Asimov's SF, Sep 2005 Read online

  Except that even the sensible people had just about run out of alternative explanations for the way scientific dogma was turning out to be just dumb-headed wrong. So we sensible people were stuck.

  We couldn't believe it, and couldn't dismiss it, either. The evidence was right there, in every physics lab and astronomical observatory in the world. Like it or not, there was a real, non-zero possibility that somebody—some Somebody, somewhere or other—was running a simulation of a universe as some kind of an experiment, and that simulated universe was the one we all lived in.

  Well, in a certain way that wasn't all bad, you know. Since Somebody Else was making up the rules that this universe ran by we didn't have to drive ourselves crazy trying to make sense of the contradictions. For instance, now we didn't have to invent negative gravity to explain the acceleration of distant galaxies. Nor did we have to postulate such weird concepts as scalar fields—that is, particles like a photon or proton, but incomparably bigger, in fact light-years in diameter—just so we could account for some anomalous clumping in some other galaxies. We didn't need to account for anything at all, really. Anything that was puzzling was, hey, just one more glitch in the superbeing's simulation. Made science a lot easier.

  But all of that was a long time ago. When Silvie was still my wife, when the United States was still run by the President and the Congress, when nobody had yet heard of the Doctrine of the Beloved Experimenter.

  Still, I should have guessed that some human beings would have seen a way to do themselves some good out of it. Somebody always had, out of every other unexpected disaster in human history, hadn't they? Why should this be any different?

  * * * *

  The big thing on my mind that day wasn't scientific anomalies. I was more concerned about how badly the War was going. The War had never gone very well, but I was just beginning to see just how bad badly could be.

  All my life I had hoped that some day I would get a chance to go back and visit Baghdad, which was where my parents had lived up until the time that Saddam made the whole country of Iraq unlivable for them. They talked a lot about the old place while I was growing up in Minnesota. Homesick, I guess, and probably that made them glamorize it. What they made it sound like was a real Ali Baba-Scheherezade kind of movie-set place, only with flush toilets.

  Well, Baghdad wasn't like that any more. (Though neither was anything else.)

  Apart from all the other things the War had done, it made a pretty big change in my personal life. Congress got nervous, and so weapons research got a huge infusion of money. The Fort doubled its lab space. So then they needed somebody with the right degrees and the amount of right at-the-front experience to head it up. The one they picked was me. I was never sure why. Silvie—we were still married then—refused to believe that it was just that I was Iraqi by ancestry and the government wanted to show all the other Arab-Americans that Arabs were considered as loyal as anybody else, but I was never really convinced that that hadn't been a big part of the reason.

  Naturally the promotion was the end of my career as a working scientist, even as the kind of working scientist that sniffed around captured Islamist labs for signs of worrisome weaponry. I had now become an administrator.

  Whether I was qualified for that sort of thing or not is a whole other question. The government didn't care much about physics any more. Biowarfare looked cheap and effective. And what, for instance, did I know about polymerase chain reactions or maintaining a database of aerosolizable organic molecules? Not much, surely, but things like that were pretty basic to the Fort's work those days. We just didn't make nasties to kill Arabs with, we did our best to identify Arab bioweapon nasties before they spread enough to kill too many of our people. Like, for instance, inventing quick-acting techniques to electrospray suspicious compounds into a mass spectrometer and—well, never mind. That's the general idea, anyway.

  Of course, we did do the nasties, too, because the DOD was convinced that you could never have too much of a bad thing. The big debate in the Fort one week was picking the best ways to deploy the toxic strains of Sargasso actinobacteria and firmicutes that the biomass people had come up with. The way they seemed to think would be most convenient was to seed the shallow waters of Arab bathing beaches with them.

  That was when I realized I was losing Silvie. “But you're talking about killing children,” she complained when she heard about it. She was really, really angry, but I refused to discuss it with her. She wasn't supposed to know about those things, and I had a pretty good idea of which of my scientists had leaked it to her. I thought about turning the leaker in, but that would have been too personally embarrassing, since he, as it happened, had recently become my wife's lover.

  But, as I say, that was a long time ago.

  * * * *

  When those Beloved Experimenter kooks began to show up I didn't take them very seriously at first. The Fort wasn't their first target, and I didn't really care much about what they were doing to the churches.

  Not to just some of the churches, either. What I mean is to all of them. I guess that was predictable enough. The churches were the institutions that got hurt worst when the idea of an alien experimenter began to take hold, and human beings, like hyenas, do love to pick on the weakest animals. So first, at Sunday services—well, at the Jewish Saturday ones too, because the Beloveds were a pretty ecumenical lot—you'd see one or two pickets wearing sandwich boards with messages like, “You do know it's all a lie, don't you?” Then you'd begin to see dozens of the pickets, then hundreds, marching civilly enough around the churches’ parking lots. Then, when it got to be thousands, the picketers hardly had anybody left to picket anymore, because by then they way outnumbered the handful of people that were still inside.

  Then, when the religions were so battered that they weren't much fun any more, the Beloveds began to move on to other targets. First they did the Congress and the Senate and the White House and all the lesser governing bodies.

  Why did they pick the politicians? Certainly not because there was anything the politicians could do, because there wasn't. But when things go wrong you blame the politicians. You don't necessarily have any better ideas than they do, but they're there for the purpose of being blamed. That's the American way.

  Then, I guess having run out of more powerful people to blame, they got around to us.

  Actually I was a little surprised they had taken so long. It seemed to me that the Fort, and all the other scientific labs and institutions in the world, were tempting targets for more reasons than one. The Beloved Experimenter people really got a kick out of having this new proof that the world's most celebrated scientists were as full of crap as their local Congressman.

  We couldn't debate them any more, either. That was a letdown, because we'd really been used to those debates, you know. Since time immemorial, we scientists had been plagued by arguments from the inerrant Bible people and the flat-Earthers and the anti-evolutionists and the flying saucerers and every other sort of nut that thought their intuitions trumped natural physical law. We didn't always win the debates. Witness Galileo and the Roman Inquisition, for instance. But we did win sometimes then and couldn't win ever again now, because this time the flakes and the nutcases weren't any wronger than we had been all along.

  Even when the demonstrators multiplied into the thousands they weren't a serious physical threat to us. The town cops just borrowed more crowd-control stuff from neighboring municipalities, and the Beloveds got herded off to side streets and parks where no one would be much bothered by them. Half of the cops were overseas veterans from places like Iberia and the Moroccan beaches. After their struggles with the mujahadeen, a few thousand chanting crazies were no problem.

  Until they were.

  The biggest mob yet turned up on Christmas Eve. They were divided about half and half between the ones chanting slogans about the Beloved and the ones who were singing “Silent Night” and “God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen.” They weren't divided any other w
ay. They stuck together no matter what the cops did and, of course, because of the holidays the police force was depleted. The cops left on duty couldn't hold them. Two or three thousand of the demonstrators came boiling through our gates, and then it was up to our MPs. Who were, God (if any) be thanked, up to the task, because the MPs’ numbers weren't depleted at all. None of them had received any Christmas leave; the Fort had abolished all holidays long before. Those guys were combat veterans, too, and they were spoiling for the fight because policy had made us keep them out of all the crowd-control problems that the town cops were supposed to handle. Military didn't bother with civilian and civilian didn't touch military, those were the rules. The MPs kept the mob moving right down to the parade ground, and then they began carving them up into parcels of a hundred demonstrators or so and herding them to places where they could conveniently be detained for as long as we liked.

  * * * *

  When I saw from my window that Billy de Blount was in the crowd it occurred to me that it would be a generous act to have him brought up to my office, maybe even to share my Christmas Eve meal.

  I don't know why I wanted to be generous to the little turd. He had been nothing but an annoyance all those years when he was growing up across the street. Not so big an annoyance, though, that I wanted to stick him with the dried food packets and unbottled water which were all he would get from my MPs.

  I always thought that was no way for a civilized human being to live. Certainly I wouldn't like it for myself, and I don't suppose my cousin Fahzeed had liked it either.

  I haven't mentioned Fahzeed. His problem was that his parents had emigrated to the States just as mine had, all right, but they had taken their time about it. They wanted to be absolutely sure before they moved. So Fahzeed had been born in Basra. Which meant that when the War got sticky and the American government began rounding up all the country's Arabs and Islamists they left me alone. U.S. born, already a first lieutenant in the American army, I was a protected species. Fahzeed wasn't. He got a resettlement camp in Utah that was called the Salt Lake Protective Custody Depot, along with eighteen or twenty thousand other possible, but not definite enough to make it to the penal camps in Alaska and Guam, security risks.

  I only visited Fahzeed at his camp once. That was plenty. I never wanted to see again how that kind of confinement could transform a bright, well educated professor of meteorological science into a crotchety old fart with serious complaints about the wilted condition of the mess hall's salad greens.

  Well, if my father hadn't crossed his fingers for all of us and taken that great jump into the American unknown when he did—why, that could have been me. Fighting to get the last bowl of Jell-O at supper, viewed with suspicion by my fellow inmates because I refused to join the improvised mosques they had set up, where the principal sermon subject was the iniquity of that Great Satan, the United States of America.

  But I had, I was reminded, problems nearer at hand. What reminded me was MP Major Kressmer, tapping at my door—which was, of course, already open. I gave him the usual now-what frown.

  "I'm just reporting that it's all secure now, sir. What are your orders?"

  "Feed them,” I said. “Keep them overnight. Around daybreak you can start releasing them, fifteen or twenty at a time."

  "Yes, sir,” he said, turning to go.

  "Oh, and one more thing, Major,” I said. “Have de Blount brought up here."

  * * * *

  Up close, Billy was a lot taller and skinnier than I remembered him, and he had grown a fairly creditable beard. He walked in under his own power, the two MP escorts staying just outside the door until I waved them away. He took a seat without being invited, and leaned back to see what I was going to say. He didn't look uneasy, not even uncomfortable, just patient.

  "Hello, Billy,” I said. “Merry Christmas.” He didn't respond to that, just looked a little more patient, so I got specific. “I'm just about to have my dinner sent up from the mess. It'll be turkey, of course, with the usual trimmings and stuff."

  "Fine,” he said, dismissing the subject. “Is that why you had me brought up here?"

  "Not really, no. Your father came to see me the other day."

  That made him grin. “Sure he did. He probably told you his Sunday attendance is down 50 percent, but it's really nearer eighty."

  "He did say that, yes. It isn't only your father's church, though, is it? Father Alexius at St. Viator's told me that they've cut out two of the three morning masses, and they're running short of altar boys."

  He said reasonably, “What did they expect? Their people have been lied to all their lives. There isn't any God, just some Experimenter that doesn't give a damn what they do. There isn't any Heaven, there isn't any Hell. So now they understand that it doesn't matter if you're a good guy or a shitheel. You don't get rewarded, and you don't get punished, either. So Pop can't scare them into showing up every Sunday any more. Can't bribe them, either. Doesn't have anything to bribe them with. So naturally they came to us, Ron. We're giving them the truth."

  God knows I'm not a religious person, but he was getting under my skin. “But that's not all religion is, Billy. What about morality?"

  "Oh, now, Ron,” he said, “really. Do you honestly think it's a sin worth going to hell for to eat pork or fail to bang your head on a rug six times a day? And I'm not even talking about the people who thought their God's morality commanded them to murder as many unbelievers as they could, from the Crusaders to Hamas."

  "Besides that sort of thing,” I said. “I mean thou shalt not kill and thou shalt not steal and thou shalt not bear false witness."

  He gave the sort of look that one gives to a person who has made a legitimate debating point. It was the first time. He thought for a moment, and then he said, “You're right about that, Ron, kind of. We're going to have to give them some kind of commandments, aren't we? As soon as I make them up. Now, what were you saying about turkey?"

  * * * *

  That wasn't the last time I saw Billy de Blount, just the last time that I was physically in the same room with him. That kind of close encounter didn't happen again. Not even when he and his team of tame biochemists commandeered the Fort, because by then I was two or three thousand miles away, being reeducated in the Salt Lake Correctional Compound. (Yes. Same place. Different name but the same place that had held, among others, my cousin Fahzeed. I never did find out what became of Fahzeed, but I have a pretty good idea it wasn't anything nice.)

  I did see a lot of Billy de Blount in the Correctional Compound. Had no choice. We inmates were made to watch him on the TV whenever he was doing something important, like ordering another retaliatory strike against the Syrians or the Iraqis, or whoever. Or announcing the development of a new cannabis strain for, what did they say? Stress reduction and recreation? Or whatever. Billy wasn't the president, exactly, or whatever the Experimenter people called the guy who did the kind of things that an elected president used to do. But he sure did get a lot of digital time.

  Some of the people I knew were really surprised when the Experimenter groups got into politics. I wasn't. Where else did they have to go?

  I wasn't surprised that they won pretty much every race they got into, either. The regular politicians were pretty much licked before they got started. The population was really shook up by then. They wanted to kick somebody's ass for messing up their lives, and who was a better target than the old-style politicians? Who, you had to admit, by and large well deserved it, anyway.

  What did surprise me about all the Experimenters having all that power, though, was what use they made of it. I would not have thought that they would finally have won the Islamist War, and I certainly didn't expect them to win it the way they did.

  [Back to Table of Contents]

  First Intermediary Willis Wardman de Blount

  I do my weekly TV address on Tuesdays. That's the bottom of the week, when the animals need to be thrown some new bone to get them through to the weekend. Mar
ta and Heinrich were prepping me for it when a page brought me another letter from my father.

  I didn't greet it with joy. It had been nearly a week since the last one, and I had almost begun to hope that he had given up on me. Or died. Or at least fallen into some kind of irreversible coma, but no such luck. What was left of the physical body he had been born with was still hanging on, and that old brain was still working away."What's that?” Marta asked, not taking her eyes off the tan she was mixing for my cheeks. Sometimes she forgets herself, but when I gave her a look she paled and fussed harder over the mixing palette.

  She probably did know, when she sneaked a look at the folded paper. It was written in my father's unmistakable crabbed hand. As well as everything else he has lost, he doesn't have much in the way of vocal cords any more, so he can't dictate like a normal person. That doesn't keep him from being my most dependable correspondent. He doesn't actually have a lot of choice about that, since he isn't allowed to correspond with anybody else, just lucky me. I don't usually read his letters. There's no reason to, because they all say pretty much the same thing, so I just flame them and go on with whatever I'm doing. This time I said, “Give me a match.” Heinrich always has one, or something like it, because he's smoking again. He listened to the bone I threw almost a year ago, when I informed the people that our scientists were pretty sure that by the end of the decade they'd be able to repair the alveoli that cigarette smoke damages. He went right out and picked up a carton of Old Golds—they say you can get them on any street corner, but I never thought it worthwhile to ban them entirely. Then he went shopping. God knows where, maybe some antique store. Anyway he got himself a solid gold cigarette lighter that still worked.