“So do I,” Darling said, then pointed at the beads. “And I need it more than you do, I think.”
“It’s okay,” Speedy assured me. A slip of white teeth showed through his fur. “Move fast. We’ve got about ninety seconds before you bipeds need to get dressed again.”
“All right,” I muttered.
We entered the room together.
I was worried we’d somehow damage it—I had this mental image of all of this ancient stuff going poof! and crumbling into dust from the stress caused by our presence alone—but nothing changed. Our footprints didn’t even show up on the floor.
Darling and Speedy began to circle the room, lightning quick, touching nothing as they inspected shelves and alcoves for small, portable treasures. As they spoke in low tones about profit margins, I took a moment to myself to just…be.
The smell of ink hit me again, stronger this time. I noticed papers spread out across the desk, covered in a thin, light hand. It was easy to imagine torchlight, a man humming to himself as he paged through old documents, a warm drink beside him…
The room was cozy. There wasn’t any other word for it. Someone—possible many someones—had loved this place very much, both in their lifetimes and after.
Guilt began to scratch at my conscience as I realized I had violated a sanctuary.
“Last step of the journey, I hope,” I whispered, as I held my arm out and let the beads hang loose. “I know you can’t understand me, but thank you for your help.”
This time, the beads moved slowly, as if the ghost moving them wasn’t quite sure where he had put that…thing…where is it…just had it…where on earth did it go…
Then the beads jumped with an inaudible There!
I followed them across the room, ending at a low shelf beneath a writing desk. Darling was watching me, the expression on her face stuck between fright and bemusement. The beads ran over a line of rolled parchments, like a finger tracing the spines of much-loved books, before stopping on one.
I placed a finger on the very edge of the scroll—carefully—and waited to see if it would dissolve into nothing. When it didn’t, I began to tug—again, so carefully!
It took me maybe a minute to remove this old scroll from its resting place. The slow tugging was almost meditative; I heard Speedy and Darling talking in normal tones, then Speedy shout aloud in a language I didn’t recognize.
Tug, tug, tug.
No sign of Mike or Atlas.
Tug, tug, tug.
The scroll finally came loose, and I sat back on the mosaic floor, cradling it in my hands.
It looked no different from the other scrolls lining the shelves in the room. There was writing along an outside edge, probably for an archival system or such. Other than that, it was merely a rolled-up hunk of heavy not-quite-paper.
Something bumped against my shoulder. Darling, her arms devoid of koalas, held out another oversized flashlight.
“It’s for smuggling,” she said. “There is a hidden compartment around the battery case, to hold documents.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Where’s Speedy?”
“It ran up the tunnel to keep watch,” Darling replied. “I don’t think it likes me.”
“Well, you keep calling him an it,” I said. “But that’s your own funeral.”
Darling helped me package up the scroll, unwinding and rewinding it around the circumference of the battery case to keep it safe. The whole time, she shook her head at the state of the parchment. “This should not be possible,” she said. “The items in this room? Too perfect, too well-preserved.”
I shrugged. “We got lucky, I guess.”
“No,” she said, with a meaningful stare towards the beads hanging from my wrist. “No, we did not. What are those?”
“Junk. Bought them from your cousin,” I said, as I screwed the flashlight back together. “He says they’re old.”
“They look old,” Darling said, as she stood and offered me a hand up. “I would say they are authentic, but I saw them move on their own. What are they? A trick of your husband’s? A small machine, maybe?”
I grinned at learning that any sufficiently advanced weirdness is indistinguishable from technology. Good to know. “Maybe. Did you get what you wanted?”
“Maybe.” She smiled, too. “Your animal helped me find some lovely pieces. Many private collectors will be very happy with me, I think.”
We moved to the doorway and Darling clicked off her light. Both of us paused in the dim light of the Nymphaeum before we had to cross back into the modern world.
“An amazing discovery,” she said quietly. “I am glad to have been part of it.”
“This could be yours, you know,” I said. “I was serious when I said that I don’t want the credit. I could spin the story to claim that the cyborgs were involved, but that’ll just create more questions for OACET. It’ll look better for us if a team of noted antiquities brokers were giving me a tour and then…oops! Hey, look what we found.”
“I am happy with myself,” Darling said. “And I want nothing to do with my cousin. He can have his name in the journals without mine beside it.”
“What about your mom?” I asked.
Her face went tight. “What about her?”
“Um…she’s sick, right?” I said, backtracking through my mindfiles to remember how I had learned—Right. The café in Athens. Speedy. Koala superhearing and eavesdropping on their conversation. “I think Atlas mentioned it.”
“Ah,” she said, as she bowed her head. “Fame is overrated. Money is not.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
As such things go, the aftermath of discovering an ancient library is just slightly better than unraveling a massive government conspiracy. They’re kinda similar, though: at first, nobody really believes what’s happened, and when you give them enough proof to choke a horse, they think you’re trying to trick them. Then, after the experts weigh in and say you’ve actually done what you’ve claimed, the world goes ever so slightly berserk.
Since Atlas wasn’t willing to take the sole credit for the discovery, we blamed the whole mess on the koala.
In the press conferences, Speedy sat on the podium or the table or the armrest of the interviewer’s chair, and lied his butt off. He said that in his work with the Smithsonian, he had come across a scrap of a rumor that the library at Rhodes had been located underground, and that a second entrance was in the Nymphaia. Photographs of the recent renovation of the Nymphaia suggested this entrance might still exist.
What? No, he wasn’t going to tell them where he found this information, or how he could tell there was a hidden entrance concealed behind solid rock from a few photographs. You think he’s going to do their jobs for them? Fuck ‘em.
Speedy is an asshole, true, but assholes are incredibly useful and having one improves the overall quality of your life.
We ended up with the story that we were blissfully touring the acropolis when Speedy slipped out of our hands and sprinted into the Nymphaeum. Someone had left the gate unlocked so we ran after him to pull him out of the fragile archeological site, but by the time we got to the pool, he had already opened the hidden door.
OACET’s hands were clean, and Speedy didn’t give one single shit that his (paws) weren’t.
Atlas looked great on camera, by the way. He was finally earning his keep: we would have been up Shit Creek if one of the country’s most reputable antiquities brokers hadn’t been with us. Atlas’ first phone call had been to his contact at the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes, and they had a team on-site within thirty minutes.
Since Darling didn’t want in on the action, I gave her a giant chunk of money as a retainer, and sent her away until the press got bored with us. The thief sent me daily updates from a hotel on the other end of the island, along with her ever-growing list of expenses.
Whatever. If a paid week of spa days at a five-star resort bought her silence, it was worth it.
As for me and Mike?
&nbs
p; When we weren’t doing interviews, we spent our time talking about the ghost of the library.
I wanted to apologize. I hadn’t realized that locating the library would be the end of it for him. He had stayed there for maybe thousands of years, and he had helped us. Now? His sanctuary was public knowledge.
By the way, that ghost who had helped us?
Archimedes himself!
We had managed to speak with Helen again. The queen said that Archimedes had retreated to a quiet island until the living humans left his home alone. Remember how I said that Speedy had started shouting in another language when we were exploring the tomb? That was when he told Archimedes to clear out his stash and get anything he wanted to preserve to safety. All of the work he had done over the centuries? Well, from what the experts at the Museum told us, the materials in the library all dated to before the great earthquake, so at least Archimedes had managed to save his best stuff.
Still. In my mind, we had driven a very old man from his home.
Mike offered old zen kōans instead of advice, all of which sounded lovely until you realized that they had multiple meanings, and that if you dug around in those then it was obvious he thought we had driven an old man out of his home, too.
I was beating myself up over the whole thing but good.
In the meantime, we studied the scroll.
There was a ton of information on that scroll. Short version? It was a firsthand account of how Archimedes was able to create a device like the Antikythera Mechanism without any messing around with weird supernatural sources.
Yes!!!
Mission accomplished, folks! We didn’t have to worry about any wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey aftershocks such as, oh, being wiped out of existence.
Long version?
Well, it’s an incredibly cute story, so here’s the full translation. [18]
__________________________________________________
I am reluctant to put down these words, as they will show how my greatest discovery may have been made while I was relieving myself in the woods. Honesty, however, is the mark of the furious cocksnack and holy balls, woman, I could be watching Dancing with the Stars reruns, [19] so I shall endeavor to preserve this event as it happened.
Poliadas, a good friend and a generous one, declared I had been spending too much time alone, and took me from my workshop to the nearby forest for a day’s rest. After a pleasant meal of fish and wine, I felt that telltale pressing upon my bladder, and walked a good distance from my friend so as not to show him the fate which was about to befall his generous repast.
I began to water a pile of fallen leaves. By chance, the weight of a portion of my urine fell within the bowl of a leaf. I watched as the leaf tipped forward. I thought the leaf would tumble from the pile, but when the liquid emptied out, the leaf righted itself. This happened many times, until I found myself to be out of urine.
Finding this to be an unusual behavior for a leaf, I bent and examined the mechanism that allowed a cup to be filled, then emptied and righted. Beneath the leaf I found two slim sticks, laying in a cross. One of these sticks was long and fixed; the other, short and flexible.
I rushed back to Poliadas’ table. My friend was not around, having walked in the opposite direction to find his own private spot in the woods, so I seized a jug of wine and ran back to the leaf and the twigs. I repeated the process of pouring liquid into the leaf, and watching it empty and return to position.
Over and over, I poured wine into the leaf. I found the shorter stick to be the source of the action, where it was forced to submit to the changing weight of the leaf. Once freed from this burden it sprung up, renewed! But! The shorter stick could only climb so far and no further, its upward movement fixed by the length of the longer stick.
Most interesting was that I learned the rate at which I poured wine into the leaf did not affect the response, merely how long it took to occur. I found a handful of soil, and poured this into the leaf—as with the liquids, the leaf shook loose its load when it had taken just enough and no more.
I continued to observe this process until the old leaf could no longer ignore the pressures I put upon it, and its structure crumbled away. When I looked up, I found Poliadas staring at me, before his eyes moved to the now-empty jug of wine.
“Archimedes,” he said, saddened at the loss of the wine. “Why are you playing in the dirt like a boy?”
“Look,” I said, and duplicated the weight of the leaf with my finger. The shorter stick obliged, and bent beneath it. “This is amazing!”
“Archimedes,” my friend laughed. “What could be of interest to you in such a thing?”
“Here we have a connection between two objects, and this connection is controlled by weight,” I replied. “This force is generated by the one, and limited by the other.”
“Ah.”
“Have you heard of the water clocks of Ctesibius?” I asked him. It was a fool’s question: such clocks were famous works of art, controlled by gears and powered by water. “They have a similar operation, but rely on the force of water to function. Imagine, Poliadas, a clock that does not need water to drive it!”
“Impossible,” my friend said, and his was a brilliant mind so he knew I’d listen to his words. “The action of the clock cannot occur without water. The clock’s movements require a source of power.”
He was right, and I pondered the problem for the next seven weeks.
I built many clocks during this period, all the while trying to find a means of driving them without the need for water. I came across many solutions, but all of these were temporary. I had no way to store the power needed to maintain an accurate clock.
Out of frustration, I built the simplest device that I could—three gears turned by a hand crank. I operated this device for hours, writing notations on each gear, observing its functions with the hope that I might become inspired with a strategy through which such a simple device could be powered.
No solution to that problem presented itself. Yet, as I stared into the gears and watched the small black inks of my notations move in a predictable pattern, I could not help but observe how the gears provided a regularity of cycles. I found myself constructing equations from these notations, and realized that while I had not been able to solve the problem of the clock, I might be able to create a new type of machine.
I began to experiment again, but this time I ignored the matter of earthly time and instead applied my studies of heavenly cycles. I was able to construct an orrery of bronze, and could use this to predict the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets.
And then, after that first orrery worked, Archimedes got more creative and made the same thing, only bigger and more complex. A few kings thought that this was awesome and hired him to build other, bigger shit, and Archimedes wrote all of this down before he built the Mechanism anyhow so the rest of this manuscript is irrelevant. I’m fucking done here; let’s go get falafels.
__________________________________________________
Mike and I thought that this story was the best thing since unsliced bread. There was no way we could deprive the world of it—or Archimedes, as it was such a catchy tale that it would help fuel his reputation—so we decided to put it back.
No reason for us to hold on to it, right? Thanks to this scroll, our work in Greece was done.
I slipped the scroll into Darling’s flashlight thief-case, and Mike and I went to revisit Archimedes’ library.
It took us maybe eight seconds to learn that getting an item into an ancient library was much more difficult than sneaking it out.
If this had happened when we were back home, I would have called on Ben or another friendly powerful ghost to pop the scroll into its resting place. But? Just like how I’ve never seen a ghost outside of the United States, I’ve also never seen an American ghost in another country. Maybe it’s a territorial thing, I don’t know, but Mike and I were on our own. I sure as hell wasn’t about to call Helen and ask her to play
errand girl.
We waited until lunch before heading to the acropolis, as we figured that was the most likely time to have a low ratio of guards to scientists. Nighttime was ridiculous: the threat of modern-day tomb robbers had motivated all of Rhodes to play sentry. None of the locals were going to allow their treasures to be taken from them, and since nearly twenty percent of the population was unemployed, there were a lot of volunteers patrolling the acropolis.
(Hopefully, they’d never learn that one of the first living humans to explore their newfound library had already made off with everything that could be crammed down her very ample cleavage. Um…let me clarify. That wasn’t me; I’m talking about Darling. My cleavage is anything but ample and I had just snagged that one scroll.)
The site was crawling with people. Mike and I were spotted the second we arrived on the hill, and there was plenty of waving and cheering. Another unintended consequence of finding an ancient site? The arrival of all of the reporters who needed to cover the story. These reporters needed to eat and sleep, so they visited the hotels and restaurants, and after hours they visited the clubs… If nothing else came of this, we had given Rhodes some good publicity and a temporary economic shot in the arm. That made me happy; that seemed to make everybody happy.
We smiled and waved back, and began walking through the gauntlet of guards. We made it as far as the inner corridor of the Nymphaeum before we bumped into resistance.
The Nymphaeum had been drained, and the algae had been scraped off and hauled away. Portable dehumidifiers chugged all around the manmade grotto, making sure moisture didn’t penetrate the layers of plastic sheeting that had been hung over the entrance to the library.
I think I had paid for those dehumidifiers and the generator running them…I couldn’t remember. I had written a lot of checks recently.
Anyhow.
They didn’t want us to go into the room. The woman running the operation insisted we stay outside; we could look through the layers of clear plastic, but we couldn’t go inside, oh no.
Greek Key Page 19