Michael Cordy - The Source

'I only just found out. Must have happened when you came back from that long trip to Saudi – you remember how we made up for lost time?'

He smiled.

'And don't worry about your job, Ross. You always feel so responsible for providing us with everything. But we're fine. More than fine. If the faculty members don't make me a full professor after tonight, they're bound to when I translate the final section of the Voynich. A Yale professorship might not pay as much as selling your soul to Big Oil but it's enough.'

He kissed her. 'I'm not worried. The only real problem is our vacation. We'll have to cancel the caving expedition – far too strenuous for a woman in your condition – and spend the whole time on the beach.'

'That suits me fine.'

'I bet it does.' He laughed. She always preferred to laze on a beach and read while he got bored after a few days and wanted to explore. Right now, though, spending a few weeks on a beach with Lauren sounded pretty good. He checked his watch. 'What time's your presentation? I was going to get some shut-eye before you shared your other amazing achievement with the world but now I'm too excited to sleep.'

Yale University That evening as they arrived at the Beinecke Library, Lauren squeezed Ross's hand and kissed him. 'I want to know you're in the audience,' she whispered, as they got out of his car, 'but don't sit too close to the front or you'll make me nervous.'

Rooms thirty-eight and thirty-nine of the Beinecke had been combined to form a lecture theatre capable of sitting seventy, and Ross took a seat at the back. The room filled fast and he saw Zeb Quinn's red curls at the front. A man in a tweed jacket sat next to her: Bob Knight, Yale's professor of linguistics and Lauren's head of faculty. Ross didn't like him. He had a reputation as a ruthless self-publicist who shamelessly took credit for other people's work. Lauren had tried to keep hers under wraps until she was ready to discuss it, but he had pressured her into revealing details of her initial findings tonight, during Voynich Week.

A priest with sharp features and dark, hooded eyes took the seat beside Ross. Any member of the public could attend the open seminar, but it was obvious from all of the cord and tweed jackets that most of the audience were academics, researchers and Voynich aficionados. Kelly wondered what a priest was doing there.

The lights dimmed and the first two speakers spoke at such length about spectral analysis, number sequences, polyalphabetic ciphers and other esoteric aspects of the cryptanalyst's dark arts that they made the world's most mysterious manuscript sound tedious and obscure. Torpor descended on the stuffy room and Ross, exhausted and jet-lagged, struggled to stay awake. To his surprise, the priest sat tense and expectant, radiating energy.

Then Lauren stood up and the mood in the room changed. For all her gravitas, she exuded warmth, her full lips constantly on the verge of smiling. Her blonde hair and emerald dress set off her eyes as she gazed confidently at the audience. This was what they had come to hear. The priest took a notebook and pen out of his pocket. As Ross watched Lauren arrange her notes and introduce herself, he felt a surge of fierce pride that she was his wife and would soon be the mother of his child. He was no dullard but he felt ordinary compared to Lauren. Her PhD had been about conserving dying languages, but for the last few years she had focused on the riddle of the Voynich Cipher, and had succeeded where all those before her had failed. Where they had crunched numbers and analysed sequences on a computer, she had used her expertise in her own field.

As a child, Lauren had once written to her parents, 'I don't like this school. It's boring,' in fifty different languages. Her parents had moved her. She still cherished the knowledge that in Amazonia there was a dialect called Tariana, which required a speaker to include a supporting suffix after everything they said, or their listener would assume they were lying; that there was a Caucasian language with no vowels, and a South Asian dialect whose innumerable verbs included gobray (to fall into a well knowingly) and onsra (to love for the last time). It upset her that of the six thousand languages left in the world more than half would be extinct by the end of the twenty-first century.

Lauren cleared her throat and the room fell silent. She began to read.

' "Welcome, fellow scholar, your efforts have not been in vain. Though your name and mine are insignificant this story is not. Know this: discoveries may excite our blood but mysteries sustain our soul. When we're strong and arrogant, mysteries remind us how little we know of God's world. And when we are weak and desperate, they encourage us to believe that anything is possible." ' Lauren looked up and smiled. 'You've just heard the opening lines of the Voynich, expressed for the first time in English.'

A low murmur rippled through the audience, like wind through a field of barley. Text from the Voynich flashed up on the screen behind Lauren. She continued, 'With my assistant Zeb's help I've now translated all of the manuscript, except the astrology section. I won't present a verbatim transcript until I've completed it.' She glanced meaningfully at Knight. 'Having been asked to share a synopsis of its contents, however, I can tell you that I found no code.' The audience's murmuring grew to a buzz and people were scribbling notes. 'I'm now convinced that Voynichese is a synthetic language. Those linguists among you will know that there are two types: a posterior language, which is based on existing languages, the most famous example being Esperanto, and a priori language, which is created from scratch. The latter is virtually impossible to translate without knowledge of the creator's rules of grammar and vocabulary, which in this case we don't have. Luckily for us, however, Voynichese appears to be of the posterior variety: a blend of two ancient languages, which have then been transliterated into the unique symbols we see in the text.'

A hand shot up from the audience. 'Which two languages?'

The priest's fingers were working at a string of rosary beads.

Lauren shook her head. 'I'm not prepared to reveal the root languages until I've completed the translation. Then I'll make a full announcement and publish all my supporting work.'

'Are you sure there's no code in the text?' asked a woman at the front.

The priest's fingers moved faster on the beads.

'With Zeb's computer models, we realized early on that a code was unlikely,' Lauren said. 'Given the age of the document and the intractable nature of the text, any code would have had to be a polyalphabetic cipher. But our entropy analyses, which looked at the pattern of symbols in the text, showed that it was too regular, too much like a proper language, to be a code.'

The priest's hand shot up. 'Dr Kelly, before you share with us how you translated the Voynich, perhaps you could tell us what your translation has revealed?' His English was perfect but held the faint trace of an Italian accent.

Lauren nodded. 'First, let me apologize to all those who, like me, hoped the manuscript contained some secret. Contrary to certain claims, the Voynich Cipher wasn't written by the medieval monk Roger Bacon and, sadly, it's not an ancient Cathar text, a wizard's treatise on alchemy, a mystic's vision, a message from God, written in the language of angels, or any of the other fanciful things many believed.'

There were audible sighs of disappointment.

'The Voynich is simply the story of a mythic quest in the classic tradition, an allegory of man's greed that shows a prescient awareness of today's environmental concerns. I've purposely translated it without trying to reproduce the archaic language of the time to highlight the sense. It tells of a scholar priest who accompanies a troop of soldiers into a vast jungle in search of Eldorado – the fabled city of gold. His mission is to chronicle their adventure and to claim the souls of the conquered for his church. The gruelling quest decimates the soldiers, leaving them lost in the middle of the forest. Just as they abandon hope, they stumble across a garden filled with strange plants and inhabited by even stranger nymphlike women and other bizarre creatures. It turns out to be both an Eden – and Hell. They find wonders and miracles there, but something terrible too. Only the scholar priest lives to tell the tale.'