He looked at me strangely. “Writing sci-roms?” he asked.
“No, of course not! That’s good enough for me, but you’ve still got your extrasolar probe to keep you busy.”
“Julie,” he said sadly, “where have you been lately? Didn’t you see the last Olympian message?”
“Well, sure,” I said, offended. “Everybody did, didn’t they?” And then I thought for a moment, and, actually, it had been Rachel who had told me about it. I’d never actually looked at a journal or a broadcast. “I guess I was pretty busy,” I said lamely.
He looked sadder than ever. “Then maybe you don’t know that they said they weren’t only terminating all their own transmissions to us, they were terminating even our own probes.”
“Oh, no, Sam! I would have heard if the probes had stopped transmitting!”
He said patiently, “No, you wouldn’t, because the data they were sending is still on its way to us. We’ve still got a few years coming in from our probes. But that’s it. We’re out of interstellar space, Julie. They don’t want us there.”
He broke off, peering out the window. “And that’s the way it is,” he said. “We’re here, though, and you better get inside. Rachel’s going to be tired of sitting under that canopy without you around.”
* * * *
The greatest thing of all about being a bestselling author, if you like travelling, is that when you fly around the world somebody else pays for the tickets. Marcus’s publicity department fixed up the whole thing. Personal appearances, bookstore autographings, college lectures, broadcasts, publishers’ meetings, receptions - we were kept busy for a solid month, and it made a hell of a fine honeymoon.
Of course any honeymoon would have been wonderful as long as Rachel was the bride, but without the publishers bankrolling us we might not have visited six of the seven continents on the way. (We didn’t bother with Polaris Australis - nobody there but penguins.) And we took time for ourselves along the way, on beaches in Hindia and the islands of Han, in the wonderful shops of Manahattan and a dozen other cities of the Western Continents - we did it all.
When we got back to Alexandria the contractors had finished the remodeling of Rachel’s villa - which, we had decided, would now be our winter home, though our next priority was going to be to find a place where we could spend the busy part of the year in London. Sam had moved back in and, with Basilius, greeted us formally as we came to the door.
“I thought you’d be in Rome,” I told him, once we were settled and Rachel had gone to inspect what had been done with her baths.
“Not while I’m still trying to understand what went wrong,” he said “The research is going on right here; this is where we transmitted from.”
I shrugged and took a sip of the Falernian wine Basilius had left for us. I held the goblet up critically: a little cloudy, I thought, and in the vat too long. And then I grinned at myself, because a few weeks earlier I would have been delighted at anything so costly. “But we know what went wrong,” I told him reasonably. “They decided against us.”
“Of course they did,” he said. “But why? I’ve been trying to work out just what messages were being received when they broke off communications.”
“Do you think we said something to offend them?”
He scratched the age spot on his bald head, staring at me. Then he sighed. “What would you think, Julius?”
“Well, maybe so,” I admitted. “What messages were they?”
“I’m not sure. It took a lot of digging. The Olympians, you know, acknowledged receipt of each message by repeating the last hundred and forty groups—”
“I didn’t know.”
“Well, they did. The last message they acknowledged was a history of Rome. Unfortunately, it was 650,000 words long.”
“So you have to read the whole history?”
“Not just read it, Julie; we have to try to figure out what might have been in it that wasn’t in any previous message. We’ve had two or three hundred researchers collating every previous message, and the only thing that was new was some of the social data from the last census—”
I interrupted him. “I thought you said it was a history.”
“It was at the end of the history. We were giving pretty current data - so many of equestrian rank, so many citizens, so many freedmen, so many slaves.” He hesitated, and then said thoughtfully, “Paulus Magnus - I don’t know if you know him, he’s an Algonkan - pointed out that that was the first time we’d ever mentioned slavery.”
I waited for him to go on. “Yes?” I said encouragingly.
He shrugged. “Nothing. Paulus is a slave himself, so naturally he’s got it on his mind a lot.”
“I don’t quite see what that has to do with anything,” I said. “Isn’t there anything else?”
“Oh,” he said, “there are a thousand theories. There were some health data, too, and some people think the Olympians might have suddenly got worried about some new microorganism killing them off. Or we weren’t polite enough. Or maybe - who knows - there was some sort of power struggle among them, and the side that came out on top just didn’t want any more new races in their community.”
“And we don’t know yet which it was?”
“It’s worse than that, Julie,” he told me sombrely. “I don’t think we ever will find out what it was that made them decide they didn’t want to have anything to do with us.” And in that, too, Flavius Samuelus ben Samuelus was a very intelligent man. Because we never have.
<
* * * *
Darwin Anathema
Stephen Baxter
Trailed by a porter with her luggage, Mary Mason climbed down the steamer’s ramp to the dock at Folkestone, and waited in line with the rest of the passengers to clear security.
Folkestone, her first glimpse of England, was unprepossessing, a small harbour in the lee of cliffs fronting a dismal, smoke-stained townscape from which the slender spires of churches protruded. People crowded around the harbour, the passengers disembarking, stevedores labouring to unload the hold. There was a line of horse-drawn vehicles waiting, and one smoky-looking steam carriage. The ocean-going steamship, its rusting flank a wall, looked too big and vigorous for the port.
Mary, forty-five years old, felt weary, stiff, faintly disoriented to be standing on a surface that wasn’t rolling back and forth. She had come to England all the way from Terra Australis to participate in the Inquisition’s trial of Charles Darwin, a man more than a century dead. Back home in Cooktown it had seemed a good idea. Now she was here it seemed utterly insane.
At last the port inspectors stared at her passepartout, cross-examined her about her reasons for coming to England - they didn’t seem to know what a “natural philosopher” was - and then opened every case. One of the officials finally handed back her passepartout. She checked it was stamped with the correct date: 9 February 2009. “Welcome to England,” he grunted.
She walked forward, trailed by the porter.
“Lector Mason? Not quite the harbour at Cooktown, is it? Nevertheless I hope you’ve had a satisfactory voyage.”
She turned. “Father Brazel?”
Xavier Brazel was the Jesuit who had coordinated her invitation and passage. He was tall, slim, elegant; he wore a modest black suit with a white clerical collar. He was a good bit younger than she was, maybe thirty. He smiled, blessed her with two fingers making a cross sign in the air, and shook her hand. “Call me Xavier. I’m delighted to meet you, truly. We’re privileged you’ve agreed to participate in the trial, and I’m particularly looking forward to hearing you speak at St Paul’s. Come, I have a carriage to the rail station ...” Nodding at the porter, he led her away. “The trial of Alicia Darwin and her many-times-great-uncle starts tomorrow.”
“Yes. The ship was delayed a couple of days.”
“I’m sorry there’s so little time to prepare, or recover.”
“I’ll be fine.”
The carriage was small but
sturdy, pulled by a pair of patient horses. It clattered away through crowded, cobbled streets.
“And I apologise for the security measures,” Xavier said. “A tiresome welcome to the country. It’s been like this since the 29 May attacks.”
“That was six years ago. They caught the Vatican bombers, didn’t they?” Pinprick attacks by Muslim zealots who had struck to commemorate the 550th anniversary of the Islamic conquest of Constantinople - and more than 120 years after a Christian coalition had taken the city back from the Ottomans.
He just smiled. “Once you have surrounded yourself with a ring of steel, it’s hard to tear it down.”
They reached the station where the daily train to London was, fortuitously, waiting. Xavier already had tickets. Xavier helped load Mary’s luggage, and led her to an upper-class carriage. Aside from Mary everybody in here seemed to be a cleric of some kind, the men in black suits, the few women in nuns’ wimples.
The train pulled away. Clouds of sooty steam billowed past the window.
A waiter brought coffees. Xavier sipped his with relish. “Please, enjoy.”
Mary tasted her coffee. “That’s good.”
“French, from their American colonies. The French do know how to make good coffee. Speaking of the French - have you visited Britain before? As it happens this rail line follows the track of the advance of Napoleon’s Grande Armee in 1807, through Maidstone to London. You may see the monuments in the towns we pass through . . . Are you all right, Lector? You don’t seem quite comfortable.”
“I’m not used to having so many clerics around me. Terra Australis is a Christian country, even if it followed the Marxist Reformation. But I feel like the only sinner on the train.”
He smiled and spoke confidentially. “If you think this is a high density of dog-collars you should try visiting Rome.”
She found herself liking him for his humour and candour. But, she had learned from previous experience, Jesuits were always charming and manipulative. “I don’t need to go to Rome to see the Inquisition at work, however, do I?”
“We prefer not to use that word,” he said evenly. “The Sacred Congregation for the Doctrine of Faith, newly empowered under Cardinal Ratzinger since the 29 May attacks, has done sterling work in the battle against Ottoman extremists.”
“Who just want the freedom of faith they enjoyed up until the 1870s Crusade.”
He smiled. “You know your history. But of course that’s why you’re here. The presence of unbiased observers is important; the Congregation wants to be seen to give Darwin a fair hearing. I have to admit we had refusals to participate from philosophers with specialities in natural selection—”
“So you had to settle for a historian of natural philosophy?”
“We are grateful for your help. The Church as a whole is keen to avoid unfortunate misunderstandings. The purpose of the Congregation’s hearings is to clarify the relationship between theology and natural philosophy, not to condemn. You’ll see. And frankly,” he said, “I hope you’ll think better of us after you’ve seen us at work.”
She shrugged. “I guess I’m here for my own purposes too.” As a historian she’d hope to gather some good material on the centuries-long tension between Church and natural philosophy, and maybe she could achieve more at the trial itself than contribute to some kind of Inquisition propaganda stunt. But now she was here, in the heart of the theocracy, she wasn’t so sure.
She’d fallen silent. Xavier studied her with polite concern. “Are you comfortable? Would you like more coffee?”
“I think I’m a little over-tired,” she said. “Sorry if I snapped.” She dug her book out of her bag. “Maybe I’ll read a bit and leave you in peace.”
He glanced at the spine. “H. G. Wells. The War of the Celestial Spheres.”
“I’m trying to immerse myself in all things English.”
“It’s a fine read, and only marginally heretical.” He actually winked at her.
She had to laugh, but she felt a frisson of unease.
So she read, and dozed a little, as the train clattered through the towns of Kent, Ashford and Charing and others. The towns and villages were cramped, the buildings uniformly stained black with soot. The rolling country was cluttered with small farms where people in mud-coloured clothes laboured over winter crops. The churches were squat buildings like stone studs pinning down the ancient green of the countryside. She’d heard there was a monument to Wellington at Maidstone, where he’d fallen as he failed to stop Napoleon crossing the Medway river. But if it existed at all it wasn’t visible from the train.
By the time the train approached London, the light of the short English day was already fading.
* * * *
As a guest of the Church she was lodged in one of London’s best hotels. But her room was lit by smoky oil lamps. There seemed to be electricity only in the lobby and dining room - why, even the front porch of her own home outside Cooktown had an electric bulb. And she noticed that the telegraph they used to send a message home to her husband and son was an Australian Maxwell design.
Still, in the morning she found she had a terrific view of the Place de Louis XVI, and of Whitehall and the Mall beyond. The day was bright, and pigeons fluttered around the statue of Bonaparte set atop the huge Christian cross that dominated the square. For a historian this was a reminder of the Church’s slow but crushing reconquest of Protestant England. In the eighteenth century a Catholic league had cooperated with the French to defeat Britain’s imperial ambitions in America and India, and then in 1807 the French King’s Corsican attack-dog had been unleashed on the homeland. By the time Napoleon withdrew, England was once more a Catholic country under a new Bourbon king. Looking up at Napoleon’s brooding face, she was suddenly glad her own home was 12,000 miles away from all this history.
Father Xavier called for her at nine. They travelled by horse-drawn carriage to St Paul’s Cathedral, where the trial of Charles Darwin was to be staged.
St Paul’s was magnificent. Xavier had sweetened her trip around the world by promising her she would be allowed to give a guest sermon to senior figures in London’s theological and philosophical community from the cathedral’s pulpit. Now she was here she started to feel intimidated at the prospect.
But she had no time to look around. Xavier, accompanied by an armed Inquisition guard, led her straight through to the stairs down to the crypt, which had been extended to a warren of dark corridors with rows of hefty locked doors. In utter contrast to the glorious building above, this was like a prison, or a dungeon.
Xavier seemed to sense her mood. “You’re doing fine, Lector.”
“Yeah. I’m just memorizing the way out.”
They arrived at a room that was surprisingly small and bare, for such a high-profile event, with plain plastered walls illuminated by dangling electrical bulbs. The centrepiece was a wooden table behind which sat a row of Inquisition examiners, Mary presumed, stern men all of late middle age wearing funereal black and clerical collars. Their chairman sat in an elaborate throne-like seat, elevated above the rest.
A woman stood before them - stood because she had no seat to sit on, Mary saw. The girl, presumably Alicia, Darwin’s grand-niece several times removed, wore a sober charcoal-grey dress. She was very pale, with blue eyes and strawberry hair; she could have been no older than twenty, twenty-one.
On one side of her sat a young man, soberly dressed, good-looking, his features alive with interest. And on the other side, Mary was astounded to see, a coffin rested on trestles.
Xavier led Mary to a bench set along one wall. Here various other clerics sat, most of them men. On the far side were men and women in civilian clothes. Some were writing in notebooks, others sketching the faces of the principals.
“Just in time,” Xavier murmured as they sat. “I do apologise. Did you see the look Father Boniface gave me?”
“Not the Boniface!”
“The Reverend Father Boniface Jones, Commissary General. Lea
rned his trade at the feet of Commissary Hitler himself, in the old man’s retirement years after all his good work during the Missionary Wars in Orthodox Russia ...”
“Who’s that lot on the far side?”
“From the chronicles. Interest in this case is world-wide.”
“Don’t tell me who’s in that box.”
“Respectfully disinterred from his tomb in Edinburgh and removed here. He could hardly not show up for his own trial, could he? Today we’ll hear the deposition. The verdict is due to be given in a couple of days - on the twelfth, Darwin’s 200th anniversary.”
Xavier said that the young man sitting beside Alicia was called Anselm Fairweather; a friend of Alicia, he was the theological lawyer she had chosen to assist her in presenting her case.
The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories [Anthology] Page 65
