The Footprints of God

by Greg Isle

  The humming UV unit finally went dark. Ravi stepped on a button that opened the Plexiglas hatch in the Bubble and stepped inside. Godin lay unconscious on a hospital bed, surrounded by monitors and resuscitation equipment. His body was pierced by a central IV line and coupled to the monitors by thin wires. His commanding head had scarcely more color than the white sheet it lay on.

  Two nurses bookended the bed, watching for the slightest change in their patient's status. Ravi nodded to them, then lifted the chart from its slot at the end of the bed and gave it a token look. Brainstem glioma, diffuse and inoperable. He'd made the diagnosis six months ago, when he'd first seen the Super-MRI scan of Godin's brain. It was eerie to see a tumor growing inside one of the most gifted minds on earth. When Godin asked Ravi to keep his cancer secret, Ravi hadn't hesitated. Revealing Godin's condition might have ended his chance to take part in the greatest scientific effort in history. Of course, Ravi had exacted a price for his cooperation. It was only proper. Peter Godin was rich, Ravi Nara relatively poor. That imbalance had now been addressed, if only in a small way. Yet the fortune in cash and stock Ravi had received now seemed trivial in the face of what might happen.

  "Ravi?" croaked the old man. "Is that you?"

  Ravi looked up from the chart and saw the intense blue eyes fix upon him.

  "Why am I so tired?" Godin asked.

  "Your seizures, probably." Godin still suffered from epilepsy caused by his exposure to the Super-MRI.

  Ravi walked around the bed and looked down into the slack face. Peter Godin had been one of the most vital men he'd ever known, yet cancer had laid Godin as low as it would any street beggar. Well . . . that wasn't quite true. No street beggar had Ravi Nara and almost limitless wealth keeping him alive. Even near death, with his hair and eyebrows gone, Godin retained the hawklike profile that had made the driven young computer designer so recognizable in the late 1950s, and for five decades afterward.

  "Your tumor is very advanced, Peter. There's only so much I can do. It's a battle between keeping you conscious and keeping you free enough from pain to function."

  "Damn the pain." Godin clenched one arthritic hand into a fist. "I can stand pain."

  "That's not what you said last night. Last night you told me your face was on fire."

  Godin shuddered. "I'm conscious now. Send Levin to me."

  Zach Levin had led the R&D department at Godin Supercomputing in Mountain View until he was brought to North Carolina to run the Interface Team, the group responsible for communicating with the Trinity computer. Levin was a tall, cadaverous man of thirty-five, and prematurely gray. Like his master in his healthier days, Levin seemed to live without sleep.

  "I'll send him in," Ravi said.

  Godin held up one hand. "What have you heard about Tennant and Weiss?"

  "There's been no sign of them since Union Station."

  The old man closed his eyes and sighed with a rattle, a hint of what lay in the near future. "The woman shot Geli?"

  "They say it was Dr. Weiss, yes."

  When Godin frowned, a nest of lines formed in the lower half of his face. Though married to one woman for most of his life, Godin had no children, and he'd always displayed a paternal affection for Geli Bauer. The notion made Ravi's skin crawl; it was like having paternal affection for a cobra.

  "How is Geli doing?" Godin asked.

  "Remarkably well, I hear. They transferred her to Walter Reed. Her father arranged that."

  A trace of a smile touched Godin's lips. "If she'd known that, she wouldn't have gone." The smile vanished. "What do you think Tennant was trying to accomplish in Washington? The president's still in China."

  Ravi wished he knew. For most of the project, the internist had been his biggest headache. Hiding cancer from laymen was easy, but Tennant was always noticing Godin's fluctuating weight, his gait disturbances, and the body changes caused by steroids. The old man's rheumatoid arthritis explained some of that, but for the last six weeks Ravi had been forced to keep his patient practically isolated from Tennant.

  "I have no idea, Peter. It worries me."

  As a nurse gave Godin a sip of water, Ravi tried to gauge the time left to the tenacious old man. It wasn't easy. He hadn't worked directly with patients for years, and Godin was well past the mortality tables for his type of tumor. Predicting survival in these circumstances was the kind of augury at which doctors like Tennant excelled. Years of clinical experience gave them a sixth sense about life and death. But any Madras midwife might do as well.

  A buzz and a purple flash made Ravi turn. Through the Bubble's transparent hatch he saw Zach Levin standing in the UV decontaminator.

  Levin spent most of his time in the concrete womb of Containment, but he always seemed to sense when Godin had regained consciousness. Levin and his technicians were like a priesthood, tending their master as he died and his creation as it was born. Priests of science, Ravi thought. What a contradiction in terms. He waved to Levin and thought, You get on my last bloody nerve—

  "There's Levin now," he said, and forced a smile.

  "How long will I be conscious?" Godin asked.

  "Until the pain gets unbearable."

  "Send Levin in on your way out."

  Ravi suppressed his anger. He'd been a wunderkind all his life, but for the past six months he'd felt more like a royal physician tending the bed of a king. The whims of a tyrant ruled his days. He stepped on the button that opened the hatch and walked out of the Bubble.

  Zach Levin nodded from the decontaminator. Technically, Levin and his team were Ravi's subordinates. But the hardware and software of the Trinity computer were so complex that Ravi could not hope to lead Levin's people in any meaningful way, except where the brain itself was concerned. Even when they approached him with neurological questions, he felt more used than listened to. They swam like piranhas through his mind, devouring what they needed for their excursions into the labyrinthine neuromodels—

  "How's he doing?" Levin asked loudly. The UV decontaminator buzzed and shut down.

  "He's awake," Ravi said. "Lucid."

  "Good. I have some exciting news for him."

  But not for me, Ravi thought bitterly. "Have you put any more questions to Tennant's model?"

  Levin seemed to consider his reply. "I dumped Dr. Tennant from the computer an hour ago." "Who told you to do that?" "Who do you think?" Godin.

  "At this point," said Levin, "bringing Trinity to full operational status is more important than any damage Dr. Tennant could do the project."

  Ravi felt the same way, but he didn't want the engineer to know that. "How does dumping Tennant's model help you to do that?"

  "Peter thinks some of the problems we're now experiencing could have a quantum etiology. He thought perhaps Andrew Fielding might be able to help us."

  "Fielding? You mean you've loaded Fielding's neuromodel into the prototype?"

  "That's right."

  "Do you really think his model can help you solve your remaining problems?"

  "To tell you the truth, I don't see why his model should perform any differently than Dr. Tennant's. But it's interesting. Dr. Fielding is going through the same acclimatization problems Tennant experienced—terror, confusion, feedback loops from his biological survival circuits having incorrectly balanced relief outlets—but he seems to be adapting to them at a significantly faster rate."

  Ravi shivered. Levin spoke as if Fielding were still alive. "What do you think that means?"

  The engineer shrugged. "Maybe nothing. But Peter's intuition has been accurate too many times to ignore it. And it was the work stored in Dr. Fielding's crystal that brought us this far. If the processing areas of his model perform at a higher efficiency level than Dr. Tennant's ... it could be a whole new ball game."

  Ravi's heartbeat quickened. "What are the odds of that happening?"

  Levin didn't answer.

  Ravi felt like slapping the taller man's face, but the implications of what he'd learned drove suc
h thoughts from his head. "Well, carry on."

  Levin's arrogant smile told Ravi just how little weight his words carried now.

  Ravi walked out of the hangar, climbed aboard his ATV, and gunned the engine. If what Levin said was true, then his phone call to Skow had been premature. Trinity might quickly become a reality despite Godin's death. And if that happened, it would change everything. Instead of looking for scapegoats, the president would be looking for chests to pin medals on. And if Ravi played his cards right, he could be first in line.

  As he rode back toward his office, he glanced at the Containment building. Half-buried in sand, the concrete block exuded a sense of power he had felt nowhere else in the world. He'd experienced unease standing in nuclear power stations, but the danger in a nuclear reactor was quantifiable. Even the worst-case scenario was predictable, because nuclear fuel, however dangerous, obeyed natural laws.

  Trinity would be different.

  Fifty miles north of this facility, the first nuclear explosion on earth had turned the desert floor to glass. Robert Oppenheimer had stared awestruck into the eye of the resulting fireball, but his awe had been at himself as much as at the new machine he had built. But if the computer inside Containment reached its full potential—if every problem were solved and a neuromodel hit 90 percent efficiency—then Peter Godin's creation would dwarf Oppenheimer's deadly toy. For when men looked into the eye of Trinity, Trinity would look back. And it would know what it was looking at.

  An inferior form of life.

  Chapter 29

  I came awake in a sweat-drenched T-shirt with no idea where I was. A sticky film covered my face, and a dark-haired woman lay in bed beside me. I could tell it was a woman by the shape of her shoulder. Afternoon sunlight spilled through a curtain to my left, falling across two suitcases standing on the floor. Then I remembered . . . Jerusalem.

  A dream had awakened me, and no normal dream. All I could see was the face of a man leaning close to kiss me. The image made me shudder, but I fought the urge to push it from my mind. Soldiers, I remembered. Soldiers with swords. I was standing in the dark, beneath a tree in a fragrant garden. Men slept around me on the ground. Their snores made me feel alone. Fear was working in me, a fear that death was approaching. I heard a commotion to my right, and then soldiers burst among the sleeping men, shouting and searching the trees. A robed man walked toward me from the shadows. With the paralysis of nightmares, I stood there as he kissed me on the cheek. His lips were waxy and cold. As he pulled back, the soldiers seized me . ..

  Rachel shifted beneath the bedcovers. I looked at my watch. Three-thirty P.M., Israel time, seven hours ahead of New York. I couldn't believe it. We'd slept almost eighteen hours. I picked up the phone beside the bed, called the lobby, and requested a car and an English-speaking driver for the afternoon. The price was 130 shekels per hour, whatever that was. Rachel stirred at the sound of my voice but did not awaken.

  I should go alone, I thought, looking down at her. Then I saw an image of myself falling unconscious in the street, lost in a narcoleptic dream. I couldn't risk that. I went to the bathroom and got into the shower.

  Israel was nothing like my dreams. From the moment we'd entered Ben Gurion airport in Tel Aviv, we were assaulted by modernity from every side. Radios, metal detectors, submachine guns, the odor of jet fuel. We rode from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem in a sherut, a hired minivan with six other people. I kept quiet most of the way, and Rachel occasionally squeezed my hand in reassurance. She could tell I was disoriented, that the scenery outside the van was not what I'd expected to find.

  As we neared Jerusalem, though, I caught sight of the Old City on its hill, pristine in the dying sunlight, and my disappointment faded. Whatever I had come for, it awaited me behind those ancient walls.

  It was nearly dark by the time we reached our hotel. We gave our passport numbers to the desk clerk and followed our bags up to the sixth floor. The room was clean but small. We'd planned to go out for food, but when we sat on the bed to catch our breath, jet lag and the exhaustion of the past two days caught up with us. Rachel had slept a little on the plane, but I had not. The warmth and silence of the hotel room were like a narcotic poured into my veins. I ate an orange Rachel had bought at Ben Gurion and fell into oblivion. Only the dream of the garden had brought me out of it.

  I shut off the shower nozzle, toweled myself off, and walked back into the room. Rachel had rolled onto her stomach. Her bare shoulders still showed above the covers. I went to the window and pulled back the curtain in the hope of seeing the Old City, but nondescript buildings blocked my view.

  I walked to the bed and shook Rachel's arm. She didn't respond. I shook her again. She blinked several times, then stretched and got up on one elbow.

  "Is that clock right?"

  "Yes. We've got a car coming."

  This did not seem to please her. "You still want to go today? It's late already."

  "I had another dream."

  "What about?"

  "The Garden of Gethsemane."

  She lay back on the bed and stared at the ceiling. "That's a lot further in the chronology than you were before, isn't it?"

  "Yes. Gethsemane begins the countdown to the crucifixion. I have to get to the Old City. It can't wait until tomorrow."

  She pulled the sheet around her, then stood and gazed into my eyes. "I think we should wait until tomorrow."

  "Why?"

  "We're safe in this room. It's a miracle that we even got here, and I think we need some time to recover from all we've been through."

  "But my dream ..."

  She reached down and took my hand. "Nothing is going to happen to you, David. Not even if you dream of the crucifixion. You're here with me, and I know how to take care of you."

  She dropped her other hand to mine, and the sheet fell around her feet. I tried not to drop my eyes, but she meant for me to see.

  "Rachel, I have to go today."

  "We can go. Just not yet." She laid her head against my chest and put her arms around me. "The world isn't going to end if we take a few minutes for ourselves."

  She kissed my chest, then nuzzled my neck and pulled me against her waist. Her professional persona had been shed like a dead husk of skin. This new woman was a revelation to me, and I wanted her. I bent to her upturned face and kissed her. Her lips were warm and elastic, nothing like the waxy lips in my dream. A shudder passed through me at the memory.

  She drew back and looked into my eyes. "What's the matter?"

  "I'm okay." I leaned down to kiss her again.

  She shook her head. "You're not. You're not going to be all right until we put this Jesus business to rest once and for all."

  The phone rang, startling us both.

  I picked it up. "Yes?"

  "Your car is here, sir," said an accented voice.

  "Thank you." I hung up.

  Before I could explain, Rachel kissed my cheek, then turned and began to dress.

  Our driver was a mustached old Palestinian named Ibrahim. His English-speaking qualification was marginal, but he understood that we wanted the Old City, and that was enough to get us to the Jaffa gate. As we approached the sun-bleached stone wall, I felt my first wave of deja vu. Behind that wall, in that blood-drenched repository of history, lay a secret for me alone. For two thousand years it had waited, invisible to those who came with shovels, toothbrushes, files, and dental picks. What that secret was, I didn't know, but I would know it when I found it.

  "Where do you want to start?" Rachel asked.

  "Jesus' last day."

  "Yes," said Ibrahim, looking back at me. "Mount of Olives, Garden of Gethsemane, place of the skull."

  A motorcycle honked angrily and shot past us.

  "Place of the skull?" I asked.

  "In Hebrew, Golgotha, in Latin, Calvary. Where Jesus was crucified."

  "That's what we want."

  "Church of the Holy Sepulchre. Nine stations of the cross outside the church, last five stations
inside. I take you there now."

  "Why there?" Rachel asked me.

  I felt a wave of heat pass through me, and for a moment I couldn't breathe. "I don't know."

  "David? What's the matter?" She put a hand to my forehead. "You're burning up."

  Thirty seconds ago I'd felt fine, but she was right. "Let's just hurry."

  Ibrahim pulled into a parking place as a Citroen backed out. A huge tour bus blocked out the light behind us.

  "Are we stopping outside the wall?" Rachel asked.

  "Yes," Ibrahim replied. "Is customary to walk from here. See landmarks of the city."

  "How far away is the church?"

  "Holy Sepulchre? On day like today, half hour to Via Dolorosa, maybe little more."

  Rachel looked doubtful. "Can you get us closer?"

  "Is the mister sick?"

  She hesitated. "Yes. He's come to Jerusalem in the hope that it will help."

  "Ah. Many sick people go to Jesus' tomb and kiss the rock where he rose up from the death."

  "Can you help us?"

  "Of course. For a hundred shekels more I get you there very fast."

  "Whatever it takes."

  Ibrahim backed up, then honked his horn and stepped on the gas, earning curses from a shawled woman who had to dodge his front bumper to save her life. Another wave of heat rolled through me. I was afraid I might pass out.

  "Is it narcolepsy?" Rachel asked.

  "No. Different."

  "We should go back to the hotel."

  "No. The Via Dolorosa."

  "Via Dolorosa," echoed Ibrahim. "Way of Sadness. Christians here call it the Way of Flowers. First station Jesus condemned to death, second station the cross was forced upon him, third station he stumbled for the first time, fourth station ..."

  Our guide's voice quickly became a drone I couldn't follow. Sweat poured from my skin, and I felt suddenly cold. As our car whipped through the narrow streets, I saw stone walls, bright shutters, market stalls spilling knickknacks from their shelves, and tourists dressed in the apparel of a hundred nations. Ibrahim rolled down his window to curse someone, and the scent of jasmine filled the car. When it entered my nostrils, I felt a sudden euphoria, and then everything went white.