The Rainbow Cadenza: A Novel in Vistata Form

by J. Neil Schulman

  Possession of any of these devices by anyone other than Federation security personnel was good for immediate sentencing to being a Touchable. Possession by a Touchable was good for a trip to the ovens.

  The Invisible Man provided Joan with the temporary, nonsurgical sort, with the recorded brainprint of a woman from St. Clive who had made a trip to Earth a year before, then returned home. He told Joan that he would "assign" that brainprint to her in his files for the next two months. After that, she should assume that it would be resold whether she had made it off Earth or not. She would have to get back in touch with the Invisible Man if she needed an extension of the time.

  After he had taken the holograms of "J.D. Harrison" needed for the official exit permit, the Invisible Man took down the information about her he needed, and told Joan that she would have her exit permit in her new name within a week. Once she had it, J.D. Harrison could book passage whenever was convenient with no security problems.

  The Invisible Man was all set to go when Joan stopped him. "I want to buy from you--at my expense, this time, and for cash-- half a dozen pickpocket transponders."

  "You planning to go into business for yourself?" he asked.

  "I just like to plan for all contingencies," Joan said.

  "I'm not sure that using such a device is quite ethical," Bromley told Joan. "Even if you're only using it temporarily, you are stealing someone's identity without consent."

  "I don't intend to use them for immoral purposes," Joan said. "But I've read enough old novels to know that it's always prudent to have what used to be call a 'hole gun.'"

  "Just don't get caught with them," the Invisible Man told Joan. "I had a friend who was. By the time the ovens were through with him, you couldn't have told him from a used-up joynette."

  Chapter 29

  JOAN HAD NO INTENTION of being caught with them--or without them.

  She prepared six packages, one pickpocket transponder to each. The outermost packaging of each was marked with the return address of Sewell Lasegraphic, Ltd., with instructions: LASEGRAPHIC COMPONENTS; DO NOT SUBJECT TO EXTREME HEAT OR COLD. There actually was an assortment of lasegraphic components in each package, along with an invoice on Sewell Lasegraphic forms-- some with a letter apologizing profusely for the delays caused by a change of ownership or shipping problems from a parts supplier in Ad Astra--dating an order from a time between April and November appropriate for the address to which that package was being sent. Enclosed also was an updated price list.

  Sewell had formerly run his business out of his home in Van Nuys, not far from the LASER Institute, and the business now consisted solely of a postal address J.D. Harrison had leased for this one use. Sewell had gone out of business two years before, but his business license was still on file. Joan was surprised how cheaply Mr. Sewell had sold his company name, some outdated business-form and stationery software, and two cartons of obsolete laser components he'd had in his garage. She had a feeling that if she had bargained a little longer she could have induced Sewell to pay her just to get the junk out of his garage.

  She addressed one package to Joan Darris co the Malcolm Institute; one to herself co Deyo, Abrams & Greenberg in Charlotte Amalie; one to herself via C.P.O.; one to herself at Villa Olga--and two to J.D. Harrison, one at General Delivery, Newer York, and one to him at a duty-free shipping address in Virginia Station. The packages addressed to the Malcolm Institute, to her attorney's office, and to J.D. Harrison were marked, DO NOT FORWARD: PLEASE HOLD FOR ADDRESSEE, and--to protect Jack Malcolm from implication in her crimes--she added the warning on the package sent to her at the Malcolm Institute: MAY BE OPENED BY ADDRESSEE ONLY.

  Her insurance taken care of, Joan forgot about the packages and occupied herself with more immediate concerns.

  Living in Bromley's apartment, Joan discovered just why Hill was so reticent to get into discussion with anybody he didn't know and trust. The Teapot Dome was only one business he operated, but, he said, as far as he was concerned it was actually owned by the Church. He ran several other firms, each providing him access to things and people necessary for his actual work on Earth as a Christian missionary to the Touchables.

  The most important of these businesses was the Hasty-Tasty Hoop Dog Company, which employed Touchables as street vendors. It was in these offices that he had easy access to--and a legitimate cover for --his meetings with Touchables, his recruitment of Christian Touchables as field agents to bring other Touchables into the Church, and the hovercart barn that doubled as the Church itself.

  Every Sunday morning an hour after dawn, and before business hours of the hoop-dog company, when the Touchables took out the hovercarts, Bromley held a secret Mass. He took confessions on Wednesdays, and Saturday mornings he held religious classes. The only Mass he held during night hours was the extremely risky midnight Christmas Mass--the most important commitment to their faith that the Touchables could make. That was why he had been so miffed at the Invisible Man for not attending--it showed a lack of spirit.

  "He's a Touchable also?" Joan asked.

  Bromley nodded. "All the parishioners in my church are."

  Bromley went on to explain that he was only the chief administrator of the Church operation; he had delegated ownership-of-record and as much authority as possible in the hope that if he were ever captured or killed, the mission could go on without him.

  Joan expressed a desire to attend Mass with him, but Bromley told her that with the high risks involved, he would allow her to come only if she was serious about converting to Christianity and taking Communion. Since Joan wasn't, she declined. But he would allow her to attend one of his Saturday-morning-classes--if she was willing to don a red cloak for that morning and wear a transponder identifying her as Touchable. "Nobody except a Touchable attends these classes," he explained, "because none of the other Touchables would show up if an outsider were allowed in. These people are very touchy--excuse the pun--about outsiders."

  "Then how can they trust you?" Joan asked.

  Hill smiled. "I was waiting for you to ask me that."

  "Shouldn't I?"

  "Only if you want the full story," he answered.

  "Yes."

  "They trust me because I also am Touchable," Bromley said.

  "There are many ways one can get to be a Touchable," Bromley explained, "but the two most frequent are women who evade the draft or desert, and men who commit rape. I think you can guess which category I am in," he said.

  Joan looked at him carefully. "You're a rapist?"

  "I was," Bromley said.

  "I wouldn't have thought that a man like you would be capable of such a thing," Joan said.

  "Men--and women--are capable of just about anything," he said, "given the necessary causes."

  "But--" Joan looked embarrassed. "You're not--you still have a-- It is real, isn't it?" She blushed. "Just professional interest, you understand."

  Bromley grinned. "Since you're going to great lengths to give up that profession, I'd say it's more like morbid curiosity. But, yes. It's real. The Church required me to have a penis cloned and reattached before it would ordain me. It was ruled that I couldn't properly repent my sin unless I was subject to the temptation, so that I could strengthen my faith resisting it."

  "But--" Joan hesitated. "Am I invading your privacy by asking how you could be brought to doing such a thing in the first place?"

  Bromley shook his head. "It's only in talking about our own sins that we can be a witness for others to our redemption. My case isn't very complicated or unusual. When I was fifteen years old, and living under my original name with my clone-father and his ward--"

  "You're a clone?" Joan interrupted.

  "Yes."

  "I'm sorry. Go on."

  "I was living in Edmonton, Alberta, with my clone-father and his ward, and when I was fifteen, my parents were divorced. A few months later, my father came home one night stoned out of his mind, and I think you can guess what happened."

  Jo
an shook her head.

  "You've heard the expression 'cloneraper'? I was the other half of that expression--the clone who was raped."

  "Goddess!" Joan said. "Oh, sorry."

  "I'm not offended," Bromley said. "God's gender is not an important issue with me. But to continue: later the same night my father raped me, I passed it on one more step. I'm not sure if it was purely out of anger and humiliation, or whether I was trying to prove my masculinity to my father and myself. You see, I'd already told my father that I'd decided to be comman rather than androman, but as far as women were concerned, I was still completely innocent. I was even too young to get into a dicteriat. In any event, the first woman I saw alone on the street that night became my victim. I don't remember what she looked like--it wasn't important to me when I raped her, and I couldn't bring myself to look at her for long in court. But since she remembered very well what I looked like, picking me out of a lineup, I was convicted, declared Touchable, and peotomized."

  "Couldn't you tell them what your father had done to you?"

  "There was no way to prove it," Bromley said. "The day I was arrested--at school, two weeks after the rape--my father killed himself."

  Joan couldn't manage to say anything. She just stared at him.

  "I almost followed him," Bromley said. "I thought my life was over. But there was something--I didn't know what it was at the time--that wouldn't allow me to give up. I managed to get hold of a false transponder, peddled my ass until I had enough money for a ticket and a bribed exit permit, and escaped to St. Clive, where I got a job working in an asteroid mine. It was then that I was drawn into the Church--mostly thanks to a fellow miner who preached to me in the bunkhouse."

  "And then you just became a priest?" Joan asked.

  "Then I just became a priest," Bromley said, "eighteen years later. In the meantime, I'd started playing music. That's how I ended up with Roland--I met Estelle when they were married. She and I sang in the choir together."

  "The rest of the band--they all know this about you?"

  Bromley nodded. "So do all the Touchables in my parish. You see, it's my experiences that make it possible for me to talk to them and be taken seriously. They know that I've been there. If there were such a thing as destiny--which I don't believe in, since I accept the doctrine of free will--I'd say that this vocation was chosen for me. I don't know of any other way, than bringing thoses who are raped and those who commit rape to God, that I could repent my past."

  "I think you're being too hard on yourself," Joan said. "What you did was wrong, but a jury should have found that there were mitigating circumstances."

  "There is only one Judge whose opinion interests me," Hill said.

  "You know I don't believe in God, Hill."

  "I know that what you believe in is not called by that name. But I know you are possessed by the Divine Spirit every time you sit down at the laser console."

  Joan smiled. "It sometimes feels when I'm composing, as if I'm possessed--I mean, things come out that seem much more coherent and intelligent than I thought they could be--but I simply attribute it to the workings of my subconscious mind."

  "Where else but inside you somewhere--it doesn't matter if you call it the subconscious mind, or the heart--could something from outside this universe reach you?"

  "How can something be 'outside' the universe--if the universe is everything that exists?"

  "If you identify 'everything that exists' with the word 'universe,' you can't," Hill said. "It would be a self- contradiction. But if you use the term 'universe' to mean all we know from the experience of our five senses to exist--the universe of space-time-gravity-mass-energy--then one leaves open the possibility of a realm organized differently."

  "How could that be?"

  "Talk to a physicist about subatomic probabilities--and then ask if there is any necessary mathematics that say thing have to be the way they are. Saint Clive himself wrote on this subject over two centuries ago in his book Miracles."

  "You can't ask if 'things could have been otherwise,'" Joan said. "That's where you start--with the universe as it is."

  "Ah," Hill said. "The argument from Objectivism."

  "The argument from what?"

  "There were two main exponents of rationalism in the twentieth century," Bromley said. "One was Saint Clive Lewis, and the other was the philosopher-novelist Ayn Rand."

  "Jaeger mentioned her," Joan said. "She was the one who used the symbol of the straight line as the abstraction of man's goals."

  "Very good," Hill said. "Both those thinkers were virtually flawless practitioners of deductive logic. Each was also a master at the art of creating metaphors to explain abstract philosophy. Yet Saint Clive was the foremost apologist of Christianity of his time, and Rand was the foremost exponent of atheism. Both were logically self-consistent to their premises. But their conclusions contradicted each other. Can you tell mewhy?"

  "'If you buy the premise, you buy the bit,'" Joan said. "Different data produce different conclusions."

  "Precisely," Hill said.

  "Where did they get fundamentally different premises, though?"

  "They had one essential epistemological difference, and it led to different metaphysics, which in turn led to diverging--though sometimes remarkably overlapping--moral codes. Read Rand's and Lewis's attacks on Immanuel Kant side by side and you'll see what I mean. The only major disagreement is one of style: Saint Clive was politer. The epistemological difference arose on the question of what, precisely, were to be allowed as sources of data--'tools of cognition,' Rand called them. Rand said that the only valid tools of cognition were the five senses--which presupposed an objective universe completely apprehendable by them--and discounted any feelings that might contradict logical integrations--sensations into percepts into concepts--built up without contradictions from those senses. Where Saint Clive differed was that he postulated the possibility of a realm 'farther up and farther in'--a concept he adapted from Plato-- that could be reached only from following a feeling of longing for that realm which he called Sehnsucht--a German word that simply means longing. Saint Clive said that not only were these feelings cognitively valid--or at least, he believed them to be -- but they were more important than cognition from the other five senses--an idea which appalled Rand, and which she attacked endlessly."

  "But," Joan said, "both of these seem to beg the question. They start with a premise of a certain metaphysics, then attempt to prove their premise by their conclusions based on what they admit as data. I was taught at Dryer that this is a classic methodological fallacy."

  "It was for Rand. But Saint Clive made the entire question of his metaphysics a hypothesis to be validated by empirical methods, rather than a basic premise in itself. The 'experiment,' however, requires a leap of faith. Rand defined faith as acceptance of that which hasn't been--or can't be-- proved true. Saint Clive defined faith more like an epistemological equivalent of loyalty--maintenance of a belief after being convinced, even in the absence of constant reminders. Here's mine: faith is the epistemological device necessary to test the internal data from this other realm--the same 'willing suspension of disbelief' applied when entering into any other creation provided by an artist. It is the only way spiritual information can be leaked to our world."

  "Define 'God,' 'spirit,' and 'heaven' for me."

  "Heaven: a realm where mass and energy--if my theories are correct--synthesize into a common plasma, transcendental to the entropic requirements of our universe--not governed by time, space, or gravity--which is coherent in such a way that the laser is only an energy metaphor of it. The substance can assume holographic consciousness, and becomes a Being of Spirit. This is not Church doctrine; I'm speaking off the record. God is the fountainhead of this spiritual consciousness."

  "The Hindus," Joan said, "also speak of matter and energy creating the universe."

  Bromley nodded. "The Tower of Babel syndrome," he said.

  "What?"

  "Do you know
the story--Old Testament--of the Tower of Babel?"

  "Built by the ancient Chaldean priests," Joan said.

  Bromley nodded. "The story says that God destroyed the Tower of Babel--an attempt by men to get into heaven without His permission--then divided humanity into a multitude of tribes, each speaking their own language, to disorganize humanity so we couldn't try it again. Sort of a 'No Trespassing' sign--though we've been trespassing against one another ever since. What the multitude of languages accomplished more than anything else was a multitude of religions--like the parable of the blind men and the elephant--each religion teaching part of the truth, but vehemently denying parts taught by the other religions. Christianity against Judaism against Hinduism against Witchcraft against Objectivism against Scientism. If we all ever start listening to each other instead of squabbling all the time, we might learn something--the password Saint Peter needs to let us through the gates. Another metaphor: it doesn't have to be an actual gate. Today, we have a worldwide Federation--no more nations fighting against nations, with English fast becoming the central language spoken on this planet--yet we are divided as much as ever: men against women, the old against the young, the Witches against the Christians, and so on. One World, but no World Community. An example," Bromley went on, "and you just brought it up. Why is it that we Christians celebrate the Eucharist--also called the Mass--and the Hindus speak of Perusha, best translated as 'mass' and scientists speak of a central, fundamental property of matter called mass--and nobody ever asked whether we're all talking about the same thing?"

  "Come on, Hill. You're basing you theology on a bad pun?"

  "The pun--a synthetic abstraction of two concepts into one word--is the simplest model of dialectical creativity. And it's a pun only in the most widely spoken language of our time," Hill said. "As Saint Clive might have asked: with God planning things from a vantage point outside time, can this be a coincidence? The words derive differently. The scientific term 'mass' derives from the Greek word maza--a barley cake-- and the same root as the Corn King legends that preceded the arrival on Earth of Our Lord, and symbolized by his use of matzoh at the Last Supper. The Church's use of 'Mass' derives from the Latin missa--a message. It is a pun that in the modern, worldwide Language of Science the two words reunite? And even if it is a pun, didn't Christ Himself show a predilection for this form of metaphorical humor when He said, 'Thou art Peter, and upon this Rock I build my church?" The Catholics took Him literally--perhaps The Lord's Pun--as the justification for basing the Church out of Rome. If the Church could take a pun literally, why can't I?"