CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN

As such things go, the aftermath of discovering an ancient library is just slightly better than unraveling a massive government conspiracy. They’re kinda similar, though: at first, nobody really believes what’s happened, and when you give them enough proof to choke a horse, they think you’re trying to trick them. Then, after the experts weigh in and say you’ve actually done what you’ve claimed, the world goes ever so slightly berserk.

Since Atlas wasn’t willing to take the sole credit for the discovery, we blamed the whole mess on the koala.

In the press conferences, Speedy sat on the podium or the table or the armrest of the interviewer’s chair, and lied his butt off. He said that in his work with the Smithsonian, he had come across a scrap of a rumor that the library at Rhodes had been located underground, and that a second entrance was in the Nymphaia. Photographs of the recent renovation of the Nymphaia suggested this entrance might still exist.

What? No, he wasn’t going to tell them where he found this information, or how he could tell there was a hidden entrance concealed behind solid rock from a few photographs. You think he’s going to do their jobs for them? Fuck ‘em.

Speedy is an asshole, true, but assholes are incredibly useful and having one improves the overall quality of your life.

We ended up with the story that we were blissfully touring the acropolis when Speedy slipped out of our hands and sprinted into the Nymphaeum. Someone had left the gate unlocked so we ran after him to pull him out of the fragile archeological site, but by the time we got to the pool, he had already opened the hidden door.

OACET’s hands were clean, and Speedy didn’t give one single shit that his (paws) weren’t.

Atlas looked great on camera, by the way. He was finally earning his keep: we would have been up Shit Creek if one of the country’s most reputable antiquities brokers hadn’t been with us. Atlas’ first phone call had been to his contact at the Archaeological Museum of Rhodes, and they had a team on-site within thirty minutes.

Since Darling didn’t want in on the action, I gave her a giant chunk of money as a retainer, and sent her away until the press got bored with us. The thief sent me daily updates from a hotel on the other end of the island, along with her ever-growing list of expenses.

Whatever. If a paid week of spa days at a five-star resort bought her silence, it was worth it.

As for me and Mike?

When we weren’t doing interviews, we spent our time talking about the ghost of the library.

I wanted to apologize. I hadn’t realized that locating the library would be the end of it for him. He had stayed there for maybe thousands of years, and he had helped us. Now? His sanctuary was public knowledge.

By the way, that ghost who had helped us?

Archimedes himself!

We had managed to speak with Helen again. The queen said that Archimedes had retreated to a quiet island until the living humans left his home alone. Remember how I said that Speedy had started shouting in another language when we were exploring the tomb? That was when he told Archimedes to clear out his stash and get anything he wanted to preserve to safety. All of the work he had done over the centuries? Well, from what the experts at the Museum told us, the materials in the library all dated to before the great earthquake, so at least Archimedes had managed to save his best stuff.

Still. In my mind, we had driven a very old man from his home.

Mike offered old zen kōans instead of advice, all of which sounded lovely until you realized that they had multiple meanings, and that if you dug around in those then it was obvious he thought we had driven an old man out of his home, too.

I was beating myself up over the whole thing but good.

In the meantime, we studied the scroll.

There was a ton of information on that scroll. Short version? It was a firsthand account of how Archimedes was able to create a device like the Antikythera Mechanism without any messing around with weird supernatural sources.

Yes!!!

Mission accomplished, folks! We didn’t have to worry about any wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey aftershocks such as, oh, being wiped out of existence.

Long version?

Well, it’s an incredibly cute story, so here’s the full translation. [18]

__________________________________________________

 

I am reluctant to put down these words, as they will show how my greatest discovery may have been made while I was relieving myself in the woods. Honesty, however, is the mark of the furious cocksnack and holy balls, woman, I could be watching Dancing with the Stars reruns, [19] so I shall endeavor to preserve this event as it happened.

Poliadas, a good friend and a generous one, declared I had been spending too much time alone, and took me from my workshop to the nearby forest for a day’s rest. After a pleasant meal of fish and wine, I felt that telltale pressing upon my bladder, and walked a good distance from my friend so as not to show him the fate which was about to befall his generous repast.

I began to water a pile of fallen leaves. By chance, the weight of a portion of my urine fell within the bowl of a leaf. I watched as the leaf tipped forward. I thought the leaf would tumble from the pile, but when the liquid emptied out, the leaf righted itself. This happened many times, until I found myself to be out of urine.

Finding this to be an unusual behavior for a leaf, I bent and examined the mechanism that allowed a cup to be filled, then emptied and righted. Beneath the leaf I found two slim sticks, laying in a cross. One of these sticks was long and fixed; the other, short and flexible.

I rushed back to Poliadas’ table. My friend was not around, having walked in the opposite direction to find his own private spot in the woods, so I seized a jug of wine and ran back to the leaf and the twigs. I repeated the process of pouring liquid into the leaf, and watching it empty and return to position.

Over and over, I poured wine into the leaf. I found the shorter stick to be the source of the action, where it was forced to submit to the changing weight of the leaf. Once freed from this burden it sprung up, renewed! But! The shorter stick could only climb so far and no further, its upward movement fixed by the length of the longer stick.

Most interesting was that I learned the rate at which I poured wine into the leaf did not affect the response, merely how long it took to occur. I found a handful of soil, and poured this into the leaf—as with the liquids, the leaf shook loose its load when it had taken just enough and no more.

I continued to observe this process until the old leaf could no longer ignore the pressures I put upon it, and its structure crumbled away. When I looked up, I found Poliadas staring at me, before his eyes moved to the now-empty jug of wine.

“Archimedes,” he said, saddened at the loss of the wine. “Why are you playing in the dirt like a boy?”

“Look,” I said, and duplicated the weight of the leaf with my finger. The shorter stick obliged, and bent beneath it. “This is amazing!”

“Archimedes,” my friend laughed. “What could be of interest to you in such a thing?”

“Here we have a connection between two objects, and this connection is controlled by weight,” I replied. “This force is generated by the one, and limited by the other.”

“Ah.”

“Have you heard of the water clocks of Ctesibius?” I asked him. It was a fool’s question: such clocks were famous works of art, controlled by gears and powered by water. “They have a similar operation, but rely on the force of water to function. Imagine, Poliadas, a clock that does not need water to drive it!”

“Impossible,” my friend said, and his was a brilliant mind so he knew I’d listen to his words. “The action of the clock cannot occur without water. The clock’s movements require a source of power.”

He was right, and I pondered the problem for the next seven weeks.

I built many clocks during this period, all the while trying to find a means of driving them without the need for water. I came across many solutions, but all of these were temporary. I had no way to store the power needed to maintain an accurate clock.

Out of frustration, I built the simplest device that I could—three gears turned by a hand crank. I operated this device for hours, writing notations on each gear, observing its functions with the hope that I might become inspired with a strategy through which such a simple device could be powered.

No solution to that problem presented itself. Yet, as I stared into the gears and watched the small black inks of my notations move in a predictable pattern, I could not help but observe how the gears provided a regularity of cycles. I found myself constructing equations from these notations, and realized that while I had not been able to solve the problem of the clock, I might be able to create a new type of machine.

I began to experiment again, but this time I ignored the matter of earthly time and instead applied my studies of heavenly cycles. I was able to construct an orrery of bronze, and could use this to predict the movements of the Sun, the Moon, and the five planets.

And then, after that first orrery worked, Archimedes got more creative and made the same thing, only bigger and more complex. A few kings thought that this was awesome and hired him to build other, bigger shit, and Archimedes wrote all of this down before he built the Mechanism anyhow so the rest of this manuscript is irrelevant. I’m fucking done here; let’s go get falafels.

__________________________________________________

 

Mike and I thought that this story was the best thing since unsliced bread. There was no way we could deprive the world of it—or Archimedes, as it was such a catchy tale that it would help fuel his reputation—so we decided to put it back.

No reason for us to hold on to it, right? Thanks to this scroll, our work in Greece was done.

I slipped the scroll into Darling’s flashlight thief-case, and Mike and I went to revisit Archimedes’ library.

It took us maybe eight seconds to learn that getting an item into an ancient library was much more difficult than sneaking it out.

If this had happened when we were back home, I would have called on Ben or another friendly powerful ghost to pop the scroll into its resting place. But? Just like how I’ve never seen a ghost outside of the United States, I’ve also never seen an American ghost in another country. Maybe it’s a territorial thing, I don’t know, but Mike and I were on our own. I sure as hell wasn’t about to call Helen and ask her to play errand girl.

We waited until lunch before heading to the acropolis, as we figured that was the most likely time to have a low ratio of guards to scientists. Nighttime was ridiculous: the threat of modern-day tomb robbers had motivated all of Rhodes to play sentry. None of the locals were going to allow their treasures to be taken from them, and since nearly twenty percent of the population was unemployed, there were a lot of volunteers patrolling the acropolis.

(Hopefully, they’d never learn that one of the first living humans to explore their newfound library had already made off with everything that could be crammed down her very ample cleavage. Um…let me clarify. That wasn’t me; I’m talking about Darling. My cleavage is anything but ample and I had just snagged that one scroll.)

The site was crawling with people. Mike and I were spotted the second we arrived on the hill, and there was plenty of waving and cheering. Another unintended consequence of finding an ancient site? The arrival of all of the reporters who needed to cover the story. These reporters needed to eat and sleep, so they visited the hotels and restaurants, and after hours they visited the clubs… If nothing else came of this, we had given Rhodes some good publicity and a temporary economic shot in the arm. That made me happy; that seemed to make everybody happy.

We smiled and waved back, and began walking through the gauntlet of guards. We made it as far as the inner corridor of the Nymphaeum before we bumped into resistance.

The Nymphaeum had been drained, and the algae had been scraped off and hauled away. Portable dehumidifiers chugged all around the manmade grotto, making sure moisture didn’t penetrate the layers of plastic sheeting that had been hung over the entrance to the library.

I think I had paid for those dehumidifiers and the generator running them…I couldn’t remember. I had written a lot of checks recently.

Anyhow.

They didn’t want us to go into the room. The woman running the operation insisted we stay outside; we could look through the layers of clear plastic, but we couldn’t go inside, oh no.

She was a hard nut to crack. I’m sure we would have been turned away if Atlas hadn’t already been in the library.

He came out to see what the commotion was, and he inadvertently gave us one of those movie moments that rarely happens in real life, you know the ones, where the character slowly emerges through a veil, gradually coming into focus, and then? Bam! Luscious eye candy. Yeah, usually that character is a woman and usually the veil is gauzy silk instead of industrial-grade plastic, but the principle was the same. Me, Mike, and the female archivist had to stop to remember where we had put our brains.

“Is there a problem?” Atlas asked the archivist.

“No, Mr. Petrakis,” the archivist replied, her face going bright red. She was about my age, maybe a year or two older, and definitely on board the Atlas Train. “They wanted to see what we’ve been working on, but—”

She never got the chance to finish. Atlas grinned at me as he looped his arm through mine and escorted me through the plastic, the archivist gasping behind us as she prevented Mike from following.

“Stay close,” Atlas said. He released my arm, but his hand traveled down to that not-quite-butt region of my lower back. I let it stay there; no need to come out swinging. “We are trying to preserve as much as we can, and it is safer if you do not touch anything.”

“Sure,” I said, as I looked around the library. The two of us were the only ones in the room. The library was well-lit with LED lamps positioned on stands, but the lamps had been kept on their dimmest settings and covered in thin white silk to protect the materials in the room. The effect was like moving through the haze of a million soft candles. The gorgeous mosaic floor had been covered in a heavy white cotton cloth to protect it from foot traffic, and the edges of this cloth were piled around the base of the walls in voluminous clouds of folds. There was a portable radio in the corner. Classical music was playing. I don’t have an ear for that stuff, but it sounded Mozart-y.

No wonder the archivist hadn’t wanted us around—I’d seen hardcore porn with more understated set design.

“We are doing the catalog from the top to the bottom,” he said, pointing towards the highest shelves. These were now empty. “It has all been photographed to preserve its order. What you found, Ms. Blackwell, is a unique example of daily life from the Hellenistic era. Simple details, such as which groups of parchment were placed upon the same shelves, may provide insight to a world many generations removed from ours.”

I nodded and muttered a comment that had nothing at all to do with the fact that a ghost had been moving those parchments around during that entire time, and unless that ghost had been extremely thorough when he moved out, there might be an inexplicable paper coffee cup or candy bar wrapper lying in a corner.

I often wonder about the accuracy of the entire historical record, but, you know. Most of life is just made of varying degrees of bullshit anyhow.

“What have you found?” I asked.

“So much!” Atlas stepped away from me and moved to the open space in the center of the room. The desk and the items on it hadn’t been touched. “This appears to be a lost treatise by Archimedes himself. Many of our discoveries seem to be related to mathematical formulae in some fashion. And there is the art, of course,” he said, as he bent down to lay a gentle hand upon the heavy cloth and the floor beneath it.

He was as giddy as a kid in the modern equivalent of a candy store. I realized I was smiling.

“Ms. Blackwell…” Atlas met my eyes and stood. “I want you to listen to me. I want to tell you something, and you must believe me.”

I dropped my shields. I don’t know why I did it—I guess it was because he was so earnest—but I let his emotions hit me. Sincerity and joy were the two that I could recognize. The rest? I don’t know. I’m nowhere near good enough at reading emotions to get through the complex layers that make up a mind.

All I knew was that Atlas Petrakis wanted to cut through the lies.

“I have told Senator Hanlon to never call me again,” he said. “I am no longer going to feed him information.”

“Former Senator,” I said absently as I brought my shields back up. I really don’t like reading people; I was beginning to think that maybe some of those underlying levels of emotion were lust, because a casual hand on my lower back wasn’t enough to get my panties steaming and holy shit I suddenly wanted to see exactly how well that table had stood the test of time. “Why not? According to Hollywood, playing both sides is a long-standing tradition with art brokers.”

“Because…” He paused. I got the impression that his brain was moving faster than his English. He lowered his voice and took a few steps towards me. “Because you found this place. I saw you do it, and I cannot explain it.

“I do not know what to do with you,” he said, leaning in close, and I smelled spices I couldn’t recognize. “You are a businesswoman, aggressive, calm…then you are a child stomping through a pool of water.

“And then you find this,” he said, pointing to the room. “You claim you are here to bring fame to your husband’s organization, but you won’t take credit for what you have found. I don’t know why you are really here, or what other discoveries you want to pursue, but if this is what you bring with you, then I must be part of it! Hanlon cannot offer me what you can.”

“That’s…very honest,” I admitted. “But I’m sure what I’ve been searching for is already here in this room. [20] As soon as you find it, Mike, Speedy, and I are going home.”

He reached out and laid his hands on my shoulders. I was wearing a sleeveless shirt, and his skin was so hot against mine. “You cannot leave,” he said earnestly. “This room, this is a miracle!”

I peered around Atlas to check on Mike. He was still outside, the archivist steadfast in her efforts to keep anyone else out of the room. If I didn’t get a distraction soon, I’d have to leave with the scroll and beg Helen to teleport it back to its original location.

“Shoulda brought Speedy,” I said.

“What?” he asked, his dark eyes searching my face. His hands began to move down my shoulders…

“Oh, just that he would enjoy what you’ve done here,” I said. There was a worrisome lack of oxygen in the room, and I took a quick step away from him to see if it was easier to breathe when there was some distance between us. Nope. “It’s…neat.”

His eyes were unbelievably dark as he took my hands in his own. “Ms. Blackwell—Hope—”

He pulled me towards him again; I let him pull me towards him again…

God and libido only know what that was going to turn into, as Mike finally managed to convince the archivist to let him into the library.

“Hey Mike!” I shouted, as he came through the plastic, the archivist behind him. “Atlas was about to tell me about the floors! They’re really…neat…”

The archivist’s face went bright red as she saw Atlas standing with his hands on my shoulders.

Ah. Jealousy. Perfect.

“Or…” I said, as I leaned against Atlas and slipped my hand into the back pocket of his jeans. “You can show me that thing you were talking about?”

“Thing?” Atlas asked. “What do you—”

“That thing!” I said, and this time I goosed his butt. Hard.

“Yes,” he said, eyes wide. “Yes. That thing. Of course.”

I began to drag Atlas out of the room, but I also managed to snag the archivist by her waist on the way. “You weren’t lying,” I said to Atlas, before the archivist could break away. “She is really pretty!”

After that, neither of them were paying any attention to Mike.

With one hand on a (firm juicy) butt and another curled around a strange woman’s hips, it was awfully hard to drop the flashlight, but I managed. The heavy cloth layered over the floor caught it and muffled the sound.

Mike found me a few minutes later. I had broken free of both Atlas and the archivist, and was taking selfies with the locals gathered at the metal fence around the Nymphaeum.

“We good?” I asked.

“We’re good,” he replied. “Atlas and Rebecca?”

“Rebecca? Oh, the archivist. I think they’re over there,” I said, and dipped my head towards one of the nearby supply buildings. “I told them to start without me while I did some fast public relations.”

“You’re a horrible tease,” Mike said.

“Me? Never! It’s a well-known fact that I have the attention span of a goldfish,” I told him. “Who’s down in the Nymphaeum now?”

“Nobody.”

“Well, hell,” I said, as I duckfaced with a giddy tweenager. “Guess we’re the ones standing guard over the place until they’re done romping in the hay. Boning on the lawnmower. Whatever.”

And that’s what we did.