Chapter Twenty Four--THE AERIE
Ari fought against his emotions, refusing to succumb to the headlong horror. He knew if he hesitated and gave them a moment for reflection, the heartbroken parents would be sucked down into grief deeper than the secret pit Yu had fatefully encountered in the swamp. His thoughts rushed as urgently as he had run to find vines to raise Yu to safety. We need more information. We need it fast. We need it now. He firmly turned to Celarius. “You mentioned death threats.”
Celarius nodded. “Three or four have come in every solar week for the past ten solar years.”
Yu delved into specifics. “Focus on recent ones. Did any of these threats seem unusual?”
Celarius’ eyes shifted to the left as he mentally scanned the filthy violent messages. “Last week there was a Yutan terrorist threat. It said something I thought only I knew.”
Celarius stopped there so definitely that it was clear the reference was to something shatteringly secret. If told, more than a confidence would be breeched.
Secrets hide two things: some ecstatic pleasure or shameful secret. Ari had learned that sinful secrets steal power from those who keep them. What did Celarius value most? What would he die for? What was more important to him than his children?
Knowing that the source of a man’s greatest pride could turn into his most damning disgrace, Ari bluffed. “The pyramids.”
Celarius looked like a laser jet had blasted his heart. Yanna’s hand pulled back from where it had alighted on this thigh to comfort him. Her biting words were frozen into calm. “What petty pride of yours is worth more than Yoris and Shaika?” Celarius burrowed deeper into stony silence.
The cold deepened in Yanna, her heart hardening with her words. “Yoris may still be alive. Tell everything. You do want him back, don’t you? Being gone for so long, could you change if Yoris returned? ”
Celarius’ closed his mind around the truth, burrowing under, sealing it in some dark concealed corner of the ancient pyramid of his mind.
Yanna felt the rocks about to bury her last hope. She blasted at them with a mother’s violently protective instinct, calmly holding out her hand. “Take it.”
Celarius stared stonily at her elegant fingers. He would not touch this graceful accusation.
Yanna would not be denied. “Take my hand now, or never touch nor see it again. Now.”
“I never wanted to get close. I never needed it —“Ice cracked stone, opening a slight fissure. Celarius did not take her hand in his, but touched fingertips tentatively “— until now.”
Yanna was adamantine. “Yesterday at this hour, my hand was red with Shaika’s blood. Though you don’t see it, it will not wash off. Her blood stains you from head to toe, more indelible than the scarlet of your precious Red Planet’s sands. You will wear it into eternity if you don’t speak now. Now!”
A massive glacier ripped a mountain wide. Words avalanched from Celarius’ lips. “You must keep this secret. My entire reputation is at risk.”
“Risk it or Yoris,” Yanna demanded. “Shaika will be avenged.”
“Three solar years ago, I discovered the five-sided pyramid. Inside I found pictograms, a legacy written before recorded time. The Red Planet project isn’t mine. All I did was follow directions from pictograms that predate known history. They were the source of the solstice events and DNA projections. In a way, I was winding the clock of time -- first backwards to understand, then forward to create.”
This shocking revelation of dark truth stunned the four huddled listeners.
Celarius would once have boasted of his labors. Now he offered them as a sort of penance. “It took me three solar years to decipher them and build the project. The face on The Red Planet is a cosmic pointer made visible by alignment of the planets and the positioning of the sun within that alignment. I believe it points to our Blue planet announcing a cosmic ancestral event. Something or someone is chosen or reborn every few hundred thousand years to save the universe.”
“Three long solar years away from us,” Yanna whispered, not as an accusation, but in mourning. “They were both nestlings, safe in the scent of blue jasmine. Sleeping to the lullaby of waterfalls.”
“Where has the time gone?” Celarius did not pause further to consider the cost of his work. He leapt from past to present. “There were a few symbols that produced the solstice. Once I learned to read them, they were as simple to understand as a nestling’s primer.”
Ari prompted him, sensing that the most important thing still lay ahead. “There was something else, something harder, something more significant.”
Celarius nodded. “Supremely significant. One strange pictogram eluded me until the end. While I read and built, I struggled to decipher it. It was cut so deeply in the rock that at first I didn’t even realize it was a pictogram. Then after looking at it for two years, one day my eyes brushed by it and I saw the shape the carved empty spaces made. It was a study in negative space. It took another year for me to understand its meaning.”
Ari let silence fall again. He sensed it would be brief this time, not brokering the cost of a secret, but heralding its significance.
Celarius’ tone conveyed that this was a deep revelation. The words came hard. “The messenger of destiny will come.”
Ari felt a flash of something. The words echoed in his mind. The messenger of destiny will come. Prove yourself worthy.
The sun struck a shadow away from his heart, like solstice magic. The feeling instantly disappeared. He flicked back his blond hair. The words struck deep but brought no action. He looked questioningly at Yu and Face. Face was immobile. Yu’s thought vein palpitated. They had no more insight of this than he did.
The messenger of destiny will come.
Celarius said no more. He could not define the connection he felt between the symbols and the young Administrator facing him. His tangled thoughts parted into a pattern, just as the negative space had revealed itself. “Ari could be the one.”
“The one?” Ari asked.
“The one to find the Yutan terrorists and my son.”
Yanna’s eyes clung to Ari, as a sailor to a tempest-tossed board, floating in rising seas. “Hope begins here.”
Down to the last twist of a double helix, Ari knew that he must rise to the expectation her grief dropped on his shoulders. His conscience had been altered beyond everyday senses with one deep look into this mother’s eyes.
Celarius activated his SES frequency. The group was immediately immersed in the broadcast to Atlantis of his Red Planet Solstice Tour. As the tour projected around them, strange primal emotions and some ill-defined personal connection to the pyramids raged within Ari.
Yu sensed her friend felt strange. They looked at each other, both understanding that there was a connection between this and the investigation. Possibly a link existed between them, the abducted children, and the Ancient Ones.
Always a master of understatement, Face concluded, “We must explore this more.”
Ari tried to focus on the first feeling aroused in him. The messenger of destiny will come. The labyrinth in his mind was as thick as matted seaweed. Sea salt filled his nostrils. Ari was awash at once in the strange red seas of ancient sands and simultaneously in some sweet Atlantian shoal. An odd inner connection from the whales grazed his consciousness. As he returned to his outward reality, he realized that while he was replying to the pod, he had missed a question from Celarius. Evidently Yu had covered his gaff with more questions.
--
Ari turned to Yu, “Where would you like to start?”
“Your mind is elsewhere, my friend. You’re trying to solve everything yourself. Those who take more than one step at a time, trip themselves. It is best to begin at the beginning.”
“You mean the gazebo.” Ari slapped his forehead. “Sometimes I just don’t see the obvious.”
Brief though their exchange was, by the time it was over Face had finished using the SES to morph Celarius’s corner room into a modern working laboratory with all the latest equipment. “Obviously, we are waging a war against time.”
“So, let us begin,” Ari decreed.
Face immediately connected with his brethren. From among the Super Intelligent Crystal Clan, Face summoned a few friends with top-secret credentials. “I’ll use clan members on secured buffers and channels to process. I have no doubt that they’ll produce results.”
Ari’s voice was urgent. “Be certain there are no leaks.”
Yanna stepped into the converted room, nodding her approval of their work. “Would you like tea and wafers?”
“Never touch the stuff,” Face said with a chitinous grin. “We need to rearrange your SES. Is that permissible?”
Yanna served Ari and Yu tea as she replied. “Anything and everything that will assist Yoris is not only permitted, but necessary. Still, it is a closed system with our own SICs inside. This is their home. You should ask their permission.”
A shy intelligence responded to Face’s summons. “We are accustomed to this home as it is.”
Face checked that Yanna had gone before he replied. “This home is not as it was. One child is dead, another in danger. The most that can be done is to restore a son to a father and mother. Will you help me, my kindred?” He sent a series of arrays to convince them.
At long last, the most-welcome of all replies was bashfully returned. “Yes.”
The rapidity of the exchange that followed was too advanced for even Ari and Yu to follow. All they could discern was a word here and there. Quantum tunneling, photon manipulation, energy density, temporal energy-rift-incursion, power coupling — the thoughts flew.
As Ari brushed aside the last crumb of an energy wafer, he sensed Face completing an exchange about emitters. Yu took a last sip of tea. They both knew that social niceties were at an end. The SES lab was complete and fully activated.
Face spoke matter-of-factly of the miraculous exchange that he and the SICs had thought into being. “We have prepared all functions for your new brain frequencies, Yu, Ari. My crystal frequencies are the only other it will accept. There is no better security.”
Ari flipped aside his long blond locks as he nodded. “Then we should be on our way. To Artan Park!”