Alternate Americas Read online

  He found me unconscious in the shallows, unscathed except that my beard and eyebrows were singed and my clothes torn. Like a meteor, I had fallen back to earth, back to life. I had fallen the way stars fall, from the remote darkness where they have shivered in the cold down into the warm, close darkness of earthly life. That night I fell from the gloom of my solitary grief into the dark of terrestrial life, where we all suffer together in our unknowing. Slapped alert by the watch, I sat up in the moon-dappled shallows and saw my forty summers fall away into emptiness. The ship was gone—just as you are gone, Heart Wing, and our daughter gone into that emptiness the Buddhists call sunyata, which is really the void of our unknowing, the mystery that bears everything that lives and dies.

  How foolish to say all this to you, who dwells now in the heart of this emptiness. But I, I have been ignorant, asleep. I needed reminding that time and the things of falling shall not fall into darkness but into a new freedom we cannot name and so call emptiness. All of reality floats in that vacancy, like the spheres in the void of space, like these words floating in the emptiness of the page. Words try to capture reality, yet what they actually capture are only more words and deeper doubts. Mystery is the preeminent condition of human being—and yet it is also our freedom to be exactly who we are, free to choose the words our doubts require.

  No one in the delegation understood this when I was taken back to the mission to account for myself. Grateful as they were for my stopping the theft of the Imperial ship, they were sure the explosion had addled me. I think the monks knew what I meant, but they are of the “just so” sect of Ch’an Buddhism, so they would be the last to let on.

  Be that as it may, I sat there quite agog and amazed, awakened to the knowledge that the freedom to be who I am means, quite simply, that I am alone—without you. For now it is meant that this be so. For reasons I will never truly understand, death is denied me. So what am I to do with this life, then, and this loneliness? This freedom to be, this freedom whose chances bleed from us, creates new imperatives. In the place of my failure and shame waits a gaping emptiness wanting to be filled with what I might yet be.

  As I meditated on this, the delegation wrote an official missive admonishing the Big Noses for their attempted thievery and threatening to report them to the Emperor. The Big Noses, all of whom had escaped the explosion and retreated to their ship, replied with a terse letter of halfhearted apology. With no other Imperial vessel anywhere in the vicinity and none of the Autocracies’ forces nearby, our host, the monastery’s abbot, urged us to accept the apology.

  In an effort to both placate and hurry the Colonizer on his way, the delegation decided to load his ships with all the porcelain in the mission, several remarkable landscape paintings, a jade statue of Kwan Yin, goddess of serenity, as well, as bales of crops he had never seen before, notably tobacco, peanuts, and potatoes. By then, inspired by my lack of family and career, I had decided to take the poison cure required by my sorrow: I have, dear wife, forsaken my return to the Middle Kingdom to go with the Colonizer on his return voyage across the Storm Sea to his homeland.

  Do you admonish me for being foolish? Indeed, the decision was a difficult one, for I had hoped to return to our homeland and administer the rites myself at your gravesite. But if what I have learned of the emptiness is true, then you are no more there than here. The path of the Way is a roadlessness without departure or arrival. I have decided, Heart Wing, to follow that path, to fit the unaccomplished parts of my life to the future and embrace the unknown.

  The delegation strove in vain to dissuade me. They fear that I have gone truly mad. But I don’t care at all. I know you would understand, Heart Wing, you whom I first won with the bridebait of stories written by the lamp of lightning. So, as absurd as this may be, I sit here now, writing to you on the quarterdeck of a leaky vessel named Santa María.

  I can tell from the way he looks at me that the Colonizer is still angry that I deprived him of his booty, and I know he has only taken me on board with the expectation of getting useful information from me. But for now our ignorance of each other’s languages offers me a chance to win the Big Noses’ respect by my deeds—and to watch and learn about these barbarians.

  In time I will understand their language. I will inform their emperor of the wonders of the Middle Kingdom, of the achievements of the Unified Sandalwood Autocracies, of the glory of our people. And I will write again from the far side of the world, from so far east, it is the west where sun and moon meet. And from there I will send back to the Kingdom and to the USA stories everyone will read, stories of another world, written in ink from the new moon.

  VINLAND THE DREAM

  Kim Stanley Robinson

  Abstract. It was sunset at L’Anse aux Meadows. The water of the bay was still, the boggy beach was dark in shadows. Flat arms of land pointed to flat islands offshore; beyond these a taller island stood like a loaf of stone in the sea, catching the last of the day’s light. A stream gurgled gently as it cut through the beach bog. Above the bog, on a narrow grassy terrace, one could just make out a pattern of low mounds, all that remained of sod walls. Next to them were three or four sod buildings, and beyond the buildings, a number of tents.

  A group of people—archeologists, graduate students, volunteer laborers, visitors—moved together onto a rocky ridge overlooking the site. Some of them worked at starting a campfire in a ring of blackened stones; others began to unpack bags of food, and cases of beer. Far across the water lay the dark bulk of Labrador. Kindling caught and their fire burned, a spark of yellow in the dusk’s gloom.

  Hot dogs and beer, around a campfire by the sea; and yet it was strangely quiet. Voices were subdued. The people on the hill glanced down often at the site, where the head of their dig, a lanky man in his early fifties, was giving a brief tour to their distinguished guest. The distinguished guest did not appear pleased.

  Introduction. The head of the dig, an archeology professor from McGill University, was looking at the distinguished guest with the expression he wore when confronted by an aggressive undergraduate. The distinguished guest, Canada’s Minister of Culture, was asking question after question. As she did, the professor took her to look for herself, at the forge, and the slag pit, and the little midden beside Building E. New trenches were cut across the mounds and depressions, perfect rectangular cuts in the black peat; they could tell the minister nothing of what they had revealed. But she had insisted on seeing them, and now she was asking questions that got right to the point, although they could have been asked and answered just as well in Ottawa. Yes, the professor explained, the fuel for the forge was wood charcoal, the temperature had gotten to around twelve hundred degrees Celsius, the process was direct reduction of bog ore, obtaining about one kilogram of iron for every five kilograms of slag. All was as it was in other Norse forges—except that the limonites in the bog ore had now been precisely identified by spectroscopic analysis; and that analysis had revealed that the bog iron smelted here had come from northern Quebec, near Chicoutimi. The Norse explorers, who had supposedly smelted the bog ore, could not have obtained it.

  There was a similar situation in the midden; rust migrated in peat at a known rate, and so it could be determined that the many iron rivets in the midden had only been there a hundred and forty years, plus or minus fifty.

  “So,” the minister said, in English with a Francophone lilt. “You have proved your case, it appears?”

  The professor nodded wordlessly. The minister watched him, and he couldn’t help feeling that despite the nature of the news he was giving her, she was somewhat amused. By him? By his scientific terminology? By his obvious (and growing) depression? He couldn’t tell.

  The minister raised her eyebrows. “L’Anse aux Meadows, a hoax. Parcs Canada will not like it at all.”

  “No one will like it,” the professor croaked.

  “No,” the minister said, looking at him. “I suppose not. Particularly as this is part of a larger pattern, yes?”


  The professor did not reply.

  “The entire concept of Vinland,” she said. “A hoax!”

  The professor nodded glumly.

  “I would not have believed it possible.”

  “No,” the professor said. “But—” He waved a hand at the low mounds around them—“So it appears.” He shrugged. “The story has always rested on a very small body of evidence. Three sagas, this site, a few references in Scandinavian records, a few coins, a few cairns He shook his head. “Not much.” He picked up a chunk of dried peat from the ground, crumbled it in his fingers.

  Suddenly the minister laughed at him, then put her hand to his upper arm. Her fingers were warm. “You must remember, it is not your fault.”

  He smiled wanly. “I suppose not.” He liked the look on her face; sympathetic as well as amused. She was about his age, perhaps a bit older. An attractive and sophisticated Quebecois. “I need a drink,” he confessed.

  “There’s beer on the hill.”

  “Something stronger. I have a bottle of cognac I haven’t opened yet…”

  “Let’s get it and take it up there with us.”

  Experimental Methods. The graduate students and volunteer laborers were gathered around the fire, and the smell of roasting hot dogs filled the air. It was nearly eleven, the sun a half hour gone, and the last light of the summer dusk slowly leaked from the sky. The fire burned like a beacon. Beer had been flowing freely, and the party was beginning to get a little more boisterous.

  The minister and the professor stood near the fire, drinking cognac out of plastic cups.

  “How did you come to suspect the story of Vinland?” the minister asked as they watched the students cook hot dogs.

  A couple of the volunteer laborers, who had paid good money to spend their summer digging trenches in a bog, heard the question and moved closer.

  The professor shrugged. “I can’t quite remember.” He tried to laugh. “Here I am an archeologist, and I can’t remember my own past.”

  The minister nodded as if that made sense. “I suppose it was a long time ago?”

  “Yes.” He concentrated. “Now what was it. Someone was following up the story of the Vinland map, to try and figure out who had done it. The map showed up in a bookstore in New Haven in the 1950s—as you may know?”

  “No,” the minister said. “I hardly know a thing about Vinland, I assure you. Just the basics that anyone in my position would have to know.”

  “Well, there was a map found in the 1950s called the Vinland map, and it was shown to be a hoax soon after its discovery. But when this investigator traced the map’s history, she found that the book it had been in was accounted for all the way back to the 1820s, map and all. It meant the hoaxer had lived longer ago than I had expected.” He refilled his cup of cognac, then the minister’s. “There were a lot of Viking hoaxes in the nineteenth century, but this one was so early. It surprised me. It’s generally thought that the whole phenomenon was stimulated by a book that a Danish scholar published in 1837, containing translations of the Vinland sagas and related material. The book was very popular among the Scandinavian settlers in America, and after that, you know … a kind of twisted patriotism, or the response of an ethnic group that had been made fun of too often…. So we got the Kensington stone, the halberds, the mooring holes, the coins. But if a hoax predated Antiquitates Americanae … it made me wonder.”

  “If the book itself were somehow involved?”

  “Exactly,” the professor said, regarding the minister with pleasure. “I wondered if the book might not incorporate, or have been inspired by, hoaxed material. Then one day I was reading a description of the field work here, and it occurred to me that this site was a bit too pristine. As if it had been built but never lived in. Best estimates for its occupation were as low as one summer, because they couldn’t find any trash middens to speak of, or graves.”

  “It could have been occupied very briefly,” the minister pointed out.

  “Yes, I know. That’s what I thought at the time. But then I heard from a colleague in Bergen that the Gronlendinga Saga was apparently a forgery, at least in the parts referring to the discovery of Vinland. Pages had been inserted that dated back to the 1820s. After that, I had a doubt that wouldn’t go away.”

  “But there are more Vinland stories than that one, yes?”

  “Yes. There are three main sources. The Gronlendinga Saga, The Saga of Erik the Red, and the part of The Hauksbók that tells about Thorfinn Karlsefni’s expedition. But with one of those questioned, I began to doubt them all. And the story itself. Everything having to do with the idea of Vinland.”

  “Is that when you went to Bergen?” a graduate student asked.

  The professor nodded. He drained his plastic cup, felt the alcohol rushing through him. “I joined Nielsen there and we went over Erik the Red and The Hauksbók, and damned if the pages in those concerning Vinland weren’t forgeries too. The ink gave it away—not its composition, which was about right, but merely how long it had been on that paper. Which was thirteenth century paper, I might add! The forger had done a super job. But the sagas had been tampered with sometime in the early nineteenth century.”

  “But those are masterpieces of world literature,” a volunteer laborer exclaimed, round-eyed; the ads for volunteer labor had not included a description of the primary investigator’s hypothesis.

  “I know,” the professor said irritably, and shrugged.

  He saw a chunk of peat on the ground, picked it up and threw it on the blaze. After a bit it flared up.

  “It’s like watching dirt burn,” he said absently, staring into the flames.

  Discussion. The burnt-garbage smell of peat wafted downwind, and offshore the calm water of the bay was riffled by the same gentle breeze. The minister warmed her hands at the blaze for a moment, then gestured at the bay. “It’s hard to believe they were never here at all.”

  “I know,” the professor said. “It looks like a Viking site, I’ll give him that.”

  “Him,” the minister repeated.

  “I know, I know. This whole thing forces you to imagine a man in the eighteen twenties and thirties, traveling all over—Norway, Iceland, Canada, New England, Rome, Stockholm, Denmark, Greenland…. Crisscrossing the North Atlantic, to bury all these signs.” He shook his head. “It’s incredible.”

  He retrieved the cognac bottle and refilled. He was, he had to admit, beginning to feel drunk. “And so many parts of the hoax were well hidden! You can’t assume we’ve found them all. This place had two butternuts buried in the midden, and butternuts only grow down below the St. Lawrence, so who’s to say they aren’t clues, indicating another site down there? That’s where grapevines actually grow, which would justify the name Vinland. I tell you, the more I know about this hoaxer, the more certain I am that other sites exist. The tower in Newport, Rhode Island, for instance—the hoaxer didn’t build that, because it’s been around since the seventeenth century—but a little work out there at night, in the early nineteenth century … I bet if it were excavated completely you’d find a few Norse artifacts.”

  “Buried in all the right places,” the minister said.

  “Exactly.” The professor nodded. “And up the coast of Labrador, at Cape Porcupine where the sagas say they repaired a ship. There too. Stuff scattered everywhere, left to be discovered or not.”

  The minister waved her plastic cup. “But surely this site must have been his masterpiece. He couldn’t have done too many as extensive as this.”

  “I shouldn’t think so.” The professor drank deeply, smacked his numbed lips. “Maybe one more like this, down in New Brunswick. That’s my guess. But this was surely one of his biggest projects.”

  “It was a time for that kind of thing,” the volunteer laborer offered. “Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria…”

  The minister nodded. “It fulfills a certain desire.”

  “Theosophy, most of that,” the professor muttered. “This was different.” The v
olunteer wandered off. The professor and the minister looked into the fire for a while.

  “You are sure?” the minister asked.

  The professor nodded. “Trace elements show the ore came from upper Quebec. Chemical changes in the peat weren’t right. And nuclear resonance dating methods show that the bronze pin they found hadn’t been buried long enough. Little things like that. Nothing obvious. He was amazingly meticulous, he really thought it out. But the nature of things tripped him up. Nothing more than that.”

  “But the effort!” the minister said. “This is what I find hard to believe. Surely it must have been more than one man! Burying these objects, building the walls—surely he would have been noticed!”

  The professor stopped another swallow, nodded at her as he choked once or twice. A broad wave of the hand, a gasping recovery of breath: “Fishing village, kilometer north of here. Boarding house in the early nineteenth century. A crew of ten rented rooms in the summer of 1842. Bills paid by a Mr. Carlsson.”

  The minister raised her eyebrows. “Ah.”

  One of the graduate students got out a guitar and began to play. The other students and the volunteers gathered around her.

  “So,” the minister said, “Mr. Carlsson. Does he show up elsewhere?”

  “There was a Professor Ohman in Bergen. A Dr. Bergen in Reykjavik. In the right years, studying the sagas. I presume they were all him, but I don’t know for sure.”

  “What do you know about him?”

  “Nothing. No one paid much attention to him. I’ve got him on a couple transatlantic crossings, I think, but he used aliases, so I’ve probably missed most of them. A Scandinavian-American, apparently Norwegian by birth. Someone with some money—someone with patriotic feelings of some kind—someone with a grudge against a university—who knows? All I have are a few signatures, of aliases at that. A flowery handwriting. Nothing more. That’s the most remarkable thing about him! You see, most hoaxers leave clues to their identities, because a part of them wants to be caught. So their cleverness can be admired, or the ones who fell for it embarrassed, or whatever. But this guy didn’t want to be discovered. And in those days, if you wanted to stay off the record…” He shook his head.