Chapter 5: Lady Thalassa
Thalassa was the daughter of the Duke of the Ordunas, an elderly man also known as Hobuk, who was the nominal head of a Steepleguard faction that believed Fiela should be the senior queen. The faction’s reasons for this belief varied. Some believed Lilian’s sordid past of drug and alcohol abuse and orgies made her unsuitable to be queen, much less the senior queen. Others believed the mark against the woman, though suspended as a result of her marriage to the king, should have disqualified from such high office.
Still others focused on Fiela’s strengths. She was a war hero, having fought countless battles against the Maqtu. She shared the same blood as the Great Sage, who was revered. Most importantly, her relationship with the king was viewed as genuine, whereas Lilian’s was clearly an arrangement. It was Fiela who walked at the king’s side on most occasions, while Lilian contentedly managed her former father’s kingdom.
Nevertheless, the duke’s supporters, known colloquially as ‘the Ordunas,’ were aware that Fiela was fiercely loyal to her sister and unwilling to accept a position as senior queen. Thus, they did not openly make disparaging remarks about Lilian, nor did they act against her, at least as far as the queen’s spies could detect. Given that Ben did not allow executions, Lilian and her supporters, ‘the Lilies,’ were required to tolerate the Ordunas and to include them in major court functions.
Against this backdrop, the duke had introduced his daughter, Thalassa, to Ben. The young woman was, of course, stunning, as all Nisirtu women were. She was thirty years old, with a light almond complexion, jet black hair and large brown eyes. At five and a half feet, she was a few inches shorter than the average Nisirtu female, though average by Ardoon standards.
More pertinently, she was brilliant, even by Nisirtu standards. A physicist and mathematician of renown before the collapse, she had earned two doctorates by the age of twenty-four. By the time she was twenty-six she had published numerous well-received articles in the best journals and had made frequent appearances on cable television news and pop-science stations, where she offered her opinions on such topics as quantum physics, string theory, and the evolution of the universe.
The Duke of the Ordunas had offered his daughter’s assistance in the study of the Tiwanaku tablets that the king had inherited from Scriptus Ridley. Though Ben was the only person capable of reading them, as they were written in Empyrean, the content was thick with scientific concepts he didn’t understand. He had broadcast his need for an assistant who understood physics and higher mathematics to help him, and ‘Thal’ was easily the most qualified candidate.
Ben made a motorboat noise with his lips. “Okay, here’s another sequence of numbers for you, Thal.”
Thal, pen in hand, said, “Go.”
He recited a sequence of thirty-eight numbers and then repeated himself.
“Got it,” the woman said. She stared at the steno pad. “That’s our third page of number sequences and still no zeroes or nines. Very odd.”
Ben, on the opposite side of the desk, leaned back and said, “Yeah. The concept of zero was alien to many ancients but it was no ancient culture that produced these tablets. I should say, ‘no primitive culture.’ As to the omission of the number nine? Not a clue.”
“We must be missing something. Are you sure you’re reading it correctly, Ben?”
“Yeah, I’m sure,” he replied. The tablets were in Empyrean. There was no possibility of error. Still, she had a point. No zeroes or nines? “Plug the numbers into the computer and see if you can find any patterns. Is anything jumping out at you?”
“What do you mean?”
“The golden ratio, or pi, something like that? The distance from Earth to the moon as measured in grains of sand? The atomic weight of something or other? You’re the physicist, you tell me.”
“No...” she said, a distant look in her eyes as she pondered the riddle. After a moment she jerked back to life. “Ben, do you think that they could be coordinates?”
The man scrunched his eyebrows and toyed with a paperweight on his desk. “They could be. Why?”
“Suppose the author of the tablet needed to specify locations and was using a system that only required the numbers one through eight to be used in a series. I don’t know what system. It’s conceivable, though, right?”
Dropping the paperweight, Ben nodded. “Like the old Military Grid Reference System, except that we used zero through nine instead of one through eight.”
“Right.” She opened a folder in her lap and reviewed several pages of number sequences. “Is there no context?”
Ben sighed and again spoke the Empyrean words. He had done this twice before in the past week, and on both occasions Thal’s involuntary response was to sit in a daze for more than an hour, her brain wrestling with concepts that were indescribable in English or Agati. On both occasions her gifted brain had failed. She had emerged from the trances in a confused state, unsure where she was, or even who she was. Luckily, the amnesia proved to be temporary.
It began the same way this time, except that twenty minutes into her trance, she shook her head and said very slowly, in English, “Secondary…and…tertiary…um…” Another minute passed. She looked at Ben. “Are they space-time coordinates?”
Shocked, Ben said, “Not bad.” It was the crudest possible definition, but it was close. He marveled at her ability to achieve even that. Had the woman’s subconscious been working the puzzle ever since the first time he’d spoken Empyrean to her? The entire week?
“So,” she said, then stopped, and thought. “Since these tablets were found at Tiwanaku, we can assume some of the coordinates apply to that location, right?”
Yes, thought Ben. That made sense. Excited, he sat up and leaned forward. “That’s right. If we can determine which coordinates apply to Tiwanaku, we might be able to figure out the system being used and determine what locations the other coordinates correspond to!”
The man leapt to his feet, walked to the physicist and kissed the woman on the cheek. “Brilliant! Thank God for you, Thal. I could have never figured that out!” Reinvigorated, he walked around the room with his hands clinched together behind his neck. “Space-time coordinates? Wow.”
“The difficulty,” the scientist said modestly, “will be determining which of these coordinates apply to Tiwanaku. There are thousands. We cannot pick one at random. We might waste months trying to make one set of numbers work, assuming there’s any merit to the theory.”
Ben snapped his fingers and jogged back to his desk. “No,” he said, his grin wider, “I don’t think so.”
Moving the stone tablets on his desk around like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, he said, “Tiwanaku is the only location such tablets have ever been found. That suggests to me that Tiwanaku is not a secondary or tertiary location. I bet it’s a primary location. If I’m right, it should appear again and again. Like the word ‘Washington’ in newspapers. Perhaps the section of the tablet we’ve been working on is...I don’t know...an appendix? Maybe there is a similar sequence on another tablet that refers to...”
A moment later he said, “Okay, I’ve found something.” He tapped the slab with his finger. “It’s a recurring sequence. Are you ready?”
The physicist retrieved her pad. “Ready when you are.”