Solomon

Chapter 4 of Signature.

Signature

Chapter Four

Solomon

It was a close race, with victory going once again to the self-preservation instinct. Yet for the final hundred yards, and especially over the last grueling seventy feet or so, the Group, middle-aged men all, were closer to death’s door than to Titus Mack’s. When they reached the porch, fingernails and teeth were literally at their backs.

Fortunately the place was ready for them. Both Izzy’s and Abel’s scans were pre-keyed, and the professor’s had been transmitted and memorized upon his acceptance of Mack’s New Year’s invitation. The instant their feet encountered the property line the observatory’s hemispherical wall began to hum in anticipation. When they were a hair’s-breadth from contact, the facing surface quickly breached and sealed, leaving their crazed pursuers to pound in frustration without. A breath of pressurized air escaped with an anticlimactic pop.

Mack’s observatory was part of the old Eyeball line: basically, an outer wave-collecting “lens”, a flexible central “iris” for digitizing those collected waves, and a smooth white Neoprene Inner Kinematic Surface--acronymically NIKS, but known in higher astronomical communities in reverse-acronym as a “skin”. Titus Mack’s skin was sympathetic; that is, it was able to learn and underwrite its runner by continuously filing domestic events as data, even as it automatically updated saved wave files.

The men blew in like tumbleweeds. No one should have been in worse shape than the angina-ridden professor, yet Amantu, still tiger-eyed and full of vinegar, was first to his feet, and the one man able to haul everyone upright. Abel, stanching the flow from his nose, coughed out, “It’s only us, Titus! Sorry about the racket! Bit of a disagreement with your neighbors! Happy New Year!” Outside, the hammering diminished to a pattering like rain.

The skin vibrated. “And to!” called a voice from one of the building’s concentric apartments. “You guys just give me a minute! Help yourselves!”

“Please--” Abel hacked back. “Take your time!”

Izzy called up a bar post-haste. The circular floor’s zodiacal arrangement broke up, and a complex glass cabinet rose with a noiseless, orrery-like movement. Various menus showed round the skin and passed. Izzy bolted enough to anesthetize a psychotic, then balanced back a tray heaped with spirits and glasses. Abel called up a favorite drink stand to meet him. The thing was a beaut; a diode-lit Messrs Ivory with a shatterproof, chlorophyll-painted lens top. The Group feigned nonchalance vociferously, hurriedly brushing their hair and robes in the glass as electronically-magnified flagella and protozoa appeared to inch along between their drinks and reflections. By the time Titus Mack came ambling in, the atmosphere was almost cordial.

Half a year had passed since the Group last saw their founder, and over that span his well-kept appearance had changed dramatically. His graying brown locks were a mess; plus he’d adopted a perpetual five o’clock shadow. His comfortable paunch was gone; he’d become, through either nerves or undernourishment, gaunt by comparison. And apparently he was too busy to bother with fresh clothes or soap and water. His matted outer robe hung from stooped shoulders like laundry on a line, his sunken waist was delineated by a belt with a knee-length overhang. Underwear and unwashed plates were scattered about the floor’s gel tiles. Only now did Amantu note the thousand palm prints on the skin’s sloping face.

Abel threw out his arms. “Ti! Nothing like the bachelor life, eh? Sorry about the turbulent entry, but boy, did we have a time of it with the adjacent fauna. Did you know there’s a Colony arm only a footrace away?”

“You didn’t take the usual route?”

“It was that little run-in with the law. We three were formally escorted, and not without a fight mind you, to a patch of infected real estate maybe a quarter mile north of here. Fraternal thanks, by the bye, for coming through.”

Amantu rose deferentially. “Sir. You are in grave peril.”

Mack waved him down. “Relax, Professor, relax. I know all about those morons. That bizarre behavior of theirs is the result of some doctored history I’ve been catalo--but, this is exactly why I wanted to see you guys this morning! And precisely why I’m so pleased to meet you, Professor Amantu.” Titus Mack offered his famous hand.

Amantu, still hopped-up and giddy, seized it in both of his and held on overlong.

“Titus Mack! An inexpressible honor! I stand, dilettante that I am, in the shadow of a legitimate legend.”

Mack extracted his palm. “So they tell me.”

He scratched his chin thoughtfully, his eyes running over the professor’s beautiful golden robes. “And a grand night for celebrating it is! I, sir, promise you a spectacle; a spectacle no other company could appreciate so astutely!”

His eyes made a pretense of wool-gathering. “Unless, of course, that company just happened to include, oh…the distinguished mediator, AJ Lee, and the famous skullcracker, our dear Doctor--”

Mack abruptly threw his arms around the little psychoanalyst. “Izzy!”

“At service!”

Izzy squirmed free. He blushed and fanned his face. “And might I Ti, mention Perseffor Mantu…this very morn made honor Group member…he now…‘Hammer’.” He laboriously raised a finger for each man in the room. “We…now…four!”

Mack zoned out, savoring the nickname. “…Hammer…”

The astronomer’s whole face lit up; he embraced Amantu like a long-lost friend. “Dubious congratulations, Professor! And I apologize for inconveniencing you on the holiday: I don’t make a habit of ringing strangers. That said, I want to thank you from the bottom of my heart for making a hole in your schedule, and sincerely beg your forgiveness regarding the untoward treatment en route. This must all seem a most unfunny holiday prank. I assure you, it is not.”

“You…you wish to thank me? Sir, when my students learn of our association I will be all but unapproachable.”

“So you shall, so you shall.” Mack drummed his palms on his thighs. “All right, then.”

He leaned to Izzy’s tray, poured himself some dark amber spirit or other, and addressed the room with his glass.

“For the last several years I’ve been chasing these exceedingly faint signals, totally unrelated to the waves I’m used to handling. They were some kind of magnetic residue, here one minute, gone the next. I had the deuce of a time, but once I’d sampled and digitized a specimen I found myself studying a terrestrial wave pattern--yet one that was electrically inverted; what I’ve come to know as a ‘waveprint’. By accident, I had it played back in A/V. So here I was, absolutely certain I’d detected the path of an exotic new particle. Imagine my expression when I picked out the distinct sawing of my shaving razor.

“I put out a seek right away, hoping the lens could find more specimens, and then--oh, what a floodgate I’ve opened.”

Mack set down his drink and forcibly folded his hands. “I tried to run in time, but I was too slow; I was infernally slow. One day I sold a few scans to the university and used the proceeds to purchase an axon accelerator off the black market. I got…close with the skin. Real close. I will confess to becoming addicted. I allowed it to vivisect my virtual brain.”

Abel coughed loudly. Amantu discretely fingered a golden hem. Izzy angrily wolfed his drink. “There go party.”

“Gentlemen,” Mack said. “My sins are off my chest.”

He rose philosophically.

“Now to the order of business.

“We all know that thought is merely a process; that the ‘mind’, when it comes right down to it, is actually a verb, as opposed to that noun--that noun we so familiarly call the ‘brain’. Our comprehension, our emotions, our memories, are utterly reliant upon the living brain. When the body dies the brain stops, and when the brain stops the mind ceases to exist.

“As I say, we know all this.

“But…when the skin apprehended it--that even an ordinary man’s mind is unbounded potential, as opposed to that very closed and predictable thing it was used to running in--it commenced processing my thoughts directly, as electrical phenomena exclusive of real time.”

Mack nodded at the room. “Mind-reading isn’t as far-fetched as it sounds, you guys. Not when it’s a program doing the reading. Let me elaborate.”

He made a frame of his hands.

“At any given moment a brain is active, there’re tens of thousands of synaptic clefts working synchronously, and the impulses jumping those gaps produce minute discharges the skin digitizes. Sampled instantaneously, they create an instantaneous pattern--an image, a feeling, a thought. But, in real time, they correspond to a continuous series of seamless mental images. So we could say that, analogously, a man’s living brain is a theater, his mind is a motion picture, and those tens of thousands of firing synapses are pixels--metabolic pulses that are read, digitized, and mapped by Solomon, the skin-written program you’re all about to meet.

“Now, Solomon cross-references radially, rather than linearly, so his runner gets momentary access to a whole world of information.

“Literally.

“Not by painstakingly seeking it out, mind you, but by allowing the program free access to his head. Solomon finds what his runner wants. And sometimes a whole lot more. How much more? Just listen:

“Every occurrence outside a vacuum, no matter how subtle, produces a corresponding current in its supporting medium.

“For example, the vibrations of my voice are right now reaching your eardrums via the intervening air.

“Every cluster of waveprints, whether produced by my vocal cords as I speak, or by some miscellaneous rock slide half a million years ago, is unique.

“Those clusters can be reproduced by Solomon here.

“They can be reconstructed and digitally saved, to be studied at leisure by his runner.

“That’s because those currents are producing discrete magnetic profiles--profiles that are ‘encoded’ in our planet’s gravitational field in real time.

“Acting as a super-sensitive receiver, Solomon’s able to pick out and transpose those collected profiles--to ‘decode’ them--and convert them back to pulses that disrupt the medium of air, thereby reproducing the clusters sonically, and thereby stimulating our tympanic membranes.”

“Doctor Mack.” Amantu clasped his hands and cocked his head; a move so characteristic it compelled immediate mimicking from both Izzy and Abel. “Please correct me if I am in error. You are claiming your thoughts and your program’s repository are in sync while the program is electromagnetically mirroring your synaptic activity?”

“Not just me. Whoever’s running in Solomon at the time. And it doesn’t have to be straightforward pulse transposition. Solomon’s voice-sensitive. He can read and bookmark vocal commands linearly, without having to deal with all the normal peripheral autonomic mental activity.”

The men fiddled with their drinks. At last Izzy grumbled, “Some name…Saw…Sawla. Strange. I--”

“The venerated name of a wise king who ruled thirty-five hundred years ago. There were plenty of these so-called sacrosanct names.”

Abel cuffed the psychoanalyst upside his head. “Ah, for Christ’s sake, Izzy! You just had to ask, didn’t you?”

“There you go. What does ‘for Christ’s sake’ mean, Josh?”

“It’s a meaningless interjection. Don’t play with me, Ti.”

“Well, what if I told you that that particular meaningless interjection pertained to a figure of great historical significance, and that most personal names do, as well? ‘Israel’, for example, is pivotal; the name of an ancient kingdom in the Eastern Hemisphere. All our names--Abel, Titus, Moses--are of great fame and antiquity.”

“Then ‘for Christ’s sake’! I second my own interjection! ‘Israel’ is the given name of our skeptical little friend here, and those three syllables have no significance whatsoever. He could have been named ‘Bugaboo’, and he’d still be the same inimitable irritant we all know and love. You’re reading too much out of your data, Ti. Besides, any fool can argue an abstraction.”

Mack bowed and swept an arm. “Just so. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you…Solo.”

The house lights came down and the chamber was permeated by a lazily swirling field, so tenuous the skin behind showed distinctly. Mack furrowed his brow, and his guests could have sworn the field discreetly funneled his way. A frantic ruckus began just outside. The voices of the Group burst into the room, accompanied by the noise of their violent entry and a sound like the pop-and-hiss of escaping air. Moments later Abel could be heard shouting, his voice seeming to issue from an unoccupied space: “It’s only us, Titus! Sorry about the racket! Slight disagreement with your neighbors! Happy New Year!” Then the muffled response: “And to! You guys just give me a minute! Help yourselves!”

The wispy field vanished and the lights came back up.

Abel nodded slyly. “Happy New Year, indeed! Gentlemen, we’ve been acoustically monitored, probably from the moment we hit the porch. A clever bit of hopping about with the audio, but…c’mon, Ti. Something a tad more sophisticated.”

“Fair enough, Josh.

“What’s running isn’t a one-dimensional read. Example: as steady fields of broadcast energy, natural and artificial light register constant values. Solomon perfunctorily enters and ignores such values as structurally insignificant. However, wherever a constant value is interrupted by an opaque object Solomon reads a reduction. A plane surface will render equal reductive values over its breadth, and so be interpreted as flat. On the other hand, a complex surface, such as a man’s face, produces countless variations in values--values Solomon automatically translates as pixels in order to produce three-dimensional imagery. Likewise color, depth, and perspective--infinite degrees in variation are instantaneously mapped and reproduced as images readily accessible to our humble rods and cones. A quick demonstration should suffice. The program opens with a single password; his nickname. The tones comprising ‘Solomon’ mean nothing. I had to write it in that way or he’d be all over the place whenever those three simple syllables were innocently spoken. His runner’s thoughts are accessed the instant he’s activated. Observe.” Cocking his head, he said, “Solo.”

The lights dimmed. Once more those voices exploded into the room, this time accompanied by a trio of sheer apparitions. It was the Group again, falling all over one another. Amantu’s intense likeness raced right through him while, not two feet away, the three-dimensional image of Abel scrambled to its feet, held a transparent sleeve to one nostril, and called out, “It’s only us, Titus! Sorry about all the racket! Slight disagreement with your neighbors! Happy New Year!”

The field retracted and the lights came up.

Abel applauded generously. “Boys, boys, boys! We’ve been scanned as well as scammed. Don’t let your guards down for a minute! And my objection stands, Titus. All you’ve done is elaborate on an illusion. A visual recording, no matter how adroitly orchestrated, is still just a technological display.”

“Not so. I couldn’t possibly have incorporated Solomon’s range of detail. Solo. The Battle of the Little Bighorn.”

Broad daylight displaced the interior lighting. The overhead skin’s dome was now sky-blue. The gel tiles uncannily resembled dirt and bare pasturage, while the skin proper appeared to have been replaced by open horizon. The Group were standing on a wide plain surrounded by reddish bluffs and craggy canyons. Close enough to touch, huddling cavalrymen crouched behind their steeds, discharging rustic firearms while naked savages hacked at them with stick-mounted stones. The action was so realistic everybody but Mack hit the floor.

“Solo. Break.” The fighting figures dissolved.

The men picked themselves up slowly, amazed and embarrassed. Faint traces of kicked dirt still appeared to hang in the air.

“Those--” Amantu marveled, “those were horses!”

“So they were, Hammer. What we’re seeing is actual history, not the prettified stuff we’ve been taught.”

“To which I say bravo! See how he uses titillating images to lead us from analysis? Hear how convincingly they clatter? It’s all a heap of technological legerdemain.”

“Titus…” Amantu faltered. “Your zeal is admirable. However, sir, I am thoroughly learned in Western history. Were I not so moved by your sincerity I would doubtless get comfortable and ‘enjoy the show’. But here I must object. I feel I can accurately describe our past over thirteen millennia. These images are without foundation.”

“But can you show me?”

The ghost of a chuckle. “If you mean--can I produce dramatic photographic imagery in three dimensions…if you mean, can I support those images with realistic acoustics, well…”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Try for yourself.”

Amantu cleared his throat.

“Just remember to use the pass.”

All eyes were on him. Amantu very clearly enunciated, “So low.” He hesitated in the sudden glimmer of drifting fireflies. “Reveal All Hall’s Congress. Year 0817, Month November, Day Eleven. It would have been a Tuesday.”

The skin now presented a wide flowing parade of film clips, accompanied by thin bites of atonal audio. The clips were obviously contrived; acted out and edited, stuffed with period costumes and unconvincing sets.

“Solo,” Mack said. “Break.” The fireflies disappeared.

“Defective,” Amantu pronounced.

“Not at all. In reality no such event took place.”

“I stand vindicated,” Abel objected. “Those were educational films; I recognized at least two of ’em.”

“That’s all Solomon has to draw on. That and voluminous fabricated records. The Text Alone command, when applied to the skin, would turn this place into a spherical encyclopedia. But in projected T/A, molecules in the air are vibrated to mimic pixels, creating distinct alphanumeric patterns. Solo. Today’s date. Text Alone.”

Characters two feet high by a foot wide, misty-white and resembling steam, appeared hovering at eye-level:

1 JANUARY 2509

Mack took a broad step to the side. The characters swiveled to face him. He hopped back, and the display followed suit. “The program’s also voice-sensitive to its runner. In heavy research, hearing a real-time response does wonders. Solo. Today’s date, in V/S.”

Titus Mack’s own voice responded, from the same general space as the dissolving characters:

“January First, Twenty-Five Oh Nine.”

His eyes gleamed. “Then again, you’d get that same film-like response if you were to request skin text files on something called the Emancipation Proclamation and a fellow named Lincoln. But in A/V we’ll get related graphics. Solo. Antietam. September 17, 1867. Real Time.”

A melee erupted in the center of the room, blew onto the enveloping skin, and quickly metastasized throughout the apparent horizon. Suddenly hundreds of uniformed men were grappling tooth and nail, firing antique weapons, stabbing one another with short mounted sabers. An echoless cannonade issued from “distant” standing guns and from “nearby” handheld artillery.

“Solo. Break.” The house lights came up and the raging soldiers dissolved. “Something called the American Civil War. On that single day over twenty-five thousand men fell in mortal combat.” Mack looked at Amantu quizzically. “As I understand it, they were in disagreement over a matter of color.”

The professor returned the look. “Solo. Parsominius Beale. Year Nine-Two-Nine. The particle driver prototype. Real Time.”

Images of Beale, or a man supposed to be Beale, rolled round the skin, accompanied by tinny narration.

“Solo,” parried Mack. “Jack the Ripper. London, England. September Seventh, 1888. 2300 hours.”

A dark foggy night. The Group were standing on a sidewalk bordering a narrow cobblestone street, facing a cul-de-sac. Dripping brick buildings loomed to either side, lit fitfully by lamps that seemed to tilt with the perspective. A heavily made-up woman was sauntering toward them, her low white dress clinging, a nervous smile on her flushed cockney face. She came up to Izzy and Amantu swinging her little sequined purse, her eyes sparkling. When she was almost upon them a man stepped between them from behind, kissed her once, clamped a hand over her mouth and cleanly slit her throat. As though in a dance, he swept her into an alley between two dirty gray buildings.

“Solo. Break.”

Izzy looked away. “Bloody little world you dug up.”

Mack studied Amantu through his eyelashes. “So tell me, Professor, in all your research have you ever come across the name Sam Butcher?”

“Unfamiliar,” Amantu admitted.

“How about the Hard Left? The Messiah Commission? The Black Days?”

“That--” Amantu said excitedly. “‘Black Days!’ Mentioned frequently in recall sessions. You can access such an event?”

“Solo. The Black Days. Winter of 2118.” He looked up, annoyed. “Anywhere. Surprise me.”

A different street, a different hemisphere, another century. It was the dead of night. Orion’s belt winked cheerlessly on the overhead skin. The projected road was deserted, the neighborhood gutted. Every house was shut down, the streetlamps shot out. But in the distance could be seen several torches, approaching slowly, accompanied by the barks and whines of savage dogs.

“Not safe to walk alone,” Mack commented. “Dangerous for the military also.” He began to pace and, eerily, the domed enclosure appeared to roll right along. “Anyone in a uniform was likely as not to have his brains blown out or his legs chewed off. This was real guerrilla warfare. Solo. Stop.” The entire projection froze instantly. Stars ceased blinking, torches became orangey spikes of light. In this mode the tongues of flame lost their natural look, turning into tiny serrated prominences with obvious peaks and shelves. Conversely, the stars no longer showed their characteristic atmospheric winking. They were positive-value pinpricks; ice-cold holes in the electromagnetic field.

“Over four hundred years ago, the Eastern and Western Hemispheres were engaged in a bloody war that employed the oceans, the atmosphere, and eventually space itself. Back then there was something known as ‘hard copy’, which meant that records were stored materially. Believe it or not, most data could be accessed by just about anybody. Much of that data was unclassified, of course--homely stuff for basic education and entertainment. But it was right out in the open, and these continents’ borders were so porous your best friend could easily have been your worst enemy; at one time it was estimated that the ratio of citizen-to-foreign agent was roughly one-to-one. Our enemies were communicating internally by a method known as ‘effacement’. In this process, bound leaves of paper are subtly graven in a manner invisible to the naked eye, but readily picked out by a trained agent. All a man had to do was go to a ‘library’ or ‘newspaper rack’, locate an adroitly dog-eared ‘book’ or ‘newspaper’, and use a special, pressure-sensitive cloth to obtain orders or pass on intelligence.

“Our solution was to scan all data, then destroy every bit of the old hard copy. Logic held that saved public-use data could be reprinted at war’s end, while classified data remained encrypted. But by war’s end technology had perfected scrollers and IBCs. The average man had access to more information than all the world’s universities and museums combined. Hard copy had become obsolete.

“Now, I’m telling you this because it pertains strongly to what you’re about to learn. That original hard copy held historical data accrued from the dawn of civilization. It was the written record of all that we are, and the sacred history of ancient peoples in the Eastern Hemisphere. Our laws and mores were built around the worship of their divinity. Citizens were tortured, armies perished. Whole states rose and fell in the name of this imaginary ruler.”

“Here we go again! And just when I thought we were getting real.”

“I didn’t say it was real, Josh. I said it was imaginary.”

“Then,” demanded Amantu, “you are claiming that international conflict, rather than plague-driven insanity, was responsible for these Black Days. You are prepared to prove this?”

“There is no plague, Professor, and insanity is insanity. The history we’ve grown up with is a lie. You’re all free to watch and come to your own conclusions. Consider this my New Year’s gift.”

“Then drop the divinity hogwash, and let’s just relax and enjoy ourselves. We’re not rubes, Ti. And as far as your new toy goes, blaze away. But bear in mind that a lifetime of practical experience will never be undone by a roomful of clever imaging.”

“Examine these records for yourself, Josh. You’ll see that a whole continent full of schemers couldn’t produce all the data Solomon can access. It would take millennia--damn it, it did take millennia!” He poked a cocky forefinger at the professor’s chest. “I’m telling you, ‘Hammer’, you and I’ll become the best of friends. You’ll have a blast here; the same jaw-dropping joyride I’ve been on for months. Solo. The Black Death. Overhead Sweep.”

And the room was all azure sky, with two hundred feet of apparent air where the floor used to be. Miles and miles of rolling countryside made up the seeming far-below. A quiet world; just primitive villages, winding dirt roads, and woods interspersed with hills and streams. A few walled cities could be seen, heavily guarded by sentries. Adjoining roads were blockaded or dug up. “Over a thousand years ago,” Mack went on, “our forebears had a plague of their own. The disease that depopulated the world below us was of the bubonic-pneumonic variety. I’ve seen fields littered with the corpses of cattle and sheep, houses deliberately burned to the ground, carts porting bloated human remains. I had Solomon cross-reference the A/V with subsequent related clusters. Rat fleas were the vectors. Way back then sanitation was a terrible problem, and medicine practically nonexistent. Solo. The ‘Satellite Frays’. Deep Zoom. Fast Motion.”

The chamber was now a hemispheric module in the upper stratosphere, with the visual panorama and technological feel of an orbiting observation station. The infinite black grandeur, brilliant with a billion white stars, was eclipsed by a dizzying video game-like battle between batteries of globular satellites. Mirror-plated orbiters took hits, automatically spun to return fire, spun back. This was a robotic war, viewed at an accelerated rate. True to the absence of a medium, the crystal-clear visual was absolutely soundless. “Solo. Ground Zero, Hiroshima, August Sixth, 1945. Real Time. Zoom Out.”

A piece of sun shot up from a coastal city and blew out into a hot smoky umbrella. There came a blinding flash that did not blind, followed by a stunning rumble that grew into a tidal roar. A raging wall of water swallowed the room as if it were a sea polyp. And, though it sounded for all the world like a giant had just stepped on the place, the contents of the room were entirely unaffected.

“Solo. Break.” Mack spun around. “What did I tell you!”

Abel shook his head sadly. “1945? Come on, Ti. Why not 9945?”

“Balls descending!” Izzy wheezed. “Could’ve swear. Entire city…wipe out!”

Amantu faced his host critically. “I am unclear. How does all this pertain to your summons of yesterday? I will concede to a genuine fascination with the visual proceedings. However, this is not history. It is an impertinent series of sophisticated projections, which, albeit convincing in their breadth and drama, titillate without validation.”

“But this is history, Professor. I didn’t bring you all the way out here just for a light show. And as to pertinence; every fact, no matter how insignificant, pertains to every other fact.” Mack drummed his fingers on the drink stand. “Look, let me take you guys back--all the way to the dawn of actual history. Not that history recorded by scribes and geologists, but to the Original recall event; a calamity so devastating it became irrevocably imprinted in our collective consciousness. It was,” Mack said, “our first great memory as a species.” He nodded. “Solo. The Deluge. Step Back ten seconds and Stand in Still Motion until Mark.”

The skin was washed in daylight. The phantom horizon expanded. And expanded, and expanded; adding layers of apparent distance in zooms meted out hexadecimally. The theater of Solomon was now a primitive, temperate arena that went on forever in every direction.

“To all appearances we are standing in the Eastern Hemisphere, in Northern Africa, in a vast basin that prehistoric man, had he the wits about him, would have designated the Mediterranean Valley. It’s the place where we started; the cradle of man. We’d barely gone from grunts to syllables, but we were true men, not progenitors. Here’s where Homo sapiens first formed tribes, under a fair sky, with no end to tomorrow. Sorry, fellows. Civilization didn’t break out in the Upper West, fostered by a line of secular scientists under the happiest of circumstances.

“In the Mediterranean the potential was limitless. Gathering accommodated hunting. There were laws, there were taboos, there were incentives for growth; intellectual, spiritual, economic. As mammals we grouped, and as men we expanded. As a tribe we extended to the very limits of that great valley.

“One day the Inevitable caught up with us. The Atlantic Ocean had been worrying at the Valley’s natural western barrier for millennia. It was eaten away only gradually, of course, but the tide pool became a seething reservoir. Something had to give, and when it did it was on a scale grand even by terrestrial standards.” Mack turned to the west skin. “Gentlemen. I suggest you hang onto your bladders. Solo. Mark.”

Immediately the room filled up with the sound of thunder. The floor seemed to pound away like a thrashing beast, though the Group’s feet remained firmly planted. Even the sky appeared to shake. Then, almighty spectacle, a wide blue horror came crashing out of the west. Walls of water flew hundreds of feet high, left and right, so vast they appeared to leap along in slow motion. When the howling monster arrived, the impression of impact was so realistic it all but knocked the Group off their feet.

“Solo. Stop!”

The observatory was swallowed up in blue. But not a static blue. All around the men, pixel streaks showed a frozen turmoil, electronically indicating air displaced, earth dispatched, fluid dispelled.

“Solo. Zoom out. Deep Overview, Wide Pan. Fast Motion Times Ten.”

All that blue was instantly replaced by air. The planet fell away with a sound like air sucked through a straw, atmospheric particulates appearing to granulate in the rapid remapping of data. The Group stood in apparent suspension, staring down between their feet. Mack’s zodiacal floor showed the Mediterranean Valley, now partitioned by unsteady lines of grid, irresistibly on its way to becoming the Mediterranean Sea. They watched the brown-and-green basin being covered by an inching blue carpet, even at this rate looking like it would take forever.

Their narrator’s voice was dreamlike. “The human race was nearly extinguished. Only those folks nearest the rim had time to get out. They spread across the virgin land; over the ages those in the north growing fairer due to the higher latitudes, those moving down the African continent developing darker characteristics. The ones migrating eastward retained our basic stock’s brownness and propensity to swarthiness. But the catastrophe was firmly established in our subconscious. In almost all cultures there exists this legend of a Great Flood, which destroyed the ‘World’, Also, there are innumerable references to obliterated fabulous sites; among them an ‘Eden’, likely man’s first homestead, and an island called ‘Atlantis’ that was forever submerged. The big exception to these ensconced Flood fables is the Orient, which developed collaterally.”

Mack looked into Amantu’s eyes. “Professor Amantu, Cultural Recall is a hybrid phenomenon; a combination of a): evolutionary changes brought about in the brain as a special extension of the self-preservation instinct, and b): mental adaptation coerced by tribal lore enforced over generations.”

Amantu nodded appreciatively.

“Solo. The ‘Holy Land’.” The scene “below” instantly shifted to the Mediterranean Sea’s easternmost crescent. “What we’re now observing is far more recent; a scant twenty-five centuries ago. It’s the roots of Western commercial civilization. There were two superpowers; in the north an empire known as Babylonia, and to the south the great dynastic state of Egypt. Solo. Highlight.” The mentioned waveclusters took on an amber glow. “The natural trade route was a thin strip of land between the Mediterranean on our left, and that blue line to the right, the Dead Sea.

“In those days there were woolly ruminants known as ‘sheep’, used both for their wool and as food. Their handlers were called ‘shepherds’. One of these shepherds, a man named Abram, took up husbandry on that strip of land and became the patriarch of several tribes called ‘Israel’--and there’s the origin of our priceless bobbing colleague’s name. Well, as you can imagine, these tribes were not amenable to those superpowers’ commercial flux, nor were they about to move. When things got sticky, the Egyptian kingpin neatly solved the problem by relocating Abram’s entire clan to a prison in Babylonia. There they were left to rot, an utterly vanquished people, for nigh on fifty years. But while there, their jailers entertained them with a crude old Babylonian legend about a so-called ‘Messiah’.”

Here Amantu had to object. “Sir--”

“Please, Hammer. Just call me Ti.”

The professor seethed. “Sir! Forgive me, but I find this line of expression dangerously close to snatching.”

Mack took a swallow and emphatically shook his head. “Uh-uh, my friend. No. I beg your patience; I’m simply defining the mindset directly responsible for the illusion we labor under today. Nobody will be snaught on my watch. As it stands, I’m already condensing like crazy.” He blew out a sigh. “Now, when those prisoners were released, they yearned only to return to their homeland. A great leader named Moses--and there’s your bid, Professor--shepherded them thereto, and represented them in their further misadventures with the head Egyptian. They claimed an elite status with their divinity, decried the Egyptian’s divinity as a dirty fraud, and insisted their almighty divinity could whip the Egyptian’s puny divinity any day of the week.

“Okay. In due time a great empire called Rome began to dominate affairs around the Mediterranean. By then Abram’s diehard descendants had established grazing states that were in direct conflict with the imperial Roman political system. These were some barbaric times. The homesteaders were subjected to all kinds of unmentionable persecutions.

“A local prophet, their ‘messiah’, attained great fame as an orator. Since his series of sermons were uncompromisingly system-damning, the empire made a particularly tragic example of him. As I said, these were barbaric times. It was all too much for this proud, much-subjugated people. Unable to retaliate militarily, they capitalized on their prophet’s execution by propagating stories of a divine connection, and proclaimed their people would rise in his name and, with the supernatural legerdemain of their wrathful God, appropriate the planet in his honor.

“Gentlemen, this campaign was no caprice. It reigned for over twenty-one centuries, in the process shaking governments, felling armies, and radically altering uncountable lives. Solo. The Second Crusade.”

In a heartbeat a ragtag army came trudging through the observatory, leading trains of marchers, followers, and pack animals without end. Several naked and scourged individuals were shouldering wooden crosses ten feet high and half as broad.

“Solo. Tomas de Torquemada.”

The blink of an eye, and an old man in dark robes was standing in the Group’s midst, watching dispassionately while a shrieking woman burned at the stake in a walled dirt field. The skin’s phantom horizon produced throbbing checkerboard patterns where flames rose above the crude wall into sunlight. There was a brief and very chilly interlude, when the inquisitor turned and appeared to glare at Amantu. False firelight made his wizened face a splotchy death mask.

“Solo. Flagellants. A specimen.”

A pack of frenzied men danced around the room, flogging themselves and their fellows with whips, slats, and birch rods. They screamed hysterically while flailing, tossing their heads like demented children. It was hard to tell if they were enjoying the ritual or merely crying out for the attention of their peers.

“Solo. Break.”

Abel shook his head in the familiar soft white light. “You’ve shown us nothing, Ti. All we’ve seen is a freak show reminiscent of a thousand carrier tales.”

But Mack just smiled. “Izzy, do you think you could manage another tray?” He called up chairs and cigars. “There’s stuff to munch on in the galley, and Solomon’ll run the heat or air if it gets uncomfortable. The lavatory’s located right through that port, so if anybody’s gotta go, please do so now. Because this is just about to get interesting.”