Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition

by Gardner Dozois

  Over the past months, I had looked for stories about Carville in the news. And Melissa had told me some of the gossip—there were differences of opinion in Baton Rouge. Some of the senators wanted the hospital kept open, as a showpiece for foreign visitors. But Barbara Rasmussen wanted the patients shipped to a labor camp outside of Shreveport, near the Arkansas border. It was a place both Steve and I had heard of.

  Over the phone he’d said, “It’s murder,”—a painful word. Then he’d told me where to meet him. He’d mentioned a time. But I knew I’d be late, because of the slow way I was driving. I wasn’t sure I wanted to help him. So I took a leisurely, roundabout route, and crossed the river near the ruins of Hahnville. I drove up old Route 18 past Vacherie. It was deserted country there, rising swamps and burned-out towns, and endless cemeteries full of rows of painted wooden markers. Some had names on them, but mostly just numbers.

  I passed some old Negroes working in a field.

  Once I drove up onto the levee, and sat staring at the great river next to a crude, concrete statue of Christ the Healer. The metal bones of His fingers protruded from His crumbling hands. Then over the Sunshine Bridge, and it was early evening.

  I first met them on River Road near Belle-Helene plantation, as they were coming back from Carville. There was a patchy mist out of the swamp. I drove slowly, and from time to time I had to wipe the condensation from the inside of my windshield.

  In the middle of the smudged circle I had made with my handkerchief, I saw the glimmer of their Coleman lanterns. The oak trees hung over the car. I pulled over to the grass and turned off the ignition. I rolled down my window and listened to the car tick and cool. Soon they came walking down the middle of the road, their spare, pinched faces; their white, buttoned-up shirts stained dirty from the cinders. One or two wore masks over their mouth and nose. Some wore civil defense armbands. Some carried books, others hammers and wrecking bars.

  The most terrifying thing about those New Baptist mobs was their sobriety, their politeness. There was no swagger to them, no drunken truculence. They came out of the fog in orderly rows. There was no laughter or shouting. Most of the men walked by me without even looking my way. But then four or five of them came over and stood by the window.

  “Excuse me, sir,” said one. He took off his gimme cap and wiped the moisture from his bald forehead. “You from around here?”

  “I’m from the Times-Picayune. I was headed up to Carville.”

  “Well,” said another, shaking his head. “Nothing to see.”

  “The road’s blocked,” offered a third. He had rubber gloves on, and his voice was soft and high. “But right here you can get onto the Interstate. You just passed it. Route 73 from Geismar. It will take you straight back to the city.”

  Some more men had come over to stand next to me along the driver’s side. One of them stooped to peer inside. Now he tapped the roof lightly over my head, and I could hear his fingernails on the smooth plastic.

  “I think I’d like to take a look,” I said. “Even so.”

  He smiled, and then looked serious. “You a Catholic, sir? I guess New Orleans is a Catholic town.”

  I sat for a moment, and then rolled up the window. “Thank you,” I murmured through the glass. Then I turned on the ignition, and pulled the car around in a tight semicircle. Darkness had come. I put on my headlights, which snatched at the men’s legs as I turned around. Illuminated in red whenever I hit the brakes, the New Baptists stood together in the middle of the road, and I watched them in my rearview mirror. One waved.

  Then I drove slowly through the crowd again until I found the connecting road. It led away from the river through a few small, neon-lit stores. Pickup trucks were parked there. I recognized the bar Steve had mentioned, and I slowed up when I passed it. I was too late. From Geismar on, the road was deserted.

  Close to I-10 it ran through the cypress swamps, and there was no one. Full dark now, and gusts of fog. I drove slowly until I saw a man walking by the side of the road. I speeded up to pass him, and in my high-beams I caught a glimpse of his furious, thin face as he looked over his shoulder. It was Curtis Garr.

  ###

  I wish I could tell you how I left him there, trudging on the gravel shoulder. I wish I could tell you how I sped away until the sodomite was swallowed up in the darkness and the fog, how I sped home and found my wife there, unexpectedly waiting. The conference might have let out early. She might have decided to surprise me.

  These thoughts are painful to me, and it’s not because I can never go back. My friend Rob tells me the borders are full of holes, at least for white people. Passports and medical papers are easy to forge. He spends a lot of time at gun shows and survivalist meetings, where I suppose they talk about these things.

  But I left because I had to. Because I changed, and Curtis Garr changed me. Now in California, in the desert night, I still can’t forgive him, partly because I took such a terrible revenge. If he’s dead or in prison now, Goddamn him. He broke my life apart, and maybe it was fragile and ready to break. Maybe I was contaminated already, and that’s why I stopped in the middle of the road, and backed up, and let him into my car. Melissa’s car.

  He got into the back seat without a word. But he was angry. As soon as we started driving again, he spoke. “Where were you? I waited at that bar for over an hour.”

  “I thought I was meeting Steve.”

  “Yes—he told me. He described your car.”

  I looked at him in the rearview mirror. His clothes were still immaculate, his dark suit. He was a fierce, thin, handsome man.

  “Where are you going?”

  He said nothing, but just stared on ahead through the windshield. I wondered if he recognized me. If he felt something in me calling out to him, he didn’t show it. At Carville, I’d been wearing a mask over my nose and mouth.

  But I wanted to ask him about Steve. “You’re Curtis Garr,” I said.

  Then he looked at me in the mirror, his fierce eyes. “Don’t be afraid,” I said, though he seemed anything but frightened.

  “I thought I was meeting Steve,” I said after an empty pause. “He didn’t say anything about you.”

  “Maybe he didn’t think you would come.” And then: “We had to change our plans after Rasmussen’s goons showed up. Don’t worry about Steve. You’ll see him later. No one on the staff was hurt.”

  Garr’s voice was low and harsh. I drove with my left hand. From time to time I scratched the skin over my left wrist.

  Soon we came up to the Interstate. The green sign hung flapping. I-10 was a dangerous road, and ordinarily I wouldn’t have taken it. Most of the way it was built on crumbling pontoons over the swamp. In some places the guard rail was down, and there were holes in the pavement. But it bypassed all the towns.

  Curtis Garr rolled down his window. There was no one on the road. In time we felt a cool draught off the lake.

  Once past the airport, we could go faster, because the road was carefully maintained from Kenner to the bridge. The city lights were comforting and bright. We took the Annunciation exit and drove up St. Charles, the great old houses full of prosperous, happy folk.

  In more than an hour, Garr and I had not exchanged a word. But I felt a terrible tension in my stomach, and my wrist itched and ached. I kept thinking the man would tell me where to drop him off. I hoped he would. But he said nothing as I drove down Calhoun toward Magazine, toward Melissa’s house on Exposition Boulevard.

  “Where are you going?” I asked.

  He shrugged.

  I felt my guts might burst from my excitement. My fingers trembled on the wheel. “Can I put you up?” I said. “It’s past curfew. You’ll be safer in the morning.”

  “Yes. I’m meeting Steve at ten.”

  And that was all. I pulled into the parking slip and turned off the car. Then I stepped outside into the cool, humid night, and he was there beside me. I listened to him breathe. Almost a hissing sound.

  “Nice house.�
��

  “It’s my wife’s. She’s a professor at Tulane.”

  Again that harsh intake of breath. He looked up at the gabled roof. For a moment I was afraid he might refuse to come inside. Something in him seemed to resist. But then he followed me onto the porch.

  “You don’t lock your doors?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Hunh. When I was in school, New Orleans was the murder capital of the entire country.”

  “It hasn’t all been bad,” I said.

  Then he was in the living room, standing on the Doshmelti carpet. I excused myself to wash my face and hands in the kitchen bathroom, and when I returned he was looking at the bookcase. “Can I get you something to eat?” I asked. “I’m famished.”

  “Something to drink,” by which he meant alcohol. So I brought out a bottle of white bourbon that we had. I poured him a glass. I really was very hungry. I’d scarcely eaten all day.

  “How can you stand it?” he asked suddenly. He had moved over to a case full of biology and medical texts, a collection Melissa had gathered during her trips.

  He had one of the books open in his hand. With the other, he gestured with his glass around the room. “All this. You’re not a fool. Or are you?”

  He put down the book and then walked over to stand in front of me, inches away, his face inches from my own. “I was at Carville,” he said. “People died there. Aren’t you afraid you’re going to catch something?”

  But I knew I had caught something already. My heart was shuddering. My face was wet.

  I looked up at him, and I thought I could see every pore in his skin. I could see the way his teeth fit into his gums. I could smell his breath and his body when he spoke to me, not just the alcohol but something else. “This state is a sick joke everywhere,” he said. “Those people who attacked the Center, they didn’t have a tenth-grade education between them. How can you blame them?”

  Curtis Garr had black hair in his ears. His lower face was rinsed in gray—he hadn’t shaved. I stood looking up at him, admiring the shapes his thin lips formed around his words. “What does your wife teach?”

  “Biology.”

  At that moment, the phone rang. It was on a table in a little alcove by the door. I didn’t answer it. Garr and I stood inches apart. After three rings the machine picked up.

  “Hi, sweetie,” said Melissa. “I just thought I’d try to catch you before you went to bed. Sorry I missed you. I was just thinking how nice it would be to be in bed with you, sucking that big Monongahela. Just a thought. I’ll be back tomorrow night.”

  The machine turned off, and Curtis Garr smiled. “That sounds very cozy.” Then he stepped away from me, back to the bookcase again, and I let out my breath.

  “A third of the population of Louisiana died during the HIV-2 epidemic,” I said. “In just a few years. The feds told them not to worry. The doctors told them it couldn’t happen. The New Baptists were the only ones who didn’t lie to them. What do you expect?”

  “Sin and disease,” he said. “I know the history. Not everybody died of HIV. I knew some biology, too—the real kind. And I said something about it. That’s why I was at Carville in the first place. The other thing’s just an excuse.”

  He was staring at the books as he spoke. But he must have been watching me as well, must have seen something in my face as he sipped his whiskey, because he lowered the glass and grinned at me over the rim. “You’re disappointed, aren’t you?”

  And then after a moment: “Christ, you are! You hypocrite.”

  But I was standing with my hands held out, my right hand closed around my wrist. “Please,” I said. “Please.”

  He finished his drink and gave a little burp. He put his glass on one of the shelves of the bookcase, and then sat down in the middle of the couch, stretching his thin arms along the top of it on either side.

  “No, you disgust me,” he said, smiling. “Everything about you disgusts me.”

  ###

  Often now I’ll start awake in bed, wondering where I am. “Melissa,” I’ll say, still half-asleep, when I get up to go to the bathroom. So Rob tells me on the nights he’s there. I used to sleep as soundly as a child. That night, when Curtis Garr stayed in the house on Exposition Boulevard, was the first I remember lying awake.

  After I had gone upstairs, he sat up late, reading and drinking whiskey on the couch. From time to time I would get up and stand at the top of the stairs, watching the light through the banisters, listening to the rustle of the pages. Near dawn I masturbated, and then, after I’d washed up, I went downstairs and stood next to him as he slept. He had left the light on and had curled up on the couch, still in his suit. He hadn’t even taken off his shoes.

  His mouth was open, pushed out of shape by the cushions. I stood next to him, and then I bent down and stretched out my left hand. I almost touched him. My left wrist was a mass of hectic spots. The rash had spread up the inside of my arm.

  In my other hand, I carried a knapsack with some clothes. My passport, and a few small personal items. Almost everything in the house that actually belonged to me, I could fit in that one bag. A picture of Melissa, which is on my bedside still. I had the card to her bank account, and I stood by the couch, wondering if I should leave a note.

  Instead, I went into the kitchen and, from the kitchen phone, I dialed a number we all knew in Louisiana, in those days. Together with the numbers for the fire department and the ordinary police, it was typed on a piece of paper which was thumbtacked to the wall. The phone rang for a long time. But then finally someone answered it, and there was nothing in his tone of voice to suggest he’d been asleep.

  Within a few minutes, I was on my way. I walked up to St. Charles Avenue just as it got light, toward the streetcar line. The air was full of birds, their voices competing with the soft noise of the cars as they passed a block away, bound toward Melissa’s house or somewhere else, I couldn’t really tell.

  The Man Who Walked Home

  James Tiptree Jr.

  Here’s a vivid and compelling look at how a scientific experiment could itself become the basis for a host of superstitions and perhaps even a new religion, given the blurring effect of time—lots of time.

  As most of you probably know by now, multiple Hugo and Nebula Award-winning author James Tiptree Jr. was actually the pseudonym of the late Dr. Alice Sheldon, a semi-retired experimental psychologist and former member of the American intelligence community who also wrote occasionally under the name of Raccoona Sheldon. Dr. Sheldon’s tragic death in 1987 put an end to “both” careers, but not before she had won two Nebula and two Hugo Awards as Tiptree, won another Nebula Award as Raccoona Sheldon, and established herself, under whatever name, as one of the very best science fiction writers of our times.

  Although “Tiptree” published two reasonably well-received novels—Up the Walls of the World and Brightness Falls from the Air—she was, like Damon Knight and Theodore Sturgeon (two writers she aesthetically resembled, and by whom she was strongly influenced), more comfortable with the short story, and more effective with it. She wrote some of the very best short stories of the seventies: “The Screwfly Solution,” “The Girl Who Was Plugged In,” “The Women Men Don’t See,” “Beam Us Home,” “And I Awoke and Found Me Here on the Cold Hill’s Side,” “I’m Too Big But I Love to Play,” “The Man Who Walked Home,” “Slow Music,” and “His Smoke Rose Up Forever.” Already it’s clear that these are stories that will last. They—and a dozen others almost as good—show that Alice Sheldon was simply one of the best short-story writers to work in the genre in our times. In fact, with her desire for a high bit-rate, her concern for societal goals, her passion for the novel and the unexpected, her taste for extrapolation, her experimenter’s interest in the reactions of people to supernormal stimuli and bizarre situations, her fondness for the apocalyptic, her love of color and sweep and dramatic action, and her preoccupation with the mutability of time and the vastness of space, Alice Sheldon was a natu
ral science fiction writer. I doubt that she would have been able to realize her particular talents as fully in any other genre, and she didn’t even seem particularly interested in trying. At a time when many other science fiction writers would be just as happy—or happier—writing “mainstream” fiction, and chaff at the artistic and financial restrictions of the genre, what she wanted to be was a science fiction writer, that was her dream and her passion.

  As Tiptree, Dr. Sheldon published ten short story collections, including Ten Thousand Light Years from Home, Warm Worlds and Otherwise, Starsongs of an Old Primate, Out of the Everywhere, Tales of the Quintana Roo, Byte Beautiful, and The Starry Rift, and the posthumous retrospective collections, Crown of Stars, Her Smoke Rose Up Forever, and Meet Me at Infinity. Coming up is a full-dress biography of “Tiptree,” by Julie Philips.

  ###

  Transgression! Terror! And he thrust and lost there—punched into impossibility, abandoned, never to be known now, the wrong man in the most wrong of all wrong places in that unimaginable collapse of never-to-be-reimagined mechanism—he stranded, undone, his lifeline severed, he in that nanosecond knowing his only tether parting, going away, the longest line to life withdrawing, winking out, disappearing forever beyond his grasp—telescoping away from him into the closing vortex beyond which lay his home, his life, his only possibility of being; seeing it sucked back into the deepest maw, melting, leaving him orphaned on what never-to-be-known shore of total wrongness—of beauty beyond joy, perhaps? Of horror? Of nothingness? Of profound otherness only, only, certainly whatever it was, that place into which he transgressed, certainly it could not support his life there, his violent and violating aberrance; and he, fierce, brave, crazy—clenched into one total protest, one body-fist of utter repudiation of himself there in that place, forsaken there—what did he do? Rejected, exiled, hungering homeward more desperate than any lost beast driving for its unreachable home, his home, his HOME—and no way, no transport, no vehicle, means, machinery, no force but his intolerable resolve aimed homeward along that vanishing vector, that last and only lifeline—he did, what?