something?”
“Eighteen twelve,” you repeated, more insistent this time, as if our hearing wasn’t good.
“Not Waterloo,” I said. “That was 1815. Wellington gets all the glory, but he’d have lost except that at the last minute von Blücher and the Prussians showed up—”
“Morag.”
“What?”
“Stick to the point, Morag.”
“Sorry. 1812. OK, yes, 1812 is—is—oh.”
“What?”
“Eighteen twelve isn’t a date. It’s two numbers, eighteen and twelve. We’re not talking battles. We’re talking a horseshoe of twelve symbols containing a spiral of eighteen more. It’s the structure of the Phaistos Disks. Daniel pointed it out to Bill. You were proud that you’d noticed what Bill missed, remember?”
There was a faint smile at the corner of your mouth.
“You do remember! Eighteen twelve.” I turned to Rosko again. “It will work, won’t it?”
He positioned the cover over the drive and started reinserting the tiny screws. “What’s that idiom in English about betting the farm? Don’t.”
“It will work,” you said. We both stopped and looked at you.
“It will work,” you said again. “But—”
Rosko raised one eyebrow. “Thanks for that, Daniel.” Then he held up the cover to me before starting to reattach it. “Root. Auf Deutsch heisst root ‘Wurzel,’ oder? Vielleicht ist das ein Wortspiel?”
“A pun?”
“Ja. Yes. Like: the root in ‘√2’ is referring to the root of a plant, maybe. Or the root cause of something? The origin?”
We both thought about that. But second root of a plant and second origin didn’t make sense.
“ Root has only two meanings I can think of,” I said. “It’s a noun, like in The tree has shallow roots and Money is the root of all evil . And it’s a verb, like in The pig is rooting for food and He’s rooting for his team . There’s nothing else, is there?”
“Root two,” you said in a harsh whisper. “Root two.” You’d turned pale, with small beads of sweat on your upper lip, and you were trembling with annoyance or frustration, as if this at least was vitally important. You took a sheet of printer paper, picked a stub of pencil from where you’d parked it behind your ear, and drew a simple thin line, like a degraded sine wave, that was clearly meant to be Ararat. Above that, a dark scribble that looked like nothing—except that I could tell right away it was meant to be the cloud from which the Architects had emerged. Then you mashed the pencil point down so hard that the point crumbled, and wrote a thick black “√2” inside the shape of the cone.
“Why Mayo was there,” you said again, looking at us as if you simply couldn’t understand how slow we were being. “Root two. Root. Two.”
Or, language being a tricky thing, that’s what I thought you said.
Rosko searched around in his box full of cables, found what he wanted, and hooked the drive up to my machine. Nothing happened. He raised his eyebrows in a resigned, told-you-so look, but unplugged it, poked at the connectors, and tried again. There was a faint, almost inaudible hum that stopped, started again, and made all our hearts skip a beat with a single high squeal, eeeeeeeeeeee . It sounded like a pig falling off a cliff.
“Great. So much for that,” I said.
“Patience, patience, patience.” He took the entire housing off again and cleaned the inside with compressed air. Moving so slowly that I wanted to scream, he clipped two wires and resoldered them. Finally he was ready to try again. And, impossibly, it worked. The names of sixty-eight files—I could have guessed that number—unpacked themselves across the screen:
Phaistos_original_a.tiff
Phaistos_original_b.tiff
Phaistos_calder_01a.tiff
Phaistos_calder_01b.tiff
Phaistos_calder_02a.tiff . . .
I couldn’t speak, so I pointed to the first one. When Rosko opened it, what swam up onto the screen like a pizza was one side of the first Phaistos Disk—the one Bill took
“Eighteen twelve,” you repeated, more insistent this time, as if our hearing wasn’t good.
“Not Waterloo,” I said. “That was 1815. Wellington gets all the glory, but he’d have lost except that at the last minute von Blücher and the Prussians showed up—”
“Morag.”
“What?”
“Stick to the point, Morag.”
“Sorry. 1812. OK, yes, 1812 is—is—oh.”
“What?”
“Eighteen twelve isn’t a date. It’s two numbers, eighteen and twelve. We’re not talking battles. We’re talking a horseshoe of twelve symbols containing a spiral of eighteen more. It’s the structure of the Phaistos Disks. Daniel pointed it out to Bill. You were proud that you’d noticed what Bill missed, remember?”
There was a faint smile at the corner of your mouth.
“You do remember! Eighteen twelve.” I turned to Rosko again. “It will work, won’t it?”
He positioned the cover over the drive and started reinserting the tiny screws. “What’s that idiom in English about betting the farm? Don’t.”
“It will work,” you said. We both stopped and looked at you.
“It will work,” you said again. “But—”
Rosko raised one eyebrow. “Thanks for that, Daniel.” Then he held up the cover to me before starting to reattach it. “Root. Auf Deutsch heisst root ‘Wurzel,’ oder? Vielleicht ist das ein Wortspiel?”
“A pun?”
“Ja. Yes. Like: the root in ‘√2’ is referring to the root of a plant, maybe. Or the root cause of something? The origin?”
We both thought about that. But second root of a plant and second origin didn’t make sense.
“ Root has only two meanings I can think of,” I said. “It’s a noun, like in The tree has shallow roots and Money is the root of all evil . And it’s a verb, like in The pig is rooting for food and He’s rooting for his team . There’s nothing else, is there?”
“Root two,” you said in a harsh whisper. “Root two.” You’d turned pale, with small beads of sweat on your upper lip, and you were trembling with annoyance or frustration, as if this at least was vitally important. You took a sheet of printer paper, picked a stub of pencil from where you’d parked it behind your ear, and drew a simple thin line, like a degraded sine wave, that was clearly meant to be Ararat. Above that, a dark scribble that looked like nothing—except that I could tell right away it was meant to be the cloud from which the Architects had emerged. Then you mashed the pencil point down so hard that the point crumbled, and wrote a thick black “√2” inside the shape of the cone.
“Why Mayo was there,” you said again, looking at us as if you simply couldn’t understand how slow we were being. “Root two. Root. Two.”
Or, language being a tricky thing, that’s what I thought you said.
Rosko searched around in his box full of cables, found what he wanted, and hooked the drive up to my machine. Nothing happened. He raised his eyebrows in a resigned, told-you-so look, but unplugged it, poked at the connectors, and tried again. There was a faint, almost inaudible hum that stopped, started again, and made all our hearts skip a beat with a single high squeal, eeeeeeeeeeee . It sounded like a pig falling off a cliff.
“Great. So much for that,” I said.
“Patience, patience, patience.” He took the entire housing off again and cleaned the inside with compressed air. Moving so slowly that I wanted to scream, he clipped two wires and resoldered them. Finally he was ready to try again. And, impossibly, it worked. The names of sixty-eight files—I could have guessed that number—unpacked themselves across the screen:
Phaistos_original_a.tiff
Phaistos_original_b.tiff
Phaistos_calder_01a.tiff
Phaistos_calder_01b.tiff
Phaistos_calder_02a.tiff . . .
I couldn’t speak, so I pointed to the first one. When Rosko opened it, what swam up onto the screen like a pizza was one side of the first Phaistos Disk—the one Bill took
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