The Bone House

Epilogue



He waited until after dark and then, to be certain that he had not been followed, Charles Flinders-Petrie approached the Sacred Way by a torturously circuitous, wandering route, doubling back time and again until he could put his mind at rest. The last passage had been fraught, and he feared he had alerted his enemies. But it seemed that he had given them the slip, if only for a little while. That was all he would need. A few more crossings and it would be finished: the map would disappear forever.

Then let them do their worst. Nothing would make him talk. He would die first. The thought of taking his secrets to the grave made him smile.

Now to the business at hand—the reason he had come to Etruria. Although he had never met the king of Velathri, he had heard the name Turms since boyhood, and had longed to meet the royal sage and seer. It would not happen now, but Charles was glad to be here just the same. The funeral of the king lasted most of the day, and he had arrived in time to witness the procession, standing reverently among the grieving subjects. As a representative of his family, it was right to acknowledge the passing of a longtime friend of his father and grandfather. Charles congratulated himself on correctly navigating the ley and calibrating the time of his arrival. True, it would have been better if he had managed to reach his destination while Turms was still alive, but as things stood he considered it a singular victory. The tomb was unsealed and would remain so for another seven days in order to allow mourners to place their gifts and remembrances in the chamber. Having dressed in the style of a rural labourer of the day, Charles did not expect to be challenged by the soldiers guarding the tomb. As far as anyone was concerned, he was merely one more rural peasant come to pay his humble respects. His modest stature and unremarkable features, together with his wholly unassuming demeanour, often made it possible for him to move unseen through the various worlds he visited. Also, he had found that few in authority paid much attention to those they considered beneath them. So, to accentuate his lowly state, he had cut his hair short and allowed his beard to go unshaved a few days, giving himself a more grizzled, rustic guise.

If fortune favoured him tonight, he would pass unnoticed once more. Charles hoped he would not have to speak to the guards or, worse, bribe them to let him into the tomb.

Bearing a cluster of grapes in one hand and pressing the bundle containing his grave gift to his chest, Charles descended the long staircase leading to the sunken road cut deep into tufa stone beneath the surface of the surrounding landscape. He walked along, his way lit intermittently by torches, advancing from one pool of light to the next, until he arrived at the place where an iron brazier had been set up outside an elaborately carved doorway. The tomb had been whitewashed and painted red, green, and gold, designating a royal burial. The doorway was festooned with white flowers, and little red pennons had been strung from the top of the high banks of tufa at the top of the Sacred Way.

Two guards stood either side of the door—yawning and leaning on their long lances—and three more sat on campstools across the narrow roadway. A table had been erected, and the remains of the funeral meal, as well as gifts of food and wine, were piled high in baskets along the walls and steps leading to the tomb. The guards gripped cups and had obviously been helping themselves to the wine, bread, and sweetmeats. Why not? There was no danger of thieves or grave robbers. Turms the Immortal was a just and revered king, well loved by the people; exceedingly long-lived, he had survived plague and drought and war—the banes of rulers in every age, and in every age the same. He had lived long enough to enjoy that rarest of elixirs: the loving acclaim of devoted subjects. Even among his enemies, the bellicose Latins, Turms the Immortal was renowned as a sage and seer of extraordinary powers. Any thief foolish enough to risk stealing from this tomb would be torn apart by the mob, so high was the esteem in which the late king was held. The presence of guards was a mere formality.

Rounding his shoulders and lowering his head, Charles affected a stoop and, for good measure, a slight limp, smiling obsequiously as he approached. The guards at the door gave him a cursory glance as he hobbled into view. Nodding and smiling, he bowed once, twice, three times—as one would to his betters—and stepped to the tomb entrance. As he mounted the steps, he heard one of the guards behind him speak out—a single word of command. He did not know what was said, but he halted nonetheless.

The soldier rose from his stool and moved unsteadily towards him. Charles turned as the guardsman confronted him; he raised a hand to his ear and touched it lightly with his finger as a deaf man might. The soldier spoke again and Charles, still smiling, shook his head. One of the standing guards spoke a word to his comrade and gestured with his lance for the visitor to enter. Charles stepped to the threshold, but the other soldier put a hand on his shoulder, turned him back around, and then, as if to assert his authority, took the bunch of grapes from his hand. Then, with a lift of his chin, he directed the old man to do what he had come to do.

Charles paused just inside the chamber as his eyes adjusted to the darkness. The little light that entered the tomb came from the torches outside, and that was not much. Although every instinct screamed at him to hurry, he forced himself to wait until he could make out the mound of gifts and tributes heaped on and around the stone sarcophagus of King Turms. The marble casing itself was fairly plain: a large box with a slightly domed lid, the sides decorated with the name and title of the resident within and an oval lozenge containing a relief depicting a figure on a throne attended by winged figures in flowing robes. That was all.

Garlands of flowers had been draped over the sarcophagus, creating the fragrant atmosphere of a garden. Grave goods filled the corners and were heaped round about: plates and bowls and chalices in decorated ceramic and hammered silver, sealed amphorae filled with wine and beer, elaborately fashioned loaves of bread, baskets of grain, an olive tree in a pot, cured meat, figs in sweet liquor, spiced honey in jars, and other delicacies a hungry soul might fancy.

Charles stepped to the great white stone coffin, removing the short iron bar from the bundle he carried. With an efficiency born of practice, he jammed the tapered end of the tool into the crack where the lid joined base. He paused, listening to the half-drunk guards talking outside; when he was certain their attention was elsewhere, he leaned all his weight on the iron bar and succeeded in raising the heavy lid sufficiently to slip a second tool into the crack. Working quickly, he levered up the coffin top. The stone was heavy, and it took all his strength, but he managed to force a tiny gap—just enough to slide in the last item from his bundle: a thin scrap of parchment sealed between two flat pieces of olive wood.

He would have preferred better tools and more time to hide the item properly, but neither luxury was possible in the circumstance. He felt the placket drop into the coffin and, with a sigh of relief, gently lowered the lid back down and removed the tools, which he swiftly hid—one beneath a sack of barley, and the other in a basket of persimmons. Then, with a bow of respect to the dead occupant, the visitor exited the tomb.

As he emerged, one of the soldiers at the door insisted on giving him a perfunctory pat-down, although anyone could see well enough that he was not hiding anything stolen from the tomb in his thin tunic. The guard sent him on his way with a nod. He bowed again and hurried away, threading back along the sunken road.

“Three down,” Charles said to himself as he flitted like a shadow along the Sacred Way. “Two more to go.”

Just two more. He prayed for time—a little more time to complete his mission. Then let his enemies plot and rage. Come what may, Charles could face the future unafraid.





Quantum Physics and Me



Thomas Young (1773–1829), who has a significant role in this story, was one of the world’s great polymaths. Born in the tiny village of Milverton in Somerset, England, he was an infant prodigy, having learned to read by the age of two. The firstborn son of a devout Quaker family, he worked his way through the entire Bible (twice!) at four, and soon topped this achievement by acquiring the basics of Latin grammar. He was able to converse and write letters in Latin to his no-doubt perplexed friends and family when he was six years old.

Young Thomas outgrew teachers faster than his family could find them—a few weeks of study and he would know as much as the master instructing the class. When he landed at Thompson’s School in Dorset at the age of eight, he found a tutor who understood his genius, gave him free reign of the library, and assisted the voracious student in learning whatever he happened to fancy—which, apparently, was everything. By fourteen years of age he was fluent in not only ancient Greek and Latin—he amused himself by translating his textbooks into and out of classical languages—but had also acquired French, Italian, Hebrew, German, Chaldean, Syriac, Samaritan, Arabic, Persian, Turkish, and, of course, Amharic.

Medicine inevitably captured his interest, and that took him to London and Edinburgh, briefly, before moving on to Germany to delve into the toddling discipline of physics. His expertise and authority in various and wide-ranging fields were such that in a few short years it was being said of him that he knew everything there was to be known. As a practicing physician he earned his daily crust, and devoted his spare time to experiments, which often led to revolutionary discoveries: it was Young who devised a means to demonstrate in simple and elegant experiments that light did indeed behave as a wave—not only as a particle, as Isaac Newton had theorised. He also established that the different colours we perceive are made by light at different wavelengths that correspond to variations in electromagnetic energy.

Never confined to any singular endeavour, Dr. Young’s insatiable curiosity stretched to other, even more exotic pursuits, including—conveniently for my story—archaeology: especially the deciphering of Egyptian hieroglyphics. No one at the time could read the ancient pictorial rebus script but, aided by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, Young—not the Frenchman Champollion, as most history texts have it—cracked the code and defined the basic rules of translation that others (including Champollion, who grudgingly admitted as much) have followed and built on ever since.

A more recent genius, Albert Einstein (1879–1955), was a great admirer of Dr. Young and ranked him next to Isaac Newton, mentioning Young’s inestimable contributions to science when he was asked to provide a forward for Newton’s Opticks, when that seminal work was republished in 1931. Einstein knew a thing or three about physics himself. In addition to creating the powerhouse E = mc2 equation, Einstein also had a knack for pithy sound bites. His observation that “the distinction between past, present, and future is only an illusion . . .” speaks directly to one of the central devices of The Bone House, as characters struggle with the diverse yet interconnecting realities of a universe unlimited by space or time.

Although the idea of a many-dimensioned universe had been knocking around for some time—the word multiverse itself was coined by the philosopher William James around 1895—it was Einstein who laid the theoretical groundwork for the notion—a suggestion later picked up and given more definite shape by physicists and cosmologists such as Hugh Everett, Max Tegmark, and John Wheeler, amongst others. The idea gained momentum in the scientific community through the 1970s and ’80s until it has become such an accepted feature in the landscape of scientific thought that it is now a useful construct for theorising about the apparent anomalies encountered when dealing with the universe in its largest, and very smallest, expressions.

It is also a highly useful construct for a writer of imaginative fiction. For the characters enmeshed in the BRIGHT EMPIRES quest are not time-travelling explorers, à la H.G. Wells’ The Time Machine or Steven Spielberg’s Back to the Future series—merely running backwards and forwards along chronological train tracks, confined to rails permanently fixed in a singular direction. Rather, Kit and company are bouncing around a multidimensional universe in the equivalent of a helicopter that can travel in any of a thousand different directions. And if that hypothetical helicopter is a vehicle that can also zoom off into hidden dimensions and lands in any possible alternate world—with a dose of time slippage thrown in for good measure—then we have the situation I am trying to describe in BRIGHT EMPIRES.

Over thirty years ago, a physicist friend who worked at Fermilab—the massive proton-antiproton collider in the suburbs of Chicago—took me on a tour of the facility. The lab itself was still fairly new at the time, and the physicists there had just identified a range of new subatomic particles: quarks. They were preparing to begin experiments in super-cold conditions with temperatures approaching absolute zero. As I look back, I think that the experience of getting up close and personal with that high-tech laboratory and coming under the spell of my friend’s enthusiasm for high energy physics launched my own interest in a subject that continues to fascinate: which is why my reading table supports a tower of books on physics (both quantum and astro), as well as cosmology, philosophy, anthropology, theology, and to be sure, history.

In the current climate, when new discoveries are announced nearly every day, it is difficult to recall that as the world marched towards the third millennium scientists were beginning to hint—not without a tinge of sadness or regret, I suspect—that science was very close to explaining everything. The sentiment was so widely expressed that by 2000 a Time magazine article was wondering, “Will there be anything left to discover?” Science, the louder voices decreed, had conquered the universe; all that was left was to write up the notes and fill in the few remaining blanks. Every major discovery had been made, and there was, sniff, nothing left.

Not only has that eventuality failed to materialise, but in the few short years since Time floated the question something very like the reverse has transpired instead. Discovery itself has exploded. Old and established certainties are being swept away by new theories driven by new discoveries.

Just now, scientific eyes are on the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland, where physicists are sifting through the results of proton-proton smashups looking for dark matter, whatever undiscovered subatomic particles might exist, and perhaps those elusive extra dimensions of the universe. They are struggling to makes sense of a universe none of them would have imagined even ten or fifteen years ago, a universe that constantly reveals new depths of wonder.

Theories, like eggs and promises, are made to be broken. Even the most perfunctory dabble in the history of science should be enough to remind us all that the closer science gets to describing something, the more it discovers how much there is to describe. Far from explaining everything, each new discovery or theory opens up whole new regions of exploration; each new advance uncovers more data that must in some way be accounted for, requiring the overhaul of old theories or the creation of new ones, and so on. In such a world, it would be useful to have a polymath like Thomas Young on the case.

In their book Quantum Enigma, Professors Rosenblum and Kuttner express their intention and hope that readers will be brought to the boundary where the particular expertise of physicists is no longer a sure guide. This is the realm of BRIGHT EMPIRES—a place where all the old ways of thinking about reality break down in the face of a new conception of the universe. “When experts disagree,” they write, “you may choose your own expert. Since the quantum enigma arises in the simplest quantum experiment, its essence can be fully comprehended with little technical background. Non-experts can therefore come to their own conclusions.”

That being the case, why shouldn’t a novelist participate in the conversation?