Arturo Serrano - To Climates Unknown - An Alternate History of a World Without America

Godin regarded Mutis and saw that his companion was truly disturbed. “It’s not that it doesn’t bother me. I hate carnage as much as you do. But you don’t want to bow to the king of Denmark, do you? Our queen must have this weapon.”

Mutis couldn’t stand to look down anymore. He leveled his eyes with the clouds and breathed. “What will you do when the war erupts?”

“I already serve the queen by training her sailors. You will serve her by healing them.”

“Is that all we are?”

“It’s what we’ll have the chance to be. War doesn’t make people great; it makes them small, so small they can vanish and it doesn’t matter.”

Mutis didn’t know whether it was because the air had grown thin at that height, but he was finding it harder to keep breathing. “In every book of history I’ve read, the wars are the longest chapters.”

“Yes, but the least interesting. Reading about war won’t tell you anything worthwhile about humans. War is what happens when humanity fails, and it always looks the same, with or without wondrous weapons. I’d rather look forward to the time that comes after. That’s when humans show you who they are.”

Afternoon, April 2 (Gregorian), 1917

Mahisūru

A commotion was sweeping the faculty offices. Professor Hiriyanna noticed the concerned murmurs exchanged in corridors, the painfully slow wave that signaled the existence of news to be told and the reluctance to voice it out loud. At each of his classes for that day, he inquired of his students what event of note had occurred, but no one could say. By the time the sun was highest in the sky, his mind had tired of running through the scenarios that over the decades of living in a world war he’d come to consider the likeliest. Above all he feared that the Danish might have made an advance beyond their half of India, a horrific thought for the villages caught in the offensive, but only a small chapter in the long story of the Danish war with Iberia. He berated himself for obsessing over that topic, but he had to admit that for the length of his life there had been no other topic. The war had become all the news there was.

Instead of going directly home at the end of his classes, he decided to stop by his boss’s office and try to get an answer there. Dominican friars had a way of being better informed about the outside world than anyone.

He knocked and was called in. On the chair was, as always, Father Emílio Seijas, the incongruous holder of the position of Dean of Indian Philosophy, busy at the one task he seemed to exist for: sorting papers between the file cabinet and the shredder. In his most private thoughts, Professor Hiriyanna liked to amuse himself with the theory that Father Seijas never left that chair and was cursed to keep sorting papers for eternity as penance for the sins of a former life.

“Good afternoon, Father. What is happening?” he asked in Portuguese. The Dean of Indian Philosophy didn’t speak Kannada.

“Ah, you. Good. I was about to send a letter requesting your presence.”

Hiriyanna cocked his head. “You wanted me?”

Father Seijas copied the gesture and Hiriyanna couldn’t tell whether it was mockery or honest incomprehension. “My last memorandum said it would happen if you didn’t change your habits. When the College Inquisition Board next meets, I hope I can at least tell them you’ve stopped teaching the most unorthodox of your opinions. Seeing you here, I reckoned you’d decided to spare me the trouble of summoning you.”

That remark bounced a few times inside the professor’s head until he recalled the Dean’s memorandum he’d tossed to the trash the previous week. His usual response would have been to make up some meek-sounding promise, but the exasperation he’d accumulated from the worried looks and attempted single syllables he’d heard all day bolstered his animus. “Let them come for me,” he said.

“Pardon me?”

In a stronger tone, Hiriyanna said, “Let them find another scholar who can quote both the Stoics and the Naiyyayikas and point out their areas of convergence. Let them find someone else who can teach the Trinity in perfect harmony with the Trimurti. Let them find someone else who can make Thomas Aquinas dispute with the Charvaka sages. Let them try.” He knew he was being injudicious, but that was one of those days when he had little patience for obtuseness.

Father Seijas examined another sheet of paper and placed it in a drawer. “Today of all days. I guess not all news can be good.”

“What is the news? What happened today?”

“A success,” said the Dominican, seeming to answer the question for the hundredth time that day. “We only received the message this morning, but it happened five weeks ago.”

“What did?” Hiriyanna felt a slight pang of alarm at his own impatience with his boss, but Seijas merely waved a typewritten folio before him.

“My Order obtained a copy of the Royal Bulletin in Manila. The straits were so full of Dutch ships that they had to send it via airship; otherwise we would’ve learned of it last Tuesday.” The Dean saw the question that persisted in the professor’s eyes and proceeded to skim paragraphs from the folio. “To quench your curiosity: the Twenty-Third Division of the Iberian Flying Army captured Copenhagen. The Canutic Emperor surrendered. We won.”

The professor stood for what felt to him like a full minute. “What… what happens now?”

Father Seijas laughed. “What, you ask? Our Lady of Velankanni heard my prayers. The war is over! Iberians have proved stronger than Scandinavians, airships stronger than submarines, Saint Peter stronger than Luther. Everything is now the way it should be. You could say history has been corrected.”

“That doesn’t answer my question.”

Allowing no dent in his excitement, Seijas said, “The next part is obvious. Now we’ll go after the steam carriages, and once we’ve brought all the apostates to their knees, the Holy Lands of the True Cross will be whole again. There will be one Church, as it was in the beginning.”

It was only because his defiance had been spent in the recent outburst that Hiriyanna refrained from demolishing, as easy as it would have been, the Dean’s belief in the inevitable dominance of His Catholic Majesty over the world, but in his head there was a clear summation of what he could have said. He could picture himself going into his home office and unrolling his copy of the Map of the World’s Colonies , one of his proudest secret possessions, issued by the Royal Observatory of Svalbard and smuggled into Iberian India by his friend Hariram, who traded in printed goods. If he weren’t afraid of confiscation by the Customs Inquisition Bureau, he would have liked to make his boss stand before the map and point at the hundred little names and lines highlighting, for example, the presence of no less than eight religions in the continent of Vinland. His point with that exercise, had he been so temerarious as to try it, would have been that Iberians had been in India for over three centuries and their evangelizing mission had failed disastrously. He placed no bets on a single Canutic duchy in Europe turning Catholic.

He voiced none of his thoughts on the matter. But one doubt still bothered him.

“Will the Danes leave India?” Their colonial bases were in the east, somewhat far from Mahisūru, but their submarines scouted with impunity the entire southern coast.