Copyright © 1991 by Kim Stanley Robinson, All rights reserved.  First appeared in Isaac Asimov's Science Fiction Magazine, November 1991.  For the personal use of those who have purchased the ESF 1993 Award anthology only.

Vinland the Dream

Kim Stanley Robinson

Abstract.  It was sunset at L'Anse aux Meadows.  The water of the bay was still, the boggy beach was dark in the shadows.  Flat arms of land pointed to flat islands offshore; beyond these a taller island stood like a loaf of stone in the sea, catching the last of the day's light.  A stream gurgled gently as it cut through the beach bog.  Above the bog, on a narrow grassy terrace, one could just make out a pattern of low mounds, all that remained of sod walls.  Next to them were three or four sod buildings, and beyond the buildings, a number of tents. 
A group of people--archaeologists, graduate students, volunteer laborers, visitors--moved together onto a rocky ridge overlooking the site.  Some of them worked at starting a campfire in a ring of blackened stones; others began to unpack bags of food, and cases of beer.  Far across the water lay the dark bulk of Labrador.  Kindling caught and their fire burned, a spark of yellow in the dusk's gloom.   
Hot dogs and beer, around a campfire by the sea; and yet it was strangely quiet.  Voices were subdued.  The people on the hill glanced down often at the site, where the head of their dig, a lanky man in his early fifties, was giving a brief tour to their distinguished guest.  The distinguished guest did not appear pleased.

Introduction.  The head of the dig, an archaeology professor from McGill University, was looking at the distinguished guest with the expression he wore when confronted by an aggressive undergraduate.  The distinguished guest, Canada's Minister of Culture, was asking question after question.  As she did, the professor took her to look for herself, at the forge, and the slag pit, and the little midden beside Building E.  New trenches were cut across the mounds and depressions, perfect rectangular cuts in the black peat; they could tell the minister nothing of what they had revealed.  But she had insisted on seeing them, and now she was asking questions that got right to the point, although they could have been asked and answered just as well in Ottawa.  Yes, the professor explained, the fuel for the forge was wood charcoal, the temperature had gotten to around twelve hundred degrees Celsius, the process was direct reduction of bog ore, obtaining about one kilogram of iron for every five kilograms of slag.  All was as it was in other Norse forges--except that the limonites in the bog ore had now been precisely identified by spectroscopic analysis; and that analysis had revealed that the bog iron smelted here had come from northern Quebec, near Chicoutimi.  The Norse explorers, who had supposedly smelted the bog ore, could not have obtained it.
There was a similar situation in the midden; rust migrated in peat at a known rate, and so it could be determined that the many iron rivets in the midden had only been there a hundred and forty years, plus or minus fifty.  
"So," the minister said, in English with a Francophone lilt.  "You have proved your case, it appears?"
The professor nodded wordlessly.  The minister watched him, and he couldn't help feeling that despite the nature of the news he was giving her, she was somewhat amused.  By him?  By his scientific terminology?  By his obvious (and growing) depression?  He couldn't tell.
The minister raised her eyebrows.  "L'Anse aux Meadows, a hoax.  Parcs Canada will not like it at all."
"No one will like it," the professor croaked.
"No," the minister said, looking at him.  "I suppose not.  Particularly as this is part of a larger pattern, yes?"  
The professor did not reply.  
"The entire concept of Vinland," she said. "A hoax!"
The professor nodded glumly.  
"I would not have believed it possible."
"No," the professor said.  "But--"  He waved a hand at the low mounds around them-- "So it appears."  He shrugged.  "The story has always rested on a very small body of evidence.  Three sagas, this site, a few references in Scandinavian records, a few coins, a few cairns. . . ."  He shook his head.  "Not much."  He picked up a chunk of dried peat from the ground, crumbled it in his fingers.
Suddenly the minister laughed at him, then put her hand to his upper arm.  Her fingers were warm.  "You must remember it is not your fault."
He smiled wanly.  "I suppose not."  He liked the look on her face; sympathetic as well as amused.  She was about his age, perhaps a bit older.  An attractive and sophisticated Quebecois.  "I need a drink," he confessed.
"There's beer on the hill."
"Something stronger.  I have a bottle of cognac I haven't opened yet. . ."
"Let's get it and take it up there with us."

Experimental Methods.  The graduate students and volunteer laborers were gathered around the fire, and the smell of roasting hot dogs filled the air.  It was nearly eleven, the sun a half hour gone, and the last light of the summer dusk slowly leaked from the sky.  The fire burned like a beacon.  Beer had been flowing freely, and the party was beginning to get a little more boisterous.
The minister and the professor stood near the fire, drinking cognac out of plastic cups.  
"How did you come to suspect the story of Vinland?" the minister asked as they watched the students cook hot dogs.  
A couple of the volunteer laborers, who had paid good money to spend their summer digging trenches in a bog, heard the question and moved closer.
The professor shrugged.  "I can't quite remember." He tried to laugh.  "Here I am an archaelogist, and I can't remember my own past."
The minister nodded as if that made sense.  "I suppose it was a long time ago?"
"Yes."  He concentrated.  "Now what was it.  Someone was following up the story of the Vinland map, to try and figure out who had done it.  The map showed up in a bookstore in New Haven in the 1950s--as you may know?"
"No," the minister said. "I hardly know a thing about Vinland, I assure you.  Just the basics that anyone in my position would have to know."
"Well, there was a map found in the 1950s called the Vinland map, and it was shown to be a hoax soon after its discovery.  But when this investigator traced the map's history, she found that the book it had been in was accounted for all the way back to the 1820s, map and all.  It meant the hoaxer had lived longer ago than I had expected."  He refilled his cup of cognac, then the minister's.  "There were a lot of Viking hoaxes in the nineteenth century, but this one was so early.  It surprised me.   It's generally thought that the whole phenomenon was stimulated by a book that a Danish scholar published in 1837, containing translations of the Vinland sagas and related material.  The book was very popular among the Scandinavian settlers in America, and after that, you know. . .  a kind of twisted patriotism, or the response of an ethnic group that had been made fun of too often. . .  So we got the Kensington stone, the halberds, the mooring holes, the coins.  But if a hoax predated Antiquitates Americanae. . . it made me wonder."
"If the book itself were somehow involved?"
"Exactly," the professor said, regarding the minister with pleasure.  "I wondered if the book might not incorporate, or have been inspired by, hoaxed material.  Then one day I was reading a description of the field work here, and it occurred to me that this site was a bit too pristine.  As if it had been built but never lived in.  Best estimates for its occupation were as low as one summer, because they couldn't find any trash middens to speak of, or graves."
"It could have been occupied very briefly," the minister pointed out.
"Yes, I know.  That's what I thought at the time.  But then I heard from a colleague in Bergen that the Gronlendinga Saga was apparently a forgery, at least in the parts referring to the discovery of Vinland.  Pages had been inserted that dated back to the 1820s.  And after that, I had a doubt that wouldn't go away."
"But there are more Vinland stories than that one, yes?"
"Yes.  There are three main sources.  The Gronlendinga Saga, The Saga of Erik the Red, and the part of The Hauksbäk that tells about Thorfinn Karlsefni's expedition.  But with one of those questioned, I began to doubt them all.  And the story itself.  Everything having to do with the idea of Vinland."
"Is that when you went to Bergen?" a graduate student asked.
The professor nodded.  He drained his plastic cup, felt the alcohol rushing through him.  "I joined Nielsen there and we went over Erik the Red and The Hauksbäk, and damned if the pages in those concerning Vinland weren't forgeries too.  The ink gave it away--not its composition, which was about right, but merely how long it had been on that paper.  Which was thirteenth century paper, I might add!  The forger had done a super job.  But the sagas had been tampered with sometime in the early nineteen century."
"But those are masterpieces of world literature," a volunteer laborer exclaimed, round-eyed; the ads for volunteer labor had not included a description of the primary investigator's hypothesis.
"I know," the professor said irritably, and shrugged.  
He saw a chunk of peat on the ground, picked it up and threw it on the blaze.  After a bit it flared up.  
"It's like watching dirt burn," he said absently, staring into the flames.  

Discussion.  The burnt garbage smell of peat wafted downwind, and offshore the calm water of the bay was riffled by the same gentle breeze.  The minister warmed her hands at the blaze for a moment, then gestured at the bay.  "It's hard to believe they were never here at all."
"I know," the professor said. "It looks like a Viking site, I'll give him that."
"Him," the minister repeated.
"I know, I know.  This whole thing forces you to imagine a man in the eighteen twenties and thirties, traveling all over--Norway, Iceland, Canada, New England, Rome, Stockholm, Denmark, Greenland. . . .  Crisscrossing the North Atlantic, to bury all these signs."  He shook his head.  "It's incredible."  
He retrieved the cognac bottle and refilled.  He was, he had to admit, beginning to feel drunk.  "And so many parts of the hoax were well hidden!  You can't assume we've found them all.  This place had two butternuts buried in the midden, and butternuts only grow down below the St. Lawrence, so who's to say they aren't clues, indicating another site down there? That's where grapevines actually grow, which would justify the name Vinland.  I tell you, the more I know about this hoaxer, the more certain I am that other sites exist.  The tower in Newport, Rhode Island, for instance--the hoaxer didn't build that, because it's been around since the seventeenth century--but a little work out there at night, in the early nineteenth century. . . I bet if it were excavated completely, you'd find a few Norse artifacts."
"Buried in all the right places," the minister said.
"Exactly."  The professor nodded.  "And up the coast of Labrador, at Cape Porcupine where the sagas say they repaired a ship.  There too.  Stuff scattered everywhere, left to be discovered or not."
The minister waved her plastic cup.  "But surely this site must have been his masterpiece.  He couldn't have done too many as extensive as this."
"I shouldn't think so."  The professor drank deeply, smacked his numbed lips.  "Maybe one more like this, down in New Brunswick.  That's my guess.  But this was surely one of his biggest projects."
"It was a time for that kind of thing," the volunteer laborer offered.  "Atlantis, Mu, Lemuria. . . ."
The minister nodded.  "It fulfills a certain desire."
"Theosophy, most of that," the professor muttered.  "This was different."
The volunteer wandered off.  The professor and the minister looked into the fire for a while.
"You are sure?" the minister asked.
The professor nodded.  "Trace elements show the ore came from upper Quebec.  Chemical changes in the peat weren't right.  And nuclear resonance dating methods show that the bronze pin they found hadn't been buried long enough.  Little things like that.  Nothing obvious.  He was amazingly meticulous, he really thought it out.  But the nature of things tripped him up.  Nothing more than that."
"But the effort!" the minister said.  "This is what I find hard to believe.  Surely it must have been more than one man!  Burying these objects, building the walls--surely he would have been noticed!"
The professor stopped another swallow, nodded at her as he choked once or twice.  A broad wave of the hand, a gasping recovery of breath:  
"Fishing village, kilometer north of here.  Boarding house in the early nineteenth century.  A crew of ten rented rooms in the summer of 1842.  Bills paid by a Mr. Carlsson."
The minister raised her eyebrows.  "Ah."  
One of the graduate students got out a guitar and began to play.  The other students and the volunteers gathered around her.  
"So," the minister said, "Mr. Carlsson.  Does he show up elsewhere?"
"There was a Professor Ohman in Bergen.  A Dr. Bergen in Reykjavik.  In the right years, studying the sagas.  I presume they were all him, but I don't know for sure."
"What do you know about him?"
"Nothing.   No one paid much attention to him.  I've got him on a couple transatlantic crossings, I think, but he used aliases, so I've probably missed most of them.  A Scandinavian-American, apparently Norwegian by birth.  Someone with some money--someone with patriotic feelings of some kind--someone with a grudge against a university--who knows?  All I have are a few signatures, of aliases at that.  A flowery handwriting.  Nothing more.  That's the most remarkable thing about him!   You see, most hoaxers leave clues to their identities, because a part of them wants to be caught.  So their cleverness can be admired, or the ones who fell for it embarrassed, or whatever.  But this guy didn't want to be discovered.  And in those days, if you wanted to stay off the record. . . ."  He shook his head.
"A man of mystery."
"Yeah.  But I don't know how to find out anything more about him."
The professor's face was glum in the firelight as he reflected on this. He polished off another cup of cognac.  The minister watched him drink, then said kindly, "There is nothing to be done about it, really.  That is the nature of the past."
"I know."

Conclusions.   They threw the last big logs on the fire, and flames roared up, yellow licks breaking free among the stars.  The professor felt numb all over, his heart was cold, the firelit faces were smeary primitive masks, dancing in the light.  The songs were harsh and raucous, he couldn't understand the words.  The wind was chilling, and the hot skin of his arms and neck goosepimpled uncomfortably.  He felt sick with alcohol, and knew it would be a while before his body could overmaster it.  
The minister led him away from the fire, then up the rocky ridge.  Getting him away from the students and laborers, no doubt, so he wouldn't embarrass himself.  Starlight illuminated the heather and broken granite under their feet.  He stumbled.  He tried to explain to her what it meant, to be an archaelogist whose most important work was the discovery that a bit of their past was a falsehood.  
"It's like a mosaic," he said, drunkenly trying to follow the fugitive thought.  "A puzzle with most of the pieces gone.  A tapestry.  And if you pull a thread out. . . it's ruined.  So little lasts!  We need every bit we can find!"
She seemed to understand.  In her student days, she told him, she had waitressed at a café in Montreal.  Years later she had gone down the street to have a look, just for nostalgia's sake.  The café was gone.  The street was completely different.  And she couldn't remember the names of any of the people she had worked with.  "This was my own past, not all that many years ago!"  
The professor nodded.  Cognac was rushing through his veins, and as he looked at the minister, so beautiful in the starlight, she seemed to him a kind of muse, a spirit sent to comfort him, or frighten him, he couldn't tell which.  Cleo, he thought.  The muse of history.  Someone he could talk to.
She laughed softly.  "Sometimes it seems our lives are much longer than we usually think.  So that we live through incarnations, and looking back later we have nothing but. . . ."  She waved a hand.
"Bronze pins," the professor said.  "Iron rivets."
"Yes."   She looked at him.  Her eyes were bright in the starlight.  "We need an archaelogy for our own lives."   

Acknowledgements.   Later he walked her back to the fire, now reduced to banked red coals.  She put her hand to his upper arm as they walked, steadying herself, and he felt in the touch some kind of portent; but couldn't understand it.   He had drunk so much!  Why be so upset about it, why?  It was his job to find the truth; having found it, he should be happy!  Why had no one told him what he would feel?
The minister said good-night.  She was off to bed; she suggested he do likewise.  Her look was compassionate, her voice firm.  
When she was gone he hunted down the bottle of cognac, and drank the rest of it.  The fire was dying, the students and workers scattered--in the tents, or out in the night, in couples.  
He walked by himself back down to the site.  
Low mounds, of walls that had never been.  Beyond the actual site were rounded buildings, models built by the park service, to show tourists what the "real" buildings had looked like.  When Vikings had camped on the edge of the new world.  Repairing their boats.  Finding food.  Fighting among themselves, mad with epic jealousies.  Fighting the dangerous Indians.  Getting killed, and then driven away from this land, so much lusher than Greenland.  
A creak in the brush and he jumped, startled.  It would have been like that:  death in the night, creeping up on you--he turned with a jerk, and every starlit shadow bounced with hidden skraelings, their bows drawn taut, their arrows aimed at his heart.  He quivered, hunched over.
But no.  It hadn't been like that.  Not at all.  Instead, a man with spectacles and a bag full of old junk, directing some unemployed sailors as they dug.  Nondescript, taciturn, nameless; one night he would have wandered back there into the forest, perhaps fallen or had  a heart attack--become a skeleton wearing leathers and swordbelt, with spectacles over the skull's eyesockets, the anachronism that gave him away at last. . . .  The professor staggered over the low mounds toward the trees, intent on finding that inadvertent grave. . . .   
But no.  It wouldn't be there.  The taciturn figure hadn't been like that.  He would have been far away when he died, nothing to show what he had spent years of his life doing.  A man in a hospital for the poor, the bronze pin in his pocket overlooked by the doctor, stolen by an undertaker's assistant.  An anonymous figure, to the grave and beyond.  The creator of Vinland.  Never to be found.
The professor looked around, confused and sick.  There was a waist-high rock, a glacial erratic.  He sat on it.  Put his head on his hands.   Really quite unprofessional.  All those books he had read as a child.  What would the minister think!  Grant money.  No reason to feel so bad!  
At that latitude midsummer nights are short, and the party had lasted late.  The sky to the east was already gray.  He could see down onto the site, and its long sod roofs.  On the beach, a trio of long narrow high-ended ships.  Small figures in furs emerged from the longhouses and went down to the water, and he walked among them and heard their speech, a sort of dialect of Norwegian that he could mostly understand.  They would leave that day, it was time to load the ships.  They were going to take everything with them, they didn't plan to return.  Too many skraelings in the forest, too many quick arrow deaths.  He walked among them, helping them load stores.  Then a little man in a black coat scurried behind the forge, and he roared and took off after him, scooping up a rock on the way, ready to deal out a skraeling death to that black intruder.
The minister woke him with a touch of her hand.  He almost fell off the rock.  He shook his head; he was still drunk.  The hangover wouldn't begin for a couple more hours, though the sun was already up.  
"I should have known all along," he said to her angrily.  "They were stretched to the limit in Greenland, and the climate was worsening.  It was amazing they got that far.  Vinland. . . " He waved a hand at the site-- "was just some dreamer's story."
Regarding him calmly, the minister said, "I am not sure it matters."  
He looked up at her.  "What do you mean?"
"History is made of stories people tell.   And fictions, dreams, hoaxes--they also are made of stories people tell.  True or false, it's the stories that matter to us.  Certain qualities in the stories themselves make them true or false."
He shook his head.  "Some things really happened in the past.  And some things didn't."
"But how can you know for sure which is which?  You can't go back and see for yourself.  Maybe Vinland was the invention of this mysterious stranger of yours; maybe the Vikings came here after all, and landed somewhere else.  Either way it can never be anything more than a story to us."
"But. . ."  He swallowed.  "Surely it matters whether it is a true story or not!"
She paced before him.  "A friend of mine once told me something he had read in a book," she said.  "It was by a man who sailed the Red Sea, long ago.  He told of a servant boy on one of the dhows, who could not remember ever having been cared for.  The boy had become a sailor at age three--before that, he had been a beach-comber."  She stopped pacing and looked at the beach below them.  "Often I imagined that little boy's life. Surviving alone on a beach, at that age--it astonished me.  It made me. . . happy."
She turned to look at him.  "But later I told this story to an expert in child development, and he just shook his head.  'It probably wasn't true,' he said.  Not a lie, exactly, but a. . . ."
"A stretcher," the professor suggested.
"A stretcher, exactly.  He supposed that the boy had been somewhat older, or had had some help.  You know."
The professor nodded.  
"But in the end," the minister said, "I found this judgement did not matter to me.  In my mind I still saw that toddler, searching the tidepools for his daily food.  And so for me the story lives.  And that is all that matters.  We judge all the stories from history like that--we value them according to how much they spur our imaginations."
The professor stared at her.  He rubbed his jaw, looked around.  Things had the sharp-edged clarity they sometimes get after a sleepness night, as if glowing with internal light.  He said, "Someone with opinions like yours probably shouldn't have the job that you do."
"I didn't know I had them," the minister said.  "I only just came upon them in the last couple of hours, thinking about it."
The professor was surprised.  "You didn't sleep?"
She shook her head.  "Who could sleep on a night like this?"
"My feeling exactly!"  He almost smiled.   "So.  A nuit blanche, you call it?"  
"Yes," she said.  "A nuit blanche for two."  And she looked down at him with that amused glance of hers, as if. . . as if she understood him.  
She extended her arms toward him, grasped his hands, helped pull him to his feet.  They began to walk back toward the tents, across the site of L'Anse aux Meadows.  The grass was wet with dew, and very green.   
"I still think," he said as they walked together, "that we want more than stories from the past.  We want something not easily found--something, in fact, that the past doesn't have.   Something secret, some secret meaning. . .  something that will give our lives a kind of sense."
   She slipped a hand under his arm. "We want the Atlantis of childhood.  But, failing that. . . ."  She laughed and kicked at a clump of grass; a spray of dew flashed ahead of them, containing, for just one moment, a bright little rainbow.  
End