Category: Science Fiction Publisher: PublishAmerica
Copyright: Jan 1 2003
What do you think would happen to the only individual on earth in possession of the philosophers' stone?
“Well, gentlemen, rest assured that if this information ever finds its way into the wrong hands, we’ll be entering our new global neighborhood without any monetary unit at all.”
Excerpt
It was the snake that snapped her back into focus. Flipping through one of the books from the stack on the floor, nodding in the embrace of the duct-taped recliner, it caught her eye—the illustration of the gargoyle her grand . . . her father had carved out of balsa wood: a snake biting its own tail, forming a ring. Inscribed within this ring were the words, “One is All.”
Kim read the caption and found the snake’s name was Ouroboros, and Ouroboros was evidently alchemy’s most enduring emblem. The circle symbolized the concept of cosmic unity, in which the heavens suffused with the earth and all matter became interchangeable.
Mm-hmm.
The book was titled The Emerald Tablet: The Alchemist’s Credo. Its pages were thin and brittle, and about the only thing in them that made any sense to Kim was the first sentence of the foreword: From the earliest centuries until today (today being 1886, according to the front matter) the fundamental codes of the Grand Arcanum have remained deliberately cryptic, secrets cloaked in allegories, that only the wise may find their way through the mystical labyrinth.
The wooden gargoyle was on the table. Kim had brought it in from the van. She had come to believe that Nathan Bradford had done his carving from this very picture. . . .
In the third book in the Ember Reign series, the android Orion is missing and the spaceship Orion is malfunctioning. The MIBs are hot on the trail of Megan and her friends. As Megan and her crew try to figure out how to fix Orion, an unknown spacecra