Ian Watson: The Mammoth Book of Alternate Histories

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 God. 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 God 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 nobody 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 relationship 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 damn 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, impassive 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 God for His purpose, and having published a book entitled 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…”