Keeper of Dreams Page 12

  The rain went on forever, or so it seemed, the rain and the wind. And then it stopped, and they were able to come out onto the roof of the seed-boat and look at the sunlight and stare at the distant horizon. There was no land at all, just water. “The whole earth is gone,” said Kormo. “Just as you said.”

  “The Heaving Sea has taken over this place,” said Naog. “But we’ll come to dry land. The current will take us there.”

  There was much debris floating on the water—torn-up trees and bushes, for the flood had scraped the whole face of the land. A few rotting bodies of animals. If anyone saw a human body floating by, they said nothing about it.

  After days, a week, perhaps longer of floating without sight of land, they finally began skirting a shoreline. Once they saw the smoke of someone’s fire—people who lived high above the great valley of the Salty Sea had been untouched by the flood. But there was no way to steer the boat toward shore. Like a true seedboat, it drifted unless something drew it another way. Naog cursed himself for his foolishness in not including dragonboats in the cargo of the boat. He and the other men and women might have tied lines to the seedboat and to themselves and paddled the boat to shore. As it was, they would last only as long as their water lasted.

  It was long enough. The boat fetched up against a grassy shore. Naog sent several of the servants ashore and they used a rope to tie the boat to a tree. But it was useless—the current was still too strong, and the boat tore free. They almost lost the servants, stranding them on the shore, forever separated from their families, but they had the presence of mind to swim for the end of the rope.

  The next day they did better—more lines, all the men on shore, drawing the boat further into a cove that protected it from the current. They lost no time in unloading the precious cargo of seeds, and searching for a source of fresh water. Then they began the unaccustomed task of hauling all the baskets of grain by hand. There were no canals to ease the labor.

  “Perhaps we can find a place to dig canals again,” said Kormo.

  “No!” said Zawada vehemently. “We will never build such a place again. Do you want the god to send another flood?”

  “There will be no other flood,” said Naog. “The Heaving Sea has had its victory. But we will also build no canals. We will keep no crocodile, or any other animal as our god. We will never sacrifice forbidden fruit to any god, because the true god hates those who do that. And we will tell our story to anyone who will listen to it, so that others will learn how to avoid the wrath of the true god, the god of power.”

  Kemal watched as Naog and his people came to shore not far from Gibeil and set up farming in the El Qa’ Valley in the shadows of the mountains of Sinai. The fact of the flood was well known, and many travelers came to see this vast new sea where once there had been dry land. More and more of them also came to the new village that Naog and his people built, and word of his story also spread.

  Kemal’s work was done. He had found Atlantis. He had found Noah, and Gilgamesh. Many of the stories that had collected around those names came from other cultures and other times, but the core was true, and Kemal had found them and brought them back to the knowledge of humankind.

  But what did it mean? Naog gave warning, but no one listened. His story remained in people’s minds, but what difference did it make?

  As far as Kemal 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 Derku people, under one name or another, had spread far and wide—the Golden Age. People remembered well that once there was a great land that was blessed by the gods until the sea rose up and swallowed their land. People who lived in different landscapes tried to make sense of the story. To the island-hopping Greeks Atlantis became an island that sank into the sea. To the plains-dwelling Sumerians the flood was caused by rain, not by the sea leaping out of its bed to swallow the earth. Someone wondered how, if all the land was covered, the animals survived, and thus the account of animals two by two was added to the story of Naog. At some point, when people still remembered that the name meant “naked,” a story was added about his sons covering his nakedness as he lay in a drunken stupor. All of this was decoration, however. People remembered both the Derku people and the one man who led his family through the flood.

  But they would have remembered Atlantis with or without Naog, Kemal knew that. What difference did his saga make, to anyone but himself and his household? As others studied the culture of the Derku, Kemal remained focused on Naog himself. If anything, Naog’s life was proof that one person makes no difference at all in history. He saw the flood coming, he warned his people about it when there was plenty of time, he showed them how to save themselves, and yet nothing changed outside his own immediate family group. That was the way history worked. Great forces sweep people along, and now and then somebody floats to the surface and becomes famous but it means nothing, it amounts to nothing.

  Yet Kemal could not believe it. Naog may not have accomplished what he thought his goal was—to save his people—but he did accomplish something. He never lived to see the result of it, but because of his survival the Atlantis stories were tinged with something else. It was not just a golden age, not just a time of greatness and wealth and leisure and city life, a land of giants and gods. Naog’s version of the story also penetrated the public consciousness and remained. The people were destroyed because the greatest of gods was offended by their sins. The list of sins shifted and changed over time, but certain ideas remained: That it was wrong to live in a city, where people get lifted up in the pride of their hearts and think that they are too powerful for the gods to destroy. That the one who seems to be crazy may in fact be the only one who sees the truth. That the greatest of gods is the one you can’t see, the one who has power over the earth and the sea and the sky, all at once. And, above all, this: That it was wrong to sacrifice human beings to the gods.

  It took thousands of years, and there were places where Naog’s passionate doctrine did not penetrate until modern times, but the root of it was there in the day he came home and found that his father had been fed to the Dragon. Those who thought that it was right to offer human beings to the Dragon were all dead, and the one who had long proclaimed that it was wrong was still alive. The god had preserved him and killed all of them. Wherever the idea of Atlantis spread, some version of this story came with it, and in the end all the great civilizations that were descended from Atlantis learned not to offer the forbidden fruit to the gods.

  In the Americas, though, no society grew up that owed a debt to Atlantis, for the same rising of the world ocean that closed the land bridge between Yemen and Djibouti also broke the land bridge between America and the old world. The story of Naog did not touch there, and it seemed to Kemal absolutely clear what the cost of that was. Because they had no memory of Atlantis, it took the people of the Americas thousands of years longer to develop civilization—the city. Egypt was already ancient when the Olmecs first built amid the swampy land of the Bay of Campeche. And because they had no story of Naog, warning that the most powerful of gods rejected killing human beings, the old ethos of human sacrifice remained in full force, virtually unquestioned. The carnage of the Mexica—the Aztecs—took it to the extreme, but it was there already, throughout the Caribbean basin, a tradition of human blood being shed to feed the hunger of the gods.

  Kemal could hardly say that the bloody warfare of the old world was much of an improvement over this. But it was different, and in his mind, at least, it was different specifically because of Naog. If he had not ridden out the flood to tell his story of the true God who forbade sacrifice, the old world would not have been the same. New civilizations might have risen more quickly, with no stories warning of the danger of city life. And those new civilizations might all have worshipped the same Dragon, or some other, as hungry for human flesh as the gods of t
he new world were hungry for human blood.

  On the day that Kemal became sure that his Noah had actually changed the world, he was satisfied. He said little and wrote nothing about his conclusion. This surprised even him, for in all the months and years that he had searched hungrily for Atlantis, and then for Noah, and then for the meaning of Noah’s saga, Kemal had assumed that, like Schliemann, he would publish everything, he would tell the world the great truth that he had found. But to his surprise he discovered that he must not have searched so far for the sake of science, or for fame, or for any other motive than simply to know, for himself, that one person’s life amounted to something. Naog changed the world, but then so did Zawada, and so did Kormo, and so did the servant who skinned his elbows running down the hill, and so did Naog’s father and mother, and . . . and in the end, so did they all. The great forces of history were real, after a fashion. But when you examined them closely, those great forces always came down to the dreams and hungers and judgments of individuals. The choices they made were real. They mattered.

  Apparently that was all that Kemal had needed to know. The next day he could think of no reason to go to work. He resigned from his position at the head of the Atlantis project. Let others do the detail work. Kemal was well over thirty now, and he had found the answer to his great question, and it was time to get down to the business of living.

  NOTES ON “ATLANTIS”

  I was working on the concept that became my novel Pastwatch: The Redemption of Christopher Columbus. The technogimmick of the story was a machine that allowed you to see the past but not touch it or affect it. The scientific premise is absurd (as it always is with time travel): The flow of time would have to be tied to the rotations and revolutions of the Earth and the solar system and the galaxy, so that when you swam upstream through time there would somehow be a way of tracking causal events backward, not at this absolute site, but rather at this relative site.

  Fortunately, science fiction readers long ago agreed to swallow such absurdities and just agree that we will allow silly time-travel stories to be taken seriously. And if you can accept stories where you travel back and forth in time, then why not stories where you only take a lookyloo?

  Anyway, as I was working on Columbus—reading a decent biography and tying it in with all sorts of cultural things I was researching in Mesoamerica and Spain—I realized that I must also develop the culture of the people in the future who are using the timeview machinery to see into the past. Who are they? What do they look for? Why is anybody paying for this research?

  I realized there were many obvious things that people would look for, and keep looking for as the resolution and range of the devices improved. There would be crimes to solve—I’m sure that finding who actually killed Jack the Ripper’s victims would be a high priority, as would close examination of that grassy knoll in Dallas in 1963. And somebody would be bound to turn the time machine to look at Jesus’ grave—if they could properly identify which of the victims of Roman crucifixion happened to be him.

  Many things like that might be classed as “idle curiosity,” but some would have genuine scientific value. And one of the biggest problems to resolve would be the widespread “great flood” story. Was there really such a flood? Or is it simply that cultures that have floods also have to invent a story of “the big one”?

  There was an obvious time for a huge civilization-destroying flood to take place: after the most recent ice age, when melting glaciers sent torrential rivers flowing into shrunken seas.

  At first, I thought of the Mediterranean Sea as an obvious place to look for such a flood. With worldwide sea levels down so far that Britain was a peninsula, surely the Mediterranean would be separated from the Atlantic, and then when the Atlantic refilled, there would be a flood that broke open the fountains of the great deep.

  No dice. The Mediterranean, regardless of Ice Age or Warm Spell, would still have the Nile flowing into it. And as the glaciers melted, they would be pouring themselves into the Rhone, the Po, the Danube, the Dnieper. Even if the Atlantic refilled faster than the Mediterranean, there would never have been such a differential between them that the result would be truly cataclysmic.

  What was true of the Mediterranean would be true of the Black Sea. Though the Bosphorus might have become dry land during the Ice Age, the melting glaciers would have been raising the Black Sea at least as fast as the Mediterranean. In fact, by my estimation I would think the Black Sea would fill faster.

  Besides, why would there be enough of a civilization in the Black Sea for anyone to come away from it with tales that would spread throughout the world? Quick: Name the great civilization that arose on the shores of the Black Sea. You can’t do it? Guess why.

  Great civilizations grow up where certain conditions are met. Not only are there enough resources within reach to support a large population, there must be certain environmental challenges that greatly reward people who learn to work together in great public works projects. The cooperative ventures would then concentrate the population in a certain area where they might be wiped out by a single cataclysmic event.

  In the Nile Valley, the annual floods made it easy to grow crops—but by creating granaries and guarding them together, much larger populations could sustain themselves through the dry season.

  Whether the land is too wet and you have to have vast community cooperation to create drier farmland, as in Mesoamerica, or the land is dry and you have to irrigate from the existing rivers, as in Mesopotamia and the Indus, civilizations grow where cooperation is rewarded with surpluses that can sustain “high” cultures.

  So where in Eurasia could there have been a place where it was likely for a civilization to grow, and yet a single flood that was specifically not a river flood but an ocean flood take place?

  While I still had hopes for the Mediterranean or Black Sea—or maybe the Persian Gulf?—I talked to my friend Michael Lewis, a geographer at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. I think it took him all of ten seconds to open the atlas and point to the Red Sea. “It’s a rift valley,” he said. “So almost no rivers flow into it. During the Ice Age, when it was cut off from the Indian Ocean, it would have dried up to a rump of what it is now—maybe even completely, like Lake Chad. And when the Ice Age ended and sea levels rose, it would have stayed low until the Indian Ocean broke through and flooded it in one amazing cataclysm. Anything and anyone in the Red Sea bed would have been swept away.”

  Looking at a map, it was obvious. The trouble was, the very lack of water that would leave it as a rump sea would also indicate that nobody could live there.

  Except . . . there would have been a bit more water flowing out of the wadis that do feed the Red Sea. Water from the wadis of southwest Arabia and the Eritrean coast might well have created the kind of seasonal marshland that would reward public works projects. Around the mountains of the Dahlak Archipelago and in the valley of the Mits’iwa Channel, water might have collected into streams and swamps; dammed and channeled, the land might have become a protocivilization.

  Anyway, it certainly looked more plausible than any of the other candidates for the job. In the Red Sea, there most definitely would have been a flood, and while it might have happened during a rainstorm, the bulk of the water would have been seawater from the Indian Ocean. There might have been advance warnings as the Indian Ocean rose and occasionally lapped over, sending tongues of water licking out across the sandy wastes of the isthmus joining Arabia and Africa. A gout of water might even have made it all the way over, sending a mini-flood down into the Red Sea basin, only to abate when the storm died.

  Then came the big one, and this time, instead of just flicking out a tongue of water, the storm would keep enough surges flowing after the first one that a channel would wear through the sand, and as the flow increased, the channel would carve itself deeper and wider, until it would look like the bursting of a dam. With no early-warning system, people in the bottomlands would find the ocean pouring in on
them, wave after wave, and many who sought the nearest high ground (“surely the flood won’t go any higher than this”) would also be swept away.

  I knew I had my flood location. Then all I needed was my flood story.

  Foolishly, I did not go back to reread the Gilgamesh epic before giving my Noah character a name echoing that alternate source of the flood story. Only after I had written and my friend Richard Gilliam had published “Atlantis” in the Atlanta World Fantasy Convention anthology (Grails: Quests, Visitations and Other Occurrences) did I make the head-slapping realization that Gilgamesh wasn’t the flood guy, he went and talked to Utnapishtim, who was. Too late to fix it for that version; I’ll change it when I write the novel Pastwatch II: The Flood. Meanwhile, the story “Atlantis” stands as I first wrote it.

  GERIATRIC WARD

  Sandy started babbling on Tuesday morning and Todd knew it was the end.

  “They took Poogy and Gog away from me,” Sandy said sadly, her hand trembling, spilling coffee on the toast.

  “What?” Todd mumbled.

  “And never brought them back. Just took them. I looked all over.”

  “Looked for what?”

  “Poogy,” Sandy said, thrusting out her lower lip. The skin of her cheeks was sagging down to form jowls. Her hair was thin and fine, now, though she kept it dyed dark brown. “And Gog.”

  “What the hell are Poogy and Gog?” Todd asked.

  “You took them,” Sandy said. She started to cry. She kicked the table leg. Todd got up from the table and went to work.

  The university was empty. Sunday. Damn Sunday, never anyone there to help with the work on Sunday. Waste too much damn time looking up things that students should be sent to find out.

  He went to the lab. Ryan was there. They looked over the computer readouts. “Blood,” said Ryan, “just plain ain’t worth the paper it’s printed on.”