To Climates Unknown: An alternate history of a world without America by Arturo Serrano

Author:Arturo Serrano [Serrano, Arturo]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2021-11-25T06:00:00+00:00

Part 5: Leap

The impossible has never happened, and the possible should cause no wonder.

Cicero, On Divination

Even one random event would mean that Providence does not completely rule the world.

Saint Augustine, On Eighty-Three Various Questions

Morning, November 14 (Gregorian), 1755

Cádiz

The hall allowed the four men little space around the huge wooden structure in the center. It looked like two ship hulls nailed together, two halves made to face each other in such a way that it wasn’t clear which side was intended to be up. One extreme was entirely made of glass and shaped as a hemisphere, which suggested that was meant to be the front, but the rest of the machine was incomprehensible to the master builders of the Iberian Royal Navy College. It had no masts, no sails, and no obvious waterline; its external design didn’t allow a crew to walk on it, let alone perform any of the ordinary tasks of sailing. But its inside, which had been studied during the process of taking it apart, bringing its pieces into the hall and reassembling it for display there, was quite elaborate: it had half a dozen decks, including one that could accommodate thirty rowers. The technique of its construction was ahead of all the shipbuilding knowledge of Europe, and no one could decipher how it was intended to sail.

The tall, blond sailors captured with it were suspected to be Dutch, which would go a long way toward explaining Dutch maritime supremacy. But so far they had refused to speak.

In the hall where the strange vessel was being displayed, Don Juan Gerbaut y Poruci, holder of the dual office of President of the House of Trade of the Indies and General Intendant of the Royal Navy, looked from his table at the richly tapestried walls and prayed that they would prove sumptuous enough to receive the monarch. He thought his office might have been a more appropriate venue for the occasion, but it had no space for that wooden beast. The surprise and speculation aroused by its discovery had almost quieted the talk of the much graver event that had occurred earlier that month.

On the Day of All Saints, the Iberian peninsula had been hit by an earthquake, and shortly later by a gigantic wave that had swallowed the coast.

Gerbaut looked to his left, where a Frenchman whose presence was due to explicit royal request stood examining a globe encased in glass. Gerbaut recalled him being a mathematician, but didn’t know much more. He had introduced himself as Louis Godin.

To his right was a slightly less explicable presence: a young doctor, more boy than man, by the name of José Celestino Mutis, sent over by the Cádiz College of Surgeons as the only one of their members not too busy resetting broken bones to give their report on the state of rescue operations. He was hunched over another table, reviewing his notes, which he’d done so many times he’d probably memorized them already.

At the opposite side of the hall, studying

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