by Richard Farr
Pandora is wrapped in a tarp. Her exposed face looks ghostly, but she has all Morag’s remaining pain meds in her and she’s breathing more or less normally. Morag comes over from the bow to check on her, unwraps the tarp enough to look at her back with a flashlight.
“I don’t think it’s infected, or not yet. But she’s lost a dangerous amount of blood. And there’s no way she can walk.”
She rubs her face, rummages in the bag, silently offers me a small square of chocolate. I’m grateful, eat it at once, immediately wish I’d resisted—I could eat five bars.
“What you thinking about?” she asks.
“I’m thinking about Eggs Benny and a side of pancakes. You?”
“No thanks on the breakfast. Thrown up more times than I can count. If you really want to know, I was thinking about Zeus’s sex life.”
Sometimes Morag says things so odd that there’s no point in trying to formulate a response—you just wait for her to go on.
“Zeus disguises himself as a shower of gold and seduces Danaë—she gives birth to Perseus. To get into bed with Semele, he disguises himself as an eagle—she has Dionysus. For an afternoon of lakeside fun with Leda, he’s a swan—she produces both Helen and Polydeuces. It goes on and on.”
“Guy must have been exhausted.” I start rowing.
“But it’s the same story over and over, in more cultures than you can count. God meets girl. Every single time, the result is crazy sex and a child who’s a half-divine miracle-worker. We tend to forget that it’s the Christian story too.”
“Except in Christianity they skip the sex.”
“Aye.”
“What’s this have to do with anything?”
“I’m not sure. But I keep hearing Bill say, ‘Myths don’t come from nowhere.’ I’m starting to wonder if the Architects messed around with us in more ways than one.”
“You notice you just spoke as if you believe the Architects exist?”
Long pause.
“I do believe they exist, D. I’ll give you that: I do believe they exist. I just don’t believe anyone has a single effing clue what they are.”
Another long pause.
“Which is kind of cool, really. Because it means we get to find out.”
She smiles a hopeful smile, her eyes gleaming. I absolutely love her at that moment—for her optimism, her brains, her sheer naive refusal to let a problem go.
Looking over my shoulder, I can see Kythera much more clearly now, a pale streak of shoreline under dark hills. And a triangular rock appears—only in fact it’s not a rock, but the accidental landmark I’ve been hoping is still there: the prow of a modern freighter that went aground years ago on an islet half a mile offshore. That’s the good news. The bad: now that I have a landmark close by, and enough light to see detail on the shore behind it, I can compare the two and judge our drift. There’s maybe a two-knot current sweeping us southwest, away from the point where I wanted to land.
Pandora groans and begins to wake up. I look again at the landmarks. Every moment is taking us farther from medical help, from the ferry dock, from any hope of catching up with Dad. Really could have used a lucky break at this point.
I take a long deep breath, savor the last aftertaste of chocolate, say a prayer to Neptune. Then I start rowing a race against the sea itself.
By the time we scrape up onto a pocket of rocky beach, an hour later, my shoulders and back are on fire. We manage to half-carry Pandora out of the boat and lay her down, then I take a minute to stretch. A remote piece of coast. No one around.
I have everything worked out, sort of. Load everything into a mesh dive bag, along with some rocks. Lash the bag into the boat. Swim back out, sink the whole thing. Then get Pandora to a clinic. Then get to the ferry.
But this scenario is seriously short on detail, especially how to do those last parts in the couple of hours we have available. I’m still looking over it in my mind when I realize Pandora is awake and arguing with Morag—if arguing is the right word, for someone whose voice is as indistinct as a mouse in the grass.
“Morag, I cannot even stand. No way you can get help for me. Not without missing the ferry. Go.”
“D, help me out here. Make this woman see reason.”
I hesitate, kneel down beside her.
“I’m not dying, Daniel,” she says. “You leave the boat right here, with me. People come to this beach every day. I’ll get help soon enough.”
That’s the big question—will it be soon enough? But she’s right. What can we do? I look at Morag. “It’s four, five miles over that ridge behind us to the port. Steep, tough hike. I don’t even know if we can make it.”
“Go, now,” Pandora says to Morag. “And stay alive.”
I kneel over her and kiss her forehead. “You too.” Then I give her an almost empty water bottle, put the clothes bag over my shoulder, and start walking.
The upward hike is even worse than I expected—dusty, pathless, steep. It’s not made easier by the fact that for a long time, as we ascend, we can look back and see Pandora. She has crawled maybe fifty feet up the beach. She has stopped moving.
“Is she going to make it?” Morag asks.
“Sure she is. Someone will find her soon.” But I look back again, soon after that, and the rest of the beach is ominously empty. She has been reduced by distance to a tiny fleck. Then the angle changes and we lose sight of her.
Another twenty minutes of blisters, gravity, and exhaustion bring us to a white-painted chapel on the summit of a hill. At last we change out of our salt-crusted clothes. I stuff them back into the bag, so that we have something to carry, hoping that we’ll pass as totally unmemorable backpackers, then it’s two or three easy miles on a gravel road that slopes down to the ferry dock. Halfway down, we see the ferry coming in and quicken our pace; we’re lining up for tickets with minutes to spare. At a quayside stall I resist the temptation to draw attention to myself by ordering a whole tray of baklava.
We’re both desperate to rest, but it’s hard to do when you think you’re being hunted and don’t even know who to be suspicious of. Luckily the ferry’s not crowded; the only people who draw our attention—and everyone else’s—are an elderly couple who keep to themselves in a corner. The woman talks constantly, in a low private voice, as if to a child. For a minute I think innocently that her husband is senile. I’m looking out the window, thinking about Dad, when I hear Morag’s sharp intake of breath. The man has looked up. Or maybe that’s the wrong way to put it. Raised his head, anyway. The blank eyes, the mouth, the tongue: he’s a Mystery. His wife gets something out of her bag, and lovingly places it around his neck. A thin white scarf with a golden Seraphim triangle.
Morag finds a Greek newspaper and I do my best to decipher it. Sure enough, more Mysteries everywhere. I can’t read the details, but there are reports coming in from all sorts of wild places, and cities too. Hanoi, Accra, Chennai, Anchorage.
For a while I watch the old man, wondering what really happened to him. Then I go into a daydream about Kit—and even that refuge fails me. I miss her. I think about how painfully obvious I’ve been about my attraction to her, and how infuriatingly, enigmatically, blandly nice she’s been in response. Is she clueless? Is she politely saying, Get lost? I think about the moment when Morag and I arrived at Rosko’s house, and the image of Kit standing over him, apparently rubbing his shoulders. Amazing how quickly, how convincingly my imagination creates more. Kit leaning down. Rosko reaching up to cup her face in his hands. Her hands straying south. The way she runs the very tip of her tongue, so lightly and delicately, over his upper lip.
I’m saved from my ridiculous, baseless, hi-def jealousies by a blast from the ferry’s horn. When I look up, the Mystery is looking steadily at his own hands, as if bothered by a memory of what they are. But his wife has turned to look out the front of the boat. I follow the line of her gaze. Up past the bow, a wall of white apartment buildings is crawling across the blue water toward us.
/> CHAPTER 20
THE ENEMY OF MY ENEMY
Greece and Turkey may hate each other, but they’re right next to each other: how hard can it be?
Hard.
Our taxi driver insists on a “shortcut” through the center of Athens. Stuck in another traffic jam from hell, we spend way too long on a free view of the Parthenon veiled in smog. I try not to look at my watch every three minutes. At last we crawl into Athens International. Then the fun really begins.
“Beautiful Eastern Turkey is popular tourist destination, sir!”
The man at the Turkish Airlines counter smiles broadly and delivers his line in perfect, almost accentless English, as if he’s been rehearsing for weeks. Flying to the Kurdish city of Van, good idea, sir! Only, there is a problem: we have to go via the capital, Ankara, and the very next flight for you, sir, involves a long wait, a long layover, and not getting to Van until late tonight.
I waste a lot of energy grinding my teeth; ask questions at every airline counter before going around and asking them again; even investigate whether we can fly to Ankara and drive to Ararat from there. (No. I’m too young to rent. And it’s a thousand kilometers—eighteen hours on mountainous roads, if you’re feeling lucky. I’m not feeling lucky.)
Morag has to virtually drag me back down into a chair. “There’s nothing we can do about it, D. We’ll get to Van tonight. We still have all day tomorrow.”
I can see several problems with that. It’s maybe a four-hour drive to Ararat even from Van—a four-hour drive into Turkey’s Wild East, the rugged, politically unstable country near the Iranian border—and we have to get a car. I go back to Mr. Smiley at Turkish Airlines: he wants to sell us a bus tour from Van to Ararat—very good, with hotel—but the bus takes forever, and only goes three times a week. I’m about to plead with the rental people again, offer them a deposit the size of Texas, bribe them, when I remember the titanium guys at AmEx.
Bad, bad cell phone connection, but eventually I get through. Even more eventually, make myself understood. No, I don’t want a van. I’m going to Van. But I do need a driver, yes. With a four-wheel drive vehicle. Has to be an English speaker who can find his way around eastern Turkey in the dark, yes.
A pause, during which I think I’ve lost the connection.
“Certainly, Mr. Calder. No problem at all.”
Half an hour into the flight from Athens to Ankara, I’m so lost in my anger and frustration—about Mom, Pandora, Derek Partridge, Dad, Rosko—that it’s a complete surprise when someone inserts a rusty chisel into the space between my top cervical vertebra and the base of my skull.
Should not be a surprise, but at first I just think, Whoa, that’s a headache. A few minutes later, when the invisible assailant with the chisel sinks it in an inch further and gives a twist, the “headache” becomes a savage, gasp-inducing shocker. But it’s only when my arms start to feel as if someone is pinching them that I put two and two together.
Time to stop thinking shit shit shit this hurts.
Time to start thinking, Oh right, panic: you have the bends.
Do I tell Morag I have decompression sickness? Do I warn her that I may be about to die, balled up in unbearable agony, right next to her? Do I mention it to the nice, harassed-looking woman in the ridiculous 1960s stewardess hat, and risk the possibility that she will tell the captain, who will say, Ladies and gentlemen, we have an idiot on board, and initiate an emergency landing in Albania, or whatever godforsaken hole we are currently flying over? I close my eyes against another wave of pain, and wonder whether Albania has a single hyperbaric chamber in the entire country. A peek through one watery eye at the in-flight map gives me a small cool droplet of relief when my besieged brain catches up with the fact that, oh yeah, wrong direction: we’re nowhere near Albania. Still, not getting to Ararat is something that just can’t happen right now. No time for a medical crisis. So I restrict myself to clutching the back of my neck, trying not to visualize the nitrogen bubbles, trying not to scream.
Morag doesn’t notice, for a while. She’s hunched over a tablet, looks like she’s playing a computer game; in fact she’s working with a program Dad wrote that combines and recombines groupings of the Phaistos symbols. She’s muttering to herself, and there’s something even more intense about her than usual. But she won’t say anything. Finally I give myself away with a strangled grunt.
“Headache?”
“If Jupiter’s a planet, this is a headache.”
She digs around in her pockets, produces a translucent brown pill bottle identical to the one that held my drowned Mayan gods. She pours the contents into her hand. Except for the variations in size, it looks something like a pile of M&M’s.
“What’s all that?”
“Oh, you know.”
“No, M, I don’t know.” (Shit shit shit.) “That’s why I asked.”
“I’ve got a little of everything. Ibuprofen. Diazepam. A couple of Ambien. The antinausea stuff that did squat for me on the boat. These are Cipro. The fat gray ones are generic multivitamins, which it turns out don’t do a bloody thing for you. This is leftover amoxicillin from when I had strep throat about a year ago. Pepto—”
“You’re not supposed to do that.”
“Do what?”
“Mix them up. It’s dangerous.”
She gives me her most skeptical, you-have-to-be-kidding-me look. “Old antibiotics are pretty low on my Threat Assessment List right now. Thanks for the advice, though.” She puts the in-flight magazine in her lap and dumps the entire load, spreading them out. “Oh look. These two here will be your special friends. Yummy, yummy Percocet. I have to tell you, these are seriously good stuff.”
“You sound like an addict.”
“I had a pinched sciatic nerve in Baghdad. It felt like someone was trying to remove my kidneys with a power tool. Believe me, they’re good.”
“Can I have them? Please?”
“How bad is it?”
“Right now, I’d kill a small defenseless animal for them.”
“Hint of desperation in your voice there, D. What’s wrong exactly?”
“Just give the fucking things to me, M.”
“Who’s sounding like an addict now?”
“It’s you who’s carrying a complete pharmacy in one pill bottle.”
She gives me a disapproving look, followed by the pills. After I wash them down with a mouthful of bad OJ, the pain keeps spreading through my joints for ten, fifteen minutes. The sensation in my head, and the back of my neck, goes from Bad to Shockingly Bad, then hovers for a minute on the extreme edge of Unendurable. I’m clutching both armrests, trying not to cry from the combination of fear and self-pity, when the drugs start to kick in, a little. Stepping outside of the pain for a moment, I recall Rosko, hunched over a bowl of Vietnamese noodles, saying, “That’s the big puzzle. Why is pain, you know, painful?”
A moment later the engine note changes, seat-belt signs go ping. When I feel my ears pop, I allow myself to entertain the idea that maybe I’m not going to die of the bends after all.
At least Ankara has that great, great invention called Turkish coffee. I buy two cups, but to my surprise Morag waves hers away—she’s back to staring and muttering—so I drink hers too, then get a third. I’m staring at my fingernails, gratefully feeling the buzz, when Morag shakes me. The screen in her lap has Phaistos symbols marching across its surface in shifting ranks, like beetles in an old-fashioned video game.
“I’m getting somewhere with this, D. Right from the start, Bill and I have been asking all the standard questions linguists ask: What structure does this language have? Is it hieroglyphic or not? Do the verbs come after the nouns, or before? But more and more I’ve been thinking: what if we stop asking what kinds of structure a human language has to have? What if we ask: what kind of structure does this thing have?”
“What difference does it make?”
“You can classify languages into a pretty limited number of structures. This thing
, it’s not like any of them, not at all, so I don’t think it’s a language, in the ordinary sense. More like a digital code. Chanted syllables, sure. But I’ve figured out what the underlying structure is. Or, well—actually, you did.”
“Excuse me?”
“Our counting system is decimal. Base 10. Computers use binary, which is base 2. But you can use any base you like: eight, sixteen, whatever. The Phaistos Disks are numerical too, but they have ‘words’ or groups in base 12, with a kind of digital key that’s base 18. Sound familiar?”
I’m back in Heraklion again: That’s clever, Daniel. Very observant. Could be significant.
“So I was right.”
“You were right. And it’s a tragedy that a great scholar like your father couldn’t pay more attention to an annoying small boy with dyslexia.”
“Can you crack it, make any sense of what it means?”
“What it means may be the wrong question. This may be something more fundamental than a language. It’s like, your computer has programs, but all the programs depend on the operating system. What if this Phaistos thing is the operating system that underlies all language? What if it’s the thing that made us capable of language?”
The Percocet must be even stronger than I thought, because this sounds unbelievably flaky, especially coming from her. “You’re saying the gods—the Architects—were like, uh, computer programmers from the eleventh dimension or something? Who programmed us?”
“I’m not saying anything about the Architects. Not yet. All I’m saying is, if this thing is at the root of our ability to have language at all, then oh, I need to crack this. And I will.”
“Before we get to Ararat?”
She shakes her head. “I’d need a spare month, a more complete collection of the Disks, and serious computing power—just to get started. And a complete Antikythera Mechanism might help.”
“You mean—”
“Just guessing. But it fits, doesn’t it? Here’s what I think. Eratosthenes finds out about what happened at Thera, or Strongyle, and he sees, just as we have, that there’s something seriously whacked about the Phaistos language. He wants to solve the mystery. Being one of the smartest mathematicians alive, he knows that what he really needs is the smartest mathematician alive. Who happens also to be a mechanical genius. His buddy Archimedes of Syracuse.”