Read Online Advanced Mythology by Jody Lynn Nye - Free Book Online Page A
Authors: Jody Lynn Nye
Ads: Link
proud to be part of the effort to right that balance.
He had no trouble enlisting numerous like-minded, highly trained people to his cause. The main problem they had was the very one they were battling. In order to overthrow the moneyed powers, one had to have money. It’d be a nice irony once he succeeded, but a pain in the down-unders while he was working to achieve his goal. To get his stake money he hired himself and his force out for industrial espionage to the new superpowers, the mega-corporations, under the nom de guerre Dotcommunist. It told everyone what his eventual goals were. He liked the idea of weapons that didn’t rely upon billions in research and development. Stefan had come to him from the former government of an Eastern European power, a former satellite of the former U.S.S.R. His deposed masters had been on the edge, they said, of finding the source of supernatural power. Beach was intrigued. If his sources were right about what they were chasing, they’d have counterintelligence “equipment” that no technological power in the world could equal—or detect.
It wasn’t that the West didn’t know that such things might exist. In response to a Russian effort in the 1950s, the US and other western nations had started chasing psychics and magic, but the effort had never gone anywhere, probably because the scientists working on the research been debunked, ignored, or laughed out of whatever chamber they’d had to go into for funding. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the east had never stopped looking, testing, probing, building on the scant evidence that had made them believe in supernatural powers in the first place. And then the Soviet Union broke up.
The evidence the satellite states had that made them believe in magic was put away into vaults. Everette had seen some of it when he was stationed in the Eastern Bloc: A wealth of documents in an unfamiliar alphabet, written on parchment, leather and primitive paper in inks that laboratory tests showed was made from nut juice, soot, ochre and other pigments. In spite of the materials’ ephemeral nature, the inks had not faded and the papers resisted even the slightest crumble. That alone had excited scientists and scholars. They couldn’t pinpoint precisely when the documents had been made. They defied traditional carbon-dating, but the provenance, the chain of ownership, went back at least to the 15th century, if not before.
But there was more. They had artifacts. They sounded simple: wooden knives that cut as well as steel, a box that kept food, even milk, fresh at room temperature indefinitely, and several other things. In Everette’s estimation, what they were looking at here was forgotten technology, like the architectural skills that had built the Pyramids, moved the trilithons of Stonehenge, not magic, but it was still amazing compared with modern electronics and inexplicable in the face of its great age. He was intrigued. He had never told anyone back home about what he had seen. Only when he left the Foreign Service, citing personal difficulties, did he go back and try to find the things and the people who knew about them he’d seen. The Eastern European governments needed money. Without Soviet money they’d been left behind by the rest of the world and were desperate to catch up. They weren’t willing to sell Beach their goods, but they allowed him access to them. His intention was to build up a spy ring, but only if he could get to the source of these things, if it still existed. The Europeans assured him that it must. They showed him more documents, written on modern paper. That told him that the creators of these goods must be somewhere around.
There was more. He’d read contemporary accounts of people who claimed to have eavesdropped on voices heard in hollow hills and under tree roots. Most statements of that kind would be dismissed by skeptics as the ramblings of the insane or the attention-hungry, but they were
He had no trouble enlisting numerous like-minded, highly trained people to his cause. The main problem they had was the very one they were battling. In order to overthrow the moneyed powers, one had to have money. It’d be a nice irony once he succeeded, but a pain in the down-unders while he was working to achieve his goal. To get his stake money he hired himself and his force out for industrial espionage to the new superpowers, the mega-corporations, under the nom de guerre Dotcommunist. It told everyone what his eventual goals were. He liked the idea of weapons that didn’t rely upon billions in research and development. Stefan had come to him from the former government of an Eastern European power, a former satellite of the former U.S.S.R. His deposed masters had been on the edge, they said, of finding the source of supernatural power. Beach was intrigued. If his sources were right about what they were chasing, they’d have counterintelligence “equipment” that no technological power in the world could equal—or detect.
It wasn’t that the West didn’t know that such things might exist. In response to a Russian effort in the 1950s, the US and other western nations had started chasing psychics and magic, but the effort had never gone anywhere, probably because the scientists working on the research been debunked, ignored, or laughed out of whatever chamber they’d had to go into for funding. On the other side of the Iron Curtain, the east had never stopped looking, testing, probing, building on the scant evidence that had made them believe in supernatural powers in the first place. And then the Soviet Union broke up.
The evidence the satellite states had that made them believe in magic was put away into vaults. Everette had seen some of it when he was stationed in the Eastern Bloc: A wealth of documents in an unfamiliar alphabet, written on parchment, leather and primitive paper in inks that laboratory tests showed was made from nut juice, soot, ochre and other pigments. In spite of the materials’ ephemeral nature, the inks had not faded and the papers resisted even the slightest crumble. That alone had excited scientists and scholars. They couldn’t pinpoint precisely when the documents had been made. They defied traditional carbon-dating, but the provenance, the chain of ownership, went back at least to the 15th century, if not before.
But there was more. They had artifacts. They sounded simple: wooden knives that cut as well as steel, a box that kept food, even milk, fresh at room temperature indefinitely, and several other things. In Everette’s estimation, what they were looking at here was forgotten technology, like the architectural skills that had built the Pyramids, moved the trilithons of Stonehenge, not magic, but it was still amazing compared with modern electronics and inexplicable in the face of its great age. He was intrigued. He had never told anyone back home about what he had seen. Only when he left the Foreign Service, citing personal difficulties, did he go back and try to find the things and the people who knew about them he’d seen. The Eastern European governments needed money. Without Soviet money they’d been left behind by the rest of the world and were desperate to catch up. They weren’t willing to sell Beach their goods, but they allowed him access to them. His intention was to build up a spy ring, but only if he could get to the source of these things, if it still existed. The Europeans assured him that it must. They showed him more documents, written on modern paper. That told him that the creators of these goods must be somewhere around.
There was more. He’d read contemporary accounts of people who claimed to have eavesdropped on voices heard in hollow hills and under tree roots. Most statements of that kind would be dismissed by skeptics as the ramblings of the insane or the attention-hungry, but they were
Similar Books
