Read Online Night Sessions, The by Ken MacLeod - Free Book Online Page B
Authors: Ken MacLeod
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mechanically. “Pardon me, I don't believe we've been introduced. I'll be forgetting my own head next.”
The outstretched hand was long-fingered, hairy, leathery.
“Cornelius Vermuelen, park ranger.”
“Piltdown, fake apeman. Pleased to meet you.” It gazed around the shed, as if it would miss the place. “Oh well, back into character. Ook ook.”
Piltdown leaned forward, knuckles almost brushing the floor, ambled to the doorway, patted the apatosaur and turned to look pleadingly at the two men, like a dog waiting for a walk. Campbell put away his tools in a toolcase and straightened up, rubbing his own neck and back.
“Oh well,” he said. “Time to get into character ourselves, I suppose. Bow down in the house of Rimmon.”
Vermuelen chuckled and nodded. He and Campbell both despised the creationist operators of the park, though from opposite directions. Vermuelen had been an Anglican since childhood and a park ranger all his working life. He'd been forty when the Genesis Institute, funded by several wealthy exiled US businessmen, had taken over the lease on the tourist side of the running of Waimangu. In the past five years he hadn't given the creationists an inch: he'd prevented them from cluttering the spectacular volcanic valley with more than a handful of their animatronic dinosaur and caveman installations, and when guiding tourists along the trail had refused to follow the creationists’ script, which claimed that the ancient appearance of this lush, recent landscape could be generalised into evidence for a 6000-year-old Earth. Instead, he had always emphasised that the effect of weathering and revegetation on compacted volcanic ash was no model at all for the geology of igneous and sedimentary rock, remarkable though the appearance of a stable landscape and mature ecosystem in less than two centuries might be.
John Richard Campbell carried, Vermuelen had sometimes thought, a very different cross, one that was all his own, and of his own making. Tall, sinewy, cerebrotonic, autodidactic, and stubborn, at the age of twenty-two he had already managed to get himself excluded from two of the local fundamentalist sects. The first, the Church of his baptism, the Presbyterian Reformed Church of New Zealand, had withdrawn its fellowship from him in his seventeenth year. In a flush of youthful enthusiasm, Campbell had submitted an article to the Church's magazine which argued (with impeccable biblical references) that the Earth was flat, and that its glaringly apparent sphericity could be explained (with incomprehensible but irrefutable mathematics) by a providential divine curvature of the space around it. Accidentally leaked to the Internet before publication, “The Creation of Apparent Shape: a Biblical and Scientific Perspective” had brought upon the Church some worldly scoffing, much to Campbell's chagrin. His dismay and repentance were real enough, but his refusal to repudiate the article, and his indignant denial that his intention had been satirical—the admission of which would have been sufficient to get him off with a warning—had brought down on his head a charge of contumacy. Not being a communicant, he couldn't be excommunicated, but he had found the disapproval and disgrace hard to bear.
To avoid contention, Campbell had transferred his attendance to the even smaller Congregational Baptist Apostolic Church of North Island, Aotearoa, whose meeting house was conveniently or providentially close to the technical college in Rotorua where Campbell had just begun a diploma course in roboticengineering. His fingers having been burned once, he'd kept his thoughts to himself for a couple of years. But the temptation to speculative theology had been too much to resist, and had become once more his undoing. An earnest piece on his personal website imploring evangelical concern for the souls of Turing-test-passing robots and other artificial intelligences had come to the pastor's attention, and that
The outstretched hand was long-fingered, hairy, leathery.
“Cornelius Vermuelen, park ranger.”
“Piltdown, fake apeman. Pleased to meet you.” It gazed around the shed, as if it would miss the place. “Oh well, back into character. Ook ook.”
Piltdown leaned forward, knuckles almost brushing the floor, ambled to the doorway, patted the apatosaur and turned to look pleadingly at the two men, like a dog waiting for a walk. Campbell put away his tools in a toolcase and straightened up, rubbing his own neck and back.
“Oh well,” he said. “Time to get into character ourselves, I suppose. Bow down in the house of Rimmon.”
Vermuelen chuckled and nodded. He and Campbell both despised the creationist operators of the park, though from opposite directions. Vermuelen had been an Anglican since childhood and a park ranger all his working life. He'd been forty when the Genesis Institute, funded by several wealthy exiled US businessmen, had taken over the lease on the tourist side of the running of Waimangu. In the past five years he hadn't given the creationists an inch: he'd prevented them from cluttering the spectacular volcanic valley with more than a handful of their animatronic dinosaur and caveman installations, and when guiding tourists along the trail had refused to follow the creationists’ script, which claimed that the ancient appearance of this lush, recent landscape could be generalised into evidence for a 6000-year-old Earth. Instead, he had always emphasised that the effect of weathering and revegetation on compacted volcanic ash was no model at all for the geology of igneous and sedimentary rock, remarkable though the appearance of a stable landscape and mature ecosystem in less than two centuries might be.
John Richard Campbell carried, Vermuelen had sometimes thought, a very different cross, one that was all his own, and of his own making. Tall, sinewy, cerebrotonic, autodidactic, and stubborn, at the age of twenty-two he had already managed to get himself excluded from two of the local fundamentalist sects. The first, the Church of his baptism, the Presbyterian Reformed Church of New Zealand, had withdrawn its fellowship from him in his seventeenth year. In a flush of youthful enthusiasm, Campbell had submitted an article to the Church's magazine which argued (with impeccable biblical references) that the Earth was flat, and that its glaringly apparent sphericity could be explained (with incomprehensible but irrefutable mathematics) by a providential divine curvature of the space around it. Accidentally leaked to the Internet before publication, “The Creation of Apparent Shape: a Biblical and Scientific Perspective” had brought upon the Church some worldly scoffing, much to Campbell's chagrin. His dismay and repentance were real enough, but his refusal to repudiate the article, and his indignant denial that his intention had been satirical—the admission of which would have been sufficient to get him off with a warning—had brought down on his head a charge of contumacy. Not being a communicant, he couldn't be excommunicated, but he had found the disapproval and disgrace hard to bear.
To avoid contention, Campbell had transferred his attendance to the even smaller Congregational Baptist Apostolic Church of North Island, Aotearoa, whose meeting house was conveniently or providentially close to the technical college in Rotorua where Campbell had just begun a diploma course in roboticengineering. His fingers having been burned once, he'd kept his thoughts to himself for a couple of years. But the temptation to speculative theology had been too much to resist, and had become once more his undoing. An earnest piece on his personal website imploring evangelical concern for the souls of Turing-test-passing robots and other artificial intelligences had come to the pastor's attention, and that
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