Yewesweder decided that he had earned his man-name, Naog, the day he made this discovery, and at once he set out for home. He had married a wife from among the tribe that lived at the Bab al Mandab, and it was only with great difficulty that she followed him so far that he was given no choice but to bring her home with him. When he reached the land of the Derku, as the Atlanteans called themselves, he learned that what had seemed plain to him at the shores of the Heaving Sea sounded like a far-fetched lie to the elders of his clan, and of all the clans. A huge flood? They had a flood every year, and simply rode it out on their boats. If Naog’s flood actually happened, they’d ride it out, too.
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.
When the flood came, Naog had a little advance notice: The first torrent to break through the Bab al Mandab caused the Salty Sea to rise rapidly, backing up in the canals of the Derku people for several hours before the pressure of the ocean burst through in earnest, sending a wall of water dozens of meters high scouring the entire width of the Red Sea basin. By the time the flood reached Naog’s boat, it was sealed tight, bearing a cargo of seed and food, along with his two wives, their small children, the three slaves that had helped him with the construction of the boat, and the slaves’ families. They were tossed unmercifully in the turbulent waves, and the ark was often immersed, but it held, and eventually they came to shore not far from Gibeil on the southern tip of the Sinai peninsula.
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.
There was also a strong element of opposition to human sacrifice in his story, for Naog’s own father had been sacrificed to the crocodile god of the Derku people while he was gone on his manhood journey, and Naog believed that the main reason the powerful god of storms and seas had destroyed the Derku was their practice of offering living victims to the large crocodile they penned up to represent their god every year after the flood season. In a way this linkage between human sacrifice and city-building was unfortunate, because when city-building was resumed by deliberate heretics rejecting the old wisdom of Naog many generations later, human sacrifice came along as part of the package. In the long run, though, Naog got his way, for even those societies that gave human offerings to their gods felt they were doing something dark and dangerous, and eventually human sacrifice became regarded first as barbaric, then as an unspeakable atrocity throughout the lands touched by the story of Naog.
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 Pastwatch. 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 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.
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 grass 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 Pastwatch’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 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.
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.
He nodded.
“I’m Diko,” she said. “Tagiri’s my mom. Toss your bags 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 rutted road.
“Mother keeps saying we should pave these roads,” said Diko, “but then somebody always says tha
t hot pavement will blister the children’s feet and so the idea gets dropped.”
“They could wear shoes,” suggested Kemal. He spoke Simple 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.
“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 Pastwatch people to live in the past even as they watched it.
He wondered vaguely if they used toilet paper or handfuls of grass.
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.
“All right?” asked Diko.
“I was hoping to live in a grass 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 puréed 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 Hassan.
“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 Atatürk, 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 Pastwatch. 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 Hassan, 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 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.”
“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 analytical 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 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.”
“But I never said that,” said Kemal. “My opponents said that I said that, but I thought you would have read more carefully.”
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.”
“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!”
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.”
Kemal laid out the mat and sat down. Hassan 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-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 overloads, 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 ra
iding 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 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.”
“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.”
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