Free Night Sessions, The by Ken MacLeod

was that. The charge this time was heresy. He did not contest it.
    A less self-assured man might have become bitter. Campbell had taken the view that theological debate was pointless: all that needed to be said had been said already, and said better, by Augustine, Calvin, and the Reformers. He graduated from college unchurched and uncertain of his future. From his earlier escapade he'd already concluded that scientific creationism was a misguided attempt to convince an unbelieving world on its own terms, but it was the creationist science park at Waimangu that had brought him his vocation. He was recruited to the park's staff because of his engineering skills, but was privately contemptuous of its operators for presuming to offer evidence for God's Word. His own view was what he called the strong delusion theory. This held that, while creation was evident on the surface of the world, deeper investigations were doomed to distortion by man's spiritual darkness.
    This gloomy view had seemed to Vermuelen to fit Campbell's personality when he'd first started working at the park, but the young man had brightened up remarkably after a visit to Scotland about a year ago. Campbell never said much about it, but his few guarded comments indicated that he'd encountered people in Scotland who shared some of his odd views. Vermuelen reckoned this was likely to be a mixed blessing in the long run, but for now he was just grateful that his colleague's natural cheerfulness had come out from the shadow of his eccentric theology.
    Campbell slammed and locked the shed door, and hefted his toolcase. The two men and the robot made their way to Vermuelen's jeep, parked on a side road in front of the visitors’ centre. The first coach party of the day had arrived, queuing for the VR frames that overlaid their views of the valley with elaborate scenes of Edenic and Noachic life, far more detailed, crowded and fanciful than the animatronic displays. The crowd—from an Indonesian cruise liner, Vermuelen guessed—nudged each other and pointed at Piltdown, who posed for video and waved back a few times before clambering into the middle seat of the jeep.
    “You buckle up too,” said Vermuelen, taking the wheel.
    The robot fumbled, awkward with its simian digits. Campbell leaned over and clicked the seat belt.
    Vermuelen drove up a small slope. From the top he could see all the way down the valley, its forested slopes obscured here and there by morning mist, a more persistent steam rising from the hot lakes and streams in the chill September spring morning. The pale blue of Frying Pan Lake and the garish azure of Inferno Crater glittered through the trees far below. Beyond the valley, on the horizon, stood Mount Tarawera, the chasm left by the 1886 eruption still visible on its flank. Vermuelen lurched the vehicle over the hump and then onto the road, six winding miles downhill to the lake. He flicked the car radio on to catch the nine o’clock news.
    The lead item was that a priest had been blown up in Scotland. The Scottish police, it was reported, weren't talking about terrorism. The experts polled by the news station more than made up for this. Vermuelen clicked the radio off after five minutes.
    “Grim,” he said.
    “Yes,” said Campbell. “But it shouldn't surprise us. The anti-Christian fanatics will never stop, that's the problem. Even the apostate states don't satisfy them. It's not enough to drive religion out of public life. They'll go after those who believe and practise in private too.”
    “Well,” said Vermuelen, anxious to head off one of Campbell's predictable rants, “at least we live in a free country.”
    This was not quite how he felt about the past decade or two of influx of fundamentalist refugees—as they called themselves—from the US and former UK to New Zealand. Aside from his personal resentment of the indignities and mendacities of the park, the exiles formed a distorting lobby in NZ politics, and their frequent