Galileo's Children: Tales of Science vs. Superstition

by Gardner Dozois

  “She refuses to share camp with you, and insists you leave.”

  Da fixed the mullah with his iron gaze. “Mullah, you are a learned man in a difficult situation, but surely you can see the woman is half-mad. She complains that my daughter has not been mutilated, and would not taint herself with my daughter’s presence. Yet she is tainted herself. Did she tell you that she tried to assault my daughter and strip her naked in public view? Did she tell you that she inflicted this wound on me when I stood between her and my daughter? Did she tell you that I have taken the bloodwriting, so she spilled the Word of God when she drew blood?”

  The mullah looked appalled. He went back to the woman, who started screeching all over again. He cut her off and began berating her. She stopped talking, stunned that the mullah had turned on her. He kept berating her until she showed a sign of humility. When she bowed her head, the mullah stopped his tirade, but as soon as the words stopped she sent a dagger-glance our way.

  That night, three families pulled out of our camp. Many of the others in camp were pleased to see them go. I heard one of the grandmothers mutter “Taliban” under her breath, making a curse of the words.

  The mood in camp lifted, except for mine. “It’s my fault Ala left,” I said.

  “No, it is not your fault,” said Da. “It was her family’s fault. They want the whole world to think the way they think and to do what they do. This is against the teaching of the Qur’an, which says that there shall be no coercion in the matter of faith. I can find the sura if you like.”

  “Am I unclean?”

  “No,” said Da. “You are the most beautiful girl in the world.”

  By morning, the camp had been filled by other families. The faces were more friendly, but Ala was gone. It was my first lesson in intolerance, and it came from my own faith.

  ###

  In Sydney, we sat for hours, waiting to be processed. By the third hour, Da finally lost patience and approached the customs officer.

  “We are Australian citizens, you know?” Da said.

  “Please be seated. We are still waiting for cross-checks.”

  “I was born in Brisbane, for crying out loud! Zada was born in Melbourne. My family is Australian four generations back.”

  His protests made no difference. Ever since the Saladin Outbreak, customs checked all Muslims thoroughly. Fifty residents of Darwin had died from an outbreak of a biological weapon that the Saladins had released. Only a handful of Saladins had survived, and they were all in prison, and it had been years ago, but Australia still treated its Muslims as if every single one of us was a terrorist waiting for the opportunity to go berserk.

  We were insulted, shouted at, and spat on by men and women who then stepped into their exclusive clubs and talked about how uncivilized we were. Once it had been the Aborigines, then it had been the Italian and Greek immigrants; a generation later it was the Asians; now it was our turn. Da thought that we could leave for a while, go on our pilgrimage and return to a more settled nation, but our treatment by the customs officers indicated that little had changed in the year we were away.

  They forced Da to strip for a search, and nearly did the same for me, until Da threatened them with child molestation charges. They took blood samples from both of us. They went through our luggage ruthlessly. They x-rayed our suitcases from so many angles that Da joked they would glow in the dark.

  Then they made us wait, which was the worst punishment of all.

  Da leaned over to me and whispered, “They are worried about my blood. They think that maybe I am carrying a deadly virus like a Saladin. And who knows? Maybe the Qur’an is a deadly virus.” He chuckled.

  “Can they read your blood?” I asked.

  “Yes, but they can’t make sense of it without the code sheet.”

  “If they knew it was just the Qur’an texts, would they let us go?”

  “Probably,” said Da.

  “Why don’t you give it to them, then?”

  He sighed. “Zada, it is hard to understand, but many people hate us for no reason other than our faith. I have never killed or hurt or stolen from anyone in my life, and yet people hate me because I pray in a church with a crescent instead of a cross.”

  “But I want to get out of here,” I pleaded.

  “Listen to me, daughter. I could show them the crib sheet and explain it to them, but then they would know the code, and that is a terrifying possibility. There are people who have tried to design illnesses that attack only Jews or only blacks, but so far they have failed. The reason why they have failed is that there is no serological marker for black or Jewish blood. Now we stupid Muslims, and I count myself among the fools, have identified ourselves. In my blood is a code that says that I am a Muslim, not just by birth, but by active faith. I have marked myself. I might as well walk into a neo-Nazi rally wearing a Star of David.

  “Maybe I am just a pessimist,” he continued. “Maybe no one will ever design an anti-Muslim virus, but it is now technically possible. The longer it takes the dhimmis to find out how, the better.”

  I looked up at my father. He had called himself a fool. “Da, I thought you were smart!”

  “Most of the time, darling. But sometimes faith means you have to do the dumb thing.”

  “I don’t want to be dumb,” I said.

  Da laughed. “You know you can choose whatever you want to be. But there is a small hope I have for you. To do it you would need to be very, very smart.”

  “What?” I asked.

  “I want you to grow up to be smart enough to figure out how to stop the illnesses I’m talking about. Mark my words, racial plagues will come one day, unless someone can stop them.”

  “Do you think I could?”

  Da looked at me with utter conviction. “I have never doubted it.”

  ###

  Da’s leukemia recurred a few years later. The chemotherapy had failed to cure him after all, although it had given him seven good years: just long enough to see me to adulthood, and enrolled in genetics. I tried to figure out a way to cure Da, but I was only a freshman. I understood less than half the words in my textbooks. The best I could do was hold his hand as he slowly died.

  It was then that I finally understood what he meant when he said that sometimes it was important not to be smart. At the climax of our haj we had gone around the Kaabah seven times, moving in a human whirlpool. It made no sense at all intellectually. Going around and around a white temple in a throng of strangers was about as pointless a thing as you could possibly do, and yet I still remember the event as one of the most moving in my life. For a brief moment I felt a part of a greater community, not just of Muslims, but of the Universe. With that last ritual, Da and I became haji and hajjah, and it felt wonderful.

  But I could not put aside my thoughts the way Da could. I had to be smart. Da had asked me to be smart. And when he died, after four months and two failed chemo cycles, I no longer believed in Allah. I wanted to maintain my faith, as much for my father as for me, but my heart was empty.

  The event that finally tipped me, although I did not even realize it until much later, was seeing his blood in a sample tube. The oncology nurse had drawn 8 mls from his central line, then rolled the sample tube end over end to mix the blood with the anticoagulant. I saw the blood darken in the tube as it deoxygenated, and I thought about the blood cells in there. The white cells contained the suras of the Qur’an, but they also carried the broken code that turned them into cancer cells.

  Da had once overcome leukemia years before. The doctors told me it was very rare to have a relapse after seven years. And this relapse seemed to be more aggressive than the first one. The tests, they told me, indicated this was a new mutation.

  Mutation: a change in genetic code. Mutagen: an agent that promotes mutation.

  Bloodwriting, by definition, was mutagenic. Da had injected one hundred and fourteen suras into his own DNA. The designer had been very careful to make sure that the bloodwriting virus inserted itse
lf somewhere safe so it would not disrupt a tumor suppressor gene or switch on an oncogene—but that was for normal people. Da’s DNA was already damaged by leukemia and chemotherapy. The virus had written a new code over the top, and I believe the new code switched his leukemia back on.

  The Qur’an had spoken to his blood, and said: “He it is Who created you from dust, then from a small lifegerm, then from a clot, then He brings you forth as a child, then that you may attain your maturity, then that you may be old—and of you there are some who are caused to die before—and that you may reach an appointed term, and that you may understand. He it is who gives life and brings death, so when He decrees an affair. He only says to it: Be, and it is.”

  I never forgave Allah for saying “Be!” to my father’s leukemia. An educated, intelligent biologist, Da must have suspected that the Qur’an had killed him. Still, he never missed a prayer until the day he died. My own faith was not so strong. It shattered like fine china on concrete. Disbelief is the only possible revenge for omnipotence.

  An infidel I was by then, but I had made a promise to my father, and for my postdoc I solved the bloodwriting problem. He would have been proud.

  I abandoned the crib sheet. In my scheme the codons were assigned randomly to letters. Rather than preordaining TAT to mean zen in Arabic or “k” in English, I designed a process that shuffled the letters into a new configuration every time. Because there are 64 codons, with three {stop} marks and eight blanks, that comes to about 5 X 1083 or 500,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations. No one could design a virus specific to the Qur’an suras anymore. The dhimmi bastards would need to design a different virus for every Muslim on the face of the Earth. The faith of my father was safe to bloodwrite.

  ###

  In my own blood I have written the things important to me. There is a picture of my family, a picture of my wedding, and a picture of my parents from when they were both alive. Pictures can be encoded just as easily as text.

  There is some text: Crick and Watson’s original paper describing the double-helix of DNA, and Martin Luther King’s “I Have a Dream” speech. I also transcribed Cassius’s words from Julius Caesar:

  The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,

  But in ourselves, that we are underlings.

  For the memory of my father, I included a Muslim parable, a sunnah story about Mohammed: One day, a group of farmers asked Mohammed for guidance on improving their crop. Mohammed told the farmers not to pollinate their date trees. The farmers recognized Mohammed as a wise man, and did as he said. That year, however, none of the trees bore any dates. The farmers were angry, and they returned to Mohammed demanding an explanation. Mohammed heard their complaints, then pointed out that he was a religious man, not a farmer, and his wisdom could not be expected to encompass the sum of human learning. He said, “You know your worldly business better.”

  It is my favorite parable from Islam, and is as important in its way as Jesus’ Sermon on the Mount.

  At the end of my insert, I included a quote from the dhimmi Albert Einstein, recorded the year after the atomic bombing of Japan.

  He said, “The release of atom power has changed everything but our way of thinking,” then added, “The solution of this problem lies in the heart of humankind.”

  I have paraphrased that last sentence into the essence of my new faith. No God was ever so succinct.

  My artificial intron reads:

  8 words, 45 codons, 135 base pairs that say:

  CTA AGC GAC GAA TGT AGT CAT TAC GGA AGC TAA CAT CAG TGT TAC TAA GAA AGT TGT TAA CAG TGT AGC GAC GAA TGT GAC GAA AAA AGG AGC TGT CAT GAG TGT GAC GGA CAA AAA CAG TAT TAA CAG AAC TGC

  The solution lies in the heart of humankind.

  I whisper it to my children every night.

  Falling Star

  Brendan DuBois

  We like to compliment ourselves on the bright, tidy rationality of our technological civilization, but the fact is, as the bittersweet story that follows demonstrates, that that technological civilization is fragile, easy to break—and, once broken, the Old Days and the Old Ways, with all of their bigotry, intolerance, and fear, are waiting to sweep in again, miring and dragging down even those who’ve always had their eyes on the stars.

  Brendan DuBois has twice received the Shamus Award from the Private Eye Writers of America and has been nominated three times for the Edgar Allan Poe Award given by the Mystery Writers of America. He’s made sales to Playboy, Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine, Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine, Space Stations, Civil War Fantastic, Pharaoh Fantastic, Knight Fantastic, The Mutant Files, and Alternate Gerrysburgs, among other markets. His mystery novels include the Lewis Cole series, Dead Sand, Black Tide, Shattered Shell, Killer Waves, and Buried Dreams.

  His science fiction novels include Resurrection Day and Six Days. His most recent novel is the suspense thriller Betrayed. He lives in Exeter, New Hampshire, with his family, and maintains a website at http://www.BrendanDuBois.com.

  ###

  On a late July day in Boston Falls, New Hampshire, Rick Monroe, the oldest resident of the town, sat on a park bench in the town common, waiting for the grocery and mail wagon to appear from Greenwich. The damn thing was supposed to arrive at two PM, but the Congregational Church clock had just chimed three times and the road from Greenwich remained empty. Four horses and a wagon were hitched up to the post in front of the Boston Falls General Store, some bare-chested kids were playing in the dirt road, and flies were buzzing around his face.

  He stretched out his legs, saw the dirt stains at the bottom of the old overalls. Mrs. Chandler, his once-a-week house cleaner, was again doing a lousy job with the laundry, and he knew he should say something to her, but he was reluctant to do it. Having a cleaning woman was a luxury and a bad cleaning woman was better than no cleaning woman at all. Even if she was a snoop and sometimes raided his icebox and frowned whenever she reminded him of the weekly church services. Some of the kids shouted and started running up the dirt road. He sat up, shaded his eyes with a shaking hand. There, coming down slowly, two tired horses pulling the wagon that had high wooden sides and a canvas top. He waited as the wagon pulled into the store, waited still until it was unloaded. There was really no rush, no rush at all. Let the kids have their excitement, crawling in and around the wagon. When the wagon finally pulled out, heading to the next town over, Jericho, he slowly got up, wincing as his hips screamed at him. He went across the cool grass and then the dirt road, and up to the wooden porch. The children moved away from him, except for young Tom Cooper, who stood there, eyes wide open. Glen Roundell, the owner of the General Store and one of the town’s three selectmen, came up to him with a paper sack and a small packet of envelopes, tied together with a piece of twine.

  “Here you go, Mister Monroe,” he said, his voice formal, wearing a starched white shirt, black tie, and white store apron that reached the floor. “Best we can do this week. No beef, but there is some bacon there. Should keep if you get home quick enough.”

  “Thanks, Glen,” he said. “On account, all right?”

  Glen nodded. “That’s fine.”

  He turned to step off the porch, when a man appeared out of the shadows. Henry Cooper, Tom’s father, wearing a checked flannel shirt and blue jeans, his thick black beard down to mid-chest. “Would you care for a ride back to your place, Mister Monroe?”

  He shifted the bag in his hands, smiled. “Why, that would be grand.” And he was glad that Henry had not come into town with his wife, Marcia, for even though she was quite active in the church, she had some very un-Christian thoughts toward her neighbors, especially an old man like Rick Monroe, who kept to himself and wasn’t a churchgoer.

  Rick followed Henry and his boy outside, and he clambered up on the rear, against a couple of wooden boxes and a barrel. Henry said, “You can sit up front, if you’d like,” and Rick said, “No, that’s your boy’s place. He ca
n stay up there with you.”

  Henry unhitched his two-horse team, and in a few minutes, they were heading out on the Town Road, also known as New Hampshire Route 12. The rear of the wagon jostled and was bumpy, but he was glad he didn’t have to walk it. It sometimes took him nearly an hour to walk from home to the center of town, and he remembered again—like he had done so many times—how once in his life it only took him ninety minutes to travel thousands of miles.

  He looked again at the town common, at the stone monuments clustered there, commemorating the war dead from Boston Falls, those who had fallen in the Civil War, the Spanish-American War, World Wars I and II, Korea, Vietnam, and even the first and second Gulf Wars. Then, the town common was out of view, as the horse and wagon made its way out of a small New Hampshire village, hanging on in the sixth decade of the twenty-first century.

  ###

  When the wagon reached his home, Henry and his boy came down to help him, and Henry said, “Can I bring some water out for the horses? It’s a dreadfully hot day,” and Rick said, “Of course, go right ahead.” Henry nodded and said, “Tom, you help Mister Monroe in with his groceries. You do that.”

  “Yes, sir,” the boy said, taking the bag from his hands, and he was embarrassed at how he enjoyed being helped. The inside of the house was cool—but not cool enough, came a younger voice from inside, a voice that said, remember when you could set a switch and have it cold enough to freeze your toes?—and he walked into the dark kitchen, past the coal-burning stove. From the grocery sack he took out a few canned goods—their labels in black and white, glued sloppily on—and the wax paper with the bacon inside. He went to the icebox, popped it open quickly and shut it. Tom was there, looking on, gazing around the room, and he knew what the boy was looking at: the framed photos of the time when Rick was younger and stronger, just like the whole damn country.