Paradeisia: Origin of Paradise Read Online Free

from the steel cable like a giant pendulum.  He folded his hands over his chest and took another deep breath.  There was a loud metallic twang from up the tower and he felt the machine beginning its descent.
     
    Doctor Zhou Ming-Zhen was now forty-two years into his paleontology career.  His last educational acquisition had been his second PhD, this one in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology from Stanford, awarded over twenty years ago.  He was now the head of the Chinese National Academy of Sciences Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.
    His childhood, burdened by heavy expectations, had done little to contribute to his success in the field.  His late father had been a Communist Party official in a smaller town, relatively poor compared to the officials in Beijing.  His mother, still living and now placed in a monolithic assisted living facility housing thousands of the elderly, had been a homemaker.  The two of them had presented a dichotomy of nurturing values: on the one hand he was coddled and spoiled, but on the other he was chastised and scolded with the constant weight of the family's success on his shoulders.
    When his father, through the Party, secured the scholarship for him to attend university, he was dispatched with the anticipation of greatness.  None in his family had attended higher education.  But when he secretly chose Paleontology as his course of study, his parents were devastated, angry.  How could he improve the family fortunes by scratching the ground for old bones?  He was a fool, his mother said.  He shamed his family, said his father.
    And now, forty-two years later, he agreed with them.  He was known the world over not merely as a paleontologist, but, as the greatest fraud in the history of paleontology.
    This came about through a chance discovery in the Gobi—during a routine fossil dig two years ago.  What he and his team of students found there in the desert was something so astonishing that all his years of study and practice could never have prepared him for the firestorm that it unleashed.
     
    As he descended down towards the deep interior of the ice, he desperately wished he would never have stepped foot on the Gobi, that he had listened to his parents and become an engineer.  But here he was, dropping into the dark unknown, not knowing whether he would return at all.
     
     
    United Nations Security Council
     
    Doctor Matthew Martin was sitting at the front row of the vast audience that had gathered at the United Nations Security Council chamber.  The chamber was airy, expansive.  A large painting ornamented the front of the room with a giant semi-circular desk situated below it.  The top of the auditorium was circled with blacked-out glass where Doctor Martin knew an army of the international press was busy broadcasting the event to the world.  The fact that he knew the event had garnered so much global attention made him all-the-more nervous.
    When he had received the call from Secretary General Kwame Aidoo, he had scarcely been able to believe it.  His work of the last eleven years had received positive attention mostly only from the lunatic fringe.  Now was the chance to provide his discoveries with the mainstream exposure they deserved.
    Science had been meddling with the tinker-toys of the universe; physics, biology, anthropology and the like, he thought.  Now it was time to move beyond that.  Now, it was time to play with the big boys.  And he, Matthew Manley Martin, was going to be the harbinger.
     
    He was scared senseless.
     
    Sitting next to him, his fiancée squeezed his trembling hand.  “How are you?” she inquired, her voice smooth and controlled, as always.
    “Developed a bit of a stomach upset, I'm afraid,” he replied.
    She shook her head, trying to hide a grin, “Have you, pet?  Shock me.”  Then she said, “You're quite pale.”
    “Am I?” he inhaled fretfully.  “Well, we can only hope they listen to my words