by Paul Melko
“Yes! Perhaps he was propagating a larger seed case; perhaps it had more rows than the typical two-rowed teosinte; perhaps it had a more perpendicular spikelets. Whatever he saw, he decided to make sure more came back next year. I think this is evidence of human selection of maize-like traits.”
Dr. Elk clapped his hands. “Excellent work. I think we’ve found our Mesoamerican drop site.” On the screen Bob took another stalk of teosinte, ripped off the cob, and dumped it into a fur sack. “Mr. Greene, I’d like you to schedule a drop of the modern maize kernels.”
*
The sowers were modified spyeyes that could carry a dozen kernels at a time. The idea was to push it through the hole, fly it near the ground, and drop the kernels in a likely place. Come summer, we’d have a cluster of modern maize. The next step was beyond our control. Bob and his cohorts would have to discover the corn, figure out that it was a useful grain, and propagate it.
That was the problem with modern maize. The grain didn’t do a good job self-propagating; it was dependent on human interaction to keep its genotype going. If our little brown people didn’t drop seeds from the cobs onto the ground, there wouldn’t be a second season of maize.
“There, I want it there on that plain,” Dr. Elk said. I was flying the spyeye across the terrain from Beth’s video. I dropped it to hover a few meters above the grass.
“Here?”
“No, a little to the left. See that open area there?” His hand was practically guiding the joystick. I bounced the spyeye a bit to the left.
“Here?”
“Yes.”
I toggled the payload button.
“Corn away!” I shouted. I jiggled the spyeye to shake free any clinging kernels. Each one of those kernels cost us ten megawatt-hours of power.
I spun the eye around and came in low. There were the kernels sitting on the ground, waiting for rain and spring.
“Now move us ahead six months,” Dr. Elk said to Kyle. “I want to see what happens.”
Kyle nodded. “That will close out this time zone.”
“I know. Do it.”
The spyeye went dead as Kyle deactivated the 7500 BC holes; there was no bringing the eye back across. The power costs dwarfed the cost of the spyeye. Plus there was the concern of disease coming from the other universe.
A few minutes later a new hole appeared, 180 days later. I watched the power level surge as another spyeye pushed through. No human from our universe would ever walk this parallel universe. The spyeyes weighed about a kilogram. The power needed to do an insertion varied with the mass of the object to the third power.
“You guys won’t need me for a while, right?” Kyle asked.
Dr. Elk nodded absently, intent on the image from the spyeye.
“You all have fun, playing god,” he said, leaving.
The sky of the other world was bright, late summer in prehistoric Mesoamerica. I zoomed through the air, looking for the rock that marked our band’s location.
“There it is,” Beth said.
“Let’s see if they figured out how to use corn.”
I sent the spyeye in a barrel roll over the village, then swung down Main Street. All right, it was the only street.
“Nobody home,” I said.
The village was empty. I pulled back, circling around, higher and higher. The fields where they picked teosinte, where we had sowed the maize were overgrown. The stream where they pulled water was empty. Nothing. The village looked abandoned.
“Can you enter one of the tents?”
“Sure.” The tents were tepee style, with off-centered ceiling holes for smoke. I slid down one of the chimneys and switched to IR.
Empty, except for a pile of skins.
“They’re gone.”
“All their tools are still there.”
“Look! There’s a body in the skins.”
I spun the spyeye around the tent to the skins and hovered there. A shrunken face stared up at us, and my hand shook on the control. I barely got the spyeye up and out without bouncing it off the walls of the tent.
I hovered the spyeye until my hands didn’t shake, then I tried a second tent.
Inside were a family of four, a mother, father, and two children. All dead.
“What did we do?” I asked.
“Nothing!” spat Dr. Elk. “This happens all the time in prehistoric societies. We were just unlucky.”
“We were unlucky? Those people are dead.”
“This had nothing to do with us,” he said. “Move us ahead one hundred years. We’ll find a new tribe.”
“I can’t do that.”
“Of course you can. It’s easy.”
“I mean, I can do it. But I’m not allowed.”
“Mr. Greene, we need to keep this project moving forward. This time zone and this tribe is useless to us. Now move the hole forward one century.” Dr. Elk held my gaze, his face red and sharp.
Beth touched my arm. “It’s okay, Ryan. No one cares if we move ahead a hundred years. Kyle won’t even notice.”
Okay, I’m not stupid. I know when I’m being manipulated. But I suddenly wanted to be as far away from Bob as I could be. Nothing like a century to turn your friends to dust.
“Okay.”
I turned on the MWD and pushed the hole uptime, just as I had watched Kyle do.
*
That night as I walked back to my apartment, I found Beth walking beside me. We passed the student bars, ringing with techno hip-hop, stepping out into the street to avoid the crush of undergrads waiting to test their fake IDs. In the lab, we’d dropped another load of maize in the new century, near a tribe that had settled in the same place as our old tribe. We’d ask Kyle to move us forward a year in the morning, pretending we hadn’t closed the hole one hundred years before. I hadn’t looked closely at the new tribe. I didn’t want to recognize any faces or name them if they were all dead in the morning.
“Going home to see your folks for Thanksgiving?” Beth asked.
I’d forgotten she was with me.
“Um, no. My family is in Oklahoma, and it’s not our favorite holiday.”
“Oh, right. My family’s local.” She looked tired and stumbled once on the curb. I reached out to steady her.
“Careful.”
“Sorry, I’m just tired.” Under my hand her arm was shaking.
“Cold?”
She shrugged.
I stopped in front of my apartment building. “Good night,” I said, without looking at her. A part of my brain was telling me I should have been hitting on her. Maybe it was the pre-bellum hoop skirt that was putting me off. But probably it was the stench of death that seemed to hover over everyone associated with the senior project.
“Listen, Ryan. It wasn’t our fault about those people.”
“Yeah, I know. Death is common in the ancient world.”
“It was just a fluke that they died. It had nothing to do with us.”
“Did Dr. Elk ask you to discuss this with me? Are you here to spin this for me?”
“Hey, I saw dead people today too! It’s not just you who’s feeling like shit.”
“Yeah, sorry.” I turned and opened the door to my building. I paused, then pulled it wide enough for both of us.
“Coming up?”
She looked at me, her face pinched. Then she swooshed past me.
It’s not what you think. We didn’t do it. We just . . . talked and hugged. And maybe we kissed once. Yeah, weird.
*
Kyle didn’t even mention the extra century. If he noticed anything, he probably blamed his own calibration skills. When we punched a new hole the next day, we found a vibrant village. Better yet, we found evidence of the maize being harvested. It wouldn’t be long before the tribe found uses for it, we hoped.
We moved forward in jumps of one year three times, and each time, the maize crop was larger. The tribe was sowing the seeds wider and wider.
“We’ve done it!” cried Dr. Elk. “We�
�ve successfully introduced modern maize to ancient Mesoamerica. Now we need to do the same in North and South America!”
By the end of the week, or rather by the end of the century, we had three successful tribes across the two continents sowing and harvesting maize. We watched them for a few decades, modeling the dispersal of the maize between other tribes. It caught on quickly, it was so much better than the native teosinte, with more yield and with bigger grain size. Then we moved ahead a century.
The first thing we saw was that our Mesoamerican site, dubbed Columbus, had grown to the size of a small town.
“They’ve set aside hunting and gathering in favor of maize farming,” Dr. Elk explained in class. “With the higher yields of modern maize, they can afford to stay in one spot. They can start to accumulate the immovable technologies that only a city-based culture can.”
Cleveland, the tribe in North America, was also growing. Cincinnati, however, had disappeared, the tribe moving on, uninterested in domestication. The maize was gone.
“Our next step is to watch as the population density increases. Watch as the maize spreads through the continents. Watch as it supplants the native and less domesticated plants. We can expect larger cities, larger populations. All of these starting at the same time as they are in the Indus Valley. Success, ladies and gentlemen. Success!”
*
Beth and I never said we were dating. She just spent a lot of time at my place. Mostly we talked about the project.
“This would make a great PhD dissertation,” she said one day.
“Thinking of doing grad work, are you?”
“For you, I was thinking.”
“I’m in engineering, remember. I don’t do the history stuff anymore.”
“Except when it’s a cool project.”
She was right. I was spending more of my time on the senior project than I was on my grad studies.
“It’s a cool project.”
We’d been moving ahead centuries at a time, watching the progression of civilization through the New World. Columbus was spreading out into a megalopolis, an Aztec empire eight millennia early. Cleveland had fragmented into a dozen city-states up and down the Mississippi River. But Vicksburg had shown signs of bronze-working. And Cairo had the wheel.
“If only we could give them a decent domesticated animal,” Beth said.
“We barely got the spyeyes through with the maize. It would take a terawatt-hour to push through a breeding pair of horses,” I said. We were eating up Dr. Elk’s funding at a horrendous rate as it was.
“There will be more money if this works,” she said. She looked fetching in Amerind faux cow-skin slacks and vest. A lot of the sorority girls were wearing them, since the article came out in the school paper.
“Why? Once we prove the theory on the impact of domesticated grain, what more do we need money for?”
“There are a thousand thesis topics in the area of historical causality! They’re talking about opening a whole new department for it.”
“I must have missed that,” I said. “With Dr. Elk as the chair, I suppose.”
“Who else? He’ll need good grad students. And don’t tell me you haven’t enjoyed the project.” She snuggled up to me on my couch, her faux leather silky smooth on my arm.
“I’m changing the subject,” I said. “Are we dating yet?”
She leaned back, frowning. “Is it important to define our relationship?” She leaned in again and kissed me gently.
I looked into her blue eyes, ran my finger along her jaw, wondering why she was here with me. Then I kissed her back.
*
In the next millennium, Columbus started gobbling up North American city-states: New Orleans, Memphis, St. Louis, and Cairo, until just Minneapolis remained independent of a pan-American empire based in the Yucatan.
The centralized bureaucracy seemed to be favoring technological development, and in several placed iron working appeared to be under way. The bureaucracy was clearly using a logogram alphabet, though we didn’t spend enough time to understand the language. Ages of history were closed off to us, never to be surveyed again as we barreled forward to the inevitable collision of Europe and America.
By 1000 CE, the Columbus Empire had collapsed, and in its place was an Alaska to Tierra del Fuego nation of seafarers, who hunted whales and caught fish, and traded up and down the western coast of the Americas, but never venturing beyond a dozen miles of shore. The Mississippi Valley was a confederacy of nation states, each governed by artisan syndicates, which drove technology forward. They had gunpowder, steel, and simple steam engines.
“When Europe meets America, they will be on equal footing. There will be no wide scale destruction of culture. We have made them equal players.”
We moved the hole up the line. And suddenly the Americas were overrun by orientals. Skipping by half-centuries, we had missed the invasion. But in 1150 CE, our experimental subjects were serfs of a Chinese empire, ruled by eunuchs. The cities were gone, turned under into the ground. The artisans gone, now slaves. The Chinese were slowly burning the Amazon to the Atlantic.
“Those damn orientals!” Dr. Elk railed in the lab. “Why didn’t they stay put like they did in our world? They’ve ruined everything.”
Beth tried to soothe him. “We’ve gotten great data, Professor. We proved that a good domesticated grain will raise the continent’s population by two orders of magnitude. We’ve shown independent technological development of language, gunpowder, steel . . .”
“It’s not enough! We’ll do it again,” he said, and stormed out of the lab.
“Again?” I said.
Beth shrugged, then followed after Elk.
*
Spring break came, and Beth left for Fort Myers. She called once while she was down there, drunk, and in the background I heard male voices calling her back to the hot tub. She giggled and hung up. Hey, we weren’t dating. Though I wasn’t seeing anyone but her. We hadn’t even slept together yet. She dissuaded my advances, but we had kissed a lot. She was beautiful, and smart, and not my type at all. But here I was all jealous and smitten.
Since the Chinese invasion, the class had turned into project prep time. Each student was doing a project based on the new universe’s data, and my time as TA was spent checking standard deviations and logic, correcting bad grammar and unclear arguments. Dr. Elk let me devise, give, and grade the mid-term. Beth got an A+.
The week after spring break, Dr. Elk announced to the class that he had funding to build a new universe, enough funding to introduce a breeding pair of horses.
“If the Chinese arrive now, our Native Americans will have the horses for armies,” he explained.
I whispered to Beth, “Where’s he getting this money?”
She shrugged.
We started over, on an accelerated schedule. The maize was easy. The natives in all three areas took to it on the first try. The horses, donated by the Equine Science Department, were just-weaned mustangs. A special container was fashioned, ultra-light weight material. From birth the foals were trained to follow the high-pitched whine of a spyeye, so that once on the other side, the horses could be led to food or away from danger.
We released them on the Great Plains.
The news stations loved it, the horses peeking out of the container, sniffing the air. You’ve seen the videos, I know. They take one tentative step, look around, and then gallop full speed into the open, as if they know they have a whole continent to fill with babies. The spyeye sizzles to catch up, as they run for miles across the open plains. A beautiful sight.
The first successful transfer of living things between universes. I figured humans would be next.
We had a vet on call around the clock. But we needn’t have worried. The horses were as happy as could be and birthed a foal the next spring. And another one the year after. Concerns of inbreeding were unfounded; the mustangs had clean genomes, no recessives.
In a decade there were fifty in the herd. B
y the end of the century there were thousands of horses across North America, in hundreds of herds. A few years after that, the first horse was domesticated by Native Americans.
We’d brought them maize and horses. I guess we could have dropped rifles in if we had the power to spare, but they would have used them as clubs. We’d done all we could do. If they didn’t fend off the Europeans and the Chinese now . . . well, then they deserved to lose.
This time we kept tabs on Asia and Europe, but they seemed to be following the same path as they had in our world. Meanwhile in the Americas, empires rose and fell, population burgeoned, technology came and went, and sometimes stuck. The printing press, steam engines, tall sailing ships.
And then in 1000 CE, instead of waiting for the Europeans to discover them, our North Americans discovered Europe, in a single tall ship that plied the Atlantic in sixty-five days, landing in Bournemouth, England. We cheered and celebrated late into the night at the lab. Dr. Elk had a bottle of champagne which we drank in defiance of University rules; even Kyle had a drink.
Tipsy, I guided Beth back to my apartment and began removing her pantaloons and poofy shirt.
“No, Ryan,” she said, as my mouth took her left nipple.
“Beth.”
“No. I can’t. Don’t.”
“You seemed interested enough in whoever you were with on spring break,” I said, regretting it.
“That’s none of your fucking business!” She pulled her shirt across her chest and fell back onto the couch.
“I know. Sorry. We never made a commitment, and I’ve just assumed —”
“Listen, Ryan. I like you. But we can’t have sex.”
“I have an implant,” I said. “We can’t get pregnant.”
“I’m not worried about that!”
“Then what?”
She looked away, rubbed her face. “I was wild in high school, Ryan. I dated a lot of men. Older men. Men with many past lovers.”
“Are you still seeing one of them?” I asked, confused.
“No! Don’t you get it? I can’t —”
She pulled on her shirt, dug for her pants on the floor.
“Beth.” I took her hand, but she shook loose.
Then she was out the door, and gone. I’m slow sometimes, but then I got it. I remembered the tremors in her hands, the palsy in her arm. She had Forschek’s Syndrome. “Oh, shit,” I muttered. And I almost chased after her, and said we could use a condom, that it didn’t matter, but at the same time I knew it did, that she could be days, weeks, or months away from the nerve-degeneration as the prions made there way from her sex organs, up her central nervous system to her brain.