Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “What is this? Part of the tomb?”

  Claire’s eyes caught the yellow of the flashlight beam as she played it around the walls. “No, I think it’s natural. Look up there.”

  Above them for about ten feet was a gray-brown layer of hardened mud. At about chest level it met a layer of harder stuff—sandstone, John guessed. The rock spread around the entire cavity and down the throat of the hole. It stopped just short of the tomb blocks.

  “They probably dug in until they hit this sandstone,” Claire said. “So they stopped and built the tomb smack up against it. But there must’ve been mud where we are.”

  “They dug the mud out?”

  “No…no, this is an erosion feature. George—” She leaned to call to him and found his head sticking through the passage.

  “You’re wondering what’s down that pit, right?” He smiled. “I dunno. I threw a rope in and slid down maybe ten feet. No signs of work on the walls. Looks to me like you said, water wear.”

  John peered down it. “From the sea?”

  “Not likely,” George said. “It’s hundreds of feet down to the ocean. No tide could force up in here.”

  Claire pointed up at the impacted mud. “The water came through from there. Seepage.”

  “Come on,” George countered, “to take out that much stone—”

  “Soft limestone in the cliff, remember—the waves are eating it up. This sandstone—” She reached out and rubbed. It crumbled into grains. “Greece gets a lot of rainfall—a lot more than you’d think, for a dry climate. Everything sits on limestone. Over the millennia the down-drip has carved out giant cisterns. The land is honeycombed with them. Their rainfall doesn’t stay in the topsoil, it settles into stone bowls and makes agriculture difficult. That’s what happened here.”

  “Maybe the builders knew that,” George said quietly.

  “Not likely. Look, it’s been 3500 years. When the tomb was built, this soft vein may not have gone much farther down than here.”

  “They used the underground springs at Mycenae, right? Built the city walls out to reach a crack in the rock. Then they drove a tunnel down twenty meters or so, just to reach a dependable water supply.”

  Claire said with a little too obvious effort at patience, “They lived downslope from here, hundreds of meters away. This wouldn’t carry enough water for a town. And a connection through a tomb—come on.”

  John said, “So you believe they just used it as a handy place to stick—that.”

  His gesture brought their attention to the slab. It was a cube, the back half resting on a flagstone block. Its rear face had no inscription, no decoration of any kind. There was a splotch of yellowish matter at the center of the back, covering a few square feet.

  John stood awkwardly, bending to avoid the inward-curving walls, acutely aware of the yawning hole a few steps away. He put out a finger toward the lumpy thing. “I wonder what this is?”

  “Don’t touch it!” Claire’s cry was loud in the close space. John flinched back.

  “Why the hell not?” he asked irritably.

  “There might be marks, even fingerprints,” Claire said rapidly but in a lower tone.

  “This looks like pebbles, dirt, Lord knows what. Nothing special.”

  “We don’t know what’s ‘special’ until we analyze it,” she said primly.

  George had wormed his way in and stood beside them. There was barely enough room without venturing too close to the edge immediately behind them. Without being obvious about it, John nudged into the sandstone for reassurance.

  “Encrustation, looks like to me,” George said. He aimed his own flashlight at the yellowish mass. “I already dusted it over, checked for fingerprints and so on. Nothing. Stuff looks sulfur-rich, maybe. Give it a sniff.”

  Claire bent and smelled it. “Salty.”

  “Sure. Salt water moisture’s been blowing up against it so long, not surprising you’d get this. This side of the cube is caked with salt—see?”

  The flashlight showed crystals glittering in the rough surface, bringing a gray pallor to the stone.

  Claire nodded. “You’re probably right. I can clean it off and check for anything beneath.”

  George sighed, his surprise exhibit exhausted. “I thought I’d really turned up something when I first crawled through. You know, a secret vault the looters hadn’t gotten into, something like that.”

  “There’s still the pit to look down, isn’t there?” John volunteered.

  “Yeah. I’ll have a look, but I think it’s just a natural cistern that’s run into the ocean.”

  His jaw locked tight, John crouched by the hole. The sides were worn smooth and shimmered with moisture. Not an inviting surface for handholds. There were black streaks down the sides, leading the eye steeply down toward the sea. To him it looked burnished by fire, but he reminded himself that water can carry stains down from higher layers and discolor older strata. Maybe that had happened here. Anyway, that wasn’t his area. None of this was, he reminded himself sheepishly. And here he had been poking around and asking questions, keeping up a pose of competence among these people, who really did know what they were doing….

  He got to his feet. The other two were talking about something he couldn’t follow. He was at least a step from the edge but he could not turn away from it, knowing that the lip lay there in the dimness at his feet, waiting, if he should slip or if somebody fell against him. No, no, forget it. Something about the atmosphere of this place, it was a grave after all, a damp clammy smell in here, this part never had a chance to dry out like the main tomb, not as though teams of archeologists had swarmed over it, brought all their twentiethcenturyness along, this was the real smell of antiquity. He wiped his brow and made himself breathe regularly. The flashlight beams swept lazily upward, where clefts and recesses swallowed the light, forming a mottled darkness that seemed to gather at his temples, thickening the air, bringing the pungent salty smell reeking into his nostrils in the tight airless space—

  “It’s, uh, getting close in here.”

  Claire peered at him in the dim reflected radiance of the walls. His face felt flushed. Did it show?

  “I want to get set up outside,” he said brusquely. “Help me with the cases, George?”

  CHAPTER

  Four

  John backed the ’scope away from the Linear A lines. “It’s metal all right, down in those grooves.”

  “Chisel marks,” Claire countered automatically. “Silver? It looks like silver.”

  “See for yourself, ma’am.” He bowed and swept his arms toward the imposing tripod-mounted microscope. About its sleek black barrel were grouped a disc of lenses and pencil-beam illuminators. She crooked her face to the eyepiece.

  “What am I seeing?”

  “Some corrosion products, I’d say. Oxides. Not very much corrosion, though—lucky.”

  “Those greenish specks, are they bronze?”

  “Maybe. Silver-copper alloy would look that way, too.”

  “Those reddish veins?”

  “Rust.”

  “What’s the underlying metal?”

  “That’s a little hard to tell right now. There could be several. The metal with the highest electrode potential is the first to corrode. That usually protects the other metals from attack, until the first is used up. Say, if you’ve got iron and silver and steel here—”

  “This was the late bronze age.”

  “Oh. Just for example, the iron would go first. That’d give you a rust covering, but the silver—”

  “I can see something shiny.”

  “Sure, because there’s not much oxidation far back in the groove—I mean, chisel mark.”

  Claire leaned back from the eyepiece and studied the amber cone itself. “I wonder why—hey!”

  “What?”

  “In the amber—there was a flash of blue light.”

  “Some internal reflection, I guess.”

  “No, it was bright.”

&nb
sp; He had seen something like that earlier. “Some mica in the amber. It catches the lamplight just right, acting like a prism—”

  “But it was so bright,” she persisted.

  “Gloomy hole like this, your eyes are sensitive.”

  “Ummm. Well, let’s get the analysis done on the chiseling. The amber can wait.”

  He tried to remember more of Caley’s Analysis of Ancient Metals. A lot of it was just informed common sense, but some of the oxidation chemistry was complicated. He remembered reading as a boy about Sherlock Holmes’s writing a monograph on over a hundred different kinds of cigarette ash, and how to identify them. It had seemed bizarre then; now, compared to this, he wondered. Maybe some more equipment would help. There was additional gear in the third case, too….

  “Can’t you study the metal content back in there? This is important.”

  He shrugged. “I’ll have to make a boring.”

  She pulled away from the eyepiece. “No. Not on the script.”

  “I understand you don’t want damage. But I think I can drill a millimeter-deep hole and cut through that film of trace impurities.”

  Or he could if he had enough time to read the manual. It was beautifully explicit; Watkins had written for well-meaning idiots who had to be prevented from damaging samples in the field and still get some useful results. People like him, in other words. But surely even as meticulous a scientist as Watkins had not planned on his level of ignorance.

  She asked doubtfully, “What technique will you use?”

  “Well, x-ray fluorescence is out,” he said cautiously. “It requires too much area. Then there’s electron microprobe examination. That’s great, and there’s one in the cases, but it samples such a small region—a few microns across—that it won’t tell you anything about average composition.” He eyed her as he said this, and it all seemed to be going over okay. “I’d say, neutron activation analysis. I have a small source and it does no permanent damage.”

  It was also the only one whose instructions he could fully understand. Until the late 1990s, neutron activation had been a technique available only if you had a nuclear reactor handy, for a neutron source. Watkins had helped develop a field-portable kit, with a manual simple enough for archeologists unacquainted with the new method. The kit was nothing but “black boxes,” components you wired up. The source shot neutrons in and back came gamma rays. A tiny computer gave a spectrum of the gammas. From the height of those peaks and their location in the energy spectrum he should be able to figure out what metals were present.

  Or that’s the way it looked from the manual, which he had read diligently on the airplane instead of sleeping. He was paying for that now; he yawned. His only hope lay in reducing the steps to mechanical acts, plug X1 into X3 sort of stuff. He knew a little electronics and could use that for cover.

  “Ummm…” She pondered. He admired the deft way she placed a forefinger on her cheek, pursing her lips slightly, making them fuller. She shifted her hip and the movement seemed to lighten her, miraculously thinning her thighs beneath the khaki jumper, drawing the acute angle up to the pedestal of her hips.

  “Okay. Do it.”

  “Uh…” His attention swerved back. “Now?”

  “Sure.” She put her hands on her hips. “We’ve got only days, maybe hours left. I’ll help.”

  He nodded. His jet-lagged sleep last night had left him dulled, with that faint air of watching everything from behind a thick pane of dirty glass. He would have liked George’s help, too—like most academics, he expected that men who worked with their hands more would have a broader knowledge of things electrical and mechanical. But George said he knew nothing about metallurgical analysis or electronics, that working with planks and shovels and braces was his line. Anyway, they needed him out in the camp, diverting the laborers who were finishing up.

  They unpacked and assembled in the musty, cool tomb, the clanking of metal reverberating back from the curved walls, giving each sound a stretched presence. He took his time, hoping he would recover some alertness, afraid of making errors. It was difficult maneuvering the equipment among the various stone blocks which hung in rope frames. John bumped into one of them and asked, mostly as a ruse for a break, “What’s this from?”

  Claire looked up from a case inventory. “That’s the original block in front of the amber cone. See how it’s marked?”

  “Religious symbol?”

  “We don’t think so. There were bronze pieces mounted into the walls, too—or we think so, because they were buried when we found them.”

  He contemplated the stone, touched it gingerly. “Okay?”

  She smiled. “Of course. Sorry I barked at you yesterday.”

  “’S fine. How come they were buried?”

  “The bronzes? Torn down by looters. Or else by later burial parties.”

  He frowned, slightly shocked. “They defiled the graves of their own ancestors?”

  She smiled again. “This was a different culture, John. Apparently they gave the dead presents—tools and weapons and food and clothing, to help them on their passage. But once the flesh had decayed away, they thought that transition was complete. The dead didn’t need the funerary gifts anymore. Most of these tombs were family burial sites. When a new burial party came, they tossed old skeletons aside to make room for the new arrival. We found ones scattered all over the tomb, at different levels.”

  “So the gifts, they were left out, where the dead could…use them?” He found the subject a little unsettling.

  “Yes, or in boxes.”

  “Then how come they hid things?”

  “They didn’t. The looters apparently had no trouble finding what they wanted. Unless it was buried under the dirt left here by some burial parties.”

  He was puzzled. “Then why did they hide that?” He pointed at the cube, still standing in its recess behind the massive corbelled blocks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “And why chisel on it, decorate it, when nobody’s going to see it?”

  Claire stared at the black limestone and said slowly, “That’s one of the points that has been bothering me, also.”

  He ran a hand over the block hanging in its cradle, liking the rough coolness of it, feeling the small nicks on the unexposed sides where a long-dead craftsman had struck flakes from it to shape the surprisingly accurate angles and edges. “Some kind of design outside, saying something…but nobody buried behind this block, just a cube with chiseling on it. And that decoration, that cone. Funny…” He stooped to examine the face more closely. A long moment passed while Claire unfastened a bundle of cables and placed them on a blanket they had spread. He insisted on a systematic arrangement of the parts before they started assembly.

  “How do you date the levels?” he asked.

  “What?” She was concentrating and in the clatter of equipment missed his question.

  “The different burials, how—”

  “Oh yes, with pottery analysis. We know the styles, how they evolved. And if there’s wood we can date it with Carbon 14.”

  “Right.” He rubbed his hand over the edges of the block. “This crumbly stuff?”

  “Mortar.”

  “And these marks here?”

  “I don’t know. Someone chipped away the outer mortar. There are those near the edge, too.”

  “Look like scratches, not chiseling.”

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “Fella used a knife or something.”

  “Ummmm?” She did not look up from her work.

  “You’d think if anybody was doing a serious job, they’d use the right tools.”

  “Remember, people got rushed and did a sloppy job even in antiquity.”

  “On graves? Well, maybe so. So much for the good old days. Still, a knife…” He examined the apparently random marrings with a flashlight. “Maybe the guy used one of those ceremonial knives left in here.”

  “Looters usually bring their own tools.”

 
“A knife’s not good for this kind of work.” He stood up. “Any way to date when that cube there was put behind the wall?”

  “George found some signs it was quite late. We do know from some small jewelry in the topmost level that someone important—or rich, or both—was the last burial.”

  “End of the family line, umm? So this slab and the cube behind it, they might have been put in here with him.”

  “Or her.”

  “Sure. Or her.” He rubbed his jaw.

  “It might even have been a king.”

  “Yeah? Do tell.” Distracted, he scuffed a toe in the hard-packed earth.

  “They had elaborate ceremonies. At some sites there is minor, ambiguous evidence that the servants of the king were buried with him. It’s a controversial issue.”

  This jolted him out of his reverie. “Really? What savages.”

  Offended, she said briskly, “A different culture. They were building these beautiful corbelled domes when your and my ancestors were chasing mastodons.”

  “I thought mastodons died out about ten thousand years ago.” He grinned; this was one of the few facts he remembered from ninth grade science.

  She smiled despite herself. “I can see I’ll have to watch every word. But if you have Indian ancestors I could still be right.”

  “Every southerner has a little Indian blood in him.”

  “Mastodons were hunted up until a few thousand years ago by American Indians. But to get back to my point—Look at that triangle over the lintel. See? It relieved the weight of the rock above and carried it down, around the door. Advanced engineering. And they mounted a facade outside, painted stonework, beautifully carved.”

  “You think they might’ve buried some servants with this guy, this king?”