ReVISIONS (23 page)

All those relays make the Net accessible from anywhere. At least, as long as you have a key.

What Angriess brought into my week-long isolation was, I thought then, even better than that.

 

“How are you feeling today?”

I glanced up from the already worn-out book.

Angriess stood on the other side of the transparent door. Behind her, I could see the now familiar faces of my midday guards, in a room as white, stark, and empty as mine.

“Bored,” I informed her. “Why?”

“I . . .” She glanced back. The guards didn't move. “I have something for you.”

After a week of silence, and only three choices of readings, I was on my feet before I knew it. “What?”

She turned again toward the guards, “Please, let me in.”

Their voices came muffled by the distance through the interphone embedded next to the door.

“Have you been checked for links?”

“Those kinds of security measures are for visitors. I'm a first-rated member of Youhen.”

And in answer the door opened.

A movement caught my eyes. She must have noticed: she lifted the bag she held in one hand, and came to sit on the floor at my side.

I slid down, my eyes still on the black leather backpack and the knot that held it closed. I had had to sew the leather thong on when I broke the plastic lock, some weeks ago. I always carried too much. Today, it looked almost empty.

“Sir. You're an antiquarian.”

With an effort, I looked up, nodded.

Her eyes were kind and sad, too.

“You're the one who repaired old themed coffee mugs and replicated them, aren't you? I bought some of those replicas.”

“I don't always succeed in bringing objects back to life.”

“But most of the time you do.”

“I try.”

She smiled. It lit up her eyes, almost enough to erase the sadness. “I'm an engineer. With the rhythm with which technologies evolve, I sometimes feel like a builder of sand castles. I care for each and every one of them, but tomorrow'll have forgotten my creations. Except if someone like you finds them. . . .”

She paused. I had no answer for her, but she didn't seem to mind.

 

 

She went on, after a while, “This is why you tried to build your own net interface, isn't it? To bring some technology of the past back to life, and make it part of our present.”

“Yes.”

“I thought you'd like to keep working on it.”

Angriess got up in one fluid motion and went to the door. She didn't look back.

I never saw her again.

 

In the bag, I found most of my tools, and the two artifacts Sabine had sent me from her digs at Crotona, sealed in plastic.

The first was an old, worn-down plastic casing that fit easily in the palm of my hand, with empty sockets where numbered keys used to be and a broken screen above. I didn't have to look inside to know from its weight that the secondary interface I'd been building inside the ancient mobile phone was still there. Either Angriess had put it back, or they hadn't checked, believing they had discovered my only illegal interface embedded in my desk. The one that had brought me here to be punished.

I could make this one work, I knew it. It would bring the ancient phone to life.

Even if I couldn't “make a call,” I would hear static, maybe more.

The second object had yielded little of its mysteries since Sabine had sent it for authentication. Even its true form, that of a hyperoctahedron, had been difficult to ascertain.

Its constant shifting under my gaze owed more to technical prowess than to optical illusion, and was my only clue to its origin. Who would conceive a solid octahedron from which stretched braids of silken material woven so tight they sketched around it the fleeting, three-dimensional image of an octahedron?

Who would be interested in creating a three-dimensional image of a four-dimensional hyperoctahedron? I'd wondered, until the white paint of the solid core told me that it was more than two thousand and fifty years old. The time of the Pythagoreans.

The Pythagorean school, fascinated with numbers and their relationship to music, associated the octahedron with air—and recognized the octave as the first natural harmony. They had dwelled in Crotona, where the hyperoctahedron had been found.

If they had created this geometric representation out of worship or interest for the number eight, what was its use? It played no sound I cared to hear.

Out of frustration, I had nicknamed it my “octofuss.”

 

 

That day, I didn't care much for it, though. I unsealed it, put it carefully on the floor next to me, and turned my attention back to the phone.

A glance at my guardians.

They weren't paying attention.

I started working.

 

Three hours later, I was done, the inner circuitry either reconfigured or replaced.

I pressed the “on” button. I held it to the side of my face, making believe I was one in a crowd of self-talkers, like those we saw in old flat-screen movies.

“I can't hear you!” I said into it, and, still hurting from Sabine's forsaking, “Crotona, Crotona!”

A voice answered, in bad English.

“Yes? Who's there?”

“Who's there?” I echoed in a silly manner.

My palms were damp with sweat, my hand trembling. I tried to get a better grip on myself and the phone.

In a steadier voice, I asked, “Who are you?”

“I'm Saturnin Ferrault. One of the archaeologists of Crotona. Who are you?”

 

 

“I am Sabine's antiquarian,” I said. “The precious finds you made in the creek? I'm the specialist authenticating—”

“What are you talking about?”

Static and a French accent made him hard to understand.

I turned my back to the guards, and talked louder.

I gave him every detail I could remember about the dig's latest discoveries to prove my claim, and concluded: “From the inscriptions Sabine discovered, the date, and some veiled references in Plato and Plotin, I'm almost positive the hyperhedron, like the cave itself, dates back to Pythagoras himself, and his school. We always believed they dwelled only on numbers, music, and that their geometry was purely theoretical, but it's clear that . . .”

I glanced at the object in question. It quivered with each sound, lay quiescent for each breath between words.

That's the last I saw of my world.

My voice faded out. My breath, too.

My cell was no more.

I was facing a man dressed in an early twentieth century suit. He looked right past me, as if I wasn't there, and talked into an antique radio post.

“What is clear? Who is this
fichue
Sabine?
Monsieur
!”

My first thought was: I have brought both objects to life!

My second, darker one, was: I, on the other hand, don't feel that much alive anymore. . . .

 

 

“You don't understand what I am saying! The Pythagorean school was thought lost after the death of its creator in 548 BCE. But all we know for sure is that secrecy was important to them, that they worked on polyhedrons, numbers, music, as parts of a whole that would unlock the universe's mysteries!”

“And I'm telling you, you're too damn gullible! Why would a total stranger speak in English to a French archaeologist, and reveal to him . . .”

“His English wasn't that good,” the French epigraphist pouted.

“Neither is yours,” replied the Tunisian engineer.

They were both quite drunk by then. Youssef Bin Ines. Saturnin Ferrault, who had answered my phone call, and whom I had continued to follow, unwillingly, invisibly, all along this hot, dusty day in Crotona, Sicily—May 4, 1923.

They staggered out of the bar at midnight, convinced that the only way to settle their argument was to prove one—or the other—right.

And so we went, me a mere thought, them noisy shadows, to the empty dig to get whatever they thought they would need, then to the creek I had described thoughtlessly.

I tried not to be here, tried to gather my wits, to shake off this vivid yet immaterial hallucination. But each breath Saturnin took shuddered inside me, and I found myself, or what was left of me, following his every move as if tethered to his muscles by invisible cords.

I even felt cramps from his rhythmic digging.

They searched for hours. At first, it seemed like a fool's errand, until they discovered among the rubble a stone with an inscription Saturnin translated. It was part of a mysterious vow of secrecy.

They dug further.

I was starting to fear what was happening, that I wouldn't wake up, when Saturnin stopped to answer the call of nature—one I shared, but would experience no more.

Dawn broke when they found the entrance. They took one step inside the man-made cave, and stopped.

Unable to go forward until Saturnin did, all I could do was stare with them at the perfect replica of my octofuss; this one carved from crystalline stone and half as high as a man of my time.

It stood in the exact center of the room. The room itself was half a sphere, the floor the only plane surface. The hyperhedron's edges reached the walls.

I was dragged forward as Saturnin took soundless steps inside. Youssef followed, and stopped before the hyperhedron. But Saturnin's attention had been caught by the walls themselves. With him, I came close enough to realize inscriptions ran everywhere.

He read for a long while, his eyes huge with wonder.

Finally, he said, “This changes everything we thought about the technology-poor Greeks. . . .”

A snapping sound almost deafened me. I looked around in amazement. I immediately noticed that the others hadn't reacted. And that I wasn't tethered to Saturnin anymore.

Youssef was commenting, “It looks like an acoustic device of some kind. . . .”

“It is,” Saturnin confirmed.

“According to this,” the epigraphist gestured toward the wall's inscriptions. “Other chambers existed, linking every disciple of Pythagoras together. They managed to communicate over great distances, if the inscriptions are to be believed. I wonder how many other chambers might still exist.”

No sooner had I thought the question than the world whirled around me, as if my asking was taking me in search of the answer.

I no longer stood—or floated, or existed disembodied—in the cave, but in what looked like a laboratory. It wasn't the 1920s, but not my time either.

1972.