The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories Part 45

Xavier murmured, "Don't worry. It's just routine. She's not a prisoner."

"It looked like it to me."

"Darwin will be found guilty of defying that long-ago injunction, of course. But Alicia will be asked only to abjure her uncle's actions, and to condemn the book. A slap on the wrist-"

"I don't care right now. I just want to get out of this place. Can we go?"

"Once the Reverend Fathers have progressed . . ." He bowed as Boniface Jones and the others walked past, stately as sailing s.h.i.+ps in their black robes.

Mary got a good turn-out for her sermon in the cathedral the next day.

She'd t.i.tled it "Galileo, Einstein and the Mystery of Transubstantiation" - a provocative theme that had seemed a good idea from the other side of the world. Now, standing at the pulpit of St Paul's itself, dwarfed by the stonework around her and facing rows of calm, black-robed, supremely powerful men, she wasn't so sure.

There in the front row, however, was Anselm Fairweather, Alicia Darwin's lawyer. He looked bright, with an engaging, youthful sort of curiosity that she felt she'd seen too little of in England. Xavier Brazel sat beside him, faintly sinister as usual, but relatively sane, and relatively rea.s.suring.

For better or worse, she was stuck with her prepared text. "I'm well aware that to most churchmen and perhaps the lay public the philosophical career of Galileo, in astronomy, dynamics and other subjects, is of most interest for the period leading up to his summons to Rome in 1633 to face charges of heresy concerning his work regarding the hypothetical motion of the Earth - charges which, of course, were never in the end brought. But to a historian of natural philosophy such as myself it is the legacy of the man's work after Rome that is the most compelling..."

n.o.body was quite sure what had been said to Galileo, by Pope Urban himself among others, in the theocratic snake-pit that was seventeenth-century Rome. Some said the Tuscan amba.s.sador, who was hosting Galileo in Rome, had somehow intervened to soothe ruffled papal feathers. Galileo had not faced the humiliation of an Inquisition trial over his Copernican views, or, worse, sanctions afterwards. Instead, the increasingly frail, increasingly lonely old man had returned home to Tuscany. In his final years he turned away from the astronomical studies that had caused him so much trouble, and concentrated instead on "hypotheses" about dynamics, the physics of moving objects. This had been an obsession since, as a young man, he had noticed patterns in the pendulum-like swinging of church chandeliers.

"And in doing so, even so late in life, Galileo came to some remarkable and far-reaching conclusions."

Galileo's later work had run ahead of the mathematical techniques of the time, and to be fully appreciated had had to be reinterpreted by later generations of mathematicians, notably Leibniz. Essentially Galileo had built on common-sense observations of everyday motion to build a theory that was now known as "relativity", in which objects moved so that their combined velocities never exceeded a certain "speed of finality". All this properly required framing in a four-dimensional s.p.a.cetime. And buried in Galileo's work was the remarkable implication - or, as she carefully said, an "hypothesis" - that the whole of the universe was expanding into four-dimensional s.p.a.ce.

These "hypotheses" had received confirmation in later centuries. James Clerk Maxwell, developing his ideas about electromagnetism in the comparatively intellectually free environment of Presbyterian Edinburgh, had proved that Galileo's "speed of finality" was in fact the speed of light.

"And later in the nineteenth century, astronomers in our Terra Australis observatories, measuring the Doppler s.h.i.+ft of light from distant nebulae, were able to show that the universe does indeed appear to be expanding all around us, just as predicted from Galileo's work." She didn't add that the southern observatories, mostly manned by Aboriginal astronomers, had also long before proved from the parallax of the stars that the motion of the Earth around the sun was real, just as Galileo had clearly believed.

Finally she came to transubstantiation. "In the thirteenth century Thomas Aquinas justified the mystery of the Eucharist - how a communion host can simultaneously be a piece of bread and the flesh of Christ - using Aristotle's physics. The host has the outer form of bread but the inner substance of Christ. It's now more than a century since the Blessed Albert Einstein, then a mere clerk, showed that the transformation of bread to flesh could be described by means of a four-dimensional Galilean rotation, invisible to our senses. And I believe that a Vatican committee is considering accepting this interpretation as orthodoxy, a second Scholasticism. But all this stems from Galileo's insights ..."

She had often wondered, she concluded, if Galileo's attention had not been focused on his dynamics work by his brush with the authorities - or, worse, if he had been left exhausted or had his life curtailed by their trial and sentencing - perhaps the discovery of relativity might have been delayed centuries.

She was greeted by nods and smiles, from churchmen accepting as justification for their central mystery the wisdom of a man they had come close to persecuting, four centuries dead.

At the end of the Ma.s.s Xavier and Anselm Fairweather approached her. "We could hardly clap," Xavier said. "Not in church. But your sermon was much appreciated, Lector Mason."

"Well, thank you."

Anselm said, "Points in your talk sparked my interest, Lector. Have you ever heard of the Lyncean Academy? Named for the lynx, the sharpest-eyed big cat. It was a group of free-thinking scholars, founded in Galileo's time to combat the Church's authority in philosophy. It published Galileo's later books. After Galileo it went underground, but supported later thinkers. It defended Newton at his excommunication trial, and protected Fontenelle, and later helped Darwin flee to Scotland..."

She glanced at the churchmen filing out ahead of her. Xavier's impa.s.sive face carried an unstated warning. "Is there something you want to tell me, Mr Fairweather?"

"Look, could we speak privately?"

Once out of the cathedral, she let Anselm lead her away. Xavier clearly did not want to hear whatever conversation Anselm proposed to have.

They walked down Blackfriars to the river, and then west along the Embankment. Under grimy iron bridges the Thames was crowded with small steam-driven vessels. The London skyline, where she could see it, was low and flat, a lumpy blanket of poor housing spread like a blanket over the city's low hills, pierced here and there by the slim spire of a Wren church. The city far dwarfed Cooktown, but it lay as if rotting under a blanket of smoky fog. In the streets there seemed to be children everywhere, swarming in this Catholic country, bare-footed, soot-streaked and ragged. She wondered how many of them got any schooling - and how many of them had access to the medicines s.h.i.+pped over from the Pasteur clinics in Terra Australis to the disease-ridden cities of Europe.

As they walked along the Embankment she addressed the issue directly. "So, Anselm, are you a member of this Lyncean Academy?"

He laughed. "You saw through me."

"You're not exactly subtle."

"No. Well, I apologise. But there's no time left for subtlety."

"What's so urgent?"

"The Darwin trial must have the right outcome. I want to make sure I have you on my side. For we intend to use the trial to reverse a mistake the Church never made."

She shook her head. "A mistake never made . . . You've lost me. And I'm not on anybody's side."

"Look - the Academy doesn't question the Church about morality and ethics, the domain of G.o.d. It's the Church's meddling in free thought that we object to. Human minds have been locked in systems of thought imposed by the Church for two millennia. Christianity was imposed across the Roman empire. Then Aquinas imposed the philosophy of Aristotle, his four elements, his cosmologies of crystal spheres - which is still the official doctrine, no matter how much the observations of our own eyes, of the instruments you've developed in Terra Australis, disprove every word he wrote! We take our motto from a saying of Galileo himself. 'I do not feel obliged to believe that the same G.o.d who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect -' "

"' - has intended us to forgo their use.' I don't see what this has to do with the trial."

"It is an echo of the trial of Galileo - which the Church abandoned! Galileo was taken to a prison, given a good fright about torture and the stake, he agreed to say whatever they wanted him to say - but he was not put on trial."

She started to see. "But what if he had been?"

He nodded eagerly. "You get the point. A few decades earlier the Church persecuted Giordano Bruno, another philosopher, for his supposed heresies. They burned him. But n.o.body knew who Bruno was. Galileo was famous across Europe! If they had burned him - even if they had put him through the public humiliation of a trial - it would have caused outrage, especially in the Protestant countries, England, the Netherlands, the German states. The Church's moral authority would have been rejected there, and weakened even in the Catholic countries.

"And the Church would not have been able to cow those thinkers who followed Galileo. You're a historian of natural philosophy; you must see the pattern. Before Galileo you had thinkers like Bacon, Leonardo, Copernicus, Kepler ... It was a grand explosion of ideas. Galileo's work drew together and clarified all these threads - he wrote on atomism, you know. His work could have been the foundation of a revolution in thinking. But after him, comparatively speaking - nothing! Do you know that Isaac Newton the alchemist was working on a new mechanics, building on Galileo? If the Church had had not been able to impeach Newton, who knows what he might have achieved?"

"And all this because the Church spared Galileo."

"Yes! I know it's a paradox. We suspect the Church made the wise choice by accident..."

Mary had a basic sympathy for his position. But she had a gut feeling that history was more complex than this young man imagined. If Galileo's trial had gone ahead, would the work the old man completed later in life have been curtailed? It might have taken centuries more to discover relativity . . .

Anselm clearly had no room in his head for such subtleties. "It would have been better if Galileo had been a martyr! Then all men would have seen the Church for what it is."

Saying this, he seemed very young to Mary. "And now," she said carefully, "you want to use this Darwin trial to create a new martyr. Hmm. How old is Alicia Darwin?"

"Just twenty."

"Does she know she's to become some kind of token martyr for your cause?" When he hesitated, she pressed, "You produced her as the family representative for this trial, didn't you? What's your relations.h.i.+p with her?"

"We are lovers," he said defiantly. "Oh, it is chaste, Lector, don't worry about that. But she would do anything for me - and I for her."

"Would she be your lover if she weren't Darwin's grand-niece? And I ask you again: does she know what she's letting herself in for?"

He held her gaze, defiant. "The Lyncean Academy is ancient and determined. If the Church has a long memory, so do we. And I hope, I pray, that you, Lector, if the need arises, will use your considerable authority in that courtroom tomorrow to ensure that the right verdict is reached." He glanced around. "It's nearly noon. Care for some lunch?"

"No thanks," she said, and she walked sharply away.

On Thursday 12 February, Darwin's 200th anniversary, the final session of the hearing was held in another subterranean room, burrowed out of the London clay beneath St Paul's.

At least this was a grander chamber, Mary thought, its walls panelled with wood, its floor carpeted, and a decent light cast by a bank of electric bulbs. But this was evidently for the benefit of the eight cardinals who had come here to witness the final act of the trial. Sitting in their bright vestments on a curved bench at the head of the room, they looked oddly like gaudy Australasian birds, Mary thought irreverently.

Before them sat the court officials, led by Boniface Jones and completed by the earnest clerk with the rapidly scratching pen. The scribes from the chronicles scribbled and sketched. Anselm Fairweather, sitting away from his client-lover, looked excited, like a spectator at some sports event. Mary could see no guards, but she was sure they were present, ready to act if Alicia dared defy the will of this court. That ghastly coffin stood on its trestles.

And before them all, dressed in a penitent's white robe and with her wrists and ankles bound in chains, stood Alicia Darwin.

"I can't believe I volunteered for this farce," Mary muttered to Xavier Brazel. "I haven't contributed a d.a.m.n word. And look at that wretched child."

"It is merely a formality," Xavier said. "The robe is part of an ancient tradition which-"

"Does the authority of a 2,000-year-old Church really rely on humiliating a poor bewildered kid?"

He seemed faintly alarmed. "You must not be seen to be disrespecting the court, Mary." He leaned closer and whispered, "And whatever Anselm said to you I'd advise you to disregard it."

She tried to read his handsome, impa.s.sive face. "You choose what to hear, don't you? You have a striking ability to compartmentalize. Maybe that's what it takes to survive in your world."

"I only want what is best for the Church - and for my friends, among whom I would hope to count you."

"We'll see about that at the end of this charade, shall we?"

As before Jones began proceedings with a rap of a gavel; the murmuring in the room died down. Jones faced Alicia. "Alicia Darwin, daughter of James Paul Darwin of Edinburgh. Kneel to hear the clerical condemnation, and the sentence of the Holy See."

Alicia knelt submissively.

Jones picked up a sheet of paper and began to read in his sonorous Latin. Xavier murmured a translation for Mary.

"Whereas he, the deceased Charles Robert, son of Robert Waring Darwin of London, was in the year 1859 denounced by the Holy Office for holding as true the false doctrine taught by some that the species of living things that populate the Earth are mutable one into the other, in accordance with a law of chance and selection, and in defiance of the teaching of the divine and Holy Scripture that all species were created by the Lord G.o.d for His purpose, and having published a book ent.i.tled A Dialogue on the Origin of Species by Natural Selection. Whereas he the said Darwin did fail to respect an injunction issued by the Holy Congregation held before his eminence the Lord Cardinal Joseph McInnery on 14 December 1859 to amend the said work to ensure an appropriate balance be given to argument and counter-argument concerning the false doctrine ..."

The Commissary's p.r.o.nouncements went on and on, seeming to Mary to meld into a kind of repet.i.tion of the details of the previous session. It struck her how little thought had been applied to the material presented to this court, how little a.n.a.lysis had actually been done on the charges and the evidence, such as they were. The sheer anti-intellectual nature of the whole proceedings offended her.

And Alicia, kneeling, was rocking slightly, her face blanched, as if she might faint. The reality of the situation seemed to be dawning on her, Mary thought. But with a sinking heart she thought she saw a kind of stubborn determination on Alicia's face.

At last Boniface seemed to be reaching the end of his peroration. " Therefore, involving the most Holy name of Our Lord Jesus Christ and His most glorious Mother, ever Virgin Mary, and sitting as a tribunal with the advice and counsel of the Reverend Masters of Sacred Theology and Doctors of both laws, we say, p.r.o.nounce, sentence and declare that he, Charles Darwin, had rendered himself according to this Holy Office vehemently suspect of heresy, having held and believed a doctrine that is false and contrary to the divine and Holy Scripture, namely the doctrine known as "natural selection ". Consequently, he has incurred all the censures and penalties enjoined and promulgated by the sacred Canons and all particular and general laws against such delinquents.

"For adhering to the doctrine of the Origin of Species, let Darwin be anathema."

The chroniclers scribbled, excited; Mary imagined the telegraph wires buzzing the next day to bring the world the news that Charles Darwin had been formally, if posthumously, excommunicated.

But Alicia still knelt before the panel. The clerk came forward, and handed her a doc.u.ment. "A prepared statement," Xavier whispered to Mary. "She's not on trial herself, not under any suspicion. She's here to represent Darwin's legacy. All she has to do is read that out and she'll be free to go."

Alicia, kneeling, her voice small in the room before the rows of churchmen, began to read: "I, Alicia Rosemary Darwin, daughter of James Paul Darwin of Edinburgh, arraigned personally at this tribunal and kneeling before you, most Eminent and Reverend Lord Cardinals, Inquisitors General against heretical depravity throughout the whole Christian Republic ..." She fell silent and read on rapidly. "You want me to say the Origin of Species was heretical. And to say my uncle deliberately defied the order to modify it to remove the heresy. And to say I and all my family abjure his memory and all his words for all time."

Boniface Jones' gravel-like voice sounded almost kind. "Just read it out, child."

She put the papers down on the floor. "I will not."

And this was the moment, Mary saw. The moment of defiance Anselm had coached into her.

There was uproar.

The chroniclers leaned forward, trying to hear, to be sure what Alicia had said. Anselm Fairweather was standing, the triumph barely disguised on his face. Even the cardinals were agitated, muttering to one another.

Only Boniface Jones sat silent and still, a rock in the storm of noise. Alicia continued to kneel, facing him.

When the noise subsided Boniface gestured at the clerk. "Don't record this. Child - Alicia. You must understand. You have not been on trial here. The heresy was your distant uncle's. But if you defy the will of the tribunal, if you refuse to read what has been given to you, then the crime becomes yours. By defending your uncle's work you would become heretical yourself."

"I don't care." She poked at the paper on the floor, pus.h.i.+ng it away. "I won't read this. My family doesn't "abjure" Charles Darwin. We honour him. We're not alone. Why, the Reverend Dawkins said only recently that natural selection is the best hypothesis anybody ever framed ..."

Mary whispered to Xavier, "And I wonder who put that in her mouth?"

"You mean Anselm Fairweather."

"You know about him?"

"He's hardly delicate in his operations."

"This is exactly what Anselm and his spooky friends want, isn't it? To have this beautiful kid throw herself to the flames. Smart move. I can just imagine how this will play back home."

Xavier frowned. "I can hear how angry you are. But there's nothing you can do."

"Isn't there?"

"Mary, this is the Inquisition. You can't defy it. We can only see how this is going to play out."

His words decided her. "Like h.e.l.l." She stood up.

"What are you doing?"

"Injecting a little common sense from Terra Australis, that's what." Before Xavier could stop her she strode forward. She tried to look fearless, but it was physically difficult to walk past the angry faces of the cardinals, as if she was the focus of G.o.d's wrath.

She reached the bench. Boniface Jones towered over her, his face like thunder. Alicia knelt on the floor, the pages of the statement scattered before her.

Anselm was hovering, desperate to approach. Mary pointed at him. "You - stay away." She reached out a hand to Alicia. "Stand up, child. Enough's enough."

Bewildered, Alicia complied.

Mary glared up at Boniface. "May I address the bench?"

"Do I have a choice?" Boniface asked dryly.

Mary felt a flicker of hope at that hint of humour. Maybe Boniface would prove to be a realist. "I hope we all still have choices, Father. Look, I know I'm from the outside here. But maybe we can find a way to get out of this ridiculous situation with the minimum harm done to anybody - to this girl, to the Church."

Alicia said, " I don't want your help. I don't care what's done to me-"