The God Machine

E
VEN BEFORE
A
BRAHAM AND THE BOY REACHED THE CAVE
near El Minya, the old man knew he was dying. A Roman blade had pricked his stomach and the bleeding was getting worse. They had traveled by camel for three nights due south, following the Nile, sleeping by day, hidden by papyrus and palm fronds, like scorpions. But while they had eluded their enemies, death lurked in the shadows of the caves of Kararra. And it was tired of waiting.

The Romans had known exactly how to attack them, and when. It was a sad truth of the times. At first Abraham and the boy had felt safe in Upper Egypt, far from the troubles in Judea. But even here, when a more orthodox Christian group felt pressure from a Gnostic wing, they sold their rivals to the Romans. Seius Strabo, Prefect of Egypt, was more than happy to crown his career by taking credit for the kill, to crow about the Christian death count in his weekly reports back to Rome.

Abraham sighed. Though barely fifty, he felt the full
weight of the history of human avarice and folly press down on his chest. It was difficult to breathe. He pulled at his Judean headdress and loosened his burnous, and his long gray hair fell down across his narrow shoulders. It was cold. It was always so cold here in this country. It had been a long wet season, full of rain and locusts. Full of strange beasts. And one night, the moon had turned completely crimson. It was a time of omens. The old man smiled. A good time to be moving on.

A Cainite Christian of profound faith and devotion, the old man had no fear of the next world. He had reconciled himself long ago to his body's eventual extinction. But he had one final mission—and only one chance now to complete it.

The old man rolled over, into a cauldron of pain. He clenched his jaw and felt the sweat break out on his brow. It was twilight. A tongue of night air flicked in from the desert, quickening the cavern's darkness. With another sigh, Abraham heaved himself up on one elbow, closer to the fire. “David?” he cried hoarsely. “David, are you there? Come into the light.” Where was his grandson? Abraham stared at the shadows that danced in the cavern, but his eyes were scaled over by cataracts. He couldn't see anything.

In an instant, the willowy David knelt down by his side. The old man reached out. To touch his face. To be certain, be sure.

Or, perhaps, just to
feel
. His talonlike fingers curled round the cheek and the soft dimpled chin of his grandson.

“I have a secret, a terrible secret,” he whispered. “I've carried it for a long time. Too long, really. Forgive me, for I am tired now, David. I can carry it no longer. But you, David, you can record it for me, set it down in Mishnaic and Greek, as I have taught you to do. The
logoi
. The words. Before they crumble into the folds of the desert, into the sands, with the rest of the man that surrounds
me.” He fingered his stomach, tried to laugh. Then he grew suddenly serious. He grabbed at his grandson, twisting the flesh of his forearm and the muscles beneath. “The words of a man that I knew as a boy. A man named Judas Iscariot.

“Record his words,” he insisted. “And then hide them away from the world. Hide them from the Sanhedrin and the Romans, from everyone, David, save from those who believe in the Word. Now bring me the codex. There is something I have to set down, in my own hand, as it was passed unto me.”

The boy did as he was told. The old man selected a pen, dipped it into a calabash of black ink and began to trace a pattern of fine lines, rectangles and circles, in a dance of exquisite proportion.

When he was finished, he felt the unspeakable burden of memory leach through his joints and his ligaments, drip from his fingertips. He rolled onto his back. “He was a man of great faith, Judas, always kind to me, always,” Abraham told his grandson. “Lest we forget. And his Master's closest companion, despite what you hear. Jesus came to Judas, and He said to him, ‘Step away from the others, and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.’”

The old man shuddered, remembering the vision—or had it only been a dream? He had seen Judas at the head of that gully, as the other disciples descended, all around him, with those stones in their hands. Those stones. They had gathered around him like wolves. Foul murder! The skin simply tore from his face.

“‘You will be cursed by the other generations,’ Jesus said, ‘and you shall come to rule over them… you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me so that I may fulfill the prophecies.’

“Judas said, 'Please don't ask me to betray you, my Lord.'

“And Jesus said, ‘Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud, and the light within it, and the stars that surround it. The star that leads the way is your star, Judas.’”

1492
Milan

T
HE VISION CAME UPON DA
V
INCI IN THE EARLY HOURS OF
the morning. It was still dark outside the window. Only an occasional oxcart winding by, only a few lost revelers disturbed the quiet rhythms of the city before dawn. Da Vinci sat up in his cot, looked over at his desk and sighed. He had no choice. When a vision came upon him as it had, there was little point in trying to venture back to sleep.

He struck a flame, lit a lamp; he stood and stretched, and scratched his long gray beard. He poured himself a cup of wine, left over from the previous evening's meal, still heaped upon a pewter plate nearby: half of a pheasant breast, a trifle gamey; some kind of sausage, pork; a broken discus of wheat bread. He took another sip of wine and pretended not to notice the decaying flesh.

Almost without thinking, he reached out for his nearest notebook, open to his rendering of “Vitruvian Man,” the circle in the square. It was lying on top of his studies of Cecilia Gallerani, the duke's mistress; by his charcoal sketch of “Il Cavallo”—the equestrian statue designed to honor the duke's father; right next to those drawings of his gear train mechanical calculator…

Il Cavallo!
Any minute now, Duke Ludovico Sforza would come barreling through that door and demand to see the masterwork he'd commissioned weeks earlier.
Da Vinci winced and took another sip of wine. Weeks, or was it months? As if it were easy to keep cranking out statues and portraits, one right after the other. As if he were some sausage-maker, official butcher to the Duchy.

Da Vinci spread the notebook out before him on his desk. There. On the blank page facing “Vitruvian Man.” He had no time to waste. He did not want to lose the pattern. And he could always tear the drawing from the notebook later, and find some hiding place.

He reached out for a nearby leather satchel and removed another illustration. It was a copy of a copy, badly smudged and wrinkled, but it was all he had to work with. And it had taken him a considerable amount of time to find it, almost sixteen years, not to mention a small fortune to procure it from that bookseller in the Levant. Contrary to the popular myth, which he himself had invented, Leonardo was not the illegitimate son of a local peasant girl from Vinci named Caterina, who had left her destitute husband and child to run off with another man from a neighboring village. In truth, his mother had been a slave girl from Constantinople. He still had his contacts in the Arab world.