The Years of Rice and Salt (74 page)

“This is how all the world will look, as people become more mobile,” Abdol Zoroush said to Budur and Piali afterward, as he showed them around the institute's grounds, very extensive, and then the riverside district just south of it. There was a promenade overlooking the river being built, with cafés backing it and a view of the mountains upstream, which Zoroush said had been designed with the estuary corniche of Nsara in mind. “We wanted to have something like your great city, landlocked though we are. We want a little of that sense of openness.”

The conference began
the next day, and for the next week Budur did little else but attend sessions on various topics related to what many there were calling the new archaeology, a science rather than just a hobby of antiquarians, or the misty starting point of the historians. Piali meanwhile disappeared into the physical sciences buildings for meetings on physics. The two of them then met again for supper in big groups of scientists, seldom getting the chance to talk in private.

For Budur the archaeological presentations, coming from all over the world, were a very exciting education all by themselves, making clear to her and everyone else that in the postwar reconstruction, with the new discoveries and the development of new methodologies, and a provisional framework of early world history, a new science and a new understanding of their deep past was coming into being right before their eyes. The sessions were overbooked, and went long into the evenings. Many presentations were made in the hallways, with the presenters standing by posters or chalkboards, talking and gesturing and answering questions. There were more that Budur wanted to attend than was possible, and she quickly developed the habit of positioning herself at the back of the rooms or the crowds in the halls, taking in the crux of a presentation while perusing the schedule, and planning her next hour's wandering.

In one room she stopped to listen to an old man from western Yingzhou, Japanese or Chinese in ancestry, it appeared, speaking in an awkward Persian about the cultures that existed in the New World when it had been discovered by the Old. It was her acquaintance with Hanea and Ganagweh that made her interested.

“Although in terms of machinery, architecture, and so forth, the inhabitants of the New World still existed in the oldest days, without domesticated animals in Yingzhou, and none but guinea pigs and llamas in Inka, the culture of the Inkas and Aztecs somewhat resembled what we are learning of ancient Egypt. Thus the Yingzhou tribes lived as people in the Old World did before the first cities, say around eight thousand years ago, while the southern empires of Inka resembled the Old World of about four thousand years ago: a distinct difference, which it would be interesting to explain, if you could. Perhaps Inka had some topographical or resource advantages, such as the llama, a beast of burden which, though slight by Old World standards, was more than Yingzhou had. This put more power at their disposal, and as our host Master Zoroush has made clear, in the energy equations used to judge a culture, the power they can bring to bear against the natural world is a crucial factor in their development.

“In any case, the great degree of primitivity in Yingzhou actually gives us a view into social structures that might be like the Old World's preagricultural societies. They are curiously modern in certain respects. Because they had the basics of agriculture—squash, corn, beans, and so on—and had a small population to support in a forest that provided enormous numbers of game animals and nut-bearing trees, they lived in a prescarcity economy, just as we now glimpse a technologically created postscarcity state in its theoretical possibility. In both, the individual receives more recognition as a value bearer him- or herself, than does the individual in a scarcity economy. And there is less domination of one caste by another. In these conditions of material ease and plenty, we find the great egalitarianism of the Hodenosaunee, the power wielded by women in their culture, and the absence of slavery—rather, the rapid incorporation of defeated tribes into the full texture of the state.

“By the time of the First Great Empires, four thousand years later, all this was gone, replaced by an extreme vertical scale, with god-kings, a priest caste with ultimate power, permanent military control, and slavery of defeated nations. These early developments, or one should say pathologies, of civilization (for the gathering into cities greatly speeded this process) are only now being dealt with, some four thousand years later still, in the most progressive societies of the world.

“In the meantime, of course, both these archaic cultures have almost entirely disappeared from this world, mostly due to the impact of Old World diseases on populations that apparently had never been exposed to them. Interestingly, it was the southern empires that collapsed most quickly and completely, conquered almost incidentally by the Chinese gold armies, and then quickly devastated by disease and famine, as if the body without its head must die instantly. Whereas in the north it was completely different, first because the Hodenosaunee were able to defend themselves in the depths of the great eastern forest, never fully succumbing to either the Chinese or to the Islamic incursion from across the Atlantic, and second because they were much less susceptible to Old World diseases, possibly because of early exposure to them from wandering Japanese monks, traders, trappers, and prospectors, who ended up infecting the local populace in small numbers, thus serving in effect as human inoculants, immunizing or at least preparing the population of Yingzhou for a fuller incursion of Asians, who did not have quite as devastating an effect, although of course many people and tribes did die.”

Budur moved on, thinking about the notion of a postscarcity society, which in hungry Nsara she had never heard of at all. But it was time for another session, a plenary affair that Budur did not want to miss, and which turned out to be one of the most heavily attended. It concerned the question of the lost Franks, and why the plague had hit them so hard.

Much work had been done in this area by the Zott scholar Istvan Romani, who had done his research around the periphery of the plague zone, in Magyaristan and Moldava; and the plague itself had been studied intensively during the Long War, when it seemed possible that one side or another would unleash it as a weapon. It was understood now that it had been conveyed in the first centuries by fleas living on gray rats, traveling on ships and in caravans. A town called Issyk Kul, south of Lake Balkhash in Turkestan, had been studied by Romani and a Chinese scholar named Jiang, and they had found evidence in the cemetery of the town's Nestorians of a heavy die-off from the plague around the year 700. This had apparently been the start of the epidemic that had moved west on the Silk Roads to Sarai, capital at that time of the Golden Horde khanate. One of their khans, Yanibeg, had besieged the Genoese port of Kaffa in the Crimea by catapulting the bodies of plague victims over the town walls. The Genoese had thrown the bodies in the sea, but this had not stopped the plague from infecting the entire Genoese network of trading ports, including, eventually, the whole of the Mediterranean. The plague moved from port to port, took a respite during the winters, then a renewal in the hinterlands the following spring; this pattern continued for over twenty years. All the westernmost peninsulas of the Old World were devastated, moving north from the Mediterranean and back to the east as far as Moscow, Novgorod, Kopenhagen and the Baltic ports. At the end of this time the population in Firanja was perhaps thirty percent of what it had been before the onset of the epidemic. Then in the years around 777, a date considered significant at the time by some mullahs and Sufi mystics, a second wave of the plague—if it was the plague—had killed off almost all the survivors of the first wave, so that sailors at the start of the eighth century reported witnessing, usually from offshore, a completely emptied land.

Now there were scholars giving presentations who believed that the second plague had actually been anthrax, following on the bubonic plague; there were others who held the reverse position, arguing that contemporary accounts of the first sickness matched the freckling of anthrax more often than the buboes of bubonic plague, while the final blow had been the plague. It was explained in this session that the plague itself had bubonic, septic, and pneumonic forms, and that the pneumonia caused by the pneumonic form was contagious, and very fast and lethal; the septic form even more lethal. Indeed, much had been clarified about all these diseases by the unfortunate experiences of the Long War.

But why had the disease, whichever one it had been, or in whatever combinations, been so lethal in Firanja and not elsewhere? The meeting offered presentation after presentation by scholars advancing one theory after another. From her notes Budur described them all for Piali at the end of the day, over supper, and he quickly jotted them down on a napkin.

• Plague animalcules mutated in the 770s to take on forms and virulence similar to tuberculosis or typhoid

• Cities of Tuscany had reached enormous numbers by the eighth century, say two million people, and hygienic systems broke down and plague vectors ran wild

• Depopulation of the first plague followed by a series of disastrous floods that wrecked agriculture leading to starvation

• Supercontagious form of the animalcule mutated in northern France at the end of the first epidemic

• Pale skin of the Franks and Kelts lacked pigments that helped resist the disease, accounting for the freckling

• Sunspot cycle disrupted weather and caused epidemics every eleven years, effect worse every time—

“Sunspots?” Piali interjected.

“That's what he said.” Budur shrugged.

“So,” Piali said, looking over the napkin, “it was either the plague animalcules, or some other animalcules, or some quality of the people, or their habits, or their land, or the weather, or sunspots.” He grinned. “That pretty much covers it, I should think. Perhaps cosmic rays ought to be included. Wasn't there a big supernova spotted about that time?”

Budur could only laugh. “I think it was earlier. Anyway, you must admit, it does merit explaining.”

“Many things do, but it looks as though we have a way to go on this one.”

The presentations continued, ranging from the recording of the world that had existed just before the Long War, all the way back through time to the earliest human remains. This work on the first humans forced everyone to the contemplation of one of the larger arguments shaping up in the field, concerning human beginnings.

Archaeology as a discipline had its origins for the most part in the Chinese bureaucracy, but it had been picked up quickly by the Dinei people, who studied with the Chinese and went back to Yingzhou intending to learn what they could about the people they called the Anasazi, who had preceded them in the dry west of Yingzhou. The Dinei scholar Anan and his colleagues had offered the first explanations of human migration and history, asserting that tribes on Yingzhou had mined the tin on Yellow Island in the biggest of the great lakes, Manitoba, and shipped this tin across the oceans to all the bronze-era cultures in Africa and Asia. Anan's group contended that civilization had begun in the New World with the Inka and Aztecs and the Yingzhou tribes, in particular the old ones who preceded their Anasazi in the western deserts. Their great and ancient empires had sent out reed and balsam rafts, trading tin for spices and various plant stocks with Asian ancestry, and these Yingzhou traders had established the Mediterranean civilizations predating Greece, especially the ancient Egyptians and Midwestern empires, the Assyrians and Sumerians.

So the Dinei archaeologists had claimed, anyway, in a very fully articulated case, with all sorts of objects from all over the world to support it. But now a great deal of evidence was appearing in Asia and Firanja and Africa that indicated this story was all wrong. The oldest lifering dates for human settlement in the New World were about twenty thousand years before the present, and everyone had agreed at first that this was extremely old, and predated by a good deal the earliest civilizations known to Old World history, the Chinese and the Midwestern and Egyptian; so at that point it had all seemed plausible. But now that the war was over, scientists were beginning to investigate the Old World in a way that hadn't been possible since a time predating modern archaeology itself. And what they were finding was a great quantity of signs of a human past far older than any yet known. Caves in the Nsaran south containing superb drawings of animals were now reliably dated at forty thousand years. Skeletons in the Midwest appeared to be a hundred thousand years old. And there were scholars from Ingali in South Africa saying they had found remains of humans, or evolutionarily ancestral prehumans, that appeared to be several hundred thousand years old. They could not use lifering dating for these finds, but had different dating methods they thought were just as good as the lifering method.

Nowhere else on Earth were people making a claim like this one from the Africans, and there was a great deal of skepticism about it; some queried the dating methods, other simply dismissed the claim out of hand, as a manifestation of some kind of continental or racial patriotism. Naturally the African scholars were upset by this response, and the meeting that afternoon took on a volatile aspect that could not help but remind people of the late war. It was important to keep the discourse on a scientific basis, as an investigation into facts uncontaminated by religion or politics or race.

“I suppose there can be patriotism in anything,” Budur said to Piali that night. “Archaeological patriotism is absurd, but it's beginning to look that's how it started in Yingzhou. An unconscious bias, no doubt, toward one's own region. And until we sort out the dating of things, it's an open question what model will replace theirs.”

“Certainly the dating methods will improve,” Piali said.

“True. But meanwhile all is confusion.”

“That's true of everything.”