Obelisk

by Stephen Baxter

  Darwin stared at him. ‘Your royal highness, I’ve no idea what is happening here – why would you be so discourteous to our hosts?’

  ‘Discourteous?’ He glared at Atahualpa. ‘Ask him, then. Ask him what a sun-bomb is.’

  Atahualpa stared back stonily.

  Dreamer came forward. ‘Tell him the truth, Inca. He knows most of it anyhow.’ And one by one the other representatives of the Inca’s subject races, in their beads and feathers, stepped forward to stand with Dreamer.

  And so, smiling at this petty defiance, Atahualpa yielded.

  A ‘sun-bomb’, it turned out, was a weapon small enough to fit into one of the Inca’s Orbs of the Unblinking Eye, yet powerful enough to flatten a city – a weapon that harnessed the power of the sun itself.

  Jenny was shocked. ‘We welcomed you to Londres. Why would you plant such a thing in our city?’

  ‘Isn’t it obvious?’ Alphonse answered. ‘Because these all-conquering Inca can’t cow Franks and Germans and Ottomans with a pretty silver ship as they did these others, or you Anglais.’

  Atahualpa said, ‘A war of conquest in Europe and Asia would be long and bloody, though the outcome would be beyond doubt. We thought that if the sun-bombs were planted, so that your cities were held hostage – if one of them was detonated for a demonstration, if a backward provincial city was sacrificed—’

  ‘Like Londres,’ said Jenny, appalled.

  ‘And then,’ Alphonse said, ‘you would use your farspeakers to speak to the emperors and state your demands. Well, it’s not going to happen, Inca. Looks like it will be bloody after all, doesn’t it?’

  Darwin touched his shoulder. ‘You have done your empire a great service today, Prince Alphonse. But war is not yet inevitable, between the people of the north and the south. Perhaps this will be a turning point in our relationship. Let us hope that wiser counsels prevail.’

  ‘We’ll see,’ Alphonse said, staring at Atahualpa. ‘We’ll see.’

  Servants bustled in to clear dishes and set another course. The normality after the confrontation was bewildering.

  Slowly tensions eased.

  Jenny impulsively grabbed Dreamer’s arm. They walked away from the rest.

  She stared up at the sea of suns. ‘If we are all lost in this gulf, we really ought to learn to get along together.’

  Dreamer grunted. ‘You convince the emperors. I will speak to the Inca.’

  She imagined Earth swimming in light. ‘Dreamer – will we ever sail back to where we came from?’

  ‘Well, you never know,’ he said. ‘But the sea of stars is further away than you imagine. I don’t think you and I will live to see it.’

  Jenny said impulsively, ‘Our children might.’

  ‘Yes. Our children might. Come on. Let’s get this wretched dinner over with.’

  The stateroom roof slid closed, hiding the sea of suns from their sight.

  DARWIN ANATHEMA

  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 cargo. 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,’ the inspector 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 five hundred and fiftieth anniversary of the Islamic conquest of Constantinople – and more than a hundred and twenty years since a Christian coalition had taken the city back from the Ottomans, in the 1870s Crusade.

  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 once-daily train to London was, fortuitously, waiting. Xavier already had tickets. He helped load Mary’s luggage, and led her to an upper-class carriage. Aside from Mary everybody in there 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 Armée 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.’

  ‘“Extremists.” All they want is 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 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 hoped she could 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 merely contribute to some kind of Inquisition propaganda stunt. But now she was here, in the heart of the great European 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. ‘HG 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 beyond the towns was cluttered with small farms where people in mud-coloured clothes laboured over winter crops, and the churches were squat buildings like stone studs pinning down the ancient green of the countryside. She’d heard there was a monument to Wellesley 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 twelve thousand 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 wary mood. ‘You’re doing fine, Lector.’

  ‘I’m just memorising 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, as Mary presumed they were, 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 Rosemary Darwin, Charles’ 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.

  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. Learned 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 worldwide.’

  ‘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 two hundredth 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.

  ‘But he’s not a defence lawyer,’ Xavier murmured. ‘You must remember this isn’t a civil courtroom. In this case the defendant happens to have a general idea of the charges she’s to face, as a living representative of Darwin’s family – the only one who would come forward, incidentally; I think her presence was an initiative of young Fairweather. But she’s not entitled to know those charges or the evidence, nor to know who brought them.’

  ‘That doesn’t seem just.’

  ‘But the goal is not justice in the sense you mean. This is the working-out of God’s will, as focused through the infallibility of the Holy Father and the wisdom of his officers.’

  The proceedings opened with a rap of Jones’s gavel. Alongside Jones on the bench were other Commissaries, and a Prosecutor of the Holy Office. Jones instructed the principals present to identify themselves. As they spoke, the clerk on the examiners’ bench began to scribble a verbatim record.

  When it was her turn, Mary stood to introduce herself as a Lector of Cooktown University, here to observe and advise in her expert capacity. Boniface actually smiled at her. He had a face as long and grey as the Reverend Darwin’s coffin, and the skin under his eyes was velvet black.

  A Bible was brought to Alicia, and she read Latin phrases from a card.

  ‘I have no Latin,’ Mary whispered to Xavier. ‘She’s swearing an oath to tell the truth, right?’

  ‘Yes. I’ll translate as we go along …’

  Boniface picked up a paper, and began to work his way through his questions, in Latin that sounded like gravel falling into a bucket
. Xavier whispered his translation: ‘By what means and how long ago she came to London.’

  Mercifully the girl answered in English, with a crisp Scottish accent, which was smoothly translated back into Latin. ‘By train and carriage from my mother’s home in Edinburgh. Which has been the family home since the Reverend Charles Darwin’s time.’

  ‘Whether she knows or can guess the reason she was ordered to present herself to the Holy Office.’

  ‘Well, I think I know.’ She glanced at the coffin. ‘To stand behind the remains of my uncle, while a book he published a hundred and fifty years ago is considered for its heresy.’

  ‘That she name this book.’

  ‘It was called A Dialogue on the Origin of Species by Natural Selection.’

  ‘That she explain the character of this book.’

  ‘Well, I’ve never read it. I don’t know anybody who has. It was put on the Index even before it was published. I’ve only read second-hand accounts of its contents … It concerns a hypothesis concerning the variety of animal and vegetable forms we see around us. Why are some so alike, such as varieties of cat or bird? My uncle drew analogies with the well-known modification of forms of dogs, pigeons, peas and beans and other domesticated creatures under the pressure of selection for various properties desirable for mankind. He proposed that – no, he proposed a hypothesis – that natural variations in living things could be caused by another kind of selection, unconsciously applied by nature as species competed for limited resources, for water and food. This selection, given time, would shape living things as surely as the conscious manipulation of human trainers.’

  ‘Whether she believes this hypothesis to hold truth.’

  ‘I’m no natural philosopher. I want to be an artist. A painter, actually–’

  ‘Whether she believes this hypothesis to hold truth.’