Black Sun

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.”

The president seemed to understand what Moore was telling him but he clearly remained suspicious. “How good is the science on this?”

Moore didn’t hedge; no time for that now. “Most physicists are certain that the universe is made up of more than three dimensions. String theory and quantum mechanics currently suggest eleven dimensions, but at the very least we know of four: the three spatial dimensions—height, width, depth—and the fourth, time.

“In general, we consider time as unidirectional, moving forward and not backward, but we know for certain that it can be distorted by relativity, and if we’re correct about where and when this stone came from, then we can be fairly certain that that unidirectional concept of time is wrong. If that’s the case, then the transfer of simple electromagnetic energy through time would likely be far easier to accomplish than the safe travel of a human person through it.”

“Why don’t we see any other manifestations of this?” the president asked.

It was a difficult concept to explain. “Maybe a demonstration would work better,” he said.

He grabbed a foot-long piece of metal that had broken off of some cabinet. He placed it on the ground, its curving, silver shape looking like a flatter version of the St. Louis arch.

“Can you see this?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Okay, now imagine a two-dimensional world,” he said. “Flat, like this floor. If there are two-dimensional beings living there, they would only be able to see what exists within their two dimensions: things that exist on either the north-south or the east-west axis. But nothing up or down. Anything going vertically above or below this flat plane is literally beyond their ability to perceive.”

Moore pointed to the arch/handle. “So if we place this three-dimensional arch in their two-dimensional world they see only the points that intersect their.”

Moore touched the base of the curved metal handle. “Here and here,” he said. “They would identify each point as an independent two-dimensional object. What they would not be able to recognize is that the two objects were co

He ran his hand along the arch.

“Now, if this were an electrical circuit and there were a power source attached to it, they would be able to sense the output at both ends, and they might even be able to determine that the two things were acting in concert, fluctuating at identical moments, but they would have no way of knowing where the power was coming from or why, because their entire plane of existence is contained in the flat two dimensions of the floor.”