no better rallying cry. It was a lie that made even the good people of society capable of carrying out acts of an evil nature.
And for oppressed peoples it became the mantle of fate; their lot in life to suffer; defeat preordained and thus accepted and unchallenged.
As he thought of these things, he wanted to point them out to both Danielle and McCarter, but he could already see the fever burning in their eyes.
CHAPTER 53
Deep within Yucca Mountain, the scientific arguments continued. Despite all the technical data regarding the stone, neither Moore, nor Stecker, nor any of the scientists could say exactly how it worked. Nor what it was meant for.
As a result, the teleconference had turned into a grilling, with questions fired at Moore from all angles. It could mean only one thing: The burden lay on him. Either he would sufficiently justify the stone’s existence or the defense would fail and the stone would be destroyed.
“Where is the energy coming from?” President Henderson asked point-blank. “How is this stone creating the type of power you’ve described? Is it nuclear? Is it through some type of fusion process?”
“It’s not, Mr. President. The stone is not radioactive. It’s not a process of cold fusion, as we once thought. It’s certainly not hot fusion. In fact, there is no process we know of through which this stone can be creating energy in the magnitude we have seen. Which leads us to believe that the stone is not creating energy but is actually drawing it from somewhere. Acting as a conduit.”
“Explain this to me,” the president demanded.
“Think of a wire in your house,” Moore said. “You stick your finger in the socket, you get shocked, but neither the socket nor the wire create the energy; they’re merely conduits. The electricity is created in another place, at a power station, probably many miles from your house. We now think this stone is receiving energy from somewhere and disbursing it.”
“Where?”
“The place it originated in,” Moore said, wondering if the president would grasp what he was saying, without elaboration.
“The future?” the president asked.
Moore nodded. “It’s not as far-fetched as it seems,” he said. “Even in the original example I gave you, the energy was created in a different time, albeit milliseconds before it reached your house. The difference is only one of magnitude and direction. In this case, the time displacement is farther away.”