"The Pacific Mystery"

"The Pacific Mystery" by Stephen Baxter was published in The Mammoth Book of Extreme Science Fiction and The Year's Best Science Fiction: Twenty-Fourth Annual Collection.

This is a dieselpunk story set in a world where the British made a separate peace with the Nazis, who then went on to defeat Russia. The vast, nuclear-powered aircraft Reichsmarschall des Grossdeutschen Reiches Hermann Goering sets out on an expedition to cross the hitherto-uncrossable Pacific Ocean. The eponymous mystery is very reminiscent of Christopher Priest's Inverted World.

"Then how do you explain the fact that nobody has crossed the Pacific before?"

"Ocean currents," he said. "Adverse winds. Hell, I don’t know."

But we both knew the story is more complicated than that. This is the Pacific Mystery.

Humanity came out of Africa; Darwin said so. In caveman days we spread north and east, across Asia all the way to Australia. Then the Polynesians went island-hopping. They crossed thousands of miles, reaching as far as Hawaii with their stone axes and dug-out boats.

But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.

And meanwhile others went west, to the Americas. Nobody quite knows how the first "native" Americans got there from Africa; some say it was just accidental rafting on lumber flushed down the Congo, though I fancy there’s a smack of racial prejudice in that theory. So when the Vikings sailed across the north Atlantic they came up against dark-skinned natives, and when the Portuguese and Spanish and British arrived they found a complicated trading economy, half-Norse, half-African, which they proceeded to wipe out. Soon the Europeans reached the west coast of the Americas.

But beyond that point the Pacific defeated them.