The Source - Michael Cordy [11]
'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.'
5
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