Tales From the Black Chamber (17 page)

9

“Hey, I got it!” Claire shouted, hanging up the phone. It was two days later, and faxes and e-mail with the mysterious markings had sped around the world to various trusted academics who were part of the larger circle of individuals whom, to Anne's amusement, the Chamber traditionally called Collaborators. Everyone in the room turned to look, and John, Mike, and Anne came quickly out of the conference room.

“An old professor of mine at Oxford recognized it,” Claire explained. “He said it's a Tibetan script.”

“Tibetan?” asked Mike. “Don't tell me, it's a cryptic yak-butter recipe.”

“No,” Claire said with a mixture of triumph and trepidation, “apparently it says ‘demon.'”

“Of course it does,” said Mike.

“Jesus,” said Steve.

“Okay, so what next?” asked John.

“We have to leverage this into some sort of knowledge about the Voynich Manuscript,” said Joe. “That'll let us know what our bad guy is up to.”

“Okay,” said Rafe. “Here's what we'll do. Lily, Joe, and I will go through as many images of the manuscript as we can find, looking for that sequence of letters. We'll send that to Claire's guy, and see what he can make of it. Then we send him a bigger piece to see if he can do that.”

“But we don't want to let him know it's the Voynich Manuscript,” Steve objected.

“That's probably true,” said John.

“We can trust him,” objected Claire. “He's wonderful and completely reliable.”

“I'm sure,” countered John, “but we really should do this need-to-know.”

“All right,” Claire conceded. “So how?”

“I've got it,” said Joe. “We convert the Voynich text into a secondary substitution cipher.”

“English, please?” said Mike, to Anne's relief.

“We just change the funny Voynich letters to regular letters or numbers.” Joe looked off into space for a moment. “Maybe numbers would be clearer. Yeah, I think numbers.”

“Okay, can you do that, Joe, while the other two get to work on finding the character sequence in the manuscript?” John asked.

“Sure,” Joe said.

“I'll help Rafe and Lily,” volunteered Anne. “I can navigate old books very quickly, and I'm good with scripts and their variants.”

“I'll help, too,” offered Wilhelmina. “Sounds a lot less depressing than trying to dig up dirt on priests. I can't think the Lord looks too kindly on that, even though our motives are good.”

“
Ora pro nobis, Sancta Wilhelmina
,” joked Mike.

Wilhelmina laughed. “I'll pray for you in particular, Mike. You need it.”

“Have you been talking to my wife again?” Mike grinned.

“Okay,” said John. “So, Joe does the cipher. Rafe, Lily, Anne, and Wilhelmina go through the manuscript. And the rest of us get back to digging up dirt on priests.”

Lily, Wilhelmina, Steve, and John, closest to the door, left to get to work.

“Hey, wait,” said Joe. “What part of the text do you want enciphered?”

“I dunno,” said John.

“How about the beginning?” asked Anne.

“Works for me,” said Joe.

“So, Claire, this old professor of yours, were you his
special
student? Did you learn anything that you can't share with the class?” Rafe asked with a theatrical leer.

Claire rolled her eyes and left, shaking her head.

“Jesus, Rafe,” said Mike, “dip her braids in your inkwell, why don't you?”

“What?”

“Dude, you
so
like her.”

“Well, of course I like her, she's a great coworker.”

“You liiiiiiike her.”

“Shut up.”

“You liiiiiiike her.”

Rafe flipped Mike the bird and stalked out.

“He likes her,” Mike said to Joe and Anne.

“Oh yeah,” said Joe.

First thing the next morning, Joe called a meeting. “I've got the cipher. Let me explain this to everyone.” He connected his laptop to a projector and displayed a section of Voynich text. It read:

ab cdefbfd vbh cdvdjbveHl cmbebno vstH vohu ab gscmb go cHgbk poqxdhqgba qvbvbgba qHcpH qd poqfb bhhd gdeohomb cyrbv gba
edaqdmrbvgba mbxohbrbv gba qksrbnorbvrvol goh cy abno voqsnol ckolqovy gdhgH zdaFd gdhmb rodq hHlfbqoebkbvu

Joe said, “Okay, this is the opening paragraph of the manuscript. It's got a lot of different letters, as you can see. There are twenty-seven, by my count. What I did was assign each a number, starting with the first character on the first line as number one, then the next as number two, and so on. So, for example, the first two words are…” He pushed a button and the following numbers appeared below the Voynich text.

1-2 3-4-5-6-2-6-4

“What this means is that we have six unique letters, then the second letter repeats, then the sixth, then the fourth. Everybody following me?”

Everyone nodded. “I don't know for how much longer,” joked Mike.

“No, if you've got that principle, you've got the whole thing. So here's what the whole text looks like as numbers,” said Joe, pushing another button, revealing:

1-2 3-4-5-6-2-6-4 7-2-8 9-4-7-4-10-2-7-5-11-12 9-13-2-5-2-13-15 7-18-19-11 7-15-8-20 1-2 21-18-9-13-2 21-15 9-11-21-2-22 16-15-23-24-4-8-23-21-2-1 23-7-2-7-2-21-2-1 23-11-9-16-11 23-4 16-15-23-6-2 2-8-8-4 21-4-5-15-8-15-13-2 9-25-17-2-7 21-2-1
5-4-1-23-4-13-17-2-7-21-2-1 13-2-24-15-8-2-17-2-7 21-2-1 23-22-18-17-2-14-15-17-2-7-17-7-15-12 21-15-8 3-25 1-2-14-15 7-15-23-18-14-15-12 9-22-15-12-23-15-7-25 21-4-8-21-11 26-4-1-27-4 21-4-8-13-2 17-15-4-23 8-11-12-6-2-23-15-5-2-22-2-7-20

“And, so, this is what we'll send to Claire's professor. I checked it out, and the letters from the breviary are 9-21-11-21. That sequence doesn't appear anywhere in my sentence, but the letters are pretty common throughout. There are six 9's and 11's, and twelve 21's. So whatever the professor decides those are, he'll have a decent head start. There are two hundred five total letters, and he'll have twenty-four off the bat. That's about twelve percent. Not great, but a lot better than nothing. And it'll be even better if Rafe's team's discovery pans out.”

Rafe spoke up. “Well, we think we can maybe help him out on that. Lily, Anne, Wilhelmina, and I managed to identify multiple instances of a long phrase with that characteristic sequence. Can you put it up, Joe?” Joe pushed a key and a Voynich phrase appeared.

npocgbqqocgHg bcbggdh bfdmvdh

Rafe pointed to the end of the first word. “Okay, here's our word, though it seems to be the ending of this long word, or a suffix or a compound or something. The really cool thing about this excerpt is that it's got multiple instances of each of two of those letters. Okay, ours kind of looks like c-ampersand-t-ampersand. And you'll notice that there are one, two, three c's, and one, two, three, four, five ‘ampersands.' And these two ampersands here are right next to each other. So presumably that's a double letter, which should help Claire's professor identify the word more easily. Oh, and I almost forgot, all these letters occur in Joe's section as well, and he was able to encipher them like this.” Joe pushed a button and up popped two strings of numbers.

14-16-15-9-21-2-23-23-15-9-21-11-21 2-9-2-21-21-4-8 2-6-4-13-7-4-8

Anne raised her hand. Rafe smiled and said, “This isn't school, Anne. Fire away.”

“Isn't this still going to be close to impossible?” she asked.

“Absolutely. We have one, sole hope—that the underlying language is Tibetan and that the professor can solve it on that basis.”

“So,” Mike said. “Everybody happy with this plan? Any obvious flaws?”

The futility and frustration of the previous weeks' work was visible on the faces of everyone in the room. After a long pause, murmurs of “let's do it,” “ok,” “give it a shot,” and the like burbled around the conference table.

Claire stood up. “Why don't you print the numbers out and I'll fax them to him. That way we can avoid electronic copies.”

Anne said, “My old office's interior decorator recommends that highly. Avoids firebombings and the like.” Everyone laughed quietly.

Joe said, “Okay, we're done.”

A week later, Anne had a question for Claire and walked over to her desk. Claire, on the phone, held up a finger, and Anne walked to the empty desk across the way and leaned on it. She stared off into the middle distance, half watching Mike Himmelberg flipping through various Catholic-looking websites on his big iMac monitor. Something caught her attention, but she wasn't sure what. A moment later, her synapses reestablished the fleeting connection, and she knew. She rushed over and grabbed Mike by the shoulders.

“Oh my God, you found the guy! Why haven't you told anyone?!”

“Uh, what?” Mike looked from Anne's suddenly proximate face almost atop his left shoulder to the monitor and back.

“You found the guy. That's the tell, right there!” She pointed to a coat of arms on the computer screen. John, Joe, and Wilhelmina walked over and looked on.

“No, I'm just looking at some unofficial organizations around the Church, thinking maybe there'd be a secret necromancer club or something,” Mike explained. “This is one that's sort of trying to lobby the Church to ditch all the smells and bells and become the Church of What's Happening Now, especially in terms of sex and divorce and women priests and the like. There are a bunch of these groups, but this is probably the best funded and most respectable. There's no way these guys are mixed up in medieval weirdness. Heck, I'm not sure that they're even all that keen on God.”

“Well, then that's an awesome cover,” Anne said loudly, “because that there is the proof that you've got a necromancer on your hands.” She pointed at the arms depicting a large, crested bird with orange and black plumage and black-and-white striped wings pecking at its breast, blood dripping from the wound.

“I think you're mistaken, Anne,” said John, squinting at the bird, as Joe leaned over and enlarged the image. “The pelican pecking at its breast is a common motif in Christian art. They were thought to nourish their chicks with their own blood—a sacrifice like Jesus's, if you will—and they were thought to be able to use the blood to bring dead chicks back to life—a resurrection motif, too.”

“Point taken, John. But here's the thing.” She paused, looked around at her expectant audience, and announced, “That … is not … a pelican.”

“Sure it is,” said John, staring at the bird. “I mean, it's all stylized and heraldic, but it's a pelican.” He canted his head. “Isn't it?”

“I think it is,” said Mike, though somewhat dubiously.

“Nope,” said Joe. “Look at the crest and the colors. I mean, orange? And stripes?”

“The colors and crest could be additional heraldic symbolism. I'd have to look it up,” said John, less and less sure.

“I'm with Anne and Joe,” said Wilhelmina. “Look at the beak, it's all long and curved and pointy. Pelicans have a big pouch on their lower bill.”