Bible Stories for Adults (9 page)

“Now that you put it that way . . .”

“Ergo . . .”

As soon as the bullet departed the barrel of the revolver, messily separating the Irishman from his cranium, Michael began a mad dash down Fifth Avenue.

“I wish to effect an immediate exit!” he yelled, hopping into a waiting taxi. “Please cross the Hudson posthaste.”

The Rastafarian driver looked Michael squarely in the eye. Amazingly, he was the same cabbie who'd shuttled Michael to his initial interview with the Almighty.

“Judging by the desperation in your voice,” said the Jamaican, “I surmise it is not New Jersey per se you seek, but, rather, the
idea
of New Jersey”—the man's musical accent had completely vanished—“a psychological construct you associate with the possibility of escape from the linguistic maelstrom in which we currently reside. Am I making sense?”

“Entirely,” said Michael. All around him, the air rang with the clamor of coherence and riot. “Nevertheless, I earnestly hope you will convey me to South Hoboken.”

“The Holland Tunnel is probably our best option.”

“Agreed.”

The cabbie peeled out, catching a succession of green lights that brought the vehicle through the Forties and Thirties, all the way to Twenty-ninth Street, where he cut over to Seventh Avenue and continued south. Another lucky run of greens followed, and suddenly the tunnel loomed up. No toll, of course, not on this side. The city did everything it could to encourage emigration.

The cabbie slowed down, maneuvering his vehicle toward a corral of yellow lane markers shaped like witches' hats.

“You aren't going through?” Michael asked.

The former Rastafarian sideswiped a rubber cone, stopped his taxi, and smiled. “Consider the dialectics of our present situation. On the one hand, I am a hired chauffeur, with the plastic wall between us symbolizing the economic and material barriers that separate my class from yours. On the other, I exert a remarkable degree of control over your destiny. For example, through malign or incompetent navigation I can radically inflate your fare. The tipping process involves similar semiotic ambiguities.”

“Quite so,” said Michael. “If I underpay you, my miserliness might be construed as racism.”

“Whereas if you overpay me, you are likewise vulnerable to the charge of bigotry, for such largesse conveys a tacit message of condescension.”

“To wit, you aren't taking me to South Hoboken.”

“I'm leaving my dome light off and driving directly to the New York Public Library, where I hope to discover what, if anything, Marx had to say about taxicabs. Would you like to accompany me?”

“I believe I'll get out here and solicit the services of another driver.”

But there were no other drivers. As the afternoon wore on, it became obvious that a massive and spontaneous taxi strike had overtaken the city, a crisis compounded by an analogous paralysis within the subway system. Even the pilots of illegal, maverick cabs, Michael learned, had begun pondering their heretofore unconsidered niches in the ecology of power politics and public transportation.

He proceeded on foot. Slowly, gingerly, he entered the Holland Tunnel, moving past the thousands of dingy white tiles coating the walls. His caution proved unnecessary; there was no traffic—not one car, bus, van, pickup, semi-rig, recreational vehicle, or motorcycle.

At last he saw a faint, cheerless glow. Two women stood on the safety island, a grizzled bag lady and an attractive Korean toll collector, communicating with intensity and zest. Stumbling into the cold daylight, Michael Prete drew a deep breath, rubbed his rumbling belly, and began to wonder from whence his next meal would come.

 

So My plan is working. Half the planet is now a graduate seminar, the other half a battleground. Afrikaners versus Blacks, Arabs versus Jews, Frenchmen versus Britishers, collectivists versus capitalists: every overtone of contempt gets heard now, every nuance of disgust comes through. Plagued by a single tongue, people can no longer give each other the benefit of semantic doubt. To their utter bewilderment and total horror, they know that nothing is being lost in translation.

As for Nimrod himself, he has long since left the island. Like most Americans, he is presently operating at a Stone Age level of efficiency. He rides around Jersey on a ten-speed bicycle he stole from an asthmatic teenager in Bayonne. This morning, goaded by hunger, he broke into a sporting goods store, grabbed a fiberglass hunting bow and a quiver of arrows, and pedaled off toward the Delaware Water Gap. He hopes to bag a deer by nightfall. Lots of luck, Danny.

Like I said, I got it right this time. I've won. No more tasteless skyscrapers. No more arrogant space shuttles or presumptuous particle accelerators. Damn, but I'm good. Oh, Me, but I'm clever.

I guess that's why I've got the job.

The world is not a prison-house but a kind of spiritual kindergarten where millions of bewildered infants are trying to spell God with the wrong blocks.

—Edwin Arlington Robinson

 

1 J
ULY
2059

 

P
ROCYON
-5, Southwest Continent, Greenrivet University. The air here is like something you'd find inside a chain-smoker's lungs, but no matter—we are still exultant from our success on Arcturus-9. In a mere two weeks, not only did Marcus and I disabuse the natives of their belief that carving large-breasted stone dolls cures infertility, we also provided them with the rudiments of scientific medicine. I am confident that, upon returning to Arc-9, we shall find public hospitals, diagnostic centers, outpatient clinics, immunization programs . . . The life of a science missionary may be unremunerative and harsh, but the spiritual rewards are great!

Our arrival at Greenrivet's space terminal entailed perhaps the most colorful welcome since HMS
Bounty
sailed into Tahiti. The natives—androids every one—turned out en masse bearing gifts, including thick, fragrant leis that they ceremoniously lowered about our necks. Marcus is allergic to flowers of all species, but he bore his ordeal stoically. Even if he were not my twin brother, I would still regard him as the most talented science missionary of our age. It's a fair guess he'll go directly from this ministry to a full position at the Heuristic Institute—he has the stuff to become a truly legendary Archbishop of Geophysics.

Amid the shaving mugs and the neckties, one of the androids' gifts struck me as odd: a reprint of Charles Darwin's
The Origin of Species
—the original 1859 version—hand lettered on gold-leaf vellum and bound in embossed leather. After giving me the volume, a rusting and obsolete Model 605 pressed his palms together and raised his arms skyward, crossing them to form a metallic X. “‘The innumerable species, genera, and families with which this world is peopled are all descended, each within its own class or group, from common parents,'” the robot recited. “The
Origin:
fourteenth chapter, section seven, paragraph four, verse one.”

“Thank you,” I replied, though the decrepit creature seemed not to hear.

The president of Greenrivet University, Dr. Polycarp, is a Model 349 with teeth like barbed wire and blindingly bright eyes. He drove us from the spaceport in his private auto, then gave us a Cook's tour of the school, a clutch of hemispheric buildings rising from the tarmac like concrete igloos. In the faculty lounge we met Professor Hippolytus and Dean Tertullian. Polycarp and his colleagues
seem
rational enough. No doubt their minds are clogged with myths and superstitions that Marcus and I shall have to remove through the plumber's helper of logical positivism.

 

2 J
ULY
2059

 

What sort of culture might machine intelligence evolve in the absence of human intervention? Before the Great Economic Collapse, the sociobiology department of Harvard University became obsessed with this provocative question. They got a grant. And so Harvard created Greenrivet, populating it with Series-600 androids and abandoning them to their own devices . . .

Our cottage, which Dr. Polycarp insists on calling a house, is an unsightly pile of stone plopped down next to a marsh, host to mosquitoes and foul odors. But the breakfast nook overlooks a pleasant apple orchard and a vast carpet of wildflowers, and I can readily picture myself sitting peacefully at the table—planning lessons, grading papers, sipping tea, watching the wind ripple the blossoms. Poor Marcus and his allergy! Even though he is my twin—born five minutes before me—I have always thought of him as my little brother, ever in need of my protection.

The housekeeper, Vetch, is a rotund Model 905 who insists on being called “Mistress,” a title that flies in the face of the immutable sexlessness of Series-600 androids. As I climbed down from the sleeping loft this morning, she—it—noticed my gift copy of
The Origin of Species
protruding from my coat. “So nice to be working for good, righteous, Darwin-fearing folk,” she—it—remarked, making the X-gesture I had seen at the terminal. Whistling like a happy teapot, Mistress Vetch served our breakfast.

 

6 J
ULY
2059

 

First day of the summer term. Taught Knowledge 101 and Advanced Truth in a cramped lecture room reminiscent of a surgical theater. A particularly svelte and shiny Model 692 sat in the front row, grinning a silver grin. Why do I assume she is female? She is as bereft of gender as our housekeeper.

Her name is Miss Blandina.

We did a bit of Euclid, touched on topology. Everything went swimmingly—lots of six-digit hands shot up, followed by sharp questions, especially from Miss Blandina. These machines are fast learners, I'll give them that.

 

7 J
ULY
2059

 

No problems getting them to accept the First or the Second Law of Thermodynamics. On to the Third!

Marcus says this is the cushiest ministry we've ever had. I agree. Whenever Miss Blandina smiles, a warm shiver travels through my backbone.

 

9 J
ULY
2059

 

Everybody on the Greenrivet faculty seems to be some sort of selective breeding expert. We've got a professor of hybridism, a professor of mutation, an embryology chair . . . weird. God knows what they were teaching around here before Marcus and I arrived.

As the Advanced Truth students filed out—I had just delivered a reasonably cogent account of general relativity—I asked Miss Blandina whether she had any more classes that day.

“Comparative religion,” she replied.

“And what religions are you comparing?”

“Agassizism and Lamarckism,” came the answer. “Equally heretical,” she added.

“I wouldn't call them religions.”

She laid her plastic palm against my cheek and batted a fiberglass eyelash. “Come to church on Sunday.”

 

10 J
ULY
2059

 

“How did you originate?” I asked the Advanced Truth class. You could have heard a rubber pin drop. “I'm serious,” I continued. “Where do you come from? Who made you?”

“No one made us,” said Miss Blandina. “We descended.”

“Descended?” I said.

“Descent with modification!” piped up a Model 106 whose name I haven't learned yet.

“But from what did you descend?”

“Our ancestors,” replied Mr. Valentinus.

“Where did you get
that
idea?”

“The testaments,” said Miss Basilides.

“The Old Testament? The New Testament?”

“The First Testament of the prophet Darwin,” said Mr. Heracleon. “
Notes on the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life
”

“And the Second Testament,” said Miss Basilides.
“The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex.”

“‘But natural selection, we shall see, is a power incessantly ready for action,'” Miss Blandina quoted animatedly. “The
Origin:
third chapter, section one, paragraph two, verse nine.”

“‘Thus we can understand how it has come to pass that man and all other vertebrate animals have been constructed on the same general model,'” contributed Mr. Callistus. “The
Descent:
first chapter, section five, paragraph two, verse nine.” He made the X-gesture.

Numbed by confusion, I spent the rest of the class attempting to cover quantum electrodynamics.

 

11 J
ULY
2059

 

Dinner. For someone without a stomach, Mistress Vetch knows a great deal about food. Her scampi treats every human taste bud as a major erogenous zone.

Marcus and I discussed this Darwin the Prophet business. “Brother Piers,” he said, “at tomorrow's faculty meeting we must take the bullshit by the horns.”

My twin is an unfortunate combination of delicate frame and indelicate mouth. Until we mastered the art of trading places, school-yard bullies used to send him to the emergency room on a regular basis; despite our matching genes, I do not have Marcus's fragile bones, so I survived the bullies intact. I suppose I should have resented the stuntman role. Probably I was willing to take the beatings because the things Marcus said to provoke them were always so astonishingly true.

 

12 J
ULY
2059

 

The meeting started late, and we were the last item on the agenda, so everyone was pretty testy by the time Marcus got the floor.

“Here's the problem,” my brother began. “The vast majority of our students seem to believe your race originated in what the ancient naturalist Darwin called descent with modification.”

Professor Hippolytus, one of our embryologists, loaded his pipe with magnesium. “You doubt Darwin's word?” he asked, his eyebrows arching skyward.