Atlantis
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
