Other Earths Read online

  Atahualpa turned and faced the procession. He may have smiled; his facemask creased. He said through his interpreter: “Once it was our practice to plant our temples in the chapels of those we sought to vanquish. Now I place this gift from my emperor, this symbol of our greatest god, in the finest church in this province.” And, Jenny knew, other Inca parties were handing over similar orbs in all the great capitals of Europe. “Once we would move peoples about, whole populations, to cut them away from their roots and so control them. Now we welcome the children of your princes and merchants, while leaving our own children in your cities, so that we may each learn the culture and the ways of the other.” He gestured to Alphonse.

  The prince bowed, but he muttered through his teeth, “And get hold of a nice set of hostages.”

  “Hush,” Jenny murmured.

  Atahualpa said, “Let this globe shine for all eternity as a symbol of our friendship, united under the Unblinking Eye of the One Sun.” He clapped his hands.

  And the orb lit up, casting a steady pearl-like glow over the grimy statuary of the chapel. The Europeans applauded helplessly.

  Jenny stared, amazed. She could see no power supply, no tank of gas; and the light didn’t flicker like the flame of a candle or a lamp but burned as steady as the sun itself.

  With the ceremony over, the procession began to break up. Jenny turned to the boy, Dreamer. “Are you sailing on the Viracocha?”

  “Oh, yes. You’ll be seeing a lot more of me. The emissary has one more appointment, a ride on a Watt-engine train to some place called Bataille—”

  “That’s where the Frankish army defeated the Anglais back in 1066.”

  “Yes. And then we sail.”

  “And then we sail,” Jenny said, fearful, excited, gazing into the dark, playful eyes of this boy from the other side of the world, a boy whose land didn’t even exist in her imagination.

  Alphonse glared at them, brooding.

  The dignitaries were still talking, with stiff politeness. Atahualpa seemed intrigued by Newton’s determination of the Earth’s age. “And how did this Newton achieve his result? A study of the rocks, of living things, of the sky? I did not know such sciences were so advanced here.”

  But when Archbishop Darwin explained that Newton’s calculations had been based on records of births and deaths in a holy book, and that his conclusion was that the Earth was only a few thousand years old, Atahualpa’s laughter was gusty, echoing from the walls of the cramped chapel.

  Alphonse’s party, with Jenny and other companions and with Archbishop Darwin attached as a moral guardian, boarded the Inca ship.

  The Viracocha, Jenny learned, was named after a creator god and cultural hero of the Inca. It was as extraordinary inside as out, a floating palace of wide corridors and vast staterooms that glowed with a steady pearl light. Jenny was quite surprised when crew members went barreling up and down the corridors on wheeled carts. The Inca embraced the wheel’s obvious advantages, but for ceremonial occasions they walked or rode their animals, as their ancestors had done long before their age of exploration. The wheeled carts, like the ubiquitous lights, had no obvious power source, no boiler or steam stack.

  The Frankish and Anglais were allowed to stay on deck as the great woollen sails were unfurled and the ship pulled away from Londres, which sprawled over its banks in heaps of smoky industry. Jenny looked for her family’s ships in the docks; she was going to be away from home for years, and the parting from her mother had been tearful.

  But before the ship had left the Thames estuary the guests were ordered below deck, and the hatches were locked and sealed. There weren’t even any windows in the ship’s sleek hull. Their Inca hosts wanted to save a remarkable surprise for them, they said, a surprise revealed to every crew who crossed the equator, but not until then.

  And they were all, even Alphonse, put through a program of inoculation, injected with various potions and their bodies bathed with a prickly light. The Inca doctors said this was to weed out their “herd diseases.” All the Europeans resented this, though Darwin marveled at the medical technology on display.

  At least you could see the Incas’ faces, however, now that they had discarded their masks. They were a proud-looking people with jet black hair, dark skin, and noses that would have been called Roman in Europe. None of the crew was particularly friendly. They wouldn’t speak Frankish or Anglais, and they looked on the Europeans with a kind of amused contempt. This infuriated Alphonse, for he was used to looking on others in precisely that way.

  Still, the ship’s sights were spectacular. Jenny was shown the great smelly hold where the llamas were kept during the journey. And she was shown around an engine room. Jenny’s family ran steam scows, and she had expected Watt engines, heavy, clunky, soot-coated iron monsters. The Viracocha’s engine room was a pristine white-walled hall inhabited by sleek metal shapes. The air was filled with a soft humming, and there was a sharp smell in the air that reminded her of the seashore. These smooth sculptures didn’t even look like engines to Jenny, and whatever principle they worked on had nothing to do with steam, evidently. So much for her father’s fond hopes of selling coal to the mighty Inca empire!

  Despite such marvels, Jenny chafed at her confinement below decks. What made it worse was that she saw little of her friends. Alphonse was whisked off to a program of study of Inca culture and science, mediated by Darwin. And in his free time he monopolized Dreamer for private language classes; he wanted to learn as much Quechua as he could manage, for he did not trust the Inca.

  This irritated Jenny more than she was prepared to admit, for the times she relished most of all were the snatched moments she spent with Dreamer.

  One free evening Dreamer took her to the navigation bay. The walls were covered with charts, curves that might have shown the trajectory of the sun and moon across the sky, and other diagrams showing various aspects of a misty-gold spiral shape that meant nothing to Jenny. There was a globe that drew her eye; glowing, painted, it was covered with unfamiliar shapes, but one strip of blue looked just like a map of the Mediterranean.

  The most wondrous object in the room was a kind of loom, rank upon rank of knotted string that stretched from floor to ceiling and wall to wall—but unlike a loom it was extended in depth as well. As she peered into this array, she saw metal fingers pluck blindly at the strings, making the knots slide this way and that.

  Dreamer watched her, as she watched the string. “I’m starting to think Alphonse is using the language classes as an excuse to keep me away from you. Perhaps the prince wants you for himself. Who wouldn’t desire such beauty?”

  Jenny pulled her face at this gross flattery. “Tell me what this loom is for.”

  “The Inca have always represented their numbers and words on quipus, bits of knotted string. Even after they learned writing from their Aztec neighbors, whom they encountered at the start of the Sunrise.”

  “The Sunrise?”

  “That is their modest name for their program of expansion across the world. Jenny, this is a machine for figuring numbers. The Inca use it to calculate their journeys across the world’s oceans. But it can perform any sum you like.”

  “My father would like one of these to figure his tax return.”

  Dreamer laughed.

  She said, “But everybody knows that you can’t navigate at night, when the sun goes down, and the only beacons in the sky are the moon and planets, which career unpredictably all over the place. How, then, do the Inca find their way?” For the Europeans this was the greatest mystery about the Inca. Even the greatest seamen of the past, the Vikings, had barely had the courage to probe away from the shore.

  Dreamer glanced at the strange charts on the wall. “Look, they made us promise not to tell any of you about—well, certain matters, before the Inca deem you ready. But there’s something here I do want to show you.” He led her across the room to the globe.

  That blue shape was undoubtedly the Mediterranean. “It’s the world,”
she breathed.

  “Yes.” He smiled. “The Inca have marked what they know of the European empires. Look, here is Grand Bretagne.”

  “Why, even Europe is only a peninsula dangling from the carcass of Asia.”

  “You know, your sense of wonder is the most attractive thing about you.”

  She snorted. “Really? More than my eyes and teeth and neck, and the other bits of me you’ve been praising? I’ll believe that when a second sun rises in the sky. Show me where you come from—and the Inca.”

  Passing his hand over the globe, he made the world spin and dip.

  He showed her what lay beyond the Ottoman empire, the solemn Islamic unity that had blocked Christendom from the east for centuries: the vast expanses of Asia, India, the sprawling empire of China, Nippon, the Spice Islands. And he showed how Africa extended far beyond the arid northern regions held by the Ottomans, a great pendulous continent in its own right that sprawled, thrillingly, right across the equator.

  “You can in fact reach India and the east by sailing south around the cape of southern Africa,” Dreamer said. “Without losing sight of land, even. A man called Columbus was the first to attempt this in 1492. But he lacked the courage to cross the equator. Columbus went back to the family business of trouser-making, and Christian Europe stayed locked in.”

  Now he spun the globe to show her even stranger sights: a double continent, far to the west of Europe across the ocean, lands wholly unknown to any European. The Inca had come from a high country that ran north to south along the spine of the southernmost of the twin continents. “It is a place of mountains and coast, of long, long roads, and bridges centuries old, woven from vines, still in use . . .”

  Around the year 1500, according to the Christian calendar, the Inca’s greatest emperor Huayna Capac I, had emerged from a savage succession dispute to take sole control of the mountain empire. And under him, as the Inca consolidated, the great expansion called the Sunrise had begun. At first the Inca had used their woollen-sailed ships for trade and military expeditions up and down their long coastlines. But gradually they crept away from the shore.

  At last, on an island that turned out to be the tip of a grand volcanic mountain that stuck out of the sea, they found people. “These were a primitive sort, who sailed the oceans in canoes dug out of logs. Nevertheless, they had come out of the southeast of Asia and sailed right to the middle of the ocean, colonizing island chains as they went.” The Inca, emboldened by the geographical knowledge they took from their new island subjects, set off west once more, following island chains until they reached southeast Asia. All this sparked intellectual ferment, as exploration and conquest led to a revolution in sky watching, mathematics, and the sciences of life and language.

  The Inca, probing westward, at last reached Africa. And when in the early twentieth century they acquired lodestone compasses from Chinese traders, they found the courage to venture north.

  Jenny stared at the South Land. There was no real detail, just a few Inca towns dotted around the coast, an interior like a blank red canvas. “Tell me about your home.”

  He brushed the image of the island continent with his fingertips. “It is a harsh country, I suppose. Rust-red, worn flat by time. But there is much beauty and strangeness. Animals that jump rather than run, and carry their young in pouches on their bellies. Don’t laugh, it’s true! My people have lived there for sixty thousand years. That’s what the Inca scholars say, though how they can tell that from bits of bone and shards of stone tools I don’t know. My people are called the Bininj-Mungguy, and we live in the north, up here, in a land we call Kakadu.”

  Jenny’s imagination raced, and his strange words fascinated her. She drew closer to him, almost unconsciously, watching his mouth.

  “We have six seasons,” he said, “for our weather is not like yours. There is Gunumeleng, which is the season before the great rains, and then Gudjewg, when the rain comes, and then Banggerreng—”

  She stopped up his mouth with hers.

  After a week’s sailing the Viracocha crossed the equator. Atahualpa ordered a feast to be laid for his senior officers and guests. They were brought to a stateroom that, Jenny suspected from the stairs she had to climb, lay just under the deck itself. Tonight, Atahualpa promised, his passengers would be allowed on deck for the first time since Londres, and the great secret that the Incas had been hiding would be revealed.

  But by now Dreamer and Jenny had shared so many secrets that she scarcely cared.

  While the Inca crew wore their customary llama-wool and cotton uniforms, George Darwin wore his clerical finery, Alphonse the powdered wig and face powder of his father’s court, and Jenny a simple shift, her Sunday best. Dreamer was just one of the many representatives of provinces of the Inca’s ocean-spanning empire aboard ship. They wore elaborate costumes of cloth and feather, so that they looked like a row of exotic birds, Jenny thought, sitting there in a row at the commander’s table.

  In some ways Dreamer’s own garb was the most extraordinary. He was stripped naked save for a loin-cloth, his face-spiral tattoo was picked out in some yellow dye, and he had finger-painted designs on his body in chalk-white, a sprawling lizard, an outstretched hand. Jenny was jealously aware that she wasn’t the only woman who kept glancing at Dreamer’s muscled torso—and a few men did too.

  The Inca went through their own equator-crossing ritual. This involved taking a live chicken, slitting its belly and pulling out its entrails, right there on the dinner table, while muttering antique-sounding prayers.

  Bishop Darwin tried to watch this with calm appreciation. “Evidently an element of animism and the superstitious has survived in our hosts’ theology,” he murmured.

  Alphonse didn’t bother to hide his disgust. “I’ve had enough of these savages.”

  “Hush,” Jenny murmured. “If you assume none of them can speak Frankish, you’re a fool.”

  He glared defiantly, but he switched to Anglais. “Well, I’ve never heard any of them utter a single word. And they assume I know a lot less Quechua than I’ve learned, thanks to your bare-chested friend over there. They say things in front of me that they think I won’t understand—but I do.”

  He was only sixteen, as Jenny was; he sounded absurd, self-important. But he was a prince who had grown up in the atmosphere of the most conspiratorial and backstabbing court in all Christendom. He was attuned to detecting lies and power plays. She asked, “What sort of things?”

  “About the ‘problem’ we pose them. We Europeans. We aren’t like Dreamer’s folk of the South Land, hairy-arsed savages in the desert. We have great cities; we have armies. We may not have their silver ships and flying machines, but we could put up a fight. That’s the problem.”

  She frowned. “It’s a problem only if the Inca come looking for war.”

  He scoffed. “Oh, come, Jenny, even an Anglais can’t be so näve. All this friendship-across-the-sea stuff is just a smoke screen. Everything they’ve done has been in the manner of an opening salvo: the donation of farspeakers to every palace in Europe, the planting of their Orbs of the Unblinking Eye in every city. What I can’t figure out is what they intend by all this.”

  “Maybe Inca warriors will jump out of the Orbs and run off with the altar silver.”

  “You’re a fool,” he murmured without malice.

  “Like all Anglais. You and desert boy over there deserve each other. Well, I’ve had enough of Atahualpa’s droning voice. While they’re all busy here, I’m going to see what I can find out.” He stood.

  She hissed. “Be careful.”

  He ignored her. He nodded to his host. Atahualpa waved him away, uncaring.

  Atahualpa had begun a conversation with Darwin on the supposed backwardness of European science and philosophy. Evidently it was a dialog that had been developing during the voyage, as the Inca tutors got to know the minds of their students. “Here is the flaw in your history as I see it,” he said. “Unlike the Inca, you Europeans never mastered
the science of the sky. To you all is chaos.”

  Jenny admired old Darwin’s stoicism. With resigned good humor, he said, “Isn’t that obvious? All those planets swooping around the sky—only the sun is stable, the pivot of the universe. Do you know, long before the birth of Christ-Ra a Greek philosopher called Aristotle tried to prove that the sun revolves round the Earth, rather than the other way around!”

  But Atahualpa would not be deflected. “The point is that the motion of the planets is not chaotic, not if you look at it correctly.” A bowl of the chicken’s blood had been set before him. He dipped his finger in this and sketched a solar system on the tabletop, sun at the center, Earth’s orbit, the neat circles of the inner planets and the wildly swooping flights of the outer.

  Servants brought plates of food. There was the meat of roast rodent and duck, heaps of maize, squash, tomatoes, peanuts, and plates of a white tuber, a root vegetable unknown to Europe but tasty and filling.

  “There,” said Atahualpa. “Now, look, you see. Each planet follows an ellipse, with the sun at one focus. These patterns are repeated and quite predictable, though the extreme eccentricity of the outer worlds’ orbits makes them hard to decipher. We managed it, though—although I grant you we always had one significant advantage over you, as you will learn tonight! Let me tell you how our science developed after that . . .”

  He listed Inca astronomers and mathematicians, names like Huascar and Manco and Yupanqui, which meant nothing to Jenny. “After we mapped the planets’ elliptical trajectories, it was the genius of Yupanqui that he was able to show why the worlds followed such paths, because of a single, simple law: The planets are drawn to the sun with an attraction that falls off inversely with the square of distance.”

  Darwin said bravely, “I am sure our scholars in Paris and Damascus would welcome—”

  Atahualpa ignored him, digging into his food with his blood-stained fingers. “But Yupanqui’s greatest legacy was the insight that the world is explicable: that simple, general laws can explain a range of particular instances. It is that core philosophy that we have applied to other disciplines.” He gestured at the diffuse light that filled the room. “You cower from the light of the sun, and fear the lightning, and are baffled by the wandering of a lodestone. But we know that these are all aspects of a single underlying force, which we can manipulate to build the engines that drive this ship and the farspeakers that enable the emperor’s voice to span continents. If your minds had been opened up, your science might be less of a hotchpotch. And your religion might not be so primitive.”