At first it was the great men that Cristoforo watched. They were dressed in the most dazzling, extravagant clothing he had ever seen. None of Father's customers came into the shop dressed like this, but some of their clothing was made from Father's finest cloth. Cristoforo recognized the rich brocade one gentleman was wearing as a cloth made not a month ago by Carlo, the best of the journeymen. It had been picked up by Tito, who always wore a green uniform. Only now did Cristoforo realize that when Tito came to buy, he was not buying for himself, but rather for his master. Tito was not a customer, then. He merely did what he was sent to do. Yet Father treated him like a friend, even though he was a servant.
Father always said that his greatest friend was the Doge -- was Pietro Fregoso. Yet now Cristoforo saw that this was not the truth, for Father did not joke, showed no easiness in his manner, told no stories, and the wine he poured was for the gentlemen at the table, and not for himself at all. Father hovered at the edges of the room, watching to see if any man needed more wine, pouring it immediately if he did. And Pietro did not include Father in his glance when he met the eyes of the men around the table. No, Pietro was not Father's friend; by all appearances, Father was Pietro's servant.
How did these gentlemen learn to speak this way? Cristoforo wondered. How did they learn to say words that are never spoken in our house or on the street? How can such words belong to the language of Genova, and yet none of the common Genovese know them? Is this not one city? Are these men not of the Fieschi as Father is? The Adorno braggarts who pushed over Fieschi carts in the market, Father spoke more like them than like these gentlemen who were supposedly of his own party.
Only once did Pietro Fregoso include Father in the conversation.
"It is not all a matter of Adorno patronage, my lord," said one of the gentlemen. "The whole city is poorer, what with the Turk in Constantinople, the Muslims harrying us at Chios, and the Catalonian pirates who boldly raid our very docks and loot the houses near the water."
One of the gentlemen spoke quietly into the silence that followed Pietro's speech. "We are not ready," he said. "We will pay in precious blood for a foolhardy attack now."
"Yours to the death, my lord," said the man. "But you were never one who punished a man for saying to you what he believed to be the truth."
De Portobello rose to his feet. "In front of you, my lord, or behind you, or wherever I must stand to protect you when danger threatens."
Cristoforo saw how the others reacted. Where they had nodded when de Portobello made his promise of loyalty, they only looked silently at the table when Father spoke. Some of them turned red -- in anger? Embarrassment? Cristoforo wasn't sure why they would not want to hear Father's promise. Was it because only a gentleman could fight well enough to protect the rightful Doge? Or was it because Father should not have been so bold as to speak at all in such exalted company?
Father doesn't matter to them, thought Cristoforo. They meet in his house because they must keep their meeting secret, but he himself is nothing to them.
"A man has honor," said Father.
"Your honor will have your children on the street in rags."
"That time is over," said Mother. "Blood will flow, and it will not be Adorno blood."
But Cristoforo wasn't satisfied. He waited as Mother calmed herself by pulling the extra spools away from the table and putting the cloth back on it, so customers could look at it and so it would stay clean. When he judged he could speak without being screamed at, he said, "How do gentlemen learn to be gentlemen?"
"But why can't we learn to talk the way they do?" Cristoforo asked. "I don't think it would be hard." Cristoforo imitated the refined voice of de Portobello, saying, "You were never one who punished a man for saying what he believed to be the truth."
"Don't ever let me hear you putting on airs like that again, Cristoforo!" she shouted. "Are you too good for your father? Do you think that honking like a goose will make you grow feathers?"
Ahnost she slapped him again, for having dared to answer her back. But then she caught herself, and actually heard what he had said. "Your father is as good as any of them," she said. "Better!"
"The Doge would laugh at him," said Mother. "And so would everyone else. And then if he kept on trying to act the gentleman, one of them would come along and put a rapier through your father's heart, for daring to be such an upstart."
"Because they really are gentlemen, and your father is not."
"Father is stronger than they are, of course. But they carry swords."
"Who would sell a sword to a weaver!" said Mother, laughing. "And what would Father do with it? He has never wielded a sword in his life. He'd cut off his own fingers!"
"It isn't the sword that makes a man a gentleman," said Mother. "Gentlemen are born as the children of gentlemen, that's all. Your father's father wasn't a gentleman, and so he isn't."
Mother laughed bitterly. "Oh, is that what the priests taught you? Well, you should see them bowing and scraping to the gentlemen while they piss on the rest of us. They think that God likes gentlemen better, but Jesus Christ didn't act that way. He cared nothing for gentlemen!"
She regarded him for a moment, as if deciding whether to tell him the truth. "Gold and dirt," she said.
"They have gold in their treasure boxes," said Mother, "and they own land. That's what makes them gentlemen. If we had huge swatches of land out in the country, or if we had a box filled with gold in the attic, then your father would be a gentleman and no one would laugh at you if you learned to talk the fancy way they do and wore clothing made of this." She held the trailing end of a bolt of cloth against Cristoforo's chest. "You'd make a fine gentleman, my Cristoforo." Then she dropped the fabric and laughed and laughed and laughed.
***
At once Father took his heavy staff from its place by the fire and ran into the street. Mother got to the front of the house too late to stop him. Screaming and crying, she gathered the children and the apprentices into the back of the house while the journeymen stood guard at the front door. There in the gathering darkness they heard the tumult and shouting, and then Pietro's screaming. For he had not been killed outright, and now in his agony he howled for help in the night.
"Will they kill Father?" asked Cristoforo.
"No," said Mother, but Cristoforo could tell that she was not sure.
"That's what I will fight for," said Cristoforo.
"I'd kill them first."
"I won't always be small."
"Why not?" said Cristoforo. "Would Christ refuse my sword?"
"I'll have a sword one day," said Cristoforo. "I'll be a gentleman!"
"I'll get gold!"
It was a worthy threat, and all the children knew well enough to obey when Mother uttered it.
He staggered inside just as the children raced after Mother into the front room. Father was covered with blood, and Mother screamed and embraced him and then searched him for wounds.
"Why are you covered with his blood, Nico!"
"Why would you do that, you fool!"
"If they saw you with him, they'll find you and kill you!"
"It matters to me," said Mother. "Get those clothes off." She turned to the journeymen and began giving orders. "You -- get the children to the back of the house. You -- have the apprentices draw water and heat it for a bath. You -- when I get these clothes off him, burn them."
Or so the old accounts of that night all said. Columbus was on watch, to keep his family safe. But Diko knew that this was not all that was going through Cristoforo's mind. No, he was making his decision. He was setting before himself the terms of his future greatness. He would be a gentleman. Kings and queens would treat him with respect. He would have gold. He would conquer kingdoms in the name of Christ.
And he had to know how to sail. Every chance he got, Cristoforo was down at the docks, listening to the sailors, questioning them, learning what all the crewmen did. Later he focused on the navigators, plying them with wine when he could afford it, simply demanding answers when he could not. Eventually it would get him aboard a ship, and then another; he turned down no chance to sail, and did any work that was asked of him, so that he would know all that a weaver's son could hope to learn about the sea.
"There's something wrong with it," Diko said, "and you're not telling me."
"Then you disagree with my conclusion. You don't think this was what made Cristoforo decide to be great."
"Then what's wrong with it!" she shouted.
"I'm not a child!"
"You're humoring me and I'm tired of it!"
It struck as brutally as the slap that Cristoforo's mother had given him, and it brought the same tears to her eyes, even though there was no physical blow involved.
"I'm not," she said. "And you're wrong."
"My project is to find when the decision for greatness was made, and that's what I found. It's your project and Mother's project to figure out when Columbus decided to go west."
"So there's nothing wrong with my report for my project, just because it doesn't happen to answer the question that's bothering you in yours."
"I know!"
But she didn't go away.
"I'll find it for you," she said.
"Whatever it was that caused Cristoforo to sail west."
"You don't think I can, do you?"
"Yes," said Diko.
He smiled at her, a crooked little smile. She assumed that he was teasing her. But she didn't care. He might think he was joking, but she would make his joke turn real. Had he and Mother and countless others pored over all the old Tempoview recordings of Columbus's life? Very well, then, Diko would stop looking at recordings at all. She would go and look directly at his life, and not with the Tempoview, either. The TruSite II would be her tool. She didn't ask for permission, and she didn't ask for help. She simply took over a machine that wasn't used at night, and adjusted the schedule of her life to fit the hours when the machine was hers to use. Some wondered whether she really ought to be using the most up-to-date machines -- after all, she wasn't actually a member of Pastwatch. Her training was at best informal. She was merely the child of watchers, and yet she was using a machine that one normally got access to after years of study.
Chapter 4 -- Kemal
The man who sank them was Kemal Akyazi, and the path that brought him to Tagiri's project to change history was a long and strange one.
This pressure of history had a strange influence on Kemal as a child. He learned all the tales of the place, of course, but he also knew that the tales were Greek, and the place was of the Greek Aegean world. Kemal was a Turk; his own ancestors had not come to the Dardanelles until the fifteenth century. He felt that it was a powerful place, but it did not belong to him. So the Iliad was not the story that spoke to Kemal's soul. Rather it was the story of Heinrich Schliemann, the German explorer who, in an era when Troy had been regarded as a mere legend, a myth, a fiction, had been sure not only that Troy was real but also that he could find it. Despite all scoffers, he mounted an expedition and located it and unburied it. The old stories turned out to be true.
So, after an abortive try at physics, he studied to become a meteorologist. At the age of eighteen, heavily immersed in the study of climate and weather, he touched again on the findings of Pastwatch. No longer did meteorologists have to depend on only a few centuries of weather measurements and fragmentary fossil evidence to determine long-range patterns. Now they had accurate accounts of storm patterns for millions of years. Indeed, in the earliest years of Pastwatch, the machinery of the TruSite I had been so coarse that individual humans could not be seen. It was like time-lapse photography in which people don't remain in place long enough to be on more than a single frame of the film, making them invisible. So in those days Pastwatch recorded the weather of the past, erosion patterns, volcanic eruptions, ice ages, climatic shifts.
Yet he could not bring himself out from the shadow of Troy, the memory of Schliemann. Even as he studied the climatic shifts involved with the waxing and waning of the ice ages, his mind contained fleeting images of lost civilizations, legendary places that waited for a Schliemann to uncover them.
Time after time Kemal would cycle through the up-and-down fluctuations of the Red Sea, watching as the average sea level actually rose toward the end of the Ice Age. He always stopped, of course, at the abrupt jump in sea level that marked the rejoining of the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. After that, the Red Sea was useless for his purposes, since its sea level was tied to that of the great world ocean.
What a flood. The Ice Age had locked up so much water in glaciers and ice sheets that the sea level of the whole world fell. It eventually reached a low enough point that land bridges arose out of the sea. In the north Pacific, the Bering land bridge allowed the ancestors of the Indies to cross on foot into their great empty homeland. Britain and Flanders were joined. The Dardanelles were closed and the Black Sea became a salty lake. The Persian Gulf disappeared and became a great plain cut by the Euphrates. And the Bab al Mandab, the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, became a land bridge.
The Red Sea had no great rivers, however. It was, in geological terms, a new sea, formed by rifting between the new Arabian plate and the ancient African, which meant it had uplift ridges on both coasts. Many rivers and streams flowed from those ridges down into the Red Sea, but none of them carried much water compared to the rivers that drained vast basins and carried the melt-off of the glaciers of the north. So, while the Red Sea gradually rose during this time, it lagged far, far behind the great world ocean. Its water level responded to the immediate local weather pattems rather than to worldwide weather. Until one day the Indian Ocean rose so high that tides began to spill over the Bab al Mandab. The water cut new channels in the grassland there. Over a period of several years, the leakage grew, creating a series of large new tidal lakes on the Hanish Plain. And then one day, some fourteen thousand years ago, the flow cut a channel so deep that it didn't dry up at low tide. The water kept running through it, cutting the channel deeper and deeper, until those tidal lakes were fall, and brimmed over. With the weight of the Indian Ocean behind it the water gashed into the basin of the Red Sea in a vast flood that in a few hours brought the Red Sea up to the level of the world ocean.
Such a hunting party would have known that their families had been killed by this water. What would they have thought? Surely that some god was angry with them. That the world had been done away, buried under the sea. And if they survived, if they found a way to the Eritrean shore after the great turbulent waves settled down to the more placid waters of the new, deeper sea, they would tell the tale to anyone who would listen. And for a few years they could take their hearers to the water's edge, show them the treetops barely rising above the surface of the sea, and tell them tales of all that had been buried under the waves.
As for Atlantis, everyone was so sure they had found it years ago. Santorini -- Thios -- the Aegean island that blew up. But the oldest stories of Atlantis said nothing of blowing up in a volcano. They spoke only of the great civilization sinking into the sea. The supposition was that later visitors came to Santorini and, seeing water where an island city used to be, assumed that it had sunk, knowing nothing of the volcanic eruption. To Kemal, however, this now seemed far-fetched indeed, compared to the way it would have looked to the people of Atlantis themselves, somewhere on the Massawa Plain, when the Red Sea seemed to leap up in its bed, engulfing the city. That would be sinking into the sea! No explosion, just water. And if the city were in the marshes of what was now the Massawa Channel, the water would have come not just from the southeast but from the northeast and the north as well, flowing among and around the Dehalak mountains, making islands of them and swallowing up the marshes and the city with them.
All these suppositions came to Kemal with the absolute certainty that they were true, or nearly true. He rejoiced at the thought of it: There was still an ancient civilization left to discover.
Kemal understood bureaucracy enough to know that he, a student meteorologist, would hardly be taken seriously if he brought an Atlantis theory to Pastwatch -- particularly a theory that put Atlantis in the Red Sea of all places, and fourteen thousand years ago, long before civilizations arose in Sumeria or Egypt, let alone China or the Indus Valley or among the swamps of Tehuantepec.
Thus dependable sources of fresh water fed the area, and in rainy season the Zula, at least, would have brought new silt to freshen the soil, and in all seasons the wandering flatwater rivers would have provided a means of transportation through the marshes. The climate was also dependably warm, with plenty of sunlight and a long growing season. There was no early civilization that did not grow up in such a setting. There was no reason a civilization might not have grown up then.
It would have made people yearn for such a place and fear it, both at once.
A more ancient civilization. The golden age. The giants who once walked the earth. Why couldn't all these stories be remembering the first human civilization, the place where the city was invented? Atlantis, the city of the Massawa Plain.
Until he thought: Why do large cities form in the first place? Because there are public works to do that require more than a few people to accomplish them. Kemal wasn't sure what form the public works might take, but surely they would have made something that would change the face of the land plainly enough that the old TruSite I recordings would show it, though it wouldn't be noticeable unless someone was looking for it.
When Kemal presented his findings to Pastwatch he was not yet twenty years old, but his evidence was impressive enough that Pastwatch immediately turned, not a Tempoview, but the stillnewer TruSite II machine to look under the waters of the Red Sea in the Massawa Channel during the hundred years before the Red Sea flood. They found that Kemal was gloriously, spectacularly right. In an era when other humans were still following game animals and gathering berries, the Atlanteans were planting amaranth and ryegrass, melons and beans in the rich wet silt of the receding rivers, and carrying food in baskets and on reed boats from place to place. The only thing that Kemal had missed was that most of the buildings weren't houses at all. They were floating silos for the storage of grain. The Atlanteans slept under the open air during the dry season, and in the rainy season they lived on their tiny reed boats.
Most important to Kemal was when he found Noah, though he had a different name -- Yewesweder when he was a child, Naog when he became an adult. For his trial of manhood, this Yewesweder, already tall for his age, made the perilous journey to the land bridge at the Bab al Mandab to see the "Heaving Sea." He saw it, all right, but also saw that this arm of the Indian Ocean was only a few meters below the level of the bench that marked the old shoreline of the Red Sea before the last ice age. Yewesweder knew nothing of ice ages, but he knew that the shelf of land was absolutely level -- he had loped along that route during his entire journey. Yet that level shelf was hundreds of meters above the plain where the "Salty Sea" -- the rump of the Red Sea -- was slowly, slowly rising. Already the Heaving Sea was cutting a channel that during the storm tides of seasonal hurricanes poured saltwater into several lakes, occasionally spilling over and sending a river of saltwater down to the Red Sea. Sometime -- the next storm, or the storm after that -- the Heaving Sea would crash through and an entire ocean would be poured in on top of Atlantis.
But Naog knew that they would not. So he began experimenting with logs lashed together, and within a few years had learned how to build a boxy, watertight house-on-a-raft that might withstand the pressures of the flood that only he believed in. Others realized after the normal seasonal floods that his tight, dry wooden box was a superior seedboat, and eventually half of his clan's stored grain and beans ended up in his ark for safekeeping. Other clans also built wooden seedboats, but not to Naog's exacting specifications for strength and watertightness. In the meantime Naog was ridiculed and threatened because of his constant warnings that the whole land would be covered in water.
They set up farming for a brief time in the El Qa' Valley in the shadows of the mountains of Sinai, telling all comers of the flood sent by God to destroy the unworthy Derku people, and how this handful of people alone had been saved because God had shown Naog what he intended to do. Eventually, though, Naog became a wandering herdsman, spreading his story wherever he went. As Kemal had expected, Naog's story, with his anti-urban interpretation, had enormous influence in stopping people from gathering together in large communities that might become cities.
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.
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 shores 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.
***
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 grass huts and built European-style dwellings as quickly as they could. They knew. The people who had had to live in grass huts had no regrets about leaving them behind.
Je nodded.
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.
"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 bumped through rut after rut.
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 Pastwatch people to live in the past even as they watched it.
To his relief, the grass 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.
"I was hoping to live in a grass hut and relieve myself in the weeds," said Kemal.
"Your mother was right. I was only joking. This room is excellent."
"Morning is excellent," said Kemal.
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.
"No," said Kemal. "I don't want a mat. I just thought you might be more comfortable ..."
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.
"So you're here to correct us," said Hassan, reddening.
Tagiri laughed. "It's one of the glories of Pastwatch, 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."
"Are you saying that slavery was not an unmitigated evil?" asked Tagiri.
Tagiri's veneer of polite interest was clearly wearing thin. "I've read your remarks about the origin of slavery."
"It's natural, when you make a great discovery, to assume 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."
Hassan 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."
Hassan stood up. For a moment Kemal wondered if he was going to strike him. But then Hassan bent down, picked up his mat from the grass, and held it out to Kemal. "So," said Hassan. "Talk."
"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-class 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."
"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."
"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."
"It became the foundation of their city, the fact that the slaves were doing the citizens' duty in digging the canals 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-god 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."
"The concept of buying and selling people was invented only among the Derku," said Kemal.
"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 Kemal. "And in the place where people weren't conceived of as property, what did they have?"
"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?"
"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 gods."
"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--"
"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."
Kemal had expected argument. Hadn't she been sniping at him all along? He found himself speechless, for a moment.
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."
"The prayer, you mean," said Kemal.
"I see that I'm not dealing with science, then."
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."
"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?"
"Besides," said Hassan, "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."
"That's an interesting problem," he said.
"How did I do that?"
"If only he had told people slavery was evil, too," said Diko.
"Because one man, alone, reshaped the world," said Hassan. "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 shore 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."
"Yes, well, it was certainly clearer than anything we've found with Columbus," said Hassan. "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."
Everyone turned to her, She seemed flustered. "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."
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 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."
They even called him "Signor Colombo." That hadn't happened much before. His father was only rarely called "signor," despite the fact that in recent years Cristoforo's earnings had allowed Domenico Colombo to prosper, moving the weaving shop to larger quarters and wearing finer clothing and riding a horse like a gentleman and buying a few small houses outside the city walls so he could play the landlord. So the title was certainly not one that came readily to one of Cristoforo's birth. On this voyage, however, it was not just the sailors but also the captain himself who gave Colombo the courtesy title. It was a sign of how far he had come, this basic respect -- but not as important a sign as having the trust of the Spinolas.
He dared not think of it, or God would know the awful presumption, the deadly pride that he concealed within his heart.
What a hypocrite I am, thought Cristoforo. To pretend that my motives are pure. I laid my purse from Chios into the bishop's own hands -- but then used it to advance my cause with Nicolo Spinola. And even then, it wasn't the whole purse. I'm wearing a good part of it; a gentleman has to have the right clothes or people don't call him Signor. And much more of it went to Father, to buy houses and dress Mother like a lady. Hardly the perfect offering of faith. Do I want to become rich and influential in order to serve God? Or do I serve God in hopes that it will make me rich and influential?
"There are plenty of charts of the Andalusian coast," said the navigator.
The truth was that the charts were full of errors. Either that or some supernatural power had moved the capes and bays, the beaches and promontories of the Iberian coast, so that now and then there was an inlet that wasn't shown on any chart. "Were these charts made by pirates?" he asked the captain one day. "They seem designed to make sure that a corsair can dodge out to engage us in battle without any warning."
There was no reason to think it would not be a success, until two days after they passed through the straits of Gibraltar, when a cry went up: "Sails! Corsairs!"
"I don't like this," said the captain.
"Hardly," said the captain. "We're loaded with cargo; they're not. They know these waters; we don't. And they're used to bloody-handed fighting. What do we have? Sword-bearing gentlemen and sailors who are terrified of battle on the open sea."
The captain gave him a withering look. "I don't know that we're any more righteous than others who've had their throats slit. No, we'll outrun them if we can, or if we can't, we'll make them pay so dear that they'll give up and leave us. What are you good for, in a battle?"
"Well, these pirates will respect the blade only if it's well blooded. Have you an arm for throwing?"
"Good enough for me. If things look bad, then this is our last hope -- we'll have pots filled with oil. We set them afire and hurl them onto the pirate ships. They can't very well fight us if their decks are afire."
"As I said -- we only use these pots if things look bad."
The captain looked coldly at him. "As I said -- we want to make our fleet a worthless conquest for them." He looked again at the corsairs' sails, which were well behind them and farther off the coast. "They want to pinch us against the shore," he said. "If we can make it to Cape St. Vincent, where we can turn north, then we'll lose them. Till then they'll try to intercept us as we tack outward, or run us aground on the shoreward tack."
The captain sighed. "The wisest course, my friend, but the sailors won't stand for it. They don't like being out of sight of land if there's a fight."
"Because they can't swim. Their best hope is to ride some flotsam in, if we do badly."
"This isn't a good time to expect sailors to be rational," said the captain. "And one thing's sure -- you can't lead sailors where they don't want to go."
"If they thought I was leading them to drown, they'd put this ship to shore and leave the cargo for the pirates. Better than drowning, or being sold into slavery."
"French," said the navigator.
Cristoforo started at the name. In Genova he had heard enough French, despite the hostility of the Genovese for a nation that had more than once raided their docks and tried to burn the city, to know that coullon was the French version of his own family's name: Colombo, or, in Latin, Columbus.
"Might be Coullon," said the navigator. "Bold as he is, it's more likely to be the devil -- but then they say that Coullon is the devil."
They laughed, all who could hear, but there was little real mirth in it. And the captain made a point of showing Cristoforo where the firepots were, once the ship's boy had filled them. "Make sure you keep fire in your hands," he said to Cristoforo. "That is your blade, Signor Colombo, and they'll respect you."
There was no hope of coordinating the defense of the fleet now. Each captain had to find his own way to victory. The captain of Cristoforo's ship realized at once that if he kept his current course he'd be run aground or boarded almost at once. "Come around!" he cried. "Get the wind behind us!"
As the pirates pulled the ropes hand over hand, forcing the boats together, Cristoforo could see that the captain had been right: Their own crew would have little hope in a fight. Oh, they'd give such a battle as they could, knowing that it was their lives at stake. But there was despair in all their eyes, and they visibly shrank from the bloodshed that was coming. He heard one burly sailor saying to the ship's boy, "Pray that you'll die." It wasn't encouraging; nor was the obvious eagerness on the part of the pirates.
The captain didn't hear him -- there was too much shouting at the helm. Never mind. Cristoforo could see that things were desperate, and the closer the corsairs got, the likelier the chance of the flames taking both ships. He threw the pot.
Turning, he could see that another corsair, also grappling with a Genovese ship, was close enough that he could visit a bit of fire on it, too. His aim was not as good -- the pot splashed harmlessly into the sea. But now the ship's boy was lighting the pots and handing them up to him, and Cristoforo managed to put two onto the deck of the farther corsair, and another pair onto the deck of the pirate ship that was preparing to board his own. "Signor Spinola," he said, "forgive me for losing your cargo."
***
"No, of course not," said Diko. "I just wanted you to see what I was doing. This scene has been shown a thousand times, of course. Columbus against Columbus, they called it, since he and the pirate had the same name. But all the recordings were from the days of the Tempoview, right? So we saw his lips move, but in the chaos of battle there was no hope of hearing what he said. He was speaking too softly, his lips moved too slightly. And this bothered no one, because after all, what does it matter how a man prays in the midst of battle?"
"The holiest shrine in Constantinople. Perhaps the most beautiful Christian place in all the world, in these days before the Sistine Chapel. And when Columbus is praying for God to spare his life, what does he vow? An eastern crusade. I found this several days ago, and it kept me awake night after night. Everyone had always looked for the origin of his westward voyage back farther, on Chios, perhaps, or in Genova. But he has already left Genova now for the last time. He'll never turn back. And he's only a week away from the beginning of his time in Lisbon, when it's clear that he has already turned his eyes irrevocably, resolutely to the west. And yet here, at this moment, he vows to liberate Constantinople."
"So you see," said Diko, "I knew that whatever it was that turned him to his obsession with the western voyage, with the Indies, it must have happened between this moment on board this ship whose sails are already burning, and his arrival in Lisbon a week later."
"Father," said Diko. "I discovered this days ago. I told you that I found the moment of decision, not that I had found the week."
"I'm afraid to," said Diko.
"Because it's impossible. Because ... because as far as I can tell, God speaks to him."
Everyone laughed.
They stopped laughing.
The pirates were aboard, and along with them came the fire, leaping from sail to sail. It was obvious to all that even if they somehow repulsed the pirates, both ships were doomed. Those sailors who weren't already engaged in bloody-handed combat began throwing kegs and hatch covers into the water, and several managed to get the ship's boat into the water on the side opposite the pirates' ship. Cristoforo saw how the captain disdained to abandon his ship -- he was fighting bravely, his sword dancing. And then the sword wasn't there, and through the smoke swirling across the deck Cristoforo could no longer see him.
Taking two more flaming pots in his hands, he lobbed one out onto the deck of his own ship, and then the second even farther, so that the helm was soon engulfed in flames. The pirates cried out in rage -- those who weren't screaming in pain or terror -- and their eyes soon found Cristoforo and the ship's boy on the forecastle.
"I can't swim," said the ship's boy.
The boy was right about his inability to swim, and it took Cristoforo considerable effort just to get him up onto the hatch cover. But once the boy was safely atop the floating wood, he calmed down. Cristoforo tried to get part of his own weight onto the tiny raft, but it made it tilt dangerously down into the water, and the boy panicked. So Cristoforo let himself back down into the water. It was five leagues to shore, at least -- more likely six. Cristoforo was a strong swimmer, but not that strong. He needed to cling to something to help bear his weight so he could rest in the water from time to time, and if it couldn't be this hatch cover, he would have to leave it and find something else. "Listen, boy!" shouted Cristoforo. "The shore is that way!" He pointed.
"Paddle with your hands," said Cristoforo. "That way!"
It was too tiring, treading water while trying to communicate with this boy. He had saved the boy's life, and now he had to get about the business of saving his own.
Sometimes Cristoforo was sure that there was a current running away from shore, that he was caught in it and would be carried away no matter what he did. He ached, his arms and legs were exhausted and could move no more, and yet he kept them moving, however weakly now, and at last, at last he could see that he was indeed much closer to shore than before. It gave him hope enough to keep going, though the pain in his joints made him feel as though the sea were tearing his limbs off.
Cristoforo decided not to do anything so foolish as to die here and now, though the idea of giving up and resting did have a momentary appeal. Instead he pushed against the bottom with his legs, and because the water was, after all, not deep, his head rose above the surface and he breathed again. Half swimming, half walking, he forced his way to shore and then crept across the wet until he reached dry sand. Nor did he stop then -- some small rational part of his mind told him that he must get above the high tide, marked by the line of dried-up sticks and seaweed many yards beyond him. He crawled, crept, finally dragged himself to that line and beyond it; then he collapsed into the sand, unconscious at once.
Pain, though, was not going to make him stay on the beach to die. He got up onto all fours and crawled ahead until he reached the first tufts of shoregrass. Then he looked about for some sign of water he could drink. This close to shore it was almost too much to hope for, but how could he regain his strength without something to drink? The sun was setting. Soon it would be too dark to see, and while the night would cool him, it might as easily chill him, and weak as he was, it might kill him.
***
"A woman from the village of Lagos comes and finds him," said Kemal. "They nurse him back to health and then he leaves for Lisbon."
"That's exactly right," said Diko. "You've seen it in the Tempoview." She went over to one of the older machines, kept now only for playing back old recordings. She ran the appropriate passage at high speed; looking like a comical, jerky puppet, Columbus peered in one direction, and then fell back into the sand for a while, perhaps praying, until he knelt up again and crossed himself and said, "The Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit." It was in that posture that the woman of Lagos -- Maria Luisa, daughter of Simao o Gordo, to be precise -- found him. Also looking like a marionette in the fast Tempoview playback, she ran back to the village for help.
It was.
"Cristoforo Colombo," said the voice.
"Cristobal Col¢n. Coullon. Columbus." The voice went on, calling his name in language after language. It was barely, barely audible. And the image never quite resolved itself into clarity.
"What are we seeing?" demanded Kemal.
They fell silent. They watched and listened.
Then, finally: "Columbus, you are my true servant."
"You have turned your heart to the east, to liberate Constantinople from the Turk."
"I have seen your faith and your courage, and that is why I spared your life on the water today. I have a great work for you to do. But it is not Constantinople to which you must bring the cross.
"Nor is it Jerusalem, or any other nation touched by the waters of the Mediterranean. I saved you alive so you could carry the cross to lands much farther east, so far to the east that they can be reached only by sailing westward into the Atlantic."
"There are great kingdoms there, rich in gold and powerful in armies. They have never heard the name of my Only Begotten, and they die unbaptized. It is my will that you carry salvation to them, and bring back the wealth of these lands."
"Your name will be great. Kings will make you their viceroy, and you will be the ruler of the Ocean. Kingdoms will fall at your feet, and millions whose lives are saved will call you blessed. Sail westward, Columbus, my son, a voyage easily within the reach of your ships. The winds of the south will carry you west, and then the winds farther to the north will return you easily to Europe. Let the name of Christ be heard in these nations, and you will save your own soul along with theirs. Take a solemn oath that you will make this voyage, and after many obstacles you will succeed. But do not break this oath, or it will be better for the men of Sodom than for you in the day of judgment. No greater mission has ever been given to mortal man than the one I give to you, and whatever honors you receive on earth will be multiplied a thousandfold in heaven. But if you fail, the consequences to you and all of Christianity will be terrible beyond your imagining. Now take the oath, in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit."
"I have sent a woman to you, to nurse you back to health. When your strength is restored to you, you must begin your mission in my name. Tell no one that I have spoken to you -- it is not my will that you perish like the prophets of old, and if you say that I have spoken to you the priests will surely burn you as a heretic. You must persuade others to help you undertake this great voyage for its own sake, and not because I have commanded it. I care not whether they do it for gold or for fame or for love of me, just so they fulfill this mission. Just so you fulfill it. You. Carry out my mission."