The Anomaly(75)

My thoughts braked suddenly.

They skidded, as if I’d blown past a mental stop sign and knew I ought to back up. I could tell I was half-asleep by the way it felt like I’d been driving through my mind, watching ideas go by like the view out of a car window.

But part of me knew I was awake, and had just thought something to which I needed to pay attention.

There’s a story here.

An arc.

Hadn’t Feather said that? Something along those lines? I believed she had. I was pretty sure. And I belatedly realized I’d interpreted the last word as the term I’d heard in a thousand meetings in LA. Partly because of the word “story” before it. Because that’s what I used to do.

But she hadn’t meant it that way. She’d been giving me a clue. She’d been spelling it differently.

She meant “ark.”

I sat up straight, far more alert now.

Of course. An ark—where the animals went in, two by two.

I couldn’t begin to understand how that worked, but I’d seen the evidence with my own eyes and I was done questioning it.

And maybe…

I was aware I was engaging in exactly the kind of speculative thinking Gemma had mocked back at the trailhead, before this whole disaster began—that style of is it therefore perhaps possible that two plus two equals seven? faux-reasoning that’ll take you anywhere you want to go if you’re not careful. But right now nobody was keeping score.

And maybe…

Maybe that’s the way it had actually been.

Perhaps at some point in prehistory something like this had been discovered before. An ancient people had stumbled upon a similar machine, hidden deep in a cave, and triggered the same process. Maybe the paintings in the gallery beyond the smelling room were even a record of this.

And instead of going in, two by two, animals came out.

And maybe this had happened somewhere in the Middle East, too—because hadn’t Feather implied there was more than one of these sites?—and was such a head-spinningly strange event (even to people with a less science-dominated grip on what’s supposed to be possible and what’s not) that it became enshrined in a myth as a cautionary tale…for long enough that a mangled version was eventually wrapped into the collection of stories, history, and legends that became the Bible.

An ark. And what else was part of that story? What was, in fact, the defining theme of it?

A flood.

It was coming on quickly now, a rush of things I knew or had at least read more than once and should have been able to put together much earlier—and perhaps might have, if they’d seemed in any way related before.

The Hopi Indians, like a lot of cultures—as I’d told Gemma, at tedious length—cherished a flood myth. I couldn’t remember the specifics of it, but I realized I didn’t have to. It was right there in my hands.

That’s what Feather had meant.

On the night before we climbed up into the cavern she’d borrowed my phone and looked through my notes. The only problem was that there were a thousand pages cached onto there and I didn’t have time to sift through all of them.

But then I realized I didn’t need to. Partly because I already understood now where this was going. Also because the app readily presented me with a history of which files had been opened most recently. What she’d looked at.

And yes, she’d read documents on the Hopi. Which wouldn’t previously have struck me as significant—we were in Hopi territory, after all, and she’d asked to look at my note stash after I’d been talking about Newspaper Rock—but now that information alone was enough to take me the final steps.

The Hopi believe the world we live in is the gods’ fourth run at it. The first attempt was erased by fire. The second was wiped out when two minor gods left their posts at the axes of the planet, causing the spin to tilt, provoking an ice age.

The next world was notably more advanced than the previous two, in which humans had lived with the animals or in small villages. This third version was their Atlantean age, with a far larger population and more advanced civilization—but of course it went to pieces. The people created a “giant flying shield” called a patuwvota—which naturally some have interpreted as an aircraft or alien spaceship—and used it to attack a foreign city. They retaliated, and it all kicked off.

Seeing this, the boss god Sotuknang decided to get eschatological once more and brought down a flood. But the good guys—the ones “with a song in their hearts”—were allowed to survive, and given another chance in a further world. Instead of being uniformly perfect like the previous ones, the Fourth World (called Tuwaqachi) was going to be possessed of height and depth, hot and cold, lush and barren areas, a more challenging environment—the idea being to keep the turbulent humans occupied with staying alive, rather than attacking each other. While it was being prepared and the planet was still flooded, the worthy were assisted by Anu Sinom—the “ant people.” These beings escorted the remaining Hopi to a place where they could wait out the transition, and meanwhile prove their piousness and fealty to the gods.

That place was a system of caves.

Of course, the legend didn’t say where it was. But the Hopi, heirs to the oldest-known Native American tribe, the Anasazi, had an ancient custom of trekking hundreds of miles from their current homes all the way to…the Grand Canyon.