Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition

by Gardner Dozois

  At zero nine thirty the Questioners go to breakfast. The magician remains suspended. On their return at eleven hundred hours his spirit is seen to have left him. He is revived with water and hot irons, and the strappado is employed again. He agrees he may have been a witch, but on being released recants. Alcohol is thrown onto his back and set alight. The strappado is used a third time, and the Questioners break for lunch.

  At fourteen hundred hours, gresillons are applied to the magician’s hands and feet. Later his calves are placed in the vice. For this purpose he is released from the pulley. He says again he may have employed spells, but afterward retracts a second time. He is placed back on the Ladder, and a plank with nails embedded pressed against his body.

  The Questioners become impatient. He is hoisted up once more, this time with the weights. Squassation is decided on. His body is allowed to drop from near the ceiling. His arms are dislocated.

  The accused of course must always confess. He signifies his willingness but indicates that he can no longer use a pen. This is of no importance; the document has already been prepared. He is asked when he first entered into pacts with demons. He states this was some twenty years before. He is asked where it took place. He says it was in the village where he was born. He is asked if the girl lived in the village. He says she was the daughter of a neighbor.

  He is asked the names of the demons. His answers are difficult to make out. Balberith seems certain, and Verrine. Gressil is less clear, which is unfortunate. It is Gressil who is the author of impure thoughts. The name is added anyway, for the sake of completeness. He it must have been who made him lust for the girl. He says this is untrue, and that his love was pure.

  He is told he must not lie, that she was his concubine. Also there were monstrous acts, performed with demons.

  The accused exhibits signs of distress, rolling his head from side to side. He likens her to certain morning stars. He says she will go to Heaven, and not Hell. He repeats his request that she be instantly released.

  This answer is not recorded, as being wholly blasphemous. The questions are repeated, but his responses are the same. Whips are brought; his body becomes bathed with blood.

  The session is concluded at eighteen hundred hours. It has been a long day; the Questioners have earned their supper.

  Next morning the interrogation is less rough. The Questioners have much experience in these matters; they know that once the answers have begun, the process becomes easier. The accused is asked the names of his accomplices. He says the innkeeper sometimes brought him food. He is asked if he means the woman Becker-Margareth. He says again that she sometimes brought him victuals.

  The Questioners smile grimly, making more notes. Her case will be a simple one to prove; her aging body will be a rich source of Marks.

  It has been stated a young boy was involved. The accused is asked his name. He says that it was Heinrich, but that he knew nothing of the work. He once more makes a plea for clemency.

  The Questioners smile again. They ask if it was Heinrich who robbed the graves.

  The magician seems surprised. He states that only one body was involved. He took the head, wishing to examine the bones of the inner ear.

  The Questioners become intent. The subject is evidently beyond redemption. The lines of ticks extend themselves. Affirmat they write, over and again. The accused says yes.

  They return to the subject of the girl. But on that alone that guilty one is obdurate. Her virtues are once more extolled. The magician seems much moved. At one point tears are seen to flow from his eyes.

  The key question is reserved till last. He has stated she took no part in his affairs. Yet it is known she gave him gold, when his own supply was gone.

  The accused rolls his head miserably. It was not to succor him, it was not for food. It was for the machines. He repeats once more his request that she be freed.

  The Questioners are satisfied. The case is proved at last. They wish though to be certain beyond all doubt. Justice must be seen to be done. They become persuasive. He has confessed to having sex with devils, stated certain facts. They show him where it is written down. Their members were cold and painful, affording no pleasure. What was the girl’s experience? Did it accord?

  The accused is seen to struggle. It seems he attempts to rise, strike out. But his arms and legs already belong to Hell. The rest of him will shortly follow. The execution is fixed for seventeen thirty sharp.

  ###

  The sunlight batters at his eyelids. He sits atop a cart, his wrists and ankles once more bound. A part of him is puzzled as to why. He could not run away.

  The sound in his ears is like the noise of the sea. Also his eyes seem weaker than before. He screws them up against the glare. He sees the people crowding round, the buildings to either side. Tall stakes have been set up by the Schutting. Round it the trees are gold with autumn. Bodies hang from them, each suspended by a leg.

  He lifts his hands by inches, moves them closer to his face. At first the white bone showed; now it is crusted with dull red. He wonders that a part of him can still feel sorrow. His hands worked for him throughout his life; they will not function now.

  The girl appears, in her vehicle. His heart gives a bound. Her upper vestment is black and neat, her hair falls softly to her shoulders. She has been saved; she has not known the fire, the hot irons. Then he sees the eyes of the man beside her, the gun pressed to her neck. He understands that death is still her portion.

  The crowd boils round. Her eyes look straight ahead; it seems her gaze is fixed on another place.

  The shouts coalesce. By degrees, one word comes to dominate. “Hexenkonigen . . . Hexenkonigen . . .” She does turn at that. Her face is full of something that is almost wonder. “No,” she says. “It is for my yellow hair. I kept it covered, as a decent woman should; but they found me out.”

  Suddenly the visions once more burn and hum within his mind. He sees what he has lost, what both of them have lost. He sees what might have been: the town, the countryside, the whole world laced with magic wires. He hears the people laugh and chatter; by the thousand, by the hundred thousand, by the million. “I could have saved them,” he shouts, desperate. “Were I a better man. I could have saved you. Saved your voice, to float and ring on air. I could have saved you, Silke . . .”

  The Executioner moves forward, appalled by blasphemy. The magician’s head drops to his chest; and the emissary nods grimly. The Devil does not like his secrets noised abroad; at seventeen twenty hours, he breaks the condemned man’s neck. The priest makes a final mark on the clipboard he carries, tucks it beneath his arm. He turns on his heel, and is quickly lost in the crowd.

  ###

  For three hundred years, the wires are silent by the will of God. While the world continues on its reeling way. Romanoff founds a dynasty in Russia; the first Prague Spring triggers thirty years of war. Magdeburg is sacked, America colonized. Richelieu rises to power, and England kills a king. Stenka Razin’s severed head laughs at the Czar; by the Peace of Utrecht, the slave trade is cornered by the English. Persia wages war against the Moguls, and Cavendish proves hydrogen to be an element.

  America breaks free of England; Charles and Montgolfier break free of earth. The Directory is established by a whiff of grape; and Boney goes to Egypt. The world’s first steamship sails the Scottish Clyde, and Metternich restores the European Royals. Sadowa ensures the supremacy of Bismarck, Napoleon the Third is swept away, and Caesar’s warring tribes become a nation.

  The witches and their tormentors are long since gone. Spain, so feared and hated by the English, is the first to see the light. The Suprema orders the Questioners to their own racks; and everywhere men wake and rub their eyes. Round them, the Age of Reason has begun to dawn.

  In 1860, Johann Reis, unsung and unremembered, begins experiments with membranes from the ears of pigs. In February of 1876, Alexander Graham Bell takes out Patent No. 174465 for the protection of a new device: his electric speaking telephon
e. A month later, his first transmitted sentence passes to history. “Watson, come here; I want you . . .”

  In 1879, the Reverend Henry Hunnings hits on the idea of treated carbon granules, to modulate the power supplied by batteries. And the inventor Watson devises a magneto cranked by hand. A year later, insulation is finally perfected; and New York City buries eleven thousand miles of wire. In 1959, aided by cable amplifiers, the voices finally plunge beneath the sea; today, the world owns half a billion handsets.

  God has relented.

  The Way of Cross and Dragon

  George R. R. Martin

  Born in Bayonne, New Jersey, George R. R. Martin made his first sale in 1971 and soon established himself as one of the most popular science fiction writers of the seventies. He quickly became a mainstay of the Ben Bova Analog with stories such as “With Morning Comes Mistfall,” “And Seven Times Never Kill Man,” “The Second Kind of Loneliness,” “The Storms of Windhaven” (in collaboration with Lisa Tuttle, and later expanded by them into the novel Windhaven), “Override,” and others, although he also sold to Amazing, Fantastic, Galaxy, Orbit, and other markets. One of his Analog stories, the striking novella, “A Song for Lya,” won him his first Hugo Award, in 1974.

  By the end of the seventies, he had reached the height of his influence as a science fiction writer and was producing his best work in that category with stories such as the famous “Sandkings,” his best-known story, which won both the Nebula and the Hugo in 1980 (he’d later win another Nebula in 1985 for his story “Portraits of His Children”); “The Way of Cross and Dragon,” which won a Hugo Award in the same year (making Martin the first author ever to receive two Hugo Awards for fiction in the same year); “Bitterblooms”; “The Stone City”; “Starlady”; and others. These stories would be collected in Sandkings, one of the strongest collections of the period. By now, he had mostly moved away from Analog, although he would have a long sequence of stories about the droll interstellar adventures of Havalend Tuf (later collected in Tuf Voyaging) running throughout the eighties in the Stanley Schmidt Analog, as well as a few strong individual pieces such as the novella “Nightflyers”—most of his major work of the late seventies and early eighties, though, would appear in Omni. The late seventies and eighties also saw the publication of his memorable novel, Dying of the Light, his only solo science fiction novel, while his stories were collected in A Song for Lya, Sandkings, Songs of Stars and Shadows, Songs the Dead Men Sing, Nightflyers, and Portraits of His Children. By the beginning of the eighties, he’d moved away from science fiction and into the horror genre, publishing the big horror novel Fevre Dream, and winning the Bram Stoker Award for his horror story, “The Pear-Shaped Man” and the World Fantasy Award for his werewolf novella, “The Skin Trade.” By the end of that decade, though, the crash of the horror market and the commercial failure of his ambitious horror novel, Armageddon Rag, had driven him out of the print world and to a successful career in television instead, where for more than a decade he worked as story editor or producer on such shows as the new Twilight Zone and Beauty and the Beast.

  After years away, Martin made a triumphant return to the print world with the publication in 1996 of the immensely successful fantasy novel, A Game of Thrones, the start of his Song of Ice and Fire series. A freestanding novella taken from that work, “Blood of the Dragon,” won Martin another Hugo Award in 1997. Two further books in the Song of Ice and Fire series, A Clash of Kings and A Storm of Swords, have made it one of the most popular, acclaimed, and best-selling series in all of modern fantasy. Coming up is a new volume in the series, A Feast for Crows. His most recent book is a massive retrospective collection spanning the entire spectrum of his career: GRRM: A RRetrospective.

  Martin has always been a richly romantic writer, clearly a direct descendant of the old Planet Stories tradition, probably influenced by Leigh Brackett in particular, although you can see strong traces of writers such as Jack Vance and Roger Zelazny in his work as well, where the emphasis is on color, adventure, exoticism, and lush romance, in a universe crowded and jostling both with alien races and human societies that have evolved toward strangeness in isolation, and where the drama is often generated by the inability of one of these cultures to clearly understand the psychology and values and motivations of another.

  Evident in the award-winning story that follows is a powerful and exotic study of the future of religion and of a very special kind of heresy that echoes the age-old question: “What is truth?”

  ###

  “Heresy,” he told me. The brackish waters of his pool sloshed gently.

  “Another one?” I said wearily. “There are so many these days.” My Lord Commander was displeased by that comment. He shifted position heavily, sending ripples up and down the pool. One broke over the side, and a sheet of water slid across the tiles of the receiving chamber. My boots were soaked yet again. I accepted that philosophically. I had worn my worst boots, well aware that wet feet are among the inescapable consequences of paying call on Torgathon Nine-Klariis Tûn, elder of the ka-Thane people, and also Archbishop of Vess, Most Holy Father of the Four Vows, Grand Inquisitor of the Order Militant of the Knights of Jesus Christ, and councilor to His Holiness, Pope Daryn XXI of New Rome.

  “Be there as many heresies as stars in the sky, each single one is no less dangerous, Father,” the Archbishop said solemnly. “As Knights of Christ, it is our ordained task to fight them one and all. And I must add that this new heresy is particularly foul.”

  “Yes, my Lord Commander,” I replied. “I did not intend to make light of it. You have my apologies. The mission to Finnegan was most taxing. I had hoped to ask you for a leave of absence from my duties. I need a rest, a time for thought and restoration.”

  “Rest?” The Archbishop moved again in his pool, only a slight shift of his immense bulk, but it was enough to send a fresh sheet of water across the floor. His black, pupilless eyes blinked at me. “No, Father, I am afraid that is out of the question. Your skills and your experience are vital for this new mission.” His bass tones seemed to soften somewhat then. “I have not had time to go over your reports on Finnegan,” he said. “How did your work go?”

  “Badly,” I told him, “though ultimately I think we will prevail. The Church is strong on Finnegan. When our attempts at reconciliation were rebuffed, I put some standards into the right hands, and we were able to shut down the heretics’ newspaper and broadcast facilities. Our friends also saw to it that their legal action came to nothing.”

  “That is not badly” the Archbishop said. “You won a considerable victory for the Lord.”

  “There were riots, my Lord Commander,” I said. “More than a hundred of the heretics were killed, and a dozen of our own people. I fear there will be more violence before the matter is finished. Our priests are attacked if they so much as enter the city where the heresy has taken root. Their leaders risk their lives if they leave that city. I had hoped to avoid such hatreds, such bloodshed.”

  “Commendable, but not realistic,” said Archbishop Torgathon. He blinked at me again, and I remembered that among people of his race that was a sign of impatience. “The blood of martyrs must sometimes be spilled, and the blood of heretics as well. What matters it if a being surrenders his life, so long as his soul is saved?”

  “Indeed,” I agreed. Despite his impatience, Torgathon would lecture for another hour if given a chance. That prospect dismayed me. The receiving chamber was not designed for human comfort, and I did not wish to remain any longer than necessary. The walls were damp and moldy, the air hot and humid and thick with the rancid-butter smell characteristic of the ka-Thane. My collar was chafing my neck raw, I was sweating beneath my cassock, my feet were thoroughly soaked, and my stomach was beginning to churn. I pushed ahead to the business at hand. “You say this new heresy is unusually foul, my Lord Commander?”

  “It is,” he said.

  “Where has it started?”

  “On Arion, a world some three wee
ks distance from Vess. A human world entirely. I cannot understand why you humans are so easily corrupted. Once a ka-Thane has found the faith, he would scarcely abandon it.”

  “That is well known,” I said politely. I did not mention that the number of ka-Thane to find the faith was vanishingly small. They were a slow, ponderous people, and most of their vast millions showed no interest in learning any ways other than their own, or following any creed but their own ancient religion. Torgathon Nine-Klariis Tûn was an anomaly. He had been among the first converts almost two centuries ago, when Pope Vidas L had ruled that nonhumans might serve as clergy. Given his great lifespan and the iron certainty of his belief, it was no wonder that Torgathon had risen as far as he had, despite the fact that less than a thousand of his race had followed him into the Church. He had at least a century of life remaining to him. No doubt he would someday be Torgathon Cardinal Tûn, should he squelch enough heresies. The times are like that.

  “We have little influence on Arion,” the Archbishop was saying. His arms moved as he spoke, four ponderous clubs of mottled green-gray flesh churning the water, and the dirty white cilia around his breathing hole trembled with each word. “A few priests, a few churches, some believers, but no power to speak of. The heretics already outnumber us on this world. I rely on your intellect, your shrewdness. Turn this calamity into an opportunity. This heresy is so palpable that you can easily disprove it. Perhaps some of the deluded will turn to the true way.”

  “Certainly,” I said. “And the nature of this heresy? What must I disprove?” It is a sad indication of my own troubled faith to add that I did not really care. I have dealt with too many heresies. Their beliefs and their questionings echo in my head and trouble my dreams at night. How can I be sure of my own faith? The very edict that had admitted Torgathon into the clergy had caused a half-dozen worlds to repudiate the Bishop of New Rome, and those who had followed that path would find a particularly ugly heresy in the massive naked (save for a damp Roman collar) alien who floated before me, and wielded the authority of the Church in four great webbed hands. Christianity is the greatest single human religion, but that means little. The non-Christians outnumber us five-to-one and there are well over seven hundred Christian sects, some almost as large as the One True Interstellar Catholic Church of Earth and the Thousand Worlds. Even Daryn XXI, powerful as he is, is only one of seven to claim the title of Pope. My own belief was strong once, but I have moved too long among heretics and nonbelievers, and even my prayers do not make the doubts go away now. So it was that I felt no horror—only a sudden intellectual interest—when the Archbishop told me the nature of the heresy in Arion.