Blameless in Abaddon (27 page)

Swiss cheese defense
, Martin typed onto his hard drive.
Evil as privation.
“Can you help me out here?” he asked Job.

Placing the Tupperware lid against his chest, the sufferer scraped away the exudate of a particularly juicy lesion. “You've read my biography, Mr. Candle. ‘Where were you when I laid the Earth's foundations?' God asked me, rhetorically. ‘Have you descended to the springs of the sea or walked in the unfathomable deep? Have you visited the storehouse of the snow or seen the arsenal where hail is kept?' Many years later, I realized He wasn't just trying to humble me. He was reminding me that the universe
exists.
For reasons known only to Himself, a finite set of law-abiding realities occupies time and space. Most of these realities are harmless, beautiful even, but a few of them—storms, gravity, plate tectonics, microorganisms, Behemoth, Leviathan—can have undesirable side effects. This doesn't mean He
intended
such results, nor does it mean He never suspended His own rules. Occasionally, as the school bus started to hurtle over the cliff, the pre-coma God would yank it back. Sometimes He would shrink the tumor or cancel the cyclone. But whenever He did so, He inevitably absorbed a piece of the cosmos back into Himself—and if He'd kept at it, intervention after intervention, the differentiated universe would have disappeared altogether, leaving Him alone again, back on square one.”

“Okay, okay, but what's the
answer
to the ontological defense?” asked Martin.

“The answer?”

“The answer.”

Job sighed profoundly. He coughed up a wad of mucus interlaced with blood and spat it onto the heap. “I don't know of any,” he said at last. “Do you?” he asked Augustine.

“There isn't one.”

A sharp pain tore through Martin's torso. He felt as if a wild horse had just kicked him in the tits. “No answer?” he rasped, glowering at Augustine and rising from the picnic cooler.
“No answer?
You mean I traveled two hundred miles up a stinking river, got bitten by ten dozen monster mosquitoes, and listened to your stupid harangues against the Pelagians and whatnot just so I could be told there's
no answer
?!”

“You're surprised, aren't you?” said Augustine. “You're shocked. Don't be. The ontological defense has been
centuries
in the making, beginning with Plato's classic meditations on the nonbeing of evil.” Wryly he raised his right eyebrow and started to descend the heap. “We'd best return to the boat. Assuming Belphegor can work up a good head of steam, we'll be in Eden by dusk tomorrow.”

Coughing convulsively, Job threw out his arms, pressed his chest against Martin's, and gave him a fervent hug. Despite the interposition of his cotton jersey, Martin could still feel the warm pus oozing from the sufferer's lesions.

“I've let you down, haven't IP”

“I'm afraid so,” said Martin, breaking their embrace.

“I'd like to say I'm hurt by what Augustine just did to me”—Job settled back onto his beer keg—“but a theological humiliation is nothing compared to fourteen boils on your ass. Keep that in mind when you get to Holland.”

N
O SOONER HAD
M
ARTIN RETURNED
to the
Good Intentions
than it began to rain—a thick, cold, gray downpour echoing the dismal condition of his mood. He stared at the river. Relentlessly the drops descended, speckling the Hiddekel with concentric circles and causing it to resemble a gigantic slice of Swiss cheese. A tremulous moan escaped his lips. There had to be an answer to the ontological defense, there simply
had
to be, but he was damned if he could think of one.

The latest e-mail did nothing to lift his spirits. Esther reported that Norma Bedloe still hadn't decided whether to kill herself posthaste or wait until after she'd testified. Randall recounted a frustrating conversation he'd had with a PBS lawyer named James Foley. According to Foley, his clients would let the Job Society show
A History of Havoc
in The Hague for a one hundred and sixty-five thousand dollar donation only if the news media agreed to point their cameras elsewhere. PBS feared that people would tape the series at home, thereby cutting into the network's profits from videocassette sales. Confronted with this stipulation, Court TV and CNN had both voiced the same reaction: you must be kidding.

In drafting his reply, Martin found himself more anxious to talk about his misadventures on the dung heap than about Randall's difficulties with public television. “We've had a major setback here—a virtually impregnable theory of evil. How smart are those Harvard kids you hired? Tell them there's a $15,000 bonus waiting for whoever can counter the ‘ontological defense.'” Only at the end of his memo did Martin address the
History of Havoc
crisis. “This nonsense about wanting Court TV and CNN to look the other way during the screening is clearly just a ploy. Find out how much PBS sank into the series and offer to buy it outright. We've still got about $8,700,000 to play with.”

At midnight the rain finally stopped, and by morning the
Good Intentions
had steamed far beyond the Country of Dung, reaching her destination late that afternoon, just as Augustine had predicted.

“The Garden of Eden,” the bishop said to Martin and the scientists, tapping the itinerary with the bowl of his briar pipe. “Any man who seeks to solve the riddle of iniquity must eventually end up here.”

On both sides of the river a dense wilderness thrived, a sprawling expanse of spastic trees and writhing vines. The aggressive stench of decaying vegetation clogged the air. If this was the Garden of Eden, it was a decidedly postlapsarian one, Martin mused—an Eden gone to seed. Cypresses and mangroves grew everywhere, their roots arching out of the water like immense rib cages, their branches laden with fruit resembling the heads of medieval maces. Along the southern shore huge spiders spun webs so vast that parrots and lemurs were becoming ensnared in them. A particularly rapacious specimen of Venus flytrap ruled the opposite bank, crushing entire cockatoos in its jaws as it went about the business of survival.

“I assume this was a less violent place before the coma struck,” said Martin.

“Not really, no,” replied Augustine. “It was the Fall of Man, not the stasis of God, that made Paradise a jungle. Ever since Eve ravaged the Tree of Knowledge, the universe has been a place of thorns and nettles, fangs and claws, germs and vermin.”

The Hiddekel narrowed and began to undulate, as if mimicking the seductive Serpent who'd once inhabited these climes. Beyond the thirteenth bend a clearing appeared, a two-acre stretch of hardscrabble land on which creatures of manifest intelligence had established a homestead, including a bamboo hut with a stone chimney and thatched roof. The front yard featured a vegetable plot where failure was the norm—marble-sized tomatoes, cabbages no larger than carnations, string beans that looked more like strings than beans—while the side yard boasted a hammock woven of sisal fibers, slung between a pair of ginkgo trees like a disembodied grin.

Dressed in leopard skins and fig leaves, two anthropoid apes of opposite genders approached the hammock on brown, unshod feet. Their gaits were slow and halting, as if they'd only recently learned to walk upright, an impression reinforced by their prognathous jaws, beetle brows, and sloping foreheads. The male was bent and hairy. The female was similarly hirsute, her sagging breasts evoking the sandbags employed by hot-air balloonists, but her most notable feature was her abdomen: she was as dramatically pregnant as Lot's daughters.

“Hello!” called Martin. “Hello, there! Might I have a moment of your time?”

Only after the female ape had eased her gravid body into the hammock did Martin realize she was in labor. As the distracted creature squirmed and jerked, panting through gritted teeth, the male hugged her shaggy arm and lovingly kissed her palm.

“Millennia ago, that creature bent his free will toward a wicked purpose, eating the fruit he'd been told to eschew,” Augustine explained, taking off his horn-rimmed glasses and pointing them toward the male hominid. “After his transgression, concupiscence infected every cell of his flesh. His semen became the carrier of his depravity, passing sin and death from generation to generation.”

“The free will defense?” asked Martin.

“Indubitably,” said Augustine.

“Does anyone know what species they belong to?” Ockham asked his colleagues as he focused his camcorder on the homestead. “
Homo habilis
, perhaps?”

“
Australopithecus
?” ventured Martin.

“Neanderthal?” suggested Belphegor.

“Behold his salacious gaze,” said Augustine. “Note his priapic posture. With revolting regularity the rampant member he conceals beneath that leaf grows hard with blood.”

“Ah . . .
Homo erectus
!” said Beauchamp, laughing.

“In point of fact, you're right,” said Saperstein.

“Hello,” Martin shouted again. “I'm Martin Candle,
International 227!”

“Can't you see we're busy?” cried the male
Homo erectus.

“Go 'way!” yelled the female.

“Come back tomorrow!” screamed the male.

“
Eeeiiiooowww!
” shrieked the female, seized by a sudden contraction.

 

Some things never change. The process by which the male
Homo erectus
fertilized his common-law wife has endured without modification until the present day.

Return with me now to that wonderful year 2,000,000,001
B.C.
It was a time of beginnings. Our Creator was working around the clock. Contrary to popular myth, the first animal to emerge from His lab wasn't a paramecium, fish, tree shrew, or any other lowly
form
—it was a human being. God said, “Let there be a prototype for
Homo sapiens
,” and there
was
a prototype for
Homo sapiens:
a featureless creature resembling a departmentstore mannequin. God saw that the prototype was good, but He also saw that it lacked a way to replicate itself. Before the week was out He'd invented an encoded copying mechanism predicated on double helices of DNA. Problem: how to meld one set of chromosomes with the other?

Among His strengths in those days was His ability to delegate authority, so He put the question to the archangel Zaphiel, who forthwith consulted the rest of the heavenly host. In a matter of days Raphael, Michael, Adabiel, and Gabriel had each devised an elegant solution, but it was the strategies of Hamiel and Chamuel that Zaphiel sensed would garner divine approval. Just as Zaphiel was about to submit these two designs, I brought him a plan of my own. Beaming with a combination of deviltry and pride, I unfurled my blueprint before the archangel.

“If this is mere whimsy on your part,” said Zaphiel, “I'm afraid I have better things to do with my time.”

“Hear me out. My great breakthrough, as you can see, was to re-imagine the prototype as a duality: Variation One and Variation Two.”

“They look the same to me.”

I tapped the blueprint with the claw of my taloned index finger. “Note this detail on Variation One. Tab A.”

“Don't they each get one?”

“Look closer.”

“Oh.”

“The system relies on Variation One periodically entering a state I call ‘procreative arousal.' When this happens, Tab A stiffens with blood—”

“How baroque.”

“—thereby permitting its insertion into Slot B on Two. After an unpredictable interval of enthusiastic forward and backward thrusting—”

“Backward what?”

“Thrusting.”

“I don't get it.”

“Trust me. After an interval of thrusting, several ounces of viscous fluid spurt from a storage compartment inside One. Adrift in the fluid are several hundred million DNA-bearing germ cells that, arriving inside Slot B, begin wriggling their tails, employing them to—”

“—scrape the inner walls and sculpt homunculi from the protoplasm!”

“—reach the terminus of Slot B, where a Variation Two germ cell awaits, likewise abrim with DNA.”

“Yes, good, your way's better.”

“The resulting zygote matures inside Two, becoming a viable infant within six or seven months. After month nine has elapsed, give or take a week, the infant is expelled through Slot B, whereupon it grows to adulthood, a process that consumes about two decades. So . . . what do you think?”

“It's complicated.”

“It works.”

“What causes the ‘procreative arousal' in One?”

“It's largely an instinctual response to certain features of Two. Knobs C and D, for example.”

“What's so special about a couple of mangoes?”

“Nothing. That's the poetry of it.”

“Why not give Two something more intrinsically exciting?”

“Like what?”

“I don't know. Baked Alaska.”

“You're not really with me on this, are you?”

“May I assume that before a One can achieve ‘procreative arousal' it must wish to reproduce?”

“The arousal arrives unbidden.”

“Oh?”

“Sometimes a One will even find itself aroused by
another
One, and vice-versa.”

“Can they obtain relief under such circumstances?”

“That's where Slot E comes in.”

“What are those bumpy things growing out of One's shoulders? Lily pads?”

“Floopers.”

“They look like lily pads.”

“Normally a One will keep its floopers clothed. As soon as a Two sees a pair of naked floopers, Slot B becomes—”

“—covered with blue polka dots and yellow—”

“—lubricious, thereby allowing the insertion of Tab A to proceed with minimal friction.”