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On Ice Pythia Chapter Two |
I can remember that day with perfect clarity. It was ten months ago and yet it seems like only yesterday. The soft white light of the medical lab – its clean, sterile walls overlaid with the palest blue – was almost a startling echo of the sculptured ice cavern from which Martyn had taken him. I was wearing working clothes rather than formal office wear; loose pants and a double layer tunic, which had those external trumpet sleeves which had been fashionable a year or so ago. I liked the looseness of the fit, a far cry from the tight-waisted, puff sleeved jackets which proprietary demands I wear to board meetings. Martyn had opted for a jinbaori jacket over his usual tunic, making him look decidedly festive. He’d taken to the samurai look several years ago and even had license to carry a katana to public functions. He wasn’t wearing a sword that day, although both he and I seriously wondered if he should. We had no way of knowing how ‘Chris’ would react if and when he was awakened. We went armed with words of assurance in several long dead languages and set up computer access to several more.
Just in case.
The board had agreed to the completion of the process, swayed by the supporting evidence our preparatory work had produced. They were in desperate need of a media boost, our funding in danger of being outvoted by appeals for further off-world investment; the prospect of being able to present to the world a genuine, living piece of history had finally outweighed any cautious misgivings they might have had. I had persuaded them to hold back on any announcement, just in case the process failed – and I knew my whole career was hanging on the events of the day.
My whole career. It seems so distant now, so unimportant. It was my life that changed – had been changing already through those busy months, working with Martyn, focused on the soul who was lost inside the body we had tended so carefully.
That body lay suspended in the nutrient gel which had been its home for several days. Cell stimulation had started the production of blood and other body fluids, his circulatory system linked into an external life support system – a heart and lung and kidney combination which supported the influx of the re-juve matrix and the nanobots we were feeding him. Cryo-units and stasis fields had been withdrawn and the whole body was slowly being raised to the right metabolic temperature. The process was mostly automatic – a development of the intensive care system used to support full body clones prior to nervous system transplantation – and the only real addition to the equipment was the neural stimulation units placed at strategic points on his body.
Much of the work at this point was in the hands of the computers and the skilled technicians that partnered them. We had set them a difficult challenge and they had responded with enthusiasm. The medics’ greatest concern was the level of neural degeneration; they warned that we might awake nothing but a drooling idiot, brain damaged beyond recall. I remember simply smiling at them and walking across to join deSilva at ‘Chris’s’ side. He won’t let you down, he’d said, and I believed him. This moment was destined – but even so, I found my hand surreptitiously seeking Martyn’s warm palm, my fingers entangling in his.
Once – long ago, when I was young and the world a less oppressive place – I had seen an old holo-vid of ‘Frankenstein’. The laboratory we stood in was stark and modern, bereft of flashing Tesla coils and gothic devices, but – as I stood there, waiting for the moment – I had a sudden flash of those images; the scientists, defying nature, recalling the dead to life. He was a relic of a time long passed, a savage shaped by a world where survival was dependant on strength. Had I been deceived by those angelic features? Were we about to awake a monster?
It was too late to protest. The sequence had been ticking down for hours. To interrupt it now would destroy everything we had worked for. I could only stand there and watch as the technicians scurried around us, intent on their goal. The body was lifted to the surface of the gel, and the supporting tines moved into place. Someone nodded; someone else nodded back. Martyn’s hand tightened on mine.
And the light came back to the world.
Not as obviously as that, of course. There were no grand flashes of lightning, no sparks or crackles of power. The equipment simply hummed softly, just as it was designed to do. But the heart monitor – which had lain silent for hours – gave a little blip. Then another. The body – draped in tubes, dripping with gel – shivered suddenly, a barely glimpsed convulsion. I held my breath – and the dead man took one, a deep, shuddering gasp which arched his back and sent the technicians dancing with delight.
I was there in a moment, my hand pressed to his chest, feeling the pound of that strong heart beneath my fingers and the push of equally strong muscles as their owner took a second breath, just as deep as the first. He woke in an instant, not a slow return to consciousness, but a quick, reflexive start that flicked open his eyes and tensed every muscle in his body. I looked down into the startled gaze of a man whose last sight of the world had been before Rome fell.
He had the most amazing blue eyes. Sky blue they would have said, back when the sky was still that colour; before we had to seed the upper atmosphere with whatever was that replaced the damaged Ozone layer. The sky is a leaden gold these days, heavy with pollutant gases and so hazy it obscures the sun, even at midday. I had never seen a day when the heavens arched with that brilliant blue – but I saw it there, in his eyes, in the look that met mine – and recognised me.
"~Alcmene?~" he gasped, his voice ragged with time. A hand – a warrior’s hand – lifted to cover mine where it lay against his chest. He smiled – a smile so dazzling that my heart skipped a wild beat. "~Gods – did I fall all the way to Elysium?~"
The effort took him away from us again; his eyes closed, his hand slid away – but into sleep, not death. Martyn’s fingers curled over my shoulder – and I realised that the moisture which had filled my eyes were tears of joy.
"He was speaking Greek." Martyn was replaying the holo for the umpteenth time, that moment of re-birth isolated and magnified, that smile recorded for all eternity. "Homer’s Greek. The classic tongue. What, in the name of all the gods, was a Greek doing in Siberia?"
"I don’t know, and right now I don’t care." I pulled him down, back into my embrace, kissing his shoulder, caressing his skin while the images flickered around us both like fireworks. "He’s alive Martyn. You can ask him, not me." Blue eyes. A smile that lit the world. And the man I loved in my arms, holding me, loving me.
"I will," he promised, returning my kisses with distracted gentleness. I laughed and pushed at him; he was still watching the re-play, caught up in its magic.
"Did you hear what he called me?" I asked, knowing that the moments for his attention were over, the two of us drawn back to the greater mystery. "~Alcmene~. Why is that name familiar?"
Martyn grinned. "Alcmene," he quoted, correcting my pronunciation with the meticulousness of a scholar. "The wife of Amphitryon, mother to twins; Iphicles, and – by the gift of Zeus – Hercules. The greatest hero who ever lived. I don’t think it was a common name, but not an unusual one. You obviously resemble someone he knew."
"Obviously." I sat up, drawing the blanket around my bare shoulders. "I’m going to have to disappoint him."
"Well – " Martyn sat back and froze the holo, fixing it on that moment of recognition, a thoughtful expression on his face, "we could always – pretend I suppose …"
"No," I interrupted firmly. "I know what you’re thinking, but we could never carry it through. He’s not in Elysium and we couldn’t convince him of that, just because I look vaguely like someone he expected to meet there. Where would we find the rest of the souls he’d be looking for? And besides – our idea of the Greek heaven might be nothing like what he’d expect to see. We have to be honest with him, Martyn."
"I suppose." He shrugged and killed the image, turning the room dark and somehow empty, even though it still held us both. "But I would suggest that we create some kind of environment he’ll feel comfortable in. There’s a bio-dome they’d identified for the mammoth display, isn’t there? We can terra-form that into a Grecian valley for the time being; a few olive and fig trees, a vine or two – a bubbling spring for the naiads and a small villa well stocked with wine …?"
I chuckled at the picture he was painting. "That’s a long way from the bleak Siberian plain and the felted Yurt I’ve got on order, isn’t it? At least I won’t have to get Mongolian ponies cloned. That was going to be expensive."
My lover of three hours lifted himself up and frowned at me. "You’ve been planning to put him on display all along," he accused. "Ellen – this isn’t a specimen of an extinct species. This is a human being. He doesn’t belong in a zoo."
He was right. But back then, I thought I knew better.
"But he does belong in a museum. Martyn – he’s two and half thousandyears old. He won’t be able to comprehend the modern world. All of our technology will be nothing but magic to him. No, I’m not going to put him on display. Not directly. But he will need to be studied and the public will want to see him. He is going to teach us so much. And we need to take care of him – protect him."
"By making him a public spectacle? Treating him like a prisoner?"
I didn’t understand what he was upset about. Hadn’t I just agreed with the very plan he’d been suggesting? "He won’t be a prisoner. He’ll have the best of care."
I was lying, but I didn’t know that. I’d been lying to myself for so long, I believed every word I said …
We both ran a couple of lingo-refreshes on our ancient Greek before we went to see him again. The technicians had moved ‘Chris’ from the med-lab into a monitoring room, keeping him at a low level of natural sleep while re-balancing his metabolism. They reported him weak, but out of the dangerous phase; there’d been no sign of tissue degeneration and both his cardioscan and neuroanalysis looked fine. For a man whose last breath had been taken over two and half thousand years ago, he was doing extremely well – although they warned us he might be a little confused when he came round.
A little! A woman of my rank and status does not laugh out loud in front of her subordinates, however amusing the situation. I merely raised an eyebrow in Martyn’s direction before thanking the technicians for their attentive work. He hid his own smile behind his hand, pretending to cough – which is probably almost as impolite, but far more excusable.
The niceties observed, I led the way into the secluded room, my heart racing a little as I did so. I had spent an hour impressing the board with how important our work had become, how valuable our new treasure might prove in the coming months. We had called back from death a man born centuries before the world we knew had been created; before industry and history had polluted the globe, before the great discoveries of science, even before the true measurement of time had begun. There was so much that he could tell us – about the dawn of civilization, about how our ancestors lived, and about how they thought. Councilor Adams had been skeptical, warning me that I had probably woken nothing but a primitive savage. I knew better than that – I had heard him speak, after all – but suggested that even a savage would give us access to answers we might otherwise never have dreamed of. The Board had voted in my favour, and ‘Chris’ was mine, to study, to nurture and to work with as I wished.
Provided I supplied some suitable material for public enlightenment, of course. Transcripts, recordings, observations and so on. We are a museum, funded for education as well as the vital preservation of the past. I thought little of the request at the time; I was already planning to record as much as I could, and had ordered appropriate devices to be incorporated into the bio-habitat while it was being furnished. I don’t know what prompted me to have most of them coded to my personal clearance code – but it would turn out to be a far wiser decision than I knew at the time.
In the meantime, Martyn and I had the discovery of a lifetime completely to ourselves. He was lying on his side, curled up beneath the single silkose sheet which gleamed softly under the equally soft light which filled the room. It was a natural, relaxed pose, an arm thrown out to one side, one knee folded higher than the other – and his hair spilled out across the pillow like a halo of gold. He stirred as we approached and I froze, holding my breath until he let out a little grunt and settled again; it wasn’t until then that I truly realised the enormity of what we had done.
That this sleeping beauty – this refugee from history - was alive.
I had handled his body dispassionately for weeks, marveling over the sleek muscular tone of his limbs, measuring every inch of him without a second thought or a moments qualm. I had cut and washed his hair. I had peeled the fabric from his limbs and studied the textures of his skin. I knew every intimate line of him, every scar, every mark, every curve from head to toe and back again – but I had been handling a corpse, a limp, inanimate thing. Now I was faced with a living man – one whose skin would be soft and yielding to my touch, whose breath would be warm and whose existence had already begun to fill the room with a sense of presence in a way I had never sensed before. The eyes which had met mine had been blue.
I’d known their colour. I just hadn’t been expecting it to be so brilliant ...
Martyn had paused at the same time that I did, respecting my hesitation, interpreting it – perhaps – as appropriate caution. He was still behind me as I closed the last few steps and reached out my hand.
"~Alcmene?~" Our guest's voice was slurred with the weight of sleep. "~That you? Gods –~ " He stirred, and shifted, rolling over to smile up at me with the innocence of the blessed. "~I feel like I’ve slept forever …~"
He was blinking, making an effort to focus past the bleariness which clearly weighted his senses. The neural suppressors do that – fog the mind and blur the edges between sleep and wakefulness – so I was not surprised by those initial signs of uncertainty. I knew they’d pass soon enough. His gaze took in my face, then that of the man behind me – and his lazy smile of welcome collapsed into a frown of puzzlement.
"~Jason?~" he reacted, Martyn’s rugged features seemingly as familiar as mine. "~What – you shouldn’t be here. Should you? I mean – you’re not dead.~" Puzzlement became concern. "~You weren’t dead. Are you dead?~" A wave of dizziness distracted him. His eyes closed for a moment and he grimaced, shaking his head in an effort to clear it. "~Come to that – am I?~"
The Greek was rich in every syllable, his voice transforming it from a dusty, dead language into a confident, living tongue. There was the barest hint of an accent and the occasional unfamiliar pronunciation, but I understood him well enough. He thought himself to be in Elysium – the ancient Greek version of paradise – and while I – whoever he thought I was – belonged there, he hadn’t expected to see the man that Martyn reminded him of. I took a careful breath. The next few moments were going to be tricky ones.
"~No,~" I told him softly, tightening my hold on his shoulder with what I hoped felt like reassurance. "~You’re not dead. You’ve just been asleep for a long time. I know you feel very disorientated right now, but it will pass. Just relax, and you’ll be fine.~"
Martyn leaned in over my shoulder, and smiled at him encouragingly. "~More than fine,~" he promised. "~But – just for the record? Can you tell us your name?~"
"~My name?~" He gave us both a baffled look. "~You know my name … oh,~" he giggled with sudden amusement, "~I get it. You want to know if I remember, right? Did I hit my head or something? Herc’s always saying I got a real hard head, you know? So if I did hit it – I don’t think I’ve got a headache ... Should I have a headache? Uh –oh, it’s Iolaus. Yeah. Iolaus …~" His initial tumble of words trailed away; a hint of suspicion had begun to dawn in his eyes. Perhaps it was the way we were looking at him. Perhaps it was the lighting, which would have been unlike any he would have seen before. Or perhaps it was some other instinct that alerted him; whatever it was, the suspicion took root with admirable speed. "~So – if I’m not dead~," he asked, his eyes flicking around to take in what little he could see of his surroundings, "~where exactly am I? Did - Herc bring me here? Is he okay? I - I remember falling. The dragon nearly got me, but – then the ice gave way and I fell … I fell …~" He trailed off a second time, one hand sliding out from under the sheet to warily explore the soft brush of his beard. His frown deepened even further – with reason, as I found out later. I’d trimmed it to what I’d thought would be an appropriate length for a mature man of the right time period. Had I known he was accustomed to going clean shaven, I would have removed it entirely.
"~A long time …~" he breathed, echoing my earlier words. His hand shot out, encircling my wrist before I had time to step away. The eyes which bored into mine were intense. Demanding. I was suddenly conscious of every little thing that would be adding to his suspicion and confusion. The artificial light. The tang of recirculated air. The soft hum of the monitoring system. The way Martyn and I were dressed; the man-made fabrics and our Pcom units – mine sitting delicately on my left shoulder, his clinging to his right hip as usual. He half lifted himself up, holding my gaze with his own. "~How long?~"
We had discussed what we could – and should tell him. Martyn and I had argued and worried over the details of the truth, over what it might do to him - over whether he’d even be able to grasp its enormity. But I didn’t want to lie to him. All the people he had known were long gone, vanished into dust on the winds of history. If he’d been the simple savage the Board was expecting, I might have prevaricated a little; maybe introduced him to the truth a little step at a time.
He was no savage – and no simpleton either. Looking into those eyes, I knew that he wouldn’t believe anything other than the truth – and that, if I lied or was evasive with my answer, he would never come to trust me. Never believe me, ever again.
His grip was gentle, but firm. I would have had difficulty freeing myself from it.
"~How long,~" he demanded again. I took a deep breath – and answered him.
"~Two and a half thousand years.~"
He stared at me, as well he might. I don’t know that I would have believed it, had I been in his place. His mouth worked silently, repeating the words I had offered him, while his eyes narrowed down into skeptical disbelief. I watched the play of emotions that warred across his face, trying to keep a slight and sympathetic smile on mine.
"~Two and a half –~ " he began to repeat.
"~- thousand years,~" I concluded for him, nodding as wisely and as reassuringly as I could. He went on staring, searching my face for the lie. He didn’t find it.
"~Two thous- twenty five centuries?~" His hand had been clenched around my wrist; I felt it slide away as his fingers went limp with the shock. "~You’re kidding me.~"
"~Alas, but no,~" Martyn assured him using an extremely formal intonation, which was an odd contrast after that particularly vernacular reaction. "~My lady speaks nothing but the truth.~"
~My lady.~ Well, that was nice way to express it. It sounded remarkably apt, phrased in the formal Greek.
"~Gods …~" the man on the bed breathed, collapsing back to stare up at the ceiling above him. He held the pose for a moment, accepting the truth, wrestling with the enormity of the news – and then comprehension struck, almost like a physical blow. He drew in a sharp gasp, his entire body tensing with an overwhelming impact of grief and loss. His eyes closed and he shuddered, his head turning away from us as he struggled to regain his self control. "~Herc…~" he choked, the word catching in his throat so that it ended on a tight sob of sound.
Martyn and I exchanged a look. We knew he might take it hard – but that quiet howl of pain was almost more than either of us could bear. "~Iolaus~," I offered softly, reaching to touch his shoulder, using the name he had given us. It hadn’t sounded at all familiar the way he’d said it, but – speaking it – I felt as if I’d known it all my life. "~Please …~"
It was comforting sound, nothing more. I had no words to offer him, and no way to comprehend the depth of this sudden grief which had shattered his world. Back then, I knew nothing about his sword brother, about the friendship they had shared – or the reasons why his distress might be so great. In the months that followed, I would watch as hope and determination came to replace the anguish in his heart - but I know the wound has never truly healed. He carries it with him even now, a sorrow which may never be resolved.
He shivered under my touch, drawing in several deep breaths as he struggled to regain his self control. "~Something must have happened,~" he muttered shakenly. "~Something bad. Because – if not, he would have come back for me …~"
That was the faith he carried – the deep and certain trust he had for his lost friend. He had woken alone and in strange world, divorced from his own time by centuries – and yet his concern was for events which had taken place long before the gods he believed in had been swept away by history. We saw his presence – his survival into our time – as a miracle. He saw it as evidence as catastrophe; in order for us to wake him, he had to have been abandoned to his fate. And for that to happen, he could not believe his partner had survived him, since – if he had – such an abandonment was inconceivable, given the bond that lay between them.
"~I’m sorry,~" I found myself saying, responding to the grief in his voice. I didn’t know the story then – but his distress was unmistakable.
"~Not your fault,~" he whispered. He drew in another deep breath and then sat up, pulling the sheet around him to cover his dignity. I found myself once again faced with the intensity of those eyes, their azure depths glistening with a hint of unshed tears but focused now on his situation, rather than the past he had no power to affect. "~Where am I?~" he asked, glancing from me to Martyn and back again. "~And who are you?~"
Those were easier questions and I answered them with confidence. "~My name is Ellen. This is Martyn. He was the one that found you, buried in the ice. You are in a city called Washington, in a place a long way from where you were found – and almost as distant from Greece. But you are safe, and among friends. You will feel weak and disorientated for a while. You must rest and recover your strength – and we will answer all your questions in good time, I promise you.~"
He nodded at that, absorbing the information and filing it away for future reference. Martyn stepped in a little closer, his own eyes shining a little with excitement. "~Do you feel well enough to answer some of our questions?~" he asked. "~We have so many …~"
"~A few at a time,~" I suggested, amused by his eagerness. Iolaus caught the curve of my smile and echoed it with one of his own.
"~This is weird,~" he decided, looking at the two of us with bemused wonder. "~You even sound like – well, I guess you’re not, but …~" He shook his head and heaved a weary sigh. "~Ask away. Guess I’ll answer as best I can …~"
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