David Sakmyster - The Pharos Objective

Lydia took her time, walking and thinking. And fighting back her emotions.

She put a hand to her stomach, and began to cry.

The advance from Doubleday paid for Caleb and Lydia’s hotel suite for the next month. The first book was still selling well across Europe, but only to limited success in the States, probably because they hadn’t had a chance to do any further promotions there.

Their room overlooked the harbor. And outside, across the Boulevard de la Rosette, they could reach the causeway and walk to Qaitbey’s fortress within an hour. The museum was a short distance away, as were the Municipal Palace and the Zinzania Theater. Near the harbor, where most archaeologists believed the old library once stood, now proudly stood the Bibliotheca Alexandrina-the modern version of the historic library. With construction finishing in 2006, it comprised ten levels, four of which were built underground to further protect the contents from environmental forces. Adjacent to the library was a science museum and planetarium.

But as exciting as all these attractions were, Caleb and Lydia had little time for sightseeing. Caleb had enlarged the photos of the great seal Phoebe had given him for Christmas years ago. He posted them on a wall and tacked up a bed sheet to cover them when he and Lydia went out. They spent hours each day analyzing every inch of the image, studying every carving, every symbol.

He sent Lydia out repeatedly, sometimes several times a day, for journal articles or books they couldn’t access online. Most of these she had to order from contacts at the UK Doubleday offices. They acquired some rare seventeenth-century texts on alchemy-Paracelsus, Geber, Hollandus and Kircher. They consulted works by Francis Bacon and Isaac Newton, Madame Blavatsky’s three-volume compendium, and so many other books of arcane knowledge. The trick, as always, was to focus on the truly inspired, those derived from the most ancient writings.

Their hotel suite quickly began to look like Caleb’s boyhood room back in Sodus. Dog-eared copies of books were scattered about, and stacks upon stacks of heavy tomes covered the floor.

One day late in September, while Lydia was taking a nap, face-down on the couch as several fruit flies buzzed around a plate of dates and prunes on the coffee table, Caleb sat cross-legged before the wall, considering the enlarged photographs. He imagined he was there again, before the grand staff and the entwined serpents surrounded by seven symbols.

Those symbols were all familiar now, old friends, after fine-tuning his knowledge of alchemy, immersing himself in the subject for the better part of a year. The first four were Water, Fire, Air and Earth and their corresponding planets, Jupiter, Saturn, Mars and Venus. These were the principles of the denser matter, what the alchemists called the elements of the Below; while the realm of the Above hosted the intangible essences of soul and spirit. The remaining three symbols were the Moon, Mercury and, finally, the Sun, often represented as salt, quicksilver and sulfur, signifying the coming together of Above and Below into a new, immortal form of pure essence. The Gold of the soul, the Philosopher’s Stone. Quintessence.

It took Caleb a long time to finally accept the obvious: that the sequence might be the key. But no matter which way around the staff he read the symbols, they were not in the right order.

When Lydia awoke she found him staring at the sign in the lower left corner.

“It’s a combination lock after all,” he said.

“Great.” She yawned, then perked up. “So what’s the combination?”

Caleb’s eyes were out of focus, and in his mind he pictured a cosmic scene of…

… the planets of our solar system whirling about the sun in their elliptical orbits. He spoke slowly, dreamily. “Working backward from the most distant planet they could see with the naked eye, Saturn came first.”

“Why backward?” Lydia interrupted.

“The sun was the center of everything. The light they all aspired to.”

She nodded, as if the truth had been obvious all along. “So then, Jupiter’s next?”

“Yes. Then Mars. Then Venus, which is also the symbol for the material of Earth. Then Mercury, the Moon and finally the Sun.”

“Wait, why not the Moon before Venus? It’s between Mars and Venus, right?”

Caleb shook his head. “I’m guessing that would stump, or kill, most people who thought they’d figured it out and dared to try. No, in the tradition of alchemy, the Moon occupies an elevated station. It’s the second largest object in the sky, dwarfed only by the Sun. Its influence, while subtle, is just as indispensible to life on our planet. And, as if we needed more confirmation, in the alchemical process of turning something into gold, the Moon represents Silver, the stage just before achieving perfection.”

Lydia smiled thoughtfully. “Okay, so if we spin the seven symbols in the proper order, we can open the door without releasing the water?”

Caleb considered that for a while, but it still didn’t make sense. He thought about the alchemist’s instructions, the order for transmuting imperfect material into perfection. And finally something clicked into place.

“That’s the wrong question.”

“What?”

“Trying to avoid the water trap-avoiding any of the traps-seems like the wrong way to look at this.”

“How do you mean?”

“Bear with me a moment. First, let’s consider how the water trap was sprung. Waxman set it off when he turned the Water symbol.” Caleb focused on the symbol for.

“He started with Water,” Lydia whispered, “but that’s wrong.”

Caleb nodded. “Saturn is farther away from the Sun than Jupiter.”

“So it needs to be Saturn first, or Fire, then Water.”

“Calcination, then dissolution.” His scalp broke out in a sweat. Could it be that simple? As long as you know the right sequence of the visible planets? “The problem,” he said, “is that we know that when the door opens, a devastating flood is released. For that much water to emerge so quickly, the opposite chamber has to be already filled up, waiting for the doors to open.”

“What chance does that give us, then?”

“Maybe we’ve overlooked something.” Caleb scanned the photos again and came back to something he had puzzled over earlier. “There,” he said, pointing, “all by itself above the left edge of the seal. It looks like a ring set in the limestone about eight feet above the ground, with a crescent moon symbol above it.”

“So?” Lydia reached for the bowl of fruit on the table and popped a fig into her mouth.

Caleb stroked the ragged stubble on his chin. “So why is it there? And is there another one somewhere? I can’t see the other side of the door, but maybe I didn’t photograph far enough. The crescent moon, it’s a symbol for Seshat, Thoth’s wife.”

Lydia nodded. “She’s the goddess of libraries and writing, I know that. But-”

“She was also the mapmaker and the designer of the king’s cities, his temples, and so on. One of her symbols is the rope, and in certain Egyptian hymns she was praised for ‘stretching the cord,’ or measuring out distances in the king’s temples and palaces.”

Lydia looked from Caleb to the photo. “So we get a rope?”

He nodded.

“But why? What do we do with it?”

“The first task of the true alchemist is to purify himself, to burn away and dissolve his ego. To blast away the imperfections.”

“You mean…” Lydia drew in a sharp breath and beamed. “We’re not supposed to avoid the traps.”

“Like I said.”

Caleb stood and started pacing. “Think about it… the water trap is an effective defense because of its sheer violence. A million gallons of water rush through the door at once and batter around everything that’s not weighted down. The room fills with water, but drains quickly. My guess is, if you’re secured well enough you can withstand it-hold your breath until it drains, and then you’re fine.”