Page 52 of The Secret of Secrets (Robert Langdon #6)
Alone now atop Pet?ín Tower, Langdon steadied himself against the observation rail as the wind whipped across the platform.
While his eyes were directed out over the snow-dusted city, the image in his mind’s eye was not Prague at all; it was a snapshot of what Katherine had emailed him earlier this morning.
For Langdon, the effect of “eidetic” recollection was indistinguishable from seeing the object live. His eidetic memory provided precise, total recall of a visual input and derived its name from the Greek eidos, meaning “visible form.”
Langdon pondered the image she had sent, which seemed to be a screenshot of her own phone. On her display was a glowing string of seven characters.
Langdon recognized the ancient language at once, but he could not begin to imagine what it was doing on Katherine’s phone.
She sent me something in…Enochian?
Often called the “Angelic Tongue,” Enochian was a language “discovered” here in Prague in 1583 by the two self-proclaimed English mystics, John Dee and his partner Edward Kelley. It was allegedly the language by which the mediums could speak to spirits and obtain “wisdom from the other realm.”
The only reason Katherine knew Enochian existed was because Langdon had told her about it just yesterday.
While walking the streets, they had seen a poster advertising an exhibit called Making Gold and Swapping Wives, which, in addition to the catchy text, was adorned with Enochian symbols.
Katherine asked Langdon what the symbols were, and he relayed the sordid tale of Dee and Kelley’s historical passion for alchemy, wife-swapping, and talking to angels in their own special language—Enochian—the mystical language of the spirit world.
“They were almost certainly a pair of charlatan opportunists,” Langdon told her, “but they were in high demand in their day, even hired by Emperor Rudolf II to ask the angels to help him make wise political decisions.”
“Have our current politicians tried that?” she asked with a smile.
“It’s not hard to do,” Langdon replied. “There’s even an Enochian app for your phone.”
“A Renaissance app for talking to spirits?!” Katherine exclaimed, laughing out loud.
Langdon took her phone and quickly downloaded the free app. “There, now you, too, can communicate with another dimension.”
“That’s thoroughly ridiculous.”
“Ridiculous?” Langdon asked, smirking. “Did we finally find a mystical idea that you don’t believe in?”
“Very funny, Professor.”
Langdon kissed her on the cheek. “You’re cute when you’re cynical.”
Now, shivering atop Pet?ín Tower, Langdon surmised that Katherine must have used the Enochian translation app to create a message, then emailed a screenshot to him.
But why? Was she being playful?
Langdon found nothing playful about reading the language of spirits while standing atop a ghost-infested hilltop looking for a woman who had disappeared.
It was conceivable that Katherine was not being playful at all, but rather had encoded her message for secrecy.
The problem was that anyone with an Enochian dictionary or app could easily decipher it.
Langdon held the image in his mind.
The translation of Enochian to English was actually an absurdly simple substitution scheme. Langdon had always found it suspiciously convenient that the mystical language discovered by a British clairvoyant turned out to be a letter-by-letter transliteration into English.
Langdon had long ago memorized the Enochian “key,” and he needed only a few seconds to make the transliteration, converting the symbols in Katherine’s message to English letters.
The decryption that emerged, however, appeared meaningless.
LXXEDOC
Langdon puzzled over the jumbled string of letters, which looked vaguely like a Roman numeral, except that the letters E and O did not exist in that numbering system, and the other letters were not in proper sequence.
Whatever Katherine wanted to tell me…this isn’t it.
Unfortunately, if she’d made a mistake while translating, she would never have suspected her message wasn’t right because all she would have seen were the symbols she had sent him.
Frustrated, Langdon stared out at the wooded landscape and tried to figure out his next move. As he did, a huge flock of birds took off from the trees, rising en masse, all turning at the same precise instant, flocking as one.
The universe is mocking me, Langdon decided as he watched the amorphous cloud of birds undulating across the sky. Katherine had researched the synchronized murmurations of starlings and declared the phenomenon to be scientific proof of an invisible connection between living things.
“Separation is an illusion,” she had told Jonas at their lunch last year and pulled up a mesmerizing video of starlings all moving as one. “This phenomenon is called behavioral synchronization, and it occurs all throughout nature.”
She scrolled through several video clips—a mile-long school of bluefish all turning left and right in perfect synch; an endless herd of migrating gazelles, all bounding and leaping in unison; a swarm of fireflies, all illuminating and blinking in unison; a nest of hundreds of sea turtle eggs, all hatching within seconds of one another.
“Incredible,” Faukman said.
“It never ceases to amaze me,” Katherine said.
“Some traditional scientists claim behavioral synchronization is actually just an illusion …that these organisms are simply reacting to one another so rapidly that the delay is imperceptible.” Katherine shrugged.
“Unfortunately, a pair of high-speed video cameras linked to atomic clocks at the front and back of a school of fish has shown that their alleged reaction time is faster than the speed of light.”
“Oops,” Langdon said.
“Exactly,” Katherine said with a smile. “That’s a no-no in our current model of physics and reality.
Instead, I would argue that there exists a point of view from which these synchronizations are not miraculous at all.
If you view a murmuration of starlings not as many individual birds—but rather as one complete organism—then the synchronization is to be expected.
The starlings are moving as one because they are one…
an interconnected system. No separation.
Much like the individual cells in your body, which form the integrated whole that is you. ”
Faukman looked fascinated.
“I believe the same holds true for each of us as human beings,” Katherine said, sounding excited now.
“We mistakenly picture ourselves as isolated individuals when in fact we are part of a much larger organism. The loneliness we feel is because we can’t see the truth—we are, in fact, integrated into the complete whole. Separation is our shared delusion.”
She touched the tablet. “Don’t take it from me, though. Here is one of the most brilliant minds in history.” A new screen appeared—a quote from Albert Einstein.
A human being is a part of the whole called by us “universe”…
He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings
as something separated from the rest,
a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness.
This delusion is a kind of prison for us.
“Even the greatest scientist who ever lived,” Katherine said, “declared that our conscious minds delude us and trick us into seeing disconnectedness where there is only unity.”
Leonardo da Vinci had said the same thing, Langdon recalled. Realize that everything connects to everything else.
“And similar proclamations have been made by spiritual prophets throughout time,” Katherine continued, “but today, a growing number of quantum physicists are echoing a belief in the interconnectivity of all things…and all people.” Katherine smiled at Faukman.
“I admit it’s hard to visualize our connection to a world we cannot see, but believe me, future generations will understand.
One day we’ll see that our perception of being alone in the world was once humankind’s greatest shared delusion. ”
“And your experiments ?” Faukman pressed. “The ones you’re not telling us about? They echo this interconnectivity?”
Katherine smiled, eyes sparkling with excitement. “Gentlemen, the results of these experiments will not only remind us we are all connected. They will light the way toward an entirely new understanding of our reality and human potential.”
Just then, a piercing squeal brought Langdon back to the cold wind at the top of Pet?ín Tower.
For a moment, he thought it was a sound from the elevator, but instead he looked down and saw that a car had just skidded loudly to a stop at the base of the tower.
The black sedan looked forebodingly familiar. The emblems on the doors confirmed it.
úZSI.
Langdon could not make out the face of the uniformed man who jumped from the driver’s seat far below and was now sprinting across the parking lot toward the tower. But there was no mistaking his muscle-bound build.
Or the large pistol clutched in his hand.