by Steve White
“Well, Sidney,” Rutherford reminded him, “you may have the opportunity to see how close Sir Arthur actually came.”
That silenced Nagel, and he looked around with new eyes at what he’d seen so many times before. Jason and Deirdre ignored him, for as far as the world at large was concerned, Evans had long ago triumphed over his detractors—or at least outlasted them. The passage of centuries had made his reconstructions a part of history in themselves, so that what he and his architect Christian Doll had wrought was now as legitimate a feature of Knossos as the works of the nameless builders of millennia before.
Like all Service members, Jason had gotten an extensive familiarization with Earth’s history. Deirdre didn’t have that depth and breadth of background knowledge, but as part of her preparation for this expedition she had learned something of this particular milieu. So, whatever Nagel may have thought, they both had some inkling of where they were and what it meant. As they walked through the northwest entrance and the propylaeum hall with its copied frescoes, Jason began to feel oppressed by the sheer, inconceivable ancientness of this haunted place. This was the concentrated and distilled essence of old Earth.
They proceeded through the dark, cavernous storerooms and walked up a flight of steps into the central courtyard. “Is this where they did the bull-leaping?” asked Deirdre, gesturing back in the direction of the frescoes they’d seen.
“That’s what many popularizations would have us believe,” said Nagel smugly. “But a moment’s thought should convince anyone of the unlikelihood that it was ever done on a stone-paved surface.”
“Hard enough to believe they ever did it anywhere , ” Jason mused, rubbing his itchy, bristly jaw. Rutherford had ordered him and Nagel to stop shaving.
“You are not the first to have that reaction,” Nagel acknowledged with a kind of condescending graciousness. “When the frescoes first came to light, experts in rodeo-type sports flatly denied the possibility. But there is no room for doubt that it did occur.”
They continued on, across the courtyard and down the restored grand staircase to the private apartments, with their appealing light airiness and their startlingly sophisticated plumbing. Then it was back to the west side of the courtyard and down a short flight of steps into what was called the throne room, although there was no proof that it had really been anything of the sort. Here, the ghosts clustered thickly around the high-backed alabaster chair that had given the chamber its name. Stealing a glance at Deirdre’s face, Jason could tell that she felt their presence as well.
The psychological atmosphere lightened again when they went above to a gallery of restored frescoes. Here again were the boys and girls vaulting over the backs of charging bulls, and portraits glowing with that blend of innocence and sophistication that the world of Evans’ day had seen in them, and found so appealing.
“And it’s never died down,” Nagel pontificated. “The fascination is rooted in the mystery, of course. Even after the Minoan scripts were deciphered—the Linear B in the twentieth century, the Linear A somewhat later—the surviving tablets revealed no more about the society’s inner life than a random day’s worth of emptied bureaucratic wastebaskets would reveal about us. So we can read whatever we want into these people’s art, and see whatever we want to see. To paraphrase what someone once said about the Neanderthals, each generation gets the Minoans it deserves.”
“Not like the later Classical Greeks, who did put themselves on record,” Jason remarked. “Admire them all you want, but you keep on bumping up against slavery and purdah and suicidal political stupidity.”
Nagel gave him a sharp glace, as though really noticing him for the first time. “Very astute, Mr. Thanou.” His very held an unmistakable connotation of surprisingly . “Evans’ post-Victorian sentimentalism—he seems to have thought of the Minoans as children quivering on the verge of exquisite decadence—is something from which we still haven’t altogether freed ourselves. Not too surprising. Evans was fairly imperious in his views, as though Knossos was his private estate. Come to think of it, Knossos was his private estate; he had bought the place. No one was apt to argue with him. So his influence lives on, despite everything that was discovered subsequently—clear evidence of human sacrifice, for example, and undeniable indications of ritual cannibalism.”
On that somewhat chilling note, they reemerged into the warm Cretan sun, now at midmorning. After the initial tour, Rutherford had a series of in-depth studies he wanted them to do, in conjunction with reconstructions of the palace’s layout, including the upper stories, holographically projected by his portable computer. Jason continued to note spatial relationships and distances, and store them away—not just in his memory, but also in the cybernetic memory of the implant in his skull, which recorded that which his eyes saw and could play it back through direct connection to his optic nerve. He saw nothing to be gained by reminding his companions of this capability, grateful though they might be for it later on.
Nagel found it necessary to quibble about the relevance of what they were seeing to what had existed in 1628 b.c., when the palace had already been half a millennium old. “It grew over time you know, almost like a living organism. At first it was isolated blocks of buildings grouped around the central court. Over the centuries, connections were built, open lanes became passageways and corridors, whole courtyards were roofed over and became rooms containing older structures, and the whole complex acquired an indescribable complexity, like … like …”
“Gormenghast,” Jason supplied. Deirdre shot him an appreciative grin—evidently her reading of classic fantasy hadn’t been limited to time-travel stories.
Nagel, on the other hand, gave him a glare of annoyed incomprehension. “At any rate, Kyle,” he said, ostentatiously ignoring Jason, “it would be useful if we could make several visits to it, at intervals of a few centuries each, to confirm the stages by which the structure evolved.”
Rutherford looked like he was having difficulty breathing—probably going into a kind of budgetary shock, Jason thought. “Well, at any rate, Sidney,” he finally managed, still wheezing a bit, “the general outline had assumed more or less its final form by our target period, had it not?”
“Probably,” Nagel grudgingly admitted. “After all these centuries, the exact dividing line between the Middle Minoan and Late Minoan periods is still a vexed question. We may find it still in its Middle Minoan III stage.” The thought seemed to cheer him.
It was night before they returned to Herakleion. The next morning and early afternoon were spent in a series of brief visits to other sites in Crete—Phaestos, Gournia, Triada. Rutherford didn’t let them stay in any one place very long, because they needed to depart from Athens for Australia the following evening, and he had one more stop he wanted them to make: Santorini.
“Needless to say,” he told them, “the landscape there is even more changed than all the others you’ve seen. Indeed, most of the landscape simply doesn’t exist anymore. Still, it can’t hurt to have a look, and it’s almost directly on our route back to Athens.”
So they flew north from Herakleion over the blue Aegean for seventy miles. The mountains of Crete were still visible behind them in the afternoon sun when the islands of the Santorini group appeared ahead.
Their aircar swung around to the west in a near half-circle, to approach from the northwest, through the gap between the big crescent-shaped island of Thera to the left, and smaller, barren Therasia to the right, to pass over the deep waters of the Santorini caldera. They flew at an altitude of a thousand feet, which put them about level with the tops of the sheer cliffs that walled the caldera in strata of gray, black, rustred and, at the top, dazzling white. Ahead, in the center of the caldera, the volcanic cone of Nea Kameni rose from the water.
Jason looked down at that water, almost as deep as the surrounding cliffs were high, too deep for any anchor chain to reach bottom. He tried, and failed, to imagine the event—“eruption” was a banality—which had obliterat
ed the center of a large circular island, leaving this thirty-two-square-mile sea-filled crater ringed by shattered fragments of the original island. Here, very clearly, was a place where the Earth had vomited its guts out.
Jason stole a look at Deirdre. The touristlike fascination she’d shown up till now was gone, replaced by a look of intense, focused concentration. It was, Jason realized, the look of one who was finally seeing at first hand a place previously studied in great depth but only from a distance.
They followed the cliffs of Thera southward. Presently a brilliantly whitewashed town appeared, sprawling along the white cliff crest of which it seemed an outgrowth.
“In the old days,” Rutherford told them, “the only access was by boat. You had to tie up at a jetty at the base of the cliffs, and go up nine hundred feet by foot or muleback. The adventurous, and those in search of authentic ambience, still do so.” He pointed downward at the ramps and steps, cut into the cliff face in a crazy series of zigzags and switchbacks. Jason took one look and decided he was grateful for the aircar that wafted them to the top of the cliff and down onto a small landing area on the outskirts of the town.
They walked through narrow, winding, multilevel streets—alleys, really—to the hotel where Rutherford had arranged accommodations. Rutherford himself was fidgeting to use what remained of the daylight, but they were all tired after their series of excursions on Crete earlier in the day. He grudgingly agreed that they could afford an evening of relaxation.
Jason settled into his room—small, austere, immaculate—and then, restless, walked up to a rooftop terrace where a few people sat at small tables. The hotel was perched at the very edge of the vertiginous cliff, and the terrace overlooked the caldera. Jason leaned on the rough-textured balustrade and peered down at the crazy mule trail and the jetty far below. Then he gazed outward, west over waters that the sun, setting behind Nea Kameni, had turned to a trail of molten bronze, rippling out to that dark mass of solidified lava.
“Hard to imagine, isn’t it?”
Jason turned at the sound of the familiar voice behind him. “Oh, hi, Ms. Sadaka-Ramirez.”
“Deirdre, please.” She had changed into a lightweight pale-blue dress whose translucent material would, Jason thought mischievously, have shown to best advantage with the lowlying sun behind her. “We may as well be on first-name terms, since we’re going to be spending quite a lot of time in each other’s company. Subjective time, I suppose I should say.”
“So we are. I’m Jason. Let me buy you a drink.”
For an instant, her face wore a defensive look—but only for an instant, before she smoothed it out. “Sure. Let’s try the local wine.”
Jason made no protest. They seated themselves at a tiny table in an angle formed by the balustrade and an equally rough wall with a tiny stand-up bar—a pass-through, really—where Jason procured a carafe of wine.
“Not bad,” he said after sipping it. “A little fizzy, but not bad. You say it’s local? I’m surprised they can grow grapes here.”
“Actually, they grow quite a few things here—tomatoes, barley and beans, as well as grapes. Volcanic soil is very fertile.”
“Yes, but it needs water. This island can’t possibly have any streams, and there’s hardly any rain.”
“It’s due to something we got here too late in the day to see. Because of the way the cliffs overshadow the caldera, the sun doesn’t hit the water until almost noon. And the water is very cold, being so deep. So the sudden heat causes lots of water vapor to rise up the cliffs and then pour down the slopes. So there’s a high level of humidity.”
Jason gave her a sharp look. “You really have made a study of this place, haven’t you? By the way, what did you mean earlier? What is it that’s hard to imagine?”
“What happened here four thousand years ago.” She swept her arm around in a gesture that took in the entire volcanically sculpted panorama, and her face wore the same look he’d seen earlier when she had gotten her first look at Santorini from the air. “At that time a circular island—called, we believe, Kalliste—took in this whole semicircle of islets. And at the center of it was a mountain a mile high. These cliffs are just the remnants of that mountain’s foothills!” She pointed to the cliffside where it curved away from them into the distance. “See that light-colored stratum? It’s the pumice and general ejecta of that mountain, which blew out to cover the island. And it’s a hundred to a hundred and fifty feet thick! Most of that cloud of ash and acidic gas—hot enough to vaporize people and other living things—expanded outward, covering the seabed and the islands to the southeast. Eventually, the ash and dust spread as far as Egypt.
“In the meantime, for a single unimaginable instant, towering walls of water must have hesitated above the cavity that had been blasted out. Then they crashed into it, striking that furnace-hot bottom and recoiling back outward in tsunamis—waves hundreds of feet high that must have devastated every coastal settlement in the Aegean that didn’t have some kind of geographical shelter.
“It was the greatest natural disaster in Earth’s history of which we have direct knowledge. The Krakatoa explosion in the early sixth century A.D., which started the dominoes of the Dark Ages falling, may have been bigger, but that’s speculation. When Krakatoa blew its top again in 1883 A.D., in the full light of history, it depopulated the adjacent areas of the Indonesian archipelago and created visible effects literally around the world … and on that occasion it released only about a third of the energy that was released here where we’re sitting, one autumn day in 1628 B.C.”
Jason looked around at the peaceful, picturesque scene, with unfamiliar but appealing music making a counterpoint to the low murmur of conversations at the other tables. A shiver ran through him.
“And the volcano has been quiescent ever since?” he asked.
“Not altogether.” Deirdre pointed outward at the Kameni islands in the middle of the caldera. “Those islands are fusions of volcanic cones resulting from a number of lesser eruptions since then. Palea Kameni had assumed its present form by the sixteenth century, when Nea Kameni appeared following a further eruption. Subsequent eruptions—including one in 1867 which was the first to be photographed—have been minor, and the configuration of the islands hasn’t appreciably changed.” She smiled. “Eventually, a new island will be built up, the same stresses will accumulate … and it will all happen again.”
” ‘World without end, amen,’” Jason quoted. He took a fortifying pull on his wine. “I repeat what I said earlier: you’ve obviously studied this place in depth. So maybe you can answer a question that’s been bothering me. There seems to be no doubt in anybody’s mind that the explosion took place in autumn of the year 1628 B.C. But how do we know that? It seems suspiciously exact.”
“Oh, that’s been known since around the turn of the twenty-first century, although it was controversial then. The ‘autumn’ part is an inference from the prevailing winds, as shown by the seabed deposits. And the year is a matter of dendrochronology.”
“Uh … dendro … ?”
“Tree-ring dating. Trees grow a new ring every year, so their growth rates can be measured. And some very old ones like bristlecone pines, and certain others preserved in northern European bogs, date back to the Bronze Age. So we know there were a couple of very bad growth years—indicating very severe, prolonged winters such as would be produced by a world-girdling cloud of volcanic ash—between 1628 and 1626 B.C.” She chuckled. “From what I’ve read, the archaeological establishment of that day went into deep denial when this came to light. It overturned some of their cherished theories, only a few years after they’d finally adjusted to radiocarbon dating.”
“Nagel’s ancestors,” Jason remarked drily. He couldn’t bring himself to worry about the crack’s appropriateness—at least not as much as he knew he should.
Deirdre looked startled for a second, then laughed nervously. “Well,” she temporized, not wanting to become a full accomplice in Jason’s naug
htiness, “they’ve come around by now, of course. They had to revise a lot of their assumptions to accommodate it. Or so I’ve read. I don’t know the details, of course. History’s not my field.”
“No, it isn’t. As much as I hate to admit it, I’m closer to Nagel than I am to you in terms of my areas of expertise. I had to soak up some background knowledge of Earth’s history in the course of my job with the Service. Not that I have any academic credentials in the field, you understand,” he added hastily.
“No,” she smiled, “you don’t seem the type. In fact, I can’t avoid a certain curiosity. What led you into the Temporal Service in the first place?”
Jason felt an unaccustomed and unwelcome awkwardness. “Well, the pay is good,” he offered. “Especially when you include the extratemporal duty bonus. And it all accumulates in a trust fund while you’re displaced in time.” This was true. After his separation from the Service there had been nothing to prevent him from retiring, except fear of an early death from boredom.
“No doubt. And I imagine that what you and Rutherford were telling us about the immutability of observed history must help. Otherwise it might be intolerable.”
“What do you mean?” Actually, Jason was fairly sure he knew.
“Well, if it weren’t that way you’d probably feel like you were walking on eggshells whenever you’re in the past, afraid to do anything that might have unintended consequences. But as it is, if you can do something then it must be all right.” She laughed. “I’m not expressing myself very well.”
“Yes, you are. And you’re right. There are circumstances in which you find you must do something.” Jason’s eyes seemed to focus on memory. “I was in Constantinople in 1204 when it was sacked by the Fourth Crusade.”