Dateline: Atlantis (36 page)

Wright's face turns an interesting shade of purple.

“Not the
Times
. You wouldn't do that to us.” Wright says in a hushed, murderous tone. She realizes she better get the whole story out quickly before he explodes.

“No. I'd never do that. No, I'm moving back to Chicago. I'm marrying Donny.”

Wright's face is at first quizzical, then comical. He finally decides on good humor and blurts out hearty congratulations. He walks over and gives her the best hug a father could give. He's making the best of it, but she knows he's stung to the quick.

“Look, I know you had no idea about Donny and me,” she starts.

“It goes all the way back to childhood, I know. And he did save your life.”

They both laugh. Then Amaryllis looks at the ground, and Wright stands next to her shifting from one foot to another.

“I'll help train someone to follow the stories as they develop,” she offers.

“There's no replacement for you and you know that.” He drops his head and waves her away with a hand that's lost all its strength. “Go finish up with Barney. We need to pick out the best of Garret's photos.”

She leaves him staring out the window again. Surely thinking of Priscilla, the other girl he lost.

She stands at the quay, watching as the crew loads a ship with vases, rugs, gold, and a chest full of scrolls. She looks at the sail, luffing in the changing breeze, bordered in crimson and marked in the middle with the cross and concentric circles. A hand touches hers, and she looks up to see a man like Donny dressed in the clothing of the ancient land. With a start, she regards her own clothing and sees she wears an identical tunic made of rich sage linen.

They look out to sea, and notice the other ships that have gone on ahead. The fleet is leaving, she knows, carrying the goods to the Hall of Knowledge. They bear due West, and the sails are marked with simple hatch marks and crosses for different lands in the various parts of the Americas. But where the Hall is remains a mystery. She wishes she could read the writing, but stands apart from the bustle of the crowd, a foreigner, unschooled in their ways.

She wakes and stretches, giving one tender look at Donny sleeping next to her. She kisses the nape of his neck, but he is so soundly asleep he doesn't move. She loves the smell of him: toasty and a tinged with a bit of spice. She's gotten used to those crystal-generated dreams by now, and they no longer fill her with dread. She's learning from them. Amaryllis' parents knew somehow that she would carry on their work, but it wasn't until this morning that she knew how to do it.

It's late on a Saturday, and she knows Donny will sleep until noon if she lets him, so she grabs some clothing and slips into the bathroom for a quick shower. There's so much to plan for, so many people making demands on her time. This day, she decides, she's going to be impossible to find for a few hours. No marriage plans, no job offers, and definitely no calls from television producers. This is her day, and she seizes it with jealousy.

After dressing in simple jeans and a fine-gauge sweater, she pops on a pair of walking shoes, waits for the elevator, then heads down to the busy sidewalk outside. She walks several long blocks west on this spring day, past students, past the park with the Tin Man statue, and remembers Donny singing “If I Only Had a Heart” as he cavorted around the artwork. She watches softball teams at fierce play on the new April grass. They look hot, yet she still hasn't shaken off the chill of the morning. If Chicago is lucky, the temperature will hit seventy degrees today. Nearly ideal. Just like Amaryllis' new life.

She turns north to the elevated train station. As she mounts the stairs to the “L,” she remembers her somber walk through the streets of a small Mexican town, when she wondered what would become of her life if her news story proved correct. Now that she has arrived at the other side of success, she's cool about the experience.
It's only a story. They can't take my life. But they surely can try to take my time.

The train lumbers to the station, and she gets in, gazing at the hip-hop kids who mime the words to the soundless headsets stuck in their ears. Across the aisle is an ancient man with more hair growing out of his ears than from his scalp. He's decked out in Cubs regalia. She smiles at him, and he says to no one in particular, “This is the year.” She plops herself down next to a Hispanic woman who's trying to keep her two toddlers from wandering into trouble. Over in the corner, a tourist consults his pocket map and tries to juxtapose it with the subway plan on the wall. Amaryllis decides to be a model citizen.

“What are you looking for?”

The tourist, a large man with enormous front teeth, looks as if he's found a savior.

“Millennium Park,” he says with a heavy Texas accent.

“Randolph stop,” she says pointing to the correct station on the wall map. “Then walk a few blocks east. You've gone too far if you end up in the lake.”

He nods like a bobble-head doll. Amused, she sits down as the tourist consults his guidebook.

She leans back and considers her journey from the Mexican caves to this moment. The doubt she had in her own abilities to report the lost civilization story had been so glaring, like blotches on her reporter's résumé. Then the fear when Garret was murdered made her distrust herself even more. All along, she knew she was in for a wild ride, but she never allowed herself to dream the resulting story would cause worldwide fervor. But it did.

First, there was the initial Sunday issue, the sensation it caused in Los Angeles, and Wright's literal dance of glee in his office. Then the television appearances started to materialize. Soon, speaking-engagement offers poured in. Jobs offers were rife. A publisher proposed a book deal, which she deftly shunted off to Shoshanna and Thorgeld, who were already deeply at work on their next opus.

She was ready, but never fully prepared for the negativity of the naysayers and debunkers who came out from under every rock and sewer cover. These were the guys who tried to find little evils in her reputation, cracks in her reporting history, anything to make her look like a joke. That had been the most grueling part—dealing with the crank calls, indignant letters to the editor, people camping out at her apartment building's front door. She even had to call the police on a guy who was tailing her for weeks. Donny finally had a showdown with him one weekend, and the creep never returned.

No matter which way the skeptics tried to shoot her story down, the photos didn't lie, and the rock buildings still stood.
Soon other adventurers confirmed her story—and the race was on to discover more about this fantastic, submerged world.

All along, Amaryllis had to fight her own disbelief to pursue the story, but she overcame all reservation when she saw the ancient inscriptions through her parent's eyes, courtesy of the crystal. When Shoshanna translated some of the writing, Amaryllis became a believer in a civilization older than any known before. It was not because she was gullible, but because her heart told her what was true.

Yet here she sits on an elevated train system first introduced in Chicago in 1892. She rode on this line with Freya when they went downtown to see Christmas decorations in the windows of Marshall Field's (now, sadly, Macy's). The buildings outside have changed, but the “L” train still bounces and sways the way it always did.
How far have we come, really?

The train tunnels underground, and she alights at Randolph, walking behind the Texan, who studies everything from the street musician near the stairwell to the public-health posters on the walls. Up and out onto Millennium Park, she breathes the cool lake breeze and marvels at what she has become. A housewife? Surely not. A columnist? She decided against it. A flash in the pan? She hopes that fate will never happen. She knows she has more than fifteen minutes of fame and plans to work forever on the dig for truth.

Here in this park that once was nothing but a dilapidated old train yard, she watches the twin glass-block fountains with their video images of giant faces and waits for them to gush water from their digital mouths. The sculptor of this piece of urban art said the images were meant to remind us of fountains of ages past that displayed the gods spewing magic from their bearded mouths. How fragmented and delicate those Roman statues are now. How will the Millennium fountains look in ten thousand years? Probably a lot like the barnacle-covered pyramids of the Caribbean depths. Everywhere Amaryllis looks, she sees change, and the constant mutability of matter.

She holds up her hands and looks at the sun's reflection in her diamond, marveling at the colors she never knew could exist in super-hardened carbon. What gems then lay under volcanic rock a mile under the sea? What else did the earth have to tell us?

After dreaming and strolling the gardens for delicious hours, Amaryllis gets herself ready for the assault of the real world. She turns her cell phone on, and the message signal immediately bleeps.

Time to get back to 21
^st
-century America. Time to put my game face on.

#

Shoshanna sends e-mail from Mexico, where she she's been attending the grand re-opening of the water diversion project along the Quintana Roo coast. No one cares much about the waterworks, however. Thanks to Amaryllis' story, all eyes are on the ancient pyramids that re-emerge amid the caves on the enigmatic shoreline. Shoshanna's note is written in her usual breathless style.

To: [email protected]

From: [email protected]

Subject: the emerging story

Hey, girl, you've got to get back down here, because the fascination with what you found is intense. Thanks to the Berlitz credentials—and the fact that you wrote about me in your story—I got past the guards and was able to stroll around the temples nearly by myself. And temples they are!

As I was trying to tell you before you hauled off and moved back to Chicago, now I can read much of the Old Civilization script. Don't wanna be calling it Atlantean or I'll get old Thorgeld mad at me. But that tower we were in, it said
“Knowledge” against the back wall. There were a million words I couldn't read, but later I looked at the pictures and compared it to the other ancient languages it resembles. Like Egyptian and the Mayan language, it's made up of both glyphs that signify entire ideas and of symbols standing for sounds. It's incredibly complex, making Egyptian look like a walk in the park

Anyway, I have to tell you that the temple of the jaguar on the Mexican coastline indicates that there is a “Hall of Knowledge” somewhere nearby. Other carvings suggest that the hall contains the writings and cultural relics of the Old Civilization. It might be the key to understanding everything about the ancient culture.

I'm pretty sure the pyramid you swam into, out there just off the beach, is the Hall and I intend to visit it. Will you come with me? Isaac is already on his way. We'll leave the submarine sightings in Cuba for another day. This Hall of Knowledge is too exciting to pass up.

Go collect your prize, get married, and get down here!

Shoshanna

#

Amaryllis, packing for her trip to New York, thinks about the speech she will give to her fellow journalists. But Shoshanna's note takes up the better portion of her mind. It has never been clearer what she should do to further her parent's research. With the Committee effectively shut down, Pitch on trial, and the Logos empire in tatters, there is nothing stopping her from getting on a diving boat and going underwater with Shoshanna to translate the knowledge of a people who lived when the whole world was little more than a band of tropical islands bookended on either side by glaciated landmasses. It was the Ice Age, a time when scientists thought humans were mere hunter-gatherers.
Now, Amaryllis could show how wrong that picture was by decoding the treasures in the Hall of Knowledge.

The wedding can't wait, however. She and Freya have been working for weeks on getting the details in order. Now that the Church of the Word is shuttered, they decided on an outdoor ceremony at a lakefront park in early June, hoping that the weather will hold.

She hopes Donny will like the idea of his new bride dragging him off to Mexico for the honeymoon. At the onset of hurricane season, no less. But there's nothing for it. Since she's decided to turn down all offers from TV, magazines and major newspapers, Amaryllis has to start her new career as explorer as soon as possible.

But she'll freelance for Wright. That much she knows. The trip that changed her life forever, the one in which she first met Gabriel and the wonders he showed her, was on Wright's tab. He not only financed the entire trek to the Bahamas, but he never lost a smidgen of trust in her ability to bring back the story of a lifetime. The story that would bring his paper the Pulitzer.

She sighs as she sits down next to her suitcase and stares at the stowed designer suit, the shiny black pumps and her typed comments for the prize ceremony. With a feeling of sudden freedom, she picks up the copy of the speech and rips it in half, deciding to wing it on the podium.

I found my family. Humanity has found its ancestral line. What more is there to say?