Orson Scott Card - Atlantis

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Atlantis

By Orson Scott Card

Kemal Akyazi grew up within a few miles of the ruins of Troy; from

his boyhood home above Kumkale he could see the waters of the

Dardanelles, the narrow strait that connects the waters of the Black

Sea with the Aegean. Many a war had been fought on both sides of

that strait, one of which had produced the great epic of Homer's

ILIAD.

This pressure of history had a strange influence on Kemal as a

child. He learned all the tales of the place, of course, but he also

knew that the tales were Greek, and the place was of the Greek

Aegean world. Kemal was a Turk; his own ancestors had not come to

the Dardanelles until the fifteenth century. He felt that it was a

powerful place, but it did not belong to him. So the ILIAD was not

the story that spoke to Kemal's soul. Rather it was the story of

Heinrich Schliemann, the German explorer who, in an era when Troy

had been regarded as a mere legend, a myth, a fiction, had been sure

not only that Troy was real but also where it was. Despite all

scoffers, he mounted an expedition and found it and unburied it. The

old stories turned out to be true.

In his teens Kemal thought it was the greatest tragedy of his life

that Pastwatch had to use machines to look through the the millennia

of human history. There would be no more Schliemanns, studying and

pondering and guessing until they found some artifact, some ruin of

a long-lost city, some remnant of a legend made true again. Thus

Kemal had no interest in joining Pastwatch. It was not history that

he hungered for--it was exploration and discovery that he wanted,

and what was the glory in finding the truth through a machine?

So, after an abortive try at physics, he studied to become a

meteorologist. At the age of eighteen, heavily immersed in the study

of climate and weather, he touched again on the findings of

Pastwatch. No longer did meteorologists have to depend on only a few

centuries of weather measurements and fragmentary fossil evidence to

determine long-range patterns. Now they had accurate accounts of

storm patterns for millions of years. Indeed, in the earliest years

of Pastwatch, the machinery had been so coarse that individual

humans could not be seen. It was like time-lapse photography in

which people don't remain in place long enough to be on more than a

single frame of the film, making them invisible. So in those days

Pastwatch recorded the weather of the past, erosion patterns,

volcanic eruptions, ice ages, climatic shifts.

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All that data was the bedrock on which modern weather prediction and

control rested. Meteorologists could see developing patterns and,

without disrupting the overall pattern, could make tiny changes that

prevented any one area from going completely rainless during a time

of drought, or sunless during a wet growing season. They had taken

the sharp edge off the relentless scythe of climate, and now the

great project was to determine how they might make a more serious

change, to bring a steady pattern of light rain to the desert

regions of the world, to restore the prairies and savannahs that

they once had been. That was the work that Kemal wanted to be a part

of.

Yet he could not bring himself out from the shadow of Troy, the

memory of Schliemann. Even as he studied the climatic shifts

involved with the waxing and waning of the ice ages, his mind

contained fleeting images of lost civilizations, legendary places

that waited for a Schliemann to uncover them.

His project for his degree in meteorology was part of the effort to

determine how the Red Sea might be exploited to develop dependable

rains for either the Sudan or central Arabia; Kemal's immediate

target was to study thedifference between weather patterns during

the last ice age, when the Red Sea had all but disappeared, and the

present, with the Red Sea at its fullest. Back and forth he went

through the coarse old Pastwatch recordings, gathering data on sea

level and on precipitation at selected points inland. The old

TruSite I had been imprecise at best, but good enough for counting

rainstorms.

Time after time Kemal would cycle through the up-and-down

fluctuations of the Red Sea, watching as the average sea level

gradually rose toward the end of the Ice Age. He always stopped, of

course, at the abrupt jump in sea level that marked the rejoining of

the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean. After that, the Red Sea was

useless for his purposes, since its sea level was tied to that of

the great world ocean.

But the echo of Schliemann inside Kemal's mind made him think: What

a flood that must have been.

What a flood. The Ice Age had locked up so much water in glaciers

and ice sheets that the sea level of the whole world fell. It

eventually reached a low enough point that land bridges arose out of

the sea. In the north Pacific, the Bering land bridge allowed the

ancestors of the Indies to cross on foot into their great empty

homeland. Britain and Flanders were joined. The Dardanelles were

closed and the Black Sea became a salty lake. The Persian Gulf

disappeared and became a great plain cut by the Euphrates. And the

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Bab al Mandab, the strait at the mouth of the Red Sea, became a land

bridge.

But a land bridge is also a dam. As the world climate warmed and the

glaciers began to release their pent-up water, the rains fell

heavily everywhere; rivers swelled and the seas rose. The great

south-flowing rivers of Europe, which had been mostly dry during the

peak of glaciation, now were massive torrents. The Rhone, the Po,

the Strimon, the Danube poured so much water into the Mediterranean

and the Black Sea that their water level rose at about the same rate

as that of the great world ocean.

The Red Sea had no great rivers, however. It was a new sea, formed

by rifting between the new Arabian plate and the African, which

meant it had uplift ridges on both coasts. Many rivers and streams

flowed from those ridges down into the Red Sea, but none of them

carried much water compared to the rivers that drained vast basins

and carried the melt-off of the glaciers of the north. So, while the

Red Sea gradually rose during this time, it lagged far, far behind

the great world ocean. Its water level responded to the immediate

local weather patterns rather than to worldwide weather.

Then one day the Indian Ocean rose so high that tides began to spill

over the Bab al Mandab. The water cut new channels in the grassland

there. Over a period of several years, the leakage grew, creating a

series of large new tidal lakes on the Hanish Plain. And then one

day, some fourteen thousand years ago, the flow cut a channel so

deep that it didn't dry up at low tide, and the water kept flowing,

cutting the channel deeper and deeper, until those tidal lakes were

full, and brimmed over. With the weight of the Indian Ocean behind

it the water gushed into the basin of the Red Sea in a vast flood

that in a few days brought the Red Sea up to the level of the world

ocean.

This isn't just the boundary marker between useful and useless water

level data, thought Kemal. This is a cataclysm, one of the rare

times when a single event changes vast reaches of land in a period

of time short enough that human beings could notice it. And, for

once, this cataclysm happened in an era when human beings were

there. It was not only possible but likely that someone saw this

flood--indeed, that it killed many, for the southern end of the Red

Sea basin was rich savannah and marshes up to the moment when the

ocean broke through, and surely the humans of fourteen thousand

years ago would have hunted there. Would have gathered seeds and

fruits and berries there. Some hunting party must have seen, from

the peaks of the Dehalak mountains, the great walls of water that

roared up the plain, breaking and parting around the slopes of the

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Dehalaks, making islands of them.

Such a hunting party would have known that their families had been

killed by this water. What would they have thought? Surely that some

god was angry with them. That the world had been done away, buried

under the sea. And if they survived, if they found a way to the

Eritrean shore after the great turbulent waves settled down to the

more placid waters of the new, deeper sea, they would tell the tale

to anyone who would listen. And for a few years they could take

their hearers to the water's edge, show them the treetops barely

rising above the surface of the sea, and tell them tales of all that

had been buried under the waves.

Noah, thought Kemal. Gilgamesh. Atlantis. The stories were believed.

The stories were remembered. Of course they forgot where it

happened--the civilizations that learned to write their stories

naturally transposed the events to locations that they knew. But

they remembered the things that mattered. What did the flood story

of Noah say? Not just rain, no, it wasn't a flood caused by rain

alone. The "fountains of the great deep" broke open. No local flood

on the Mesopotamian plain would cause that image to be part of the

story. But the great wall of water from the Indian Ocean, coming on

the heels of years of steadily increasing rain--THAT would bring

those words to the storytellers' lips, generation after generation,

for ten thousand years until they could be written down.

As for Atlantis, everyone was so sure they had found it years ago.

Santorini--Thios--the Aegean island that blew up. But the oldest

stories of Atlantis said nothing of blowing up in a volcano. They

spoke only of the great civilization sinking into the sea. The

supposition was that later visitors came to Santorini and, seeing

water where an island city used to be, assumed that it had sunk,

knowing nothing of the volcanic eruption. To Kemal, however, this

now seemed far-fetched indeed, compared to the way it would have

looked to the people of Atlantis themselves, somewhere on the

Mits'iwa Plain, when the Red Sea seemed to leap up in its bed,

engulfing the city. THAT would be sinking into the sea! No

explosion, just water. And if the city were in the marshes of what

was now the Mits'iwa Channel, the water would have come, not just

from the southeast, but from the northeast and the north as well,

flowing among and around the Dehalak mountains, making islands of

them and swallowing up the marshes and the city with them.

Atlantis. Not beyond the pillars of Hercules, but Plato was right to

associate the city with a strait. He, or whoever told the tale to

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him, simply replaced the Bab al Mandab with the greatest strait that

he had heard of. The story might well have reached him by way of

Phoenicia, where Mediterranean sailors would have made the story fit

the sea they knew. They learned it from Egyptians, perhaps, or nomad

wanderers from the hinterlands of Arabia, and "within the straits of

Mandab" would quickly have become "within the pillars of Hercules,"

and then, because the Mediterranean itself was not strange and

exotic enough, the locale was moved outside the pillars of Hercules.

All these suppositions came to Kemal with absolute certainty that

they were true, or nearly true. He rejoiced at the thought of it:

There was still an ancient civilization left to discover.

Everyone knew that Naog of the Derku People was going to be a tall

man when he grew up, because his father and mother were both tall

and he was an unusually large baby. He was born in floodwater

season, when all the Engu clan lived on reed boats. Their food

supply, including the precious seed for next year's planting, was

kept dry in the seedboats, which were like floating huts of plaited

reeds. The people themselves, though, rode out the flood on the open

dragonboats, bundles of reeds which they straddled as if they were

riding a crocodile--which, according to legend, was how the

dragonboats began, when the first Derku woman, Gweia, saved herself

and her baby from the flood by climbing onto the back of a huge

crocodile. The crocodile--the first Great Derku, or dragon--endured

their weight until they reached a tree they could climb, whereupon

the dragon swam away. So when the Derku people plaited reeds into

long thick bundles and climbed aboard, they believed that secret of

the dragonboats had been given to them by the Great Derku, and in a

sense they were riding on his back.

During the raiding season, other nearby tribes had soon learned to

fear the coming of the dragonboats, for they always carried off

captives who, in those early days, were never seen again. In other

tribes when someone was said to have been carried off by the

crocodiles, it was the Derku people they meant, for it was well know

that all the clans of the Derku worshipped the crocodile as their

savior and god, and fed their captives to a dragon that lived in the

center of their city.

At Naog's birthtime, the Engu clan were nestled among their tether

trees as the flooding Selud River flowed mudbrown underneath them.

If Naog had pushed his way out of the womb a few weeks later, as the

waters were receding, his mother would have given birth in one of

the seedboats. But Naog came early, before highwater, and so the

seedboats were still full of grain. During floodwater, they could

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neither grind the grain into flour nor build cooking fires, and thus

had to eat the seeds in raw handfuls. Thus it was forbidden to spill

blood on the grain, even birthblood; no one would touch grain that

had human blood on it, for that was the juice of the forbidden

fruit.

This was why Naog's mother, Lewik, could not hide alone in an

enclosed seedboat for the birthing. Instead she had to give birth

out in the open, on one of the dragonboats. She clung to a branch of

a tether tree as two women on their own dragonboats held hers

steady. From a near distance Naog's father, Twerk, could not hide

his mortification that his new young wife was giving birth in full

view, not only of the women, but of the men and boys of the tribe.

Not that any but the youngest and stupidest of the men was overtly

looking. Partly because of respect for the event of birth itself,

and partly because of a keen awareness that Twerk could cripple any

man of the Engu that he wanted to, the men paddled their boats

toward the farthest tether trees, herding the boys along with them.

There they busied themselves with the work of floodwater

season--twining ropes and weaving baskets.

Twerk himself, however, could not keep from looking. He finally left

his dragonboat and climbed his tree and watched. The women had

brought their dragonboats in a large circle around the woman in

travail. Those with children clinging to them or bound to them kept

their boats on the fringes--they would be little help, with their

hands full already. It was the older women and the young girls who

were in close, the older women to help, the younger ones to learn.

But Twerk had no eyes for the other women today. It was his

wide-eyed, sweating wife that he watched. It frightened him to see

her in such pain, for Lewik was usually the healer, giving herbs and

ground-up roots to others to take away pain or cure a sickness. It

also bothered him to see that as she squatted on her dragonboat,

clinging with both hands to the branch above her head, neither she

nor any of the other women was in position to catch the baby when it

dropped out. It would fall into the water, he knew, and it would

die, and then he and everyone else would know that it had been wrong

of him to marry this woman who should have been a servant of the

crocodile god, the Great Derku.

When he could not contain himself a moment longer, Twerk shouted to

the women: "Who will catch the baby?"

Oh, how they laughed at him, when at last they understood what he

was saying. "Derku will catch him!" they retorted, jeering, and the

men around him also laughed, for that could mean several things. It

could mean that the god would provide for the child's safety, or it

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could mean that the flood would catch the child, for the flood was

also called derkuwed, or dragonwater, partly because it was aswarm

with crocodiles swept away from their usual lairs, and partly

because the floodwater slithered down from the mountains like a

crocodile sliding down into the water, quick and powerful and

strong, ready to sweep away and swallow up the unwary. Derku will

catch him indeed!

The men began predicting what the child would be named. "He will be

Rogogu, because we all laughed," said one. Another said, "It will be

a girl and she will be named Mehug, because she will be spilled into

the water as she plops out!" They guessed that the child would be

named for the fact that Twerk watched the birth; for the branch that

Lewik clung to or the tree that Twerk climbed; or for the

dragonwater itself, into which they imagined the child spilling and

then being drawn out with the embrace of the god still dripping from

him. Indeed, because of this notion Derkuwed became a childhood

nickname for Lewik's and Twerk's baby, and later it was one of the

names by which his story was told over and over again in faraway

lands that had never heard of dragonwater or seen a crocodile, but

it was not his real name, not what his father gave him to be his

man-name when he came of age.

After much pushing, Lewik's baby finally emerged. First came the

head, dangling between her ankles like the fruit of a tree--that was

why the word for HEAD and was the same as the word for FRUIT in the

language of the Derku people. Then as the newborn's head touched the

bound reeds of the dragonboat, Lewik rolled her eyes in pain and

waddled slowly backward, so that the baby flopped out of her body

stretched along the length of the boat. He did not fall into the

water, because his mother had made sure of it.

"Little man!" cried all the women as soon as they saw the sex of the

child.

Lewik grunted out her firstborn's baby-name. "Glogmeriss," she said.

GLOG meant "thorn" and MERISS meant "trouble"; together, they made

the term that the Derku used for annoyances that turned out all

right in the end, but which were quite painful at the time. There

were some who thought that she wasn't naming the baby at all, but

simply commenting on the situation, but it was the first thing she

said and so it would be his name until he left the company of women

and joined the men.

As soon as the afterbirth dropped onto the dragonboat, all the other

women paddled nearer--like a swarm of gnats, thought Twerk, still

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watching. Some helped Lewik pry her hands loose from the tree branch

and lie down on her dragonboat. Others took the baby and passed it

from hand to hand, each one washing a bit of the blood from the

baby. The afterbirth got passed with the baby at first, often

dropping into the floodwater, until at last it reached the cutting

woman, who severed the umbilical cord with a flint blade. Twerk,

seeing this for the first time, realized that this might be how he

got his name, which meant "cutting" or "breaking." Had his father

seen this remarkable thing, too, the women cutting a baby off from

this strange belly-tail? No wonder he named him for it.

But the thing that Twerk could not get out of his mind was the fact

that his Lewik had taken off her napron in full view of the clan,

and all the men had seen her nakedness, despite their efforts to

pretend that they had not. Twerk knew that this would become a joke

among the men, a story talked about whenever he was not with them,

and this would weaken him and mean that he would never be the clan

leader, for one can never give such respect to a man that one laughs

about behind his back.

Twerk could think of only one way to keep this from having the power

to hurt him, and that was to confront it openly so that no one would

laugh behind his back. "His name is Naog!" cried Twerk decisively,

almost as soon as the baby was fully washed in river water and the

placenta set loose to float away on the flood.

"You are such a stupid man!" cried Lewik from her dragonboat.

Everyone laughed, but in this case it was all right. Everyone knew

Lewik was a bold woman who said whatever she liked to any man. That

was why it was such a mark of honor that Twerk had chosen to take

her as wife and she had taken him for husband--it took a strong man

to laugh when his wife said disrespectful things to him. "Of course

he's naog," she said. "All babies are born naked."

"I call him Naog because YOU were naked in front of all the clan,"

answered Twerk. "Yes, I know you all looked when you thought I

couldn't see," he chided the men. "I don't mind a bit. You all saw

my Lewik naked when the baby came out of her--but what matters is

that only I saw her naked when I put the baby in!"

That made them all laugh, even Lewik, and the story was often

repeated. Even before he became a man and gave up the baby-name

Glogmeriss, Naog had often heard the tale of why he would have such

a silly name--so often, in fact, that he determined that one day he

would do such great deeds that when the people heard the word NAOG

they would think first of him and his accomplishments, before they

remembered that the name was also the word for the tabu condition of

taking the napron off one's secret parts in public.

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As he grew up, he knew that the water of derkuwed on him as a baby

had touched him with greatness. It seemed he was always taller than

the other boys, and he reached puberty first, his young body

powerfully muscled by the labor of dredging the canals right among

the slaves of the dragon during mudwater season. He wasn't much more

than twelve floodwaters old when the grown men began clamoring for

him to be given his manhood journey early so that he could join them

in slave raids--his sheer size would dishearten many an enemy,

making them despair and throw down his club or his spear. But Twerk

was adamant. He would not tempt Great Derku to devour his son by

letting the boy get ahead of himself. Naog might be large of body,

but that didn't mean that he could get away with taking a man's role

before he had learned all the skills and lore that a man had to

acquire in order to survive.

This was all fine with Naog. He knew that he would have his place in

the clan in due time. He worked hard to learn all the skills of

manhood--how to fight with any weapon; how to paddle his dragonboat

straight on course, yet silently; how to recognize the signs of the

seasons and the directions of the stars at different hours of the

night and times of the year; which wild herbs were good to eat, and

which deadly; how to kill an animal and dress it so it would keep

long enough to bring home for a wife to eat. Twerk often said that

his son was as quick to learn things requiring wit and memory as to

learn skills that depended only on size and strength and quickness.

What Twerk did not know, what no one even guessed, was that these

tasks barely occupied Naog's mind. What he dreamed of, what he

thought of constantly, was how to become a great man so that his

name could be spoken with solemn honor instead of a smile or

laughter.

One of Naog's strongest memories was a visit to the Great Derku in

the holy pond at the very center of the great circular canals that

linked all the Derku people together. Every year during the mud

season, the first dredging was the holy pond, and no slaves were

used for THAT. No, the Derku men and women, the great and the

obscure, dredged the mud out of the holy pond, carried it away in

baskets, and heap it up in piles that formed a round lumpen wall

around the pond. As the dry season came, crocodiles a-wandering in

search of water would smell the pond and come through the gaps in

the wall to drink it and bathe in it. The crocodiles knew nothing of

danger from coming within walls. Why would they have learned to fear

the works of humans? What other people in all the world had ever

built such a thing? So the crocodiles came and wallowed in the

water, heedless of the men watching from trees. At the first full

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moon of the dry season, as the crocodiles lay stupidly in the water

during the cool of night, the men dropped from the trees and quietly

filled the gaps in the walls with earth. At dawn, the largest

crocodile in the pond was hailed as Great Derku for the year. The

rest were killed with spears in the bloodiest most wonderful

festival of the year.

The year that Naog turned six, the Great Derku was the largest

crocodile that anyone could remember ever seeing. It was a dragon

indeed, and after the men of raiding age came home from the blood

moon festival full of stories about this extraordinary Great Derku,

all the families in all the clans began bringing their children to

see it.

"They say it's a crocodile who was Great Derku many years ago," said

Naog's mother. "He has returned to our pond in hopes of the

offerings of manfruit that we used to give to the dragon. But some

say he's the very one who was Great Derku the year of the

forbidding, when he refused to eat any of the captives we offered

him."

"And how would they know?" said Twerk, ridiculing the idea. "Is

there anyone alive now who was alive then, to recognize him? And how

could a crocodile live so long?"

"The Great Derku lives forever," said Lewik.

"Yes, but the true dragon is the derkuwed, the water in flood," said

Twerk, "and the crocodiles are only its children."

To the child, Naog, these words had another meaning, for he had

heard the word DERKUWED far more often in reference to himself, as

his nickname, than in reference to the great annual flood. So to him

it sounded as though his father was saying that HE was the true

dragon, and the crocodiles were his children. Almost at once he

realized what was actually meant, but the impression lingered in the

back of his mind.

"And couldn't the derkuwed preserve one of its children to come back

to us to be our god a second time?" said Lewik. "Or are you suddenly

a holy man who knows what the dragon is saying?"

"All this talk about this Great Derku being one of the ancient ones

brought back to us is dangerous," said Twerk. "Do you want us to

return to the terrible days when we fed manfruit to the Great Derku?

When our captives were all torn to pieces by the god, while WE, men

and women alike, had to dig out all the canals without slaves?"

"There weren't so many canals then," said Lewik. "Father said."

"Then it must be true," said Twerk, "if your old father said it. So

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Orson Scott Card - Atlantis

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