Pastwatch_ The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus Part 6

Kemal had found Atlantis; he had found the original of Noah and Utnapishtim and Ziusudra. His childhood dream had been fulfilled; he had played the Schliemann role and made the greatest discovery of them all. What remained now seemed to him to be clerical work.

He withdrew from the project, but not from Past.w.a.tch. At first he simply dabbled at whatever work he fitfully began; mostly he concentrated on raising a family. But gradually, as his children grew up, his desultory efforts took shape and became more intense. He had found an even greater project: discovering why civilization arose in the first place. As far as he was concerned, all old-world civilizations after Atlantis were dependent on that first civilization. The idea of the city was already with the Egyptians and the Sumerians and the people of the Indus and even the Chinese, because the story of the Golden Age of Atlantis had spread far and wide.

The only civilization that grew up out of nothing, without the Atlantis legend, was in the Americas, where the story of Naog had not reached, except in legends borne by the few seafarers who crossed the barrier oceans. The land bridge to America had been buried in water for ten generations before the Red Sea basin was flooded. It took ten thousand years after Atlantis for civilization to arise there, among the Olmecs of the marshy land on the southern sh.o.r.es of the Gulf of Mexico. Kemal's new project was to study the differences between the Olmecs and the Atlanteans and, by seeing what elements they had in common, determine what civilization actually was: why it arose, what it consisted of, and how human beings adapted to giving up the tribe and living in the city.

He was in his early thirties when he began his Origin project. He was almost forty when word of the Columbus project reached him and he came to Tagiri to offer her all that he had learned so far.

Juba was one of those annoying cities where the locals tried to pretend that they had never heard of Europe. The Nile Rail brought Kemal into a station as modern as anywhere else, but when he came outside, he found himself in a city of gra.s.s huts and mud fences, with dirt roads and naked children running around and the adults scarcely better clothed. If the idea was to make the visitor think he had stepped back in time into primitive Africa, then for a moment it worked. The open houses clearly could not be air-conditioned, and wherever their power station and solar collectors were located, Kemal certainly couldn't see them. And yet he knew they were somewhere, and not far away, just like the water-purification system and the satellite dishes. He knew that these naked children went to a clean, modern school and used the latest computer equipment. He knew that the bare-breasted young women and the thong-clad young men went somewhere at night to watch the latest videos, or not watch them; to dance, or not dance, to the same new music that was all the rage in Recife, Madras, and Semarang. Above all, he knew that somewhere - probably underground - was one of Past.w.a.tch's major installations, housing as it did both the slavery project and the Columbus project.

So why pretend? Why make your lives into a perpetual museum of an era when life was nasty, brutish, and short? Kemal loved the past as much as any man or woman now alive, but he had no desire to live in it, and he thought sometimes that it was just a bit sick for these people to reject their own era and raise their kids like primitive tribesmen. He thought of what it might have been like to grow up like a primitive Turk, drinking fermented mare's milk or, worse, horse's blood, while dwelling in a yurt and practicing with a sword until he could cut off a man's head with a single blow from horseback. Who would want to live in such terrible times? Study them, yes. Remember the great accomplishments. But not live like those people. The citizens of Juba of two hundred years before had got rid of the gra.s.s huts and built European-style dwellings as quickly as they could. They knew. The people who had had to live in gra.s.s huts had no regrets about leaving them behind.

Still, despite the masquerade, there were a few visible concessions to modern life. For instance, as he stood on the portico of the Juba station, a young woman drove up on a small lorry. "Kemal?" she asked.

Je nodded.

"I'm Diko," she said. "Tagiri's my mom. Toss your bag on and let's go!"

He tossed his bag into the small cargo area and then perched beside her on the driving bench. It was fortunate that this sort of lorry, designed for short hauls, couldn't go faster than about thirty kilometers an hour, or he was sure he would have been pitched out in no time, the way this insane young woman rattled headlong over the ratted road.

"Mother keeps saying we should pave these roads," said Diko, "but then somebody always says that hot pavement will blister the children's feet and so the idea gets dropped."

"They could wear shoes," suggested Kemal. He spoke simply, as clearly as he could, but it still wasn't good, what with his jaws getting smacked together as the lorry b.u.mped through rut after rut.

"Oh, well, they'd look pretty silly, stark naked with sneakers on." She giggled.

Kemal refrained from saying that they looked pretty silly now. He would merely be accused of being a cultural imperialist, even though it wasn't his culture he was advocating. These people were apparently happy living as they did. Those who didn't like it no doubt moved to Khartoum or Entebbe or Addis Ababa, which were modern with a vengeance. And it did make a kind of sense for the Past.w.a.tch people to live in the past even as they watched it.

He wondered vaguely if they used toilet paper or handfuls of gra.s.s.

To his relief, the gra.s.s hovel where Diko stopped was only the camouflage for an elevator down into a perfectly modern hotel. She insisted on carrying his bag as she led him to his room. The underground hotel had been dug into the side of a bluff overlooking the Nile, so the rooms all had windows and porches. And there was air-conditioning and running water and a computer in the room.

"All right?" asked Diko.

"I was hoping to live in a gra.s.s hut and relieve myself in the weeds," said Kemal.

She looked crestfallen. "Father said that we ought to give you the full local experience, but Mother said you wouldn't want it."

"Your mother was right. I was only joking. This room is excellent."

"Your journey was long," said Diko. "The Ancient Ones are eager to talk to you, but unless you prefer otherwise, they'll wait till morning."

"Morning is excellent," said Kemal.

They set a time. Kemal called room service and found that he could get standard international fare instead of pureed slug and spicy cow dung, or whatever was involved in the local cuisine.

The next morning he found himself in the shade of a large tree, sitting in a rocking chair and surrounded by a dozen people who sat or squatted on mats. "I can't possibly be comfortable having the only chair," he said.

"I told you he would want a mat," said Ha.s.san.

"No," said Kemal. "I don't want a mat. I just thought you might be more comfortable ..."

"It's our way, " said Tagiri. "When we work at our machines, we sit in chairs. But this is not work. This is joy. The great Kemal asked to meet with us. We never dreamed that you would be interested in our projects."

Kemal hated it when he was called "the great Kemal." To him, the great Kemal was Kemal Ataturk, who re-created the Turkish nation out of the wreckage of the Ottoman Empire centuries before. But he was weary of giving that speech, too, and besides, he thought there might have been just a hint of irony in the way Tagiri said it. Time to end pretenses.

"I'm not interested in your projects," said Kemal. "However, it seems that you are capturing the attention of a growing number of people outside Past.w.a.tch. From what I hear, you're thinking of taking steps with far-reaching consequences, and yet you seem to be basing your decisions on ... incomplete information."

"So you're here to correct us," said Ha.s.san, reddening.

"I'm here to tell you what I know and what I think, " said Kemal. "I didn't ask you to make this a public gathering. I would just as happily speak to you and Tagiri alone. Or, if you prefer, I'll go away and let you proceed in ignorance. I've offered you what I know, and I see no need to pretend that we are equals in those areas. I'm sure that there are many things you know that I don't - but I'm not trying to build a machine to change the past, and therefore there is no urgency about alleviating my ignorance."

Tagiri laughed. "It's one of the glories of Past.w.a.tch, that it's not the smooth-talking bureaucrats who head the major projects." She leaned forward. "Do your worst to us, Kemal. We aren't ashamed to learn that we might be wrong."

"Let's start with slavery," said Kemal. "After all, that's what you did. I've read some of the softhearted, sympathetic biographies and the a.n.a.lytical papers that have emerged from your slavery project, and I get the clear impression that if you could, you would find the person who thought of slavery and stop him, so that no human being would ever have been bought or sold on this planet. Am I right?"

"Are you saying that slavery was not an unmitigated evil?" asked Tagiri.

"Yes, that's what I'm saying," said Kemal. "Because you're looking at slavery from the wrong end - from the present, when we've abolished it. But back at the beginning, when it started, doesn't it occur to you that it was infinitely better than what it replaced?"

Tagiri's veneer of polite interest was clearly wearing thin. "I've read your remarks about the origin of slavery."

"But you're not impressed."

"It's natural, when you make a great discovery, to a.s.sume that it has wider implications than it actually has," said Tagiri. "But there is no reason to think that human bondage originated exclusively with Atlantis, as a replacement for human sacrifice."

"But I never said that," said Kemal. "My opponents said that I said that, but I thought you would have read more carefully."

Ha.s.san spoke up, trying to sound mild and forceful, both at once. "I think that this seems to be getting too personal. Did you come all this way, Kemal, to tell us that we're stupid? You could have done that by mail."

"No," said Kemal, "I came for Tagiri to tell me that I have a pathological need to think that Atlantis is the cause of everything." Kemal rose out of his chair, turned around, picked it up, and hurled it away. "Give me a mat! Let me sit down with you and tell you what I know! If you want to reject it afterward, go ahead. But don't waste my time or yours by defending yourselves or attacking me!"

Ha.s.san stood up. For a moment Kemal wondered if he was going to strike him. But then Ha.s.san bent down, picked up his mat from the gra.s.s, and held it out to Kemal. "So," said Ha.s.san. "Talk."

Kemal laid out the mat and sat down. Ha.s.san shared his daughter's mat, in the second row.

"Slavery," said Kemal. "There are many ways that people have been held in bondage. Serfs were bound to the land. Nomad tribes adopted occasional captives or strangers, and made them second-cla.s.s members of the tribe, without the freedom to leave. Chivalry originated as a sort of dignified mafia, sometimes even a protection racket, and once you accepted an overlord you were his to command. In some cultures, deposed kings were kept in captivity, where they had children born in captivity, and grandchildren, and great-grandchildren who were never harmed, but never allowed to leave. Whole populations have been conquered and forced to work under foreign overlords, paying unpayable tribute to their masters. Raiders and pirates have carried off hostages for ransom. Starving people have bound themselves into service. Prisoners have been forced into involuntary labor. These kinds of bondage have shown up in many human cultures. But none of these is slavery."

"By a narrow definition, that's right," said Tagiri.

"Slavery is when a human being is made property. When one person is able to buy and sell, not just someone's labor, but his actual body, and any children he has. Movable property, generation after generation." Kemal looked at them, at the coldness still visible in their faces. "I know that you all know this. But what you seem not to realize is that slavery was not inevitable. It was invented, at a specific time and place. We know when and where the first person was turned into property. It happened in Atlantis, when a woman had the idea of putting the sacrificial captives to work, and then, when her most valued captive was going to be sacrificed, she paid her tribal elder to remove him permanently from the pool of victims."

"That's not exactly the slave block," said Tagiri.

"It was the beginning. The practice spread quickly, until it became the main reason for raiding other tribes. The Derku people began buying the captives directly from the raiders. And then they started trading slaves among themselves and finally buying and selling them."

"What an achievement," said Tagiri.

"It became the foundation of their city, the fact that the slaves were doing the citizens' duty in digging the ca.n.a.ls and planting and tending the crops. Slavery was the reason they could afford the leisure time to develop a recognizable civilization. Slavery was so profitable to them that the Derku holy men wasted no time in finding that the dragon-G.o.d no longer wanted human sacrifices, at least for a while. That meant that all their captives could be made into slaves and put to work. It's no accident that when the great flood destroyed the Derku, the practice of slavery didn't die with them. The surrounding cultures had already picked it up, because it worked. It was the only way that had yet been found to get the use of the labor of strangers. All the other instances of genuine slavery that we've found can be traced back to that Derku woman, Nedz-Nagaya, when she paid to keep a useful captive from being fed to the crocodile."

"Let's build her a monument," said Tagiri. She was very angry.

"The concept of buying and selling people was invented only among the Derku," said Kemal.

"It didn't have to be invented anywhere else," said Tagiri. "Just because Agafna built the first wheel doesn't mean that someone else wouldn't have built another one later."

"On the contrary. We do know that slavery - commerce in human beings - was not discovered in the one place where the Derku had no influence," said Kemal. He paused.

"America," said Diko.

"America," said Kemal. "And in the place where people weren't conceived of as property, what did they have?"

"There was plenty of bondage in America," said Tagiri.

"Of those other kinds. But humans as property, humans with a cash value - it wasn't there. And that's one of the things you love best about your idea of stopping Columbus. Preserve the one place on earth where slavery never developed. Am I right?"

"That's not the primary reason for looking at Columbus," said Tagiri.

"I think you need to look again," said Kemal. "Because slavery was a direct replacement for human sacrifice. Are you actually telling me that you prefer the torture and murder of captives, as the Mayas and Iroquois and Aztecs and Caribs practiced it? Do you find that more civilized? After all, those deaths were offered to the G.o.ds."

"You will never make me believe that there was a one-for-one trade, slavery for human sacrifice."

"I don't care whether you believe it, " said Kemal. "Just admit the possibility. Just admit that there are some things worse than slavery. Just admit that maybe your set of values is as arbitrary as any other culture's values, and to try to revise history in order to make your values triumph in the past as well as the present is pure-"

"Cultural imperialism," said Ha.s.san. "Kemal, we have this argument ourselves every week or so. And if we were proposing to go back and stop that Derku woman from inventing slavery, your point would be well taken. But we aren't trying to do anything of the kind. Kemal, we aren't sure we want to do anything! We're just trying to find out what's possible."

"That's so disingenuous it's laughable. You've known from the beginning that it was Columbus you were going after. Columbus you were going to stop. And yet you seem to forget that along with the evil that European ascendancy brought to the world, you will also be throwing away the good. Useful medicine. Productive agriculture. Clean water. Cheap power. The industry that gives us the leisure to have this meeting. And don't dare to tell me that all the goods of our modern world would have been invented anyway. Nothing is inevitable. You're throwing away too much."

Tagiri covered her face with her hands. "I know," she said.

Kemal had expected argument. Hadn't she been sniping at him all along? He found himself speechless, for a moment.

Tagiri took her hands away from her face, but still she looked at her lap. "Any change would have a cost. And yet not changing also has a cost. But it's not my decision. We will lay all our arguments before the world." She lifted her face, to look at Kemal. "It's easy for you to be sure that we should not do it," she said. "You haven't looked into their faces. You're a scientist."

He had to laugh. "I'm not a scientist, Tagiri. I'm just another one like you - somebody who gets an idea in his head sometimes and can't let it go."

"That's right," said Tagiri. "I can't let it go. Somehow, when we're through with all our research, if we have a machine that lets us touch the past, then there'll be something we can do that's worth doing, something that will answer the ... hunger ... of an old woman who dreamed."

"The prayer, you mean," said Kemal.

"Yes," she said defiantly. "The prayer. There is something we can do to make things better. Somehow."

"I see that I'm not dealing with science, then."

"No, Kemal, you're not, and I've never said so." She smiled ruefully. "I was shaped, you see. I was given the charge to look at the past as if I were an artist. To see if it could be given a new shape. A better shape. If it can't, then I'll do nothing. But if it can ..."

Kemal was not expecting such frankness. He had come expecting to find a group of people committed to a course of madness. What he found instead was a commitment, yes, but no course, and therefore no madness. "A better shape," he said. "That really comes down to three questions, doesn't it. First is whether the shape is better or not - a question that's impossible to answer except with the heart, but at least you have the sense not to trust your own desires. And the second question is whether it's technically possible - whether we can devise a way to change the past. That's up to the physicists and mathematicians and engineers."

"And the third question?" asked Ha.s.san.

"Whether you can determine exactly what change or changes must be made in order to get exactly the result you want. I mean, what are you going to do, send an abortificant back and slip it into Columbus's mother's wine?"

"No," said Tagiri. "We're trying to save lives, not murder a great man."

"Besides," said Ha.s.san, "as you said, we don't want to stop Columbus if by doing so we'd make the world worse. It's the most impossible part of the whole problem - how can we guess what would have happened without Columbus's discovery of America? That's something the TruSite II still can't show us. What might have happened."

Kemal looked around at the people who had gathered for this meeting, and he realized that he had been completely wrong about them. These people were even more determined than he was to avoid doing anything foolish.

"That's an interesting problem," he said.

"It's an impossible one," said Ha.s.san. "I don't know how happy this will make you, Kemal, but you gave us our only hope."

"How did I do that?"

"Your a.n.a.lysis of Naog, " said Ha.s.san. "If there's anyone who was like Columbus in all of history, it was him. He changed history by the sheer force of his will. The only reason his ark was built at all was because of his grim determination. Then because his boat carried him through the flood, he became a figure of legend. And because his father was a victim of the Derku's brief return to human sacrifice just before the flood, he told everyone who would listen that cities were evil, that human sacrifice was an unforgivable crime, that G.o.d had destroyed a world because of their sins."

"If only he had told people slavery was evil, too," said Diko.

"He told them the opposite," said Kemal. "He was a living example of how beneficial slavery could be - because he kept with him his whole life the three slaves who built his boat for him, and everyone who came to meet the great Naog saw how his greatness depended on his ownership of these three devoted men." Turning to Ha.s.san, Kemal added, "I don't see how Naog's example inspired you with any kind of hope."

"Because one man, alone, reshaped the world," said Ha.s.san. "And you were able to see exactly where he turned onto the path that led to those changes. You found that moment where he stood on the sh.o.r.e of the new channel that was being carved into the Bab al Mandab, and he looked up at the shelf of the old coastline and realized what was going to happen."

"It was easy to find," said Kemal. "He immediately started for home, and to his wife he explained exactly what he had thought of and when he had thought of it."

"Yes, well, it was certainly clearer than anything we've found with Columbus," said Ha.s.san. "But it gives us the hope that perhaps we can find such a moment. The event, the thought that turned him west. Diko found the moment when he determined on being a great man. But we haven't found the point where he became so unrelentingly monomaniacal about a westward voyage. Yet because of Naog, we still have hope that someday we'll find it."

"But I have found it, Father," said Diko.

Everyone turned to her, She seemed fl.u.s.tered. "Or at least I think I have. But it's very strange. I was working on it last night. It's so silly, isn't it? I thought - wouldn't it be wonderful if I found it while ... while Kemal was here. And then I did. I think."

No one said anything for a long moment. Until Kemal rose to his feet and said, "What are we doing here, then? Show us!"

Chapter 5 - Vision.

It was more than Cristoforo could have hoped for, to be included on the Spinola convoy to Flanders. True, it was just the sort of opportunity that he had been preparing for all his life till now, begging his way onto any ship that would carry him until he knew the coast of Liguria better than he knew the lumps in his own mattress. And hadn't he turned his "observational" trip to Chios into a commercial triumph? Not that he had come back rich, of course, but starting with relatively little he had traded in mastic until he came home with a hefty purse - and then had wit enough to contribute much of it, quite publicly, to the Church. And he did it in the name of Nicolo Spinola.

Spinola sent for him, of course, and Cristoforo was the picture of grat.i.tude. "I know that you gave me no duties in Chios, my lord, but it was nevertheless you who allowed me to join the voyage, and at no charge. The tiny sums I was able to earn in Chios were not worth offering to you - you give more to your servants when they go to market to buy the day's food for your household." A ludicrous exaggeration, they would both know. "But when I gave them to Christ, I couldn't pretend that the money, meager as it was, came from me, when it came entirely from your kindness."

Spinola laughed. "You're very good at this, " he said. "Practice a little more, so it doesn't sound memorized, and speeches like that will make your fortune, I promise you."

Cristoforo thought that he meant he had failed, until Spinola invited him to take part in a commercial convoy to Flanders and England. Five ships, sailing together for safety, and one of them devoted to a cargo that Cristoforo himself was in charge of trading. It was a serious responsibility, a good-sized chunk of the Spinola fortune, but Cristoforo had prepared himself well. What he hadn't done himself, he had watched others do with a close eye to detail. He knew how to supervise the loading of the ship and how to drive a hard bargain without making enemies. He knew how to talk to the captain, how to remain at once aloof and yet affable with the men, how to judge from the wind and the sky and the sea how much progress they would make. Even though he had actually done very little of the work of a sailor, he knew what all the jobs were, from watching, and he knew whether the jobs were being done well. When he was young, and they were not yet suspicious that he might get them in trouble, the sailors had let him watch them work. He had even learned to swim, which most sailors never bothered to do, because he had thought as a child that this was one of the requirements of life at sea. By the time the ship set sail, Cristoforo felt himself completely in control.