Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “A Stoic.”

  “Huh. Just stay warm.”

  Another long silence. She was unnerved by his acceptance of their situation. She thought furiously.

  “Does this side passage go anywhere?”

  “Sure. Straight down to somewhere below France. It’s the tunnel the singularity bored.”

  “Oh.” She reached out and felt along the cold, slick surface.

  In the utter blackness her sense of touch was amplified, exaggerating every crevice and slope into valleys and mountains. She thought wistfully that if the shaft and this side opening had any archeological significance, it was lost now; such damage had surely erased any record of the past.

  She asked him what had happened to Arditti and the others. He told her sketchily, plainly not wanting to remember. His voice was deep and gravelly and she concentrated on it in the absolute blackness, using it as an anchor. The words came slowly to him and his voice trembled when he told how he had found the bodies. She was horrified by the repeated passings of the singularity. She wanted to ask how much radiation he had gotten but saw it would do no good, that he could not judge and was trying not to think of it.

  He slowed, his words dropping into the silence like pebbles into a deep well. He stopped. Then, as if from a long way off, he said drowsily, “C’mon, rest, cuddle up. We prob’ly got a long wait.”

  She wrapped herself around him, feeling protective. He was exhausted and probably had mild shock. She had been banged up, but nothing like the strain of swimming and climbing for so long, not to mention the terror he must have felt in this awful place.

  She held him, trying to ignore her numb feet. The cold spread gradually, her muscles tightening, fingers of dull pain working up through her legs. She could not sleep. The excitement had abated, leaving a residue of darting attention, unable to subside. It would be better if she were played out, like John. Then she could sleep and save her energy for later. She could not keep her thoughts from skittering over the grim future. They were trapped in the cold and dark, no one knowing their location, perhaps even believing them killed in the cave-in. As much as she went over the facts she could see nothing to do, no real hope of ever escaping this silent grave. Much the way others might have faced death in the ancient tomb above, if in fact servants had been buried with their masters. John had spoken of that long ago, felt it there in the tomb, the horror of burial.

  Gradually she shifted away from their prospects and thought of the tomb. She smiled to herself, recognizing that even when she lay in what would probably be her own tomb, she still regretted the destruction of such a fine site. The artifact had opened up many possible interpretations of the burial site, ideas which could be tested, leads which would reward a careful combing through the record.

  It was obvious that the singularity had been magnetically trapped in the stone before the cube came to the tomb. Possibly the amber cone was a way to view the singularity’s awesome light without leaving a howling hole in the cube.

  But why bury it? Because it belonged to a ruler, a great man? Perhaps. But the Mycenaeans gave their dead implements which would be useful during the passage to the land of the afterlife. The implements were left near the body. Why bury the cube behind the tomb wall?

  Because it was dangerous? Not to the dead, but to the living who finished preparing the tomb.

  If the crude marks on the outer block were in fact from servants buried with their master, then those servants wanted to get the artifact itself. Perhaps they knew that it contained something which could cut rock, make an opening in the tomb walls. They certainly knew that they could not escape through the sealed doorway and the tons of sand beyond.

  They had tried for something they might have been able to reach. But whoever made the gouges never got beyond the outer block, and perished.

  Suppose everyone knew the artifact contained something terribly dangerous. Something was trapped inside, or else the great man wouldn’t have kept it with him. But if it got loose after the man’s death, his mourners did not want it around, on the surface, where it could kill and destroy.

  Pride. All this suggested a certain hubris, the boasting of a man after some feat, some victory now vanished in the dust. He might have prized the artifact, had the stone-trapped singularity chiseled out of rock and fashioned into a cube.

  That way he could return in grandeur, bringing the captive monster back to his people, he could boast, Here, gaze upon my prey. And watch the stay-at-homes cower, fearful and awed, before the rough-cut cube. See, he could say, look at the amber. It glows with the inner demon. To show how unconcerned he was, he could have the cube ornamented, carved further with a Linear A inscription, and an ivory map attached.

  The map. What would be more natural than to attach to the cube a record of his travels, his triumphs?

  A sign of where the cube came from. Santorini.

  The ivory rectangle was the first map of any kind found from Mycenaean Greece, from the old times when the legends were born, before Homer had spun the central images of his culture into his rich tales. Almost certainly map-making arose from navigation, so maps would be drawn on useful, cheap parchment or other writing material. Something a fisherman or trader could afford to carry around. Not an ornament, laboriously inscribed on precious ivory. That fragile rectangle was clearly a gesture of opulence and great glory.

  So for some reason the great man, the King, had gone to Santorini and brought back the thing in stone. He must have pursued it beneath the Earth and found it embedded. A bit of luck, which he turned into a grand tale.

  She tried to remember what John and Sergio had said about the twinned singularities. Together they might be much more benign. Once they paired up, buried in rock, the accidental magnetic trap into which they had blundered could hold them. Perhaps that was how they had come together—one becoming caught in the accidental magnetic cup, and then the other seeking it out.

  Unless the pair were jarred, as she and John had jarred them. So perhaps the King had found the twins reunited, trapped in the rock, had commanded his men to carve out a stone vessel around it, brought it across the sea….

  No, that was unreasonable. Maneuvering tons of rock onto a sailing vessel, bringing it hundreds of miles—somewhere it would have slipped, jounced, separated the singularities.

  What if the King found only one singularity? A sole singularity could remain relatively quiet in such a trap for at least months; theirs had, sitting in Boston. Then the King would bring it home….

  …And its twin would follow.

  Suppose the King thought he had found the monster, caught it. But in fact he had only gotten one of the monsters. The second twin was probably nearby, perhaps on Santorini itself. They would seek each other, trying to reunite, but continually deflected by the ocean, by volcanic currents deep beneath the rock.

  Suddenly she remembered the ruined outline of the shaft in the sea, the trench they had supposed was a seepage channel…which led to the shaft where they were trapped now. A singularity, cutting through limestone, would open a small passage. Rainwater would preferentially flow there, eroding the limestone easily, enlarging the bore of it. In time it would look the same as the millions of seepage shafts that wove through the soft limestone beds of Greece.

  There would be no way to tell that something had cut the seed passage, searching for its twin.

  The twin twist had found its brother in the tomb, bored the hole in the back of the cube along the precise line bisecting the cube face—and reunited, forming a bound state. And no one had seen it because it tunneled under the Aegean, slowly working its way through rock, from far Santorini. It had never broken onto the open soil of Greece. It hid itself in a tomb, waiting silent and content, till it was unearthed.

  Claire felt a welling certainty. She thought of that ancient prince, a man who knew well the sharp glint of sunlight on olive trees, the many rich smells of newly turned earth, the wind’s whisper of storms coming. Picture a clever man, close to the rub an
d clamor of the natural world, and then confront him with a tiny point of virulent light that ate everything, that dwelled in the Earth, that sliced through rock itself.

  The King must have found it by its piercing, grating whine. The sound of it feeding. Perhaps the natives of Santorini had seen the thing before, or its twin—watched it break free of fiery rock and rip and burn through their fields, their homes. Would they have called for help, and drawn to them a King who craved danger, loved the hunt, believed that monsters were as natural as rain and sun?

  So he had ventured below, into caverns, and come upon the shrill thing that called through massive rock. And when it did not move or emerge, he guessed that it was caught. He did not have to fight it. He could simply chip away at its cage, and take it with him.

  But a brave man would want to know what he had. He would look through the small hole, through which the first singularity had entered. From which howling and light emerged.

  And would never feel the killing sleet of radiation that flowed out, dooming him to a hideous end months or years from that moment. His end had been sealed then, fating his burial in a corbelled limestone tomb, interred with the glowering ageless beast who killed him.

  She turned restlessly, deeply chilled, her mind flooded with ideas, possibilities. John stirred against her, seeking warmth. The blackness pressed in.

  What would the King make of it? What tale would he spin from such glory, while his artisans labored to decorate the cubical trap? She tried to imagine the King’s death, wasting from the radiation, spinning tales in his delirium, perhaps finally guessing that the growling thing in the stone had given him the sweaty, hot fever dreams, the wrenching nausea, the listless failing death.

  She shook John awake. He groaned, fitfully struggling up from some deep place. “Ah?”

  “The amber cone, I know what it means.”

  “What? I dunno…”

  “It’s golden, don’t you see? The bull’s head in Crete, remember it in the museum?”

  He reached up and felt her face in the darkness with icy hands. “Take it easy…. Lie back down—”

  “No, I’m OK, I only want to tell you this. Listen! The golden horns are ceremonial in Mycenaean civilization, and that’s what the King, that dead King up in the tomb, that’s what he had put on his prey. A horn. So the legend was built around that image, a horned thing in the Earth—”

  “I don’t—”

  “—That the King hunted and killed. Brought back with him. You see? You and Sergio, you’re always talking about this like it was a new piece of particle physics. But people saw the singularities then, too, some must have broken onto the surface, burning and terrorizing and—it was important, it was history.”

  “Look…I’m tired, I—”

  “History we know! Only it’s gotten all twisted up. What can you expect of farmers who’re trying to describe something as horrible as that thing on the loose? The King, he really was a great King, because he killed the beast. Or captured it, anyway.”

  “Uh?” He was groggy. “Beast?”

  “The beast or god or demon we let loose again. We dropped it down the shaft, so it shot out through that natural exit—the ‘symmetry axis,’ you said. Just the way it had come in, shortly after the King was buried. Both singularities lived in the caves of Santorini and burned people. Maybe the volcanic currents brought them there in the first place. And the King heard, he came and caught one—heard it humming, already trapped in the rock! A great quest! He didn’t know there was a twin. They were searching for each other, and they’d break onto the surface sometimes. How could the Greeks tell them apart? They thought there was only one.”

  “So’d…we….”

  “Yes! And when the King caught it they made up a legend about the beast. A garbled version of the truth. It was in the Earth and when the King died, it went back into the Earth. With its horn! The amber horn!”

  “Uh huh.”

  “The horn is the key.” She laughed. “The singularity was the Minotaur.”

  CHAPTER

  Twelve

  Cold that cut bone deep, robbing the body of its will to move, its urge to pump blood into the numbed limbs, even its lust to breathe. He had been cold so long he had lost track of the gathering ache and now it was a separate thing, an aura of pain, a presence that lived in his body with him and fed upon him and would never leave.

  He opened his eyes to the consuming dark. From Claire came a mild diffuse warmth, a wan sun about which he orbited in eternal hard blackness. He held her to him and felt her heart thud slowly, almost reluctantly.

  She had chattered on for a time and he had half understood what she was driving at, but it all seemed so far away, history and ideas, abstractions as distant as the chilling stars. He had tried to listen but the tiredness pulled the strength out of him and he could barely stay awake. Then she had run down, talked less, her voice happy in a way, a liquid sound in the endless total dark, and finally the sleep had claimed her, too.

  He had slept, he was sure of that. How long the two of them had been here he didn’t know. He didn’t have the will to lift his watch to his eyes. That movement would have let precious heat escape, and anyway time did not matter anymore. Time was simply enduring, and when you stopped doing that there would be no more time, no matter what the watch said.

  But now he had woken up and he wished he had not. Asleep, the grasping, leaden pain did not sit on your chest and breathe into your face and send ice knives forking up through your legs into your gut. Asleep was better. Awake was to live and to know what came next.

  He blinked, and saw luminescent retinal patterns. Drifting stabs of light, coming and going like drifting clouds, silent and unknowing. The clouds, he had never really looked up into the sky and studied them, never tried to find out what those cottonball ships meant. He had spent his life staring at pieces of paper or endlessly talking or crawling around in the goddamned smelly dirt, when he should have been watching the clouds, lying in the warm sun and sopping up the plentiful eternal heat that came streaming down from the burnt-gold sun, warmth without end. Streaming…

  Yellow, rippling streamers. Long stabs of light. On the walls.

  He moved his hand and could see fingers knotted into a tight fist constricted by cold, a slightly darker outline among the shadows.

  He opened his mouth and nothing came out. The tightness in his chest robbed him of air.

  “Hey! Arditti! Anderson! Anybody down there?” An echoing call.

  “Ah!” he croaked. He shook Claire. “Ah!”

  Dimly: “Hear that?”

  Even fainter: “No.”

  “Ah! We, we’re here!”

  “Damn! Hear that? There’s somebody down there.”

  When John stumbled from the ruin of the tomb he refused to wait for the stretcher they offered. His first few steps had brought savage lancing pinpricks into his legs and he knew abstractly that the circulation would have to hurt anyway, so he walked, just to be in the open. His legs were wooden, chunky logs of blood. The weight on his chest was gone. The exercise of getting into the harness, of dumbly holding onto the rope as they hauled him up, had brought him out of his aching stupor.

  He stumbled beyond the tumbled blocks of the tomb and walked slowly out the long entranceway, one hand on the wall. Hale was with Claire, making her lean against him, just ahead. So Hale had come through after all. Good.

  A man kept telling John that he should get on the stretcher but he ignored the voice and made his way. There were humming white lamps every five yards or so and the whole area was lit brilliantly. Helicopters clacked overhead and jets roared, cruising above the clouds. The Sixth Fleet was present in force. Carmody had dropped the mask.

  John reached the end of the entranceway and sagged against the last rough limestone blocks. The fire in the camp had died out and a ceiling of murky smoke hung over the valley. Helicopters rested on a flat space to the east. The men who rescued them had come in them, obviously; the stretcher bea
rers were approaching from that direction. Crimson dawn rimmed distant hills.

  But his attention turned immediately to the blue spark that drifted in the west, at the far end of the valley. Above it hung Claire’s helicopter, the bulky crate suspended like an egg sac below. The helicopter drifted north and below it by sympathetic magic the hot blue point followed, echoing each turn. It was as though the singularity was on a leash, obediently following the pilot’s unspoken orders.

  They had drawn it away from the tomb and into an area where they could maneuver it, test out its response. Now as John watched the helicopter lowered and the underside of the crate flexed open.

  The engineers had designed this with simple failsafe devices, but in fact no one knew whether it would work. Decades of research on extracting fusion energy had advanced enormously the art of magnetically confining plasmas. Physicists knew how to trap and hold hot ionized matter in magnetic pouches shaped like donuts or figure eights or links of sausage. But this thing was not a plasma, and the physicists’ experience might not apply. Experience yielded only crude rules of thumb, approximations.

  Men had gathered near him but they let him be. He tucked numb hands into the folds of the down jacket they’d given him. Claire and Hale sat on the hillside. There was no talk. The helicopter slowly lowered the crate, rotors slapping. The crate’s underside was a complex contraption of magnets and conducting surfaces. Heavy steel plates shielded the helicopter from the singularity’s spitting gamma radiation.

  The blue-white sun rolled on its own fire, scorching the land, scratching a path of orange flames, leaving smoking plumes in its wake. A faint keening came from it, and when it bit deeply into soil the high notes drowned and a long, low bass note sounded down the valley as it ate.

  Perhaps the ancients of Santorini had seen it like this. John reflected that he could easily believe this thing was a monster of the scalding volcanic depths, bellowing its rage, bringing scorching death as vengeance for man’s failure to send it sacrifices, failure to come and seek and appease it in its vast, sulphurous labyrinth.