Blameless in Abaddon (19 page)

“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.

“Good Lord, He's a Platonist!” gasped Ockham, aiming at the lion with his camcorder and squeezing the trigger. “I knew it, I just
knew
it.”

“What do you mean?” asked Martin.

“Unless I miss my guess, we're in a universe of perfect forms. This is God's private laboratory. It's where He develops His ideas.”

“I must admit, I was expecting a more Jewish sort of consciousness,” said Saperstein. “I never thought He'd be so Greek.”

Awesome as the floating archetypes and the optic cathedral were, their connection to the world's great theodicies seemed decidedly remote, and Martin had trouble summoning a properly reverent attitude. Had he been foolish to believe the errant neuron's claim that triumphing in The Hague meant trekking across this terra incognita? Might he have done better staying home in Abaddon, reading dead Christians?

In the center of the cathedral the explorers paused for lunch. They opened their backpacks, removed their provisions—beef jerky, fresh fruit, stuffed grape leaves—and began to appease their rumbling stomachs. Organ notes filled the air, chords that Martin immediately recognized as belonging to one of his father's favorite pieces, Bach's
Toccata and Fugue.
But of course, he mused—whom else but Johann Sebastian Bach would God have commissioned to compose the divine Muzak?

Before the
Carpco New Orleans
sailed from Philadelphia, Martin and his co-prosecutors had calculated that, throughout the flotilla's Atlantic crossing, the Corpus Dei would be in range of the Mahatma Gandhi Geosynchronous Satellite. It was with this fact in mind that he now drew out his Apple PowerBook, along with a modem and a cellular phone. He plugged the devices into each other and set about determining whether the United Nations computer in New York City harbored any e-mail from either Randall or Esther.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Sun, May 14, 11:32 AM EDT

 

Martin, did you ever hear of the Disaster Studies Department at Bowling Green State University, founded two years ago by a professional “cataclysmatician” named Donald Carbone? He's something of a madman, but he has a million facts at his fingertips about earthquakes, tornadoes, pestilences, plane crashes, and hotel fires. Wonderful stuff. (Did you know 550,000 Americans died in the Great Influenza Epidemic of 1918–1919, more than ten times our battlefield losses during the concurrent Great War?) Problem: Carbone is scheduled to teach a summer school course on the Black Plague. Second problem: he wants $125,000 for ten days on the stand.

 

I'm in Philadelphia right now, shooting gorilla footage at the zoo for a
Nova
episode about primate behavior. Your landlady and I had dinner last night. We quite enjoyed ourselves. I did, at least. As you probably know, she's in love with you.

 

Earthquakes, tornadoes, pestilences, plane crashes, hotel fires—wonderful stuff indeed, thought Martin. If Job had possessed such data, he might have won his case.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Tues, May 16, 01:38 PM Local Time

 

The Defendant's brain is very strange. Ideas fly through the air like angels. Believe it or not, He's a Platonist.

 

Randall, we simply
must
put your cataclysmatician on the stand. Tell Carbone we'll not only pay him his $125,000, we'll earmark another $15,000 for whomever he gets to teach his Black Plague course. I'm delighted you and Patricia are hitting it off, but please don't dissipate your energies. June
5
will be here before we know it. It's time to start filing discovery motions. Contact Pierre Ferrand in The Hague and ask him for a list of Lovett's proposed defense witnesses.

 

Esther, too, had posted a message.

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Mon, May 15, 06:15 PM EDT

 

Progress on this end is slow but steady. Allison Lowry is willing to submit a deposition concerning her son's brain injuries, but she won't come to Holland. (Jason needs her, she says. I think we should respect her wishes.) On the bright side, I've lined up seven absolutely terrific cancer patients, six bereaved parents, and Stanley Pallomar. Remember him? That Marine lieutenant who lost both his legs in Vietnam? I'll bet he'll break the world's collective heart.

 

Allison's recalcitrance put Martin in a foul humor. Couldn't the kid get by without her for one lousy week?

 

From: [email protected]

To: [email protected]

Date: Tues, May 16, 02:03 PM Local Time

 

Esther, we absolutely
have
to get Allison to testify. There wasn't a dry eye in the room after she talked about feeding
Jason his pureed birthday cake. Yes, Stanley's missing legs will probably net us a couple of “guilty” votes, but Allison's story is even
more
wrenching. Tell her we'll pay a nursing team top dollar to watch over Jason the whole time she's in Holland, and she can charge us whatever witness fee she wants, up to $10,000.

 

Reading the first draft of his letter to Esther, Martin experienced a sudden and profound bewilderment. What kind of world were they constructing here? What sort of reality was it where Stanley Pallomar's mutilation became an asset and Jason Lowry's paralysis an ace in the hole? Right before Martin's eyes,
International 227
was transmuting into a terra incognita every bit as strange as God's brain. He shuddered to imagine what vistas lay ahead.

“Well, folks,” said Saperstein, sealing a divine dendrite in a Ziploc bag, “it's time to hit the road.”

 

The farther the neuronauts advanced, the more of God's mind they met. Certain archetypes were astonishingly concrete (the paper clip), others highly abstract (freedom), but in each case Martin had no trouble identifying the manifestation at hand. The concept of photosynthesis drifted past, enacted by masses of eternally transmogrifying ectoplasm. The notion of a feather followed. Pollination next. Homeostasis. Fission and fusion. Wheel and wedge. Pi and pie. The self-healing intelligence of wounds. The pleasures of a successfully scratched itch. Bad ideas inhabited the laboratory as well—fleas, greed, monarchy—but despite such lapses this was clearly the workshop of a genius.

Beyond the cathedral, the brain changed radically, the neuronal conglomerates yielding to a more conventional terrain: a flood plain reeking of ammonia and roofed by a lambent sky. It was a world of mud, dotted with ferns and pocked with puddles, spreading toward the horizon like a preternatural oil slick. The explorers pressed steadily on, pausing only to take pictures and collect pieces of the pungent landscape—silt, leaves, holy water.

They had traveled barely three kilometers when an ornate wooden gazebo appeared, elegant despite the ravages of rain and wood lice. No less exquisite were the gazebo's inhabitants, two ten-foot-tall, ostrichlike dinosaurs, seated at a picnic table and engrossed, against common expectations, in the venerable game of Scrabble.