[What Might Have Been 04] Alternate Americas

by Anthology

  “He just wouldn’t give up,” came a terribly familiar voice. We all turned around to behold none other than the Dark Duke!

  “Saints preserve us,” said a little redheaded sailor.

  The duke was in a bragging mood: “After sinking your other ships, I got here ahead of you in plenty of time to warn these people about your mad dreams of conquest.”

  “A thought that never crosses your mind,” said Columbus, his voice dripping with sarcasm.

  The regal figure held up his hand, and all were silent. “Your petty squabbles are no concern of ours,” said the Atlant … I mean, Indian.

  “So long as you restricted yourselves to your part of the world, we could afford to leave you alone. But now, with improved sailing methods, not to mention a submersible craft worthy of our own shipbuilding, you threaten to extend your violence to our peaceful shores. You leave us no choice.”

  He clapped his hands, and two European men appeared from behind a huge wall. They were very old, with beards down to their ankles, and they wore horned helmets. Each carried a strange weapon made of crystal and gold, with rotating blades.

  “The two of you will fight a stupid, bloody duel to the death,” said our host, inclining his head first to Columbus, and then to the duke. “We are pacifists, so we will derive much pleasure from watching the spectacle.”

  This seemed fair all around. Clearly these people were civilized. But the admiral’s practical approach to life did not desert him now: “What will the winner claim as prize?”

  The shining man held up a shining cup of water. “This liquid comes from a land to the west. We call it Floridated water, and it will make He who drinks it immortal. The survivor and his crew will be given this water and our most seaworthy submersible, the Nautilus. They may explore the rest of the world so long as they never return to bother us.”

  The admiral did not avail himself of this opportunity to hold forth on the demonic nature of boats that travel underwater. Diago had a practical question too: “What happens to the loser’s crew?”

  “They will be fed to a giant octopus, of course,” came the unemotional answer.

  As the weapons were passed to the men from Europe, the Dark Duke made a surprisingly cryptic comment: “No matter how far we travel, we find ourselves there.”

  Suddenly a volcano erupted.

  TO BE INDEFINITELY CONTINUED

  SHIP FULL OF JEWS

  Barry N. Malzberg

  Cristoforo could hear the moaning from steerage, the Chassids were chanting again, moaning and raving in their strange and steeped tongue, the sounds of the Hebrew emerging cloudily from the deck of the Pinta, filling him with some mixture of dread and regard, religiosity and hope, the swells and pitching of the barren seas reminding him of the essential perilousness of his journey. Images of spices, fragrant bouquets from the sullen and mysterious East rose in his nostrils, taunting thoughts of the new and deadly continent opening up before him possessed him with a kind of graciousness. The sounds of the Chassids were overwhelming. Sometimes they would pray for hours, unstopping, one choir beginning when another paused, filling the moist air with imprecations and song, at other times they were silent, pitching and rolling in the deck, the queasiness of their condition doubtless the origin of this strange and necessary silence. Cristoforo did not understand any of it.

  Of course the Chassids were not to understand, they were to transport. Isabella had pointed this out to him. “They are none of your concern,” she had said, “they are being deported, will keep to themselves under guard, will pray and rave in their strange way, but have nothing to do with your journey.” The excitable queen had gazed at him, her eyes full and penetrating in the darkness. There was something very special between she and Cristoforo; that had been his intimation from the start, but of course under Ferdinand’s cruel gaze and with the happenstance of the Inquisition, it was impossible to bring this strange and stunned accord to any kind of realization. Cristoforo was a temporal man, his mind was seized by the fragrance of spices, but his imagination remained clear and pristine, somewhere to the side of fantasy. He had an assignment to commit, the Chassids were only the most marginal part. Standing on the deck, swaying, finding purchase on the thin and decaying boards of this wretched ship that was, his great friend, the queen, had insisted, the very best available to him, Cristoforo pondered his fate, considered his condition, swung his keen and penetrating gaze toward el Norte, the hidden land beyond the dip of the great horizon. Santa María, Cristoforo murmured, and did not know if he was invoking that mother of passage or merely repeating the name of that third and most eccentric ship, filled with roustabouts and assassins, also deported from Spain, a gang so cruel that he had taken Ferdinand’s instruction not to deal with that ship at all, even in his capacity as overseer of the voyage. “You will really be much better, my son,” Ferdinand had said, “staying with your crew and examining the route with compass and disjunction, allowing the guards to control that hostile ship.” Cristoforo had shrugged. Who was he to argue with Ferdinand? A king’s reputation stood between him and all desire. Cristoforo lusted hopelessly for the queen, but all proportion was necessary within the arc of condition. Sometimes his thoughts were metaphysical, sometimes they were practical, and at all times the three ships rolled and sculled their way toward the New World. Abolish all desire, Cristoforo thought, and the spices of desire may someday soon be yours.

  “Excuse me, master,” his yeoman said, approaching with downcast gaze and suitable humility. Everyone knew of Cristoforo’s special relationship with Isabella, also his terrible temper and the secret instructions from the queen, which reportedly granted him the right to scuttle any who displeased him. Behind lay the specter of the Inquisition, only for the Jews so far, but who could tell; ahead lay the equally imponderable New World; but somewhere in the middle Cristoforo presided, and his word was terrible, his authority absolute. “The rabbi has requested permission to speak to you. He asked me to carry this message.”

  Rabbi? What Rabbi? Cristoforo could feel his consciousness swim as he slowly reoriented himself to the possession of a steerage filled not only with chanting but with hierarchy. There was a leader or several leaders of the Chassids, yes, and they obtained not only the spiritual but the temporal title rebbe, corrupted by the idiomatic language of his day to this less forbidding form. Jesus had been rebbe, too, Cristoforo noted, not a religious man, no longer possessed by any vision other than the spicy and nefarious East toward which they so perilously cruised, he recalled from his childhood pictures of the bearded Master, who had of course emerged from the Pharisees of his day and had been put to torture and death for daring to rival them in popularity. Or was that the story? He was not sure; the Inquisition of course was a final settling of accounts for this ancient injustice, but Cristoforo, concerned with matters of the sea as well as certain entanglements on shore, which even before Isabella had made his life colorful and difficult, had not paid much attention to this. “Master,” the yeoman said, “I have brought the Rabbi to the deck. He is instant over there; he is asking for appearances.”

  Cristoforo shrugged. A shrug seemed to possess him head to toe, front to back, through all the specious and yet solid aspects of his frame; he had been shrugging, he sometimes thought, all his life. Shrug for the mean-spirited Barcelona of his day, which seemed obsessed with questions of reparation that could not concern a simple master of the seas. A shrug for Isabella, who, after all, was beyond him for all of her flirtatiousness and desirability and would have made much trouble in the possession, a trouble that he suspected she would have found no less titillating than the specter of his murder. Shrug for the Santa María and its decks full of felons who would be the first to grapple with the savages of the New Land if the savages were to show any hostile intention. Shrug for the jewels and fragrances that Ferdinand had promised him if he were successful on this difficult mission. Shrug for this and shrug for that, meet the temper of the world with a certain calculated indifference an
d ignore the screams and concerns of the Inquisition which, after all, had absolutely nothing to do with him and which would go on its tortuous way whether or not he was present. “So, bring him here,” Cristoforo said. “Let me discuss with you later the proper way to deal below deck, do you hear me?”

  “Whatever you say, master,” the yeoman said, and gestured. The rabbi, a huge bearded man wrapped in the vestments of his calling—but they all seemed to wear this strange and elaborate garb—shuffled toward him downcast, his eyes seeking the deck, then his head tilting upward, the strange, luminous, Israelic eyes locking with Cristoforo’s in a way that induced strange sensations, perhaps due to the odors of steerage wafting from the rabbi and the vague screams across the water, which might have been emanating from the Niña, just barely visible, or the more distant Santa María, which, Jesus Christo, he could not and would not want to see in these conditions. “Well, well,” he said to the Jew as the yeoman backed away, submission in all of his posture—if nothing else he had established deference in this crew, he had the weight of royalty behind him, and there were rumored special and terrible arrangements that the king could visit even at a distance upon mutineers, spies among the crew. “Tell me what brings you above deck? Yes, what do you want?”

  The Jew, still staring at him in that curious and affecting way, said, “My name is Solomon. Schelemo, I come to ask you a favor.”

  “I am not interested in your name,” Cristoforo said. “Your names, frankly, mean nothing to me.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “If I wanted to establish special relations with Jews,” Cristoforo said, “it would not be through the medium of names. I would request your presence in other ways. You are here, below the decks, on sufferance, through the mercy of Isabella and Ferdinand, our king and queen. I have nothing whatsoever to do with any of this, I am simply under orders.”

  “That is understood,” the Jew said. “The conditions below are impossible. There are five hundred and fifty two of us, and we are fainting. We are placed one upon another in tight racks and without fresh air, without even the possibility of air. There is much fainting and illness.”

  “This is not my account,” Cristoforo said. “Conditions are difficult for all of us. This is a voyage of privation.”

  “I beg of you,” Solomon said. “Permit us to come above decks. Not all together, but ten or twenty at a time, just to relieve ourselves of this torment, to take the air, to move—”

  “Conditions are worse on the Santa María,” Cristoforo said. “It is a slave ship, filled with the darkest felons of our time. But they do not complain. They drift upon the waters to the New World uncomplainingly, and they hold against the day.”

  “I know nothing of that,” Solomon said. “I know only the conditions below deck. We are perishing. Soon the disease will begin, then the slow and terrible wasting of flesh. Even our most fervent prayers will go unanswered.”

  Cristoforo shrugged. Another shrug. Shrug at this, turn away from that, consider the Marins, who, it was rumored, had renounced their Judaism to live in secret and had thus evaded the eye of the Inquisition while seeking penalties in other ways. Shrug at the sea, shrug at the New World itself. If it had been left to him, he would have been a merchant at the port of Barcelona and would have left conditions such as these to the more intrepid. How did this happen to him? How had he become the master of such a rude voyage? It was all that Cristoforo could do not to reach out and shake the rabbi, explain that there were many in agony here and that agony was not now only a matter of steerage. But he said nothing of course. The loneliness and fervency of command.

  “I am sorry,” he said, “I cannot help you. You will have to do what you can down there. It is so decreed. The conditions were made quite explicit to me, surely the same was done for you.”

  “But how long,” Solomon said. “How long will this voyage be?” Another shrug. Shrug at distance, at lust, at all the complications of empire and design. “I can’t answer that,” Cristoforo said. “It could be weeks, it could be a matter of days. We have been at sea for almost a month and we are in uncharted waters. When the New World looms over the horizon and not before, then the journey will end. The rest is in hands we cannot understand. Surely you know of imponderables, of fate.”

  “I know of nothing,” Solomon said. “You misjudge us, all of us, clearly. We are not cattle. We are as you, and we are suffering. Men, women, and little children, some with pets smuggled aboard, all in pain, all of them with special and necessary grace. Do you understand any of this?”

  “You are to return below deck at once,” Cristoforo said, the dark lash of anger trailing through his bowels. “Now, before this continues. You are insolent and you are exceeding my patience. You were taken aboard by measure of the queen’s generosity and because she took a sudden and unaccustomed pity upon you. I know of nothing else.”

  “They cry,” Solomon said. “They pray, and in their prayers is their spirit and their torment.” He gestured. “Can’t you hear?” Indeed, the keening of the Jews to which Cristoforo had accommodated himself as he had to the stunning curvature of the water struck him suddenly, rose up within him now with the urgency if not the fragrance of those spices he sought. Words seemed to emerge dimly from the groans of insistence, then subsided. “Adonai,” the Jews cried. “Elohim. Brich hu omen.” “O countrymen,” Solomon said, “my countrymen, my brother—”

  “Enough,” Cristoforo said. “I am the captain.” He turned his back to signal that the interview was over, that the petition had been reviewed and denied, that, no less than Torquemada, he had been forced to obduracy as a means of containing these people. Behind him he could hear grunts, then whimpers as if Solomon were planning some desperate final assault. Cristoforo shook his head, folded his arm, stared grimly at the sea, which heaved from its greenish depths the small mysteries of flotsam, small pieces of debris that assumed vaguely organic shape, then were swallowed by the water. “V’yisgadal. Shmeh rabo.” The small and diminished sound of Solomon pattering away from him and then the chants rising from the spaces of Neptune, mingling with the sounds of the sea itself, swaddling Cristoforo in the dangerous and terrible sounds that signaled the slow turning of the earth, the emergence of the New World to the starboard. In the distance Cristoforo imagined that he could see mountains, could glimpse the tread of elephant, could see the bangles of princes as they contended with one another for the splendors of their new estate, but he knew the signs of delirium when from a great distance he let it signal him. He was a man of the sea. Cristoforo shrugged again, shrug for the Jews, for Torquemada’s insistence, for Torquemada’s descent. Shrug for the New World, shrug for the troubles and purchase of five hundred Jews below deck whom he would never see, could never grasp. More was to be done and later. He felt his body lighten as a sense of decision came upon him. This would only last to a certain point, then there would be another circumstance. He was sure of it. Shrug and step, step and shrug, a sudden disturbing intimation of Isabella’s swollen and needful breast prodding at him as he signaled the yeoman to take over the helm, however momentarily.

  On the Santa María Torquemada, enthused, gathered the desperadoes around him. Garbed as they, indistinguishable from them, far departed from the priestly robes of his magnificence, he had become their equal and therefore their superior. The plan was working. The cunning and ingenious plan—worked out in the most sacred places of the Church and then with the king and queen—was working. “O listen to me,” Torquemada said. “O listen, friends and companions.” They gathered around him, the most desperate men of Spain, men so desperate that on this voyage of desperadoes they had been segregated. Only Torquemada could control them, could understand and apprehend their spirit, and it was for this reason—to test himself—that he had embarked upon this exile. Behind him the Jews, who soon enough would be encountered. “The New World beckons,” Torquemada said. “A place of justice, light, and peace. Attend to it! Can you not see it?” Unshaven and desperate heads t
urned, gleaning the new land through the spume of the sea. “Here we will begin afresh,” Torquemada said. “That was the plan, the plan for all of us.” They murmured in response. “Here,” Torquemada said, “we will take the Jews and plant them, rid the world of Israel, depart then for new and better shores. But you must keep your courage up. Must not fail.”

  “Kill them,” one of the men said. “We should go back to the master’s ship and kill them now.”

  Torquemada smiled, thinking of how far he had taken them, how far all of them had come in this one sharp, difficult month of voyage. “Not just yet,” he said. “It must be at the right time for the right purpose. Now it would be just slaughter. There was enough slaughter in Spain, here it will be of a different kind. We will seed the ground,” Torquemada said. “We will expend their blood in the purposes of consecration, and it will be better.”

  “You talk like a priest,” one of them said. “Are you a priest, then? Or are you one of us.”

  “I am one of this and one of the other,” Torquemada said. “I make faith with you in these spaces as you make faith with me. Soon the mountains, the tablelands of the New World will be upon us and we will turn them holy under the gush of sacrificial blood. But for now,” he said, “for now we must once again pray, we must place our knives and ordnance in protected places and pray for a good conclusion to this voyage. Do you hear me? Ave María,” Torquemada said, and continued with the familiar litany. They settled in with him, attentive as scholars to the rhythm of his words. I had no choice, Torquemada thought, looking at the high plumes of the water, the sails glinting against the turbulence. It was difficult, but the only means to carry forth the Inquisition. One must constantly move outward in order to move inward. We had accomplished our sacred purposes in Madrid. Barcelona had become ours as well. Soon it would have turned within, and by losing everything we would have gone beyond risk. But here, here, by transporting the Jews, by moving forth even as we move back, we have encountered and made ripe the oldest possibilities of all.