Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition

by Gardner Dozois

  Three official-looking strangers who had been at the inn came up and introduced themselves to Uncle Laban as observers from Alberta Central. They went on into the tent which had been erected over the enclosure, carrying with them several pieces of equipment which the town-folk eyed suspiciously.

  The mechanics teacher finished organizing a squad of students to protect the slab’s curtain, and Mira and Serli and Laban went on into the tent. It was much hotter inside. Benches were set in rings around a railed enclosure about twenty feet in diameter. Inside the railing the earth was bare and scuffed. Several bunches of flowers and blooming poinciana branches leaned against the rail. The only thing inside the rail was a rough sandstone rock with markings etched on it.

  Just as they came in a small girl raced across the open center and was yelled at by everybody. The officials from Alberta were busy at one side of the rail, where the light-print box was mounted.

  “Oh, no,” muttered Mira’s uncle, as one of the officials leaned over to set up a tripod stand inside the rails. He adjusted it and a huge horsetail of fine feathery filaments blossomed out and eddied through the center of the space.

  “Oh no,” Laban said again. “Why can’t they let it be?”

  “They’re trying to pick up dust from his suit, is that right?” Serli asked.

  “Yes, insane. Did you get time to read?”

  “Oh yes,” said Serli.

  “Sort of,” added Mira.

  “Then you know. He’s falling. Trying to check his—well, call it velocity. Trying to slow down. He must have slipped or stumbled. We’re getting pretty close to when he lost his footing and started to fall. What did it? Did somebody trip him?” Laban looked from Mira to Serli, dead serious now. “How would you like to be the one who made John Delgano fall?”

  “Ooh,” said Mira in quick sympathy. Then she said, “Oh.”

  “You mean,” asked Serli, “whoever made him fall caused all the, caused—”

  “Possible,” said Laban.

  “Wait a minute,” Serli frowned. “He did fall. So somebody had to do it—I mean, he has to trip or whatever. If he doesn’t fall the past would all be changed, wouldn’t it? No war, no—”

  “Possible,” Laban repeated. “God knows. All I know is that John Delgano and the space around him is the most unstable, improbable, highly charged area ever known on Earth and I’m damned if I think anybody should go poking sticks in it.”

  “Oh come now, Laban!” One of the Alberta men joined them, smiling. “Our dust-mop couldn’t trip a gnat. It’s just vitreous monofilaments.”

  “Dust from the future,” grumbled Laban. “What’s it going to tell you? That the future has dust in it?”

  “If we could only get a trace from that thing in his hand.”

  “In his hand?” asked Mira. Serli started leafing hurriedly through the pamphlet.

  “We’ve had a recording analyzer aimed at it,” the Albertan lowered his voice, glancing around. “A spectroscope. We know there’s something there, or was. Can’t get a decent reading. It’s severely deteriorated.”

  “People poking at him, grabbing at him,” Laban muttered. “You—”

  “Ten minutes!” shouted a man with a megaphone. “Take your places, friends and strangers.”

  The Repentance people were filing in at one side, intoning an ancient incantation, “Mi-seri-cordia, ora pro nobis!”

  The atmosphere suddenly took on tension. It was now very close and hot in the big tent. A boy from the mayor’s office wiggled through the crowd, beckoning Laban’s party to come and sit in the guest chairs on the second level on the “face” side. In front of them at the rail one of the Repentance ministers was arguing with an Albertan official over his right to occupy the space taken by a recorder, it being his special duty to look into the Man John’s eyes.

  “Can he really see us?” Mira asked her uncle.

  “Blink your eyes,” Laban told her. “A new scene every blink, that’s what he sees. Phantasmagoria. Blink-blink-blink—for god knows how long.”

  “Mi-sere-re, pec-cavi,” chanted the penitentials. A soprano neighed “May the red of sin pa-aa-ass from us!”

  “They believe his oxygen tab went red because of the state of their souls.” Laban chuckled. “Their souls are going to have to stay damned a while; John Delgano has been on oxygen reserve for five centuries—or rather, he will be low for five centuries more. At a half-second per year his time, that’s fifteen minutes. We know from the audio trace he’s still breathing more or less normally and the reserve was good for twenty minutes. So they should have their salvation about the year seven hundred, if they last that long.”

  “Five minutes! Take your seats, folks. Please sit down so everyone can see. Sit down, folks.”

  “It says we’ll hear his voice through his suit speaker,” Serli whispered. “Do you know what he’s saying?”

  “You get mostly a twenty-cycle howl,” Laban whispered back. “The recorders have spliced up something like ayt, part of an old word. Take centuries to get enough to translate.”

  “Is it a message?”

  “Who knows? Could be his word for ‘date’ or ‘hate.’ ‘Too late,’ maybe. Anything.”

  The tent was quieting. A fat child by the railing started to cry and was pulled back onto a lap. There was a subdued mumble of praying. The Holy Joy faction on the far side rustled their flowers.

  “Why don’t we set our clocks by him?”

  “It’s changing. He’s on sidereal time.”

  “One minute.”

  In the hush the praying voices rose slightly. From outside a chicken cackled. The bare center space looked absolutely ordinary. Over it the recorders silvery filaments eddied gently in the breath from a hundred lungs. Another recorder could be heard ticking faintly.

  For long seconds nothing happened.

  The air developed a tiny hum. At the same moment Mira caught a movement at the railing on her left.

  The hum developed a beat and vanished into a peculiar silence and suddenly everything happened at once.

  Sound burst on them, raced shockingly up the audible scale. The air cracked as something rolled and tumbled in the space. There was a grinding, wailing roar and—

  He was there.

  Solid, huge—a huge man in a monster suit, his head was a dull bronze transparent globe holding a human face, dark smear of open mouth. His position was impossible, legs strained forward thrusting himself back, his arms frozen in a whirlwind swing. Although he seemed to be in a frantic forward motion nothing moved, only one of his legs buckled or sagged slightly—

  —And then he was gone, utterly and completely gone in a thunderclap, leaving only the incredible afterimage in a hundred pairs of staring eyes. Air boomed, shuddering, dust roiled out mixed with smoke.

  “Oh, oh my God,” gasped Mira, unheard, clinging to Serli. Voices were crying out, choking. “He saw me, he saw me!” a woman shrieked. A few people dazedly threw their confetti into the empty dust-cloud; most had failed to throw at all. Children began to howl. “He saw me!” the woman screamed hysterically. “Red, Oh Lord have mercy!” a deep male voice intoned.

  Mira heard Laban swearing furiously and looked again into the space. As the dust settled she could see that the recorder’s tripod had tipped over into the center. There was a dusty mound lying against it—flowers. Most of the end of the stand seemed to have disappeared or been melted. Of the filaments nothing could be seen.

  “Some damn fool pitched flowers into it. Come on, let’s get out.”

  “Was it under, did it trip him?” asked Mira, squeezed in the crowd.

  “It was still red, his oxygen thing,” Serli said over her head. “No mercy this trip, eh, Laban?”

  “Shsh!” Mira caught the Repentance pastor’s dark glance. They jostled through the enclosure gate and were out in the sunlit park, voices exclaiming, chattering loudly in excitement and relief.

  “It was terrible,” Mira cried softly. “Oh, I never thought it wa
s a real live man. There he is, he’s there. Why can’t we help him? Did we trip him?”

  “I don’t know; I don’t think so,” her uncle grunted. They sat down near the new monument, fanning themselves. The curtain was still in place.

  “Did we change the past?” Serli laughed, looked lovingly at his little wife. He wondered for a moment why she was wearing such odd earrings. Then he remembered he had given them to her at that Indian pueblo they’d passed.

  “But it wasn’t just those Alberta people,” said Mira. She seemed obsessed with the idea. “It was the flowers really.” She wiped at her forehead.

  “Mechanics or superstition,” chuckled Serli. “Which is the culprit, love or science?”

  “Shsh.” Mira looked about nervously. “The flowers were love, I guess . . . I feel so strange. It’s hot. Oh, thank you.” Uncle Laban had succeeded in attracting the attention of the iced-drink vendor.

  People were chatting normally now and the choir struck into a cheerful song. At one side of the park a line of people were waiting to sign their names in the visitors’ book. The mayor appeared at the park gate, leading a party up the bougainvillea alley for the unveiling of the monument.

  “What did it say on that stone by his foot?” Mira asked. Serli showed her the guidebook picture of Carl’s rock with the inscription translated below:

  welcome home, john.

  “I wonder if he can see it?”

  The mayor was about to begin his speech.

  Much later when the crowd had gone away the monument stood alone in the dark, displaying to the moon the inscription in the language of that time and place:

  ON THIS SPOT THERE APPEARS ANNUALLY THE FORM OF MAJOR JOHN DELGANO, THE FIRST AND ONLY MAN TO TRAVEL IN TIME.

  MAJOR DELGANO WAS SENT INTO THE FUTURE SOME HOURS BEFORE THE HOLOCAUST OF DAY ZERO. ALL KNOWLEDGE OF THE MEANS BY WHICH HE WAS SENT IS LOST, PERHAPS FOREVER. IT IS BELIEVED THAT AN ACCIDENT OCCURRED WHICH SENT HIM MUCH FARTHER THAN WAS INTENDED. SOME ANALYSTS SPECULATE THAT HE MAY HAVE GONE AS FAR AS FIFTY THOUSAND YEARS AHEAD. HAVING REACHED THIS UNKNOWN POINT, MAJOR DELGANO APPARENTLY WAS RECALLED, OR ATTEMPTED TO RETURN, ALONG THE COURSE IN SPACE AND TIME THROUGH WHICH HE WAS SENT. HIS TRAJECTORY IS THOUGHT TO START AT THE POINT WHICH OUR SOLAR SYSTEM WILL OCCUPY AT A FUTURE TIME AND IS TANGENT TO THE COMPLEX HELIX WHICH OUR EARTH DESCRIBES AROUND THE SUN.

  HE APPEARS ON THIS SPOT IN THE ANNUAL INSTANTS IN WHICH HIS COURSE INTERSECTS OUR PLANET’S ORBIT AND HE IS APPARENTLY ABLE TO TOUCH THE GROUND IN THOSE INSTANTS. SINCE NO TRACE OF HIS PASSAGE INTO THE FUTURE HAS BEEN MANIFESTED, IT IS BELIEVED THAT HE IS RETURNING BY A DIFFERENT MEANS THAN HE WENT FORWARD. HE IS ALIVE IN OUR PRESENT. OUR PAST IS HIS FUTURE AND OUR FUTURE IS HIS PAST. THE TIME OF HIS APPEARANCES IS SHIFTING GRADUALLY IN SOLAR TIME TO CONVERGE ON THE MOMENT OF 1153.6 ON MAY 2, 1989 OLD STYLE, OR DAY ZERO.

  THE EXPLOSION WHICH ACCOMPANIED HIS RETURN TO HIS OWN TIME AND PLACE MAY HAVE OCCURRED WHEN SOME ELEMENTS OF THE PAST INSTANTS OF HIS COURSE WERE CARRIED WITH HIM INTO THEIR OWN PRIOR EXISTENCE. IT IS CERTAIN THAT THIS EXPLOSION PRECIPITATED THE WORLDWIDE HOLOCAUST WHICH ENDED FOREVER THE AGE OF HARD-SCIENCE.

  —He was falling, losing control, failing in his fight against the terrible momentum he had gained, fighting with his human legs shaking in the inhuman stiffness of his armor, his soles charred, not gripping well now, not enough traction to brake, battling, thrusting as the flashes came, the punishing alternation of light, dark, light, dark, which he had borne so long, the claps of air thickening and thinning against his armor as he skidded through space which was time, desperately braking as the flickers of earth hammered against his feet—only his feet mattered now, only to slow and stay on course—and the pull, the beacon was getting slacker; as he came near home it was fanning out, hard to stay centered; he was becoming, he supposed, more probable; the wound he had punched in time was healing itself. In the beginning it had been so tight—a single ray in a closing tunnel—he had hurled himself after it like an electron flying to the anode, aimed surely along that exquisitely complex single vector of possibility of life, shot and been shot like a squeezed pip into the last clink in that rejecting and rejected nowhere through which he, John Delgano, could conceivably continue to exist, the hole leading to home—had pounded down it across time, across space, pumping with his human legs as the real Earth of that unreal time came under him, his course as certain as the twisting dash of an animal down its burrow, he a cosmic mouse on an interstellar, intertemporal race for his nest with the wrongness of everything closing round the rightness of that one course, the atoms of his heart, his blood, his every well crying Home—HOME!—as he drove himself after that fading breath-hole, each step faster, surer, stronger, until he raced with invincible momentum upon the rolling flickers of Earth as a man might race a rolling log in a torrent! Only the stars stayed constant around him from flash to flash, he looked down past his feet at a million strobes of Crux, of Triangulum; once at the height of his stride he had risked a century’s glance upward and seen the Bears weirdly strung out from Polaris—But a Polaris not the Pole Star now, he realized, jerking his eyes back to his racing feet, thinking, I am walking home to Polaris, home! to the strobing beat. He had ceased to remember where he had been, the beings, people or aliens or things he had glimpsed in the impossible moment of being where he could not be; had ceased to see the flashes of worlds around him, each flash different, the jumble of bodies, walls, landscapes, shapes, colors beyond deciphering—some lasting a breath, some changing pell-mell—the faces, limbs, things poking at him; the nights he had pounded through, dark or lit by strange lamps; roofed or unroofed; the day flashing sunlight, gales, dust, snow, interiors innumerable, strobe after strobe into night again; he was in daylight now, a hall of some kind; I am getting closer at last, he thought, the feel is changing—but he had to slow down, to check; and that stone near his feet, it had stayed there some time now, he wanted to risk a look but he did not dare, he was so tired, and he was sliding, was going out of control, fighting to kill the merciless velocity that would not let him slow down; he was hurt, too, something had hit him back there, they had done something, he didn’t know what back somewhere in the kaleidoscope of faces, arms, hooks, beams, centuries of creatures grabbing at him—and his oxygen was going, never mind, it would last—it had to last, he was going home, home! And he had forgotten now the message he had tried to shout, hoping it could be picked up somehow, the important thing he had repeated; and the thing he had carried, it was gone now, his camera was gone, too, something had torn it away—but he was coming home! Home! If only he could kill this momentum, could stay on the failing course, could slip, scramble, slide, somehow ride this avalanche down to home, to home—and his throat said Home!—said Kate, Kate! And his heart shouted, his lungs almost gone now, as his legs fought, fought and failed, as his feet gripped and skidded and held and slid, as he pitched, flailed, pushed, strove in the gale of time rush across space, across time, at the end of the longest path ever; the path of John Delgano, coming home.

  When the Old Gods Die

  Mike Resnick

  Mike Resnick is one of the best-selling authors in science fiction, and one of the most prolific. His many novels include Santiago, The Dark Lady, Stalking the Unicorn, Birthright: The Book of Man, Paradise, Ivory, Soothsayer, Oracle, Lucifer Jones, Purgatory, Inferno, A Miracle of Rare Design, The Widowmaker, The Soul Eater, and A Hunger in the Soul. His award-winning short fiction has been gathered in the collections Will the Last Person to Leave the Planet Please Turn Off the Sun?, An Alien Land, Kirinyaga, A Safari of the Mind, and Hunting the Snark and Other Short Novels. In the last decade or so, he has become almost as prolific as an anthologist, producing, as editor, Inside the Funhouse: 17 SF Stories about SF, Whatdunits, More Whatdunits, and Shaggy B.E.M. Stories; a long string of anthologies coedited with Martin H. Greenberg, Alternate Presidents, Alternate Kennedys, Alternate Warriors, Aladdin: Master of the Lamp, Dinosaur Fantastic, By Any Other Fame, Alternate Outlaws, and Sherlock
Holmes in Orbit, among others; as well as two anthologies coedited with Gardner Dozois. He won the Hugo Award in 1989 for Kirinyaga. He won another Hugo Award in 1991 for another story in the Kirinyaga series, “The Manumouki,” and another Hugo and Nebula in 1995 for his novella “Seven Views of Olduvai Gorge.” His most recent books include the novel The Return of Santiago and the anthologies Stars: Songs Inspired by the Songs of Janis Ian (edited with Janis Ian) and New Voices in Science Fiction. He lives with his wife, Carol, in Cincinnati, Ohio.

  Here, in one of the Kirinyaga stories (which take place on an orbital space colony that has been remade in the image of ancient Kenya as a Utopian experiment, and which were gathered in the collection Kirinyaga), he pits science in a head-on battle with superstition, tradition, and hidebound cultural conservatism, with the winner selected on entirely pragmatic grounds: what works, works.

  ###

  Ngai, who rules the universe from His golden throne atop the holy mountain Kirinyaga, which men now call Mount Kenya, created the Sun and the Moon, and declared that they should have equal domain over the Earth.

  The Sun would bring warmth to the world, and all of Ngai’s creatures would thrive and grow strong in the light. But even Ngai must sleep, and when He slept He ordered the Moon to watch over His creations.

  But the Moon was duplicitous, and formed a secret alliance with the Lion and the Leopard and the Hyena, and many nights, while Ngai slept, it would turn only a part of its face to the Earth. At such times the predators would go forth to maim and kill and eat their fellow creatures.

  Finally one man, a mundumugu—a witch doctor—realized that the Moon had tricked Ngai, and he made up his mind to correct the problem. He might have appealed to Ngai, but he was a proud man, and so he took it upon himself to make certain that the flesh-eaters would no longer have a partnership with the darkness.