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judge!

We trifle time: I pray thee, pursue

sentence! Por. A pound of that Antonio’s

flesh is thine:

the law allows it and the court awards it.

And let what blood may in this surgery run

be interest on three thousand ducats lost. Shy. Most learned judge! A sentence! Come,

prepare!

(antonio being held, he cuts out his

heart and weighs it.) Ant. Oh, I die! A curse on all your

heads! Shy. Fie, such felons’ mouthings shall miss

merely.

Nay, ‘tis too much. Prithee, give it him

back.

(he throweth the excess back.)

Horrified, Picard scanned back up the text of the play and found nothing but long humorous passages about the folly of people who entered into agreements and then depended on the putative kindness of the other parties. The whole play was seen as an example of the triumph of the state over the pettifogging of special interests and sentiment, and everything in it was as blatantly and sensationally done as anything in The Revenger’s Tragedy, with stage directions to match—in Jessica’s case, where Lorenzo betrays her and then laughs in her face, She runs on his sword and kills herself.

Picard swallowed, his throat gone dry, more betrayed by the black ink on the yellowed page than by anything that had happened to him so far. He turned the pages and found what frightened him more second by second: a Shakespeare horribly changed in all but the parts that were already horrible. Titus Andronicus was much as it had been. So was Macbeth, and oddly, Lear; but Picard paged through the latter and breathed out unhappily, almost a moan, to find one small part missing: that of Cornwall’s “first servant,” who tries to protect old Gloucester from having his eyes plucked out and is immediately killed—a matter of a few lines in the original, now gone completely. And the other two servants gone dumb, and not even a single voice raised, now, to protest the old man’s fate at the hands of Lear’s hateful daughter and her husband.

Slowly Picard shut the book, put it back, and looked mistru/lly at the Bible— and, beautiful language or not, decided not to pick it up.

Other books he did look at, briefly— just long enough to see that plots and other details were changed in some cases, not in others. The Iliad looked about as it should have. After its time, though, something seemed to have started—a slow, relentless moral inversion. Kindness, compassion, charity, seemed to have been declared a waste of time; greed, violence, the survival of the fittest—in this case, the most ruthless—seemed to have been deemed more useful to a species “getting ahead in the world.” The perfect government, in Plato, was now one in which “fear is meted out to the populace in proper proportion by the wise ruler.” Civic virtue soon only mattered insofar as it served self-advancement. Acquisition, especially of power, but also of material goods and wealth—having, and keeping, at whatever expense to others—seemed to have become of paramount importance. It was a ruthless world, enthusiastically embodying the worst of many traits that humanity had been trying to shake for millennia. Some that had been shaken, in Picard’s own world, remained in full and evil flower here. In one spot and another, a little light of virtue, a kind deed or moment of pity, still shone through the prose. Shakespeare was not wholly lost; Kipling, idiosyncratic as always, was still himself; so was Aristotle. But the closer the books came to modern times, the more corrupt their philosophies seemed—and even the oldest ones betrayed him abruptly, for at the end of this universe’s Iliad, Achilles killed old King Priam while the pitiable old man was on his knees before him, begging in tears for the release of Hector’s body for the burial rites. The one time in the poem when that terrible man showed mercy, Picard thought, closing the Iliad and putting it down; that one moment of awful pain and humanity … But not here, it seems. Not here. There was no question, now, why the horrible events of this Earth’s