Artifact

by Gregory Benford

  “You will publish soon?”

  John blinked. He gave a little bow to Abe. “That’s up to the man with the data,” he said courteously.

  Abe responded, “I want to be very sure.”

  Zaninetti said solemnly, “But of course. I respect your caution.”

  “The interesting question is, where to publish?” John added.

  Zaninetti and Abe frowned. John went on, “I mean, is this a physics problem now? Or should we deal with the archeological role of the cube itself? Claire’s going to want a hand in that.”

  Abe said, “Well, I know what you’re thinking, but this splits into two problems, doesn’t it.” It was not a question.

  “There’s an archeological side to this. We can’t experiment on the thing willy-nilly,” John said.

  “We will not destroy the cube, of course,” Abe said. He smiled at Zaninetti. “The rock usefully shields us from the gammas, after all.”

  “Sure, but you’ve got to deal with BU and the others.”

  Abe said strongly, “Don’t worry about that. Once everybody realizes what we’ve got here, there won’t be any more nonsense from BU. I spoke to the president again this morning, and believe me, he’s on our side. Totally.”

  John nodded. Abe was an able strategist at these bureaucratic levels. Maybe he should simply forget the politics and concentrate on his mathematics. Zaninetti had clearly seen the possibilities immediately.

  In fact, John thought suddenly, maybe Sergio had sniffed out the implication in the data that he was working on. He couldn’t assume it had clean slipped by Zaninetti.

  Things were moving fast. Too damned fast.

  He left the lab and went straight to his office, skipping lunch. There were paths to follow in the mathematics, branching and forking possibilities that only patience and intuition could get him through. Sergio had glad-handed him and made some jokes, had in fact been his famous expansive self, charming Abe unmercifully. Sergio’s early career had been in elementary particle physics, where he had learned the skills of extracting needed data from tight-lipped experimenters and laconic postdocs. An NSF study had once showed that theoretical physicists were the most verbally deft of all the scientific community, and the assumption had been that this overlapped in some way their mathematical ability. Mathematicians were more apt to be good at music, but—the study argued—theoretical physics was a kind of halfway house, requiring mathematical deftness and physical intuition. Perhaps these correlated with verbal ability, the report wondered. The study had not considered the possibility that good talkers were more successful because they won over opponents and gained needed information more readily.

  John knew enough to stay away from talk for a while. He needed time to stare at a blank writing pad and see where the coiling implications of equations led, in search of patterns that lay behind the compressed, deceptively simple notation. The equations of physics were not complicated in form; indeed, they were dauntingly simple, hiding complexity in recondite notation.

  The mandarins of physics were those who searched for the basic laws, a hunt which took them inward to the very small—divining how the fundamental particles should work—or outward to the colossal, cosmology. Actually solving the equations in their myriad applications was a problem left for the bulk of mathematicians and physicists. Even though the basic equations describing the sun, for example, had been known for a century—Maxwell’s four relations, plus Newtonian mechanics—the magnetic arches, virulent flares and torrential storms on the sun’s surface were still only poorly understood.

  There were two crucial facts about the cube. First, it weighed only a ton or so. With that little mass, its self-gravitational field was very, very small. But the second fact—the four-poled looping of the gravitational field—seemed to contradict this. How could so little mass make a strong, complicated field nearby?

  That was the crucial clue, John thought, scratching his lip absently—those deceptively weak tugs as you ran your hands over the cube.

  In human experience, gravity was always simple. Stars and planets were spherical. The solar system and the Milky Way were disks, but that was because their spinning prevented collapse into one big round mass. In all of them, a clean spherical force compressed matter.

  The artifact wasn’t so well behaved. It proved that a particle could make complicated gravitational fields. In mathematicians’ language, that meant there had to be non-spherical solutions lurking in the basic equations.

  For the last few days, ever since he discovered the second fact, John had been working on the classical Einstein equations for gravity. Everyone had always assumed solutions to those equations which gave spherical cases—stars, disks. Even the universe as a whole was conveniently assumed to be spherically symmetric.

  Convenient was just the point, John saw. If you didn’t assume spherical symmetry, the Einstein equations were a mess. He wrote out the more general form, one Einstein had never investigated. He stared at it for a long time, barely hearing the distant voice passing in the corridor outside. There were possibilities here….

  To get a contorted field, you had to find solutions which warped space-time like a standing wave. The analogy which led him was to the large, slow-moving pile-ups of water sometimes seen in canals and rivers. He had seen one in a creek near the Gulf once, just before a storm. It was an eerie stack of water, massively crawling inland on the surface of the creek. He had been fourteen and the sight disturbed him, seemed somehow malevolent. He had studied such waves since; they were called solitons. Unlike ordinary water waves, they had only crests, no troughs.

  He had found some solitonlike solutions to Einstein’s equations, but they had disturbing properties. Staring at them now, he felt again the boyhood uneasiness, a slight rising of the hackles at something utterly contrary to experience.

  The solitons required definite mathematical forms to have a stable solution at all. This implied another force had come into play, some field which operated on an extremely small scale. Alone, solitons would look very much like ordinary, tiny black holes. They didn’t have to move, like water solitons. They could stand still.

  But two black holes together would immediately attract each other, merge, and make a slightly larger hole with a weight at least as great as a mountain’s. That clearly wasn’t what dwelled at the center of the cube, or else nobody’d have been able to even move it.

  Suddenly he glimpsed the way out.

  The new force solved this puzzle. Unlike gravity, it was repulsive. It stopped the black holes from forming a deep gravitational pit, by forcing the holes apart, never letting them merge.

  It was an odd force. In mathematical jargon, it was a non Abelian type, similar to the forces which regulated the subnuclear particles called quarks. The only viable solutions were not the point singularities familiar in ordinary field theory. They were something stranger, more like twists in space-time than points.

  The style in particle physics was to label solutions with quantum numbers, and give those numbers names, like “color” and “charm.” Good terminology was scarce; now there was even “style” and “substance,” used to describe obscure mathematical aspects. John decided to label his new force “fashion,” just to inject a note of wry doubt. It could be all this was dead wrong.

  The particles he had wrestled from Einstein’s equations were massive, all right, but the repulsive force between them compensated almost exactly for that mass. Fine. In fact, he might as well take the configuration of two close-together holes and call it one particle, since that was all that could exist. Twists, he decided to call them. Twists in space-time.

  He had worked until late afternoon, unmoving, seated in an old-fashioned, cushioned walnut chair. At last he stood up stiffly and surveyed the deepening shadows out his window, hearing for the first time the swish of traffic on Memorial Drive. He had something, but he didn’t know what it meant. Or if it described what sat in Abe’s lab.

  He got up and prowled the room re
stlessly. He knew he was spent for the day; no one could do intense mathematics unrelentingly. The mind simply lost its edge, its ability to flit through chains of logic and dip into possibility after possibility. He was startled by the knock on his door, but not irritated by the interruption.

  Claire came into his office with the same elan she’d had at their first meeting. She was wearing a modish rust-red suit with a frilly off-white blouse showing at the neck. Her nail polish matched her lipstick and she moved as though she was worth a million dollars. He remembered her from that first time with absolute recall, and was surprised to think that it had been only a few months ago. It seemed half a lifetime.

  “It’s cleared,” she remarked brightly.

  “Uh, yeah, sun’s been out some,” he said, his tongue feeling thick.

  “No, silly, I meant your desk.” She beamed and sat on the edge of it. “It’s usually a mare’s nest.”

  “I’ve been calculating. I always keep papers in order when they might mean something.” He leaned against his bookshelves and watched her light one of the dark brown cigarettes with the gold tips. She always dressed well, but he recognized the signs of insecurity; certitude was inversely proportional to the amount of makeup. “What’s up?”

  She grimaced. “Hampton’s building a file on me.”

  “To deny you tenure?”

  “If he can’t have me drawn and quartered first.”

  “Obviously the BU administration will see he’s biased.”

  “So what? They’re on his side. An affront to the university, one of them called me today.”

  “Come here.” She did, almost reluctantly. They embraced and John closed his eyes, letting the fatigue of the afternoon seep out of him, inhaling the scent of her hair. It was not the pulse-pounding bits he liked best, but rather moments like these, when she seemed so rich and deep that he could never penetrate to the center of her. Gradually a pliant softness came into her, molding to him. The long moment held, lingered, and then broke smoothly. They kissed and separated. She put out her cigarette.

  “If I only knew what to do about this,” she said wanly.

  “Counter-punch.”

  “How?”

  “Hampton’s gone public, blatherin’ all over the Globe. You do the same.”

  “Call them up, ask them to interview me?”

  “Tsk tsk. Nawthern in’lecshull rigidity. Make them come to you. General Lee used to do that all the time.”

  “Gettysburg was an oversight?”

  “A squeaker that went the wrong way.”

  “How do I make them come sniffing around?”

  “Give a talk. Slides of the artifact.”

  “At BU? They’d block it.”

  “Isn’t there someplace better? More in the public eye?”

  “Let’s see…. What about the Museum?”

  “Where is it?”

  “You’ve never been to the Museum?”

  “I’m an illiterate, antihumanistic scientist, remember.”

  “Oh yes, from Philistine Tech. I forgot.” She broke their loose embrace and moved about the office with renewed energy. He was pleased to note that the rust-red suit fit quite snugly. “They might, you know…. The Museum has occasional public lectures. But how much should I say?”

  “The whole truth and nothing but the truth.”

  “Really?”

  “Come as clean as a hound’s tooth.”

  “Abe might object.”

  “We’ll talk to him.”

  “A lot of it’s his to publish.”

  “Not the archeological aspects.”

  “I don’t know. I’ve never really played to the gallery like this.”

  “’Bout time to learn.”

  CHAPTER

  Four

  As Claire left the Boston Museum of Fine Arts she slowed, listening to the sharp echoes of her high-heeled shoes on the stone. Short of the exit she turned on impulse to the left and strolled through the Egyptian exhibit. It was not remarkable, but for the moment she felt the need of its reassurance, its solidity, its silent statement that the past endured, was still present, still meant something.

  The meeting with the director had gone remarkably well. He was thin and controlled, and at first spoke so softly that she wondered if his pilot light had gone out. She had sensed within a few minutes that he was attracted to her, and it had been a strain to not use that, to keep everything coolly professional. She had known since she was a teenager that she was not a beautiful woman, so she had worked to be striking. Today’s navy suit and red scarf, with matching gloves, had been helpful; she could not deny that. Still, Claire hated Charlotte Brontë’s comment that she would have given all her talent to be beautiful. That condemned you always to play somebody else’s game—and, when your looks failed, finally to lose.

  MODEL PROCESSION OF OFFERING BEARERS, FOUND WITH THE COFFINS OF DJEHUTY-NEKHT AND HIS WIFE IN THE BURIAL CHAMBER AT DEIR EL BERSHEH.

  Wooden figures carrying provisions for the afterlife. There were real supplies and implements in the tomb. Djehutynekht had assumed a direct line from this life to eternity, so they took care to take useful items along. But what modern person, believing utterly, would also take with them objects which were merely beautiful? No, the twentieth century equivalent would store away cartons of canned groceries, rifles, perhaps an electrical generator. This was what never failed to stir her—the unfathomable gulf between today’s thinking and the way the ancients thought. They were truly alien, not merely innocent agrarians with a foolish faith. They lived, and their response to their world was deep. And, she thought wryly, let us hope they were wrong about the afterlife, for a substantial amount of their belongings ended up, not in the nether world, but uselessly, in museums.

  She wandered into the Greek section, inhaling the faint, persistent scent of her beloved antiquity. Even here, under glass and tastefully lit, the strangeness persisted. The Attic waterjugs from 500 B.C. were marvelous self-referring artworks. Around one, white women in black dresses filled similar jugs from a Doric fountain-house. Water poured from animal heads; the Greeks habitually associated the movements of the natural world with animals. Behind every natural force lurked a personality, a beast. There was a subtle sensuality in the jug’s large lip, the curling rear handle, the saucy side handles, the opulent, billowing body.

  The jug had lasted over two thousand years in the earth. She moved to the pinnacle of the collection, a Minoan snake goddess. A petite ivory woman with a pensive and distant expression, clutching a snake in each hand. She had lain in the dust of Knossos for 3500 years, and with her disinterment would come her death. Who could believe that she would survive 3500 more years in Boston? Chance would befall her here. A collapsing roof, fire, a war. Claire and others like her were killing the past as they brought it to life, drawing it up from the safe soil and back into the harsh, fatal clangor of life.

  She frowned. Such skeptical reflections about her profession were new to her. Certainly the Kontoses and Hamptons of the field inspired cynicism, but they were mercifully few. Or did they merely look that way, viewed by a woman who was at that crucial stage of an academic’s career, the final push for tenure? Maybe everyone wilted a bit in that pressure cooker.

  Leaving, she passed the famous torso of King Haker—hands clenched at its sides, biceps bulging, wearing only a loincloth, full of power. Headless, she noted sardonically; many of her fantasies featured a faceless man with a similar body. Now, however, she often realized partway through the dream that it was John. He had a quiet, encased force in him. This statue’s tight, uncommunicative hands were the opposite of his calm, broad, sure ones.

  She shook herself, glanced at the other cases, and left. The director was just John’s opposite—insinuating, airy, pencil moustache, as substantial as a butterfly, full of really! marvelous! but of course! His eyes had gleamed behind aviator lenses, and Claire could see his mind tripping lightly through the exciting possibility of a first, with gorgeous press coverage
and controversy and maybe a TV tie-in for icing. She had reacted by being even more solemn, stressing the “need” to “air the issues” and, of course, display the artifact itself, an artwork of importance. It had been easy. She was somewhat dismayed to find that even here, one of her favorite institutions, notoriety merged with importance.

  She drove slowly away, following the contours of Back Bay along Fenway Drive. John’s prediction of the director’s reaction had been disturbingly accurate. The director had arranged a public talk Sunday night. No time for much publicity, but then, the size of the audience was immaterial; the Globe would be there, and probably WGBH. This was Friday afternoon, and she had to prepare slides, sharpen her arguments. Like most people, she feared public speaking. She wondered if the years of lecturing would give her that impervious manner professors wore like a badge. Then, with a pang of knotting in her stomach, she remembered that she would probably not be lecturing at all. This was the end. She might hope for an appointment elsewhere, but Boston was almost certainly sealed to her. Hampton carried that much weight.

  To leave Boston. Maybe John was right about Claires One and Two, that she was constricted here. Yet she loved it. Despite the chill she rolled down her window and leaned an elbow out. Two boys were sliding down the dead grass that bordered the fens, riding on flattened cardboard boxes in the bright, clear air.

  Boston. Full of seeming contradictions—the richer you were, the more threadbare your clothes; you always walked to work over the Hill to town, ignoring cabs; symphony attendance was as holy as church, and church felt like a meeting of the state legislature; a man’s war record and club membership counted far more than his bank account or advanced degrees. Nothing needed to be expressly stated; everything was known. She wondered what it was like, really, beyond Boston. John’s nostalgia for the South hinted that the people there were similar, steeped in the past. Perhaps it would not be so bad to live elsewhere.