Not long ago, Noelle Stull had sent Janos a book of essays written by a famous American writer of the past. The author called himself Mark Twain. That was apparently not his real name, though, which Janos found a bit odd. To be sure, many Europeans of this age and ages past wrote under pseudonyms. But the up-timers insisted they'd had no inquisition in their nation. Why, then, the need for pseudonyms? But perhaps he was missing something.
Among the essays, most of which had been shockingly irreligious, had been one titled "The Damned Human Race." Try as he might, Drugeth had found it difficult to quarrel with Twain's thesis. He'd seen too much cruelty and brutality in his life, some of which—the brutality if not, he hoped, the cruelty—he'd inflicted himself.
He wondered still why Noelle had sent him the book. She was herself a devout Catholic and could not possibly have agreed with Twain's viewpoint, especially that displayed in his Letters From the Earth. Had Twain been alive today, that text alone might have gotten him burned at the stake in some countries and in serious trouble with the authorities in most others.
Well . . . maybe not. In fact, almost certainly not. The manner in which heresy was handled—even the way it was looked upon—had been undergoing a rapid change in Europe since the Ring of Fire. Today, it would be highly unlikely that any nation, even Spain, would actually execute an American for heresy.
Americans themselves would attribute that reluctance to fear of their military capabilities. Which, to be sure, was real enough. But the source of the unease was deeper, something which few Americans really understood themselves. Most of them considered themselves Christians and many of those considered themselves very devout. But with very few exceptions, not even the most religious up-timers really had the same outlook as most people born and bred in the seventeenth century.
The up-timers were, at bottom, a profoundly secular folk. To them, the Ring of Fire had been some sort of cosmic mystery. The more religious would add that God's hand was clearly at work—but they would say the same about almost anything. If they became ill and recuperated, they saw God's hand at work. If their favored sports team won a game, for that matter, they saw God's hand at work.
But there would be no miracle involved. Just God's mysterious ways.
People in the seventeenth century, on the other hand, believed in miracles. And they believed just as firmly—or had, until the Ring of Fire—that the age of miracles was over, and had been over for sixteen hundred years. Every theologian had told them so—and it didn't matter if they were Catholic or Lutheran or Calvinist. On that subject, there had been no real dispute.
True, there were still miracles of a sort. The Catholic church to which Janos himself belonged required evidence of a miracle before it would canonize someone who had not been a martyr. But the sort of miracles one expected to be associated with such "Venerables," as they were called, were modest in scale compared to the miracles that had happened in ancient days. Typically, it would be found that a person was gravely ill, with a disease for which there was no cure or remedy; prayers were then sent to the Venerable, by the victim or by relatives; the afflicted one was cured, spontaneously and completely; for which doctors had no explanation due to natural causes.
Well and good. Janos did not doubt the reality of such miracles. But they were hardly on the order of the parting of the Red Sea or the destruction of Sodom and Gomorrah. Such things had been absent from the earth for over a millennium and a half.
Until the Ring of Fire.
The issue had agonized theologians for years now. There was simply no getting around it. Thousands upon thousands of people—Janos himself was one of them—had gone to Grantville and seen the miracle with their own eyes.
Nor was it just the appearance of a mysterious town of peculiar folk with near-magical mechanical powers. That might possibly have been explained away. But you couldn't explain away the land itself.
There were great cliffs there, nine hundred feet tall—three times the height of the famed White Cliffs of Dover—and completely unnatural in their design. Absolutely sheer, absolutely flat, and with nothing in the way of a scree slope at their base.
More than four years had passed since the Ring of Fire and those cliffs had begun to wear down. But Janos had spoken to eyewitnesses—and there were many of them; Thuringia was a well-populated area—who swore that on the day it happened, those cliffs had gleamed and shone like mirrors. They were simply stone and earth, like any other cliffs, but on the day of the Ring of Fire they had been cut by a blade sharper than any razor. A blade huge enough to cut a perfect circle six miles in diameter,