A River Divided Read online

  With the aid of the loupe lenses and dissecting forceps, she slowly unfurled the fragile papyrus. Her heart fluttered like a trapped butterfly when the scroll cracked. It had broken into four pieces by the time she flattened it between two glass plates.

  She feared it was in danger of disintegration. What am I doing? I don’t have the training for this; I cannot protect it; I cannot preserve it.

  However, the find was hers; the opportunity was hers too.

  Slowly she traced the letters on the glass with her finger. They were Greek. Many of them were legible; the symbols were exactly those her grandfather had taught her. But there were no spaces between words—it was all one continuous flow and all in upper case.

  She jotted down the letters, guessing where she could, using “x” where illegible, consulting her dictionary when she could not understand a word. It took hours to decipher something of what was written.

  Thou art gone silence has fallen upon our ears xxxxxxxxxxxxx minds xxxxxxxx Thy bones to speak xxxxxxxxxx lift the darkness that has xxxxxxxxx spirit May the cross xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx the symbol xxxxxxxxxx blood that flowed xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx fountain of redemption xxxxxxxx Rest here Righteous One xxxxxxxxx splendor xxxxxxxxxxxxxx to rebuild xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx dead The prophecy xxxxxxxxxxxxxx for the day xxxxxxxxxxx Thou shall be xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx not by two not by xxxxxxxx.

  The papyrus was speaking to her after two millennia of silence.

  As a scientist she wanted more evidence, much more, but her instinct told her she was right. It mentioned rebuilding—this had to refer to the Temple in Jerusalem. Therefore, the reburial in the desert must have taken place after the destruction of the Temple by the Romans, after AD 70. It mentioned the cross and blood. This was real evidence. This and the piece of wood. Who else could it be?

  On the other hand, not all the script was legible. The “x” was everywhere. All this indecipherable text could spell out precisely who it was—and it could have nothing to do with Him. Hyperspectral imaging could help decipher the rest.

  She started photographing the papyrus. Would the photos be good enough if the original is damaged?

  She picked up the other container, the sphere. It was heavy for a small object, 3.23 kilograms on her set of kitchen scales. As she cleaned the surface with a brush, an elaborate diagram began to emerge. The carving showed the right brain hemisphere as it would appear to an observer positioned above the brain.

  When she finished, there it was, a detailed and accurate representation of a hemisphere. The tracing depicted the sulci, the grooves that give the surface of the brain its wrinkled appearance. The lateral sulcus, the Grand Canyon of the brain, was appropriately the deepest carving. To her surprise, other common sulci were also represented. The diagram could have been used in a modern neuroanatomy tutorial. She marveled at it as she had at the Leonardo da Vinci tracings many years earlier when studying anatomy.

  The sphere has to contain the brain.

  What if she ruined it by exposing it to the atmosphere? She did not have the right equipment. She did not have the right training. She did not have qualifications to dig a hole in her own backyard. Even professional archeologists would tremble at the idea of tampering with this. And then, what exactly could she do with the evidence? She had already broken the law to get it. Michael’s concerns about the Church were the least of her worries.

  She could not open it. She should not open it. A find of this magnitude, if it were Him, was not hers to tamper with.

  If I compromise the evidence, I will destroy a part of human heritage and become the laughing stock of science.

  Exam results were due the next day, but Evelyn could not concentrate, losing track of whether an idea had come from an earlier paper or the one she was currently marking. Words kept blending with one another. It was futile to continue.

  Sleep was not possible either. She wanted to share her find; but, strangely, she was also content to keep it hidden. Sipping chamomile tea, she mulled over whether to call Michael. She was dying to talk to him, to show him there were real data consistent with her hypothesis, but this did not feel like the right moment. They had dinner plans for the following evening, so she would be seeing him soon anyway. But what if he does not agree with my inference? If he derides me, I have no one to turn to.

  As it stood, the totality of evidence was weighty—a skeleton from the appropriate period, marked with injuries consistent with crucifixion and buried together with relevant artifacts. But none of this was conclusive. The papyrus supported the hypothesis, but it was not enough. Michael, or anyone else, could argue she was proving preconceptions.

  There is no way the sphere does not contain the brain. But what would that prove? On the other hand, there was the piece of wood. “INRI” was as close as you can get to a nametag. But it did not say INRI—only one letter remained. I have to talk to Michael.

  She had slipped into considering him just a friend, a brother. When he had first come into her life, it felt she had finally found the person she had been waiting for. Everything about him fascinated her—love had colored it all. But after only three months she was bereft of feelings for him. Nothing he did had caused it. It was just that love had left. He wanted commitment, and, although he never intentionally pressured her, it was so obvious he adored her that it became pressure in itself. His very happiness seemed to depend on her. It was too much. She felt trapped. The rest of her life was being mapped out for her—marriage, kids, old age—and all of this with someone she did not love. Logically, he was the perfect man, but love was never—

  Lightning illuminated the windows and was almost instantly followed by deafening thunder. It must have struck something very close. Might it have been the tallest tree in the block, her beautiful Sydney blue gum?

  Evelyn did not want to lose Michael altogether. It had been selfish to offer only friendship when it was so obvious he wanted more. She knew how he felt, having suffered a similar rejection after falling in love in first-year university. Her boyfriend had moved on following their breakup, but she had remained fixated on him. No one else had his eyes, his smile, his humor. If only she could hate him instead of love him, she would have found the right person by now. About a decade after their breakup, he invited her to his wedding. It was torture to see him marry another woman. Yes, love was made in heaven; but hers, in hell.

  And now, the ghost of an old love was killing all future ones. Since that breakup, Evelyn was even more afraid of intimacy. But what could she do? Unlike her sister Kathryn, she had always been reserved. Human relationships were such a hard task. Even Kathryn’s once beautiful marriage had ended in bitter divorce. It is so much simpler to be on your own.

  She was lying in bed—lying in bed while the sphere was concealing its secret.

  Kicking away the covers, Evelyn put on her track suit and headed back to the garage. She had to know what was inside. This is a step I have to take, whether Michael supports me or not. I will just have to do my best to protect the integrity of the brain—if that is what is in there.

  Switching on the fluorescent lights, she went straight back to her workbench. Avoiding the carving, she weakened the structure of the sphere by drilling along its equator, where the two halves had been joined. With a screwdriver, she split the vessel in two.

  An exquisitely preserved brain appeared. It looked like a cauliflower.

  Evelyn put on a fresh pair of gloves and gently eased it from its resting place.

  She held the brain in her palms.

  The meninges had been removed, rendering the cortical mantle visible. The ancient artist must have drawn that very brain because the carving on the sphere surface corresponded to the groove pattern of the right hemisphere. The lateral sulcus was so deep that it made the temporal lobe look like the thumb of a boxer’s glove. Modern plastination methods could not have produced a better preservation of structure. What chemicals did they use to preserve the tissue?

  The brain was a dull brown, like the clay that had
protected it all this time. As people age, brain matter wastes and grooves passively expand. Here, however, the sulci were thin, indicating it belonged to a young adult, in agreement with evidence from the skeleton.

  Whoever preserved the brain must have had a sense of its importance. The papyrus was in Greek, consistent with the Hellenistic influence in that period. She thought of the ancient Greek physician Hippocrates. He was the first to conclude that from the brain, and from the brain alone, arise our pleasures, joys, laughter and jests, as well as our sorrows, pain, grief and tears.

  I am getting ahead of myself again, she thought. The only scientific evidence I have is that the carbon dating matches.

  The brain was flexible and, to her relief, it did not crumble. It was much firmer than jelly, nearly as stiff as rubber. Of the twelve cranial nerves, only the olfactory was missing, as were parts of the olfactory bulb. She took photographs from all angles and then weighed the brain—1.403 kilograms she recorded in her notebook. This was about 100 grams above average, but the method of preservation could have altered the weight.

  Driving rain was again drumming the garage door.

  Using a scalpel, Evelyn cut out a block of approximately one gram from the primary motor cortex of the right hemisphere and placed it in a vial. The structure of cells in the different layers of this part of the cortex was well known and she was familiar with the normal morphology.

  I need to get to my lab. If only the ancients have used a process that preserves neuronal integrity!

  There was more lightning, followed immediately by thunder. The dangerous thing to do was to point an umbrella to that sky.

  Evelyn endured the rain as she hurried to the campus of The University of New South Wales, the vial with the tissue firmly in her hand. Following the steps on the slope south of the library, she reached the Biological Sciences Building through the wind tunnel created by the tall buildings of the upper campus.

  Once in her laboratory, she released her vise-like grip on the vial and tried to dry her hair with a towel. Pushing back her wet fringe, she began to work.

  Finally, she was back in her area of expertise. Amateur archeologist she was, but she was also a professional geneticist. She snap-froze the tissue on dry ice and positioned it on the stage of a cryotome, a sophisticated salami-slicer used to cut frozen tissue into serial sections. She obtained 40-micrometer thick sections and placed them on a gelatin-coated glass slide.

  The unstained tissue looked amorphous, revealing virtually none of its secrets. After drying the sections on a hot plate, Evelyn advanced the slide through baths containing xylene to remove the fat, then progressively through decreasing concentrations of alcohol to rehydrate the tissue in preparation for staining for Nissl substance to reveal the neurons.

  Impatiently she waited the five minutes for the uptake of stain into neurons. She looked at her nails—they needed painting too. After washing off the excess stain, she passed the tissue through an ascending series of alcohols and then into xylene, in preparation for cover-slipping with another piece of glass for permanent preservation.

  She placed the tissue slide on the stage of her Olympus microscope and turned on the light that shone through a condenser onto the undersurface of the slide. She closed her eyes for a moment, knowing the evidence was already there.

  After a few seconds of tense immobility, she opened her eyes. The cells were shining bright blue and were arranged like stars in constellations.

  When she moved the stage of her microscope to different fields of view, she was an astronomer training a telescope on unexplored sky. The cells were beautiful and their arrangement a work of art. She was the sole witness of a spectacular pyrotechnic show.

  Using the forty-times lens objective, she zoomed in on one neuron, a giant pyramidal cell, a Betz cell, located in the fifth layer of the cortex. She could see the structure of the neuron, including its nucleus, where the genetic information was stored.

  It was a flower whose closed petals kept the secrets of how to construct a life.

  The stain was taken up not only by the cell body, but also by the closest parts of the dendrites, tentacles with which neurons communicate—exchange protoplasmic kisses in an epic love journey.

  The cell looked as though it had been obtained from an on-the-spot biopsy during surgery, rather than from 2,000-year-old tissue.

  She zoomed out and looked at the distribution of the cells again. This was not just any brain. These were not just any cells. These were the neurons responsible for a historic change in civilization.

  All the ideas came from here. All the courage was generated here. All the suffering was endured here.

  Bent over the microscope, Evelyn closed her eyes again as she recalled the discovery of the ossuary and the stigmata on the skeleton.

  She opened her eyes. Arranged in six neat layers were giant pyramidal cells, granule cells, spindle cells, stellate cells, chandelier cells.

  These are the gems of His mind.

  Dawn found her at the microscope.

  It had been a sleepless night, like those she had spent earlier in her career. Evelyn was then extracting fragments of DNA from a preserved specimen of the thylacine, the beautiful Tasmanian tiger, a species that became extinct in the 1930s. She had never worked harder in her life, clocking over a hundred hours a week for seven months straight.

  Two of her articles were published in Science and became citation classics. She had developed the theoretical framework for a novel approach to cloning and had been on the verge of proving its success through experimentation with the tiger.

  She was shattered when her director ordered the project be abandoned because of funding shortfalls. The dream was lost and all the effort behind it.

  And yet, now nothing seemed lost. From the literature and more so from her own attempts to resurrect the Tasmanian tiger, she knew the principles of how to produce a clone. She wondered whether there was viable DNA in the neurons in front of her.

  If there were viable DNA, an extractable nucleus, it might be possible to clone. It might be possible to clone Him.

  She buried her face in her hands.

  Chapter 3

  HYPOTHETICAL

  She has been up to something with those artifacts, but she hasn’t kept me in the loop.

  He had helped her dig them up; he had helped her bring them home. He had shared the risk. But not a word. Maybe the dates didn’t match and she was lying low. Even if she had disconfirming evidence, she should have told him.

  Michael had arrived early for dinner with Evelyn and chosen a table in the outdoor section of the Barzura restaurant, on the footpath with sweeping views of Coogee Bay. The sun was retreating from the beach, but was still illuminating Wedding Cake Island, a small outcrop of rocks on which waves broke, frothing like frosting on a cake. It had been a humid summer day, but now a refreshing landward wind brought relief and the faint scent of seaweed.

  He could not keep his eyes on the crossword puzzle. A four-wheel drive slowly cruised by, the driver searching for parking. After it passed, he saw Evelyn striding toward him from halfway down the beach, her long white skirt wrapping around her legs, her brown hair whipped into a frenzy by the breeze. Is that triumph in her walk?

  He folded the paper when she arrived. He was taking no prisoners. “What was in the containers?” he asked as she bent down to kiss him.

  “Hello to you too,” she said, handing him her notebook. “A scroll. There was a scroll in the cylinder.”

  “Was it legible?”

  She sat opposite him. “Some of it. And it’s not inconsistent with the hypothesis.”

  “The hypothesis,” he repeated as he scanned the page. There were notes on the artifacts, and the translation of sections of the papyrus. As he read the scattered words, he felt a sense of vertigo. “It’s not inconsistent. But are you sure this is what it says?”

  “I checked it time and again. It’s Greek of the post-Hellenistic period.”

  He looked at he
r. “And the other one?”

  “The carbon dating is consistent too.”

  Her voice was velvet, but her words were missiles. “And now what?” he asked. “What will you do?”

  She changed seats and sat next to him. Her hair was unkempt and she wore no make-up. “I don’t know. I don’t know where to go from here. I surely need more evidence.”

  He took a sip of his wine. “You are in a bind. And you look it. How can you have these relics in your garage and keep quiet?”

  “But how can I publish anything without incriminating myself?”

  “You don’t have to say you took anything. You just reveal the location. There is so much there. It’s still possible to make it all legitimate, if that’s what you want.”

  She leaned toward him. “The other one—at first, I couldn’t bring myself to open the sphere, but then I couldn’t resist… The brain was inside. The brain. So well preserved. And do you remember those carved lines? They depict the sulci of that very brain.”

  She was really close to him. “Your hair is all over the place,” he said as he reached to push it back. “It hides your pretty face.”

  She caught his hand and held it. “Michael, I might be able to extract viable DNA from a brain cell.”

  “DNA?” he echoed. “What for? What could you do with it?”

  Evelyn was biting her lip.

  “You said ‘viable,’ didn’t you?” She remained silent. Silence to Michael meant only one thing. “What? No … No,” he said and took his hand back. “If we suppose you’re right about the skeleton, you have made a discovery, a discovery without precedent.” He shook his head. “And you’re throwing it all away. And to chase … what?”

  “Michael, it’s just speaking hypothetically.”

  “Rubbish. You are not speaking hypothetically.” He recalled the way she had worked at the ossuary—the squint of her eyes against the rosy desert light, the furrowing of her brow as she focused the camera; the graceful, easy movements of her long slim legs, bending and extending as she crouched over the relics to photograph them. The little flower, the yellow flower she found and talked to. How could it all have come to this?