The Philosopher's Apprentice (45 page)

“Are you hurt?” she asked after I was safely on deck. “You're covered with blood.”

“It's not mine. I must see Colonel Fox. Major Powers, too, and Dagmar Röhrig. There's no gentle way to say this. Dr. Sabacthani is dead.”

“Dead, sir? Jesus.
Dead?
”

“Dead.”

“How?”

“Suicide. She stabbed herself.”

“With a knife?”

“A conquistador's sword.”

“Dead. That's awful.”

“Not entirely.”

“I know what you mean,” Lieutenant Kristowski said.

 

TWO HOURS LATER
,
having taken a shower and changed my clothes, I entered Londa's denuded suite, slouched against the antique desk, and, gesticulating wildly, stammering like Demosthenes, repeated for Vetruvia Fox, Carmen Powers, and Dagmar Röhrig my various conversations with Edwina 0004. Her ontogenerated origins were not news to my listeners, as both Colonel Fox and Major Powers had attended her birth, firing up the machine on Londa's instructions, then lowering the fetus into the maturation chamber. My narrative of their leader's ultimate purpose in bringing forth the Wild Woman, by contrast, took all three hijackers by surprise. As the women fixed me with ever widening gazes, I revealed that Edwina 0004 was in essence the child of her creator's death wish, that the murderous component of her DUNCE cap program had started functioning about ten hours earlier, and that Londa's body now lay on an obscure Blood Island beach. I confessed that I could have saved her with a single glance and a six-word sentence but had instead allowed the Wild Woman to carry out the assassination.

“What a horrible choice,” Colonel Fox said in a voice as flat as glass. I could not tell whether she meant to express sympathy for my plight or disgust with my decision.

“Londa insisted that this new Edwina was merely her second conscience,” Major Powers said, “but we suspected there was more to the story.”

“Something crazy and pathological and perverse,” Dagmar said. “Something quintessentially Londa.”

I studied the weary hijackers, their moist eyes, trembling jaws, quivering lips, each face conveying its own distinctive mixture of anguish and relief. Not for an instant did they imagine that lynching Felix Pielmeister or Corbin Thorndike or Ralph Gittikac would be
queath the earth to the meek—and now, suddenly, here I was among them, revealing that Londa would never again demand such ferocity of her apostles. Even as they grieved, their gratitude washed over me like a wave of warm rococonut milk.

Slowly, piece by piece, the women constructed a plan. Its essence was capitulation. Its particulars included removing the corpses from the foremast, putting them on ice, convincing the enlisted Valkyries that surrender made sense, and telling the world that Operation PG had been terminated. But the first order of business, Colonel Fox insisted, was for Major Powers and Lieutenant Kristowski to retrieve Londa's body, without which the FBI might never regard the case as closed. When the G-men arrived, Colonel Fox would explain that, tortured by guilt and unable to abide captivity, Londa had stabbed herself to death, a story that in its own way was absolutely true.

“I've been honest with you,” I told the hijackers, “and now I'd like some candor in return.”

I didn't have to say another word. Moving synchronously, the women took out their Godgadgets and pushed the red buttons in tandem. I steeled myself. No detonation reached my ears. No blast wave shook the hull. The
Redux
remained at anchor in the tranquil bay.

Major Powers pushed her button a second time. She merely wanted to emphasize the point, but I still flinched. “You see, Mason?” she said. “You were a better conscience than you knew. Londa wasn't really putting us at risk—not through our Godgadgets anyway.”

“Are the explosives themselves also a lie,” I asked, “or just the part about their being wired to the transmitters?”

“Take a trip to forehold three,” Colonel Fox said. “You'll find a long serpent of plastique weaving through the champagne cases and the sardine crates.”

“I believe you,” I said.

“Londa liked to bluff, no doubt about it,” Dagmar said. “But she liked holding aces even more.”

 

I SHALL NOT DWELL
on the denouement of the
Titanic Redux
's maiden voyage, a succession of episodes that found the Fifth Horseman of the Apocalypse, Expediency, galloping along her corridors and promenades. The television coverage was both exhaustive and exhausting, and most of the key events were later hashed over ad nauseam by Sabacthani obsessives everywhere. Read their books, visit their Web sites, and you'll discover that when it comes to recounting the raw historical data, there's a surprising harmony between the faction that holds Londa a latter-day Joan of Arc and those who believe that she and Judas Iscariot were separated at birth. The dissolution of Operation PG is open to myriad interpretations, but the facts themselves are not in dispute. How Vetruvia Fox broadcast a special edition of
The Last Shall Be First
disclosing that Dr. Sabacthani was dead and the Valkyries were hoisting the white flag. How the U.S. Coast Guard decided to believe Colonel Fox and forthwith dispatched a cutter to the Ship of Dreams, whereupon the cutter's officers and crew purged forehold 3 of the plastique, collected the Valkyries' weapons, and ferried the surviving Phyllistines to Miami along with Londa's remains and the frozen bodies of Anthem and Thorndike. How the FBI, after accepting the Coast Guard's assurances that the liner was no longer booby-trapped, landed a succession of helicopters on the poop deck, evacuating the entire Valkyrie brigade within an hour and flying them to a government detention facility in Fort Lauderdale. How the American system of jurisprudence placed the captured women on trial for hijacking, kidnapping, piracy, torture, and premeditated murder. How the Valkyries' canny and, thanks to Donya's donations, well-funded attorneys succeeded in casting Londa as the one true villain in the narrative, their clients as mere accessories, with the result that every Valkyrie
was spared life imprisonment, receiving instead a sentence of ten to twenty years, a penalty that in most cases transmuted into less than five years behind bars followed by a laissez-faire probation. And, finally, how Ralph Gittikac, reviving his impudent project, sailed the
Titanic Redux
from Southampton to New York City without incident, so that his original quarry, “those imps, devils, and angels of catastrophe who haunted the North Atlantic on the fateful night of April fifteenth, 1912,” were finally vanquished.

There is one occurrence, however, that you didn't see on TV or read about in any Sabacthanite's blog. I speak of the conversation I had with Felix Pielmeister shortly before he departed the Bahía de Colón for points north. Different ambitions had brought us to the weather deck. The postrationalist merely wanted to get the hell off the ship, the Coast Guard having told him and the other former hostages to gather around the foremast until the evacuation craft was ready to receive them. As for me, I simply needed to survey the rigging and tell myself, over and over, that ten more Phyllistines would have died on these shrouds if I'd terminated the Wild Woman's mission.

“It appears that your protégée didn't sink the ship after all,” Pielmeister said. An ellipsis of white scars arced across his brow, a stark testament to his days down among the furnaces. “My powers of prediction failed me on
that
one, didn't they?”

“Don't worry about it,” I said. “Jesus was a poor prophet, too. He said his apostles would live to see the Kingdom come to earth. Matthew sixteen, verse twenty-eight. Mark nine, verse one.”

A grin broke through Pielmeister's scraggly beard. “You atheists are such fundamentalists, always quoting Scripture. May I ask you a question?”

“As long as it's not about Charles Darwin.”

“Is it true what I heard? You played a role in the lunatic's death?”

“I won't deny it.”

“Here's what else I heard,” he said. “You did it so she wouldn't order my execution.”

“I did it so she wouldn't order
anybody's
execution.”

“But she told you I was next in line.”

“Maybe. Don't take it personally. I just wanted to end her tawdry little reign of terror.”

“Nevertheless, you saved my life.”

“That's one way of looking at it.”

“Thank you,” Pielmeister said humbly.

“You're welcome,” I replied icily.

“No, I mean it. Thank you. If I can ever do you a favor, simply ask.”

“How about canceling the paradigm shift?”

He gave me a look of consummate perplexity. Could it be that Pielmeister no longer believed in Corporate Christi? Was it possible that during his sweltering days in boiler room 2 and his polluted nights on G deck he'd forgotten about the twilight of the iconoclasts? With any luck, I figured, this theological giant would continue thinking small for the rest of his life.

A Coast Guard midshipman approached, a pimply youngster with an Adam's apple as large as his nose, and, tapping Pielmeister's shoulder, requested that he go down to E deck. Pielmeister nodded, then faced me squarely and said, “Good-bye, Ambrose. You're really not such a bad philosopher. Forsake your foolish scientism”—he stretched out his arm, his fingers soliciting contact with mine—“and you might even get your Ph.D.”

“Know what you can do with that hand of yours?” I asked.

“What?”

“You can shove it up thy neighbor's ass,” I said, an answer that I imagined would have pleased Yolly, almost as much as if I'd thrown Pielmeister into the bay.

Saying nothing, he slid the rejected hand into his pocket. He
strode past the foremast and joined the other released hostages, and then the lot of them were swallowed by the sun's noontime glare. Inevitably I thought of Amenhotep IV's lyrical hymn to his shining divinity, the Aton. “Whatever flies and alights, they live when thou hast risen for them,” ran the panegyric. “The fish in the river dart before thy face. Thy rays are in the midst of the great green sea.” Even Darwin, I decided, could not have said it better.

 

IN THEORY IT WOULD BE EASY
convincing the FBI that I'd played no part in the Valkyries' assault on the
Titanic Redux.
For one thing, I was not a woman. For another, Colonel Fox and Major Powers would vouch for me. Nevertheless, I decided to err on the side of paranoia, and so I secluded myself inside a cold furnace in boiler room 3, crouching amid the carbon detritus and remaining there until the G-men had gotten all their prisoners off the ship.

Smeared with soot and ash, I climbed free of the furnace and with feline stealth ascended the aft companionways. It seemed entirely possible that I now had the
Redux
to myself, though my desire to sit alone in the Café Parisien was nonexistent, likewise my wish to savor a solitary respite in the Turkish bath or enjoy a private screening of
Touched by an Angel: The Complete First Season
in the ship's cozy little movie theater. I had but one ruling passion just then—to return to the island and extinguish the last vestige of a technology that my species would be better off without.

Upon reaching E deck, I entered the maze of corridors and found myself staring at an ax: not the morally charged prop from Plato's famous parable but a fire ax of no symbolic significance whatsoever, sealed behind a pane of glass stenciled with the words
EMERGENCY USE ONLY.
I detached the ball peen hammer from the wall, broke the glass, and retrieved the ax.
Existential use only,
I mused, hurrying away,
including personal vendettas against infernal machines
. At last I reached the hatch through which the hostages had been evacuated. I turned the lock wheel. The great steel door
swung open, revealing a twenty-foot drop to the Bahía de Colón. I inflated my lungs, gritted my teeth, closed my eyes, and jumped. Surfacing, I employed a crude approximation of a sidestroke to bear the ax toward the bow of the ship. Warm and smooth and briny, the tropical waters washed the carbon from my skin. Soon I reached my rowboat, still moored to the anchor chain and miraculously afloat, the keelson covered by several gallons of the Gulf of Mexico.

For the rest of the afternoon the Aton continued to smile upon my mission. Despite a choppy sea, an obstinate breeze, and the weight of my unwanted water, I rowed myself into the Bahía de Matecumba without any serious mishaps—blistered palms, strained muscles, nothing more. I made landfall near the great keep. Ax in hand, I strode across the drawbridge, then climbed the spiral staircase and immediately got to work, wielding my weapon against the RXL-313. I shattered the enzyme tanks, smashed the chamber ports, toppled the gantry, crushed the DUNCE cap, pulverized the plasma monitors, eviscerated the control console. Rampage accomplished, I stood back and surveyed the former laboratory, exhausted, panting, and unconscionably pleased with myself. Even Daedalus, I decided, could sustain no wonders here. Even God would strain to wring from this wreck any creature more substantial than a tick.

The jungle paths leading away from Torre de la Carne were soaked in shadows, but the westering sun shone brightly, guiding me safely past the treacherous roots and perilous bogs, until I arrived, famished, at Faustino, eager to consume whatever
Redux
delicacies I could find. I sat at the kitchen table and worked my way through a wheel of Gouda, a quarter pound of caviar, and half a bottle of cabernet, until I felt both sated and insensate and thus prepared to deal with Londa's letter. Abandoning the feast, I sought the library, my apprehension growing with each step.

Alonso occupied his usual post, discouraging visitors from choosing forbidden texts. Someone, Edwina 0004 presumably, had returned
his sword to its scabbard. What thoughts had gone flitting through her head at the moment she'd sheathed that bloody implement? Did she see herself as a child-killer—Medea's doppelgänger—or simply as a machine like the RXL-313 from which she'd come, beyond good and evil? I half expected to find her in the philosophy section, reviling the conquistador for supplying the murder weapon, but the only life-forms around just then were a hairy black spider, a scattering of ants, and a grieving Darwinist from Boston.