Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  The crate came closer, lowering, its white now a dusky blue as it reflected the fire below. Nearer, nearer—a brilliant flash, a thundering clap. Suddenly the whole scene was plunged into darkness.

  The shock of disappearance was frightening and everyone gasped. But then John saw that the helicopter’s running lights still shone. The twin singularity had been drawn into the trap and found its brother, and now they slumbered together. The binding energy of recombination was very minor compared with the megatons he and Zaninetti had calculated. But they had assumed the worse case, when the two met with high velocities. Slowed, the twinned twists recombined softly. The flame was snuffed.

  A ragged cheer from the crowd. The helicopter rose, its engines revving triumphantly.

  So at low speeds the energy lost from binding the twins was quite little. He should have known that, if he had had time or wit enough to think through Claire’s theory. If the two singularities had reunited while inside the cube, 3500 years ago, then obviously they couldn’t have released much energy—otherwise the cube itself would’ve been blown apart. He and Claire and poor dead George would never have discovered more than fragments. He chuckled to himself. If he and Zaninetti had paid more attention to the archeology, maybe they’d have been spared some of this.

  Now, as long as they kept the two twins united, they could experiment with them, open up a whole new field of physics. Keeping them confined, that was the problem. There was lots to be done. He tried to concentrate on the possibilities but found his head was a smoky, blurry place where ideas darted away into the murk.

  Hale and Claire were standing beside him, he saw. The stretcher bearers came at a trot. He decided that indeed, the broad white expanse of the stretcher, and the luxuriant blankets, did beckon.

  “Are you…OK?” Claire asked.

  “C minus, as we say in the teaching trade,” John said wanly.

  “Sonuvabitch,” Hale said wonderingly, pointing at the helicopter. “It works.”

  “Yeah,” John said. “Until somebody drops it.”

  EPILOGUE

  She was going to be late.

  Claire hurriedly assembled the xeroxed pages, tucked them in the envelope addressed to Science, and licked the flap. Done.

  She had set herself the quite probably neurotic goal of finishing the review paper by this date, and now “Ethnohistoric Connections Between the Minotaur Myth and an Unusual Mycenaean Burial Artifact” was ready for the sanctified precision of print. She had planned a somewhat more circumscribed piece—just the facts, ma’am, as John described it—to be followed by a full book, which would try to link the separate pieces of the puzzle in a lengthy format, copiously annotated with reservations, maybes, on-the-other-hands and however-ifs.

  But as word leaked out through February and March, she saw that piecemeal publishing would only bring the academic predators more quickly. Someone would see the connections and publish a short note in Ethnoarcheology or somewhere, nailing down the general idea. To protect herself she had to make a big splash on the first go. A few phone calls to major figures in the field had established that Science would welcome a paper touching on the mysterious events in the Peloponnese. John was slated to give a review talk on his theory in New York next week, and the two would dovetail nicely.

  Claire gathered her things and left her office without bothering to straighten the mess on the desk. Time enough for that later, much later, somewhere in the rest of her life. She fidgeted her key into the lock, unfamiliar with the ancient warp of the door. The department had grandly offered her a new office, about three times larger than her former claustrophobic cubbyhole, and with a commanding view of the Charles. There had not been enough time to sort her files. She left a note to the cleaning man to leave everything where it was for the weeks she would be away.

  Commonwealth Avenue shimmered in late spring green. Bedraggled students passed, self-absorbed as finals approached. She drew in the damp air, its weight promising a humid summer. The welcome press in her lungs reminded her of smoking, which she had given up months ago and still missed, a fidgety lust. She found a mailbox. The solid thump as it received the manuscript neatly punctuated her life. Done and done and done.

  She found her Alfa Romeo, threw away the parking ticket under the wiper, and pulled out into traffic with a screech. She had deliberately left her briefcase behind in the office; while preparing the paper, it had come to symbolize the weight of the past year.

  A horn blared at her as she darted onto Storrow Drive. She glanced at her watch. Probably the best bet was to shoot up to Cambridge Street and loop into town. Early afternoon on a May Saturday, the baseball crowds were headed the opposite way, toward Fenway Park. She made good time, overtaking Volkswagens with her customary contempt.

  The swelling, time-consuming labor of putting together the paper had come when she tried to nail down corroborating evidence. Time enough later for experts on Minoan ethno-history and the archeologeology of Santorini to come forward with their suspected connections and compatible ideas, all based on fragments of pots and scattered bits of metal and wood. That was all fine and good. But the clincher would have to come from new research.

  She had persuaded Carmody to map the ruined outlines of the shaft that lay in the sea near the tomb. The Sixth Fleet had taken up a shore-hugging formation for a week following the incident, covering a scientific team that explored the effects of the singularity on the terrain in detail. There had been plenty of time for divers to verify that the shaft made a straight line which, drawn on a larger map, neatly sliced through Santorini. What’s more, the line passed through the giant caldera of the exploded volcano, not through the remaining crescent of the present island. That implied that the singularity left Santorini, searching for its twin, before the final eruption.

  Was it coincidence that the movements of the singularities, the dead King’s quest for one of them, and the eruption of 1426 B.C., all occurred at about the same time? Or had the King gone to Santorini to find the mythic beast, to quell it, because the natives saw with foredoomed intuition a connection between the sun-bright, scorching things and the restless massive tremors beneath their feet? Did the singularities cause the eruption?

  So perhaps the Minotaur legend had come from man’s futile effort to control the world, block the uncaring shrug of the Earth that would send down into dust all his creations. Then all the wondrous myths of the Minotaur became a tale of pride, of hard-won temporary success, transmuted by tribal talk into a story about a thing half man and half beast.

  Still, as John said, maybe wasn’t a theory, maybe was just plain maybe. So she had searched for something firmer, something with the hard glint of physics behind it. The King’s bones and scattered tools were in some of the crates brought back early by Hampton, so she had worked on those. A radiological analysis of the bones showed a clear excess of several isotopes. The King had suffered a lethal dose of radiation. Other bones from the tomb floor, from other bodies, showed no excess. To her this was the capping argument. The singularity had slain him even in his moment of great victory.

  Archeology was a quiet, methodical field. Like all sciences, it rewarded caution. She was advancing a theory from which later evidence might force her to retreat, speculating broadly in order to explain seemingly isolated facts. This was always dangerous, and she knew it. But audacity was in her blood now and she liked the zest of challenge.

  Cambridge Street was unusually jammed. She kept looking at her watch. There was still time to get ready, but just barely.

  She passed the JFK Building, turned onto Tremont Street, pulled over to the right and parked the car in an illegal zone. She spotted her Uncle Alexander standing at the intersection of Tremont and School Street, talking with two Irish policemen. She hugged him, pointed to her car, and from the way the policemen touched their caps and nodded she saw that Uncle Alexander had already tipped them. The No Parking sign was temporary, flimsy, she saw now; this block was clear and there were plenty of spaces. U
ncle Alexander made a joke and she laughed, feeling her chest expand, the cramped anxiety lofting away.

  King’s Chapel crouched like an indomitable bulldog of the past, square and gray and blockish among the mindless high-rises of School Street, monotonous in their endlessly repeated windows. Claire hurried across Tremont on the light. In front of King’s Chapel, Uncle Charlie was talking to Aunt Edna, so rapt in gossip that they missed her as she slipped between the formidable solemn columns and into the central portal.

  A small sign warned PRIVATE CEREMONY. Good; no tourists. Their shuffling, blank attentiveness had always muted the tone of churches for her, given them an air as public as railway stations. King’s was an historical site, its granite towed on barges from open pits in Quincy in 1749. Its gravid solemnity enveloped her and she stood for a moment, unnoticed by the early arrivals in the forward pews. The stony Episcopal values that King’s first introduced into the New World had faded into that stoic Bostonian compromise with the future, Unitarianism. The church still lacked its white Protestant spire, though hard-pressed building committees still occasionally brought out the centuries-old plans for one. The past inevitably seemed melancholy here, as if the hushed and graceful spaces remembered when they were the pivot of a theocratic Boston. Yet in the narthex were signs of persistent purpose: the chaotic bulletin board and hopeful pamphlet rack announcing the inner life.

  She turned and ascended the stairs, steep enough to win Cotton Mather’s no-nonsense stern approval. Here were the others—jittery, nervous, knowing she was late. She made the usual excuses and surrendered herself to them: mother, assorted aunts, cousins, all in tasteful mauve or muted yellow or puce. Most had come down from Vermont or New Hampshire, where so many of the old families had retreated; travel time had dictated an afternoon wedding. They had the old dress, passed down from Great-grandmother, still a trim and brilliant white. Her own dress evaporated and the ancient cloth enveloped her, carried on impatient hands. The air up here was close, with that cloying smell of varnish and trapped heat. Claire had invested three hours yesterday in having her hair done, and was relieved to find, in the mirror, a well-sculpted cap of faintly blondish brown. Her mother hovered, adjusting the hem, minutely tugging the shoulders so Claire’s slip straps did not show. The elaborate, embroidered mantilla seemed almost excessive, but calmed her with its comforting drape about the shoulders. She turned before the mirror, inspecting, critical, and was pleased to find its folds conformed elegantly to the slopes of her body; Great-grandmother must have felt the same sly satisfaction.

  Talk swirled around her, approving, remembering, tremulous with an ordained excitement. These women called out their assent in coos of admiration and she saw them affectionately in their pastel gowns, immersed in their element. She had always thought them admirably bright in the minutia of living and strangely passive in the larger curve of their lives. Now she was not so sure. Perhaps it was possible to gather from so many petals a bouquet of fresh meaning.

  Slow swells from the organ loft. Below, dutiful cousins were escorting relatives to the box pews. The air of anticipation rose; other boxes yawned, beckoning, yielding jewelry; she chose a pearl ring but rejected any necklace, as too great a contrast with the ivory excellence of the mantilla.

  Time. She descended the steep steps, shoeless upon the advice of her hovering mother, afraid she would stumble. At the stone floor she paused and a cousin slipped on her white satin pumps. The box pews were nearly filled, their red cushions a rich display beneath the upward swoop of the white Corinthian columns. The organ stopped on signal. She glanced up and saw the organist nod to her, smiling, and begin with gusto, Here comes the bride, and she thought with a shock that, incredibly, it was she.

  Down the aisle, on the arm of her red-cheeked grandfather. Past the pulpit, paneled and pilastered, its sounding board hanging above, a symbol of authority all unused for this ceremony. The minister smiled at her and the music swarmed up and there was John, coming forward in white tux to claim her. She recited the archaic vows, suitably altered to omit promises of obeying, all in a husky tone that seemed tentative and inaudible in the open spaces encasing her.

  As they left to a Vivaldi trumpet voluntary, she glanced back at the scene, the crowd, to remember it. Then, without noticeable pause, she was at the reception at Eliot House, 6 Mount Vernon Place. She and John arrived first, chauffeured, to the welcoming salute of the caterer, who pressed lobster salad rolls and brimming glasses of champagne upon them. The reception line formed before she had finished admiring the flowers, and John’s father, resplendent in his tux, asked the first kiss of the reception. Uncle Alex gave her a burly hug and repeated his old joke about an archeologist being a person whose future lay in ruins.

  They were all there, the seldom seen denizens of distant farms and villages, and John moved among them, smiling, genuinely engrossed in whatever they had to tell him, no matter what lore of regional delirium they summoned up. Aged uncles asked him if it really was true that atoms were little solar systems, the electrons whirring around like planets. Aunts moved about the room, unsteady, carefully navigating past the treacherous unpadded furniture. She realized that he was genuinely interested, and that he still carried the automatic Southern faith that families were intrinsically fascinating.

  Sergio approached, beaming. “Esquisito. I did not think the Bostonians, they knew how to do these things.”

  “We’ve had many Italians to teach us.”

  “So you have indeed. I hope you will come to supper when you return. And in the fall, John will be in the department.”

  “Of course.” By “the department” he meant, obviously, Harvard.

  The offer had come to John out of the blue, six weeks ago. A discovery of this magnitude carried perks, fame, security. She had been so involved, so fretful over her breach of ethics, that she had quite missed the true import of it all. John had gotten a dozen offers in a single month, with Harvard coming as the crowning touch. He would be an assistant professor; tenure seemed automatic.

  Sergio congratulated John effusively and Abe Sprangle joined him. Abe and Claire were to collaborate on a detailed paper about the artifact once she returned. Already it was Abe’s best-known work, and it had not even been written, much less published. The rumor mill made more reputations than the journals.

  The crowd noise rose and the band began. She waltzed with abandon, not consciously remembering the steps but falling into them with ease, her head high, the chandelier lights whirling like constellations. In a momentary giddiness she leaned her forehead forward onto John’s white tux, seeing it as a clean expanse to rest upon, as welcoming as the stretcher had been that distant morning.

  Her mother gathered the principals around for the obligatory photographs. A ferret-faced man arranged lights and people, then maneuvered them through the ordained configurations of immediate family, stiff group shots, static-smile closeups. Though this was the least natural event of all Claire felt uplifted by it, encased in unfurling eggshell light, oddly able to see them all as though they were fixed forever, not she. Her mother toasted the new couple, holding high a cup of mysteriously potent punch: “Cheers, dears.” A dribble of spilled punch fell, turned into amber drops, and the photographer snapped them up, froze them—wobbly globes hanging in slanting yellow sunlight, to her mother’s genteel yet slack-jawed surprise.

  Professor Hampton appeared, grinning, face flushed with the heat of champagne. “I certainly am looking forward to having you in the department,” he said with forced jollity. “This has all been the pièce de resistance to a truly incredible year.”

  She smiled and said something meaninglessly polite. She might stay at BU another year, but she was damned if she’d remain under Hampton’s tutelage. Either he went or she would. But that was another battle, she reminded herself, another day.

  “I believe you should change for your plane,” her mother said. The party was swirling about her, voices shifting up in timber, a ripe fullness in the air. She did
not want to leave. She wished to cling to this afternoon and savor it, a moment she had thought would never come, that she had halfway feared anyway. But it had all come out, she had found the distant shore, and time did not need to stand still.

  “It’s time,” John said at her elbow.

  Summer had shouldered its way through the gossamer Manhattan spring, bringing a swarming, leaden heat to the afternoons. They made lunch an ample center of the day and retired to their room at the Astor for the hottest hours, lazing away the time in an erotic haze. A week went by without a feeling of time spent, but rather of a river’s movement, the current endlessly streaming and yet the river never changing.

  They had told no one their destination. John’s father had driven them to Logan, in a car besmirched with shaving lotion and JUST MARRIED signs. At the Callahan Tunnel the driver ahead of them paid their toll, honking and waving in salute. John’s father had helped them with the luggage and then given John a solid, man-to-man handshake of goodbye. On the plane they both agreed that the reception had been wonderful, and in fact they regretted having to leave before it dissolved.

  The ample, almost wasteful busyness of New York enveloped them. They steeped themselves in art, ate well, saw the season’s hit play, I Would If I Could But I Can’t So I Won’t. John liked it, Claire didn’t. They spent a morning at the new amusement park between 130th and 142nd Streets. It was artfully done, a technicolor carnival planted like a Bradbury fantasy in the middle of a block’s-wide greensward. The rolling hills reminded her of a golf course, and indeed their foundations were heaps of bricks from the tenements that had squatted here. Two phony skyscrapers towered above the rides and booths, serving as props for a frightening ride known inevitably as The Beast With Two Backs. Claire took it once and emerged trembling.

  The sensation came back that night and she wrestled up from sleep, gasping.