The Prophecy Overground Chapter Four

‘What did you say he wanted to talk about?’ asked Maria. ‘Who did he say he was?’

‘Razjosh, the Elder,’ Kaleem repeated. He had already told his mother this three times. ‘He didn’t say what he wanted.’

‘Razjosh … Razjosh….,’ muttered Maria. ‘Which Elder, though? Did he say?’

Kaleem looked blankly at his mother.

‘What sorts of Elders are there?’ he asked. ‘I just thought Elders were Elders.

‘They all have a different function,’ said Maria. ‘Just like the Heads of Services do. I remember when ….’

Maria stopped suddenly.

‘You remember what Mum?’ asked Kaleem. Was she going to give something away at last?

‘Well, all I know is that there are about two hundred of them and they’re just there to, well, give advice and guidance.’

‘But who are they really Mum? How do they get to be Elders?’ asked Kaleem. It seemed unfair. It was as if people just became Elders, that they didn’t do anything to deserve it.

‘I don’t know,’ Maria said, frowning slightly. ‘They’re just there. They’ve always been there. I think they might be retired Heads, or something. But they do have specialisms. Because when…’

She stopped herself just in time again.

‘Because when what, Mum?’ asked Kaleem. He was finding it difficult to keep the  irritation out of his voice. Why did she have to be so secretive about it all?

They didn’t have time to argue any longer. The communicator buzzed. He was there.

‘Show,’ commanded Maria. Razjosh’s face appeared on the porthole screen.

‘Oh my goodness,’ she said. ‘What have we done to deserve this?

Kaleem shrugged his shoulders. It hadn’t seemed that important when he had first met him. Was it such a big deal, having contact with an Elder?

‘You are welcome, Razjosh the Elder,’ Maria managed to say at last. ‘Kaleem will show you to our apartment.’

Twenty minutes later, Kaleem was showing the old man in. He was surprised at how Razjosh managed the stairs. Kaleem was now used to the two hundred steps between  the surface and their cave. He expected the old man to struggle. He didn’t. He was almost as quick as Kaleem.

‘Mmm, said Razjosh,’ as he came in. ‘These cave homes were so secure and cosy, weren’t they? A pity more people didn’t decide to stay in them. We could have kept the surface beautiful then, couldn’t we?’

‘Can I offer you something to drink?’ asked Maria.

‘Do you still have cave water?’ asked the Elder.

‘Oh yes,’ replied Maria. ‘We have a natural spring near our cave and it is still piped into the apartment.’

‘Ah, such reminders of the old days,’ said Razjosh.

Maria went to the kitchen unit and returned with a glass of water. Kaleem could not understand what was so special about cave water. It was boring to him. They drank it all the time. Maria could not afford the high-density drinks that were now so popular amongst the people in Kaleem’s social group, nor the wines and liquors so loved by their parents.

The old man sipped the water. He seemed to relish it just as others loved wine.

‘Delightful,’ he commented. ‘But now to some even more traditional things.’

Maria looked pale and was biting her lip. She stood with her arms folded across her chest.

‘Won’t you sit down, my dear?’ said Razjosh. ‘I have many things to tell you.’

Maria nodded. She sat down on the edge of one of the chairs. She was frowning slightly.

‘You see, I am here in connection with the Babel Prophecy,’ the old man began.

It was that word again. Maria gasped. Razjosh looked at her intensely for a moment. Kaleem could not decide what to make of the Elder. He looked old, certainly, but  although none of his words or movements was hurried, he was definitely not feeble or slow.

‘Of course, these days, people take little notice of prophecies. Belief in the divine went out when the poison cloud came in,’ he continued. ‘Though its disappearance was  regarded as some sort of miracle, I suppose.

‘Anyway, whether we believe in prophecies or not, part of the role of the Elders is to maintain the effects of the Prophecy.’

This was beyond Kaleem.

‘Effects of the Prophecy?’ he asked.

‘What has to be done according to what the Prophecy has predicted.’

‘But if there’s no such thing as the supernatural,’ replied Kaleem. ‘Why do we have to take any notice of the prophecies?’

‘I didn’t say there was no such thing as the supernatural,’ said Razjosh. ‘I said people had stopped believing in the divine. But that’s not so important. Prophecy is largely a matter of common sense. The clairvoyants - the genuine ones - could see the future clearly. In fact their name comes from the French. It means ‘seeing clearly’. They can see things coming better than the rest of us. ‘

‘French?’ interrupted Kaleem.

‘Another language from another time,’ replied Razjosh.

‘Language?’ asked Kaleem.

‘Which brings us nicely to the Babel Prophecy,’ said Razjosh.

‘The Tower of Babel?’ asked Maria. Her face was flushed now and her eyes were glistening. ‘The tower they built to try to reach God? And were punished by God for being so arrogant?’

‘The very same,’ replied Razjosh. He was looking intently at Maria.

She blushed even deeper. ‘What’s the matter?’ she stammered. ‘That’s not Hidden Information is it?’

‘No, far from it,’ replied Razjosh. ‘That is Golden Knowledge. I  was just curious how you had come to know that.’

Maria shrugged her shoulders. ‘I just heard about it somewhere.’

Kaleem had never heard of Golden Knowledge. There was just what everybody knew and what you weren’t allowed to know, but tried to find out, the Hidden Information.

Razjosh nodded his head and half smiled at Kaleem.

‘Confusing, isn’t it?’ he said, ‘Golden Knowledge is what we Elders know and guard. We reveal snippets of it now and then to those who need to know. Which is what I’m doing now. The Babel Prophecy says there will one day be a very special Peace Child. A Peace Child who can overcome Babel. That means, overcome the difficulties which exist because people speak different languages.  One who can act as a bridge between peoples. All Peace Children attempt to do that. A very special one will succeed.’

‘But why do we need that here?’ asked Maria.

Kaleem was surprised at how fierce she sounded. ‘Everyone on Terrestra speaks Terrestran English.’

‘But not on other planets,’ replied Razjosh.

‘We don’t have contacts with other planets,’ said Maria. Her voice had become quite shrill. She was sitting right on the edge of her chair.

‘We don’t, and we seem not to need to,’ replied Razjosh. ‘But this is a matter of “just in case” and it would seem sensible to keep alive some of the old Golden Knowledge. We have always kept a Peace Child. The current one has grown rather old. It is time to pass on the knowledge.’

‘So, who is this current Peace Child?’ asked Kaleem.

Razjosh looked at him intently, one eyebrow raised.

‘Can’t you guess?’ asked the Elder.

‘You are?’ said Kaleem.

‘Yes, and it’s time to  train up my replacement,’ replied the old man.

‘So, why have you come here?’ asked Kaleem. He knew the answer to that one before Razjosh replied.

‘I think you know,’ said Razjosh. He raised the other eyebrow. ‘So what did you think of my little messages? Have you decoded the Wordtext file yet?’ he asked.

‘Some of it,’ said Kaleem. He realised suddenly that what had been most difficult about understanding the messages had not been so much turning the little black marks on the white background into words, which had meanings he understood. It had been that the total message which did not seem to make any sense. Some of it was clearer, now, though. He understood about the tower, and about what the Peace Child had to do. ‘But I don’t get the bit about the Mother.’

‘Earth Mother. Non-stopes conceptions and all that?’ asked Razjosh.

Kaleem nodded. Maria seemed to be choking.

‘Excuse me,’ she said and dashed out of the room.

‘Yes, well,’ said Razjosh. ‘Even we Elders struggle with some parts of the prophecies. We certainly aren’t clairvoyants. But for most purposes, you can interpret prophecies any way you want. Make of that what you will. But you do agree, that it makes sense that at least one person on this isolated planet of ours keeps in touch with the old languages?’

‘Well, yes, I suppose’ said Kaleem. ‘But why me?’

‘We watch all the young people like yourself,’ said Razjosh. ‘We look for certain aptitudes and attitudes which would indicate a reason for revealing some of the Golden Knowledge. We saw that you did indeed have the right attitude for the Peace Child Project. And we like to check every Peace Child to see whether they fit with the Prophecy.’

‘How?’ asked Kaleem. What attitudes or aptitudes did he have?

‘Well,’ said Razjosh with a sigh. ‘Oh this is a big subject. But one thing which is really, really important, is that you should have an appreciation of what we call otherness. That it exists. And that you can work with it and that it doesn’t have to work against you. It’s something along the lines of the stranger being the friend that you have not met yet. You can’t ignore the strangeness. But you can find the friendship beyond it. And one of the strangest things, of course, is that the sounds which come out of the stranger’s mouth mean nothing to you until you work at learning that language, which you understand better if you understand the speakers better. And you understand them better when you understand their language better. And so it goes on in an ever decreasing circle.’

Kaleem thought of Erik Svenson and Stuart Davidson, and how they treated him because he was a bit different.

‘But I’m the one who’s different,’ he protested.

‘Exactly,’ said Razjosh. ‘And don’t you cope with ordinary people well? Look at how you get on with Pierre LaFontaine and Rozia Laurence. As well as all your teachers and other adults.’

Kaleem blushed at the mention of Rozia.

‘I guess,’ he mumbled. Did he cope with being different? He didn’t think he did.

‘The strange messages I sent to your dataserve were an aptitude test. To see whether you had the right type of learning style and thinking skills to learn the old languages. You seem to have done remarkably well.’

‘Do I?’ asked Kaleem. He had found it so hard working out what the Wordtext files meant and he’d still understood less than half of it, though he had to admit he had found it really interesting.

‘We want to put you on a special programme. You will be exempted from some of your normal schooling, though you will have to keep up with the basics. And we shall need your mother’s permission.’

‘That’s fine,’ said Maria. She was standing in the doorway. Her cheeks were pink and her eyes were shining. Kaleem had never seen her look so animated.

‘That is good news,’ said Razjosh. ‘There will, of course, be some formalities. We shall be in touch shortly.’

Seconds later, he was making his way out of the cave. Kaleem offered to accompany him to the surface, but he shook his head.

‘You now need to get back to those Wordtext files as soon as possible,’ he said.

Five hours later, he had done it. His eyes were sore and his back ached. It had been tedious, matching and cross-matching the little marks from the Peace Child file and the dictionary file. But it had got easier as he went along. He had begun to remember what some of the symbols meant and some of the words. He knew a bit more of the story, from what Razjosh had told him. He now knew that the Prophecy said that there would be many Peace Children, but that one would come who would save the world. And that that Peace Child  would overcome Babel forever. There was still a lot he didn’t understand, about why the Peace Chid was called the Peace Child. But now he had a real idea about the role of a Peace Child and he found it rather exciting. In the end, he’d quite enjoyed this decoding exercise. He’d already learnt a few tricks that  would speed things up if he had to do this again.

‘Replay as voice file,’ he said to the dataserve.

‘Historical, note or storyteller mode?’ asked Tin Man.

Well, it would be good to be entertained. ‘Story-teller,’ he said.

‘Long ago, when Man had just started to live on the Earth,’ the dataserve started, ‘there were only a few people and they all spoke one language. Gradually, as children grew up and new families were made, the people moved more and more from the east to the west. They learned to build homes from baked bricks and strong mortar.

“We ought to show how clever we are,” they said, “and use our great building skills to create a great city. We shall make a great name for ourselves. People will remember us - even when we have spread out to cover the lands beyond where the sky and land meet.”

‘The masons worked hard. The tower, which seemed to lead up to Heaven, was completed. Men and women from the city began to climb up it.

‘However, God was not pleased.

‘“They are trying to be God,” he said. “Because they only have one language and they understand each other, they will be able to do anything they propose. I am the only true god. I shall have to confuse their language and make them move from this place to the four corners of the world.”

‘The people were enjoying their climb to the top of the tower. They were telling each other their news and their stories as they went up. The first began to get near to the top. Suddenly, there was an almighty rumbling. The ground began to shake. The tower began to topple. In their panic, they rushed down the steps or jumped from the tower. One person would hardly understand what another was saying. Many died.

‘Of those who survived, only a few stayed in the city near the tower. The building was never finished. The others moved away to other parts of the world, where they raised their families.

‘The languages continued to change, so that today the people who live in the west cannot understand the people who live in the east.

‘The name of the tower was Babel.’

Maybe we did all start off in one place, thought Kaleem, then spread out and filled Terrestra, just as people went from Terrestra and filled the other parts of the universe. If that was the case, we ought to speak more or less the same language, but we don’t.

The dataserve continued to blink at him.

‘Save and close,’ he commanded the machine.

‘Some story, eh?’ asked Maria. Kaleem turned to  see his mother standing in the doorway. Her cheeks were pink again and her eyes shining. He opened his mouth to ask again what she knew about the Prophecy.

‘You ought to get some sleep now,’ Maria said quickly.