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On Ice Pythia |
This is the stupidest thing I've ever done.
Not that I’m in the habit of doing stupid things, you understand. I earned my position and my reputation over many years and none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been considered reliable enough to hold high office. It’s funny in a way; a year ago I would have been foremost among those condemning what I’ve done. That isn’t me anymore. This last year has opened my eyes to many things, and I don’t want to lose what I’ve found. Don’t want to go back to that routine, nothing ever happens, nothing needs to happen life which I used to own.
I’m finally alive, and I want to stay that way.
Even if it’s only for the next few minutes …
I was in New Atlantis when they found him. The message came through that the expedition to Siberia had uncovered a remarkable find; there weren’t any details at first, just tantilising hints. I finished my business with the Reconstruction Director and caught a sub-shuttle back to the surface, my mind still wrestling with the arguments about balancing historical fact with modern aesthetics. It was all academic where Atlantis was concerned, of course. There never had been a city on the site, and all the archeology had uncovered were pieces of the old style movie set that had been built – and sunk – back in 2056. That was what I’d gone to see, and all that I did see. New Atlantis is the last refuge for those few true romantics still left on earth, and I hope they manage to build the city they deserve.
Like I said, my head was buzzing with the inevitable conflict between history and mythology. I arrived back at the Smithsonian just as the transit from Siberia docked with the Washington Dome and was on hand as they unloaded its precious cargo. It was Christmas Eve – one of the last traditional holidays that the world actually bothers to celebrate – and the loaders were complaining about having to work so late. Martyn – Dr deSilva, I should say – was supervising the process, his weathered face creased down into tense anxiety and his staff running around like a bunch of eager students, practically falling over each other to catch a glimpse of what he’d found. He was all but batting them away like flies when I arrived. They immediately started falling over each other in the opposite direction – which is what happens when you have the kind of reputation I do, I suppose. I wouldn’t have fired any of them for eagerness, but incompetence is another matter altogether.
I’d picked deSilva for the expedition, despite the misgivings of the other executives. I’d heard about his personal eccentricities, but his work had always been exceptional. His recovery and restoration work in Venice, for example, and his work on the Great Wall, which had managed to prove – beyond all doubt – that the Chinese government had moved portions of it sometime in the early 21st century. I’d given very little credence to the idea that he’d been trying to find historical reference to the presence of Greek and Sycthian invaders having reached China in the late centuries BCE. He could hardly prove something that had never happened, no matter how obscure his theories – nor, I’d reasoned, could he pursue that particular hobby in the wilds of Northern Siberia. Especially not while trying to track down specimens of Woolly Mammoth in among those few surviving glaciers which have been rugged enough to resist the onslaught of global warming.
I was wrong, of course. But I didn’t know Martyn, back then. Nor did I know what he’d found, or the profound effect his discovery would have on me.
I’d assumed he’d located the specimen we’d sent him to find. The cryo-lab had been begging to lay hands on a decent mammoth carcass for years, promising to preserve and present the beast in its full glory, just as they had done for the Lapland Sabre-tooth whose cloned kittens are the prime attraction in the city zoo. I wouldn’t even have bothered to be there for the unloading, had its arrival not coincided with mine. I was a little disappointed with the size of the storage box that emerged from the transit’s hold; it was hardly big enough to contain the creature I’d been expecting.
Someone joked about deSilva managing to capture a Yeti before spotting me watching from the upper rail; I was amused at the way the joker hastily found himself something else to do. Yetis are a sore point with the Museum board and have been ever since the hoax of ’32. I wasn’t on the Board back then, but I had been part of the team which had debunked the whole business; part of my reputation for meticulousness had been founded on the careful work I had contributed on that occasion.
DeSilva had been distracted enough by the joke to realise that I was among his observers. He beckoned me down with eager invitation and – since I had a little time to spare – I indulged his enthusiasm and descended to join him, falling into step behind his precious box as the auto-loaders carried it deeper into the bowels of the Institute.
"Small mammoth, Dr deSilva," I remember remarking. I remember the look that crossed his face too – a look of delighted triumph and eager anticipation. I think that was the first time I actually looked at him. I wonder now, why I took so long.
"It’s not a mammoth, madam," he announced, ushering me into the specimen reception area. "It’s a man."
He wasn’t much to look at. Not at first. For one thing, the shell that held him was still encased in centuries of dirty ice. The glimpses that could be had of his hunched body were distorted and uncertain, even under the brightest of lights. There were hints of disheveled fur and leather strapping, the vaguest suggestion of a purple or dark blue fabric – and there was hair. Lots of it, tangling him in a cocoon of flaxen fibers, his face totally obscured by a matting of head hair and beard. It almost made a nest into which he’d been curled like a sleeping child – except that this was no child, and it would take much more than a simple shake to wake him from that sleep.
Was it then – staring down into that unlikely capsule of long sealed time – that I realised how much my life was about to change? I don’t remember exactly – but I do recall the sudden shiver of excitement which stirred my heart. It had been a long time since any one discovery had inspired me. History had become a dead thing, a burden I carried from having chosen to look back rather than forward. The man I had married had long since followed his heart out to the frontier worlds, and the son we had shared had not been long in following him. I had grown old regretting that; the re-juves might have refreshed my blood and renewed my body, but they had never been able to touch my soul. Nothing had been able to do that.
Nothing, that is, until I looked down through a prison of cold ice and somehow recognised that lost spirit, trapped in time and untouched by the weight of centuries.
"Nearly two and half millenia," Martyn whispered from somewhere beside me. "We took a core sample as close as we dared. The dates aren’t exact, but we think he predates Common Era by a couple of centuries. Not as old as some that have been found, of course, but even so … The scans were incredible. He’s in perfect condition. No broken bones, no obvious deterioration – and there’s definitely fancy metal work in there somewhere; buckles, studs, an amulet of some sort, a knife in his boot … Just think," he considered, staring, like me, into the surface of the ice, "when he last saw the light of day, Rome had not yet conquered the world. They still believed in the old gods, and heroes still walked the surface of the earth."
I snorted, I recall. I had long since lost faith in either gods or heroes. I was too old for such nonsense – and science too exact to allow space for miracles anymore. I was the keeper of a dead past, guarding nothing but fading memories. One day – and soon, I believed - Earth itself would be nothing more than one vast museum, clinging to mistaken glory and re-inventing history to comfort itself in its old age.
But he had been there. The echo of Martyn’s excitement caught in my heart and stayed, oddly resonant. There’d been a time when I’d been entranced by the very time period in which this man had lived. Not that he’d have seen much of the flowering of Greece – since he could only be, at best, a minor noble from some Siberian nomadic tribe – but even so … The questions I could ask, if only he were alive to answer them.
"We were expecting a mammoth, Dr deSilva," I said, instantly deflating his eagerness. "Still," I went on, as if trying to recover from that disappointment, "it would be shame to waste all the preparations that have been made. Thaw your ‘hero’ out and let’s see what the cryo-lab can do with him."
I didn’t expect much from the experiment. In fact, I was beginning to regret the rashness of my initial decision as I made my way down to the cryo-labs later that week. The holiday had been – inevitably - empty for me and I’d been glad to get back to work. Something had reminded me of our new arrival and I’d decided to check on his progress. If – as I’d suspected at the time - deSilva’s discovery had turned out to be nothing but deteriorated tissue, then I would have gladly called a halt to the whole proceedings. His ‘find’ was likely to be an old man who’d wandered out onto the glacier to die; a suitable specimen to preserve in bonded acrocylinate and present to the world as a curiosity and nothing more. I wasn’t even sure that the Dr had been right about his dates; there had been examples of bodies preserved in ice for much longer than two thousand years, but they were rare finds and none had been recovered in this century. The edges of the ice fields now lay well beyond the normal expected range of nomadic tribes which had lived in Siberia in the appropriate time frame. Either the man was much older – or a lot younger than the initial dates might suggest.
The cryo-level felt chilly, I seem to recall. An odd sensation, since it was meant to be kept at exactly the same temperature as the rest of the Institute. The preservation of biological specimens is an art that has long since outgrown the need for literal cryogenics – these days it mostly involves the manipulation of micro-centric temporal stasis fields. With local time slowed to a imperceptible crawl, bio-degeneration cannot occur; decay is a chemical process that requires activity on a molecular level, and a good stasis field reduces even sub-atomic activity to practically nothing at all. ‘One heartbeat in a hundred years,’ is the boast of the cryo-loaders who send would be colonists to the stars. It’s cheaper to ship human beings in stasis, especially for journeys which take several months.
I wonder if you feel anything, suspended in time like that?
Martyn was waiting for me, pacing a little in the reception lounge. I knew he’d been hovering over his specimen like a hawk all week, impatient for the defrosting to be complete and anxious for the supporting stasis fields to be configured so that the man remained perfectly preserved by the process. It’s a tricky balance to achieve; the technicians had been practicing – with simulated mammoths – for months.
I’d pondered on the discovery, but not given much thought to its discoverer since I’d seen him last. I knew his file, of course; a man who’d spent his early years studying the Great Martian ruins and making as little sense of them as anyone else has managed to do. He’d started re-juves late, preserving himself in his middle years, much as I have done. When I walked through the door it was to be greeted by a man with the grace of a dancer, the muscular build of a late twentieth century stevedore, and the sturdy looks of a weather beaten sailor. His sense of presence shook me a little; he radiated excitement with almost tangible force.
"Come on," he urged, catching me by the elbow and frog marching me into the main laboratory. "You are not going to believe this."
I didn’t.
I still don’t. I don’t believe in miracles. Even though I’ve seen one with my own eyes.
‘Perfectly preserved’ Martyn had said. I’d imagined a frozen corpse, its skin an ashen blue, its eyes sunken and its muscle tone beginning to shrink in on itself. I’d seen the Sabre-tooth when they’d thawed that out, and had memories of the limp carcass giving up its secrets to the geneticists while the animatics artist carefully scanned every inch of its withered frame. I knew what to expect.
What I got was sleeping beauty.
Well, Rip van Winkle to be more exact. He was still wrapped in his protective shell and mostly obscured by the bird’s nest which was his hair and beard. But the ice had gone, and beneath it lay a figure as fresh and perfect as if it had been laid to rest only the day before. He floated at mid point in the stasis sphere, curled onto his side and suspended there by the same forces which now preserved his sleep. The semi-translucent shroud which protected him glittered softly in the laboratory lights and the white fur cloak it covered gleamed as if it were new. His tangle of hair was corn gold, and the hand – one hand, emerging from the thicket – which lay over it was a soft pale bronze in colour.
"Amazing, don’t you think?" Martyn was filled with excitement, clearly itching to delve deeper, to unwrap the stranger and reveal the secrets he concealed. Amazing was a paltry word for what I saw. I couldn’t question the dating evidence which had placed his origin beyond all question – but I still had to wonder. If this was a hoax, it was a remarkable one.
"What’s that – shell thing around him?" I remember asking. It wasn’t the question in my heart. I wanted to lean forward and demand ‘who are you?’ even though I knew I’d never get an answer. That we would never know.
I was wrong, of course. But that came later. That was part of the miracle. Back then, all I had was a corpse.
"We’re not sure." Martyn signaled to one of the technicians, who hurried over with a minute sample of the shell suspended in a specimen tube. "It seems to be organic – and yet it’s some kind of crystal. It started to break down as soon as we exposed it to air."
I was disappointed and must have shown it, because he broke into a broad grin. "No, no," he assured me, waving for the second specimen he had ready. "That’s what’s so amazing. The crystal – whatever it is – has somehow preserved the organic tissues underneath it. Look – we took a sample of the fur, and the hair, and even his skin. It’s perfect. No ice crystal damage. Nothing. It’s like he died – just a few seconds ago."
I turned and stared at him. Martyn is worth staring at, even when I don’t have a reason – but I had a reason back then, and it was if he knew what I was thinking. As if the two of us had somehow stepped out of our narrow lives and started on a journey from which we could never return.
"And?" I remember asking. He smiled.
"And that means – we might have a chance to revive him."
My heart skipped a beat. It was impossible. It was outrageous. The Board would never go for it, no matter what the possibilities. It was too great a risk. A perfect specimen – a discovery that was likely to shake the world, just as it was – and to try and revive the man … It would mean returning those suspended tissues to real time. It would mean putting what we had at risk, with only a slender chance of gaining a greater prize. We didn’t know what had killed him. The ice, some sickness, old age? We might wake him up just to lose him again …
"It won’t be so hard." Martyn read my hesitation as disbelief. "We can utilise old style cryo techniques to preserve the body while we identify what needs to be done. If we can revivify his blood, jump start the heart – apply neuro regeneration … It’ll be like putting him through a re-juve and – well, people do that almost every day."
"A re-juve," I echoed, turning to study the specimen with a growing sense of excitement. "On a man two and half thousand years old? DeSilva – are you crazy?"
"Yes," he answered promptly. "And so are you. Ellen," he demanded, catching my shoulder, turning me towards him, "if this works, just imagine what he can tell us …"
I should have shaken him off and stalked away. I was his executive Director and a woman of high standing. He had no right to touch me, let alone call me by my first name. But his grip was strong and his hand sent a shiver through me that had nothing to do with fear or disgust. His eyes were pleading with me and I could not resist that look. Once – lifetimes ago – I shared a bond with this man that went deeper than the heart. That bond still lay between us – and I could no more refuse him than I could stop breathing.
"Very well," I heard myself say. "You can try. But if you fail – my head rolls after yours. I’m taking a big risk here."
"I won’t let you down," he promised. "And you know something?" I looked where he looked, focusing on that huddled figure, wrapped in crystal and suspended in time. "I don’t think he will either."
It took two months. Slow and steady wins the race, they say. We weren’t about to rush this one. And there was work to do. Careful, delicate work, weaving the preparations to bring a dead man back to life. To – as Martyn put it – defy the gods and bestow the gift of Prometheus, just as the Titan had done, so long ago.
I got used to those classical references very quickly. Martyn was full of them, quoting Homer and Socrates, declaiming Heroditus, Virgil and Euripedes as if they were old friends. I made this project a personal one; I had put my position and my reputation on the line for it and I wasn’t going to walk away and leave that in another’s hands. So I worked beside Martyn and his team, made our patient my business and went back to skills I had thought long abandoned for greater things.
Greater things! I found myself back where I belonged, and wondered why I had ever left it. I majored in Classics and Archeology and this was pursuing both with a vengeance. We started with that crystal shell, un-peeling it a piece at a time and laying it back into stasis for further study later. After that we laid careful hands on the man within, slowly and gently uncurling him from his huddle, straightening his limbs and studying what that revealed.
I’d feared to find him old, but there was no sign of age in those lithe and muscular arms and legs. He was a man in his prime, in excellent health and superb physical fitness. We holo-ed every moment of the process, recording and measuring every step and every discovery. It was I who carefully cut away his tangled hair, trimming that golden cascade back to shoulder length and shearing his matted beard into a neat line of soft curls. We took every one of those silken locks and subjected them to every test we could think of. We weren’t sure we could believe what they told us, but we had no other answers. He hadn’t had that tangle the day he’d tumbled into his icy prison. Rather, it – like the twisted and curled nails we found sprouting from his fingers and toes – had slowly and inexorably grown after his fall. I remember turning to look at the stasis generator and recalling the engineer’s boast. ‘One heartbeat every hundred years.’ When had our sleeping beauty died? Two and a half thousand years ago? Or on that Christmas day, a month before, when we had returned him to the world?
Martyn started referring to him as Chris after that – joking that we might have found Santa Claus himself, preserved in the ice after falling from his sleigh. It was total nonsense of course – but the name stuck and we had to call him something. If I’d had the choice it might have been Gabriel or Michael; beneath that tangle of matted silk I’d found the face of a careworn angel – a handsome one, given, I thought, more to laughter than anything else. His skin was clear, lacking pockmarks or other blemishes, and the scar which curled above his brow was faint – an old souvenir rather than a recent one.
There were other scars on his body though; some marks obviously won in battle and others – well, they were harder to interpret. The faint scarring on his shoulder, for instance, looked a lot like some kind of bite, although no-one could picture what sort of creature might have made it. What we didn’t find were any tribal marks or tattoos – signs that might have told us who and what he was. His clothing told us more, although even that was puzzling.
The fur cloak was in as good condition as the man it had enfolded. It was a thick, heavy wolf skin; a winter pelt, cut from the carcass as was and cured with a mixture of salt and saltpeter. It had been a big wolf. ‘Chris’ wasn’t a notably big man – he measured no more than 180 centims from head to foot – shorter than Martyn and not that much taller than I. Even so, the wolf from which that pelt had come had measured almost as long. The cloak had wrapped him from shoulder to ankle and the neck piece had been sewn into a snug hood. There was a silver clasp which had helped keep it on his shoulders; an excellent example of middle European work of the right period, although in much better condition than most of the pieces that had previously been found. The museum artisans went to work on it straight away – within a week the copies were a best seller at the souvenir booths
Under the cloak we found a conundrum. His costume should have instantly placed his origins, but instead it simply created a mystery. His boots were tailored, and he’d been wearing tight fitting leather pants – a far cry from the simple cut that we’d been expecting. The leather was soft and well patched, as was his jerkin, which had no fastenings but had been lined. He had intricate leather bracers on either wrist, and had been wearing a single amulet, one carved from jade and to all intents and purposes resembling a piece of Maori work – which was, of course, utterly impossible. The jerkin was woven from a combination of red and blue thread, with embroidered patches and leather epaulets at either shoulder. The outfit didn’t match any culture or period which we could pinpoint within the relevant timescale – and nor did the metal work on any of his three belts.
His knife though – that was a different matter. We found it tucked inside his boot and spent several days admiring the workmanship. It was bronze knife, the blade first cast and then forged and tempered afterwards. It belonged, however, to a time well before the one we were looking for; I wondered if it were some kind of family heirloom, although it appeared well used and the binding on the handle was worn and in need of repair.
The very last piece we took from his body was his earring – a small golden loop which had rested in the lobe of his left ear. It wasn’t big enough to serve as a burial price, and it had no marks to give it religious significance, so we simply labeled it ‘body jewelry’. A primitive custom, long since abandoned by civilised people – except that I rather liked it. It had given its wearer an unexpected hint of charm.
So – we had a man dressed like a warrior, with a weapon seemingly forged several centuries before he’d lived, draped in an extinct species of wolf and in a far better physical condition than might be expected of a man two and half thousand years old. He had nearly a full set of teeth, and they were strong and lacked any sign of cavities. There was evidence of previously broken bones, all of which had been expertly set and apparently healed without distortion or thickening around the breaks. He was dehydrated, which was only to be expected, but evidenced no sign of disease, infection, fungal infestation or even bugs of any sort. (We combed all that hair in search of fleas and found none – nor head lice, nor ringworm, nor anything else for that matter.)
There were frost burns on the back of one hand, and a fresh abrasion on his right cheek – and other than that we had a man in perfect health and perfect physical condition.
Who’d apparently been dead for two and half millennia.
By the end of those two months we knew we had to try to revive him. It was the only way that we might possibly find out who and what he was.
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