Demi leaned over, hands on knees, the basketball wedged between her arm and hip. "Best of five?" she said, catching her breath. Sweat dripped from her chin.
Each afternoon for a week, she and Peter had played one-on-one as a distraction from the stream of ominous news coming through the radio. There were already over twenty thousand cases of JCAV in the US alone, and thousands more were being reported every day. Everyone seemed to think they were getting sick with it. Even the most benign symptom was a harbinger: a headache, a misplaced key, a fit of road rage. Panic was setting in, clinics and hospitals overrun with the sick and the worried. Absenteeism skyrocketed. Public services began to buckle and crack. Many states were mobilizing their National Guard, and president Jack Almerson had just signed an executive order authorizing the emergency nationalization of every major medical center in the country. Similar dramas were beginning to play out in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Europe. All in little over a week.
"All right, best of three," said Peter, resigned to another loss on the basketball court. He blamed them on his injuries, even though he had mostly healed. Demi was a phenomenal basketball player, tall but quick, her legs powerful, her touch delicate. If Peter stepped up to guard her at the three-point line, she would blow by him and lay it in off the glass. And if he backed off, even a little, she would bury a three-point shot right in his face. His only hope of victory lay in fouling the crap out of her, but even that failed to achieve more than a few consolation wins.
Drenched and exhausted, they went inside to clean up. Demi headed upstairs for a shower, while Peter plopped down at the dining room table to reassemble his ego. Sitting there in the darkened room, he watched Saul and Davila in the kitchen as they prepared the venison Demi had bagged up by Kiger Gorge.
Saul rinsed and patted dry the long slab of red meat, while Davila chopped garlic and pimento olives. They made several deep slits in the meat, stuffing in the olives and garlic, then topping it all off with strips of salted pork.
"Where did you learn to prepare venison like this?" she asked.
"It's a Basque recipe. I got it from a close friend of my father's up in Jordan Valley by Idaho. You know, the Basques came to this part of North America to herd sheep back in the early nineteen hundreds." He reached for another strip of salted pork and suddenly blushed. "Oh, I'm sorry, I didn't even ask. Do you keep kosher?"
She touched his hand and laughed, a bright musical sound that tickled Peter's ears. "Don't worry. I eat pork. My father was Jewish, but my mother was Catalan, from northern Spain. Davila was my maternal grandmother's first surname. She used to prepare venison just like this. That's why I asked."
Sprinkling the meat with crushed black pepper, they quickly simmered it in a deep pan with chopped potatoes, onions, and dried tomatillos. Then they put it all in the oven to roast.
Saul began to clean up. "How's that leg of yours doing?"
"I'm afraid it's a permanent injury. But Peter's been working with me."
It was the one gift he had to offer, his healing hands.
Saul nodded. "He's been teaching me some exercises for my shoulders. They're beat up from roping when I was a kid."
She set aside the bowl she was drying and wiped her hands. "I'd like to help out if I might."
"You mean with Demi."
She nodded. "It seems to me you've raised a remarkable young woman, but if you think there's anything I might help with . . ."
Saul thought about it for a moment. "You speak Hebrew, right?"
"Of course, Spanish and Catalan as well."
"Demi's great with languages, human or computer. She's learned quite a bit of her Native language, but she's always wanted to learn Hebrew and Spanish. Teach her, in private. And if there's anything else she wants to know, she'll ask you."
After dinner, the four of them lingered around the dining room table drinking coffee and listening to AM radio on an old boom box that had belonged to Saul's deceased daughter, Rachael. As they listened, Davila stood behind Demi and braided her glossy black hair.
Peter had seen Demi up close every day on the basketball court, but it was just a blur of hands and feet. Now, with her hair pulled back, he appreciated for the first time the young woman's beauty, regal and stern, her dark, wide-set eyes smoldering with thought. Davila knotted the final braid and leaned close, her cheek nearly touching hers. There was something there between them that Peter could not put his finger on, a likeness, a kinship.
They all turned at the sound of a helicopter approaching from the east. Tumbling onto the front porch, they watched the multicolored lights of a Black Hawk helicopter descending over the far end of the meadow. It touched down, and the pilot immediately cut the engine. A minute later, a lone soldier approached on foot, his flashlight sweeping the snow-streaked ground.
The soldier removed his cap to a balding halo of gray-blond hair. "Good evening," said Dr. Brisling. His voice seemed flat, muted somehow by the dry, brittle air. He wore desert fatigues, matching boots and thick government-issue glasses that made his eyes look huge. He seemed thinner too, his face haggard.
"Where are your soldiers?" asked Saul.
"I'm not actually in the Army anymore. See, no rank insignia."
"I thought they gave you your commission back."
"Apparently, I have a problem obeying orders."
Everyone gathered in the living room as they had before, Saul in his chair, picking at the loose threads, Peter and Davila standing behind him by the wall of framed photographs. Demi fed the stove with juniper wood then sat on the arm of Saul's chair. She wore her father's old blue jeans and a red-and-black checked flannel shirt, twin braids falling over her chest.
Brisling sat alone on the couch and squinted through his army glasses at Saul. "Your cut's healing nicely."
"I had a good doctor."
"Right. Do you folks need anything up here?"
"We're doing fine. The hydrogen fuel cells are fully charged for winter."
They had everything they needed, electricity, food, clothing and medical supplies. Over the years, Saul had also amassed a respectable arsenal of handguns, rifles, shotguns, and hunting bows, just in case. Indeed, they might survive on the mountain for years, decades evenâSaul, Demi and Davila at least. Yet Peter could not live another second without asking the question that had burned his mind ever since Brisling and Genevieve left with a vial of his blood. "Did you find the mutation in my DNA?"
"No," said Brisling.
"What do you mean, no? That's what Jason Dayan was looking for. That's the only reason Gryphus murdered my dad and all the Sons of Simon."
The doctor removed his glasses and massaged his temples. They all knew what that meant by now. "He wasn't looking for a mutation."
"But that's how he identified the Sons of Simon."
"Right." As he cleaned his glasses on the sleeve of his fatigues, he explained how a young woman working at Dayex Corporation headquarters had informed the FBI about a special DNA probe Jason Dayan was using to select rare individuals for murder. "But it wasn't a mutation he was after."
"Then what was it?"
"Something nobody considered. At first, I thought it was just a balanced chromosomal translocation. That's when two different chromosomes swap chunks of DNA. It's not that rare, actually."
"What are you talking about?"
He put on his glasses and looked up at Peter. His blue eyes seemed startled, magnified by the lenses. "What I'm trying to say is that you have a hundred-thousand base pairs of extra DNA that shouldn't be there."
"What?"
"I tried to convince myself you were part of some top-secret military eugenics experiment, a test-tube baby or something like that. But then we checked your father's DNA using the blood sample the FBI found at Dayex Headquarters."
"He had it too."
"It's attached to your Y chromosomes."
The Y chromosome, the determinant of male sex, passed from father to son, generation to generation. Suddenly, it all made sense, the killing of the Sons of Simon and every first-degree male relative. The Y chromosome.
"The data are the data. It was high time I took my own damned advice. So says Genevieve. But I still can't accept it, not completely."
"Accept what?"
"The fact that the extra DNA you and your father inherited isn't natural. It's a man-made sequence."
"Man-made? Butâ"
"I know. I know. But there's no getting around it. Somewhere in your family tree, one of your direct male ancestors was the subject of genetic engineering."
Peter staggered back against the wall.
"You should have seen how I reacted. The docs at Bethesda put me on sedatives. I refused at first, but Genevieve convinced me." He reached into a breast pocket and held up a pill bottle. "I have some extra if you want."
Peter waved it off, the sedatives, everything the man was saying.
Brisling pocketed the bottle and shook his head. "There's no disputing the DNA-sequencing results. I was there when they performed it." He let out a long, cool breath. "Then I made the mistake of asking them to extract DNA from the bones of that skeleton they found in Dayan's vault."
"The Rab Mag!" said Davila, stepping forward.
Peter grabbed her arm. "Wait. Did he have the extra DNA too?"
The doctor turned his hands into little pistols and shot lazily at Peter. "Bingo. That old wizard carried the same genetically engineered Y chromosome as you. You're distant relatives."
And there it was, extraordinary evidence for William Fitzimmin's extraordinary claim. Peter and all the Sons of Simon were direct patrilineal descendants of Simon the Apostle, son of the Rab Mag, Lord of the Magi, Pillar of Seth, the Son of Adam and Eve. Through the centuries, the Sons of Simon had shepherded the Mustard Seeds, not in a wooden box, not in the teachings of the Church, but within each and every cell of their bodies. That was why they called the handshake and passwords the usual means of identification, because there was another way, another means, an unusual means, an extraordinary meansâDNA. The Sons of Simon had known it all along, ever since the time of Jesus.
Now it was Davila's turn to grab Peter's arm, and a chunk of flesh with it. "Then it wasn't a hoax!"
Brisling met her gaze. "Your people no longer believe so. We did carbon-dating on the Rab Mag's skeleton, and it checks out at two thousand years old. The story about the Palestinians finding it checks out too. I'm sorry I led you to believe otherwise. But you have to understand how hard this has been for me, for everyone. No one can really see the future, not until they step in it, and then, of course, it's too late. But I've had a little time to think about all this, to let it sink in. Of course, the drugs help too." He leaned back and looked to Peter. "So, I also made the mistake of asking them to sequence Jason Dayan's DNA."
"No."
"I'm afraid, yes. Jason Dayan had the same Y chromosome as you and your father. You're all related."
Peter wriggled free of Davila's grasp. "This can't be real."
"I know. Your mind doesn't want to accept it. I understand that. It'll take time. It might even begin to make a little sense. So just listen. We also compared Jason Dayan's DNA to a bit of the Ice Man's DNA, andâ"
Saul sat upright. "Hold on. That was all handed over to the tribe and buried with the Old One."
"Well, not quite all of it. It turns out several labs working on the Ice Manâthe Old Oneâkept some leftover DNA in cold storage."
"And?" said Peter.
"They match. Not just their Y chromosomes, but all the other chromosomes as well. They're a complete match, base pair for base pair, like identical twins. I asked the NSA spooks to calculate the odds of something like that happening by chance, and they just laughed in my face."
Saul continued to unravel his chair's upholstery. "Then all that malarkey about time travel and splitting into three was true?"
"That's what we're left with, I'm afraid. I've been beating my head against this all week, trying to pull an alternative explanation out of my ass, but I just can't do it. No one can."
Peter's head began to swim, and he slid down the wall until he was on his haunches. He covered his face with his hands and let them slip down, fingertips trailing over his gaping mouth. Then he stared down at his empty palms. "What am I?"
"A messenger, it seems."
Peter looked up sharply. "What do you mean?"
"The extra DNA you carry doesn't have any biological function in your body. It doesn't give you any special powers, in case you were wondering. In fact, your cells can't even use it. They just keep replicating it over and over. But it's not a random sequence, either. The cryptographers at Fort Meade have been working on it 'round the clock. Actually, I was waiting on some sort of answer before I came back here."
"It's the blueprints," said Demi.
Everyone turned.
"How did you know that?" said Brisling.
She spoke to the floor, averting the doctor's gaze. "Because it makes sense. Jason Dayan said that Seth from the Bible had secret knowledge about science and technology, and that he hid in a way that only people in the future could find it and use it. That's us, now, because we have the technology to sequence DNA."
"Is she right?" said Peter.
The doctor's eyes lingered on Demi as he turned. "Yeah, she's right. The extra DNA you carry is coded information. But it's not the repeating three nucleotide code used by cells to make proteins. It's something completely different and new. They say it's a quaternary code. Computers use binary code, just two values, zero and one. But the code in your DNA uses four, the four DNA bases, A, T, C and G."
"What's in the blueprints?" asked Demi.
"Formulas and equations. Mathematics, physics, chemistry and a bunch of stuff they won't talk about."
"Is there a cure for JCAV in all that?" said Saul. "That's what Jason Dayan told me."
"Some of the chemical formulas appear to have antiviral and anticancer properties, at least based on computer modeling. The lab teams at Walter Reed are testing them as fast as they can. But like I said, even if we come up with something, we're not going to get it to people in time."
"What about the equations?" said Demi. That spring, she had taken her college-entrance practice exams online and absolutely crushed the math and science portions. Maximum scores.
"I wish I could show you. String theory, unified theory, emergent gravitational theory, dark matter, fusion energyâit's all there. You should see the physicists. They're going absolutely ape shit. They say it'll open up a new chapter of humanity. If anyone survives, that is."
"My God," said Saul. "Dayan was right, a new civilization transformed by science and technology. It's the ancient knowledge of Seth, hidden away in anticipation of the Flood, carried from generation to generation, for thousands of years."
Peter felt like he was in a dream. "Semina sinapis. The Mustard Seeds. The Seeds of Salvation. That's what Jesus said."
Davila gasped. "If even a fraction of this is true, it would undermine all of Christian theology. It would completely rewrite history."
Brisling leaned back on the couch, hands on his knees. "My dear friends, I'm afraid history has already rewritten itself. The page has turned."
The fire crackled faintly in the stove. The sweet smell of burning juniper filled the air like incense. At length, Brisling's phone began to chime, and he fished it out of his pocket.
"Is that a satellite phone?" asked Saul.
He silenced the chime with a tap of his finger. "No, it's time for my meds."
Peter fetched a glass of water, and the doctor took his medicine. He handed the glass back to Peter. "I have to get to Maryland. I'm sure you all have a lot to think about. But before I go, is there anything you need up here? I can arrange for it."
"A cure for the virus would be nice," said Saul.
He nodded, saying to Peter, "If we come up with anything, I promise you'll get it first."
"Thank you," said Peter.
"And get the Army to unblock our satellite," Saul added.
"Sorry, that's a no-go. The FBI and DHS have you under strict physical and electronic quarantine. In case you haven't noticed, you're the only ones left on Steens Mountain. They don't want any of this leaking out. Not that people would believe a damned word of it." He slapped his thighs and stood, ready to go.
Saul got to his feet. "How about some coffee for the road?"
"No, thanks. I'll be asleep as soon as we're in the air. Besides, I have some sweet tea waiting for me back in Maryland." He stepped around the coffee table and stood before Peter. "I'm sorry," he said.
"For what?"
"Anna. I'm sorry about what happened to her."
Before Peter could respond, the doctor turned to Davila, his index finger raised. "Remind me never to question a girl with a gun."
She smiled feebly.
"And you," he said to Demi. "We could use a mind like yours back in Maryland."
Saul stepped between them. "She's not going anywhere."
"I know that." The two men's eyes met again, brown against brown. Brisling extended his hand. "No hard feelings?"
Saul took it. "Just find a cure."
Brisling nodded. Then he donned his cap. "Well, I'm off."
____________________
Author's note:
Thank you for reading Chapter 47!
This chapter is dedicated to @BarbaraMiskovic for her love of storytelling and for introducing me to Runa, the wonderful protagonist of her story, Everwind.
The story about the Sons of Seth is recounted by the first century Romano-Jewish historian, Flavius Josephus in his famous treatise, "Antiquities of the Jews." According to Josephus, Seth and his sons were renowned for their knowledge of mathematics, astronomy and a body of secret scientific knowledge received from God. Foreseeing the potential destruction of the world either by fire or flood, they inscribed their secret knowledge on two pillars: one made of brick and the other of stone. The idea was that at least one of the pillars would survive any catastrophe. These pillars were said to have been preserved and later discovered, ensuring that the wisdom and knowledge of the Sons of Seth continued to benefit future generations. Their contributions to the understanding of the cosmos were considered significant and influential in ancient traditions.
All comments welcome.
-Frode
Image: Abby Scott (Warm Springs/Yakama), who in 2014 set the WAC record for 3-point shots made in a game (11), http://www.bendbulletin.com/home/2698465-151/abby-scott-back-on-track