Kim Stanley Robinson - Vinland

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. First appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine,

November 1991. For the personal use of those who have

purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.

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 the 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--archaeologists, 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 archaeology

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.

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Kim Stanley Robinson - Vinland

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