“I hope your parents didn’t see you as a divine incarnation when you were born,” I teased her.
“Far from it. I wasn’t a priestess when our array first began to appear. I was a pot maker. My hands were stuck in clay all day. Except when I was firing and painting my creations. Those were simple days filled with a great deal of satisfaction. My childhood was joyful.”
“Something must have triggered the creation of your array,” I said, with a note of impatience. Umara has only one fault. She’s never in a hurry. I suppose it’s a reasonable quality for a twelve-thousand-year-old woman to possess. But I find myself often wishing she would get to the point quicker.
“It started rather innocently. On our equivalent of Sunday, our day of worship, we used to gather near the banks of the Nile at nighttime and pray. We had maybe a dozen songs we all knew, and we used to sing them with great love and devotion. Thanking nature for rain, the river, our crops, our good health. Like I said, we were a devoted people. But as a race, we began to enjoy the silence that would follow our prayers, and for that reason we made it a rule that we’d sit quietly for a few minutes after every hymn.”
“How did you begin to ‘enjoy the silence’?”
“I mean exactly what I say. We were a sensitive race and we found it pleasant to sit still after each prayer. A large number of us sensed a presence in the silence. I think it’s the way we lived that made us so receptive. We had no enemies. When other tribes from the interior of the continent visited, we welcomed them with open arms. We never tried to take lands that didn’t belong to us. We were content with our own village beside the river.”
“So what triggered the array?” I asked.
“While sitting in silence after our prayers, a few of us began to make sounds.”
“Involuntary sounds?” I asked.
“Well, they weren’t planned.”
“You began to speak in tongues. Like the Pentecostal people.”
“That’s a fair example. But I must add that we were by no means a dogmatic race. We embraced all religions as long as they were based on love and gratefulness. We saw gratitude as the key to invoking the grace we felt from our prayers.”
“Did you personally speak in tongues?”
“It started that way for me. I didn’t do it because others were doing it. I was a shy teenage girl. I wasn’t trying to show off. But imagine ten thousand people all singing in harmony, and then falling silent, and in that silence a few sparks began to ignite.”
“Sparks?”
“It was like an energy burst through some of us and we had to let it out by speaking. Only we didn’t know what we were saying. We only knew that it sounded like a language. It seemed to have structure and syntax.”
“But you were just speaking gibberish.”
“No. It got to the point that one in ten of us started to talk like this. That was over a thousand. And when that number was achieved, the words we were spouting became clearer, and we began to sense their meaning.”
“Wait a second. Are you saying that nature itself began to teach you a language?”
“That’s one way of putting it.”
“That’s ridiculous.”
“Try telling that to the millions of people worldwide who go to Pentecostal churches. When they pray with fervor and start to speak in tongues, it’s nothing they can control. It just happens.”
“I understand that. I’ve seen it. But they never make any sense. You’re saying you were spontaneously given an intelligent language.”
“It happened. In time, we wrote down the words and realized that an intelligence greater than our own was trying to teach us things.”
“What kind of things?”
“Like how to sterilize our milk and water by boiling it. How to build aqueducts to channel the water from the Nile so we could grow ten times as many crops. It even taught us how to build a thresher to separate our wheat kernels from the stalks.”
“Right. I suppose you ordered the parts from the steel mill it taught you how to build.”
“You don’t need steel to build a basic thresher. All you need is rope, lumber, a saw, primitive spokes and wheels, and some ingenuity. I add that last word deliberately because the knowledge we were channeling didn’t tell us everything. It was more a source of inspiration. It was for that reason we began to call the being who spoke through us the Source.”
“Hmm,” I said.
“You don’t look impressed with my story.”
“It lacks the scientific basis Sharp’s explanation does. His discovery was uncovered step by step. It produces results that can be mathematically measured. Your array sounds more like a revival meeting.”
“The creation of our spontaneous language is throwing you off.”
“Most languages are the result of a random searching for sounds to describe something. No, my problem with your tale is that you were taught so much so quickly.”
“Once again, it happened. Thanks to the Source, in a few short years our culture evolved tremendously. We discovered higher math, algebra and geometry, and used it to help develop engineering principles that allowed us to build huge structures.”
“Don’t tell me you constructed the Great Pyramid?”
Umara hesitated. “That came later.”
“I would hope so.”
“But not as late as you think.”
“You forget, I was in Egypt five thousand years ago, not long after Krishna died. That’s where I met Suzama. I know the Egyptians had pyramids even then.”
“Good.”
“But you’re asking me to believe they had them seven thousand years before that.”
“We did.”
I considered. “You were there. I can tell you’re not lying. But it’s hard to accept this channeled information—and that’s what it was—was of such practical value.”
“Nothing I’m telling you is really different from what Sharp told you. Your prejudice against our discovery is the form it took. So we didn’t use decks of cards and record hits and misses on calculators. The principle of using a group mind to tap into a faint ESP signal was identical. It didn’t matter that our information came us to after praying. It still took thousands of us listening together to understand what we were being told.”
“Could your people hear this voice?” I asked.
“In time, yes. After many years the most sensitive of us discovered how to link our minds together so we could hear the language as clearly as you hear me speaking right now. Come on, Sita, you have to believe that we could become telepaths. You’re a telepath yourself. Just look at how your mind melds with Seymour. He practically wrote your life story before he met you.”
“Seymour and I do have a special connection. And I can hear other people’s thoughts, from time to time. But I’ve never had the universe speak to me.”
Umara sat back in her seat and nodded to herself. “Ah. Now I see the problem.”
“Really? Why don’t you wipe that smug expression off your face and tell me what it is.”
“Your problem stems from the fact that Krishna has never spoken to you in five thousand years.”
“How do you know he hasn’t?”
“It’s obvious. Otherwise you wouldn’t protest how we came into contact with the Source.”
Her words stung. They hurt because they were true.
“Tell me more about how you linked your minds,” I said.
“Just as Brutran has the Array and the Cradle, we had a thousand of us who could sense the Source, a hundred who could channel information from it, and a dozen of us who could link our minds so they functioned as one. We called our inner circle the Link.”
“I assume you were the head of it.”
“My father was. But I was a member. I saw how it evolved over time.”
“How much time?” I asked.
“Now we come to the Telar’s deepest secret. How did we become immortal? It didn’t happen overnight. As a people, we were in contact with the Source for two decades before it gave us insights into how to extend our lives. These insights Brutran and her inner circle are already using. We were taught herbal formulas, yoga exercises, and breathing techniques that greatly slowed down the aging process. That’s why the scriptures talk about people who lived to be several hundred years old.”
“Umara. I’m the last person on earth who needs a history lesson.”
She ignored me. “But the secret of the Telar’s immortality came from the Link.”
I waited but she didn’t continue.
“So what was the secret?” I asked.
“A great white light came and blessed us.”
I groaned. “Now I know you’re a born-again Pentecostal.”
“You’ll have trouble with this part of my tale. But I suspect after you leave Brutran’s castle—if you manage to survive—you’ll have no trouble believing every single word of it.”
“Go on.”