Now there were scholars giving presentations who believed that the second plague had actually been anthrax, following on the bubonic plague; there were others who held the reverse position, arguing that contemporary accounts of the first sickness matched the freckling of anthrax more often than the buboes of bubonic plague, while the final blow had been the plague. It was explained in this session that the plague itself had bubonic, septic and pneumonic forms, and that the pneumonia caused by the pneumonic form was contagious, and very fast and lethal; the septic form even more lethal. Indeed, much had been clarified about all these diseases by the unfortunate experiences of the Long War.

But why had the disease, whichever one it had been, or in whatever combinations, been so lethal in Firanja and not elsewhere? The meeting offered presentation after presentation by scholars advancing one theory after another. From her notes Budur described them all for Piali at the end of the day, over supper, and he quickly jotted them down on a napkin:

' Plague animalcules mutated in the 770s to take on forms and virulence similar to tuberculosis or typhoid; – Cities of Tuscany had reached enormous numbers by the eighth century, say two million people, and hygienic systems broke down and plague vectors ran wild; – Depopulation of the first plague followed by a series of disastrous floods that wrecked agriculture leading to starvation; – Super-contagious form of the animalcule mutated in northern France at the end of the first epidemic; Pale skin of the Franks and Kelts lacked pigments that helped resist the disease, accounting for the freckling; – Sunspot cycle disrupted weather and caused epidemics every eleven years, effect worse every time '

'Sunspots?' Piali interjected.

'That's what he said.' Budur shrugged.

'So,' Piali said, looking over the napkin, 'it was either the plague animalcules, or some other animalcules, or some quality of the people, or their habits, or their land, or the weather, or sunspots.' He grinned. 'That pretty much covers it, I should think. Perhaps cosmic rays ought to be included. Wasn't there a big supernova spotted about that time?'

Budur could only laugh. 'I think it was earlier. Anyway, you must admit, it does want explaining.'

'Many things do, but it looks as if we have a way to go on this one.'

The presentations continued, ranging from the recording of the world that had existed just before the Long War, all the way back through time to the earliest human remains. This work on the first humans forced everyone to the contemplation of one of the larger arguments shaping up in the field, concerning human beginnings.

Archaeology as a discipline had its origins for the most part in the Chinese bureaucracy, but it had been picked up quickly by the Dinei people, who studied with the Chinese and went back to Yingzhou intending to learn what they could about the people they called the Anasazi, who had preceded them in the dry west of Yingzhou. The Dinei scholar Anan and his colleagues had offered the first explanations of human migration and history, asserting that tribes on Yingzhou had mined the tin on Yellow Island in the biggest of the Great Lakes, Manitoba, and shipped this tin across the oceans to all the bronze era cultures in Africa and Asia. Anan's group contended that civilization had begun in the New World with the Inka and Aztecs and the Yingzhou tribes, in particular the old ones who preceded their Anasazi in the western deserts. Their great and ancient empires had sent out reed and balsam rafts, trading tin for spices and various plant stocks with Asian ancestry, and these Yingzhou traders had established the Mediterranean civilizations predating Greece, especially the ancient Egyptians and Middle Western empires, the Assyrians and Sumerians.

So the Dinei archaeologists had claimed, anyway, in a very fully articulated case, with all sorts of objects from all over the world to support it. But now a great deal of evidence was appearing in Asia and Firanja and Africa that indicated this story was all wrong. The oldest lifering dates for human settlement in the New World were about twenty thousand years before the present, and everyone had agreed at first that this was extremely old, and predated by a good deal the earliest civilizations known to Old World history, the Chinese and the Middle Western and Egyptian; so at that point it had all seemed plausible. But now that the war was over, scientists were beginning to investigate the Old World in a way that hadn't been possible since a time predating modern archaeology itself. And what they were finding was a great quantity of signs of a human past far older than any yet known. Caves in the Nsaran south containing superb drawings of animals were now reliably dated at forty thousand years. Skeletons in the Middle West appeared to be a hundred thousand years old. And there were scholars from Ingali in south Africa saying they had found remains of humans, or evolutionarily ancestral prehumans, that appeared to be several hundred thousand years old. They could not use lifering dating for these finds, but had different dating methods they thought were just as good as the lifering method.

Nowhere else on Earth were people making a claim like this one from the Africans, and there was a great deal of scepticism about it; some queried the dating methods, others simply dismissed the claim out of hand, as a manifestation of some kind of continental or racial patriotism. Naturally the African scholars were upset by this response, and the meeting that afternoon took on a volatile aspect that could not help but remind people of the late war. It was important to keep the discourse on a scientific basis, as an investigation into facts uncontaminated by religion or politics or race.

'I suppose there can be patriotism in anything,' Budur said to Piali that night. 'Archaeological patriotism is absurd, but it's beginning to look as if that's how it started in Yingzhou. An unconscious bias, no doubt, towards one's own region. And until we sort out the dating of things, it's an open question as to which model will replace theirs.'

'Certainly the dating methods will improve,' Piali said.

'True. But meanwhile all is confusion.'

'That's true of everything.'

The days shot by in a blur of meetings. Every day Budur got up at dawn, went to the madressa's dining commons to have a small breakfast, and then attended talks and sessions and poster explanations from then until supper, and after that far into the evenings. One morning she was startled to hear a young woman describing her discovery of what appeared to be a lost feminist branch of early Islam, a branch which had fuelled the renaissance of Samarqand, and was then destroyed and the memory of it erased. Apparently a group of women in Qum had taken against a ruling by the mullahs, and led their families east and north to the walled town of Derbent, in Bactria, a place that had been conquered by Alexander the Great and was still living a Greek life in Transoxianic bliss a thousand years later, when the Muslim women rebels and their families arrived. Together they created a way of life in which all living beings were equal before Allah and among themselves, something like what Alexander would have made, for he was a disciple of the queens of Kreta. Then all the people of Derbent lived happily for many years, and though they kept to themselves and did not try to impose themselves on all the world, they did tell some of what they had learned to the people they traded with in nearby Samarqand; and in Samarqand they took that knowledge, and made of it the start of the rebirth of the world. You can read all this in the ruins, the young researcher insisted.

Budur wrote down the references, realizing as she did that archaeology too could be a kind of wish, or even a statement about the future. She went back into the halls, shaking her head. She would have to ask Kirana about it. She would have to look into it herself. Who knew, really, what people had done in the past? Many things had happened and never been written about and after a time had been utterly forgotten. Almost anything might have happened, anything. And there was that phenomenon Kirana had mentioned once in passing, of people imagining that things were better in another land, which then gave them the courage to try to enact some progress in their own country. Thus women had everywhere imagined that women elsewhere had it better than they did, and thus they had had the courage to press for changes. And no doubt there were other examples of the tendency, people imagining the good in advance of its reality, as in the stories of the good place discovered and then lost, what the Chinese called 'Source of the Peach Blossom Stream' stories. History, fable, prophecy; no way to distinguish, until perhaps centuries had passed, and they had made the stories one thing or the other.