ReVISIONS (6 page)
Authors: Julie E. Czerneda
“I'd love to study there. You could come.”
“What, China?” William shook his head. “Too far from home, my friend. I plan to attend the London College of Physicians, or mayhap the Collège Royal in Paris. Lenses. The mechanics of the body. Medicine is where to make a mark, Byron. And fortune.”
“I've sufficient fortune, William. Medicine doesn't interest me. Public office, now. There's a future.”
“Ambitious, aren't you?” William stopped rowing, his round face troubled. Lily pads kissed the hull. “You'd have to pass the civil service exams. Not to mention you have to qualify to take the bloody things. Scant few who do come from England. By the time you make Lord Mayor of London, you'll be gray, and theyâ” a nod to the shore lined with dewy-eyed maidens, “âwon't be waiting.”
Byron dipped his hand into the water, then brought his fingers to his lips and licked them. “The Thames, William, safe to drink within our parents' lifetime. Their lifetimes, a third longer than our grandparents'. Trade routes to Zimbabwe, Ghana, and Songhai, protected from the threat of malaria, typhus, or sleeping sickness. Our world is changing for the better because it is served by those educated in the arts, philosophies, and sciences. I know I must study. Public office must be filled by those who understand the past and can build for the future.”
“I'm all for clean water,” William replied, “and I won't deny the inventions of our time are marvels, Byron. But have you tried getting an audience with one of those old men? Before every city wanted nothing but esteemed scholars, you could at least bribe a permit from a bored young clerk with a pint.” He dug in the oars again, as if straining against fate. “You heard they refused John Cabot permission to cross the Atlantic?”
“What did you expect? The inspectors found a rat in his hold.”
“And I say it was probably put thereâ” William paused. “I know what you'll say. There are no rats left in England and Cabot deserves time in the Tower for being so careless, no matter how it came on his ship. But there's a difference between care and obsession, Byron. You have noticed, I'm sure, the wealth of our northern neighbors, the Danes. They traffic with the New World and have managed to avoid contamination.”
“They claim.”
“Who's to call them false? We're being closed off from the rest of the world, Byron, while scholars from the East build us better toilets.”
“It's not a perfect system,” Byron said. “Yet, imagine what things might have been like if China hadn't shared the knowledge of how diseases spread from beast to man?” He gave a theatrical shudder. “Thousands dying, without understanding how or why. At best, they'd seek answers from religion, fearing divine punishment. At worse, they'd hunt for those to blame. It might have been people, not vermin, who were slaughtered.” Another shudder, less contrived. “It would have been a black time, William. The scholars spared us that.”
“Ay. Well, if you must become a dusty old thinker, where will you go?”
“I've applied to Maimonides, in Tudela, Spain. Some of the most famous Jewish, Arab, and Chinese scholars have attended.”
“Then you'll come home.”
Byron leaned back, arms behind his head. “I'm more ambitious than that, fair William. Maybe I'll find a way to set foot in the New World.”
“And maybe,” William laughed, “you'll start by acknowledging the frantic waving of that dainty treat before she falls into the river and you must explain your woeful neglect to her father.”
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An estate in Yunnan Province, Central Asian Bios, 2003 AD
“They say the surface of a clear lake is an aperture into another world, another time, an other reality.”
Song Xai squinted at the tiny pond, ablaze with reflected sunlight. “If that's so, Grandfather,” she ventured, “it must be warmer there.” She'd already pulled her sleeves over her fingers; now she tucked her hands under her arms.
Her grandfather's face creased into a hundred tiny smiles. “You don't have to stay out here with me, Little Blossom. Your mother values your visits also.”
She didn't move from her seat on the stone bench. Any chance she had of convincing him and, through him, others meant persistence. The chill of late autumn was a small price to pay for the future. “I've something to discuss with you, Grandfather, that is best said out here, in your garden, where there will be no interruptions.”
Dr. Song Li's smile faded. “Perhaps it is something best not said at all.” For an instant, Song Xai glimpsed the will her grandfather must have shown in the Council of Civils, when he was one of the Thirteen who governed this bios.
“I must. I need your wisdom.” She paused to marshal the arguments that had seemed so irrefutable on the speedtrain, then changed her mind. His familiar presence comforted her into the simple truth. “Grand-father, there is a manâ” His expression cheered until Song Xai shook her head. “A colleague. A visionary. He leads a team of researchers. His workâour workâcould change the shape of the world.”
“Why would you wish to do that, Granddaughter?” The wording might have come from a civil inquisitor. Song Xai refused to hear any threat in her grandfather's soft voice. She needed him. Even in retirement, Song Li wielded immense influence over the reigning civils, his age and experience treasures beyond price.
In his own way, he had been a visionary. And he loved her. With his support, her dream could happen.
Would happen
, she told herself.
Would happen
, she told herself.
Like a lucky omen, a flock of cranes appeared in the sky, their huge wings beating in synchrony. Gathering her courage, Song Xai pointed at the birds. “That is our dream, Grandfather.”
“To visit the Sub-Saharan Bios?” He tilted his head like one of the tiny birds flitting through the branches of his gardenâmigrants lucky to avoid the harvesters in the befogged mountain pass. “It can be arranged, Little Blossom, but even I can't shorten the months in quarantine you must endure in both directions. Surely such a trip would disrupt your research.”
Despite what depended on this conversation, she couldn't help but smile. “To fly, Grandfather.”
He rose to his feet, startling the cats dozing around his ankles. “What?”
She stood also, bowing ever so slightly. “We have completed model prototypes stable in the four required dimensions. The new waterjet engine proved ideal for controlled propulsion through air. We are ready to build an experimental atmosphere ship to test with a human operator. To fly like the birds, Grandfather.” Song Xai heard the longing in her own voice.
Her grandfather frowned. “The waterjet was developed in one of the American bios. How did youâ?” His eyes narrowed as he looked at her. “Your âvisionary' colleague is one of
them
.”
them
.”
She blinked at the venom in his voice. “Most of our team is based outside this bios, Grandfather. There's nothing unusual in such collaboration.”
“There was when I took my oath of service.”
“The war has been over for a hundred years . . .” A war, Song Xai realized with a sudden chill, her grandfather had witnessed.
As had most of the world. The combined might of the western continents had sought to conquer the east, to overthrow six hundred years of growing, deliberate physical isolation, to reshape countries, bios, formed on the basis of naturally-occurring biomes. Their warships never reached shore and the western continents paid the price for misunderstanding their enemy. A knowledge of living things must include the knowledge of death.
When the diseases had run their course, toppling governments and economies, thousands of civils had volunteered to be exiled in the west, taking with them both cure and future.
Today, those born after the conflict saw only the result: a jigsaw pattern of bios, united by similarities in governance and mutual goals, completing a world where change was planned, scrutinized, and usually deferred.
Song Xai, like many of her generation, wasn't interested in waiting. “I need your help, Grandfather,” she insisted. “We need to come together for the next phase of experimentation. I suggested here. Well, more specifically down the watershed, on the flood plainsâ” His upraised hand stopped the words in her throat.
The old man returned to his place on the bench, and patted the seat beside him. “Sit, Little Blossom.” The words were heavy and slow.
“We will work with the civils at all stages, Grandfather,” she assured him, even as she obeyed. “There will be every safety precaution.”
“And what of the Shipping Guild? Have you spoken to them?”
“We will, once we succeed. The Guild will be in charge of implementing the technologyâ”
“The Guild will destroy it,” her grandfather said softly and with utter certainty.
“Butâbut why?” She wanted to take his frail shoulders in her hands and shake him. Instead, she used words. “Flight will do so much for us, Grandfather. Imagine being able to travel anywhere, quickly, without the need for canals or tracks. Some of our group postulate similar machines could reach high into the atmosphere, possibly to space itself. What wonders await us there?”
“Nothing worth the risk,” he told her. “The Shipping Guild protects us. They know their duty: no living thing may move from one bios into another unless it is free of disease and historically occurs in both.”
“Our atmosphere ships won't change that,” she protested. “The Guild would arrange sterilization and verification, just as it does for every ship and train now.”
“And how long before someone young, someone foolish, someone malicious decides to build their own atmosphere ship? They will. We've seen it on the oceans and rivers. How can the Guild control the sky as well?” It was he who took hold of her, wrapping one chilled hand in his bent and dry ones. “Do you remember Zheng He?”
Song Xai couldn't keep the sullen note from her voice. “No.”
“I'm not surprised. His grave was hidden, lest others become soâadventuresomeâagain.” He gazed at her. “In the 1400s, he led the largest armada the world had yet seenâover 300 ships, some over 300 meters longâtaking them to Africa, and what was then Europe and the New World.”
“Then why isn't he famous?”
“Because on his return, China, his home, judged Zheng He misguided. He had found nothing of sufficient value to justify the risk of contamination from unknown diseases. The Shipping Guild records its first act as the destruction of Zheng He's fleet; their next the enforcing of new laws governing the maximum size of ships, so no others would be tempted.”
“This is no longer China,” Song Xai said, snatching back her hand.
“Yet this,” her grandfather lifted his arms to the world, “came out of China. If you wish to fly, Little Blossom,” he shook his head once in caution as she sat straighter, “if you ever wish to fly, you must remember how today came to be. You and your visionary colleagues must strive to become members of the Council of Civils. If and when you succeed, you will know for yourselves if your passion is truly wise for this world. If it is, you will build your atmosphere ships.”
Song Xai gazed into the pond for a moment, then looked up at her grandfather. “Done that way, it will take my entire life.”
Song Li's face creased into a hundred tiny smiles. “Little Blossom. Is that not what dreams are for?”
Revision Point
Plague. The Black Death.
Yersinia pestis
, the bacterium responsible, killed untold millions in Asia, Europe, and Africa. It passed like a storm of death over a world without the knowledge of life and disease we possess today. Perhaps the most infamous epidemic began in the early 1300s, when a ship carrying infected rats, and their fleas, is purported to have landed in Venice with goods from China, already ravaged by the disease. From there, the plague spread until it helped plunge Europe into the Dark Ages, causing unspeakable hardship.
Yersinia pestis
, the bacterium responsible, killed untold millions in Asia, Europe, and Africa. It passed like a storm of death over a world without the knowledge of life and disease we possess today. Perhaps the most infamous epidemic began in the early 1300s, when a ship carrying infected rats, and their fleas, is purported to have landed in Venice with goods from China, already ravaged by the disease. From there, the plague spread until it helped plunge Europe into the Dark Ages, causing unspeakable hardship.
The plague bacillus was discovered in Hong Kong, in 1894, by Swiss scientist Alexandre Yersin (and by Japanese bacteriologist Shiba-saburo Kitasato). Shortly afterward, Professor M. Ogata, of the Hygiene Institute in Tokyo, found this bacillus in rat fleas. But the experiment to prove that the flea was the vector, carrying the plague from rat to human waited for a Belgian, Paul-Louis Simond. In 1897, after noticing flea bites on infected humans, Simond found that if he let fleas from a plague-killed rat reach a healthy rat, that animal would be infected by the plague. Eradicating rat fleas is now a fundamental weapon against the plague.
At the time of my story, the Chinese already made and used pyrethrumâessence of chrysanthemumâto repel fleas. They called the plague the “Disease of the Rats” because they'd observed a mass death of the rodents always preceded an outbreak in humans. They had a civil service staffed with scholars, who had to study and pass exams before being accepted.
If only one of these scholars had done Simond's simple experiment before that ship left for Venice, what else might have come out of China?
J.E.C.
SITE FOURTEEN
by Laura Anne Gilman
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EREUS Shuttle Four to Gateway Station, you have control.”
EREUS Shuttle Four to Gateway Station, you have control.”
Robinechec nods confirmation as though the pilot could see him. “Roger that. Bringing you in.” I watch as, palming the flat-topped lever, he moves it gently back toward him, pulling the bullet-shaped transport into the shed, an external framework of metal beams just large enough to hold two minisubs, or one shuttle.
Robinechec has nightmares sometimes about something going wrong here. Forget the fact that it's the safest maneuver in the entire procedure; he still talks about waking up in a cold sweat because he screwed up.
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