Time Travelers Never Die - Jack McDevitt [75]
“Okay.”
“How many of his plays do we have?”
“Seven.”
“All right. Maybe it’ll be enough. I’ll get back to you.”
She was due at school and reluctantly decided to put the issue aside until evening. It is, she told herself, a fake. Don’t get your hopes up. If it weren’t, why on earth would they have sent it anonymously?
At the end of the day, she got tied up in a faculty meeting. Consequently, it was almost dark before she got home. She came in the door, the place lit up, and she dropped her bag on the nearest chair. She had a message waiting from Miles: “Aspasia, I have the software. Call me when you can.”
IT was Miles’s busy season, so it was almost a week before they could get together. For Aspasia, it was a difficult time. She read and reread the Achilles. And yes, it did have the power of Sophoclean drama, the classic confrontation in which the moral course is unclear, and any decision might easily prove lethal.
She wanted this to be what it pretended to be. If she actually held in her hands one of the lost plays, it would give her life a level of meaning for which she could never have hoped. And because she so desperately wanted it to be true, she knew she could not manage an objective judgment.
The reality was that she could probably have produced a play of this calibre herself. All that was needed was a command of the language and a familiarity with classical dramatic technique. One could not read a work of literature and safely assign greatness to it. That was something that came only with time. With the approbation of generations. All she knew at this point was that the play touched her, that it struck her sensibilities as Antigone had, and Oedipus at Colonus.
She told herself to relax and tried to forget the manuscript. She made no effort to do an English translation. That would mean she was taking it seriously, and only an idiot would do that.
Still, emotionally, she moved into that nondescript chapel outside the Trojan wall. She saw it as it would have been, had it existed at all: a modest stone structure with a statue of Apollo near the altar, the whole illuminated by a series of flickering candles or oil lamps. A handful of worshippers would be kneeling before the god, heads bent, praying that they might return from the endless conflict to their families. And in back, hidden among the shadows, would be Paris, waiting with that notched arrow.
Finally, Miles showed up with the software. It was called Reading the Syntax. It wasn’t the original Shakespearean program, but something more recent that was being used in classrooms in an effort to help students become creative writers. It analyzed their work. “But,” he said, “I can’t see that it won’t be just as effective. And we can adjust it for classical Greek.”
Miles was in his thirties, with dark hair and good features. His eyebrows were always raised, giving him a permanently surprised look. He was endlessly enthusiastic about computers, and, given the least encouragement, would talk endlessly about the latest technological achievement.
Aspasia had already scanned the seven extant plays into the computer. Miles sat down and loaded the software. Then he asked some questions about Greek verbs and sentence structure and relative pronouns and so on. He entered her responses, directed it to compare the Achilles to the other seven, and to establish a degree of likelihood that all eight came from the same author. He looked up at her, said “Good luck,” and clicked on START. “Shouldn’t take long,” he said.
The system hummed and beeped for a minute or so. Then it provided a few bars of Rachmaninoff, signifying that the process was complete.
PROBABILITY ONE AUTHOR: 87%
“There you