The Eternal Footman Page 21

  “I must admit, I didn’t understand that scene.” Crock sipped a gin fizz from a Texaco coffee mug. “If the Waters of Death could dissolve all those wooden poles, why didn’t they eat the skiff too?”

  “Myths and epics work that way. Dream logic. Such stories aren’t factual, but they’re metaphorically true.”

  He drained the coffee mug and said, “No wonder I hated English.”

  Later, lying in her bunk, lulled by the rhythmic thumping of the paddle wheel, Nora sifted through her brief but rewarding career on the stage. The evening’s performance would be over by now. So what was Percy doing? Knocking back Hurricanes with Bruno Spangler? Shagging the Lotz twins? Sleeping, most likely. He’d never been much of a reveler.

  She resolved to meet him that night in the land of Morpheus, but when she awoke the next morning, she realized that her subconscious had been cruel, taking her not to Percy’s side but to the New Orleans Superdome.

  In Nora’s dream, the Circus was doing The Lyre of Fate. Cast as Eurydice, she’d somehow missed all the rehearsals and hadn’t learned a single line.

  Her first cue arrived. She faced the audience. She opened her mouth.

  And she said, “Come, Gilgamesh, and be my lover! Grant to me your seed, and I shall harness for you a chariot of lapis and gold!”

  When Gerard finally got around to assembling his apprentices on the studio grounds and explaining how their jobs no longer existed, Somatocism’s temples being at capacity and its founder indifferent to evangelization, the dismay that emanated from the acolytes’ loved ones did not surprise him. What he hadn’t anticipated was the pain of the acolytes themselves. How strange that these saved souls, these delivered psyches, should be vulnerable to ordinary disappointment. But soon he came to perceive an essential humanness in their anger: what was the point of returning from the dead if you weren’t then allowed to worry about taxes, dandruff, or water in the basement?

  One by one, the apprentices drifted away. A few, such as Malvina Fergus, moved into El Agujero with the aim of helping plague families get through the ordeal of waiting. Others, including Pelayo and Fulgencio, headed north to find unhealed victims and guide them toward treatment. Gerard was especially sad to see the Ruíz brothers leave his employ: they were credible artists and energizing companions, and without their knowledge of Mount Catemaco’s theophanic powers, Somatocism’s gods might never have burst into actuality. Eventually only Gerard remained—Gerard, Fiona, and the great reubenite brain.

  Much to Fiona’s distress, Gerard was practically living at Oswald’s Rock these days. His project consumed their conversations, fueled their arguments, occasioned their silences, and wrecked their sex life.

  “Now and forever, you are my Beatrice,” he told her. “Inspired by your purity, I shall fashion the greatest tribute to human creativity since the library of Alexandria.”

  “I’m pure now? Is that why you don’t fuck me anymore?”

  “We’ll make love tonight.”

  “Your prick will be inside me, but your mind will be inside this sculpture.”

  “Nolo contendere.”

  “You have the odd distinction, Gerry, of being the only man I know who can fake an orgasm.”

  Claimed by the ghost of Erasmus, inflamed by Ockham’s shade, Gerard set about transforming the Cretaceous dinosaurs’ gravestone into a contemporary Ark of the Covenant, a latter-day Liberty Bell, a postmodern Kacba—or so he hoped. Hour after hour, his chisels danced along the cosmic stone. Chips flew into the sultry air. Sparks shot upward, arcing away like seeds from which a thousand Burning Bushes might spring. As always, the reubenite proved sufficiently plastic to permit the effects he sought—mineral become animal, lithic tissue, the throbbing collective mind—yet the emerging hemispheres still possessed a gravity appropriate to their purpose.

  By day ten, he’d completed not only the striated cerebellum, locus of balance, but also the mighty cerebral cortex with its majestic convolutions, ropy crimson veins, and great central commissure. Next he shaped the pituitary gland, breaching it with a rectangular portal suggesting the entrance to a pharaoh’s tomb. At last he was ready to tunnel through the cerebrum. He would hollow out the left hemisphere, then the right, then the cerebellum, filling each chamber with vivid displays of Homo sapiens’s ingenuity and sculpted incarnations of Ockham’s little myths. It would be, he prayed, a shrine to make Erasmus proud.

  ERASMUS:

  Have you seen Korty’s newest project?

  LUTHER:

  Is that really what cerebral convolutions look like, a brood of writhing snakes? Most men have satanic souls—do they also have satanic brains?

  ERASMUS:

  He’s got the physiology right—it’s the philosophy that troubles me. This bloated brain of Korty’s simultaneously aggrandizes Man and reduces him to mere flesh.

  LUTHER:

  Dear Desiderius, at last we agree on something. If our friend’s magnum opus succeeds in seducing the human imagination, he’ll have much to answer for. Matter without spirit is shit.

  ERASMUS:

  Better excrement on one’s hands than blood.

  LUTHER:

  Oh, that again.

  ERASMUS:

  Even the blood of rebellious German serfs. That again.

  LUTHER:

  You have a one-track mind.

  ERASMUS:

  If a second chance presented itself, would you still call for their extermination?

  LUTHER:

  I’m a reformer, not a revolutionary. The princes were right to crush them.

  ERASMUS:

  I still have my copy of Against the Murderous and Thieving Peasant Bands. I keep it alongside your translation of the Beatitudes.

  LUTHER:

  I’m prepared to defend both documents.

  ERASMUS:

  Death toll, five thousand. If that’s where your Road to Damascus leads, monk, give me Gerard Korty and his brave new church any day of the week.

  LUTHER:

  His brave new godless church.

  ERASMUS:

  He’s scooping out the cerebrum even as we speak. He intends to fill it with iconography—a Nativity, perhaps, a Loaves and Fishes, a Sermon on the Mount.

  LUTHER:

  You papists love your graven images.

  ERASMUS:

  Mind as museum, brain as basilica—a powerful conceit, don’t you think? Our Savior said, “The Kingdom of God is within you.” I’d always believed he meant our souls. Perhaps he meant our synapses.

  LUTHER:

  A Romanist quoting scripture. How novel.

  ERASMUS:

  The Third Millennium is going to be an amazing time.

  LUTHER:

  Thank God I’m dead, and thus fairly certain of missing it.

  ERASMUS:

  That’s the difference between us. I’d rather glimpse the future than behold a hundred naked courtesans. Say, look there. Do you see him?

  LUTHER:

  Who?

  ERASMUS:

  An angel sails toward us—Raphael, I think. Or Gabriel.

  LUTHER:

  On shining wings!

  ERASMUS:

  How they glow!

  LUTHER:

  Feathers of flame!

  ERASMUS:

  A question, monk. Imagine that our angel is presently weighing two alternatives. He can carry us straight to Heaven, or he can restore our youth and maroon us in the Third Millennium. Which fate would you implore him to seal?

  LUTHER:

  I don’t even have to think about it.

  ERASMUS:

  Figures.

  LUTHER:

  What about you? Which shall it be? Heaven, or the future?

  ERASMUS:

  Difficult question.

  LUTHER:

  Decide quickly. He’s almost here.

  ERASMUS:

  The future, monk. It probably has a better library.

  From the very first, Gerard knew that when it came
to appointing his brain, he would begin not with the right hemisphere’s Hall of Artistic Passion nor with the left’s Garden of Scientific Knowledge but with the freshly dredged Gallery of Decency. Much as he loved art and prized science, it was only his species’s moral cerebellum, its priceless if underexercised faculty for counterbalancing impulse with obligation, anger with wisdom, that had kept the pages of human history from being written entirely in blood.

  He molded a rabbi, two feet high, dressed in a crimson robe. Flowing hair, neat black beard, eyes like a lion’s. A woman stood beside him, frightened but not cowed. Without especially intending to, Gerard carved her in the image of Fiona.

  An indignant crowd encircled the rabbi and the woman, brandishing rocks, staves, and bits of broken pottery. They stared at the rabbi’s outstretched hand. His palm held a chunk of basalt.

  Above the tableau Gerard fixed a wooden plaque. It read LET HIM AMONG YOU WHO IS WITHOUT SIN CAST THE FIRST STONE.

  “It’s gorgeous,” said Fiona.

  “Thank you.”

  “He looks a little smug.”

  “You’re right. I’ll work on that.”

  “Maybe if the mouth were straighter.”

  “Good idea.”

  “Wisdom smiles,” she said, “but it never smirks.”

  Nora saw it first. As she stood watch in the bow, her eyes scanning the foggy morning sea for tar balls, flotsam, and other debris that might damage the Natchez Queen’s paddles, a vessel emerged from the mist: an ancient square-rigger under full sail, prototype of the model Eric had used in one of his best tricks—ship here, bottle over there, and suddenly, abracadabra, the ship was in the bottle. She switched on the walkie-talkie and told Anthony of the intruder, and five minutes later he stood beside her, red neckerchief fluttering in the breeze, gripping the foredeck rail.

  “Who’s minding the bridge?” she asked.

  As Anthony fixed on the horizon, a dreaminess clouded his eyes, and when he spoke, Nora realized he was looking not on the square-rigger but inward. “You should see that boy of mine take the helm.”

  “But who’s steering her now?”

  He blinked, tightening his hold on the rail. His muscles bulged, fattening the mermaid tattooed on his left forearm. His hands, she saw, were large and scored with scars—cable cuts, winch wounds, barracuda bites—each having its own tale to tell.

  “My wife,” he said. “Damn good quartermaster.”

  By 1335 hours, the Queen had cruised near enough for Nora to discern both the square-rigger’s name, Cornucopia, and her triad of smokestacks: she was an antique steamship, built during the era when it was prudent to retain masts, ropes, and canvas in case your boiler exploded. The steamer’s owners had their own peculiar ideas about propulsion. Her stacks were vacant, her engine silent, and the objects that Nora had initially taken for sails were in fact solar panels—thirty at least, wired to the yardarms. Evidently the panels didn’t work. The Cornucopia was dead in the water.

  “Ahoy, there!” cried a wiry, sunburned man from atop the forecastle—the only visible presence on deck besides the diminutive Asian man at the helm and the hefty African-American woman making ready to lower the dinghy. “Ahoy, Natchez Queen!”

  “Ahoy, Cornucopia! Anthony Van Horne here, bound in ballast for Coatzacoalcos!”

  The Cornucopia’s solar panels were not her strangest accessory. She was loaded to her gunwales with nearly a hundred upright steel cylinders, each encircled by an aluminum coil and featuring a stained-glass rose window from which a human face peered out. At first Nora assumed that the cylinders were diving bells, their contents oceanographers, but then she noticed the ice crystals crosshatching the windows and the corona of frost surrounding each face. Maybe the occupants had been oceanographers in the past, but now they were that most unremarkable of Third Millennium commodities, a collection of cadavers.

  “Boris Lampini here, Institute for Lifespan Augmentation!”

  “What’re you carrying, Cornucopia?!”

  “Ninety-four suspendees!” shouted Boris Lampini, slapping the nearest cylinder.

  “Suspenders?”

  “Suspendees! Can you help us, Captain Van Horne?! Our coal ran out this morning!”

  Nora bristled when Anthony invited Boris Lampini onto the Queen, and she bristled again when the captain expressed a willingness to take the derelict in tow. A burden of such magnitude would add at least a day to their journey.

  “It’s a terrible idea,” she told him.

  “I agree,” said Cassie.

  “Let’s hear the man’s story,” said Anthony.

  “I’m happy to tell it,” said Lampini.

  They were sitting in Anthony’s Victorian stateroom, Crock at the helm, the Maxwell House instant flowing freely, the four of them absorbed in a problem that seemed lurid even by contemporary standards: how to prevent the famished citizens of Houston, Texas, from stealing and devouring ninety-four frozen human bodies. After carefully establishing that he and his crew were cryonicists, not cryobiologists (the latter profession generally taking a dim view of the former’s ambitions), Lampini explained that the “patients” in his care enjoyed a condition known as cryonic suspension. Years before the plague, each client had shelled out $165,000 to the Institute for Lifespan Augmentation in Bellaire. In return, Dr. Lampini and his colleagues promised the client that at the instant of his death specially trained technicians would artificially restart his heart, squirt glycerol into his veins to minimize freezing injury, and suspend his body in a vacuum bottle filled with liquid nitrogen. The client’s tissues would drop to a temperature of –196° centigrade over a period of fifteen days, a state in which his remains might be preserved indefinitely, provided that the Augmentation Institute replenished the coolant as it evaporated. By this procedure the client stood a reasonable chance, in Lampini’s opinion, of awakening in a future where medical science, blessed with nanotechnology, had no more difficulty reviving dead neurons than setting broken arms. Thus did the suspendee attain a qualified immortality. At the Augmentation Institute, the customer was eternally right.

  “When the plague cut off our liquid nitrogen supply, we reluctantly converted to formaldehyde dunks combined with solar-powered electric refrigeration,” said Lampini in a defensive tone. “This isn’t good customer service, I’m the first to admit it, but we had no choice.” His sunburn was more severe than Nora had realized, his nose a plump radish, his forehead so speckled with blisters that it suggested a swatch of bubble wrap. “Keeping the patients frozen was the least of our worries.” He shivered, a symptom of either his disturbing recollections or his damaged skin, Nora couldn’t tell. “Abulia hit Houston especially hard, no fuel, people starving in the streets. Then somebody remembered about the Institute and its suspendees, and soon we were under siege.”

  Cassie swallowed a mouthful of coffee, smiled, and said, “You can’t ask a hungry mob to ignore a pile of frozen TV dinners.”

  “I find that remark offensive,” said Lampini.

  “I find cryonic suspension offensive,” said Cassie.

  Lampini resumed his tale, narrating how the Institute’s security forces had beaten back the besiegers long enough for the twelve scientists to escape with their customers—every last suspendee, solar rigs included—under cover of night. They fled to Galveston. The besiegers gave chase, but before the two factions could come to blows, the Institute’s staff loaded their customers onto the Cornucopia and steamed out of the harbor.

  “We burned our last lump of coal three hours ago,” said Lampini, sighing, “but we’re not giving up. The Institute has taken on a sacred trust, and we intend to honor it.”

  Anthony stretched across the length of his green velvet sofa. “Are the cannibals still after you?”

  “Two hours away, unless they’re stopping to fish, which I doubt—they’ve got their hearts set on my patients. Racing yachts, catamarans, outrigger canoes, whatever they could lay their hands on. They think we’re headed for Jamaica. Tow
us to Coatzacoalcos, Captain, and this nightmare will end.”

  “Sorry, Doc. It’s six hundred miles from here to there, and the Cornucopia will cut our speed in half, especially with all those cans of rich people you have on board.”

  “Stockbroker stew,” said Cassie.

  “Plutocrat preserves,” said Nora.

  “Cream of capitalist.”

  “Chief Executive Officer Boyardee.”

  “That’s enough, you two,” said Anthony.

  “They aren’t cans” said Lampini. “They’re cryogenic Dewar vessels.”

  “What do your customers tell their children?” asked Cassie. “‘Sorry, kids, I spent your inheritance on my immortality. I’m going to outlive you yet.’”

  “What we will do is take you to the Yucatán,” said Anthony. “We’ll drop you off, then cruise west along the coast.”

  “Darling, we aren’t responsible for this man’s problems,” said Cassie to her husband.

  “When times are tough, people must go out of their way to help one another,” said Anthony.

  “Two hundred miles out of their way?”

  “I’ve towed quite a bit of death in my day. I’m ready to start towing life.”

  “They’re corpses, dear. This lunatic is hauling corpses.”

  “Suspendees,” said Lampini.

  “Suspendees,” said Anthony.

  “Give me a break,” said Cassie.

  “Look at it this way,” said Anthony. “If we were out of fuel, wouldn’t you be grateful if the doc here took us to our destination? I’m telling O’Connor to plot us a course for Puerto Chicxulub.”