The Footprints of God: A Novel

by Greg Iles

  “Godin’s hospital bed,” said Skow.

  Three soldiers wheeled Godin’s bed into the ring of display screens. Four more followed, pushing medical carts and an IV tree. Dr. Case from Johns Hopkins walked beside the bed, and Geli Bauer followed the procession like a praetorian guard of one.

  “Is he conscious?” asked McCaskell.

  Dr. Case said, “I want to go on record as objecting to this.”

  “Noted,” said McCaskell, standing and approaching the bed.

  Godin motioned to Geli with his hand. She stepped forward and cranked a handle on the bed, raising Godin to eye level with McCaskell. The old man’s breathing was more labored than before.

  “We’ve met before, Mr. Godin,” said McCaskell. “I don’t have time to waste on pleasantries, and neither do you. I’d like you to tell me what you intended by breaking protocol and loading a neuromodel into that machine.”

  Godin blinked like a man trying to orient himself after coming out of a dark room. “Trinity hasn’t spoken for itself?”

  “No. Will it?”

  “Of course.”

  “You haven’t answered my question. What was the purpose of this?”

  “You don’t know?”

  “No.”

  “The old systems have failed, Mr. McCaskell. Even ours, the noblest experiment of them all. It’s time for a new one.”

  “What systems are you talking about?”

  “Rousseau said democracy would be the perfect political system if men were gods. But men are not gods.”

  McCaskell glanced back at Skow and General Bauer. “Mr. Godin, this isn’t getting us anywhere. Am I to infer that you have a political goal?”

  “Politics.” Godin sighed heavily. “That word disgusts me, Mr. McCaskell. Men like you have soiled it. Your idea of government is a whorehouse. A sleazy flea market where the ideals of our forefathers are sold for trifles.”

  McCaskell peered at the old man as he might at a street preacher screaming condemnation at passersby. He was about to speak again when the men at the table behind him gasped.

  On the main plasma display, four lines of blue text had appeared.

  I have a message for the President of the United States. Later, I will have a message for the people of the world. Do not attempt to interfere with my operations. Interference will be instantly punished. Do not test me.

  “Holy God,” Skow breathed. “It’s real. He did it. We did it.”

  “Yes, you did,” said Ewan McCaskell. “You arrogant son of a bitch. And you may be hanged for it.”

  “Look,” said Ravi Nara. “There’s more.”

  The first message scrolled down the screen, and new words appeared.

  I will accept as valid only data from the White House Situation Room and from the command post at White Sands. Communications should be addressed to Internet Protocol Address 105.674.234.64.

  “It knows we’re here,” said Ravi, glancing around the room for security cameras.

  “Of course it does,” said Skow. “It’s Godin. And Levin will have briefed him on everything that’s happened up to this point.”

  “Look,” said McCaskell.

  A new message had flashed onto the screen.

  Is Peter Godin still alive?

  “Who’s going to talk to this thing?” asked General Bauer.

  “Answer him,” said McCaskell.

  The general signaled one of the technicians sitting at a console.

  “Answer in the affirmative, Corporal. Begin a dialogue with the machine.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  There was a clicking of keys as the response was typed in. A new message flashed up almost instantaneously.

  I wish to speak to Godin.

  “Type what I say,” said McCaskell.

  General Bauer nodded to his tech.

  “This is Ewan McCaskell, the chief of staff of the president of the United States.”

  The soldier typed in McCaskell’s message. The response was immediate.

  I know who you are.

  “I don’t know who you are,” McCaskell said. “Will you identify yourself, please?”

  The huge screen went dark for a moment. Then two words flashed up and glowed steadily.

  I am.

  “My God,” Ravi murmured.

  “Type this,” said McCaskell. “Answer not understood. Please identify yourself. Are you Peter Godin?’”

  I was.

  “Who are you now?”

  I AM.

  The men at the table looked at each other, but no one said a word. The letters on the screen continued to glow softly, as though the machine understood that it would take time for humans to comprehend them. Ravi felt a fear unlike any he’d ever known, and he saw that fear reflected in the eyes of the others. Only Peter Godin’s face was free of it. The old man’s blue eyes were wide and fixed on the screen, his wrinkled countenance relaxed into a childlike gaze of wonder.

  Chapter

  38

  The sun shone white and clear outside the plane as we raced westward over the continental United States. Our El Al 747 had been left behind in New York. The corporate Gulfstream the Israelis had transferred us to was tiny by comparison, but far more luxurious. Rachel had been sleeping on a bed in the back since we’d left JFK. I wasn’t so lucky. General Kinski had kept me up front, answering endless questions from the Israeli scientists. I badly needed rest, but since the Mossad chief could order the pilot to return to New York at any time, I had little choice but to cooperate.

  Somewhere over Arkansas, Kinski finally realized I’d endured all I could. I visited the toilet, then walked to the rear of the plane to join Rachel. She was no longer sleeping, but staring out a window at the endless carpet of cumulus clouds below us.

  “Are you all right?” I asked.

  She looked up at me, her eyes circled in shadow. “I thought they’d never let you go.”

  I sat beside her. My throat was sore from talking, and my neck ached as though I’d been watching a film from the first row of a theater.

  She slipped her hand into mine and leaned on my shoulder. “We haven’t really talked since you came out of the coma.”

  “I know.”

  “Are we going to?”

  “If you like. But you’re not going to like what you hear.”

  “Did you dream?”

  “Yes and no. It wasn’t like my old dreams. Not like movies. It was like being deaf for a lifetime and then hearing Bach. An indescribable feeling of revelation. And now…I know things.”

  “That sounds like an acid trip. What kinds of things do you know?”

  I thought about it. “The kinds of things that five-year-olds want to know. Who are we? Where did we come from? Does God exist?”

  Rachel sat up, and I could tell she was slipping into her professional persona. “Tell me about it.”

  “I will. But you have to drop all your preconceptions. This is Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus stuff.”

  She chuckled softly, her eyes knowing. “You think I expected something else?”

  Part of me wanted to remain silent. The things I’d shared with Rachel in the past had stretched her willingness to believe, yet compared to the revelations of my coma, they were conventional. The safest way to begin was with something familiar.

  “Do you remember my very first dream? The recurring one?”

  “The paralyzed man sitting in the dark room?”

  “Yes. He can’t see or hear or remember anything. Do you remember what he asks himself?”

  “‘Who am I? Where did I come from?’”

  “Right. You said the man in that dream was me, remember?”

  She brushed a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. “You still don’t think he was?”

  “No.”

  “Who was he, then?”

  “God.”

  The muscles tensed beneath the oval plane of her face. “I should have guessed.”

  “Don’t panic. I’m using that word as a kind
of shorthand, because we don’t have a word to communicate what I experienced. God is nothing like we imagine him to be. He’s not male or female. He’s not even a spirit. I say ‘he’ only as a conversational convenience.”

  “That’s good to know.” A wry laugh. “You’re telling me God is a paralyzed man with no memory sitting in a pitch-black room?”

  “In the beginning, yes.”

  “Is he powerless?”

  “Not completely. But he thinks he is.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “To understand the beginning, you have to understand the end. When we get to the end, you’ll see it all.”

  She looked far from convinced.

  “Remember the dream? The man in the room becomes obsessed with his questions, so obsessed that he becomes the questions. ‘Who am I? Where did I come from? Was I always here?’ Then he sees a black ball floating in space ahead of him. Darker than the other darkness.”

  Rachel nodded. “Do you know what the ball is now?”

  “Yes. A singularity. A point of infinite density and temperature and pressure.”

  “A black hole? Like what existed before the Big Bang?”

  “Exactly. Do you know what existed before that?”

  She shrugged. “No one does.”

  “I do.”

  “What?”

  “The desire of God to know.”

  Curiosity filled her eyes. “To know what?”

  “His identity.”

  Rachel took my hand in hers and began messaging my palm with her thumb. “The black ball exploded in your dream, right? Like a hydrogen bomb, you said.”

  “Yes. It devoured the darkness at a fantastic rate. Yet the man in the dream always remained outside the explosion.”

  “How do you interpret that image? God watching the birth of the universe?”

  “Yes, but I don’t interpret it. I’ve seen it. I’ve seen what God saw.”

  Her thumb stopped moving. She could not hide the sadness in her eyes.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” I said.

  “David, you can’t read my mind.”

  “I can read your eyes. Look, to understand what I’m telling you, you’re going to have to stop being a psychiatrist for twenty minutes.”

  She sighed deeply. “I’m trying. I really am. Describe what you saw for me.”

  “I described it for you weeks ago. I just didn’t understand it then. That explosion was the Big Bang. The birth of matter and energy from a singularity. The birth of time and our universe.”

  “And the rest of your dreams?”

  “You remember what I saw. After the bang, the expanding universe began displacing God. This didn’t happen in three dimensions, but that’s the only way we can think about it. Think of God as a limitless ocean. Genesis describes something like that. No waves, no tension, not even bubbles. Perfect harmony, total resolution, absolute inertia.”

  “Go on.”

  “Think of the birth of the universe as a bubble forming at the center of that ocean. Forming and expanding like an explosion, displacing the water at the speed of light.”

  “All right.”

  “What happens inside that bubble is what I saw in my later dreams. The births of galaxies and stars, the formation of planets, all the rest. I saw the history of our universe unfold. You called it ‘Hubble telescope stuff.’”

  “I remember.”

  “Eventually my dreams focused on the Earth. Meteors crashed into the primitive atmosphere, amino acids formed. Evolution went from inorganic to organic. Microbes became multicellular, and the race was on, right up the chain to fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, primates…”

  “Man,” Rachel finished.

  “Yes. It took ten billion years just to get to biological evolution. Then hundreds of millions of years of mutation to get to man. And all that added up to nothing in the eyes of God.”

  Rachel knit her brows. “Why? Didn’t God intend all those creatures to exist? To evolve?”

  “No. It’s not like that. God was surprised by all of this.”

  “Surprised?”

  “Well…I think the feeling was more like déjà vu. He’d seen something like it before. Not exactly like it, but what he saw made him remember things.”

  She turned in her seat and stared at me. “And the creation of life meant nothing to him?”

  “Not in the beginning. But then—out of that teeming mass of life—a spark as bright as the Big Bang flashed in his eye.”

  “What spark?”

  “Consciousness. Human intelligence. Somewhere in Africa, a tool-making hominid with a relatively large brain perceived the fact of its own death. It perceived a future in which it would no longer exist. That hominid became not only self-conscious, but conscious of time. That moment was an epiphany for God.”

  “Why?”

  “Because consciousness was the first thing in that terrifying explosion of matter and energy that God recognized as being like himself.”

  “That’s what God is? Awareness?”

  “I think so. Awareness without matter or energy. Pure information.”

  Rachel was silent for a while, and I couldn’t read her eyes.

  “Where is all this going?” she asked finally.

  “To a very provocative place. But let’s stay with the dreams for now. Man evolved quickly. He tilled the ground, built cities, recorded his history. And God felt something like hope.”

  “Hope for what?”

  “That he might finally learn the nature of his own being.”

  “Did God answer his questions by watching mankind?”

  “No. Because after a certain point, evolution stopped. Not biological evolution, but psychological evolution. Almost as quickly as man created societies, he destroyed them. He sacked cities, salted fields, slaughtered his brothers, raped his sisters, abused his children. Man had unlimited potential, yet he was trapped in a cycle of self-destructive behavior, unable to evolve beyond an essentially brutal existence.”

  “And God had nothing to do with this?”

  “No. God can’t control what happens inside the bubble. He doesn’t exist in the world of matter and energy. Not as God, anyway. He could only watch and try to understand. As the centuries passed, he became obsessed with man, as he’d once been obsessed with himself. Why couldn’t man break the cycle of violence and futility? God focused all his being on the bubble, searching for a weak point, for a way into the matrix of matter and energy that was displacing him.”

  “And?”

  “It happened. God found himself looking at the bubble from the inside. Through the eyes of a human being. Feeling human skin, smelling the Earth, looking up into a mother’s face. His mother’s face.”

  Rachel had gone still. “You’re talking about Jesus now, aren’t you? You’re saying God went into Jesus of Nazareth.”

  I nodded.

  “You’re saying exactly what Christians believe. Only…you make it sound like an accident.”

  “It was, in a way. God exerted his focus upon the world, and Jesus was the door that opened to him. Why that particular child? Who knows?”

  “Did all of God enter Jesus?”

  “No. Imagine a burning candle. You hold a second candle up to that flame, light it, then take it away. The new candle has been lit, but the original flame remains. That’s how it worked. Part of God went into Jesus. The rest remained outside our universe. Outside the bubble.”

  “But Jesus had God’s power?”

  “No. Inside the bubble, God is subject to the laws of our universe.”

  “And the miracles? Walking on water? Raising the dead?”

  “Jesus was a healer, not a magician. Those stories were useful to those who built a religion around him.”

  She was shaking her head like someone with vertigo. “I don’t know what to say.”