Mer-Cycle

  “My soul.”

  Gaspar nodded understandingly and moved on.

  The street they were on became narrow and crooked. It was as if they were entering a denser, older inner city. Large structures remained, but they were set much closer together.

  “Hey—steps,” Gaspar said.

  He was right. Their street had become a walkway, with twenty or thirty broad steps, each about thirty feet from side to side, fashioned of—what? Fine marble? He could not tell through the smothering sediment. They led up to the remains of a labyrinthine palace. Don made out the shells of what must have been spacious, shady courts, with elegantly drained lavatories. The few standing columns were tapered downwards, narrower at the base than the apex.

  “Typical Minoan architecture,” Don murmured professionally.

  “What?” Gaspar asked sharply.

  “The hygienic sanitary facilities,” Don explained. “The Cretans were virtually alone in the ancient world in their fastidious insistence on personal cleanliness. They had the most sophisticated system of water supplies and drainage, with pipes designed on correct hydraulic principles. See, that’s the fundament of a flush toilet, I’m sure, even through the silt. The configuration—”

  “What kind of architecture?” Gaspar repeated.

  “Minoan, of course. I’ve seen many examples of—” Don stopped. “Minoan! What am I saying? Mayan! I mean—”

  “You sounded as if you knew, just as clearly as I know metamorphic from igneous.”

  “Ridiculous! I’m just used to saying—” But he had to stop again. “Damn it, these are Minoan configurations, essentially. I don’t care how crazy it is. This is my specialty.”

  “I don’t see that it’s crazy,” Gaspar said. “When did your Minoan civilization develop?”

  “About three thousand B.C., or a little later. They appeared suddenly; they must have had a high culture before they came to Crete. But we have no tangible evidence of them before; it’s just conjecture.”

  “So let’s say the waters encroached here after 4000 B.C.,” Gaspar continued carefully. “It was slow but sure. So wherever they were, they had to move, and they didn’t like the barbarian mainland, so they went to Crete and set up shop there.”

  Don stared at him. “You mean to suggest—they were here? They crossed the Atlantic?” Don shook his head, bemused. “Even if—no, they would have chosen a closer island. Like Cuba.”

  “Too big. They wanted something the size of Crete.”

  “Jamaica, then. Why didn’t they move to Jamaica?”

  Gaspar shrugged. “Got me there. But there must have been some connection. Or could the architecture be coincidental?”

  “It must be,” Don said. “Crete is six thousand miles from here by water, and even today that’s a fair piece. For an Amerind canoe—”

  “How about the other way, then? Maybe your Minoans developed earlier than you think. Two thousand years earlier. Maybe their main cities were submerged, so most of them set up colonies elsewhere. They had ships, didn’t they? They could sail the oceans?”

  “They were the leading maritime culture of the ancient world,” Don said warmly. “The Phoenicians developed only after the Minoan civilization perished—and the early Phoenicians were afraid to lose sight of land, because they couldn’t navigate by the stars. The Minoans were true sea-voyagers.”

  “Just a moment. If the Minoans were so strong, what brought them down? Maybe there’s our real city-builder!”

  “Two things,” Don said. “There was the explosion of the volcanic island of Thera, which devastated Crete, leveled their palaces and probably wiped out their fleet. It was one of the worst eruptions known to man, many times as powerful as Krakatoa. It literally buried Crete in ash. But that was not the end; they did rebuild. But they needed an enormous supply of wood, for their ships and buildings, and the rebuilding used it up at a faster rate. Their civilization flourished even more after the eruption than before it, but in the end they ran out of wood and had to leave the island. Lesser cultures, with virgin forests, expanded to take their place.”

  “Oh. Well, back to the sea. I still think there could have been a connection. Didn’t some guy cross from Egypt to America in a reed craft?”

  “That was Thor Heyerdahl. Yes, he reconstructed an Egyptian papyrus vessel and crossed the Atlantic in 1970, demonstrating that it could have been done in ancient times. He had a similar venture some years before, crossing from South America to the Polynesian Islands. The Kon-Tiki.”

  “Right. He discovered new species of fish and had an adventure with a whale shark.”

  “But he knew what he was doing, or thought he knew. Even so, it was an extremely risky business. The Egyptians would hardly have set out voluntarily to cross the Atlantic in a sinking reed craft.”

  “Maybe they didn’t,” Gaspar said. “Maybe they set out to reach some port on the western coast of Africa, and were stormblown toward America. The prevailing winds and currents favor that, you know. If it’s possible with a reed craft, it’s more than possible with a full-fledged Minoan seaworthy ship.”

  “In four or five thousand B.C.? The Minoans can’t have had such good ships that far back.” But Don was wondering, for it could have been the Palace of Knossos he saw here, with its tremendous inner court and interminable surrounding walls and passages and cubicles. The court was oblong, about fifty feet across and a hundred long, quite flat and completely walled in. Even through the rubble he could make out the enormous complexity of the surrounding corridors, stairs, terraces, and halls, that crisscrossed and dead-ended and right-angled bewilderingly. A stranger would soon have been lost within the living building.

  “What a maze,” Gaspar remarked.

  “That’s the point,” Don said. “According to legend, Theseus fought the bull-man, the Minotaur, within just such a labyrinth. Then he needed help finding his way out. God, I wish I could trench this.”

  “Do what to what?”

  “Dig a trench. Excavate. The vast majority of artifacts are well buried in silt. But if I could cut a trench through the middle—”

  “You can’t do that,” Gaspar said.

  “I know. That’s the frustrating thing about this phase-out. My inability to interact with the substance of the world when I need to. But if I could dig, I’d mark off the most promising mound here, and excavate a narrow trench across it, very carefully, and note the exact position of every artifact I located. I’d make the sides exactly vertical and smooth them off so I could observe the precise layering, because there are apt to be a number of layers of occupation—”

  “You don’t understand, Don! You can’t do that here. Even phased in. You can’t dig a trench underwater. Not the kind you want.”

  “Why not? Are there laws against it?”

  “The law of nature. Start digging, and your trench will immediately fill in from the sides. Silt doesn’t pack the way dirt does on land; it’s always partly in suspension. Touch it and you stir up a cloud of stuff so that you can’t see. You get nowhere.”

  Don looked at him, appalled. “But how can an archaeologist excavate?”

  “Not the way you do it on land. You have to suck up the sludge, then let the water clear, and see what you have.”

  Don sighed. “It’s unnatural.”

  “But I’ll bet we can find you some artifacts right now.”

  “F-forget it,” Don said with disgust. He had glimpsed marvelous visions, but in the end he was impotent.

  “I’m not joking. Consider: when you grab a fish, you feel the bones, right? Because they’re just a bit more rigid than flesh. Well, what are your artifacts made from?”

  “Anything is an artifact. Pottery, statuary—”

  “Anything made of gold?”

  “Yes, of course. Much of the finest Minoan handi-work—”

  “Gold has a density of about twenty-two times that of water. You could almost pick it up through the phase, couldn’t you?”

  “I suppose I could
. But—”

  “While this rock must be no more than four or five times as dense as water. And the silt is little thicker. So—”

  “So I could feel the gold under the silt!” Don exclaimed.

  “Of course you couldn’t actually move it. But you could get a pretty good idea of its shape. That would help, wouldn’t it?”

  “Yes!” Don cried.

  “So why don’t we get up a team of five tomorrow and feel through a likely spot? Maybe we’ll find something to unriddle Atlantis.”

  “Why is it so important to explore this city?” Melanie inquired when they got back together. She had spent her day resting, and looked refreshed. “I heard you say it was six thousand years old, but you can’t really see it, under all that mud. Or do anything, because of the phase. So it’s all sort of pointless, isn’t it, holding up the party?”

  For a moment Don was irritated. But he realized that it was an honest question. How could she comprehend the drive of archaeological zeal? It was not enough to claim that a mountain had to be climbed merely because it was there; a more rational answer was required. But Don’s head was spinning with the irrational notions forced upon him during the day: a city with apparent Minoan affinities that predated the known Minoan culture by a thousand years or more. A mysterious alternate world, Earth’s almost perfect duplicate, except that it had lived and then died. Recently. Geologically. His mind still balked at such concepts. And she wanted to know why he had to investigate this city! What answer could he give her?

  “Hey, are you doing it to me, now?” Melanie asked, smiling. “The silent treatment?”

  Don had to laugh, really appreciating for the first time the kind of mood that dictated silence as the best answer. In a year he might explain it all to her, if ever. Had she felt that way about her autographs, that first time she had hit him with a silence? If so, he had been a boor.

  “Why do you collect autographs?” he asked.

  “Uh-oh. You mean it’s that way?”

  He didn’t answer.

  “Well, all right, then. I guess I asked for it.” She took a breath. “As I remember, you said something to the effect that you were more interested in what an author said, and that autographs and such were relatively unimportant. But books are printed by a very mechanical process, and in such a way that one must accept on simple faith that they are written by any one particular person at all. Not that all books are, of course. But we are used to dealing with particular individuals, and it seems somehow proper that a book should have been written by an individual. But if we consider society to be a network of human relations, the believability of the existence of an ‘author’ back there somewhere becomes rather attenuated. Writing is in some sense a form of sharing. We can all sit at the feet of and listen to whomever we like. Sort of like the university lectures in France. Some of the lecturers have small audiences and some have very large audiences. There the important thing is passing the exams at the end of the four years or so of study, and attendance per se is not as important as it is in the system here. But we all long to be recognized for ourselves. To receive some token, however small, of the uniqueness of the relation between ourselves and the author. An autograph is one such token. It all seems to be a striving for affection and attention. For recognition of the uniqueness and value of the individual self. Readers and reviews give recognition to an author, although the relationship is sometimes painful. But authors in their turn give recognition to readers. By writing, of course—but also by standing still for pictures, smiling, saying things and autographing. The relationship between an author and his readers can be very much strained by the very large number of the latter. So—”

  “Enough!” Don exclaimed. “You’ve made your point, I think. And I guess if it could be turned about, you’ve made mine too. Because the books I read, archaeologically, are the record of an entire culture, and the physical artifacts are like personal autographs that some living hand has shaped and used. When I study a city such as this one, even under the mud, I am relating to living human beings of the past, just as you relate to the author of a novel. That’s very important to me. I can never actually come to know them better than this, though I long to. If I could actually visit that past—”

  “Yes, I understand!” she said warmly. “I suppose it is the same. Now I see why you want to find a real artifact tomorrow. And I hope you do. I’ll help you look.”

  Did that mean she had completed her period of considering their relationship? What was his own conclusion about it?

  “You know, if you could visit the past,” she remarked, “well, maybe it wouldn’t mean so much.”

  She had surprised him again. “How can you say that? An actual look at—”

  “Because I did visit a writer once. Not settling for just an autograph. If the parallel holds—”

  “You-you visited the past, in effect?” He was intrigued. They had had a breakthrough in mutual understanding; was another on the way?

  Then he thought: was that when she took the pills?

  “I had been hinting to Mother now and then that I would like to go on a trip,” she said blithely. “Partly to make a pilgrimage to the ocean—that was before I came to Miami on my own—and partly to see something, some place, besides home. I guess I just get the urge to travel a little, every now and then. Maybe expecting to find something better on the other side of the mountain. If I could afford it I would travel around the world a few times, I am sure. But the thing that most immediately precipitated my trip was reading Shirley MacLaine’s Don’t Fall Off the Mountain. Have you—?”

  “No, I never heard of it,” Don said. Where did she dig up these obscure books?

  “Oh. Well, for one thing it made me jealous. For another it is a tribute to the admissibility of a woman wandering around on her own. The voices of conformity sound strongly in my head, and to some extent I live in fear.” She paused again. “I shouldn’t be saying this.”

  “I shouldn’t be listening,” Don said comfortably. “Go on.”

  “I have always been somewhat of a disappointment to my mother,” she continued faintly. “I mean, not just because of the hair. Because she always wanted someone who was level headed. So I try to pretend to be. And quite frankly it is a very painful pretense. Somehow I have learned, rightly or wrongly, to keep silent on many kinds of things.”

  Was he about to wish that she had kept silent on this? Here he was getting jealous of someone she had visited before he ever met her. But maybe that was a sign: why should he feel that way, unless he cared about her?

  “Anyway,” she continued after a moment, “I went to visit this writer. He’d published a couple of novels I liked, and there’d been some correspondence. Nothing much—I don’t mean to make it sound like more than it is—just some fan letters and a polite acknowledgment. I sent him clippings, too. That sort of thing.”

  She valued an autograph as a personal touch. How did the things she sent to the writer relate? Did they make the personal touch mutual?

  “So when I decided to meet him, one of my reasons was simple curiosity. To see if he looked anything like my mental picture of him. So I glued on my wig and went.”

  And she took pills, just in case. Damn her!

  “And you know, he did,” she said. “Close enough.”

  Don would have hit her with a silence, had he not already been silent.

  “Not that it made a great deal of difference. What he looked like, I mean. At least I had a better image to orient on when I thought of him. I have been meeting some people in the flesh always, and some people always through the medium of the written word, and the curiosity is about the similarities or dissonances between the possible views.”

  “Now you’re meeting people under the ocean.”

  “Yes. I like being with you, Don. I’ve thought about it, and I like it. Even if it doesn’t last.” She met his gaze, and smiled.

  Suddenly Don regretted his silent objects. She wanted to be with him! Had she brought
her pills? But he couldn’t say that. “How did your visit go? W-with the writer?”

  “Oh, it was nothing, really. That’s why I used it as an example. He’d come out with opinions—that’s what writers do, you know—and I’d be silent. You know.”

  “Yes.” Good. He was still jealous of that writer, and wished the man ill. Yet he remained quite curious about the event.

  “I talked with his wife, too. And I played with his little girl. She was about four. She liked to climb. On people. I thought he might invite me to stay to supper, but he didn’t. He was locked up in his family. So I took some pictures and went home. It was raining.”

  So the writer had been married, with a child. Don had visualized a lecherous bachelor. Now he felt ashamed. “I see,” he said, because he had to say something. A silence at this point could give him away.

  “So that’s what I mean,” Melanie said. “Really, that writer was just another person, in person. I wouldn’t have known he had written those novels, just by meeting him. I can’t say it was a disappointment. I mean, people are what they are. But it wasn’t exactly a revelation, either.”

  “So you think that if I traveled into the archaeological past, it might be like that,” Don said musingly. “Mundane. I wonder.”

  Melanie nodded. Then she rummaged in her pack and pulled out her wig. She put it on, working it carefully into place and pressing it down so that it stayed.

  “You look strange,” Don said.

  “Thank you.”

  Apparently she had made her point, and now was satisfied to resume the illusion.

  They settled into sleep.

  “I’m no historian or archaeologist,” Eleph said as he walked his bicycle through the waist-deep silt of what Don hoped was a temple storeroom. “But I seem to remember something about a unique Indian tribe in North America, racially and linguistically distinct from the norm, with a legend of arrival from the east. Do you suppose they could have—?”

  “Oh, yes,” Don said, sweeping his hand through the slight resistance of the mud. “I remember now. The Yuchis. They wound up in Oklahoma, I think. From Georgia. But we can hardly rely on such scant evidence as legends. We’d have to believe that some peoples descended from the sun, and others from human miscegenation with animals.”