“What is it?” Sam asked, his eyes glancing at the ancient script.
Zara met his gaze. “I don’t know yet. There’s something about this that I recognize.”
“I thought you’d never studied anything to do with the Garamantes?”
“I didn’t.” She bit her lower lip. “This is all written in the language of modern Berber.”
“That’s great,” Tom interrupted. “But if we don’t work out how to get out of here soon, we’re going to be sharing their tomb with them.”
“This might be important,” she said.
“So is staying alive,” Tom said, cheerfully.
“Wait. I can read this.”
“Well. Don’t keep us in suspense. What does it say?” Sam said.
She swallowed hard. “Our problem just got a whole lot worse.”
Chapter Seventy-Nine
Zara felt her entire world spin. She imagined it would have been a similar experience to the early navigators in the world who believed the world was flat, suddenly discovering it was spherical. Worse still, it might even be more like then discovering the world used satellites high up in the orbit of the earth to send messages, allowing computers to triangulate their exact position on earth using a GPS. Everything she believed had just turned in on itself.
Sam asked, “What’s changed, Zara?”
“Everything!”
“What?” Tom said.
“This place was visited by Nostradamus in 1557.” Zara waited for the thought to sink in.
Sam and Tom stared at her, silently.
She continued. “After the massive sand storm, which killed all of his party except for my great ancestor, Nostradamus must have entered one of the Garamante irrigation tunnels and made his way to this ancient city.”
Sam asked, “Why? What did he come here to do?”
Zara paused. “He came to bury the very last Garamante. A king without a people. And he came so that I could know what he’d learned.”
“What did Nostradamus learn?” Sam looked at her. “Didn’t he leave everything you needed to know in his book?”
“No. After he’d left his book buried in the sands of the Sahara, Nostradamus had changed the future. Consequently, his next visions had changed as a consequence.”
Tom asked, “What did he write?”
“It’s a story, of times to come.”
Sam asked, “What does it say?”
“It’s about the fall of man. About a great civilization. The Garamante Empire. About their successes, and their losses. About their riches and their greed. About their greatness and their fallibility. At the end of the story, it says that man is no better than the locusts who multiply into destructive plagues. If the human race is to survive, we must do so in smaller numbers. There is only so much the land will stretch and bend to meet our demands — and when that is all done, our time on earth shall end like so many other animals before us.”
“Wow,” Sam said. “Seems pretty much on the mark of what Nostradamus was saying.”
“Sure.” Tom shook his head. “Pity it didn’t really tell us what to do about it.”
“Sure it did.”
Tom smiled. “It did?”
“Yeah,” Zara said. “Didn’t that letter to Mikhail say it wasn’t about a new diamond mine? It was about lithium. World War Three was going to be fought over lithium — and the world’s largest stores were in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”
“Yeah,” Sam confirmed. “What are you suggesting, by backing our guy in there the human race is going to stop procreating?”
“No. I’m suggesting Nostradamus meant us to let them fight a war.” Zara said. “I’m serious. Maybe Nostradamus knew I would run into you and stop you from supporting the good guys.”
Sam shook his head. “Or maybe he wanted us to support the United Sovereign of Kongo so that the lithium could be mined and the world could live more economically.”
“For how long, though?”
“Until it’s no longer sustainable.”
“But when will that be? When will there be too many human beings on this planet? Do you know at the turn of the eighteenth century what the best estimate of the total population of the planet was?”
“I don’t know, a billion?” Tom asked.
“A little above two hundred million,” Sam said. He spoke with the certainty of a man who knew the statistic and was as concerned as anyone should be. “It took us nearly fifty thousand years from the beginning of agriculture to reach two hundred million and it’s taken us only the two hundred years since to take that number up above seven billion. The United Nations currently predicts the population to reach eighteen billion by the end of this century alone. I know. It’s not scare tactics. It’s science.”
Zara sighed. “No, that statistic’s wrong.”
Sam shrugged. “It’s a prediction by the United Nations. It’s a ball park figure.”
“According to Nostradamus, the population is going to reach thirty billion before the century is out. Do you know what the final population is going to be in the year 2100?”
Sam and Tom both shook their heads.
Sam looked at her. “The woman Tom killed before we entered the well — she said you knew something terrible. You denied it at the time, but I thought I saw your eyes look away. It was subtle. For a second I doubted it. But now that I see it again, I know where I’ve seen that look. It’s the distinct image of a person trying to hide the painful truth. You were hiding something, weren’t you?”
She nodded.
“I see that same look in your face now,” Sam said. “What are you trying to hide?”
“I found a second note addressed to me in the book of Nostradamus. The first one was explicit. Nostradamus said it was the first thing he wrote before he started his entire works. The second wasn’t even attached to the codex. Instead, he scribbled it on a piece of paper with a simple note. An addendum.”
Sam asked, “What did it say?”
Zara said, “I had a choice. He’d never seen it before. But now he knew that I had a choice to make. He couldn’t tell me what to do, because he hadn’t seen anything in my future.”
“What was the choice?”
“He said that I could do nothing and the human race would become extinct when my bloodline ceased in three hundred years.”
“What alternative did he give you?”
She remained silent. Her eyes avoiding his and staring at the sarcophagus.
“Go on. You’ve gone this far now.”
“He said I may attempt to change the future.”
“And?”
“And if I’m successful the human race will continue far into the future.”
“But?”
“If I fail that population number changes at the end of this century. Any child born today will have a high chance of being alive to see this date. We’re not talking about hundreds of years in the future. We’re talking about the end of this generation.”
“All right,” Sam said. “I’m interested. What does Nostradamus predict the population to be on the first of January 2101?”
She looked at him. Her jaw rigid and her eyes intense. “Zero — the human race would be extinct.”
“Okay. So you have a choice. You can do nothing and the human race will survive another three hundred years. That’s not so bad. Or you can take a chance and potentially kill everyone at the end of this generation.”
“Those were the choices.”
“You mean, those are the choices,” Sam corrected her.
“No. Were. Past tense. This is a new note. Nostradamus obviously had another vision since he’d left the book of Nostradamus buried in the Saharan desert.”
“Why? What’s changed?”
“Here he says that when my daughter turns eighty-two — the human population on earth will reach zero.”
Sam did the math. “For that to be true, you’d need to be pregnant right now?”