Domain (14 page)

“That’s not exactly true, is it, Mr. Dodds?” The raccoon eyes stare down the director. “You and I both know that SETI has been using Arecibo’s big dish to transmit messages into deep space for quite some time.”

“Just as networks have been broadcasting television signals into space at the speed of light ever since
I Love Lucy
first aired.”

“Don’t play games, Mr. Dodds. I’m no astronomer, but I’ve read enough to know that television signals are far too weak to have reached Orion. When this discovery is announced, there are going to be a lot of very angry, very frightened people out there who will insist that SETI brought this unknown terror upon us.”

Dodds hushes the objections from his assistants. “You’re right, Senator. SETI transmissions are stronger, but television signals are infinitely more vast, spreading out into space in all directions. Of the two, television signals are far more likely to have reached a random receiver than a narrow beacon from Arecibo. Keep in mind that the strength of the radio signal we detected was produced by an alien transmitter far and away superior to our own. We’d have to assume that the intelligence behind the signal also has radio receivers capable of detecting our weaker signals.”

“Regardless, Mr. Dodds, the reality of this situation is that millions of ignorant people are going to wake up tomorrow, frightened to death, waiting for little green men to break into their homes, rape their wives, and steal their babies. This situation has to be handled with finesse, or it’ll blow up in all of our faces.”

The NASA director nods. “That’s why we called you in, Senator.”

The deeply set eyes lose a bit of their harshness. “Okay, let’s talk about this new telescope you’re proposing.” Chaney thumbs through his copy of the briefing. “It says here that the dish would be thirty miles in diameter and would be built on the dark side of the moon. That’s gonna cost some chunk of change. Why the hell do you need to build it on the moon?”

“For the same reasons we launched the Hubble Space Telescope. There’s too much radio interference escaping from Earth. The far side of the moon always faces away from Earth, offering us a natural radio-free zone. The idea is to construct a dish in the bottom of a massive crater, similar in design to Arecibo’s big dish, only several thousand times larger. We’ve already selected a site—Saha Crater—only three degrees on the dark side of the moon, close to the lunar equator. A lunar telescope would give us the capability to communicate with the intelligence that contacted us.”

“And why would we want to do that?” Chaney’s voice booms across the conference room, losing its rasp as it rises. “Mr. Dodds, this radio signal may be the most important discovery in the history of mankind, but what NASA is proposing is going to frighten the masses. What if the American people say no? What if they don’t want to spend a few billion dollars to contact E.T.? This is a pretty big financial pill you’re asking Congress to swallow.”

Brian Dodds knows Ennis Chaney, knows the man is testing his fortitude. “Senator, you’re right. This discovery is going to frighten a lot of people. But let me tell you what frightens a lot of us even more. It frightens us when we pick up our daily news monitor and read stories about nuclear weapons in Iran. It frightens us when we read about the growing hunger problems in Russia, or about the strategic arms buildup in China, another country capable of destroying the world. It seems like every nation suffering political and economic unrest is armed to the teeth, Senator Chaney, and that reality is a lot more frightening than any radio signal coming from eighteen hundred light-years away.”

Dodds stands. At just over six feet and a solid 220 pounds, he looks more a wrestler than scientist, “What the public needs to understand is that we’re dealing with an intelligent species far superior to our own that has succeeded in making first contact. Whatever they are, wherever they are, they’re too far away to be dropping by for a visit. By building this radio telescope, we enable ourselves to communicate with another species. Eventually, we may be able to learn from them, share our technologies, and gain a better understanding of the universe, and maybe even our own origins. This discovery could unite mankind—this project could be the catalyst that leads humanity away from nuclear annihilation.”

Dodds looks Chaney square in the eye. “Senator, E.T. has called, and it’s vitally important to the future of humanity that we call him back.”

Chapter 7

SEPTEMBER 26, 2012
MIAMI, FLORIDA

T
here are five residents gathered in the pod known as 7-C. Two are seated on the floor playing what they think is chess, another is asleep on the sofa. A fourth stands by the door, waiting for a member of his rehab team to arrive to escort him to his morning therapy session.

The remaining resident of 7-C stands motionless before a television set suspended above his head. He listens to President Mailer extol the tremendous work of the men and women of NASA and SETI. He hears the president speak excitedly about world peace and cooperation, about the international space program and its impact on the future of humanity. The dawn of a new age is upon us, he announces. We are no longer alone.

Unlike the billions of other viewers watching the live news conference from around the world, Michael Gabriel is not surprised by what he is hearing, only saddened. The ebony eyes never blink, the body, held rigid, never moves. The blank expression never changes, even when Pierre Borgia’s face appears on screen over the president’s left shoulder. It is hard to tell if Mick is even breathing.

Dominique enters the pod. She pauses, taking a moment to observe her patient watching the special news broadcast while she verifies that the tape recorder fastened beneath her tee shirt is obscured by the white lab coat.

She moves beside him, the two now shoulder to shoulder in front of the television, her right hand by his left.

Their fingers entwine.

“Mick, do you want to watch the rest of this, or can we talk?”

“My room.” He leads her across the hall, entering room 714.

Mick paces the cell like a caged animal, his cluttered mind attempting to sort through a thousand details at once.

Dominique sits on the edge of the bed, watching him. “You knew this was going to happen, didn’t you? How? How did you know? Mick—”

“I didn’t know
what
was going to happen, only that something
would
happen.”

“But you knew it would be a celestial event, something to do with the equinox. Mick, can you stop pacing, it’s hard to carry on a conversation like this. Come here. Sit down next to me.”

He hesitates, then sits beside her. She can see his hands shaking.

“Talk to me.”

“I can feel it, Dom.”

“What can you feel?”

“I don’t know … I can’t describe it. Something’s out there, a presence. It’s still in the distance, but it’s getting closer. I’ve felt it before, but never like this.”

She touches the hair flowing down his neck, fingering a thick, brown curl. “Try to relax. Let’s talk about this deep-space radio transmission. I want you to tell me how you knew the biggest event in humanity’s history was about to happen.”

He looks up at her, fear in his eyes. “This is nothing. This is only the beginning of the final act. The biggest event will happen on December 21, when billions of people die.”

“And how do you know that? I know what the Mayan calendar says, but you’re too intelligent to simply accept some three-thousand-year-old prophecy without the scientific evidence to support it. Explain the facts to me, Mick. No Mayan folklore, just the supporting evidence.”

He shakes his head. “This is why I asked you to read my father’s journal.”

“I started to, but I’d rather you explain it to me in person. The last time we spoke, you warned me about some kind of rare galactic alignment orienting itself to Earth beginning on the fall equinox. Explain that to me.”

Mick closes his eyes, drawing slow breaths as he forces his adrenaline-racked muscles to calm.

Dominique can hear the whirring of the tape recorder. She clears her throat, covering the noise.

He reopens his eyes, his gaze softer now. “Are you familiar with the
Popol Vuh
?”

“I know it’s the Mayan book of creation, their equivalent of our Bible.”

He nods. “The Maya believed in five suns or five Great Cycles of creation, the fifth and last of which is set to end on December 21, the day of this year’s winter solstice. According to the
Popol Vuh
, the universe was organized into an Overworld, a Middleworld, and an Underworld. The Overworld represented the celestial heavens, the Middleworld—Earth. The Maya referred to the Underworld as
Xibalba
, a dark, evil place said to be ruled by Hurakan, the death god. Mayan legend claims the great teacher, Kukulcan, was engaged in a long, cosmic battle with Hurakan, pitting the forces of good and light against darkness and evil. It’s written that the fourth cycle came to an abrupt end when Hurakan caused a great flood to engulf the world. The English word, ‘hurricane,’ comes from the Mayan word, ‘Hurakan.’ The Maya believed the demonic entity existed within a violent maelstrom. The Aztecs believed in the same legend, only their name for the great teacher was Quetzalcoatl, the underworld deity known as Tezcatilpoca, a name which translates to ‘smoking mirror.’ ”

“Mick, wait—just stop a moment, okay. Forget about the Mayan myth. What I need you to stay focused on is the facts surrounding the calendar and how it relates to that deep-space transmission.”

The dark eyes blaze at her like onyx lasers, the look causing her to shrink. “I can’t discuss the science supporting the doomsday prophecy without explaining the creation myth. It’s all related. There’s a paradox surrounding the Maya. Most people think the Maya were just a bunch of jungle-dwelling savages that built some neat pyramids. The truth is, the Maya were incredible astronomers and mathematicians who possessed an unfathomable understanding of our planet’s existence within the galaxy. And it was this knowledge that allowed them to predict the celestial alignment that led to yesterday’s radio signal.”

“I don’t understand—”

Mick fidgets, then begins pacing again. “We have evidence that shows the Maya and their predecessors, the Olmec, used the Milky Way galaxy as their celestial background marker to calculate the Mayan calendar. The Milky Way is a spiral galaxy, about 100,000 light-years in diameter, made up of approximately 200 billion stars. Our own sun is located in one of the spiral arms—the Orion arm—about 35,000 light-years from the galactic center, which astronomers now believe to be a gigantic black hole, running straight through Sagittarius. The galactic center functions as a kind of celestial magnet, pulling the Milky Way in a powerful vortex. As we speak, our solar system is whipping around the galactic center point at a velocity of 135 miles per second. Despite that speed, it still takes Earth a good 226 million years to complete one revolutionary cycle around the Milky Way.”

You’re running out of tape
. “Mick, the signal—”

“Be patient. As our solar system moves through the galaxy, it follows a fourteen-degree-wide path called the ecliptic. The ecliptic crosses the Milky Way in such a manner that it periodically moves into alignment with the central bulge of the galaxy. As the Maya looked to the night sky, they saw a dark rift, or dark elongated band of dense interstellar clouds, beginning where the ecliptic crosses the Milky Way in the constellation of Sagittarius. The
Popol Vuh
’s myth of creation refers to this dark rift as the Black Road, or
Xibalba Be
—a nexus shaped like a giant serpent, connecting life and death, the Earth and the Underworld.”

“Again, this is all fascinating, but how does it relate to the deep-space radio signal?”

Mick stops pacing. “Dominique, this radio signal—it wasn’t just some random transmission beamed across the universe; it was purposely directed toward our solar system. From a technological standpoint, you can’t just transmit a radio beacon halfway across the galaxy and hope it somehow manages to reach a specific planetary speck of dust like Earth. The farther the beacon has to travel, the more the signal breaks up and loses its strength. The radio transmission SETI detected was a very powerful, precise, narrow beacon, indicating to me, at least, that whoever, or whatever sent it required a particular galactic alignment, a sort of celestial corridor that aimed the transmission from its point of origin to Earth. In essence, the signal traveled through a sort of cosmic corridor. I can’t explain why, I can’t explain how, but I felt the portal of this corridor as it began opening.”

Dominique sees the fear in his eyes. “You felt it open? What did it feel like?”

“It was a sickening feeling, like icy fingers moving inside my intestines.”

“And you believe this cosmic corridor must have opened up just enough to allow the radio signal through?”

“Yes, and the portal’s widening a little bit more each day. By the December solstice, it will open completely.”