Search: A Novel of Forbidden History Read Online Free PDF

meant to his employer, but there was nothing to be gained by sharing that information. He made a show of studying the artifact more closely, wondering if she would share information with him. As long as they were talking, he still had options.
    “It’s a meteorite. Nickel-iron. Someone told me most of them are formed in a star, just before it explodes. That one landed here a long time ago. Someone found it, cut it in half—more or less—polished the cut surface, and carved that pattern into it.”
    “Not a pattern. A map. Of the solar system.” MacClary’s fingers lightly traced the almost invisible lines cut into the smooth metal surface. “On the boundary, this band of stars, and then the sun, here in the center. Six planets circling it. Mercury. Venus. Earth with its moon. Then Mars, Jupiter with its four major moons, and a ringed Saturn.” MacClary shifted her attention back to him. “Is any of that significant to you?”
    Merrit changed the subject. “What happens now?”
    Krause hadn’t moved from the wheel. It wasn’t hard to guess what he wanted to happen next. Renault’s body was still in its wetsuit. The air tank had been removed, but Merrit could see the outline of the buoyancy vest under the tarp. That could mean the rest of the diver’s equipment was in place, as well.
    But it seemed MacClary hadn’t finished her interrogation. She cradled the meteorite as if it were as fragile as a newborn. “Do you know when this map was carved?”
    Merrit shook his head. Sweat stung his eyes. It was late afternoon, and the flybridge deck overhead provided no shade from the sun.
    “Nine thousand years ago,” she said.
    Merrit thought he had heard this before, but it was just a number, no different from millions or billions.
    “Nine thousand years,” MacClary repeated softly. “When historians tell us our ancestors were just beginning to settle in the first villages, just beginning to learn about agriculture.” She gazed at the incised meteorite. “The heliocentric solar system in this map—with the sun in the center—doesn’t even show up in ancient writings until Aristarchus of Samos—270 B.C . Almost seven thousand years
after
this was carved. Even then, the idea wasn’t generally accepted until Copernicus proposed it seventeen hundred years later. And Jupiter’s four major moons, Saturn’s rings—you can’t see those with the naked eye. They don’t turn up again in the astronomical records until Galileo recorded his own observations through his first telescope in 1610. So how is this map possible?”
    MacClary was speaking as if she were alone, as if she weren’t on a slowly rocking dive boat under a blazing sun in the middle of nowhere.
    “Can I move into the shade?” Merrit asked. He made himself sound exhausted, unthreatening.
    MacClary gave no indication that she’d even heard him, still lost in contemplation of the artifact, so he acted. “Right. I’m sitting in the shade.” He dropped to his knees and awkwardly shifted his body until he was sitting against Renault’s body. “Okay.” He began working his hands behind his back.
    Taking no apparent notice of his movement, MacClary gently replaced the artifact in the cooler, then stood to face him, answering the question she’d just asked herself. “There’s only one explanation, Merrit. You must know it as well as we, or you couldn’t be finding our sites before we do.”
    Merrit kept his silence.
    “You won’t tell me, will you?” MacClary fingered her pendant cross as if drawing strength from it; she seemed to make a decision. “May the gods forgive you your desecration.” She spoke with a strange mixture of pity and contempt. “Because I won’t.” She raised her hand, signaling the white catamaran to come alongside the boat.
    Merrit heard the catamaran’s engine growl to life, and when MacClary’s dive boat bumped into his, he was rocked forward, away from Renault’s body. But that no longer mattered.
    One of