Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “What about the real thing?”

  “Pornography? I like food, but not somebody saying, ‘When I eat peas, I take three or four and mash them between my teeth, then spread them over the roof of my mouth, getting them even, making them all gooey, and—’ See?”

  He laughed. “You win.”

  After lunch they strolled along the quay, John lugging his diving gear from the car. Somewhat to his surprise there was a diving shop with tanks. He rented a pair, checked them with his own regulator, and went out to the commercial boats. There were dozens in port, mostly fishing craft with nets. The state of the Greek economy was apparent at a glance: men idling alongside their boats, some tending to the perennial jobs of painting, cleaning, repairing, but most wearing the sour look of boredom.

  He studied a small fortified island offshore while Claire spoke to the captain of a red fiberglass motorboat. The gray stonework commanded the harbor with a high square tower and semi-circular fort. “Imposing,” he said to Claire.

  She broke off negotiations. “The Venetians built that, when they held Greece. They could close off the harbor by stretching a half-mile chain out to it. When Greek independence came along, the government used the island as the home of their executioner.”

  “Charming place.”

  “Concensus politics isn’t a habit in the Mediterranean,” she said lightly. “Get your diving gear. I’ve bargained this fellow down as far as I can without rending my garments.”

  “Do go on, then. I have to stay within budget, remember.”

  She made a face. “You’ll have to work harder than that.”

  “Effortlessly, ma’am.”

  The red motorboat cut a white V across the azure flatness of the Gulf. The peninsula of Hermionis, where their dig perched on a cliff, served as breakwater for the Gulf, deflecting the mild-mannered waves of the Mediterranean. Each time Claire gave the pilot directions the swarthy man bit down on his perpetual cigarette and twisted the wheel abruptly, even if no course correction was required. “Macho Hellenic tradition,” Claire remarked.

  “They don’t like taking orders from a woman?”

  “Who does?” Claire eyed him wryly.

  “Ummm,” he said noncommitally.

  “But they’ll take the money,” she said.

  They headed southeast, past barren knobs of islands, salt spray wetting Claire’s white blouse. She shucked it casually, revealing a swimsuit underneath. John suited up in the stern, admiring her covertly. She was slim and proportioned with what he thought could, in artistic circles, be termed admirable restraint.

  When they slowed beside a ragged, stony beach he peered overboard, looking for rocks or seaweed, some sign of good diving spots. “Would you like fish tonight?”

  “I don’t care,” she said. “That’s not what we’re after.”

  “Oh?” He was not surprised.

  “Recognize that?” She pointed at the cliffs nearby.

  “No.”

  “Our dig is just out of sight around that hill.”

  “And you want me to…”

  “Correct.”

  He slid over into the warm salt clasp. Visibility was excellent. He swam downward to a muddy bottom. There were large fish nestled in among patches of sea plants, and a surprising number of strange-shaped, barnacled protrusions littered the floor. Pieces of old shipwrecks, he guessed. All that remained of millennia of disaster and pillage and brave, bloody venture.

  The serene schools of fish seemed to have no fear of him, no experience. He felt almost guilty at how easy it was to spear three large ivory-skinned ones. He took them up to the boat and Claire called, “See any signs of it?”

  “Nope.”

  “Try nearer shore.”

  “Sho’ ’nuff.” He suppressed his irritation at her single-mindedness, and dove again.

  Mud gave way to sandy bottom as he swam shoreward. Weed clung to outcroppings of rock. A rusted shaft like a truck axle kept his attention for a moment as he tried to figure out how it could have gotten here, and then he resumed his slow, systematic search. He felt natural and free like this, slipping easily through water that was like a bath compared to most of the dives he had known. Squeezing his breath through a narrow tube did not seem constricting, somehow, compared with the chest-tightening sensation of being in close confines, like the other day in the tiny opening inside the tomb wall. Under water things were different—he could move freely, flying and swooping in shafts of brimming golden sunlight. Most people were afraid of being underwater, but he had been a swimmer since he was two years old, flailing about in the Gulf of Mexico, associating the ocean with vacations and freedom and timeless fun. If he’d had to learn in a swimming pool like the gloomy, chlorinated, joyless one at MIT—

  There. Two parallel ridges of rock.

  He had come upon them at an angle. They stood a few feet above the sandy bottom, bracketing a jumble of rocks. He followed the ridges away from shore. They went straight, parallel as train tracks and somewhat narrower. He followed them away from shore for over fifty meters before they disappeared under an expanse of mud.

  He doubled back. The rocks filling the middle of the tracks were fairly large but did not look unusual to his untrained eye. He picked up one and carried it in his burlap fish bag.

  A school of gray motes flashed into silver and then back to gray, hovering in rigid ranks a safe distance away, studying him carefully. They kept an exact spacing between themselves and then, as he approached again, dissolved instantly, to reform again at the edge of his vision. Their hovering precision was a marvel. In such ordinary things mathematics seemed most casually elegant, he thought. How did nature specify the fishes’ spacing against the tugging currents, what measure told them when he came too near? That was what drew him to mathematics. Not because it was rarefied, but because it probed to the subtle, deeper reality. People said that mathematicians were unworldly, and yammered on about how Einstein couldn’t make correct change. Nonsense. Einstein just didn’t give a damn. It was the subtle, the beautiful that concerned him.

  He swam toward the shadow of the cliff. The ridges were still straight and now they began to rise up from the sandy floor, stubs of rock jutting obliquely, perhaps betraying the angle of the local strata.

  He glanced up. Still at least twenty feet under. He swam into the cliff’s shadow. Details were muted here and weeds clung to every crevice, green and scarlet and cinnamon, waving at him drowsily, obscuring the ruined contours of the stone tube.

  The angle of the two small ridges steepened as it neared the bulging rock of the cliff wall. Erosion was worse here, probably because of wave action. Behind the regular burbling rush of his exhaled bubbles he heard the low mutter of turbulence overhead. He lost sight of the blurred ridges in the gloom. By now he was under an overhang and the rippling refracted light played tricks of perception. The shadows were deeper there, higher up the worn rock. He swam upward, into darkness.

  A cave. A water-formed passageway knifing up into the cliff. He remembered standing in the cramped little stone pocket, a foot from the edge. There had been the distant swish of water. So this channel went all the way up.

  John unhooked his flashlight and clicked it on. The cave walls were smooth and unremarkable in its yellowish splash radiance. He ventured a few feet farther. The steepening continued. Claire said that seepage from above had slowly opened this weak seam, in the 3500 years since the Mycenaeans sealed their king’s tomb. Interesting, he supposed, for geologists.

  Something brushed his shoulder and he whirled, heart thumping. A strand of seaweed. The wave surge here was weak but he went rigid each time a current forced him farther up the cave, bracing with one hand to prevent being taken farther in.

  His tank clanged on an upthrusting of mossy stone. The flashlight showed nothing more than a smooth bore ahead, snaking upward and away. Inky cold currents flowed across his chest. He decided he had reconnoitered enough, thank you.

  Claire jumped when he broke surface nex
t to the boat. “My God! You were gone so long—what happened?”

  “I found a seep hole.”

  The pilot helped him wallow aboard. He shrugged off the tank straps.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Sure. I know what you’re thinking—that it was a tunnel, dug by the tomb builders.”

  “Uh, yes.”

  “Well, they were sure gluttons for work if they did. It continues out into the sea bed, maybe a hundred yards or so. Only a couple feet wide. Looks like a collapsed tube. Then it runs into mud.”

  “Oh. Too narrow for a man to dig.”

  “You’re pretty desperate for a big find, aren’t you?”

  She looked affronted, dark eyebrows descending. “I’m following up every possibility. Archeology—”

  “I know, you said before—the science of endless details.”

  “There was always the chance—”

  “Look,” he said impatiently, “that seep hole was worn through ’way back. It runs out into the gulf. The sea bed’s just gradually washed most of it away and—”

  “Yes, you’re undoubtedly right. There’s a subterranean stream tube that emerges offshore at Anabalos, too, I remember. There must be many—what’s that?”

  “Sample from the caved-in rock.”

  “Oh.” She seemed mollified by the gift of a slimy, wet stone. She handled it gingerly.

  “I’ll try roses next time.”

  She laughed. “You are an odd man. And—I do thank you. For doing this.”

  “I couldn’t very well let that Kontos browbeat you all day.”

  She nodded. “I hate him,” she said matter-of-factly.

  When they docked there was a band playing on the quay.

  “Quite a reception,” John said, studying the crowds in the twilight. Clouds scudded overhead.

  “It’s not for us, I assure you,” Claire said lightly. “See those signs?”

  “Politics?”

  “Yes. Let’s see—National Socialist Labor Party.”

  “That’s the one Kontos is so fired up about?”

  She nodded. A loudspeaker boomed down the quay, impossibly loud. On a platform a man obscured by the crowd called out a singsong phrase in a giant’s voice and the crowd answered, their ragged chorus a faintly comic echo of him. He shouted a few sentences and again the people answered, stronger this time. This went on for several minutes, with the man becoming more excitable. In white-washed cafes lining the quay old men sipped beer and watched, blank-faced. John noticed that the crowd was mostly young people wearing denims. He heard the word “America” used in sentences that rose in inflection, ending with a shout. Each time some men in the crowd waved their fists. They seemed to function as cheerleaders.

  “What’s it about?”

  “The Elgin marbles, air bases, the price of olives.”

  Several men nearby had heard the English. They turned and stared.

  “Let’s eat,” John said. He shifted his diving belt over his shoulder.

  “Greeks don’t have dinner this early.”

  “What? I can’t hear in this—”

  “I want to find out what he’s leading up to.”

  The chanting stopped. They were over a hundred meters from the platform. The quay was filling with men in baggy work clothes. Several Army officers appeared on the platform, waving to the crowd. One of them began to speak.

  The deep tones rolled down the quay, reflecting from the stucco buildings, distorted. The crowd shouted in agreement. Their voices were hoarse, angry. John noticed the men still looking at them, nudging others nearby, talking.

  “At least let’s get a drink.”

  “What? Something about national unity.”

  One of the men smirked at his friends and ran his gaze slowly up and down Claire’s body. John caught his eye and the man jutted out his jaw defiantly.

  “I need some supper.”

  “Too many political parties, he says.”

  Now half a dozen people were watching them, not paying attention to the speaker at all. There was a set to their faces John did not like.

  “Come on.” He picked up his diving gear, grunting.

  “No, I want—”

  “Come on.” He took her elbow and steered her away. One of the men started after them. John glared back at him and Claire, watching, understood instantly.

  They walked rapidly away. The man slowed, stopped, and finally contented himself with an obscene gesture.

  Claire said, “That junior-grade Hitler can steam them up.”

  “I’ll say. Funny, I didn’t see that stuff on the travel posters.”

  “I’ve never seen people so stirred. That man, he was truly angry at us.”

  “The justifiable rage of the oppressed, y’know,” John said, doing an imitation of Kontos’s accent.

  Claire laughed. “This cafe’s open—let’s stop. You can put down that diving stuff.”

  John set down the air tank with a groan of relief. His sandy hair was mussed and he itched all over from the salt still on his skin. Still, it had been exhilarating, exotic. Much like Claire herself, he mused, as they ordered wine with retsina in it. She was thoroughly, unconsciously Bostonian. He watched her as she gestured at the fish he’d speared, asking in a quick flow of Greek that they be cooked as the main dish. The waiter did not seem to find this unusual. She studied the menu and asked the waiter questions without glancing at the man, at ease, not even making a gesture toward letting John handle matters. He liked that. It was one thing to be instantly attracted to a woman, and another to like her independence, the way she took no notice of what he thought of her, one way or the other. She was indeed a modern woman—not aggressive, yet not submissive. A self-possessed apartness, a lack of cling. A far remove from the southern girls he had dated and bedded and became bored with.

  Her lips pursed in a businesslike, introspective way as she pondered a choice, running a forefinger down the edge of the menu, oblivious to the languidly sensual undercurrent in the gesture. Yes, that was what held his attention: her reserve. The promise of depths you could not guess merely by seeing her in a swimsuit.

  “Was it one of your boyhood hobbies?”

  “Um?”

  “Diving.”

  “Oh. No, the only hobby I had as a teenager was amateur gynecology.”

  She laughed lightly and gave him a guarded look. “With those serene-looking southern girls?”

  “Under the crinoline they’re not so different,” he said loyally.

  “Ummm.”

  More of the cautious look. He decided not to tell her about his short postgraduate stint at Berkeley, and the mixed reviews he gave California women. Generalizations were hopeless anyway. He had had some disastrous affairs and some of the good-but-doomed variety, and doubtless so had she. From the relentless specifics of each one it was hard to refine any comforting lessons. Even worse, it was hard to say anything intelligent.

  He asked brightly, “What did you order for us?”

  “A side dish of calamari. That’s squid. Could you understand any of my Greek?”

  He shook his head. “I’m bilingual in English and calculus.”

  “You’ll pick it up if you pay attention.”

  “I’m about as improved as I’m gonna get.”

  “I’d have thought you would at least learn Spanish or something, down there in…”

  “Georgia.”

  “Oh yes. I keep thinking it’s close to Miami, and with all the Cubans there…” She picked up a bread stick and bit it off with a satisfied crunch. “Didn’t something happen in Georgia in the Civil war?”

  He drawled, “You refer to the War of Seccession, ma’am?”

  “Good Lord, I’ve never heard that.”

  “A term of my father’s.”

  “Sheridan’s March, that’s it.”

  “You mean Sherman’s March.”

  “Yes. He won a great battle outside Atlanta, wasn’t it?”

  “Burned a lot of hou
ses and crops, if that’s what you mean,” he said sharply.

  She raised her eyebrows. “My. You still feel it, don’t you?”

  He managed a smile. “Losers don’t forget as fast as winners.”

  “I suppose that’s true. No one ever talks about it in Boston. My great-grandfather bought his way out of military service, I believe.”

  “Yes, just a li’l interruption between Independence and Kennedy.”

  “I wonder if that’s what’s happening here,” Claire murmured softly. “Civil war.”

  “That rally, you mean?” He gazed back toward the floodlit quay, where the loudspeaker was silent at last.

  “There was a lot of jargon I couldn’t understand, but he seemed to be calling for getting rid of some of the ‘obstructionist’ political factions.”

  “Uh oh.”

  “Yes. And that man who—who—”

  “Gave us the finger, that’s the technical term.”

  “Well, I’ve never seen such public impoliteness in Greece.”

  “Why, then?”

  “The economy is flat on its back. It’s always tempting to blame a foreign scapegoat.”

  “Good ol’ us.”

  “I’m afraid so. Kontos may be right about many political things, though. He used to be such a good archeologist.”

  “Well, right or wrong, he’s still an SOB.”

  “It’s not that we’re blameless.”

  He grinned wearily. “Who is?”

  The waiter arrived with wine. John poured. He was much more interested in Claire than in politics. Best to steer conversation to lighter areas.

  “Y’know,” he began, “maybe the more you travel, the more things look the same. Greece reminds me of Mexico a lot. Same tinny music on the radio, same bare-bones style, electric light bulbs with no shades, same—awk!”

  She giggled. “The dread retsina strikes again!”

  CHAPTER

  Seven

  When they returned to the site Kontos and his men had just arrived. He shone his flashlight into their front seat.

  “Where did you go?” he demanded.

  John said, “Around, looking at things.”

  “The site officer at Mycenae saw no one matching your description.”