“And what became of Nostradamus?”
“He died in 1566. He had long suffered from gout and naturally predicted his own end, although sources say he was off by a year. Many translations of his Centuries and treatises on their significance appeared in the generations following his death, and remain popular to the present day. Interpreters claim Nostradamus predicted Adolf Hitler's rise to power as well as the explosion of the U.S. space shuttle Challenger in 1986. Biographies of the seer have also appeared periodically. For two centuries the Vatican issued the Index, or a list of forbidden books, and Centuries was always on it.”
“So that was the end of Nostradamus?”
She nodded. “In the centuries since his death, people have credited him with accurately predicting other pivotal events in history, from the French Revolution to the rise of Adolf Hitler to the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001. According to Nostradamus, the world is slated to end in the year 3797. The question is, will the human race still be part of it?”
“And there’s been nothing more since Nostradamus died?”
Zara smiled. “Until now. When nearly four hundred years later, I dug up his book, and was told I alone can prevent the extinction of the human race.”
Chapter Sixty-Six
Sam waited in silence. Smiled and said, “All right.”
Zara asked, “All right, what?”
“How do you think he worked it out?”
“Worked what out?”
“Everything he got right so far,” Sam said. “Originally I assumed he made predictions up, kept them vague, then manipulated the result later, so that it would be reported that he’d predicted the event. Like a psychic, fortune teller, or a spiritual healer.”
“But then?”
“Some of his quatrains were too close to the truth. Even to be manipulated by retrospective analysis. I’ve started to wonder if some of his most useful predictions, as far as career advancements, were too coincidental to occur naturally. So what happened? Did he plan and execute some of the events he described in his quatrains? Was he like a modern day magician using clever tricks, such as sleight of hand, distraction, and setting up fake scenarios to improve the veracity of his storytelling?”
“You think he faked killing King Henry II?”
Sam shook his head. “Maybe he was having an affair with his wife?”
“You’re disturbed. He would have been the one to end up dead if he engaged in some sort of royal affair.”
“Maybe he got under Henry’s skin?” Sam looked at her and smiled. “You know. Planted the seed of doubt. Told him that he would die from a jousting accident. Encouraged him to change his helmets until they became cumbersome, and eventually, provided him with his own seed of self-fulfilling doubt that inevitably got him killed?”
Zara laughed. “I doubt it.”
“So what do you think it really was?”
“He was a true Seer.”
“Really? As a scientist you can’t possibly expect me to believe this.”
She ignored his complaint. “The way he did it wasn’t magical. It was pure science. You see he could follow the outcome of each significant incident, which would lead to another and another, until the final outcome for an event would occur. Meaning at the end of several hundred years, he could predict the outcome of a certain event today.”
“The butterfly effect?”
“No.”
“What then?”
“Compared to our ability to think in advance, Nostradamus was a chess master. He was incredibly intelligent in that way, or he simply had a natural gift for extrapolation. He could see out each line of events, all the way to the end. And each one led to the same disastrous event on earth.”
“The extinction of the human race?”
She nodded, but remained silent.
Sam asked, “How?”
Zara shrugged. “He didn’t say.”
“Okay, so why didn’t he just change things in his time to create the difference needed. Why go walking through the desert, seeking an elaborate plan that spanned centuries and utilized a complex prophecy?”
She took in a breath and sighed, like she knew what she was going to say was crazy. “Because the future’s already preordained. Destined by some higher divinity. It wasn’t that Nostradamus didn’t believe in the butterfly effect, he knew it didn’t work — he’d tried it multiple times without success. He could change small things, but the things which really mattered, simply fought back until the destiny of man returned to its original path. He looked, trust me he looked. But all the alternative lines led to the same catastrophic event which in turn led to the demise of humanity.”
He said, “Fuck with the future and it fucks with you?”
She smiled and shook her head. “No, nothing quite so vulgar or sinister. Simply that new events will occur and those will eventually lead to triggers that cause the same outcome to be achieved.”
“Well that’s just great. So, now we know that the future’s been ordained, and there’s nothing we can do to affect it — what’s the point of living?”
“Exactly.”
“When is this catastrophe supposed to occur?”
“Now.”
“Now when?”
“This year, to be exact.”
Sam’s eyes narrowed. “So, if he knew we were all going to simply vanish… why go to the trouble of burying his stupid book?”
“Because out of the billions of lines of futures that he investigated, just one provided him with an unclear future.”
“He can’t see everything?”
“Everything except the outcome of one event. All he knew was that if that one event occurred, everything afterwards became foggy.”
“As in, the world ended?”
“No, as though a new line had been created with no known future. The only line in which the world didn't end!”
“It was a long shot, but he took it.”
Sam asked, “What was the image of the event that changed everything?”
Zara said, “Me.”
“You?”
“I found his book.”
Sam looked her in the eye, trying to gauge some sort of understanding. “And what does he expect you to do with this book?”
She shrugged. “He doesn’t know.”
“Because of the cinema fragments thing?”
“Probably. He didn’t say. As I explained before, Nostradamus doesn’t see all of the future. Only tiny scenes. Somehow he knows the scene in which I find the book changes the future. We’re at a turning point. A watershed moment, where life can go either way.”
“What’s inside the book?”
“The fifty-eight quatrains that are missing for Century VII.”
“Could you work out anything with those?”
“Not much. I’ll need a lot more time to work it out. At a glance, I doubt there will be much there that I can do to change the future.”
“Let me guess, it’s all a bunch of riddles and poorly written gibberish?”
She cringed. “Sort of.”
“Did he tell you anything useful at all?”
“He said I needed to find an equation he’s never seen, but knows exists.”
“What sort of equation?”
“I’ve nicknamed it the Nostradamus Equation, but he didn’t write it. In fact, he spent a lot of his life trying to find it, and he’s certain I already knew what it was and where to find it, when he wrote to me in his book.”
“But what does it do?”
“Nostradamus only ever saw parts of the future. Like you just said, like tiny scenes from a movie. He documented thousands of these visions over the course of his lifetime, but had no more idea than you or me when these events would occur.”
“And so the equation could be applied to his visions?”