Will Adams - The Eden Legacy

‘Huh. So where did the flat-earth idea come from, then?’

Knox smiled. ‘It’s the fault of your people, as it happens.’

‘My people?’

‘Sure,’ he nodded. ‘Darwinists; evolutionists. Though, to be fair, it really started with an American essayist called Washington Irving. He wrote a romanticised account of Columbus’s voyages, I guess in around 1830, though don’t hold me to that. It praised Columbus for defying the conventional wisdom of his time, risking sailing over the edge of the world for the sake of expanding knowledge. But it was complete nonsense. You’ve got to remember that Columbus didn’t head off searching for a new world; he was just looking for a shortcut to the Spice Islands. The people who argued against him pointed out that such a voyage was too far to be practicable, because they correctly believed the earth to be about twenty-three or twenty-four thousand miles in circumference; but Columbus refused to accept their estimate, insisting that it was only seventeen thousand miles around, which meant that Japan was just two and a half thousand miles west of Spain.’

‘And how far is it really?’

‘Ten or eleven thousand miles. Something like that. But the point is, Washington Irving knew all this. Everyone did. He never meant for his version of the story to be seen as historically accurate. But somehow the idea caught on. People began to believe flat-earthers had been for real. And then Darwin came along with all his disturbing ideas about evolution, and a lot of people took fright and tried to rubbish him away. The science got lost; it became a propaganda war. And a couple of Darwin’s defenders, Draper and Dickson White, I think their names were-’

‘Yes,’ said Rebecca. ‘That sounds right.’

‘They decided attack was the better form of defence. They wanted to make the point that just because an idea is revolutionary doesn’t mean it’s wrong; and also to poke a little fun at people who insisted on clinging to stupid ways of thinking even in the teeth of irrefutable evidence.’

‘So they accused them of being flat-earthers?’ laughed Rebecca. ‘Nice.’

‘Exactly. Pure propaganda. And incredibly effective. Too effective. Now anytime someone criticises a new theory, they’re just another flat-earther. It’s pretty unfair, when you think about it. And unnecessary, too. They could have accused them of being like the people who attacked Copernicus and Galileo for putting the sun at the centre of the solar system. Or they could have even accused them of being bulge-earthers.’

Rebecca squinted at him. ‘Bulge-earthers?’

‘Oh, man,’ laughed Knox. ‘This is going to get complex. Maybe that’s why they didn’t use it, come to think of it. You’ve got to go back to the Greeks. Everything was made up of four elements: earth, fire, air and water.’ The Indians, Japanese and plenty of others had believed in there being just four or five elements, but it had been the Greeks who’d influenced the Europeans, and it had been the Europeans who’d believed in the bulging earth. ‘Earth was the heaviest element, of course, because it fell through air and water. It therefore had to lie at the centre of the universe. Second heaviest was water, which surrounded earth; then came air, which surrounded water, and fire, which flamed upwards in air. But Christianity had a problem with this view, because the universe was God’s creation, and therefore perfect; and it stood to reason that a perfect universe would be arranged in a series of perfect concentric circles, with earth at its centre, and the sun, the moon, the planets and the stars all revolving around it.’

‘Why would that be a problem?’

‘Because if you put your perfect circles together with your differently weighted elements, the earth should logically have been an absolutely round ball completely submerged by water.’

‘Ah. So we should all have drowned by now? Or be fish?’

‘This was a serious conundrum,’ said Knox. ‘Medieval scholars really fretted about this stuff.’

‘And what was their explanation?’

‘It’ll sound weird, but effectively they decided that God had wanted to create man, and therefore had needed dry land, so He’d arranged the universe’s mix of elements and gravitational fields in such a way that the earth bobbed in the great world ocean, rather like an apple in a bucket.’

‘So just the top bit is exposed?’

‘Exactly. But that creates problems of its own, not least that all of the world’s exposed land had to be gathered in one place. There simply couldn’t be any land on the other side of the world.’

‘And people really believed this?’

‘Oh, yes. It was pretty much accepted wisdom in Europe in Columbus’s time; so the argument against him wasn’t just that the voyage he proposed was many thousands of miles longer than he believed; but also that it would be across a wilderness of water, and that therefore they’d have no chance of finding land and restocking on the way. But Columbus knew that there was land to the west, because he’d seen Iceland for himself; he’d heard about Greenland, Newfoundland and maybe even the northern US from the men of Bristol, who regularly fished off those coasts. And that was why he dismissed the arguments of the Spanish courtiers, and had the courage to set off.’

‘Bulge-earthers,’ smiled Rebecca, glowing with the new knowledge. ‘I’m going to have to use that in my next series.’

The gun dealer wasn’t due until that afternoon, so Boris took Davit into town after breakfast to buy supplies. The two-man tents on offer in the camping store weren’t designed for people the size of Davit; he could only fit diagonally. They took one each, added it to the growing mound by the counter, then returned to look at sleeping bags. ‘Damned things,’ muttered Davit, stepping into one and pulling it up to his waist. ‘It’s discrimination, that’s what it is. It’s tall-ism.’

His good humour needled Boris. He’d been this way all morning. ‘So how’s the girlfriend?’ he asked.

‘I really like her,’ grinned the big man. ‘I’m thinking maybe of staying on a few days after we’re done with Knox.’

‘I wouldn’t make any promises,’ advised Boris. He didn’t know quite how, but Claudia had got beneath his skin. The evening before, he’d offered her fifty euros for a quick roll. The little bitch had turned him down flat. ‘A job like this, we may have to leave in a hurry.’

‘I’d just like to do something for her, you know? Show her a good time, buy her some nice clothes. She’s had such a hard life, and they treat her like shit at that hotel.’

Claudia turning him down had only aggravated Boris’s itch. He’d lain awake last night listening to the two of them going at it like pigmy chimps next door. There was only one thing to do when a woman got beneath your skin this bad, and that was to fuck her until the sight of her made you sick. ‘Why don’t you ask her to come with us?’ he suggested. ‘She can cook for us, translate, even scout out Eden for us.’ This was a genuine problem that had been weighing on his mind. He and Davit shone like beacons in this place; they’d be spotted in a heartbeat as they approached Eden. But no one would look twice at Claudia if she went to their free clinic complaining of a toothache.

‘I don’t know, boss,’ said Davit. ‘I don’t want her tangled up in this.’

‘We won’t ask her to do anything risky. And we’d pay her well. Five hundred euros, say. That’s a hell of a lot of money in this place. It could change her life.’

‘She’d have to give up her job at the hotel.’

‘Make it a thousand, then. I don’t care.’ It was Sandro’s money, and he wouldn’t exactly miss it. And if Boris couldn’t manage to get Davit out of his way for long enough for him to scratch his itch good and proper, he wasn’t the man he knew himself to be.