Analog SFF, April 2008 Read online

  T. Jason Roderick's yacht, the Snark II, was a 100-foot monster with a two-seat helicopter perched on a pad on its bow. A radar antenna was rotating on the roof of its forward cabin. I parked in one of the reserved spaces. As I was getting out of the car, I was confronted by two armed guards in identical beige shorts and monogrammed golf shirts. One asked for ID while the other murmured into a cell phone. Tweedle Dum stared at my Florida drivers license then squinted at my face. “Mr. Sanko?” Yeah, it had been Sanchez, Caesar Sanchez, once upon a time. But now it was legally Charlie Sanko because even today 500 million bucks doesn't hire a private investigator named Caesar Sanchez. This sandy-haired creep was looking at me like he smelled something bad so I snatched back my license.

  “Roderick's having me review his security,” I said, stooping to focus on his nametag.

  “He's expecting you, sir,” he said, donning a paste-on smile. “Please follow me."

  Roderick was in a deck chair in a white robe and sandals. Tanned like old leather with thinning white hair, he might have been sixty, but he looked like it had been sixty miles of bad road. Or was it just the contrast to the leggy girl next to him—twenty-something, blonde, in an expensive one-piece—who peered at me over her sunglasses?

  “Mr. Sanko, please sit down,” Roderick said, nodding at the next chair in a line of half a dozen. “Marta, Mr. Sanko and I have some business to discuss. Why don't you dial up a movie or something?"

  Without a word Marta unfolded herself fetchingly from the chair and sauntered away.

  Roderick turned to me, his deeply tanned furrows contrasted with a cold gray stare. “Now then, Mr. Sanko, I have a problem of a rather delicate nature and I have it from several sources that your methods are thorough and discreet."

  That wouldn't have been my staple of marital infidelity cases he was talking about. Any PI with a digital camera makes his living with those. It might have been the Anderson Amusements International case—I'd saved their asses from a fraudulent damage claim. Or maybe it was some of those wash-and-wear banks—I'd done some laundry work for a couple that I wasn't particularly proud of. I just sat back and gave Roderick a non-committal smile.

  “I have a daughter, Mr. Sanko. Pamela. She is twenty-five-years old and has a PhD in theoretical chemistry from Yale.” Roderick produced a large cigar case and offered it to me. Illegal Cuban Cohibas in glass tubes. I took one and pocketed it. “Thanks,” I said, “I'll save it."

  He shrugged and uncorked one for himself, slicing the end with a gold cigar cutter. “Pamela had the world by the ass,” Roderick continued. “She is smart and beautiful. A business associate of mine was prepared to offer her a position in his firm that would lead to vice president of research and development. Who knows how far she could have gone after that...?” Roderick rolled the cigar end in a lighter's flame, then puffed leisurely. “Several universities offered her faculty positions. But she let it all go ... to write this drivel.” He reached under his chair and produced a hardbound book. The dust jacket showed one of those blurry photographs of a disk-shaped UFO, like a patty-pan squash, in the sky above a cornfield with a crowd of incredulous on-lookers in denim work clothes in the foreground. Are We Ready, it was titled. I turned it over. On the back was a picture of Pamela Roderick. Her daddy was right; she was a looker—reddish-brown shoulder-length hair, perfect teeth just visible between full lips, and green eyes canopied by long dark lashes.

  Roderick blew a cloud of smoke that hovered a moment, then was caught by an ocean gust. “She takes after her mother,” he said. “You never knew what she was up to."

  “You are..."

  “Divorced. She took up with a second-rate actor. Prenup saved me a bundle."

  I began paging through the book. It didn't seem to be at all like your stereotypical lunatic fringe opus. After a few minutes I realized that it didn't fit the mold even remotely. The chapter titles alone suggested something very different: “Contact: Apotheosis or Anomie?"; “The Conquistador Model"; “The Proselytizing Model"; “Deconstructing Social Paradigms.” I turned back to the Introduction, opened it at random and began to read:

  * * * *

  Unless a contact event—whatever form it may take—is preceded by an informed dialectic that analyzes the complete social consequences of all likely scenarios, mankind is certain to experience a bouleversement of an unprecedented scale. It is striking that no serious discussions to prepare the human race for what most thoughtful people regard as an inevitable event have yet taken place outside the realm of science fiction. In this volume I have attempted to initiate such a colloquy by pairing projected future events involving extra-terrestrial contact with probable cultural, economic, philosophic, and religious effects in the modern world.

  * * * *

  “It reads like a treatise in sociology,” I said.

  Roderick flicked some ash on the deck. “I haven't read the damn thing. It was on the bestseller list last year—may still be for all I know. The point is she's dropped her career in science to become a writer."

  I started to hand the book back. “She's a big girl now,” I said, disappointed. “I'm afraid I can't help you."

  Roderick didn't take the book. Instead, he reached under his chair again and handed me another. “I'm not asking you to play truant officer, Sanko. Take a look at this."

  The second book's cover showed a detailed drawing of some weird-looking plants and a lot of writing in a fluid cursive hand, but in an alphabet I didn't recognize. The title was superimposed in yellow: The Voynich Verdict. Pamela Roderick had co-authored it with somebody named Reggie Marsh. I flipped it over and there was Pamela with Reggie—tall and gaunt, but with a face like Tom Hanks and a hair-do like Howard Stern. I had to admit the contrast grated on me. “Charming couple,” I said.

  Roderick blew a smoke ring that was quickly torn apart by the quickening breeze. “It's not funny, Sanko.” He spat violently on the deck between our chairs. “I hear they're engaged to be married.” He turned that gray stare at me, and I could see that he meant business. “I want to know all about this Marsh guy. He's been influencing my daughter, and now he wants to be family. I want you to find out his angle, and then I want you to get rid of him for me.” He sat back and puffed furiously to keep the cigar alight.

  I squinted at him through a cloud of smoke. “I think you got the wrong idea about me,” I said. “I'm not a hit man or a leg-breaker."

  Roderick waved the cigar. “No, no, Sanko. No violence. At least for now. I have heard good things about your resourcefulness...."

  * * * *

  I read over the second book on the flight from Miami to Kennedy. It didn't take long to find out that it was a lot screwier than the first. Still, there was that professorial tone that gave the thing a ring of authority. It began with a plausible story:

  It seems there was this Russian/American antique book dealer named Wilfrid M. Voynich. In 1912, Voynich discovered a very weird manuscript dated from the sixteenth century among a collection of old documents in an Italian villa. The item in question was a packet of 234 vellum pages profusely illustrated with crude drawings of plants that had no known counterparts on earth, with astronomical and astrological diagrams, and with pictures of nude women in a strange network of pipes and tubs. Some of the women were wearing crowns. The accompanying text was written in a language that no one in more than a century has been able to decipher.

  In 1930, Voynich's widow, Ethel Lillian Voynich, inherited the manuscript among her husband's effects. When she died in 1960, it was left to her friend Miss Anne Nill, who sold it the next year to Hans P. Kraus, a New York-based antique book dealer, for $24,500. He attempted to sell it for his asking price of $160,000, but no one snapped it up. In 1969, he donated it to Yale University's Beinecke Rare Book Library where it currently resides as catalog number MS408.

  Pamela and Reggie's book turned the Voynich manuscript into the key plot element in an alien abduction scenario with a new twist. Apparently, a claim has been made that the
Voynich pictures contain symbols suggestive of the Albingensian religious movement that had been stamped out by the Crusaders and the Inquisition three centuries prior to the presumed date of the document. According to Pam and Reggie, in the 1230s, when the religious crusade against the Cathari (as they were called) was at its peak, a few hundred of the fleeing heretics were rescued from the Languedoc region of France by one or more alien space ships. The earthlings, men and women, were transported to the aliens’ home planet in another star system, where they were culturally assimilated. In the sixteenth century, after about fifteen generations of life on the alien world, a few of the descendants of the rescued Cathari were returned to earth. By then the furor over their forebears’ beliefs had been forgotten, but the returned Cathari were understandably cautious and secretive. Pamela and Reggie claimed that the Voynich manuscript was the record of their life on the alien world.

  The stewardess sold me a can of beer and plopped down two small bags of pretzels on the service tray. I sipped and munched through part of a chapter on that strange alphabetic text. Apparently, linguists and code-breakers have been working on this thing ever since Wilfrid Voynich discovered the manuscript. Nearly all the experts said that it was not gobbledy-gook, that it had the rhythm and flow of a real language. Presumably, a talented linguist could invent a convincing new language as a hoax, even in the sixteenth century, but what kind of lunatic would have the skill and patience to sustain it for 234 pages?

  * * * *

  When we arrived at JFK, the terminal screen said that the hedgehopper to New Haven was delayed. Rather than sit it out, I found a rental booth and signed up for a Grand Marquis. It wasn't going to be that bad of a drive. I made a spur of the moment detour to Quick Jerry's, a print shop in Jersey City. It was run by an ex-con I knew who had spent some hard time for forgery. I was collecting on a favor he owed me. Half an hour later I picked up Interstate 95 just south of New Rochelle and headed up the Connecticut coast past Stamford, Norwalk, and Bridgeport.

  A little under two hours later I was strolling the Yale campus in the center of New Haven, trying not to look out of place. I was carrying a briefcase and had donned a pair of glasses and a cardigan sweater. It was a sunny winter day but I shivered a bit from the unaccustomed chill. There were still a few melting snow-piles—vestiges of the last winter storm.

  The Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library contrasted sharply with the venerable limestone columns and hallowed stone and redbrick structures of the campus. It was a huge rectangular prism composed of translucent marble panels framed with granite, and it sat in the center of a quadrangle decorated with geometric abstract sculptures. Stepping inside its controlled atmosphere I was brought up short, first by the quality of the diffuse natural light from the immense array of translucent marble, then by the central book tower, six stories high. The outer walls were revealed as a giant shell encasing a steel superstructure of steps and shelves loaded with books and documents.

  “May I help you, sir?” A woman's voice. A rent-a-cop in my line of sight pointed over my left shoulder where a pretty young thing behind a large counter was motioning me over.

  I let the glasses slide forward and pushed them back with my thumb. I wrinkled my nose, knitted my brow and showed some teeth like I was trying to focus on her. I was overdoing the Nutty Professor, I realized and knocked it off.

  “Are you a faculty member, sir?” she asked.

  “Ah, no. That is, not here. At Yale, I mean."

  “Could I see a photo ID, please?"

  I made a show of fumbling in several pockets, finally producing the laminated card that Quick Jerry had run off for me. It was made out for a small mid-western university. She checked it out, entered something in a computer, handed it back, then slid over a flat-screen and stylus. “Please sign in, Professor Sanko."

  The girl gave me a bar-coded visitor's badge, a brochure, and a map of the library. I started to walk away, then abruptly turned back. I had suddenly remembered a name from the book's Acknowledgement page. “Oh, ah, Miss ... You wouldn't have a Dr. Hans Dietrich on your staff here?"

  “Dr. Dietrich?” she said. “Why, yes. Let me check his schedule.” She tapped again at her keyboard. “Mm ... Dr. Dietrich is out today. Could I have his teaching assistant, Miss Chandler, help you?"

  “That would be lovely,” I said.

  * * * *

  Ann Chandler was a cute twenty-two-year-old grad student with a honey blonde bob cut and wire-rim glasses. We were at a table in the huge reading room. Both of us were wearing white nylon gloves, and the Voynich manuscript and several boxes of related materials were opened before us.

  “Dr. Dietrich wrote an article refuting the Roger Bacon authorship,” she was saying. “Would you be interested in a reprint?"

  “Yes, indeed I would,” I said, “but for now I'm particularly interested in your ... or Dr. Dietrich's overall understanding of the background of the manuscript.” I waved my gloved hand. “Just presume that I know nothing at all about it."

  “Well,” and Miss Chandler blushed a little, “stop me if I begin boring you."

  “That you shan't do, young lady."

  She knitted her brows. “The earliest record of it, as you probably know, dates from the court of the Holy Roman Emperor Rudolph II in the late sixteenth century. Someone had sold it to him for six hundred gold ducats.” She looked up and smiled. “That was an astonishing amount of money for a manuscript at that time—something like $50,000 today. But Rudolph collected oddities—giants for his army, dwarfs for his court, as well as magicians, alchemists, necromancers...” She caught her breath. “You must have heard about the connection with John Dee and Edward Kelley?"

  I hadn't a clue, but I liked her youthful enthusiasm. What I said was: “Of course, but it's always helpful to hear a fresh take on the facts."

  Ann Chandler took that as a green light to really open up and demonstrate her knowledge. “Well, John Dee was likely a sincere humbug who believed himself to be a great sorcerer. He was Queen Elizabeth's astrologer and she consulted him from time to time throughout her reign. Kelley, on the other hand, was clearly a charlatan who duped many people, including Dee. They first met when Kelley appeared at Dee's door wearing a skullcap to conceal the fact that he had lost his ears in punishment for forgery. Kelley duped Dee, convincing him that he was a sensitive, a ‘scrier’ as they called it, who could channel with the angels and the dead. He also claimed to have a powder that converted base metals into gold.

  “Dee and Kelley teamed up and traveled with their wives across Europe in the 1580s, demonstrating their arcane talents. At one point Kelley actually convinced Dee that a spirit wanted them to share each other's conjugal beds.” I expected a blush at this, but Anne Chandler just smiled coyly. “It was natural that they gravitated to Rudolph, who loved anything occult. Kelley had already invented a language, Enochian, that he claimed his angel contacts spoke in heaven, so some people think that he also invented the language of the Voynich manuscript. Dee, on the other hand, was an expert on the works of Roger Bacon. And so it's a short stretch to imagine that Kelley and Dee sold the manuscript to Rudolph, representing it as a newly discovered text written by Roger Bacon. Dee may even have believed it himself."

  I turned a few pages carefully with a gloved hand, feigning interest in the curlicues of the text and the crude colored drawings. “I suppose,” I said, “the main question is: was Kelley capable of such a sustained effort?"

  The girl nodded enthusiastically. “It's a major question. The Voynich text is the biggest mystery in historical cryptology. It's been scrutinized by dozens of professional and amateur code-breakers and linguists over the last century. No one has even been able to prove definitely whether it's a code or a language. Subjectively, the text looks like a cursive alphabetic language, written from left to right. There are no obvious corrections or erasures. The fluid cursive style suggests that the writer did not have to stop and look up or calculate the next letter."

  Sh
e produced a folder. “I brought along some notes,” she said. “There are approximately 170,000 glyphs or ‘letters,’ spaced to form about 35,000 words,” she read. “The ‘alphabet’ consists of somewhere between twenty and thirty characters, depending on one's guess as to what constitutes a letter. Some glyphs are only found at the start of words, some only in the middle, and some only at the end. There are almost no words composed of more than ten glyphs and very few one—and two-glyph words. There are a large number of repeats and sequences of words that differ by only one glyph. Words that appear to be figure titles seldom recur elsewhere."

  Ann Chandler looked up from the folder notes. “Is this the sort of information you were looking for?"

  “Please go on,” I said.

  “A statistical treatment of the text showed that word frequency followed Zipf's Law.” She looked up. “All that means is that, just as in all known languages, a few words like ‘the’ and ‘and’ occur with a high frequency, while most words are rare and the tail-off is steep. The word entropy is similar to that of English and Latin."

  “Word entropy?” I said. “That sounds familiar."

  The girl shrugged. “I had to look it up. It comes out of Claude Shannon's work on information theory. Apparently information and thermodynamics are deeply connected. In fact it's been suggested that thermodynamic entropy is a special case of information entropy. Are you familiar with the TV game show Wheel of Fortune? Well, there you have a sequence of blanks and spaces and you guess letters to identify a phrase or title. Each letter that you guess correctly gives you a bit of information about the puzzle. Assuming you are the only player, if you would total up all your wrong guesses as bits, the information entropy of the puzzle is the total number of bits needed to use to solve it.” She caught her breath and continued. “Actually, that's single character entropy. But in all known alphabetic languages the characters are not independent of each other. If Vanna turns over a ‘q’ you know the next letter is a ‘u'—that's richer information. There are hundreds of similar clues—a ‘th’ is always followed by an ‘r’ or a vowel, for instance. They call that second-order entropy. The Voynich manuscript's word entropy has been estimated as ten bits per word, which is similar to the value for English."