by
Mary Ruth Pursselley -
Robin
Corpsman kept clean living quarters. For all the faults he willingly owned up
to, he at least had that to his credit. Weekly room checks during his years at
boarding school and the university had trained him well.
There
were times when clutter was a necessary evil, though, and this was one of them.
The table in his hotel room was a wreck of books and diagrams surrounding the
disk Robin had bought from the fisherman, Burt.
He
had transcribed the symbols from the disk onto paper—reading them line by line
was easier than following their spiral—and was now beginning the process of
comparing them with the symbols in Hanks’ book.
He’d
been surprised at how quickly Trinity had responded to his request for informational
resources. Ernesto Hanks and his work weren’t exactly lauded in the academic
community, and yet the archaeology department had gotten a copy to Robin in
just a couple of days. They must be getting antsy for a big find—it had been a while since their last
one—and Robin’s descriptions of the disk must have seemed irresistible.
They
wouldn’t be disappointed. Robin was only a few lines in, and already his heart
was pounding, his hands shaking. His excitement grew with every symbol he
translated and transcribed into his notebook. This was incredible: the artifact
was angel-made.
Hanks
was right about everything—angel writing, angel intelligence and civilization,
all of it. If he was right about that, Robin could see no reason Hanks couldn’t
have been right in his theories of angel-human interaction, too.
It
was amazing. The very beginning of the inscription was a short list of
meaningless words that Robin guessed were names, followed by an account of the
angels’ decision to colonize some kind of headland somewhere, above water.
Incredible! There were legends about this, theories thrown around by the most
radical dreamers and speculators, but who would have guessed those dreamers
were right all along?
This
very premise of this find went against everything Robin had learned about
angels. It was almost more than he could process and accept at one time.
It
would take time to translate the disk, at least another day, but God only knew
what he could have learned by then. This was going to revolutionize the
academic world—maybe the world in general. Whether he ever succeeded in finding
Empathia or not, the find in front of him not only had the potential to secure
his future, but to open the door to a whole new world of knowledge.
Thanks for writing this one, Mary!
ReplyDeleteI had just been doing some catching up on reading the various author threads over the weekend and was getting ready to ask you when your next installment was due. It's good to see this, and I'm looking forward to whatever interaction Robin has with you C sisters.
ReplyDeletemy, some of these stories are really coming together, yours, Travis's, Fred's, the Jeffs's. It's good to see what's happening all over AE.