"Then why did you come here today with all these -- suggestions?"
"I think of them as imaginings, Your Majesty. I would not presume to suggest anything." He smiled. "While the others have been trying to determine what is correct, I have been thinking more along the lines of what is good and right. I have been thinking of St. Peter stepping from the boat and walking on the water."
"Until he doubted."
"And then he was lifted up by the hand of the Savior."
Tears came to Isabella's eyes. "Do you think Colўn may be filled with the Spirit of God?"
"The Maid of Orleans was either a saint or a madwoman."
"Or a witch. They burned her as a witch."
"My point exactly. Who could know, for certain, whether God was in her? And yet by putting their trust in her as God's servant, the soldiers of France drove the English from held after field. What if she had been mad? What then? They would have lost one more battle. What difference would that have made? They had already lost so many."
"So if Colўn is a madman, we will only lose a few caravels, a little money, a wasted voyage."
"Besides, if I know His Majesty at all, I suspect he'll find a way to get the boats for very little money."
"They say that if you pinch the coins with his face on them, they screech."
Talavera's eyes went wide. "Someone told Your Majesty that little jest?"
She lowered her voice. They were already talking so low that Lady Felicia could not possibly hear them; still, he leaned toward the Queen so he could hear her faint whisper. "Father Talavera, just between you and me, when that little jest was first told, I was present. In fact, when that little jest was first told, I was speaking."
"I will treat that," said Father Talavera, "with all the secrecy of a confession."
"You are such a good priest, Father Talavera. Bring me Father Maldonado's verdict. Tell him not to make it too cruel."
"Your Majesty, I will tell him to be kind. But Father Maldonado's kindness can leave scars."
* * *
Diko came home to find Father and Mother both still awake, dressed, sitting up in the front room, as if they were waiting to go somewhere. Which turned out to be the case. "Manjam has asked to see us."
"At this hour?" asked Diko. "Go then."
"Us," said Father, "including you."
They met in one of the smaller rooms at Pastwatch, but one designed for the optimum viewing of the holographic display of the TruSite II. It did not occur to Diko, however, that Manjam chose the room for anything but privacy. What would he need with the TruSite II? He was not of Pastwatch. He was a noted mathematician, but that was supposed to mean he had no use for the real world. His tool was a computer for number manipulation. And, of course, his own mind. After Hassan, Tagiri, and Diko arrived, Manjam had them wait just a moment more for Hunahpu and Kemal. Then they all sat.
"I must begin with an apology," said Manjam. "I realize in retrospect that my explanation of temporal effects was inept in the extreme."
"On the contrary," said Tagiri, "it couldn't have been clearer."
"I don't apologize for a lack of clarity. I apologize for a lack of empathy. It isn't one of the things mathematicians get much practice at. I actually thought that telling you that our own time would cease to be real would be a comfort to you. It would be to me, you see. But then, I don't spend my life looking at history. I didn't understand the great ... compassion that fills your lives here. Tagiri, you especially. I know now what I should have said.
"That the end will be painless. There will be no cataclysm. There will be no sense of loss. There will be no regret. Instead, there will be a new Earth. A new future. And in this new future, because of the wise plans that Diko and Hunahpu have devised, there will be far more chance of happiness and fulfilment than in our own time. There will still be unhappiness, but it will not be so pervasive. That's what I should have said. That you will indeed succeed in erasing much misery, while you will create no new sources of misery."
"Yes," said Tagiri, "you should have said that."
"I'm not used to speaking in terms of misery and happiness. There is no mathematics of misery, you see. It doesn't come up in my professional life. And yet I do care about it." Manjam sighed. "More than you know."
Something that he said struck a wrong note in Diko's mind. She blurted out the question as soon as she realized what it was. "Hunahpu and I have not finalized any plans."
"Haven't you?" said Manjam. He reached out his hands to the TruSite II, and to Diko's astonishment he manipulated the controls like an expert. In fact, he almost immediately called up a control screen that Diko had never seen before, and entered a double password. Moments later the holographic display came alive.
In the display, to Diko's astonishment, she saw herself and Hunahpu.
"It isn't enough to stop Cristoforo, " Diko was saying in the display. "We have to help him and his crew on Hispaniola to develop a new culture in combination with the Taino. A new Christianity that adapts to the Indies the way that it adapted to the Greeks in the second century. But that also isn't enough."
"I hoped you would see it that way," said Hunahpu in the display. "Because I intend to go to Mexico."
"What do you mean, Mexico?"
"That wasn't your plan?"
"I was going to say that we need to develop technology rapidly, to the point where the new hybrid culture can be a match for Europe."
"Yes, that's what I thought you were going to say. But of course that can't be done on the island of Haiti. Oh, the Spaniards will try, but the Tainos are simply not ready to receive that level of technology. It will remain Spanish, and that means a permanent class division between the white keepers of the machines and the brown laboring class. Not healthy."
Manjam paused the display. The images of Diko and Hunahpu froze.
Diko looked around at the others and saw that the fear and anger in their eyes was a match for what she felt.
"Those machines," said Hassan, "they aren't supposed to be able to see anything more recent than a hundred years ago."
"Normally they can't," said Marjam.
"Why does a mathematician know how to use the TruSite?" asked Hunahpu. "Pastwatch already duplicated all the lost private notes of the great mathematicians of history."
"This is an unspeakable violation of privacy," said Kemal icily.
Diko agreed, but she had already leaped to the most important question. "Who are you really, Marjam?"
"Oh, I'm really Manjam," he said."But no, don't protest, I understand your real question." He regarded them all calmly for a moment. "We don't talk about what we do, because people would misunderstand. They would think we are some kind of secret cabal that rules the world behind closed doors, and nothing could be farther from the truth."
"That reassures me completely," said Diko.
"We do nothing political. Do you understand? We don't interfere with government. We care a great deal about what governments do, but when we want to achieve some goal, we act openly. I would write to a government official as myself, as Manjam. Or appear on a broadcast. Stating my opinions. Do you see? We are not a secret shadow government. We have no authority over human lives."
"And yet you spy on us."
"We monitor all that is interesting and important in the world. And because we have the TruSite II, we can do it without sending spies or openly talking to anybody. We just watch, and then, when something is important or valuable, we encourage."
"Yes yes," said Hassan. "I'm sure you're noble and very kind in your godlike role. Who are the others?"
"I'm the one who came to you," said Manjam.
"And why are you showing us this? Why are you telling us?" asked Tagiri.
"Because you have to understand that I know what I'm talking about. And I have to show you some things before you will understand why your project has been so encouraged, why you've had no interference, why you've been allowed to bring together so many people from the moment you dis
covered, Tagiri and Hassan, that we can reach back and affect the past. And most especially since you, Diko, discovered that someone had already done so, canceling their own time in order to create a new future."
"So show us," said Hunahpu.
Manjam typed in new coordinates. The display changed. It was a long-distance aerial view of a vast stony plain with only a few desert plants every square meter, except for thick trees and grass along the banks of a wide river.
"What is this, the Sahara project?" asked Hassan.
"This is the Amazon," said Manjam.
"No," murmured Tagiri. "That's how bad it was before the restoration began?"
"You don't understand," said Maniam. "That is the Amazon right now. Or, technically speaking, about fifteen minutes ago." The display moved quickly, mile after mile down the river, and nothing changed until at last, after what must have been a thousand miles, they came to scenes familiar from the broadcasts: the thick growth of the rain-forest restoration project. But in just a few moments they had passed through the entire rain forest and were back to stony ground growing almost nothing. And so it remained, all the way to the marshy mouth of the river where it flowed into the sea.
"That was all? That was the Amazon rain forest?" asked Hunahpu.
"But that project has been going for forty years," said Hassan.
"It wasn't that bad when they started," said Diko.
"Have they been lying to us?" asked Tagiri.
"Come now," said Manjam. "You've all heard about the terrible loss of topsoil. You all know that with the forests gone, erosion was uncontrolled."
"But they were planting grass."
"And it died, " said Manjam. "They're working on new species that can live in the scarcity of important nutrients. Don't look so glum. Nature is on our side. In ten thousand years the Amazon should be right back to normal."
"That's longer than -- that's older than civilization."
"A mere hiccup in the ecological history of Earth. It simply takes time for new soil to be brought down from the Andes and built up on the banks of the river, where grasses and trees will thrive and gradually push their way outward from the river. At the rate of about six to ten meters a year for the grass, in the good spots. Also, it would help if there were some really massive flooding now and then, to spread new soil. A new volcano in the Andes would be nice -- the ash would be quite helpful. And the odds of one erupting in the next ten thousand years are pretty good. Plus there's always the topsoil blown across the Atlantic from Africa. You see? Our prospects are good."
Manjam's words were cheerful, but Diko was sure he was being ironic. "Good? That land is dead."
"Oh, well, yes, for now."
"What about Sahara restoration?" asked Tagiri.
"Going very well. Good progress. I give us five hundred years on that."
"Five hundred!" cried Tagiri.
"That's presupposing great increases in rainfall, of course. But our weather prediction is getting very good at the climatic level. You worked on part of that project for a while in school, Kemal."
"We were talking about restoring the Sahara in a hundred years."
"Well, yes, and that would happen, if we could continue to keep so many teams working on it. But that won't be possible for even ten more years."
"Why not?"
Again the display changed. The ocean in a storm, beating against a levee. It broke through. A wall of seawater broke across -- fields of grain?
"Where is that?" demanded Diko.
"Surely you heard about the breaching of the Carolina dike. In America."
"That was five years ago," said Hunahpu.
"Right. Very unfortunate. We lost the coastal barrier islands fifty years ago, with the rising of the ocean. This section of the North American east coast had been converted from tobacco and lumber production to grain, in order to replace the farmland killed by the drying of the North American prairie. Now vast acreages are under water."
"But we're making progress on finding ways to reduce the greenhouse gases," said Hassan.
"So we are. We think that, with safety, we can reduce the greenhouse effect significantly within perhaps thirty years. But by then, you see, we won't want to reduce it."
"Why not?" asked Diko. "The oceans are rising as the ice cap melts. We have to stop global warming."
"Our climate studies show that this is a self-correcting problem. The greater heat and the increased surface area of the ocean lead to significantly greater evaporation and temperature differentials worldwide. The cloud cover is increasing, which raises the Earth's albedo. We will soon be reflecting more sunlight than ever before since the last ice age."
"But the weather satellites," said Kemal.
"They keep the extremes from getting unbearable in any one location. How long do you think those satellites can last?"
"They can be replaced when they wear out," said Kemal.
"Can they?" asked Manjam. "Already we're taking people out of the factories and putting them into the fields. But this won't really help, because we're already farming very close to one hundred percent of the land where there's any topsoil left at all. And since we've been farming at maximum yields for some time, we're already noticing the effects of the increasing cloud cover -- fewer crops per hectare."
"What are you saying?" said Diko. "That we're already too late to restore the Earth?"
Manjam didn't answer. Instead, he brought onto the display a large region filled with grain silos. He zoomed in and they viewed the inside of silo after silo.
"Empty," murmured Tagiri
"We're eating up our reserves," said Manjam.
"But why aren't we rationing?"
"Because politicians can't do that until the people as a whole see that there's an emergency. Right now they don't see it."
"Then warn them!" said Hunahpu.
"Oh, the warnings are there. And in a while people will start talking about it. But they'll do nothing, for the simple reason that there's nothing to be done. Crop yields will continue to go down."
"What about the ocean?" asked Hassan.
"The ocean has its own problems. What do you want us to do, scrape away all the plankton so that the ocean dies, too? We harvest as much fish as we dare. We are at maximum right now. Any more, and in ten years our yields will be a tiny fraction of what they are now. Don't you see? The damage our ancestors did was too great. It is not within our power to stop the forces that have already been in motion for centuries. If we started rationing right now, it would mean that the devastating famines would begin in twenty years instead of six. But of course we won't start rationing until the first famine. And even then, the areas that are producing enough food will become quite surly about having to go hungry in order to feed people in faraway lands. Right now we feel that all human beings are one tribe, so that no one anywhere is hungry. But how long do you think that will last, when the food-producing people hear their children pleading for bread and the ships are carrying so much grain away to other lands? How well do you think the politicians will do at containing the forces that will move through the world then?"
"So what is your little non-cabal doing about it?" asked Hassan.
"Nothing," said Manjam. "As I said, the processes have gone too far. Our most favorable projections show collapse of the present system within thirty years. That's if there are no wars. There simply won't be food enough to maintain the present population or even a major fraction of it. You can't keep up the industrial economy without an agricultural base that produces far more food than is needed just to sustain the food producers. So industry starts collapsing. Now there are fewer tractors. Now the fertilizer factories produce less, and less of what they do produce can get distributed because transportation can't be maintained. Food production falls even further. Weather satellites wear out and can't be replaced. Drought. Flood. Less land in production. More deaths. Therefore less industry. Therefore lower food production. We have run a million different scenarios and there's n
ot one of them that doesn't lead us to the same place. A worldwide population of about five million before we stabilize. Just in time for the ice age to begin in earnest. At that point the population could start a slower decline until it's down to about two million. That's if there's no warfare, of course. All these projections are based on an assumption of a completely docile response. We all know how likely that is. All it will take is one full-fledged war in one of the major food-producing countries and the drop will be much steeper, with the population stabilizing at a much lower level."
No one could say anything to that. They knew what it meant.
"It's not all glum news," said Manjam. "The human race will survive. As the ice age ends, our distant children will again start to build civilizations. By then the rain forests will have been restored. Herd animals will once more graze the rich grassland of the Sahara and the Rub' al Khali and the Gobi. Unfortunately, all the easy iron was taken out of the ground years ago. Also the easy tin and copper. In fact, one can't help but wonder what they'll do for metals in order to rise out of the stone age. One can't help but wonder what their transitional energy source is going to be, with all the oil gone. There's still a little peat in Ireland. And of course the forests will have come back, so there'll be charcoal until they burn all the forests back down to nothing and the cycle starts over."
"You're saying that the human race can't rise again?"
"I'm saying that we've used up all the easy-to-find resources," said Manjam. "Human beings are very resourceful. Maybe they'll find other paths into a better future. Maybe they'll figure out how to make solar collectors out of the rusted debris of our skyscrapers."
"I ask again," said Hassan. "What are you doing to prevent this?"
"And I say again, nothing," said Manjam. "It can't be prevented. Warnings are useless because there's nothing that people can do to change their behavior to make this problem go away. The civilization we have right now cannot be maintained even for another generation. And people do sense it, you know. The birthrates are falling all over the world. They all have their own individual reasons, but the cumulative effect is the same. People are choosing not to have children who will compete with them for scarce resources."
Pastwatch: The Redemption Of Christopher Columbus Page 22
