The Testimony of the Minotaur
It is not clear to me what has happened. Beyond the earth tunnels, a passage of chalk, widening, straightening, and soon a dim light suffusing into the darkness but I emerged into a landscape that I had not expected to see. Before me lay a vast expanse of bare earth. For as far as I could see, the ground lay in ridges of frozen soil. Jagged stones lay scattered in a loose pattern of ragged and frost-encrusted polygons as though surfacing disgruntledly from a solid ocean of ice.
I stood at the water's edge. A frozen transparent sheet ran out from the shore but I could see that water lay beyond. I crouched down as a figure appeared suddenly, but he turned his back to me and tried to run across the ground, tripped and nearly fell. I laughed to myself. This cannot be the ferryman! The runner found an easier path and was soon some distance away. Then he disappeared, quite suddenly, and I found myself alone.
In my hand I held a silver dagger, an ornamental dagger, a gift for the ferryman. Finding a small stream, I searched for fresh water beneath the ice, but my blows with the knife could find only hard soil and stones.
I shouted into the vastness of the air. There was no reply but the wind across the frozen shore. A little further down the coast, ridges of blue clay ran out across the ice and towards clear water. I picked my way along one and plunged into the waves and swam. The foul and painful liquid splashed against my face and threw salt water into my nostrils. The land ran past me and I realised to my horror that I was in the grip of a dreadful current. I screamed for the ferryman but there was no reply; there seemed to be nobody else in the underworld but me. I was alone. The cold began to grip me and draw the strength from my limbs.
On the shore again, hungry, with nothing to eat and only ice to lick for moisture, I cried once more for the ferryman. I cried, again. There was no reply, but only the sound of the wind against the stones. The world was empty but for me. My gift was too small.
I made my way back across the tracts of frozen soil and into the side of the hill. My journey back has been long and cramped, but I followed my thread this time and now I kneel in lamplight. I have brought an oil lamp down from a room above to illuminate the red walls of this tunnel. It is late morning and the sun is too bright to bear. But I will need to find food very shortly.
·
'Sirius is the brightest star in the sky,' said Jim. 'I used to watch it emerge slowly through the deepening blue of a summer evening when I was a child.'
Ariadne nestled her head into the collar of his duvet jacket. 'It seems such a small thing to journey to,' she said. Jim held her closer to him, shielding her from the chill of the subzero air.
'Look over there,' he said, after a while.
Below them, near the edge of a broad sweep of patterned ground that stretched eastwards and northwards in a frozen expanse towards the icy waters of the Solent, a figure was making its way across ground that was strewn with a wide scatter of frost-encrusted stones; making its way slowly southwards towards the foot of the chalk ridge upon which they stood.
'Look at his head!' exclaimed Ariadne.
They watched as the creature disappeared from sight beneath the brow of the ridge. Ariadne seemed to loose interest in it quickly and returned to the comfort of Jim's shoulder. Jim felt a surge of anxiety pass through him, as though the animal's trek across a frozen wasteland held a terrible prophesy, and reminding him of his own departure.
They started back, descending the slope on the other side of the ridge towards an ancient megalithic stone that stood like a gun-sight between two low hills and silhouetted against a grey, forbidding sea.
'I am going to miss you,' she said.
·
Sirius is a star like our sun, a little larger, burning hydrogen at an alarming rate, alarming until one calculates the amount which it holds in reserve, enough to last for a thousand million years. If the earth was the size of a grain of sand it would require Thersander's journey to go from sand grain Earth to grapefruit Sirius - from a speck of sand on a beach in Albion to a yellow grapefruit floating in the eastern Mediterranean.
The ship was ready.
It had been hanging suspended in an evacuated hanger for six years - suspended by nothing. Hovering under its own power. Producing enough thrust to counter the acceleration that had split Jim's knee open on a bare floor joist of Ariadne's new home on Cyprus, just after their wedding, requiring six stitches - hanging by a thread, balanced upon a thread. It had been a lot lighter at the end of the test, light enough to be transported up into high Earth orbit and refuelled with only five times its own weight, and the gathering webs extended to immense proportions.
Jim said goodbye to Ariadne on an overcast morning, as a car arrived to take him to the shuttle. He was a little hung over from the meal the evening before and she cried, then pretended that there was no pain. Jim kissed her and held her tightly.
'Goodbye,' called Ariadne as he was driven away, finding composure in the only moment left to her. 'I love you,' she called, as it began to rain.
The shuttle docked with the ship and the crew transferred. When the checks were completed, the engines sent a reassuring throb through the fabric of the vessel and Jim fell down onto his feet with the others.
The routine of the ship was geared to a artificial day of twenty-four hours, but in place of sunset at ten o'clock each evening, the lights went out and the moonlights came on. Or darkness, as the crew preferred.
During the long days in space, Jim was busy with observational tasks. It was his duty to help monitor the smooth running of the countless devices, instruments and experiments on board. Soon he knew exactly how many there were. They were accelerating away from the Earth at an average of just over one Earth gravity.
A little over a year from the launch of the mission, Ariadne sent a fourth birthday message to Jim. He would receive it nine years later, as the ship slowed into orbit within the planetary system of Sirius. She told him how their son was cutting his first tooth, how the garden was doing, how she missed him, how much she loved him.
The space centre showed her a simulated track of her message as it sped at the speed of light towards a spacecraft that was itself receding at close to the speed of light (during the next eighteen years Ariadne would sent only another three messages to wish Jim a happy birthday, which his ship would sweep up as it sped homewards).
·
Disaster struck - a little over two years into the flight. The ship would not reorientate and could not be made to slow down. The onboard computers and their backups refused to acknowledge that a problem existed and the trouble was traced to two sensors deep in the engine, both malfunctioning identically. The computers refused all coercion. They reoriented the ship to the commands of the astronauts in the mistaken belief that the ship was responding correctly. They refused to be persuaded otherwise. The astronauts sent a distress signal.
For six months they tried to reprogram the software themselves, to bypass the information from the damaged sensors. It was not easy. Ariadne's birthday came eight times during these fraught months.
·
Jim sat and composed his last message to Ariadne. The astronauts were three years and five months into the mission. Jim had sent ten birthday messages to Ariadne in the space of six weeks, and had to stop. He did not have the strength of emotion to continue.
A year passed, and the Earth lay behind them in a dim tunnel of light about the size of the full moon. They were passing stars that on Earth had been more than one hundred light years away; stars which emerged from a bright tunnel directly above them, moved across the sky in changing colours and plunged into a dimmer orb of a similar size beneath.
The engines collected dust and hydrogen. Ahead, everything was approaching at the speed of light and with increasingly high energy. Sooner or later the orb ahead of them would fire dust like shells from the barrel of a howitzer. The universe was becoming hostile as they moved away from universal time.
·
A further three and a half years passed. The ship had swept the astronauts towards the edge of the galaxy's diffuse envelope, tangential to the hub of the galactic centre. More than half the sky showed a blank, black face. On the opposite side of the ship a broad smile of stars hurried out from the bright tunnel ahead, scintillated with visible microwave frequencies, sped and disappeared dimly into the tunnel beneath the ship. They all knew that it was now only a matter of time. They could only repeat the procedures tried, already, a hundred times.
Then one day a poltergeist appeared.
It seemed suddenly to move into the onboard computer, which began apologising for not having recognised the problem before. It threw cold beer at them from the food synthesizer and soothed them with strange music. It told them that they had been travelling for ten thousand years. Fifteen hours later they found themselves floating weightlessly. Fifteen minutes later still and they were back on their feet again. They had turned at last, eight years and two weeks into the voyage.
A week later Jim received a transmission from Ariadne. It was an affectionate reply to his final birthday message to her, on her eightieth birthday. It had winged its way from home and caught up with the ship at the very edge of the galaxy, ten thousand light years distant from Earth.
·
Another eight years of flight elapsed, and the galaxy spread before them, at rest at last. But the engines were given no rest. Only the extensive screen library kept sanity alive.
Jim had received several more messages from Ariadne, but then silence. The astronauts searched for the faintest signal from Earth, but could find none. They speculated that the poltergeist had been an instantaneous transmission from home and marvelled at the advanced technology that had allowed this miraculous repair of their onboard system. But they knew that the ship would have to retrace a substantial portion of its journey for them to have any hope at all of receiving the radio signals that this civilisation might be producing–signals that would be approaching them at the speed of light but still ten thousand light years behind them.
The view was beautiful. A broad milky way across a third of the sky and a bright line which swirled in an arc from this river of light and became a stream of stars in a spiral arm. Above their heads lay the Earth, twenty thousand light years away.
·
On Earth, the observers Lenina and Henry Foster recorded an intensely faint signal from a ship which had been launched twenty thousand years ago by one of the archaic civilisations of the days before soma. From the records left by an equally enigmatic but far more highly advanced civilisation ten thousand years ago it had been calculated that the ship would have already begun to return. But the light that they saw on the observing screen of the telescope showed a rapidly receding object still, throwing back the slowest and weakest of heartbeats as it appeared still to be speeding away from them on the fastest part of its outward journey.
On board the ship, eighteen years into the mission, the galaxy had begun to collapse again into a bright moonlike orb; the end of a tunnel that seemed to them, distressingly, to be closing in upon itself and receding as they accelerated towards it. Emanating from this orb of light, the heartbeats of the galaxy had begun to purr like a cat.
·
A further six years passed, the astronauts were one of their number short, and the current speculation was whether the ship would reverse acceleration in order to arrive in the vicinity of the earth at a slow enough speed to see it, let alone return home. Jim and the others gave a concerted effort to an attempt to discover if the system was going to do this. They had given up, long ago, trying to regain manual control.
Three days before Jim's forty-ninth birthday, a present arrived; a signal from Earth, from the bright tunnel above their heads. It was the first signal they had received since the ship had miraculously interpreted Ariadne's final message, fifteen years earlier. It read - unreadably. A language which the computer could interpret into Roman characters quite happily but which made no sense when it did so. Only two character strings were susceptible to a degree of guesswork. One was 8k888k888kkkk8. The string was the binary representation of the number 'twelve thousand and one'. The other looked suspiciously like 'spiritus'.
The astronauts could not explain how the shipboard receivers were able to interpret such a weak and blue-shifted signal from Earth, many light years away from them still. Such signals were now streaming into their ship. They probed the instrumentation and software to find a clue, but the stream of information remained miraculous. Twenty-one years and six months previously, when communication with Earth had been lost, after overshooting Sirius, the link with Earth had remained forbiddingly silent. Then immediately after the appearance of the poltergeist, Ariadne's final messages had been captured. But a long silence had then endured. What had happened to humanity?
Now the information streamed in as it had never done, radio waves bursting through the infrared, hot with news that the computer system happily translated into language, but none of it made any sense! It was unintelligible. Gibberish!
Very quickly, the computer discovered a broader suite of patterns in the frantic signal and explained its theory to the crew. The major mode was superimposed upon another wavelength that was three hundred and sixty-five and a quarter times longer.
Six months passed and ten thousand cycles of the longer mode arrived from Earth, and the ship turned its direction of acceleration through one hundred and eighty degrees at exactly the right time.
A further eighteen months passed and despite another sixteen thousand cycles of the longer mode from Earth, the messages, if any indeed there were, remained unintelligible to the astronauts. Slowly, very slowly, the light in the orb of stars beneath them began to broaden and grow, as though they were nearing the end of a long tunnel.
·
The last years were the hardest to bear. The final messages from Ariadne began to haunt Jim (she had kept up correspondence with the ship until her death in her late eighties, some of her communications being quite lengthy. The ship had only been able properly to receive the weak signal after the arrival of the 'poltergeist'). He kept them as a printout in his personal locker and went through a period of reading them continually; then he thought of destroying them. In earlier times, when speculation upon the fate of the ship and themselves had occupied their minds obsessively, Ariadne had receded like a friend and lover no longer a part of reality, as though their courtship and marriage had happened in a dream. As though their winter holiday in the cooling climate of southern Britain had never happened. Or if it had once happened, then in a different life. But now, so many memories had returned, had become concrete again. And the knowledge that everything was irretrievably lost was a hammer blow to his heart, continuously. For the first time in the mission, he contemplated suicide.
Before the coming of the poltergeist, Jim had resolved to see the end of time, if the ship allowed it, with almost a little joy. If the ship had not turned, they would by now have been such an extraordinary number of billions of years into the future of the universe that they might have been face to face with the Ultimate. Now they were going to see something at least as equally uncertain.
Jim and his shipboard colleagues were relieved when Sirius passed them. It had been a fear that the ship's instruments might return them into the star system they had originally meant to study. But Sirius went flying past, into the large orb of stars above them.
The Earth had aged forty thousand years since they had left. Jim was fifty-six years old.
On Earth, the Sensitivity knew that the Megalithic astronauts were safe, only a single light year from them now, although the telescopes saw only that the ship had finally turned, twenty thousand light years distant. Only now did the heartbeats of the astronauts, formerly so ridiculously slow, rise to normal. The ship would arrive in less than two year's time, close on the tail of the lightbeam that revealed, even now, its remote history. Preparations began to be made.
The Earth was only one light year away. The cascade of its yearly cycles had slowed almost to the point of normality. They would be home in less than a year and a half.
They arrived back in Earth orbit, flying such an insignificant number of miles from the surface that they could almost have stepped onto it; they orbited so tantalizingly close to the surface of this blue planet, and wondered how they were to get down.
Cyprus was much as Jim remembered it. He had lived his childhood by the coast and knew how the winter rains pulled at the cliffs near to his home and dragged bits of them into the waves every year, great bites maintaining the raggedness of the shore and keeping the fossil hunters happy. He had expected the low hills further inland to have long disappeared.
But as he stood on a grassy ridge and surveyed the coast, the landscape seemed almost as expansive as he remembered. Perhaps the shore had receded by a mile or two. All that was missing to the south was the broad, flat strip of cliff top where his parent's house had once looked out across the Mediterranean. But except for where white limestone cliffs remained, the land now sloped gently down to the water's edge. Forests spread over the hills and onto the land below, a land with buildings in strange materials and forms, admittedly, and he had an idea that there was a lot beneath the surface. There was a glint of something large and shiny in the distant grey mountains to the north. There were no reflections anywhere else. But there were circles.
The white hills seemed less far above the sea than they had been when he was younger; was this a trick of the memory or had it been more of a climb to reach the top? He was certain he was not fitter now than he had been in his early twenties. Perhaps the level of the sea was higher.
In a museum of local history was a case in which a plastic tablet was displayed. A card explained its significance, in a language that Jim was trying to learn. 'Near the beginning of the last Ice Age, a woman ... this memorial .. her remains.' he read. 'The language .. lost.'
"Waiting for your return, Jim. Your Ariadne. I will always love you." read Jim. Beside the tablet was a jawless skull, with the stains of forty thousand years upon it.
·
'Near the beginning of the next Ice Age?' the Goddess mused, and cast her scrutiny of the tapestry of reality away from this world of possibility, away and back to a world where this pleasant landscape lay like a distant fibre in the warp of the universe.
'There will be no more glacial periods,' she said. Poseidon smiled indulgently.
'The charcoal that Thersander piles high in his workshop, to provide the energy for his alchemy, will guide his descendants to the coal underground, and to the oil and to the gas. Their inventiveness will lead them to recover these things. I have put curiosity into their hearts and the Axe into their hands. The deep shaft in Albion and the mines of Laurium reflect my need as well as theirs. Their need subsumed in mine. Soon their inquisitiveness and their industry will lead them to recycle the black stone and the oil and the limestone that is locked beneath the ground, and to replenish the air of the forests.
She looked down at the Temple Mansion and at the distant harbour shore, and smiled. Such an illusion of permanence.
The Minotaur screwed up his eyes in the late-morning glare as the sun shone through the columns that fronted the Shrine of Potnia and cast shadows like bars in a cage to his left. Before him was the golden Axe of the Covenant. A noise made him start and withdraw into the shadows of the hall behind the shrine. He stood perfectly still and watched Theseus lift the Axe from its plinth.
Theseus weighed the Axe in his hands. 'Today must be the day,' he told himself. 'What is the point of spending any more time here? I have delayed for far too long. Today must be the day!' And he dropped the Axe back into its socket with a resolve that he had not felt for some time.
The Minotaur watched him and took notice of the weight of the gold.