Annette felt like sighing, too. "Europe was all set to take off. It did in the home timeline—all the explorations, and the Scientific Revolution, and the Industrial Revolution. Here—"
"Everybody died," Mom said. That wasn't how Annette had intended to go on, which didn't mean it wasn't true.
"No Scientific Revolution anywhere but in Europe in this alternate, either," Dad said. "The Muslim world knows some things the Europeans—what's left of them—don't, but the Muslims don't know how much they didn't know before the plagues."
"Thomas Aquinas and al-Ghazzali," Annette said. Her father nodded. They'd drilled that one into the Kleins in their briefings. In the home timeline and here, the Christian saint and the Muslim holy man had asked the same question—was scientific research compatible with religion?
Aquinas had said yes. He said there could be no conflict between religion and science. All knowledge, to him, was one. He made Aristotle's logic fit inside the Christian faith. In the home timeline, that helped pave the way for the Scientific Revolution.
Al-Ghazzali had believed just the opposite. He thought scientific research undermined faith, and he thought faith was more important. In the home timeline, Aquinas' view dominated western Christianity. Al-Ghazzali's prevailed in Islam.
Al-Ghazzali's ideas prevailed in Islam in this alternate, too. If anything, the Great Black Deaths here had only made those ideas stronger. If God could do such a thing, how could any man hope to understand Him or His works? Muslims in this alternate feared and distrusted science. They clung to religion, and they clung to it hard.
The irony was, al-Ghazzali was right about whether science undermined faith. St. Thomas Aquinas was wrong. Studying science did weaken belief in God and in traditional religion. A lot of experience in the home timeline and in alternates with breakpoints more recent than this one's showed as much.
That studying science could also lead to a richer, healthier, more comfortable and more knowledgeable life on earth . . . was beside the point if you thought religion the be-all and end-all. Just about everyone in this alternate felt that way. Some people in the home timeline still did, too. Every so often, they used the products of science—explosives, radioactives, tailored viruses— to try to make their point.
"By the time Western Europe got its people back, it wasn't the same kind of place any more," Mother said.
Europe had needed more than two hundred years to get back to where it had been before the plagues came. It never took off, the way it had in the home timeline. That was partly because Muslims had reconquered Spain and Portugal and reoccupied Italy. It was also partly because of the Second Son and the Final Testament. Henri's take on Christianity wasn't as hostile to science as Islam was. But Aquinas' certainty that science and God went hand in hand was one more plague victim in this alternate.
"I wonder why China didn't do it," Annette mused.
In this alternate, the Manchus still ruled China. No pressure from Europe had weakened their dynasty there. China was the biggest, strongest, richest country in the world. But it wasn't much further along than it had been at the breakpoint, either. Some Emperors favored scholarship, some didn't. The ones who didn't tore down what the ones who did had built. In this alternate as in the home timeline, great Chinese junks under Zheng He had visited Arabia and East Africa in the 1410s. They'd taken Chinese porcelain to Africa and a giraffe back to China. But no Chinese ships had made the journey again in all the centuries since. Trade stayed in the hands of Arab and Indian and Malay middlemen.
Scholars in the home timeline still argued about why things turned out this way. They would go on arguing, too, till they knew a lot more—and probably even after they knew more. Arguing, testing ideas against evidence, moved scholarship ahead.
"China has always been very good at how," Dad said. "It hasn't been so good at why. Being good at how will make you more comfortable in the short run. In the long run, finding out why things work the way they do makes for bigger changes."
"Some people say you need to believe in one god first, before you can believe there's one why behind everything," Mom added. "If you explain things by saying they happen because this imp is fighting with that spirit, how are you going to look deeper?"
"So you think that's true?" Annette asked.
"I don't know. It can't be the whole answer—I'm sure of that," her mother replied. "But it may be part."
It seemed neat and clean and logical. Of course, plenty of things that seemed neat and clean and logical were also wrong. "I'll be studying all this stuff when I get to college, won't I?" Annette said.
"You'd better believe it," Mom said. Dad nodded.
So did Annette. Travel across timelines was the biggest thing that had happened to people since the discovery of the New World, maybe since the discovery of writing and the wheel. As far as Annette was concerned, anybody who didn't want to get involved with it probably would have thought Columbus would fall off the edge of the world or that wheels ought to be square. If seeing all the different ways things might have turned out didn't interest you, odds were you didn't have a pulse.
And the home timeline needed the alternates, too. They had all the things the home timeline was running out of when Gal-braith and Hester discovered crosstime travel. Trade for a little here, trade for a little there—the alternates would never miss it. Sink oil wells in a world where men had never evolved, and you could take whatever you needed.
Not everything was perfect. When was it ever? Some diseases had reached the home timeline. These days, biotech usually blunted them in a hurry. People who didn't work for Crosstime Traffic often complained the company had too much power. Annette thought they would have grumbled the same way about scribes back when writing was new. CT had to be the most closely watched company in the history of the world. The early days had seen a few scandals—again, nothing was perfect. But nobody's found any trouble like that for as long as she'd been alive.
"College," she murmured.
Her father chuckled. "Seems far away, doesn't it, when you're in a world where you get sick because your humors go out of whack, where they've forgotten what the Romans used to know about plumbing, and where they've got markets to sell human beings just like we've got markets to sell beans and watermelons?"
"Markets to sell human beings. Slave markets." Annette's mouth twisted. She'd seen one of those markets, down in Marseille. She understood that people in this alternate needed other people to do their work for them. They didn't have machines, the way the home timeline did. Even if she understood that, the idea of slavery gave her the cold horrors. To sell people like beans, to use them—or use them up—like farm animals . . . The day was cool, but that wasn't why she shivered.
Mom understood. She reached out and set a hand on Annette's shoulder. "It's a nasty business," she said. "Our hands are clean of that, anyhow."
"They'd better be!" Annette exclaimed. "We shouldn't just sit back and watch it, though. We ought to try to stamp it out."
"Where we can, we do," Dad said. "In an alternate like this, it's not easy. People here don't think slavery's wrong. They think it's natural. And it helps make the wheels go round. Sooner or later, the time will come when that's not so. But it hasn't got here yet."
To Annette, sooner or later might as well have been forever. To anybody in this alternate who was bought and sold like a bushel of beans, sooner or later was much too late. She could understand what Dad was driving at. Even in the home timeline, people hadn't started questioning slavery till the eighteenth century. Nobody—except maybe the slaves—questioned it here. Annette's heart said that was wrong, that was wicked, that needed to be changed yesterday—if not sooner.