Blameless in Abaddon, page 14
part #2 of Godhead Series
He bid the bodyguards farewell and, suitcases in hand, strode up the gangway and stepped onto the weather deck of the Carpco New Orleans, where Anthony Van Horne greeted him with a vigorous handshake. The captain was a hale, gray-haired, lantern-jawed man in his late fifties, wearing dress blues and sporting a broken nose. Guiding Martin down the catwalk, he explained that by tomorrow morning they’d be in Bayonne, where they would refuel, take on supplies, and pick up the two scientists Saperstein had chosen to accompany him into the divine cranium.
“It’s good to be at sea again,” said Van Horne, inhaling a healthy helping of salt air. “It’s good to have a mission. I hope you’re prepared for a long, slow voyage. I speak from experience. Towing the old Smiler takes time.”
“Ever been to Holland before?”
“A Dutchman like me, you’d think I’d have gotten over there by now, but this is actually my first trip.”
“Looking forward to it?”
“My country is the ocean, Mr. Candle. Tulips and windmills do nothing for me.”
While the Jehovans regarded Martin as the most insidious piece of slime ever to creep across the face of planet Earth, the Committee for Complete Disclosure saw him as a hero, the man whose vision and stubbornness had afforded them their entrée into God. The cabin into which Van Horne now led Martin was luxurious to the point of decadence: Cornell astronomer Dwayne Kitchen, the Committee’s flamboyant chairperson, had arranged the poshest accommodations available—a four-room suite featuring a Jacuzzi, a wet bar, a home-entertainment center, and a refrigerator stocked with champagne and caviar.
“I’ve read about your troubles,” said the captain. “Illness, and then your wife. Really rough. In your shoes, I’d probably want to strike back too.”
Setting the smaller suitcase on the bunk, Martin popped the clasps and tilted back the lid. He shuddered. A plastic syringe and fifty 2cc vials of Odradex rested atop his flannel pajamas, right next to Augustine’s Confessions and Lovett’s The Conundrum of Suffering. Patricia’s doing, no doubt—he certainly hadn’t packed the stuff.
“I must tell you something, though,” said Van Horne. “I’m a big fan of your opponent.”
“God?”
“G. F. Lovett. If his books are anything to go by, you’ve got your work cut out for you. That fellow’s crafty as a marlin.”
Martin studied the beguiling vials. Hobson’s choice. If he didn’t go on Odradex, he might die before the trial began, whereas taking the drug meant losing the alertness on which his hypothetical victory depended. “I sometimes wonder if I’m the only person in the world who’s never read The Mermaid in the Maelstrom.”
“You should give it a try. My little boy and I are working our way through the whole Saga of Sargassia together—it’s going to take us about five hundred bedtimes. Thanks to G. F. Lovett, Stevie thinks having a skipper for a dad is a pretty good deal. He’s started calling me Captain Renardo.”
Martin passed the voyage to Bayonne in yet another attempt to plumb Opus imperfectum contra Julianum, pausing only to eat caviar, swallow Roxanol and Feminone, and visit the bathroom. With the help of his American Heritage Desk Encyclopedia he’d already deduced that liberum arbitrium meant “free will,” that the so-called “eschatological” explanation of suffering had something to do with Heaven and Judgment Day, and that “ontology” was a branch of metaphysics addressing the nature of existence, enabling philosophers to distinguish, for example, between flesh and spirit. He’d been hoping Augustine would offer coherent accounts of these theodicies, so he could start devising counterclaims. Alas, the further he ventured into Opus imperfectum, the more perplexed he became. The proper words appeared with regularity—evil, will, soul, body—but their context continually veered between the obscure and the opaque. The linchpin sentence of book one, chapter twenty-two, for example: “This is the Catholic view, a view that can show a just God in so many pains and in such agonies of tiny babies.” Maybe it made more sense in Latin.
On the morning of May 11, in the supertanker’s oak-paneled wardroom, a breakfast meeting occurred—a colloquy addressing matters of such consummate uncanniness that an eavesdropper might have interpreted it as a therapy session for schizophrenics. At the head of the table presided the celebrated neurophysiologist Irving Saperstein. To Saperstein’s left sat Jocelyn Beauchamp, a black mathematics professor from Vassar best known for her work in artificial intelligence, which she described for Martin as “my quest to create a sentient robot whose heart is in conflict with itself.” To Saperstein’s right: Father Thomas Ockham of Fordham University, the cosmologist who’d served as the Vatican’s liaison during the first towing of the Corpus Dei, an adventure the priest subsequently turned into the best-selling Parables for a Post-theistic Age. Martin occupied the remaining chair, adjacent to a porthole framed in brass, from which vantage point he watched the stormy, windswept Atlantic, forever ejecting foam and spindrift as the convoy crept eastward toward The Hague.
Saperstein began by announcing that within forty-eight hours they’d be beyond the range of the TV helicopters. “This is all to the good,” he explained, sipping coffee from a Carpco Shipping mug. “Whatever we find in His skull, it’s bound to be complex, right? God is a professional. When we reemerge into daylight, the last thing we want is some pesky CNN stringer landing in our laps, demanding an instant analysis.”
“We’ll be strangers in a strange land, won’t we?” said Beauchamp. She was a booming, stately, Junoesque woman with flaming red lipstick and clusters of dreadlocks hanging from her cranium like coils of insulated wire.
Saperstein grunted in agreement. “The Fodor’s guide to this particular country hasn’t been written yet. The Berlitz phrase-book for trips to infinity doesn’t exist.”
“You’re imagining we’ll be able to communicate with Him, aren’t you?” said Ockham.
“That cell we pried from His optic nerve tells us everything that’s on its mind. Look at the Torah, Thomas. Genesis, Exodus, Leviticus: this is a God who talks. He likes to spell out laws. You needn’t be shy about asking Him to clear up certain longstanding mysteries—you know, what is the correct value of the Hubble constant, why is the proton in a hydrogen atom eighteen hundred and thirty-six times as heavy as the electron?”
“Naturally one thinks of old Werner Heisenberg, lying on his deathbed, declaring he’ll have two questions for God,” said Beauchamp.
“What questions?” asked Martin.
“Why relativity, and why turbulence?” Beauchamp bit into a cinnamon roll and smiled. “Then Heisenberg added, ‘I really think He may have an answer to the first question.’”
“Fine, great, but I’d like to venture even deeper than that,” said Ockham. He was a gaunt, rawboned man, forever in motion—eyes darting, fingers entwining, spine shifting—as if trapped in an eternal state of remembering he was supposed to be somewhere else. “I’d like to go to the meat of things and ask why He bothered to create a physical cosmos in the first place. I’m assuming, of course, our Corpus Dei is in fact the Supreme Being and not some Gnostic artificer or Platonic demiurge.”
“Artificer?” said Martin, swallowing orange juice. “Demiurge?”
“It’s one of the oldest problems in theology,” said Ockham. “Was the universe created by God Himself or by one of His fallible apprentices? Human vanity favors the former hypothesis, though the latter makes a good deal more sense.”
The orange juice soured in Martin’s stomach. Oh, crap, he thought—with my luck, everybody will decide the Corpus Dei is really just a “demiurge.” It was God the Father he wanted to bring down, not some ancillary hit man.
“Even if our cargo is a demiurge, he probably knows more about the universe than we do,” said Saperstein. “We should still have our questions ready.”
“What if God doesn’t exist?” asked Beauchamp. “What if our demiurge was created by another demiurge, and that demiurge by another demiurge, and that demiurge . . .?”
“Assuming the universe was truly made—assuming it didn’t somehow invent itself—then eventually one must posit an uncreated Creator: a self-sufficient, self-explanatory, necessary Being,” said Ockham. “And there’s the real puzzle. Why would a self-sufficient Being indulge in the seemingly pointless exercise of fashioning a material cosmos?”
“Maybe He was bored,” said Martin.
“Then He wouldn’t be self-sufficient, would He?”
“Lonely?”
“Same problem—a lonely God is a codependent God.” Ockham slapped the shell of his soft-boiled egg with the back of his spoon. “One answer is that the Supreme Being in His day had two poles: a self-sufficient side that existed beyond space and time, and a contingent side that created the universe. That, I would argue, is the first thing we should ask Him. ‘God, were You bipolar?’”
Martin stared out the porthole. He didn’t quite know what to make of his fellow passengers aboard the Carpco New Orleans. In theory their curiosity was wholly admirable, yet it seemed tainted with a certain opportunism. He pictured the scientists as three learned vultures, eyeglasses balanced on their beaks, circling around and around above the cooling chamber as they prepared to devour the spoiling meat of God’s mind.
“I imagine you’re planning to ask Him a math question or two,” said Saperstein to Beauchamp. “I mean, if anybody can prove Fermat’s last theorem . . .”
“The equation ‘x to the n plus y to the n equals z to the n,’ where n is an integer greater than two, has no solution in the positive numbers,” said Martin, who’d had the good sense to take Mrs. Rosenzweig’s Math for Romantics course at Abaddon Senior High. He remembered about the maddening note Fermat had scrawled in a book he was reading, brought to light posthumously; evidently the mathematician had hit upon a neat little proof of his conjecture, but there wasn’t enough room in the margin for the details. “You mean they still haven’t cracked that thing?”
“Several years ago my colleague Andrew Wiles announced that he’d done so,” said Beauchamp, consuming a fluffy forkful of scrambled eggs, “but his solution was such a Rube Goldberg sort of affair nobody could work up much affection for it. What we really want, of course, is Fermat’s solution to Fermat’s last theorem.”
A smile broke through Saperstein’s scraggly beard. “So far we’ve been working from the top down—lofty, abstract questions. I’d prefer to begin near the bottom—with a single cell, okay? The human zygote. Immediately after arriving on the scene, it divides into two cells, then four, eight, sixteen, et cetera. Then, at a certain stage, one particular cell commits to becoming the baby’s brain stem. Amazing. A miracle. How does that cell know to inaugurate the apparatus for thinking, feeling, hoping, dreaming? What keeps it from turning into a kidney or a spleen?” The neurophysiologist ate a syrup-laden hunk of pancake. “Now let’s descend even further—to the protozoan Myxotricha paradoxa, a parasite who lives in the digestive tract of the Australian termite, engulfing fragments of finely chewed wood.”
Hearing the word termite, Martin cringed. Ravenous termites have attached the guardrails on the Henry Avenue Bridge, the police report on Corinne’s death had noted, turning them into little more than slabs of compacted sawdust.
“Look at Myxotricha under the microscope, and you’ll see he gets around via spirochetes attached all over his body. Question: what holds the spirochetes in place?” Saperstein bit the apex off a triangle of toast. “Static electricity? Duco cement?”
“Spirochetes on a bacterium?” said Martin. “Inside a termite? Do you people really worry about things like that?”
“You bet we do,” said Beauchamp.
“All the time,” said Ockham.
Saperstein’s rubbery face contracted into a frown. He sighed, finished his coffee, and intoned what Martin recognized as a paraphrase of Franz Kafka’s famous observation about religious faith. “To the scientist, no explanation is necessary . . . and to the nonscientist, no explanation is possible.”
As the late-morning sun beat down on the convoy, its beams slanting into the sea like flying buttresses holding up Heaven’s airy ramparts, the neuronauts made ready to enter the Defendant’s skull. They donned their scuba gear, shouldered their waterproof backpacks, and scrambled into the New Orleans’s launch, an inboard motorboat piloted by Van Horne’s beefy and phlegmatic chief mate. Maneuvering amid the treacherous web of tow chains, the mate managed to ferry his charges out to the raft in only twenty minutes.
The southern face of the cooling chamber featured a vertical series of five hundred footholds, and by noon the neuronauts were climbing skyward. But for the painkiller in his blood, Martin would never have gotten past the first rung. Flecks of spray ricocheted off his wet suit, instantly borne away by the wind. Petrels cruised across the sky, gliding back and forth above the Corpus Dei, their flight made particularly beautiful by the soothing opium haze that lay between Martin and the world. As he reached the top and stepped onto the Lucite lid, he noticed how dramatically the chamber had changed since his visit to Celestial City USA. Gone were the flowered footpath and the neon arrows. A huge manhole now occupied the spot from which he’d once beheld his Creator’s grin. Gangways and catwalks protruded from the edge of the opening, dropping for nearly a thousand feet to the spongy surface of His right tear duct.
Martin looked up, facing the Lockheed 7000. Beyond lay the North Atlantic, rolling between the continents like some vast wrinkled canvas on which God had once intended to paint His masterpiece.
“You don’t much like us, do you?” said Saperstein, drawing alongside Martin. The neurophysiologist slid his face mask in place, rested his gloved hand on Martin’s shoulder, and frowned. “You think we’ve got our heads in the clouds.”
“That’s one way to put it.”
“Someday I’ll tell you about my wife. Ever see a woman die of ovarian cancer?”
Martin ate his sixth Roxanol of the morning. “No.”
“I hope you never do,” said Saperstein, wrapping his lips around his regulator.
Into the eye, then. Into the primal wink, the pristine squint, the great globular organ through which, ten billion years earlier, He’d seen the Big Bang—that it was good. Saperstein led the way, fingers encircling the pistol grip of a tungsten-halogen lantern as he followed the path he’d blazed the previous winter. Marching across the tear duct, the explorers lowered themselves into an artificial fistula extending from the pocked outer surface of the cornea to its glassy underside. They plunged through the limpid aqueous humor, entered a second culvert, and, traversing the mighty lens (as large as the equivalent component of the Hawking Space Telescope), brought themselves to the shores of the vitreous humor. Stepping forward, they began their final descent.
Ever since he’d performed a wedding ceremony at the bottom of the Schuylkill River, Martin had felt comfortable wearing scuba gear. But this dive was different, a slow-motion fall through a fluid so heavy and gelatinous he felt like a bumblebee imprisoned in a bottle of Prell. As he neared his destination, jagged bursts of light shot upward from the basin: the sacred rods and holy cones, he realized, blinking and sputtering as co-matosity claimed the farthest reaches of His nervous system.
Landing, the neuronauts collected on the threshold of the optic nerve—a ten-foot-wide hole, black as the silt of Abaddon Marsh—and yanked the regulators from their mouths. This was God’s blind spot, Saperstein explained, the only light-insensitive area on His entire retina. Free at last of God’s humors, the neuronauts shed their scuba gear, securing the mound of wet suits, air tanks, masks, gloves, fins, and weight belts beneath a dead photoreceptor. The surrounding cells continued to convulse, flashing randomly on and off like semaphores being operated by lunatics.
Activating his lantern, Saperstein aimed the beam straight ahead and climbed into the blind spot, Beauchamp right behind, then Ockham, then Martin. Within a minute the neuronauts were hiking through the damp, gluey shaft of the optic nerve: a dazzling place, alive with the op-art throb of its glistery ceiling and rainbow-colored walls. The nerve expanded, soon growing as large as the Lincoln Tunnel. A journey of a hundred yards brought them to the pulpy crossroads of the optic chiasma. Beauchamp snapped a dozen photographs with her waterproof Nikon. Focusing his camcorder, Ockham ran off a long burst of videotape.
They had a choice now—left optic nerve versus right—an issue Saperstein resolved with a flip of the Manhattan subway token he found in his windbreaker. Heads. Left. They would stay on their appointed path, bound for His western hemisphere.
Seventy yards beyond the chiasma they began encountering actual brain matter. Massive assemblages of neurons lined the shaft, their dendrites interlocked in spidery configurations, their synapses firing madly, a million golden explosions per second. As the explorers ventured forward, the nerve became larger still, its fleshy walls rising for a hundred meters, then meeting to form the roof of a vast subdural chamber. Saperstein killed his lantern, the surrounding psychic fireworks having rendered it superfluous. To Martin the space felt simultaneously soothing and incomprehensible, as if he were traversing the nave of a cathedral housing a religion so fiercely beautiful only angels and children were permitted to believe in it.
Large, glowing objects drifted through the air: tree, lion, chair, plow, sword—shapes that despite their numinous luminosity seemed to possess more reality than their terrestrial equivalents. The tree radiated treeness. The lion exuded lionhood. The chair was the source of all chairs, the plow a primal plow, the sword a glittering quintessence.
