The Vesuvius Isotope (The Katrina Stone Novels) (4 page)

“Whoa,” I said, trying to imagine a heat so intense that it could instantly desiccate an entire city.

We passed through a series of spaces and corridors into another small room containing glass exhibition cases. In the center of one was an instrument that resembled an old, battered loom. Long, knotted strands of a charcoal-colored substance hung suspended from it. I read the English version of the description and then leaned forward, gaping in disbelief. The suspended cluster looked more like curing meat hanging in a slaughterhouse than what it actually was.

“That jumbled mess is made of
paper
?” I asked Alyssa.

“It’s papyrus,” she said. “This room is dedicated to the
Villa dei Papiri
—Villa of the Papyri. The villa is named for its large library containing approximately two thousand papyrus scrolls. These scrolls were among the objects buried in the eruption of Mount Vesuvius. They were rediscovered during the excavation of Herculaneum that began in the 1700s. They are still legible to this day.

“What you are looking at is the tool developed in 1756 to unroll them, and that ‘jumbled mess’ is one of the actual scrolls from Herculaneum. It took four years to unwind the very first scroll. We are still in the process of unwinding some of them—an extremely laborious procedure, even with today’s technology.”

I tore my eyes away from the slaughterhouse meat and scanned the room. On its walls were flattened papyri—torn, faded, and smudged in places but, indeed, legible. I walked over to examine one of them more closely. It was written in Greek.

“This is the focus of my research today,” Alyssa said. “As I mentioned on the phone, I am the director of an effort called the Piso Project. The project was named after a man called Lucius Calpurnius Piso Caesoninus. He was the owner of the Villa dei Papiri. He was also the father-in-law of Julius Caesar.

“The Piso Project seeks to unravel, translate, and archive a specific subset of the scrolls unearthed from the library. We believe these scrolls may contain information that can disprove a vast range of common dogma regarding ancient Rome, Greece, and Egypt.

“It was during this work several weeks ago that I translated the section of one of the scrolls that compelled me to phone your husband. At first, I was not sure what I had found. To be honest, I’m still not certain.

“I consulted Jeff to ascertain whether or not the phenomenon described in my translation was even possible from a chemistry perspective. Jeff suggested that it probably was but that to identify the isotope with any degree of confidence would be like finding a needle in a haystack. And, as you know, we have been working intensely toward that goal ever since. With Jeff away on—did you say a family emergency?—I was hoping you could take his place in these efforts.”

“Of course,” I said, with absolutely no idea what I was agreeing to.

“Bulging tumors on his breast” means the existence of swellings on his breast, large, spreading and hard; touching them is like touching a ball of wrappings; the comparison is to a green hemat fruit, which is hard and cool under thy hand, like touching those swellings which are on his breast.

There is no treatment.

-
The Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus
, 1600 BCE

Paper of whatever grade is fabricated on a board moistened with water from the Nile: the muddy liquid serves as the bonding force. First there is spread flat on the board a layer consisting of strips of papyrus running vertically… After that a cross layer completes the construction. Then it is pressed in presses, and the sheets thus formed are dried in the sun and joined one to another.

-Natural History

Pliny the Elder (23–79 CE)

Chapter Four

Alyssa Iacovani led me away from the exhibition rooms and into a hallway of private offices. We stepped into one of them, and she closed the door behind us.

Alyssa walked over and sat down in the desk chair while I looked around the cluttered space. Bookshelves lining the walls were double stacked with a collection ranging from various history texts to archeological case studies to basic biology, chemistry, and physics books.

The books were interspersed with a number of small statues and trinkets that I imagined might have come from the museum’s gift shop. A large wall calendar resembled a book of papyrus scrolls. Various dates were scrawled with appointments in scarcely legible Italian.

On the desk near a badly scuffed computer lay several disheveled piles of notepads, binders, and manuscripts. Beside them, a small cardboard shipping box lay open, with packing peanuts strewn about it, its precious treasure already pillaged from within.

Also on the desk stood two framed photos. One was a portrait of a dark-skinned middle-aged man with a crooked-toothed but attractive smile and a full head of salt-and-pepper hair. His rounded black eyes shone brightly, but beneath them were heavy bags.

Beside the man’s photo was an image of two black-haired youths in their mid-to-late teens. The boy stood casually behind the seated girl, her thick tresses pouring like oil over one shoulder to her slender waist. Both children shared the same dark complexion and rounded black eyes of the man in the photo beside them. I wondered if the teenagers were twins.

I examined the photos on the desk for a moment and then glanced into the golden face and cat-like green eyes of Alyssa Iacovani. Her eyes, too, fell to the photographs for an instant before returning to meet mine.

“Would you like to see the document?” she asked.

Alyssa switched on the desktop computer and sat back in her chair for a moment while the aging machine hummed to life. She clicked with the mouse, and across the room a printer began to whirr.

She stood to snatch up a single page and then handed it to me. “This is the English translation of that section of the scroll I was telling you about. This is what I showed Jeff. The original is much, much longer.

“Each of these texts spans many papyrus scrolls; the ancients were wordy, to say the least. Furthermore, many of the scrolls are horribly fragmented. As researchers, we are tasked with piecing together the full-scale works. This aspect of antiquities research is quite literally the assembly of a large jigsaw puzzle…”

As I read and re-read the document, I barely heard her.

I have in my charge the care of ten, all stricken with the plague of the crabs.

Agariste and I created two extra beds from the feathers of pigeon to accommodate the six men. The gods granted the comfort of more spacious surroundings to the four poor women in the adjacent room, but they wail without stopping nonetheless.

All ten of my charges have failed the scalpel and the fire drill. Their tumors continue to grow. The crabs continue to devour them.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Wasn’t it Hippocrates who coined the word ‘cancer,’ meaning something about crabs?”

Alyssa looked impressed. “Yes, it was!” she said. “Cancer, carcinoma, carcinogen… all of these words descend from
karkinos
, the ancient Greek for ‘crab.’ Hippocrates’ hypothesis of cancer, that it was caused by an excess of ‘black bile,’ remained fairly unchanged from about 450 BCE all the way until the Renaissance.”

“And did the word
tumors
, as used here, have the same meaning in the ancient world that it has today?”

“Essentially,” Alyssa said. “Of course the ancients’ descriptions reflect a lack of technology—so any deformity of the skin or other imperfection that resembles a tumor will have been written as such. But true tumors have been documented in ancient papyri for thousands of years. The first known case study is a papyrus scroll from ancient Egypt, known today as the
Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus
after the man who found it. The scroll dates to 1600 BCE but is believed to be a copy of much older texts. It describes breast cancer—in men, oddly enough. The ancients could even distinguish between malignant and benign, based predominantly on the same gross differences in tumor composition that are still utilized for preliminary assessment today.”

“Vascularization, asymmetry, et cetera?” I asked, and Alyssa nodded.

“And recurrence,” she added.

I glanced again at the last three sentences of text.

All ten of my charges have failed the scalpel and the fire drill. Their tumors continue to grow. The crabs continue to devour them.

“What is the
fire drill
?” I asked.

“That was essentially a cauterizer. They basically treated the tumors by burning them off. Each of these patients had endured it, as well as the procedure that today we would call ‘surgical resection’ or ‘de-bulking.’ Yet the tumors recurred. These points are strongly indicative of an aggressive malignancy.”

“I agree,” I said.

Alyssa printed another document and handed it to me. “The handwriting, ink, and text indicate to me that this piece and the one you just read are two parts of the same document. We do not know yet what comes between that piece and this one. It is possible that the missing fragment has yet to be unrolled or has not been unearthed from the Villa dei Papiri. Unfortunately, it is also possible that the piece is lost forever.”

I read the document translation once, and then again. As I processed the information, my initial enthusiasm gave way to absolute, debilitating despair. Before me was the text from an ancient papyrus that had somehow lured my husband to Italy behind my back. It might also have been what led to his demise.

And it was nonsense.

I blinked back frustrated tears as I stared at the page in my hand, still warm from the printer. Then I closed my eyes and sighed.

“This is categorically impossible,” I said.

“That’s what Jeff thought, at first. In fact, it’s also what I thought. But following several weeks of intensive research, your husband and I are both convinced that it
is
possible.”

She looked into my eyes. “You
know
new chemical elements can be created,” she said. “Jeff won a Nobel Prize for exactly that. You and he have now co-founded a successful company based on the creation of new elements and the medicinal value of their isotopes. You already have four of them in clinical trials. Why do you think I picked him to consult about this?”

“But… the creation of new elements requires modern technology!” I argued. “There is no way the ancient Greeks, or Egyptians, or whomever else you study, could have done this!”

“You are assuming that modern technology is the only way,” Alyssa said. “But nature produces phenomena that no scientist in the world has ever managed to harness. Thanks to this document, I think that Jeff and I may be able to learn how to harness one of them. One that, if we are right, may revolutionize the field of medicine.”

When the sky opened and the gods cast down their anger upon our enemies, the wine soured and the nardos by the bedsides turned from green to red.

“The nardos have quickened!” said one of the women, and she reached forth a frail hand to touch one but then hastily withdrew as if stung by an insect. “It bit me!” she said, with the crazy eyes of the sickness.

What part of humanity makes us need to see, to know for ourselves, even though the gods so frequently punish those whose vanity drives them to explore the forbidden? It is the greatest mystery I have known. But as the first withdrew, three other thin arms reached forward at once, the other women also seeking what their bedmate had experienced. All three retracted with haste.

I, too, needed to know. When I touched one of the nardos, a gentle warmth ran from my fingertips to my heart, like a quiet flame in the blood of my arm. I feared the sickness that would soon follow! And then, the sensation was gone.

“Agariste!” I shouted. “The nardos are aflame!” But by the time she entered the room and reached out to touch one, the effect was gone.

The next morning, the four women reported an unusually peaceful sleep, and their tumors appeared smaller to my eye. After four more days, they were gone, yet the crabs continued to overtake the men. The sickness I had expected never came.

Why did the gods spare the women through magic plants? Is it because women do not make war, as men do? It is not for us to know, but, in those four, it was as if the crabs never existed.

“What is a
nardo
?” I asked, my voice trembling slightly.

“A medicinal plant,” Alyssa said. “I have come across the term in other ancient texts. It was apparently used to treat a number of ailments in those days. Unfortunately, today there are multiple possibilities for what a nardo could actually be, and I’m not sure which of today’s plants corresponds with the one in this document—
if
, of course, the plant in the document even still exists today.

“Furthermore, none of the possibilities that I have investigated so far are poisonous or stinging, and certainly none of them bite, as all five of these women seemed to agree upon, including the caretaker—who I assume was perfectly healthy to begin with. And if an ancient nardo was poisonous, electrified, or otherwise capable of attacking humans, I can’t imagine it would be selected to adorn patients’ bedsides in a hospital. So we can probably assume that the phenomenon observed by our author was very rare.”

“Then what happened?” I shouted. “Magic? The gods?”

“Exactly,” Alyssa said. “Magic. The gods. Except that today we attribute these phenomena to the laws of nature. And as you are well aware, they frequently turn out to be explicable by science.”