—Live Science
Florida
One Year Ago
Nadia lay in a dream sleep. She heard people moving around, speaking in quiet voices, occasionally touching her, but when they bothered her, she simply willed herself to sink deeper in this luminous place where anything seemed possible. She let the years and the decades sweep her back like a slow, gentle tide. She saw faces, some making her happy, others not. She smiled when she recognized her great-grandmother, so old, her face so seamed by the sun, she looked like lovely old leather. She loved to tell Nadia the favored story back in the olden days when Elena, a young girl in their tribe, had come upon a man burying something beneath a rowan tree. It was in Poland, yes, before the tribe moved back to Walachia. Elena’s parents had come to Kezia, who was called the Old Princess, with the pages, and she gave thanks when she saw them. She’d formed the strange words in her mind, then spoken them aloud to all, and showed them strange red and green pictures, had taken a stick and used it to scratch more of the strange plants and figures in the sand next to the fire pit. No one understood the words or the strange drawings, but all marveled at her gift, for she was above and beyond them. She told them the pages were from a great manuscript.
Nadia knew the story so well, passed down from mother to daughter for two generations. The Old Princess had prophesied that one day, special twins would be born into the family, twins who would read the strange words and understand the strange drawings. But Nadia’s mother hadn’t given birth to twins, only to her, Nadia. And The Old Princess had died at nearly ninety years old. Before she breathed her last, she’d whispered again to Nadia’s mother, “Wait, wait.”
She floated through the years, her memories, watched her mother grow ill and die, saw herself young, limber, very talented, a gymnast for the Romanian Olympic team, and she was very good at it, winning, always winning. But then she’d wanted to leave Romania, to be free, and managed to be granted asylum in the United States. She moved to Florida, a flat land of endless sun and water, but she missed the mountains of her birth.
Years, decades, floated like clouds, showing her mother’s memories, maybe others’ memories too, and she’d catch one and linger and savor. She saw Jackson’s hard face, a man of few words who’d loved her deeply, but she saw he was sad because Isabella’s small twin sister, Kristiana, had died. He and Nadia had wept together, though he’d said little. Time rolled forward, still slow and easy, but she was aware of its passing, aware of herself in the passage of time. She saw herself sitting on a sandy beach one lonely day, half-watching Isabella play in the warm ocean. She saw the Old Princess, heard her say clearly, as if she were but a foot away, “I told your mother there would be twins, but there weren’t twins for her.
But it was you, Nadia, it’s you who birthed twins, and they will listen and hear the pages speak and sing and cry to be reunited to the great manuscript.”
But Kristiana was dead. Nadia, the floating Nadia, didn’t say anything. Isabella was still a twin even though she was now alone. And then she knew what she had to do. She saw herself young, still supple and vigorous, pawing through an ancient trunk in the attic of that small house in Florida, finding the box that still held the linen-wrapped pages, all of them torn on the edges, all save one that someone had cut from the great manuscript.
She’d shown Isabella the pages and soon regretted it. Her daughter read them easily, as the Old Princess had, and she’d made drawings like those on the pages, only the colors weren’t ever right, no matter which ones Nadia bought. Isabella said they were about plants and medical sorts of things she didn’t understand. She said the pages spoke to her, they sang to her, and they cried for what they’d lost. And her daughter continued to read the strange words, deep into the night, the pages becoming an obsession.
And Nadia, that anxious young mother, feared for Isabella’s sanity, for the little girl grew withdrawn. That long-ago Nadia had grown frantic, as had Jackson. He’d wanted to burn the pages, but Nadia could not—they’d been passed down from the Old Princess, generation after generation. To her. To Isabella, a twin.
She saw herself, unable to destroy the pages, and she looked down from where she glided above and watched herself as a young mother bury them in a lead box so Isabella couldn’t hear them calling to her, crying to her.
Then, coming through a seam in time was the Old Princess Kezia, and Nadia saw herself trying to explain, telling her over and over she wanted to protect Isabella, that her precious child was going mad and it was because of the pages. She saw the Old Princess, heard her speak, her voice hollow and so very old, even in that lovely dream sleep, and she saw a soft breeze that surely wasn’t really there softly ruffle her snow-white hair around her face.
Nadia said to the Old Princess, “Isabella is a young girl, not of the same ancient superstitious world as you. In this modern world, there are no ties to magic or mysterious words or languages or unknown drawings.”
Where had the Old Princess gone? She drifted, seeing things and people from a great distance or up close, it didn’t seem to matter. Some of them were deep inside her, locked away forever, her memories of them soft as long-ago sunlight on her face.
When had Isabella become enamored with the Voynich manuscript? Then there came the day, that single day, so clear she wondered if the Old Princess had sent it to her now, in this soft, wonderful place where nothing bothered her, where nothing could really touch her, the day she’d told Isabella, “The pages, they’re lost, gone forever. You must forget. Forget.”
She lay there, as if cushioned on soft white clouds, saw herself begging Isabella to swear she would never tell anyone she could read the great manuscript, the Voynich, promise, promise, because Nadia knew it would lead to tragedy, and Isabella had agreed.
Nadia saw the Old Princess hovering beyond her, and she turned and saw her old wrinkled face had smoothed out. She nodded and whispered to Nadia, “Do not be afraid, my beautiful one, soon you will be with me. Soon, but first you must tell Isabella where you buried the pages. She is the only one to reunite them to the great manuscript. You cannot fail, my beloved, you cannot.”
And for some reason no one at the hospital could explain, Nadia Gabor Marin came out of her morphine-induced coma and asked to write another single line to her will. And she wrote in a surprisingly strong hand to Isabella where she’d buried the loose pages and page 74.
THE SIXTH DAY
SUNDAY
Westminster Bridge is 252m long and 26m wide. It’s an arch bridge with seven iron-ribbed elliptical spans; the most spans of any of the Thames bridges. Westminster Bridge was painted green in 1970 to match the seats in the House of Commons, the part of the Palace of Westminster closest to the bridge. Lambeth Bridge, further upstream, is painted red to match the colour scheme in the House of Lords.
The first Westminster Bridge featured semioctagonal turrets at intervals along the crossing to provide shelter for pedestrians. But these cloistered cubby holes soon became haunts for vagabonds, muggers and prostitutes. In the end, 12 night watchmen had to be hired to guard travelers as they crossed the river.
—LONDONIST.COM
CHAPTER EIGHTY-ONE
Air Force pilots near Las Vegas can fly drones 7,500 miles away in Afghanistan. The Air Force has 65,000–70,000 people working to process all the data and footage it’s currently collecting from drones.
—Forbes Magazine
Drone Flight Facility
Warehouse on Thames
North London