by Amie Kaufman
I can’t bring myself to look at her as I reply. Suddenly she’s just a scavver doesn’t feel like a remotely good enough reason for sacrificing her interests in favor of mine. I promise myself again I’ll find a way for her to earn some money out of this. “This is exactly what I was hoping for,” I say.
She doesn’t seem to notice it’s not an answer to her question. “I don’t suppose all these carvings tell us what sort of traps we can expect?”
“I’m afraid that’s on a room-by-room basis,” I say, carefully testing the next paving stone with my foot, and stepping forward. “We can take some educated guesses, based on what happened to Explorer IV. Some of it will be good, old-fashioned stuff designed to stand the test of time. Falling rocks, spikes that come out of nowhere, that sort of thing. Some of it will be a little more high-tech.”
“I’ve watched all the Explorer videos available online,” she says, taking her lead from me and carefully probing each paving stone with her foot before she steps forward. “And a few classified ones that Mink—that’s my backer—could get hold of. But you’re the expert. What next?”
“That,” I murmur, staring up at the glyphs, “is the question. This sequence here tells us this room is clear, but that the next room will contain our first test.” I move forward gingerly anyway, aware that while I think I can read the glyphs on the walls, I could very easily miss something simply by not seeing the world the way their creators did.
I realize Mia’s not following me and pause. Her expression is troubled, lip caught between her teeth. I’m starting to recognize that as her “thinking” face, but the way her lip dimples is distracting, and I have to stop myself staring. “Mia?”
“I don’t know.” She gives a little shiver, as if trying to shake off a chill. “I just expected this to feel more…alien.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean, this place is like the Pyramids, or that thing in like…Cambodia or wherever—”
“Angkor Wat,” I interrupt, unable to control the impulse.
“Right,” she continues absently, not missing a beat. “That. Or Stonehenge. I mean, isn’t it weird that these temples are even here? Space is infinite, practically, with infinite possibilities and forms for life to take, and we’re exploring a temple that has steps and doorways. It just feels…strange. This could’ve been built by our own ancestors.”
She’s a lot more perceptive than she seems, and I find myself wondering how much of that is my own prejudice, and how much is the fact that she doesn’t let on just how clever she is. “True,” I admit. “Except that the Undying were traveling the stars before our ancestors learned how to make fire—they wrote these messages and went extinct before the first human had figured out how to write.”
“But that’s an estimate,” Mia protests. “They date it with the radiation, right? It could be wrong.”
“Off by a few hundred years, sure. But the stones of this temple have been absorbing that solar radiation for the last fifty thousand years.”
“And still…” she murmurs.
“It’s not so strange. It happens on Earth all the time. Convergent evolution. Two totally unrelated creatures wind up with the same traits because they evolved in similar environments. Think of birds and bats and butterflies. They don’t share any common ancestor with wings, but it turns out it’s a useful development, and so they all ended up with them. Or dolphins and sharks. Completely unrelated, but ended up roughly the same shape, and with a lot of the same features, because they found a niche where those worked.”
“So you’re saying we fill the same niche as the Undying did?” she asks, looking down at herself, then across at me, like she’s sizing us up.
“Could be,” I say. “We can’t know how similar to us they were physiologically, but perhaps there’s something about the way we evolved that made us the most likely to be the dominant species on our planet, and that held true elsewhere. True, there’s no cities or record to indicate they evolved here, but the fact that the Undying chose Gaia to build these structures suggests they could breathe this atmosphere, just like us. It would make sense for two intelligent species who need similar environments to survive to share some traits.”
Mia’s frown lessens a little and she shivers again. “Let’s just get going.”
The archway opens up into a vast cavern, with a yawning abyss a few meters from our feet. Only a narrow stone bridge crosses the chasm to the far side, where a stone door blocks the exit. The bridge itself is beautifully symmetrical, as mathematically precise as one of our own suspension bridges. And though it seems intact, it’s not hard to figure out what fate awaits anyone who makes a wrong step.
“You think it’s as simple as walking across?” Mia’s beside me, the LED on her wrist shining futilely down into the impenetrable darkness below.
I’m scanning the walls, searching for the carvings that will tell me how to solve whatever challenge the Undying have set for us. I stare at the strings of glyphs, letting the translations slowly unravel in my mind. It’s a narrative—a repeat of the story in the original transmission, I think. I take a careful shot of it with my wrist unit. I can translate it tonight, when we stop for time with our breathers.
What’s not among those glyphs, though, is anything by way of instructions for tackling the bridge.
The only thing I can’t account for is a gentle curve etched into the stone above the far door, nothing like the glyphs I’ve been studying, and nothing like the spiral I’m here to find out more about.
There must be an answer here somewhere, but if there is, it’s not in the glyphs I’ve been trained to read. I spend a full hour examining every centimeter of the walls our lights can reach, searching for clues. Eventually, heart in my mouth, I simply step out onto the bridge.
It feels reassuringly solid, though I can feel my heart slamming against my rib cage. Now that I’m shining my light down directly onto the stone of the bridge, I can see it’s not the same stone as the room all around us. It hasn’t simply been carved or built from the rock of the cliffs.
The stone of the bridge is oddly crystalline, striations running through it with faint glimmers that dance away from my vision as soon as I try to focus on them. One moment there’s a pattern to them, and the next moment, just as I think I’m about to grasp it, it’s gone. It’s not quite circuitry, but it’s…something.
And this, the unknown glimmering at me from the stones of the bridge, is what scares me even more than the bridge itself.
Fortunately, the bridge isn’t that long—and it’s been so expertly constructed that despite a chip here and a missing chunk there, it doesn’t even tremble once before I reach the other side, which butts up against the sealed stone doorway to the next chamber. I take my time, searching the surface of the door for any warnings, before placing my hand on it, gingerly. Then my shoulder—then the weight of my whole body. It doesn’t budge. There’s not even a shower of sand or debris for my efforts. And no sign of a handle or any mechanism that would open it.
“Perfututi,” I mutter. After a time I’m forced to carefully make my way back, and that’s when I see it. Scratched into a stone on the side of the bridge, a small shape. Like an afterthought, a quick, last-minute addition carved with nothing like the care of the proper glyphs.
It’s the Nautilus, tucked in out of the way where nobody would see it, unless they were hunting all over the chamber for a clue about how to safely cross the bridge. The word that was with it in the original broadcast isn’t there, but my memory helpfully supplies the grim translation: Catastrophe. Apocalypse. The end of all things.
I suppose at least I can be sure I’m in the right place to solve my mystery. I just wish my spine was crawling a little less while I tried to do it. I drop to my knees, pretending to inspect the bridge itself. Explaining the Nautilus to Amelia would mean exposing my lie.
“Do you hear that?” Mia’s frowning, flashing her light about the room. “A rattling?”
“The
room’s probably channeling wind from the desert outside,” I answer, my eyes still on the shape in front of me.
“Hmm…” Mia’s wandering off to one side, following the sound of that rattling wind. She keeps on talking, but her voice is a buzz in the back of my consciousness, as I carefully photograph the Nautilus—and the line radiating from it, which I haven’t seen before—with my wrist unit.
“Yes,” I say, when there’s a pause that seems to suggest she’s waiting on me, only realizing a moment too late that I don’t know what I’ve agreed to. I snap my head up, and my heart stops. She’s climbed up on a platform to the side of the entrance, one hidden when you stand in the doorway as I was doing. “Check this out, it’s like a latch or something.”
“Wait—wait, don’t—”
But she’s already grasping it, and the ancient mechanism gives way under her fingers, allowing some kind of stone shutter to slide down, away into the rock, opening a channel that unleashes a small-scale gale that half knocks her back with surprise.
While the wind itself is shocking, neither of us are prepared for what it causes—a series of jangling, discordant notes flood the room, forcing us both to clap our hands over our ears. Mia shouts something, trying without success to pull the shutter back up out of its groove to block the wind again.
Forgetting the Nautilus, I run to join her, half furious, half thrilled. “You’ve got to be more careful!” I say over the jarring notes, which are hollow and resonant like a deep-voiced bassoon.
“You said yes!” she retorts.
Deus, I have to pay more attention to what I’m agreeing to.
She spares me the need to explain myself, jabbing a finger downward, where into the stone platform are sunk a series of five holes, arranged in the same curve depicted over the immovable door. “You tell me, Oxford. Think there might be some connection?”
If it were quiet, I’d be forced to admit she’s right. As it is, the noise of the “music,” such as it is, lets me answer her with a shake of my head, and we both lean forward to inspect the shutter, the wind plastering Mia’s hair back away from her face. She drops to her knees, reaching out to cover one of the holes with her hand—and one of the notes cuts out.
“It’s like blowing across a bottle,” she says, moving so her body can cover more of the holes, muffling the cacophony a little.
“It’s bloody awful, is what it is.” I want so badly to admire the Undying in this moment, but the remaining two uncovered holes are just slightly out of tune with each other, making my teeth hurt.
She glances at me, jerks her head to the side. “Stand there in front of the wind, will you? Buy us some quiet.”
I brace my shoulders obediently against the channel, feeling the wind trying to force me away, the holes drilled into the platform are mostly silent now, except for the occasional eddy that slips around me. Now that things are a little calmer, I can see the stone shutter that slid away was that same odd crystalline stone that made up the bridge.
“What do those mean?” she asks, pointing to the few glyphs carved into the wall.
“Nothing useful,” I say. “They’re telling us what we already know—that we have to pass tests—and I think they’re starting to tell the story of the Undying.”
“And that?” she asks, pointing to the curve over the far door, then tracing the holes in the ground.
“I don’t know—it’s not an Undying glyph.”
“Well, it has to mean something, right? Otherwise, why put it there?” She leans forward to shine her light down into the holes, thoughtful. “Maybe it’s not language. Maybe it’s math.”
“Math?” I eye her sidelong, fighting to keep my back pressed against the wind tunnel.
“Yeah. You said their letters are based on math, and the original broadcast was math, right?” She glances up at me. “So maybe this is, too. Like—you know, when you put points on a graph, they make shapes.”
I pause, glancing back at the bridge. From here, you can’t see the Nautilus shape scratched into its other side. What she’s talking about is exactly how my father first found the spiral—equations hidden deep in the Undying code that, when graphed, formed the image that brought me here. I take a careful breath. “There aren’t any numbers, though, no glyphs to—”
“No, not the glyphs—look.” She jumps down long enough to pick up a loose stone, then climbs up again beside me.
Before I can stop her, she’s using the rock to etch lines against the platform. I’m so shocked by her casual defacement of this ancient place that I can’t summon the speech to stop her—I just stare.
She marks out a crossed pair of lines for the axes of a graph, then scratches a curve connecting the holes sunk into the rock. Then she frowns, lip caught between her teeth as she examines the result, tapping her rock against her chin and looking for all the world like one of my father’s colleagues at a tablet with stylus in hand. Then she’s making more marks, a horizontal line through the first hole, another through the second, and so on.
My foot slips, and I give up trying to block the wind. There’s a flood of discordant sound for a few moments before I drop to my knees beside her and cover as many of the holes as my hands and one foot will reach. “I know it’s been fifty thousand years or so, but one might’ve hoped they’d take better care tuning their instruments.”
She blinks, and looks up at me. “Tuning?” But before I can answer, she’s flashing me a huge smile. “Tuning—you’re a genius, Jules. That’s the puzzle. We have to tune this.”
“How does one tune holes in the floor?” I ask dubiously.
“Well…” Mia hesitates, experimenting with placing a hand over the second hole and removing it again, and listening to the awful dissonance between it and the first hole. “If they were pipes you’d just shorten the pipe to…” She looks up abruptly. “Give me your water bottle.”
“My water bottle?”
“Yeah, you’ve got one of those fancy air condenser things, right? It’ll fill itself back up by sucking water out of the air. So we can use that, pour it in the holes here, shorten the pipes.”
I’m reaching for the bottle, all too aware of the preciousness of what I’m handing over. But then, if we don’t make it past the first door, we might as well have an entire swimming pool full of water for all the good it’ll do us. “How do we know what to ‘tune’ the holes to?”
“The glyph. Or graph. Or whatever it is.” She’s gesturing to her etched lines with pride—it’s all I can do not to burst out with all the reasons she shouldn’t have done what she did, scratching graffiti into such a precious find. “The holes are points on this curve, numbers in the equation. If you think of the first hole as a pipe or a bottle full of air, we need to make the second hole half-full—because its point on the graph is halfway down from the top.”
I’m staring at her. “Uh…what?”
She waves away my incredulity. “Just trust me. Math is like the one thing about school I actually miss. Numbers are my thing, they always make sense, they’re always the same. These are fractions. One over one, one over two—half—one over three…” One by one, she’s adding water to the holes. And one by one, the notes are rising in pitch. The second hole, half-full, matches the note the empty hole is playing, only an octave higher. The third note rises until it’s suddenly harmonizing with the first two, making the air resonate.
Suddenly, the defacement of the stone below us isn’t on the top of my list of concerns. The simple brilliance of the puzzle makes me ache to see my father. I’d give anything to hear the intake of breath that always marks a new realization for him, to see the way the lines come in around his eyes when he grins like a teenager. He’d lean in so close his nose nearly touched the stone, then remember his glasses and slide them down, drawing back a little.
“You’re making harmonies with an ancient alien temple, Mia,” I murmur, just to see her look up and flash me a delighted smile. It’s not my father’s smile, but it’s hard to look away from. Sh
e’s hard to look away from, lit up like that.
We finish her work together, filling each hole to the amount specified by the arc etched into the stone, and this time, when I move out of the way, the whole set plays at once.
And it’s a chord. Beautiful, haunting, resonating with the room until the soles of my feet ache with it, until my head’s ringing, the room swaying around me…
But the room isn’t swaying. It’s the bridge.
And with Mia’s voice ringing in my ears, the reminder that maths is music and music maths—somehow, the Undying have tuned this bridge to the same frequency as that chord. It’s twisting on itself, the very stone warping, glimmering in the beams of our flashlights. And just as my heart’s sinking, as I’m thinking we’ve ended our journey before we ever really got started, and the bridge’ll crumble into the chasm at any moment…The door shifts.
The bridge itself is rooted under the door, and with each fluctuation the bridge is nudging the solid stone just a fraction more to the side. A few more seconds and the doorway will be wide enough to slip through.
I don’t have to speak to know Mia’s thinking exactly what I am—that crossing the beautiful stone bridge was one thing when the room was still and quiet. Now, with each side buckling up and down like a wave…
“We just have to go,” I manage, trying not to think of the drop below. “If we stay in the center, the waves won’t knock us off. They’ll just twist around us. I—I’ll go first. You hang back, in case anything goes wrong, maybe you can make it back to the beginning.”
Mia starts to protest, but she glances back at the temple entrance, and I know she’s thinking of the sister she mentioned. She can’t help her if she’s dead. “Fine,” she whispers. “The tech on the other side of that door had better be worth a freaking fortune. Let’s go.”
The buckling bridge under my feet makes me want to throw myself to the stone and hold on for dear life, but I force myself to focus on the destination, not the shifting, wavering path below me. My legs feel more and more rubbery with each step, but I’m telling myself over and over it’s just fear, it’s just exhaustion, it’s just—