Oh, he was a smart one—for the worst of the hackers were always male—whoever he was, and Rick often wished that the designer of the ultimate virus (called the Final Virus, for a very good reason) had been on an aircraft or an operating room table when it had struck. For when the computers sputtered out and died, the chaos that was unleashed upon the world . . . cars, buses, trains, trucks. Dead, not moving. Hundreds of thousands of people, stranded far from home. Aircraft falling out of the skies. Ships at sea, slowly drifting, unable to maneuver. Stock markets, banks, corporations, everything and anything that stored the wealth of a nation in electronic impulses, silent. All the interconnections that fed and clothed and fueled and protected and sheltered most of the world’s billions had snapped apart, like brittle rubber bands. Within days the cities had become uninhabitable, as millions streamed into the countryside. Governments wavered and collapsed. Communications were sparse, for networks and radio stations and the cable stations were off the air as well. Rumors and fear spread like a plague itself, and the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse—called out from retirement at last—swept through almost the entire world.
There were a few places that remained untouched: Antarctica and a few remote islands. But for the rest of the world . . . sometimes the only light on the nightside of the planet were the funeral pyres, where the bodies were being burned.
He grew nauseous, remembering what had happened to him and how it took him months to walk back here, to his childhood home, and he repressed the memory of eating something a farmer had offered him—it hadn’t looked exactly like dog, but God, he had been so hungry—and he looked over to young Tom. How could he even begin to tell such a story to such an innocent lad?
He wouldn’t. He composed himself and said, “No, God didn’t punish us back then. We did. It was a wonderful world, Tom, a wonderful place. It wasn’t perfect and many people did ignore God, did ignore many good things . . . but we did things. We fed people and cured them and some of us, well, some of us planned to go to the stars.”
He went up to the wall, took down the picture of the International Space Station, the Big Boy himself, and pointed it out to Tom. “Men and women built that on the ground, Tom, and brought it up into space. They did it for good, to learn things, to start a way for us to go back to the Moon and to Mars. To explore. There was no evil there. None.”
Tom looked at the picture and said, “And that’s the dot of light we saw? Far up in the sky?”
“Yes.”
“And what’s going to happen to it?”
He looked at the framed photo, noticed his hands shaking some. He put the photo back up on the wall. “One of these days, it’s going to get lower and lower. It just happens. Things up in orbit can’t stay up there forever. Unless somebody can go up there and do something . . . it’ll come crashing down.”
He sat down in the chair, winced again at the shooting pains in his hips. There was a time when he could have had new hips, new knees, or—if need be—new kidneys, but it was going to take a long time for those days to ever come back. From his infrequent letters from Brian, he knew that work was still continuing in some isolated and protected labs, to find an answer to the Final Virus. But with people starving and cities still unlit, most of the whole damn country had fallen back to the late 1800s, when power was provided by muscles, horses, or steam. Computers would just have to wait.
Tom said, “I hope it doesn’t happen, Mister Monroe. It sounds really cool.”
Rick said, “Well, maybe when you grow up, if you’re really smart, you can go up there and fix it. And think about me when you’re doing it. Does that sound like fun?”
The boy nodded and Rick remembered why he had brought the poor kid up here. He got out of his chair, went over to his bookshelf, started moving around the thick volumes and such, until he found a slim book, a book he had bought once for a future child, for one day he had promised Kathy Meserve that once he left the astronaut corps, he would marry her . . . Poor Kathy, in London on a business trip, whom he had never seen or heard from ever again after the Final Virus had broken out.
He came over to Tom and gave him the book. It was old but the cover was still bright, and it said, MY FIRST BOOK ON SPACE TRAVEL. Rick said, “You can read, can’t you?”
“Unh-hunh, I sure can.”
“Okay.” He rubbed at the boy’s head, not wanting to think of Kathy Meserve or the children he never had. “You take this home and read it. You can learn a lot about the stars and planets and what it was like to explore space and build the first space station. Maybe you can get back up there, Tom.” Or your children’s children, he thought, but why bring that depressing thought up. “Maybe you can be what I was, a long time ago.”
Tom’s voice was solemn. “A star man?”
Rick shook his head. “No, nothing fancy like that. An astronaut. That’s all. Look, it’s getting late. Why don’t you head home.”
And the young boy ran from his office, holding the old book in his hands, as if scared Rick was going to change his mind and take it away from him.
###
It was the sound of the horses that woke him, neighing and moving about in his yard, early in the morning. He got out of bed, cursed his stiff joints, and slowly got dressed. At the foot of the bed was a knapsack, for he knew a suitcase would not work. He picked up the knapsack—which he had put together last night—and walked downstairs, walked slowly, as he noticed the woodwork and craftsmanship that a long forgotten great-great-great-grandfather had put into building this house, which he was now leaving.
He went out on the front porch, shaded his eyes from the hot morning sun. There were six or seven horses in his front yard, three horse-drawn wagons, and a knot of people in front. Some children were clustered out under the maple tree by the road, their parents no doubt telling them to stay away. He recognized all of the faces in the crowd, but was pleased to see that Glen Roundell, the store owner and one of the three selectmen, was not there, nor was Henry Cooper. Henry’s wife Marcia was there, thin-lipped and perpetually angry, and she strode forward, holding something at her side. She wore a long cotton skirt and long-sleeve shirt—and that insistent voice inside his head wondered why again, with technology having tumbled two hundred years, why did fashion have to follow suit?—and she announced loudly, “Rick Monroe, you know why we’re here, don’t you.”
“Mrs. Cooper, I’m sure I have some idea, but why don’t you inform me, in case I’m mistaken. I know that of your many fine attributes, correcting the mistakes of others is your finest.”
She looked around the crowd, as if seeking their support, and she pressed on, even though there was a smile or two at his comment. “At a special town meeting last night, it was decided by a majority of the town to suspend your residency here, in Boston Falls, due to your past crimes and present immorality.”
“Crimes?” In the crowd he noticed a man in a faded and patched uniform, and he said, “Chief Godin. You know me. What crimes have I committed?”
Chief Sam Godin looked embarrassed. A kid of about twenty-two or thereabouts, he was the Chief because he had strong hands and was a good shot. The uniform shirt he wore was twice as old as he was, but he wore it proudly, since it represented his office.
Today, though, he looked like he would rather be wearing anything else. He seemed to blush and said, “Gee, Mister Monroe . . . no crimes here, since you’ve moved back. But there’s been talk of what you did, back then, before . . . before the change. You were a scientist or something. Worked with computers. Maybe had something to do with the change, that’s the kind of crimes that we were thinking about.”
Rick sighed. “Very good. That’s the crime I’ve been accused of, of being educated. That I can accept. But immoral? Where’s your proof?”
“Right here,” Marcia Cooper said triumphantly. “See? This old magazine, with depraved photos and lustful women . . . kept in your house, to show any youngster that came by. Do you deny having this in your possession?”
&nb
sp; And despite it all, he felt like laughing, for Mrs. Cooper was holding up—and holding up tight so nothing inside would be shown, of course—an ancient copy of Playboy magazine. The damn thing had been in his office, and sometimes he would just glance through the slick pages and sigh at a world—and a type of woman—long gone. Then something came to him and he saw another woman in the crowd, arms folded tight, staring in distaste toward him. It all clicked.
“No, I don’t deny it,” Rick said, “and I also don’t deny that Mrs. Chandler, for once in her life, did a good job cleaning my house. Find anything else in there, Mrs. Chandler, you’d like to pass on to your neighbors?”
She just glared, said nothing. He looked up at the sun. It was going to be another hot day.
The Chief stepped forward and said, “We don’t want any trouble, Mister Monroe. But it’s now the law. You have to leave.”
He picked up his knapsack, shrugged his arms through the frayed straps, almost gasped at the heavy weight back there. “I know.”
The Chief said, “If you want, I can get you a ride to one of the next towns over, save you—”
“No,” he said, not surprised at how harshly he responded. “No, I’m not taking any of your damn charity. By God, I walked into this town alone years ago, and I’ll walk out of this town alone as well.”
Which is what he started to do, coming down the creaky steps, across the unwatered lawn. The crowd in front of him slowly gave way, like they were afraid he was infected or some damn thing. He looked at their dirty faces, the ignorant looks, the harsh stares, and he couldn’t help himself. He stopped and said, “You know, I pity you. If it hadn’t been for some unknown clown, decades ago, you wouldn’t be here. You’d be on a powerboat in a lake. You’d be in an air-conditioned mall, shopping. You’d be talking to each other over frozen drinks about where to fly to vacation this winter. That’s what you’d be doing.”
Marcia Cooper said, “It was God’s will. That’s all.”
Rick shook his head. “No, it was some idiot’s will, and because of that, you’ve grown up to be peasants. God save you and your children.”
They stayed silent, but he noticed that some of the younger men were looking fidgety, and were glancing to the Chief, like they were wondering if the Chief would intervene if they decided to stone him or some damn thing. Time to get going, and he tried not to think of the long miles that were waiting for him. Just one step after another, that’s all. Maybe, if his knees and hips held together, he could get to the train station in Concord. Maybe. Take Brian up on his offer. He made it out to the dirt road, decided to head left, up to Greenwich, for he didn’t want to walk through town. Why tempt fate?
He turned and looked one last time at his house, and then looked over to the old maple tree, where some of the children, bored by what had been going on, were now scurrying around the tree trunk.
But not all of the children.
One of them was by himself, at the road’s edge. He looked nervous, and he raised his shirt, and even at this distance, he could make out young Tom Cooper, standing there, his gift of a book hidden away in the waistband of his jeans. Tom lowered his shirt and then waved, and Rick, surprised, smiled and waved back.
And then he turned his back on his home and his town, and started walking away.
Three Hearings on the Existence of Snakes in the Human Bloodstream
James Alan Gardner
James Alan Gardner has made many fiction sales to the Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s Science Fiction, Amazing, Tesseracts, On Spec, Northern Stars, and other markets. His books include the science fiction novels Expendable, Commitment Hour, Vigilant, Hunted, Ascending, and Trapped. His most recent novel is Radiant.
In the fascinating and ingenious story that follows, he takes us to a world where history has worked out a little differently than it did in our own—but where the fundamental things, particularly the battle between science and superstition, have really not changed at all.
###
1. Concerning an Arrangement of Lenses, So Fashioned as to Magnify the View of Divers Animalcules, Too Tiny to Be Seen with the Unaided Eye:
His Holiness, Supreme Patriarch Septus XXIV, was an expert on chains.
By holy law, chains were required on every defendant brought to the Court Immaculate. However, my Lord the Jailer could exercise great latitude in choosing which chains went on which prisoners. A man possessed of a healthy fortune might buy his way into nothing more than a gold link necklace looped loosely around his throat; a beautiful woman might visit the Jailer privately in his chambers and emerge with thin and glittering silver bracelets—chains, yes, but as delicate as thread. If, on the other hand, the accused could offer neither riches nor position nor generous physical charms . . . well then, the prison had an ample supply of leg-irons, manacles, and other such fetters, designed to show these vermin the grim weight of God’s justice.
The man currently standing before Patriarch Septus occupied a seldom-seen middle ground in the quantity of restraints: two solid handcuffs joined by an iron chain of businesslike gauge, strong enough that the prisoner had no chance of breaking free, but not so heavy as to strain the man’s shoulders to the point of pain. Clearly, my Lord the Jailer had decided on a cautious approach to this particular case; and Septus wondered what that meant. Perhaps the accused was nobody himself but had sufficient connections to rule out unwarranted indignities . . . a sculptor or musician, for example, who had won favor with a few great households in the city. The man certainly had an artistic look—fierce eyes in an impractical face, the sort of high-strung temperament who could express passion but not use it.
“Be it known to the court,” cried the First Attendant, “here stands one Anton Leeuwenhoek, a natural philosopher who is accused of heresy against God and Our Lady, the Unbetombed Virgin. Kneel, Supplicant, and pray with his Holiness, that this day shall see justice.”
Septus waited to see what Leeuwenhoek would do. When thieves and murderers came before the court, they dropped to their knees immediately, making gaudy show of begging God to prove their innocence. A heretic, however, might spit defiance or hurl curses at the Patriarchal throne—not a good way to win mercy, but then, many heretics came to this chamber intent on their own martyrdom. Leeuwenhoek had the eyes of such a fanatic, but apparently not the convictions; without so much as a grimace, he got to his knees and bowed his head. The Patriarch quickly closed his own eyes and intoned the words he had recited five times previously this morning: “God grant me the wisdom to perceive the truth. Blessed Virgin, grant me the judgment to serve out meet justice. Let us all act this day to the greater glory of Thy Divine Union. Amen.”
Amens sounded around the chamber: attendants and advocates following the form. Septus glanced sideways toward Satan’s Watchboy, an ominous title for a cheerfully freckle-faced youth, the one person here excused from closing his eyes during the prayer. The Watchboy nodded twice, indicating that Leeuwenhoek had maintained a proper attitude of prayer and said Amen with everyone else. Good—this had just become a valid trial, and anything that happened from this point on had the strength of heavenly authority.
“My Lord Prosecutor,” Septus said, “state the charges.”
The prosecutor bowed as deeply as his well-rounded girth allowed, perspiration already beading on his powdered forehead. It was not a hot day, early spring, nothing more . . . but Prosecutor ben Jacob was a man famous for the quantity of his sweat, a trait that usually bothered his legal adversaries more than himself. Many an opposing counsel had been distracted by the copious flow streaming down ben Jacob’s face, thereby overlooking flaws in the prosecutor’s arguments. One could always find flaws in ben Jacob’s arguments, Septus knew—dear old Abraham was not overly clever. He was, however, honest, and could not conceive of winning personal advancement at the expense of those he prosecuted; therefore, the Patriarch had never dismissed the man from his position.
“Your Holiness,” ben Jacob said, “this case co
ncerns claims against the Doctrine of the, uhh . . . Sleeping Snake.”
“Ah.” Septus glanced over at Leeuwenhoek. “My son, do you truly deny God’s doctrine?”
The man shrugged. “I have disproved the doctrine. Therefore, it can hardly be God’s.”
Several attendants gasped loudly. They perceived it as part of their job to show horror at every sacrilege. The same attendants tended to whisper and make jokes during the descriptions of true horrors: murders, rapes, maimings. “The spectators will remain silent,” Septus said wearily. He had recited those words five times this morning, too. “My Lord Prosecutor, will you please read the text?”
“Ummm . . . the text, yes, the text.”
Septus maintained his composure while ben Jacob shuffled through papers and parchments looking for what he needed. It was, of course, standard procedure to read any passages of scripture that a heretic denied, just to make sure there was no misunderstanding. It was also standard procedure for ben Jacob to misplace his copy of the relevant text in a pile of other documents. With any other prosecutor, this might be some kind of strategy; with ben Jacob, it was simply disorganization.
“Here we are, yes, here we are,” he said at last, producing a dog-eared page with a smear of grease clearly visible along one edge. “Gospel of Susannah, chapter twenty-three, first verse.” Ben Jacob paused while the two Verification Attendants found the passage in their own scripture books. They would follow silently as he read the text aloud, ready to catch any slips of the tongue that deviated from the holy word. When the attendants were ready, ben Jacob cleared his throat and read:
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