The Discovery of Heaven (51 page)

"I don't believe this!" said Onno. "What are you doing here?"

"I'm doing my job. I've got an article to write on what's going on here."

"How do you know what's going on here?"

The journalist shrugged his shoulders. "Where does a newspaper get its information from?"

"For God's sake, beat it. Publicity is something I can do without. Of course you were called up by some male nurse anxious to make a few guilders on the side."

"There's no point in asking me, Onno. I'd rather be sitting in the pub too."

"I'm not Onno to you."

"Okay, Dr. Quist, let's keep calm. I can understand that you're a bit overwrought. What's going on inside you at the moment?"

"The uncontrollable desire to smash your face for hour after hour! And if you don't clear off this minute I'm going to do just that."

When Onno made to get up, with the smock still in his hands, the journalist shrugged his shoulders.

"Okay, I'll do it without you," he said, turned on his heel, and disappeared.

Onno threw the smock furiously into the carryall. "Those sensation-seeking scum . .."

"Don't get excited," said Max. "The fellow has already been sufficiently punished by being who he is."

Suddenly Sophia put her hand on both their arms. "Quiet a moment. . ."

There was the scarcely audible sound of a child crying on the other side of the wall.

A little later a nurse put her head around the door and said with a smile: "The stork has been here! An angelic little boy! Mother and child are doing fine!"

The fact that it was a boy was hidden by a diaper—but establishing the sex meant little. They stood speechless in front of the incubator while doctors, assistants, and nursing staff looked over their shoulders. No one had ever seen such a baby. Newborn infants tended to look like boxers at the end of the final round: swollen, eyes puffed and closed, reeling from the violence they had been through—but what was lying there in the sealed glass space was really like a precious museum piece in a display case, more like a
putto,
such as could be seen in Italian Renaissance paintings: all that was missing were the wings.

It was not balding and wrinkled in the way some infants immediately prefigured their old age, but had strong black hair with a deep mahogany glow, which covered its whole scalp as though it had just come from the hairdresser's; its skin was firm and seemed bathed in the light of the full moon. Nor did it have the bloated monstrousness that could be found beautiful only when seen through the eyes of maternal and paternal instinct; its cheeks were full, and in the thighs and at the wrists there were slight folds of skin, which in an adult would indicate obesity. But there was no trace of endearing chubbiness; everything was perfect, like a work of art worthy of the name. At the same time this caused it to radiate a certain aloofness, as though it did not need anyone. The small nipples, the slim fingers and toes, looked as if they had been engraved with a fine etching needle; although it had been born a month early, not only the ears but the nose and mouth too had already developed into more or less their final shape.

However, most striking of all were the eyes. They were wide open, and the space between the dark lashes was completely filled with lapis lazuli, a color blue that none of them had seen before in a human being. It reminded Max of the color of the Mediterranean—but only at a particular moment, when after driving for days through Belgium and France he caught the first glimpse of it, between the scorching hills near Saint-Raphael:
Thalassa!
The incredible blue of that moment; he now saw it in two places in that pale, strange face. His fear of an immediately evident likeness had immediately disappeared—he could obviously relax for the first few years. He had looked immediately at the nose and the thumbs, but there was nothing of himself to be recognized in them, either. There was no discernible likeness to Onno, either, and from Ada it had only the black hair and the black, sharply etched eyebrows and eyelashes, which made the blue of its eyes even deeper.

"What a beautiful child," said Sophia. "That's going to cause him problems in the future." Suddenly she turned around and asked the faces behind her, "How is my daughter?"

"She's still in there. Everything is going according to plan, but it will be a little while yet."

Onno and Max were not thinking of Ada.

"What's his name?" asked Max.

Onno looked at him proudly. "You must know the story of the man who said to a colleague of yours that he understood how astronomers could determine every possible property of the stars with their instruments—but how had they discovered their names?"

"That is indeed our most brilliant achievement." Max nodded.

"Quinten," said Onno.

De Profundis

PART THREE
THE BEGINNING OF THE END

Second Intermezzo

—
Congratulations! That must have been a satisfying moment for you. So there he was, our envoy—after years of hard work.

—Only for a moment, though. After that, it was like it always is: once you've achieved what you wanted to achieve, it's no longer what you wanted to achieve, but simply what you've achieved. You've come to take it for granted. What you win you lose, all things considered. What's more, when you see the havoc you've had to wreak to achieve it, it takes away the satisfaction. But anyway, I'm a professional, an old hand. Only the end matters.

—
I
take it you're thinking of the friendship between those two. But that tree that blew over. . . was that coincidence, or were you behind that, too?

—I was behind that, too. There were two trees, by the way.

—
What was the point of that? It was a very risky course of action, wasn't it? Suppose she hadn't survived, or had had a miscarriage. I know you don't care for this kind of question, but perhaps you'd like to answer anyway.

—If I couldn't make trees blow over exactly as I want, I wouldn't make any trees blow over. We know the position and force of every molecule in the air and, moreover, the elasticity of every point in the tree and its roots— it would gratify Laplace if he could see our aerodynamics division handling that kind of thing.

—
Laplace? I expect he's one of those French intellectuals with a dirty scarf around his neck and a shawl over his shoulders.

—I don't know if they did that in his day. At any rate, a great man, a colleague of Max Delius's. But also an incorrigible optimist. A demon who knew all the world's preconditions at a given moment, he claimed—would not only be able to reconstruct the past precisely, but also work out the future with certainty.

—
Definitely someone from the eighteenth century. Even we can't do that.

—We do very well at the level of trees being blown over.

—
Tell me, why did that poor child have to have such a dreadful accident?

—Because otherwise the mission couldn't have been accomplished. In everything I did, I had only one thing in mind: the return of the dictate.

—
All right, I can understand your not wanting to answer. Obviously it's a matter of your professional honor, and I respect that. I expect it will be clear to me in retrospect.

—To you, yes. In the past things were easier for us.

—
What do you mean?

—When we simply used to address people directly as the need arose.

—
But we stopped doing that after the creatures got the idea that it was not our voice they were hearing but their own inner voice. Of course, we couldn't stand for that kind of pickpocketing. It's undeniable that technology is increasingly taking the place of theology on earth, but psychology shouldn't get any big ideas on that score.

—It's still a shame it happened like that. The fact is that heaven and earth are only linked by means of the word—the present operation has precisely made that clear yet again.

—
Exactly. This operation was the period we put after that conversation.

—It would be nice if people were scared to death when they hear what has happened—namely, that the testimony has been returned—and the shock brought them to their senses.

—
No one will ever know. And anyway: senses? Don't make me laugh. Did you really think, that brood would give up anything at all? Come now. What they once have, they want to keep. That wretch Lucifer knows exactly what he's doing. With each new invention, people have stolen a piece of our omnipotence and in so doing have demonized their own reality step by step. Under the terms of the contract he has turned them into vampires, who are sucking us dry under his patronage. With their rockets they are already traveling faster than the wind, sound even, and one day they will approach the speed of light; with their television they are in fact already virtually omnipresent—they can see in the dark, they can look, into the insides of a human being without opening him up; with their computers they have a complete operating and monitoring system, in which they're already vying with your department; they can observe elementary particles, and they already know what happened ten to the minus forty-third seconds after our explosion of light. Beyond that limit their theories have failed up to now; for the time being all their calculations result in infinity, and let's hope that they never realize the deeper meaning of that; but by now I'm not sure of anything anymore.

—I've something to tell you about that in a moment.

—
If they want, they can even destroy the earth. Excuse my saying so, but that power really was our prerogative. Meanwhile they're busy destroying the planet without meaning to, and to be on the safe side, they're already walking on the moon as a jumping-off point for the rest of the universe. In the foreseeable future they will have mastered our absolute privilege: the creation of life, as a pendant to its wholesale extermination. A virus to begin with, then a microbe, then a worm, Caenorhabditis elegans probably, and one day they will produce people in their own image—and these days that's often as vacuous as a doll: instead of an expression, they have things, like cars. Of necessity they will become peoplelike things. Human knowledge doubles every twelve years—now, in their 1985, they know and can do twice as much as in their 1973, and as omnipotence draws closer, literally everything becomes possible down there. Knowledge itself is power—who do you think thought up that aphorism? That damn Francis Bacon again, of course. Knowledge is power sure enough, and not just over nature, but over people, and us too. The earth has changed once and for all into his doomed House of Solomon and people no longer need us—we've become fairy stories to them, curiosities, literature . . . Do you remember that string of questions that the Chief once fired at Job—whether he could raise his voice to the clouds, and whether he could shut out the sea with doors, and heaven knows what else? No, he could not, only the Chief could do that, and now just look at everything our Job can do. There are some things that are brand-new even to our Chief. Lucifer has won, and there's no use in beating around the bush any longer. Through his devilish move with the treacherous viscount, he has proved the stronger—there's no getting away from it. Less than five years after Bacon's death, Galileo and Descartes wrote their fundamental works, the Dialogo and the Discours de la methode, the beginning of the modern age, which set us off along the fateful road to Auschwitz and Hiroshima and the decoding of DNA. Old Goethe had foreseen that course of events, although he gave it a worthily positive twist: he has his hundred-year-old Faust end up as a technocrat who subdues the sea with dikes and canals—that is, he turns nature into a human creation.

—A kind of Dutch polder engineer from the Ministry of Transport, in fact, who shuts out the sea with doors. Perhaps Goethe was thinking of Leeghwater; he was very famous as early as the seventeenth century with his
Book of the Haarlemmer Meer.

—
Maybe, but I can't concentrate on literary historical reflections at the moment. You're distracting me from my argument—what was I talking about?

—About the general downfall of everything.

—
Yes, and especially our own. Because that was what Lucifer was after from the very first day: our complete humiliation and destruction. In the last analysis human beings leave him cold. And for that matter don't forget that the damn technology also has all kinds of pleasant aspects. Not only the construction of polders, but take medical technology for example. Think of local anesthetic, to mention one small thing. Did you think that anyone at all would want to go back to having a tooth pulled without anesthetic? And can you blame them? How dreadful to have teeth! No, take it from me—that it's hopeless. Via people's bodies, Lucifer has gotten a grip on their minds. Our greatest mistake is that we have always underestimated him. We thought things wouldn't be that bad, because who could challenge the Chief? Well, he could. Sometimes I think—it's a shame to have to say it—that he knows people much better than the Chief. The Chief is an idealist, a darling, who wants the best for people without knowing what he has taken on. But Lucifer knows that they would prefer to let heaven and earth go under rather than get rid of their car. He has ensured that their salvation now resides in things. He knows that they'd sooner get rid of their own legs. So heaven and earth will go under. And there will be nothing left to be lost in that Twilight of Humankind, because it has been devilishly betrayed, sold and melted down to make machines. A motorist is not a pedestrian in a car but a totally new creature, made of flesh, blood, steel, and gasoline. They are modern centaurs, griffons, and the actual mythical creatures are the only thing that will ultimately remain, because they have been created at the cost of nature, human beings, us and the Chief. With every new technological gadget, human life has automatically become more absurd. And our world will finally contain only that triumphant Negative in the ice-cold flames of its hell, with in heaven the eternal agony of the Chief as the flickering ember of a great Light. Looking back on it, it's all been for nothing. What was I actually going to say? I've totally lost the thread. Yes, I'm getting more and more confused. I can feel the decay and exhaustion in myself, too. Go on. I'm listening.