THIRTY-EIGHT
Sasha felt as though her head was about to implode.
The variables had multiplied beyond her ability to enumerate them. They were coalescing in her consciousness, becoming a veritable black hole of chaos and uncertainty that consumed her thoughts. Her sleep had been erratic; there were huge gaps of time in her memory; dark periods where she must have slept deeply, but she felt exhausted and physically ill. Her techniques for tuning out the world — working through prime numbers, performing complex mathematical operations in her head — seemed beyond her ability now. She barely understood where she was; even the simplest of sensory inputs were scrambled in a fog of confusion.
She sat in the back of a large vehicle, an SUV of some kind. There were five other men there. Four of them had been on the plane; Chinese men, whose tailored suits did not quite conceal their true identity as thugs working for the triad. They had told her their names, but that information had already vanished beyond the event horizon. The fifth man had been picked up shortly after their arrival. He was different; he cowered fearfully in his seat, nursing superficial wounds that oozed blood. Sasha sensed that he was not there of his own volition.
A prisoner. Like me.
The realization slipped away, engulfed by the blackness of chaos.
Some time later — perhaps just a few minutes, perhaps days or weeks — she became aware of someone tugging at her arm. The SUV had stopped, and all of its passengers, save for her, had already disembarked. She allowed herself to be coaxed from her seat, but as soon as she was standing on the rough ground outside, she felt her legs go weak. She tried to lean against a fender, but the man holding her arm did not permit this; he drew her toward the front end of the vehicle.
She gradually came to understand that it was nighttime. The headlights of the SUV were illuminating a rather plain looking metal door set into a much larger white structure. The man — the prisoner — was propelled forward, and one of their captors barked a rough order. The prisoner fumbled with a ring of keys, and after a few moments, he succeeded in unlocking the door, after which they all filed in. Sasha and her minder brought up the rear.
Flashlights came out, but their beams revealed little about the interior of the white structure. Sasha wasn’t paying any attention. This new experience only compounded her sense of dislocation; the dark tumor of uncertainty throbbed in her head, consuming even her desire to know what was happening.
The group descended a flight of carved stone steps, and they halted at last in a room that might have been the office at a construction site. One of the men barked something, and then repeated himself, but Sasha paid no heed until she felt someone shaking her arm violently. Through a monumental effort of will, she fixed her gaze on the man who had been speaking.
“Tell him what you want.” The man spoke in a harsh, clipped manner, possibly a result of his relative unfamiliarity with English but more probably because he was a man of violence, used to getting his way with bellicose displays of aggression.
“What, I—?” Sasha shook her head. What was he talking about?
“We bring you here to Maragheh, like you ask. You say you need writings.” He gestured forcefully at the prisoner. “Tell him which papers you need.”
Maragheh. That was important, and she struggled to remember why. “Al-Tusi,” she murmured. “In Nasir al-Tusi’s writings, is there anything that describes how to construct an urghan?”
The prisoner, a middle-aged man with a full head of gray hair and a bushy beard, looked at her blankly for a moment, and he seemed on the verge of answering in the negative, but a menacing growl from one of the other Chinese men gave him pause.
“An urghan, you say?” He bent over a table and began flipping through a ring binder.
This simple act of compliance was a lifeline to Sasha in the midst of the whirlpool. Maragheh.Al-Tusi. The urghan.
These were not variables. They were the constants that anchored her to the world; they were known quantities and values that, while not yet completely understood, were fixed properties.
The manuscript.
Yes.
The Voynich manuscript was the ultimate constant. The knowledge locked within its mysterious cipher text would not change once she decoded it. It would be the same tomorrow as it was when al-Tusi had first written it down. But she would change.
The book was the irreducible prime factor that would enable her finally to balance the equation of her life…of the very nature of human existence. She believed this to be true with every fiber of her being.
I need to be here…right now…in this moment.
She willed herself back from the swelling tide of chaos and straightened, at long last taking in her surroundings. She knew that she was in the ruins of the Maragheh Observatory, which now rested inside a protective geodesic bubble that preserved its ancient stones and the scrolls and codices from the ravages of the elements. The man — the prisoner — was an Iranian, and probably one of the archaeologists or caretakers of the facility. Her Chinese captors had rightly deduced that they would not be able to simply walk into Maragheh and find what they needed lying out on a table. Sasha wondered if she would even recognize the document when it was finally procured.
“This must be it,” the prisoner announced, tapping a page. “A treatise on the mathematical nature of harmonies. Al-Tusi’s authorship is suspected, but not proven. It appears nowhere else, and it is not mentioned in any other writings of the time.”
“Get it,” ordered the leader.
The man moved into the maze of shelves, followed closely by one of the Chinese men, and then he returned a moment later with a copper tube. The lead captor snatched it from his hands and handed it to Sasha.
“You must wear gloves,” admonished the Iranian, but before he could explain why, a savage blow to the gut put him on his knees, hunched over and moaning in pain.
Sasha witnessed the violence with detachment; her attention had already become focused on opening the case and teasing out the roll of parchment inside. The outermost curl, which had received the most exposure to the environment, felt stiff and cracked a little at the edges when she began to unfurl it, but above that, the vellum had, for the most part, remained supple. She carefully unrolled the document and spread it out on a tabletop.
It was immediately evident that she would not be able to read it; the careful and elegant script looked to her untrained eye like Arabic, but the accompanying illustrations filled her with hope. This was, unquestionably, a set of instructions for building the device that had been recovered from Guo’s crypt. One illustration even showed the levers, marked with Voynich characters, and each one was connected by a line to the pipes of varying length contained in the body of the urghan. Though she could not grasp the specific musical tones that the pipes were intended to produce, Sasha could already see the mathematical progression that al-Tusi had employed. Given enough time, she might be able to work it out in her head, but she felt certain that, if afforded access to a computer and supplied with translation tools, she could build a virtual replica of the device, and with it, at long last, she could decode the Voynich manuscript.
“This is it,” she breathed.
The lead captor did not appear to appreciate the gravity of her discovery, but he understood well enough that they had accomplished their objective. He dipped a hand into the folds of his jacket and produced a pistol, which he promptly trained on the other captive.