The Diamond Moon Read Free

confessor.”
     
“No one below the rank of the knights and elders could connect Linda to the Knowledge.” Her voice betrayed her fear.
     
On screen, the title sequence faded. The final episode began. . . .
    Sir Randolph Mays was a formerly obscure Cambridge historian whose title derived not from his scholarship but from the lavish charity of his youth, when he had given a good part of his inheritance to his college. Popular with his students, he had become an overnight star, a veritable viddie nova, with his first thirteen-part BBC series, “In Search of the Human Race.” Mays had seemed to move through the widespread locations of his show as if stalking elusive prey, gliding on long, corduroy-clad legs past the pillars of Karnak, up the endless stairs of Calakmul, through the jumbled maze of Çatal Hüyük. All the while his great hands sawed the air and, perched atop the neck of his black turtleneck, his square jaw worked to deliver impressively long and ve-hement sentences. It all made for a wonderful travelogue, thickly slathered over with a sort of intellectual mayonnaise.
    Mays took himself quite seriously, of course; he was nothing if not opinionated. Like Arnold Toynbee and Os-wald Spengler before him, he had reduced the whole of hu-man history to a recurrent and predictable pattern. In his view, as in his predecessors’, the elements of that pattern were societies having their own life cycles of birth, growth, and death, like organisms. And like organisms—but with the aid of rapid cultural change rather than sluggish biological adaptation—societies evolved, he claimed. Just what human society was evolving toward, he left as an exercise for the viewer to determine.
    The historical and ethnographic establishments assailed him for his primitive ideas, his dubious interpretations of fact, his loose definitions (What distinguished one society from another? Why, for Mays, did Jews constitute a society wherever they lived but not, for example, expatriate Hun-garians?), but a dozen eminent scholars mumbling in their dewlaps were not enough to deflate public enthusiasm. Ran-dolph Mays had something better than academic approval, something better than logic; he had an almost hypnotic presence.
    That first series ran to numerous repeat screenings and set record videochip sales; the BBC begged him for another. Mays obliged with the proposal for “Overmind.”
The proposal gave even its BBC sponsors initial pause, for in it Mays set out to prove that the rise and fall of civilizations were not, after all, a matter of chance evolu-tion. According to him, a superior intelligence had guided the process, an intelligence not necessarily human, which was represented on Earth by an ancient, most secret cult.
    The first dozen programs of “Overmind” adduced evi-dence for the cult’s existence in ancient glyphs and carvings and papyrus scrolls, in the alignments of ancient architec-ture and the narratives of ancient myth. It was a good story, persuasive to those who wanted to believe. Even unbelievers were amused and entertained.
As Mays knew, and as his immense audience was about to find out, tonight’s episode went well beyond ancient texts and artifacts. It brought Grand Conspiracy into the present day.
    But Randolph Mays was nothing if not a shrewd showman. His viewers were forced to sit through almost the whole ensuing hour of review, during which Mays rehearsed all the evidence he had developed in preceding weeks, thrift-ily using the same locations and replaying bits of preceding shows; only the skeptic viewer would have noted that his thesis was thus reduced from thirteen hours to one.
    Finally he came to his point. “They called themselves the Free Spirit, and by a dozen other names,” Mays asserted—appearing in person now, close up, swiping at the air. “ These people were almost certainly among them.”
    The next image was static, taken by a photogram camera: a fit but aging English gentleman in tweeds