Tales From the Black Chamber, page 12
“Woo!” said Rafe, still adrenalized.
“Wait,” said Mike. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but you guys said that this language—if it is a language—has defied generations of cryptographers and linguists. What good does having one more word do? I mean, as Anne says, I’m sure this is a huge historical clue to its origins, but … it doesn’t really help us, does it?”
“No, not really,” said John. “But it can’t be a coincidence that someone’s stolen Beinecke MS 408 and Mildred was killed for this book with the only known sample of Voynich … ish outside the book.”
Claire hadn’t taken her eyes off the page since Rafe set it down. “Okay guys, wait. Look here. See these squiggles right under the Voynich-ish? What if that’s a translation or transliteration?” She pointed at a group of doodles or practice marks that looked like:
zhæh
“I mean,” Claire suddenly seemed less certain, “I know it’s a long shot, but it kind of looks like there are four letters in the Voynich word, and there are four marks here.”
They all squinted at the page for two full minutes in silence.
“It doesn’t really look like anything, does it?” asked Anne.
“I don’t know,” said John.
“Sorry—” began Claire.
“No, no, hold on,” interrupted Rafe. “Here’s one thing for your theory. The first Voynichy word has what looks like four letters, and two of them—the sort of ampersands with tails—are the same. What we’ve got here is four marks, two of which are the same. Now, if we’re to read left to right, we know the first ‘letter’ is not the one that’s used again. And that’s true in the second one as well. Similarly, the right-most ‘letter’ in both is one that’s redoubled. But … of course, that leaves out the possibility that the final ‘letter’ in that second series of marks is actually the bottom-most squiggle.”
Mike walked out of the office for a minute. The rest of the crew stared in silence. Not long after, he came back with Lily, Wilhelmina, and Joe. “Okay, first question is to Lily. Lily, is that Korean?”
She squinted. “No. It’s not. It looks kind of like Korean, but that Nike swoosh at the bottom can’t be Korean. First, it’s swoopy; second, it looks like it starts on the right and then comes left. All lines in Hangul are written top-down or left-right. No exceptions. If it were illiterate Korean, it would say something like ae or i-i or e or maybe mae, me, mi-i or something. And maybe the swoosh would be a final eu, just written poorly. But, no, I can’t think of a Korean word that would look anything like that, even copied by someone who doesn’t know the language.”
“Thanks, Lily,” said Mike. “The next question is for all of you guys. You have any clue what that might be?”
“Hmm. Zero-one-one is three in binary,” suggested Joe.
“It kind of looks like a smiley face with the right eye closed or covered or scratched out. Maybe a pirate eyepatch?” said Wilhelmina.
“Good point. Maybe it’s an ideogram,” said John. “I hadn’t thought about it as a whole; we’ve just been looking at the elements.”
“Anyone know any Chinese?” asked Claire.
Lily said, “A little. Mostly through Hanja in Korean. It doesn’t look like anything to me, but I’m not an expert. What about another script? Something like Demotic Egyptian. Didn’t they simplify the hieroglyphs down to strokes?”
John said, “Great thought. Wait a second, I have some books on Egyptian in my office.” He returned a moment later with an armful of books, including Gardiner’s big blue Egyptian Grammar. He flipped through one book and said, “Okay, here’s the demotic alphabet. It’s pretty much just squiggles to my eye. But it does have a double-vertical-line letter and a swoop. No real circle, though. But still. Could be. You know, what we’ll have to do is send this to some experts and see if they can make any sense of it. But for once … I think we’re onto something. Excellent job, guys. Anyone who doesn’t have plans, dinner’s on Grandpa Cal.”
9
“Hey, I got it!” Claire shouted, hanging up the phone. It was two days later, and faxes and e-mail with the mysterious markings had sped around the world to various trusted academics who were part of the larger circle of individuals whom, to Anne’s amusement, the Chamber traditionally called Collaborators. Everyone in the room turned to look, and John, Mike, and Anne came quickly out of the conference room.
“An old professor of mine at Oxford recognized it,” Claire explained. “He said it’s a Tibetan script.”
“Tibetan?” asked Mike. “Don’t tell me, it’s a cryptic yak-butter recipe.”
“No,” Claire said with a mixture of triumph and trepidation, “apparently it says ‘demon.’”
“Of course it does,” said Mike.
“Jesus,” said Steve.
“Okay, so what next?” asked John.
“We have to leverage this into some sort of knowledge about the Voynich Manuscript,” said Joe. “That’ll let us know what our bad guy is up to.”
“Okay,” said Rafe. “Here’s what we’ll do. Lily, Joe, and I will go through as many images of the manuscript as we can find, looking for that sequence of letters. We’ll send that to Claire’s guy, and see what he can make of it. Then we send him a bigger piece to see if he can do that.”
“But we don’t want to let him know it’s the Voynich Manuscript,” Steve objected.
“That’s probably true,” said John.
“We can trust him,” objected Claire. “He’s wonderful and completely reliable.”
“I’m sure,” countered John, “but we really should do this need-to-know.”
“All right,” Claire conceded. “So how?”
“I’ve got it,” said Joe. “We convert the Voynich text into a secondary substitution cipher.”
“English, please?” said Mike, to Anne’s relief.
“We just change the funny Voynich letters to regular letters or numbers.” Joe looked off into space for a moment. “Maybe numbers would be clearer. Yeah, I think numbers.”
“Okay, can you do that, Joe, while the other two get to work on finding the character sequence in the manuscript?” John asked.
“Sure,” Joe said.
“I’ll help Rafe and Lily,” volunteered Anne. “I can navigate old books very quickly, and I’m good with scripts and their variants.”
“I’ll help, too,” offered Wilhelmina. “Sounds a lot less depressing than trying to dig up dirt on priests. I can’t think the Lord looks too kindly on that, even though our motives are good.”
“Ora pro nobis, Sancta Wilhelmina,” joked Mike.
Wilhelmina laughed. “I’ll pray for you in particular, Mike. You need it.”
“Have you been talking to my wife again?” Mike grinned.
“Okay,” said John. “So, Joe does the cipher. Rafe, Lily, Anne, and Wilhelmina go through the manuscript. And the rest of us get back to digging up dirt on priests.”
Lily, Wilhelmina, Steve, and John, closest to the door, left to get to work.
“Hey, wait,” said Joe. “What part of the text do you want enciphered?”
“I dunno,” said John.
“How about the beginning?” asked Anne.
“Works for me,” said Joe.
“So, Claire, this old professor of yours, were you his special student? Did you learn anything that you can’t share with the class?” Rafe asked with a theatrical leer.
Claire rolled her eyes and left, shaking her head.
“Jesus, Rafe,” said Mike, “dip her braids in your inkwell, why don’t you?”
“What?”
“Dude, you so like her.”
“Well, of course I like her, she’s a great coworker.”
“You liiiiiiike her.”
“Shut up.”
“You liiiiiiike her.”
Rafe flipped Mike the bird and stalked out.
“He likes her,” Mike said to Joe and Anne.
“Oh yeah,” said Joe.
First thing the next morning, Joe called a meeting. “I’ve got the cipher. Let me explain this to everyone.” He connected his laptop to a projector and displayed a section of Voynich text. It read:
ab cdefbfd vbh cdvdjbveHl cmbebno vstH vohu ab gscmb go cHgbk poqxdhqgba qvbvbgba qHcpH qd poqfb bhhd gdeohomb cyrbv gba edaqdmrbvgba mbxohbrbv gba qksrbnorbvrvol goh cy abno voqsnol ckolqovy gdhgH zdaFd gdhmb rodq hHlfbqoebkbvu
Joe said, “Okay, this is the opening paragraph of the manuscript. It’s got a lot of different letters, as you can see. There are twenty-seven, by my count. What I did was assign each a number, starting with the first character on the first line as number one, then the next as number two, and so on. So, for example, the first two words are…” He pushed a button and the following numbers appeared below the Voynich text.
1-2 3-4-5-6-2-6-4
“What this means is that we have six unique letters, then the second letter repeats, then the sixth, then the fourth. Everybody following me?”
Everyone nodded. “I don’t know for how much longer,” joked Mike.
“No, if you’ve got that principle, you’ve got the whole thing. So here’s what the whole text looks like as numbers,” said Joe, pushing another button, revealing:
1-2 3-4-5-6-2-6-4 7-2-8 9-4-7-4-10-2-7-5-11-12 9-13-2-5-2-13-15 7-18-19-11 7-15-8-20 1-2 21-18-9-13-2 21-15 9-11-21-2-22 16-15-23-24-4-8-23-21-2-1 23-7-2-7-2-21-2-1 23-11-9-16-11 23-4 16-15-23-6-2 2-8-8-4 21-4-5-15-8-15-13-2 9-25-17-2-7 21-2-1 5-4-1-23-4-13-17-2-7-21-2-1 13-2-24-15-8-2-17-2-7 21-2-1 23-22-18-17-2-14-15-17-2-7-17-7-15-12 21-15-8 3-25 1-2-14-15 7-15-23-18-14-15-12 9-22-15-12-23-15-7-25 21-4-8-21-11 26-4-1-27-4 21-4-8-13-2 17-15-4-23 8-11-12-6-2-23-15-5-2-22-2-7-20
“And, so, this is what we’ll send to Claire’s professor. I checked it out, and the letters from the breviary are 9-21-11-21. That sequence doesn’t appear anywhere in my sentence, but the letters are pretty common throughout. There are six 9’s and 11’s, and twelve 21’s. So whatever the professor decides those are, he’ll have a decent head start. There are two hundred five total letters, and he’ll have twenty-four off the bat. That’s about twelve percent. Not great, but a lot better than nothing. And it’ll be even better if Rafe’s team’s discovery pans out.”
Rafe spoke up. “Well, we think we can maybe help him out on that. Lily, Anne, Wilhelmina, and I managed to identify multiple instances of a long phrase with that characteristic sequence. Can you put it up, Joe?” Joe pushed a key and a Voynich phrase appeared.
npocgbqqocgHg bcbggdh bfdmvdh
Rafe pointed to the end of the first word. “Okay, here’s our word, though it seems to be the ending of this long word, or a suffix or a compound or something. The really cool thing about this excerpt is that it’s got multiple instances of each of two of those letters. Okay, ours kind of looks like c-ampersand-t-ampersand. And you’ll notice that there are one, two, three c’s, and one, two, three, four, five ‘ampersands.’ And these two ampersands here are right next to each other. So presumably that’s a double letter, which should help Claire’s professor identify the word more easily. Oh, and I almost forgot, all these letters occur in Joe’s section as well, and he was able to encipher them like this.” Joe pushed a button and up popped two strings of numbers.
14-16-15-9-21-2-23-23-15-9-21-11-21 2-9-2-21-21-4-8 2-6-4-13-7-4-8
Anne raised her hand. Rafe smiled and said, “This isn’t school, Anne. Fire away.”
“Isn’t this still going to be close to impossible?” she asked.
“Absolutely. We have one, sole hope—that the underlying language is Tibetan and that the professor can solve it on that basis.”
“So,” Mike said. “Everybody happy with this plan? Any obvious flaws?”
The futility and frustration of the previous weeks’ work was visible on the faces of everyone in the room. After a long pause, murmurs of “let’s do it,” “ok,” “give it a shot,” and the like burbled around the conference table.
Claire stood up. “Why don’t you print the numbers out and I’ll fax them to him. That way we can avoid electronic copies.”
Anne said, “My old office’s interior decorator recommends that highly. Avoids firebombings and the like.” Everyone laughed quietly.
Joe said, “Okay, we’re done.”
A week later, Anne had a question for Claire and walked over to her desk. Claire, on the phone, held up a finger, and Anne walked to the empty desk across the way and leaned on it. She stared off into the middle distance, half watching Mike Himmelberg flipping through various Catholic-looking websites on his big iMac monitor. Something caught her attention, but she wasn’t sure what. A moment later, her synapses reestablished the fleeting connection, and she knew. She rushed over and grabbed Mike by the shoulders.
“Oh my God, you found the guy! Why haven’t you told anyone?!”
“Uh, what?” Mike looked from Anne’s suddenly proximate face almost atop his left shoulder to the monitor and back.
“You found the guy. That’s the tell, right there!” She pointed to a coat of arms on the computer screen. John, Joe, and Wilhelmina walked over and looked on.
“No, I’m just looking at some unofficial organizations around the Church, thinking maybe there’d be a secret necromancer club or something,” Mike explained. “This is one that’s sort of trying to lobby the Church to ditch all the smells and bells and become the Church of What’s Happening Now, especially in terms of sex and divorce and women priests and the like. There are a bunch of these groups, but this is probably the best funded and most respectable. There’s no way these guys are mixed up in medieval weirdness. Heck, I’m not sure that they’re even all that keen on God.”
“Well, then that’s an awesome cover,” Anne said loudly, “because that there is the proof that you’ve got a necromancer on your hands.” She pointed at the arms depicting a large, crested bird with orange and black plumage and black-and-white striped wings pecking at its breast, blood dripping from the wound.
“I think you’re mistaken, Anne,” said John, squinting at the bird, as Joe leaned over and enlarged the image. “The pelican pecking at its breast is a common motif in Christian art. They were thought to nourish their chicks with their own blood—a sacrifice like Jesus’s, if you will—and they were thought to be able to use the blood to bring dead chicks back to life—a resurrection motif, too.”
“Point taken, John. But here’s the thing.” She paused, looked around at her expectant audience, and announced, “That … is not … a pelican.”
“Sure it is,” said John, staring at the bird. “I mean, it’s all stylized and heraldic, but it’s a pelican.” He canted his head. “Isn’t it?”
“I think it is,” said Mike, though somewhat dubiously.
“Nope,” said Joe. “Look at the crest and the colors. I mean, orange? And stripes?”
“The colors and crest could be additional heraldic symbolism. I’d have to look it up,” said John, less and less sure.
“I’m with Anne and Joe,” said Wilhelmina. “Look at the beak, it’s all long and curved and pointy. Pelicans have a big pouch on their lower bill.”
“Heraldic motifs are often stylized, to the point they don’t really look like the real animal. Think of the lion rampant. It sometimes looks like a boxing dog-monster,” John objected, though his confidence was ebbing in proportion to the width of the grin on Anne’s face, which seemed to grow every time he offered an explanation. Finally, he said, “Okay, Anne, if that’s not a pelican, what is it?”
“I thought you’d never ask. That, dear colleague, is a hoopoe,” Anne stated.
“A what?” everyone asked simultaneously.
“A hoopoe. An hoopoe? I’m never quite sure of that rule.”
“Never heard of it,” said Mike.
“Me neither,” chimed in Joe.
“It’s an Old World bird,” explained Anne. “You’d never have seen one in this hemisphere outside a zoo.”
“Zoo aviaries drive me nuts,” said Mike, warming to his tangent. “I mean, I go to a zoo to see animals displayed for me, the paying customer. I don’t want to be wandering around staring at a bunch of trees hoping to catch a glimpse of the deep-throated Greek swall—”
“Shut up, Mike,” said John, swatting the back of Mike’s head. “I’ve heard of the hoopoe. In The Conference of the Birds, a Persian Sufi poem, the hoopoe’s sort of the head bird. But I never bothered to find out what one looks like.”
“It looks like this,” said Joe, having pulled the Wikipedia “Hoopoe” page up in another window of Mike’s web browser.
“That’s the same bird,” Wilhelmina said with finality.
John looked at the picture on the screen. “You’re right. That’s the same bird.”
“Whoever did this slipped a hoopoe here where you’d expect a pelican?” wondered Mike aloud. “Wouldn’t that sort of be blasphemous, if the pelican has all those Christ-like connotations?”
“Oh yes,” said Anne. “And not just because of that. I once read a necromancer’s manual in the Bavarian State Library in Munich that said, and I quote, ‘Debes igitur attendere quod uppupa magne virtutis est nigromanticis et demones invocantibus, quapropter ipsa multo utimur ad nostri tutelam.’”
Mike said, “Uppupa is my new favorite word.”
Joe grimaced at Mike and appealed, “Now I’m going to have to say, ‘English?’”
John said, “‘You should note that the hoopoe is possessed of great virtue for necromancers and those who invoke demons, because of which we use it much for our safekeeping.’ That about right?”
Anne was impressed. “On the nose!”
John said, “Latin rocks.”
Anne said, “It does at that. But I should also add that hoopoe blood is used very frequently in necromantic rituals.”
“Holy shit,” said Mike. “Sorry, Wilhelmina, Anne. But so this is a black-magic bird dripping its hoodoo blood out where you’re supposed to see a pelican representing Christ? This definitely must be the guy. There’s no way that’s a coincidence. And hanging it out here for everyone to see? What an arrogant prick. Sorry, Wilhelmina, Anne.”
