Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “Greece? What part?”

  “Peloponnesian peninsula, near Mycenae.”

  “Uh, I see.”

  “Never been there?”

  “No. I always wanted to.”

  “Mycenae is the ruins of an ancient palace. It was once the center of what we call the Mycenaean culture. Possibly an offshoot of the Minoans, who traded all over the eastern Mediterranean. But the Mycenaeans got big and prosperous, and there are signs that they became the dominant power in the region, even bigger than the Cretans, by about 1400 B.C.”

  “Ah hah.” He leaned on his desk and cupped a hand around his chin, pretending to be lost in thought, trying to be as casual as possible about tracing the outlines of her legs under the skirt.

  “Anyway, our dig is about forty kilometers from Mycenae, down on the coast of the Gulf of Argos. It’s—”

  “On the ocean? How’s the diving there?”

  She blinked, taken aback. “I don’t know.”

  “The water’s still warm this time of year, I guess?”

  “Oh yes. You…dive?”

  He nodded enthusiastically. “I learned down in Texas. Not much to see round there, but it was sure a lot of fun.”

  She said cordially, “I’m sure there are excellent spots near the site. We’re right on the coast. Matthews at Brown did archeological diving off Spetsae, an island near us.”

  His furtive inspection of her body outline stopped and he liked the result. She was slender as a fish, yet with a ripening swelling at the hips that promised a lush wilderness. Women who interested him struck him this way; as unknown territory, rich and forgiving, complex as a continent.

  “Sounds nice,” was all he could manage to say.

  She flicked her cigarette out the window, into a brimming puddle. “The only condition is, you have to leave tomorrow.”

  “Tomorrow?” This jolted him out of his reverie. “Can’t—”

  “I’ll explain it on the plane. I’ve already got reservations. Here.” She fished in her purse and held out an American Airlines ticket.

  “You don’t waste time,” he said appreciatively.

  “No, I don’t. Never have.” She stood up. “Can you come?”

  “Well—” His mind spun among myriad details, lofted above them, descended. “Yes. I’m on the research staff, so I don’t have teaching to worry about.”

  She smiled. “That’s what I figured. I saw that on the directory. You were the first non-faculty member listed. Regular faculty would have classes. So I figured the next most senior was the best bet.”

  He grinned. “Well, ma’am, I guess I’m lucky you didn’t notice that postdocs are listed by room number alone.”

  “Oh.” Again the full lips curled in a self-mocking curve.

  “Say, isn’t the political situation pretty rocky over there?”

  The gathering, slow motion world depression had unleashed a lot of smoldering resentments.

  She shrugged casually. “It has its ups and downs. We’ll take only a few days, remember.” She started toward the door.

  “But wait—what should I bring? And Watkins’ equipment, I’ll have to…”

  “To what? Just pack it. Put it through as your luggage.”

  He hesitated. Then, to cover his confusion, he boomed out, “No problem. You’re right.”

  She eyed him. “Good. By the way, travel light. It’s still fairly warm in Greece. Oh, and here.”

  She tossed him a packet. “Medicine?” he asked, peering at the polysyllabic label.

  “It’s that new microbio stuff. Take one a day. It lives in your gut and eats whatever microbe causes dysentery.”

  “Oh?” John looked doubtful. He didn’t like the idea of tinkering with his body. Even when he had been injured in sports he resisted the pills offered him.

  “No other side effects, don’t worry,” Claire said with distant amusement. “Put your faith in science.”

  “I thought the whole point of science was that you didn’t have to merely have faith,” John said sarcastically.

  Claire chuckled. “Picky, picky. But do take them.”

  “Okay.”

  “See you at the gate. Be early.”

  “Will do,” he said with what he hoped was crisp confidence. He opened his mouth to say something more, but she was gone, without even a goodbye. He leaned back against his desk again, puffed out his cheeks, and blew. The office now had the stale flat stink of smoke, a smell he hated. A small price to pay, though, for moments with such a delicious woman. She had riveted him from the first, making his breath catch. That hadn’t happened in years, not since Ann. A heady, jolting moment like this had to be pursued. Minor aspects—his own plans, her annoying smoke—must be brushed aside.

  He would have to tell Sprangle he was taking a quick vacation. Luckily, he had nothing crucial looming in the next few weeks. He hadn’t been in Boston long enough to stack up obligations. He did have to hunt up the Watkins stuff, though, and bone up on it.

  He collected his papers from the desk. The scribbled symbols seemed like something he had written weeks before.

  “Things happen fast up north,” he muttered to himself.

  CHAPTER

  Two

  He didn’t get the full story until they were driving from Athens to the site. The flight to Paris had been packed; the dollar was high again and tourists were spilling into France, even long after the usual season. He had to pay a hefty extra charge to get all the equipment aboard. Claire had been unable to get seats together.

  On the Paris-Athens leg Claire had slept, but he sat up reading about Watkins’ equipment. Now John blinked sleepily at the improbably bright and orange-tinted day and tried to assimilate the scenery flashing past as Claire kept up a rapid-fire summary of the tangled events so far. She digressed frequently, piling on nuances and technical jargon without pity, assuming he knew far more than he did.

  “We’d been having troubles with Kontos all summer, everything from political discussions to disagreements over how to organize the collection boxes, so I guess it’s not surprising that—oh, see there? That island with a hump back in the bay? That’s Salamis. Themistocles broke the Persian fleet there, burned them to the water line, and saved Athens.”

  The outskirts of Athens seemed an unending line of cement works. Farther on, gray cement shells of two-story houses stood like bared bones of a mechanical monster. Some ground floors were inhabited, sporting antennas and flowers, while the skeletal promise of future affluence hung overhead. They sped westward, the glittering bay to the south, and crossed over the canal at Corinth. She parked beside it and they ate triangles of honey and nuts, while John walked halfway through and peered down at the geometrically exact slice cut through solid rock. “When the Germans retreated, back in World War II, they jammed the canal with trains, trucks, anything they had.”

  “Nice guys. How long did it take to clear?”

  “Years. It was merely the latest in two thousand years of grudges against outsiders.”

  “Including Americans?”

  She sighed as a tug drew a freighter into the mouth of the canal, over a kilometer away. “It’s beginning to look that way. Let’s go.”

  She had been the same way at the Athens airport, speedily fetching the rental car while he stacked the eight carrying cases of Watkins’ equipment, their luggage, and his diving gear. It filled the trunk and the back seat. He hoped he would have time to go over Watkins’ instruction manual again before she demanded the first run of tests.

  They turned south from Corinth, running down the coast. The Peloponnesian peninsula is a four-fingered hand grasping south into the Mediterranean. They sped down the easternmost finger, along roads that narrowed and whitened beneath the October sun. They slowed behind a cart piled high with fat, cloudy green grapes. Claire cursed under her breath and passed it, narrowly slipping by before an ancient truck descended on them, hooting its horn.

  “Lord God A’mighty!”

  She laughed. �
��I thought people only swore like that in movies.”

  “It was a prayer. Slow down, ma’am. This thing’s been there over three thousand years, a few minutes aren’t going to make any difference.”

  “Afraid not. Kontos was so mad, he might close us down early. He may know I went back to Boston.”

  “How?”

  “He called Hampton, the US co-director, at BU, even before I left Greece. I don’t know what bullshit Kontos fed Hampton, but when I went in to see him, he was polite, proper, and frosty. No, sorry, special help?—nossir. Not at this time of the school year. He gave me a lecture on resources. Fretted about my extra trip back. He went tut-tut about the early shutdown, said I must have done something to offend Dr. Kontos, he couldn’t imagine what it could have been, but didn’t I think perhaps we could simply let matters lie, just withdraw when the Ministry wished? All very solemn with much profound puffing on a pipe, a sad hound-dog expression, the works.”

  “What’d you say?”

  “I told him I’d think it over and come back the next day to see him again.” She smirked, turning the car sharply around curves as they wound up into a series of rolling, tawny hills.

  “Today?”

  “Right-o. He could remove my control over funds if he wanted. So I went out and bought our tickets through the BU office, charged our grant’s account, and drew a big travel advance besides.”

  “He’s still waiting for you to show up?”

  “Yes.” She laughed. “See, I gained one day on him. So then I went over to MIT, to recruit a warm body from Watkins’ minions.”

  “And here I thought it was my charm.”

  “I decided to overlook your missing limbs and birth defects. When Hampton told me he wouldn’t release any of our own people who knew metals, I knew it was—”

  “Time to git.”

  “Right again. I only hope Hampton didn’t call Kontos back after I showed up. I don’t want him to know I left. Even—damn!” She snapped her fingers, meanwhile swerving around a donkey. “I should’ve called in sick from the Boston airport, said I had the flu, put off the appointment for a few days. That would’ve delayed old Hampton.”

  “Oh, what a web we weave, when first—”

  “Sho’ ’nuff, honey,” she said in a credible Southern accent.

  He countered in a clipped, arch tone, “High moral standahds are the foundation of ouah society.”

  “What was that?”

  “A Kennedy accent.”

  “Glad you told me. I thought you’d suddenly developed tongue cancer.”

  “Where’s yours from?”

  “My what?”

  “That accent.”

  “I don’t have an accent.”

  “Ha. I thought maybe English.”

  “I grew up on Marlborough Street.”

  “That’s the original Snob Hill accent?”

  She grinned and looked at him.

  “No matter how fascinating I am,” he said soberly, “don’t take your eyes off the road. Not at this speed.”

  “The Kennedys speak what my father called Englosh. That’s the English of people who came from where they eat goulash. He died believing that Irish stew was a bastard form of goulash.”

  “Quaint.”

  The road reared and twisted over folded ridges, and then they were coming down again, the Aegean gleaming in the distance. The site was in a hilly area that sloped down to the sea, reachable only by rough sandy roads. They worked their way south on a rocky track, the Ford bouncing roughly at the speeds Claire habitually used. They rounded a curve and John sighed in surprise. An olive wood stretched through a narrow valley, gleaming like the surface of a river, and flowing like one, too—the wind tossing the branches so that green brimmed into silver rushes, like foam on a tossing current, and breezes swept down the valley like great surges of a storm. “Beautiful,” he said.

  “Yes. I love Greece. It’s my favorite place to dig.”

  “Where else have you, uh, dug?”

  “Iraq. Egypt. Turkey. Every summer since high school.”

  “You really like it.”

  “Of course.” She glanced at him with surprise. “A lot better than sitting in a lab all year.”

  He said quietly, “Aren’t you taking a chance with your career, playing fast and loose with travel funds, flaunting it in the face of Hampton?”

  She pursed her lips and said nothing for a long moment. “Maybe so. But I’m damned if I’ll let him push me around.”

  “Kontos?”

  “Kontos and Hampton and—well—” She grimaced and shot him another glance. “Men.”

  CHAPTER

  Three

  George met their car before the dust of its arrival had settled. To John the camp was the scruffy cluster of tents Claire had described, with laborers in blue jeans and sweaty T-shirts loading crates onto nearby pickup trucks. Ignoring George for a moment, he swept a long look down the valley, picking out the pits of the dig. They were, of course, simply bare holes along a staked-out rectangular grid, with mounds of worked stones sorted into piles nearby. The place seemed remarkably ordinary, to yield secrets of millennia past.

  He searched the tawny slopes to the left and found the tomb entrance, a stone-walled passage that lanced into the hillside. Now this was something else entirely. Even at this distance its stately bulk promised not merely a way into a hole in the ground, but the entrance to an unfathomed world long past.

  He sniffed, catching on the crisp breeze a welcome, salty tang from the sea. He remembered how, as a boy on a trip to Atlanta with his mother, he had been impressed with buildings that were positively ancient, well over a century old.

  George studied John quizzically as they were introduced, but then was swept along in Claire’s story of events at Boston University. George’s sour expression told quite clearly what he thought of departmental politics and Professor Hampton.

  “Damn typical,” was his verdict.

  “If Hampton calls him back, we may have only a day or two before Kontos comes steaming in here,” Claire said.

  “We can’t work miracles.” George gestured at the gang of men who were packing up the camp. “Plenty more to do here.”

  “He can’t very well stop you from packing,” John said.

  “No, he’ll speed it up,” Claire said. “And stick to us like glue. So that we can’t moonlight any research.”

  “When he sees me here—”

  “That’s an idea, yes. We actually will moonlight it. Work in the tomb at night, after the men have gone home.”

  “Why?” John asked.

  “If Kontos has a snoop among them, he’ll see nothing unusual.”

  “Is archeology always like this?”

  George and Claire looked at each other. “No,” Claire said despairingly. “This situation has gotten ’way out of hand. Sometimes I…” Her voice trailed off and then she visibly rallied herself. “Forget it. We’re not going to be pushed around by a pig in a tailored uniform.”

  George sighed. “The trip didn’t take any starch out of you, huh?”

  She turned to him. “No, quite the reverse. Any problem with that?”

  He stepped back, holding up both hands, palms out, chuckling. “Hey, no contest. I was kinda counting on some of your famous diplomacy, is all.”

  “What for?”

  “Well…” He hooked his hands in his hip pockets and inspected the dust. “I was hoping this thing between you and Kontos would blow over. Then we could maybe get some more time here. Just a little easing off—”

  “Impossible. Kontos won’t budge.”

  “We need the time. I’ve found more stuff. I got around behind that slab, had a look.”

  Claire’s momentum suddenly dissolved. “You did? What’s there?”

  “Lots. Come on.”

  They had to unlock and pull back the iron gate at the dromos entrance. George kept it closed while the laborers were nearby. The bulky wooden door that sealed the tomb itself was
open. To John, entering was a sudden transit from a sunbaked valley where birds chirruped and wheeled, into a gloomy world of cool, sepulchral silence. The corbelled vault was topped by a wooden plug to keep rain out and prevent further cave-ins, but it did not mar the sense of converging, encasing mass overhead, a brooding weight of history.

  When Claire saw George’s new framing and support beams she ran an eye over the entire structure before venturing under it. “Rube Goldberg again. Looks like a bridge put together by somebody who’d lost the instructions.”

  “Aw, crap. It works, doesn’t it? I got a lot of support under those ones higher up. See how I got that whole quadrant interlocked?”

  “All by yourself?”

  George shook his head. “Had to use two men. I draped sheets—see?—to cover the hole and other stuff. Told them the framing was to make sure the place didn’t cave in while we’re gone this winter.”

  The sheets were still in place. Claire stepped through the steel and wooden structure and slipped a rope free.

  On the right side George had slipped a block forward, leaving enough room to wriggle through. Claire picked up a flashlight and pointed it into the hole.

  John came forward gingerly, careful of the framework. To him the black slab looked ordinary enough, except for the chiseling at the top. The amber cone was lovely, he had to admit. Claire had waxed almost lyrical about it in the car, one of the few deviations he had seen from her crisp practicality.

  “Not much room in here,” she called.

  “No kidding,” George said. “I been leaning halfway through, scraping the soil, for two days.”

  He looked it. John had wondered why the man’s coveralls were uniformly filthy, from neck to boots.

  Claire grunted. “Find much?”

  “Not a damn thing.”

  “How far down?”

  “I took off half a meter.”

  “Safe to go in, then?”

  “Sure.”

  John watched her wriggle through the opening. A muffled “Huh!” came back. He expected George to follow, but after a moment she called, “John. Come on.”

  He bent himself through the narrow passage and stiffly maneuvered onto the chilly, hard dirt beyond. Her flashlight lit the center of the irregular chamber but something black dominated the opposite wall. Neither said anything. It was a long moment before John realized that the unyielding inky spot was a hole. He wriggled forward a few feet. A rotten, salty smell drifted up from the opening. A grave? he guessed. Then a distant rushing gurgle echoed faintly. The wash of sea against stone.