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“But what?”

“Cameron? Did you say something?”

He turned around. “Just thinking out loud.” Susan sat beneath the speaking tube while he continued to inspect his options, also certain that while one would free them, the others would kill them. That was the way of the Maya.

“These 260-byte files,” he added. “You looked at them, right?”

Susan nodded.

“And saw no possible pattern?”

“My disassembler could not decode it, and there is no apparent surface pattern like with the binary map.”

“The Maya, however, were masters at geometrical sequences, as you have come to find out recently. Have we really analyzed these files under that eye?”

“Doubt it.”

“See, we need to think geometrically. Whatever the message, it's related to the end of the thirteenth
baktun.
”

“To zero one zero one zero zero.”

He nodded. “Is there a way to get a small laptop down here?”

Susan stared at him for a moment before saying, “My laptop's too big, but let's call Reid. See if he brought something smaller that can be networked.”

7

Ishiguro Nakamura watched with a sense of awe as the nineteen-inch monitor of one of the FBI's HP workstations displayed the first of the two captured images by the portable radio telescope, showing an incredibly clear picture of the planets circling HR4390A.

“It … it
can't be,
” Jackie said.

“How in the hell…?” he asked.

“This is impossible,” Jackie said. “This place is 139 light-years away. Even a Cerro Tolo mounted on a rocket at the edge of our solar system could not capture such an image.”

“I'm counting thirteen planets,” said Ishiguro, forcing his mind to focus, to get past the unexplainable circumstances and focus on the gathered data.

Jackie Nakamura, sitting next to him in front of the workstation, tapped a fingernail on the screen. “Same here. Thirteen planets. Son of a—”

“How can you tell them apart from nearby stars?” asked Reid, standing next to them, eyes narrowed while also staring at the screen, his face glistening with perspiration. Reid's massive bulk was not compatible with the tropical weather.

“A combination of many factors, including coloration, shape, and degree of pulsation. I guess after you stare at the universe like we have, planets and stars look radically different. Trust me,
those
are planets.”

“And these little ones are their moons,” added Jackie. “All twenty of them.”

Ishiguro frowned. “Thirteen planets and twenty moons?”

“Just like the rows and columns of those arrays of numbers in the temple. Could that be just a coincidence?” asked Jackie.

“We'd better let Dr. Slater know. Perhaps he can make some sense of it,” offered Reid.

“Hold on,” Jackie said, zooming in on the five closest planets to HR4390A, which was almost five times the size of the Sun. “Let's see what else we can learn here.”

The Japanese astrophysicist nodded. “The orbits are too close to HR4390A. Surface temperatures must be well beyond those that can sustain life.”

“At least as we know it,” she added.

“True.”

“Still,” Jackie said, pulling down a few menus to measure the wavelengths of the captured image, whose wide-frequency spectrum provided them with information not just in the visual range but also in the ultraviolet and infrared ranges. “According to the IR signature, the closest planet might as well be a star. Its surface temperature is over nine hundred degrees.” She continued to tap the keys and information kept on browsing. “The temperature decreases steadily. The fifth planet has an average temperature of around three hundred degrees, still too hot to sustain life … as we know it.”

“What about the rest of the planets?” asked Reid with growing interest.

She panned across the image. “Here are the next five planets, ranging in temperature from 190 degrees to 22 degrees.”

“From boiling hot to freezing,” said Reid. “Any of them close to our Earth?”

Ishiguro pointed at the last one. “The tenth one is. The temperatures that Jackie's quoting are in degrees Celsius, not Fahrenheit. Twenty-two Celsius is room temp, or around seventy-two Fahrenheit.”

“That's an average temperature, of course,” said Jackie. “I'm sure there is a range, like on Earth.”

“So number ten might be the one, huh?” asked Reid, pointing at it on the screen, a bluish-green circle surrounded by darkness.

“What about the rest of the planets?” asked Reid.

Jackie pulled them up on the screen. “From minus five to minus ninety, Celsius.”

“Now
those
are freezing,” said Ishiguro.

“What's on the second image?” asked Reid.

Jackie worked the pull-down menu and retrieved the second file, already translated into a digital image by the HP workstations.

“Oh, my God,” she said, leaning into the screen as the second image materialized. It was a close-up of the tenth planet, its bluish hues and cloud coverage resembling those of Earth.

“How in the hell? How did you
get
this shot?” asked Ishiguro.

“I …
I don't know!
” she said. “I thought I was just taking shots at one resolution … I … the microwave signal must have come preset with these images. I can't think of any other explanation.”

They stared at it for several minutes, admiring its similarities to Earth, including snow-covered polar caps, bluish-green oceans, and dark brown continents, though none of the shapes even came close to matching those of Earth.

“Close in on that,” Ishiguro said, pointing at a spot of land between breaks in the clouds, close to the equator. “Looks like peculiar irregularities in the landscape.”

Jackie worked the keyboard and the mouse, zooming in while also running a program to enhance the image by averaging the pixels to keep the picture from getting grainy.

None of them said a word as the new image came alive on the screen. Right there, in front of them, with undeniable clarity, from a planet 139 light-years away. The trio saw the landscape in utter disbelief, reading the sequence of numbers etched on the land, across what appeared to be a massive mountain range, larger than the Andes and the Himalayas combined.

“The millennium clocks,” hissed Jackie Nakamura. “They're counting down to this sequence!”

“We need to get this information to Susan and Dr. Slater!” said Troy Reid, sweating profusely. “After that, I have to call Washington!”

8

The portable computer system turned out to be a small NEC mini notebook, just seven inches long and four wide, easily lowered to the burial chamber while also attached to an Ethernet cable, electronically linking Susan with the powerful workstations in the courtyard. The tiny system came loaded with a pocket version of Windows98 and with limited memory, but fortunately the files captured from the daily virus, at 260 bytes each, were small enough that they could all fit at once inside the system's memory card.

Susan sat with her back to the crypt, the NEC on her lap, its bright display casting an eerie glow inside the crypt, bringing thousand-year-old carvings to life.

“The technology from the modern world illuminating the works of the ancient world,” Cameron mumbled in a poetic tone, marveled by the moment.

Susan regarded him with admiration, wondering about a man who viewed life so much differently than anyone she had ever met, a man who drew satisfaction from moments usually ignored by others, who saw beauty in things that often escaped the eye.

She leaned over and kissed him on the cheek.

“What was that for?”

“For adding perspective to my life.”

The small system churned away, its relatively slow microprocessor working to display the requested information on the small screen.

Susan looked at the first file, scanning the lines of code. “Looks pretty random. Any words of wisdom from the world of archaeology?”

“From the world of archaeology
and
also from the world of astrophysics.”

She nodded. It had taken them several minutes to come to terms with the incredible revelation about the planets circling HR4390A. The parellels were indeed amazing, beyond anything she could have imagined. “Thirteen planets and twenty moons,” she said, still in awe.

“Just like the Tzolkin, the Mayan sacred calendar, divided into thirteen months of twenty days each, which multiplied together yields 260 days. Let's divide this file in the same way. Split it up into thirteen rows of twenty bytes each.”

Susan did the math. “That would mean creating rows of 160 bits each. Here's the first two segments.”

“See anything?” she asked.

Cameron studied the screen for several moments. “The last five bits are the same for both strings,” he commented.

“Zero one zero one zero,” she said. “It's missing the last zero.”

“You indicated that this was the string for the
second
day of the virus, right?”

“Correct. We missed the first day.”

“Let's shift the entire search to compensate for this. Place the first bit of the array as the last one and redo the segmentation.”

She did, promptly displaying the new 160-bit rows.

Cameron tapped on the last six bits of each segment. “Do you see what I see?”

Susan nodded. “The missing zeroes. I'll be damned. It now matches all of the observations from the SETI team. The number of planets, the number of moons, and also the sequence of numbers spotted on the tenth planet.” She displayed five more segments, noticing the pattern.

“Now,” Cameron said. “I'll bet you anything you want that the 260-bytes segments on the following days will reveal a similar segmentation pattern, after you shift the bits to compensate for the day that it was received in relation to the starting date, December eleven.”

“Then we should align them based on these boundaries?”