The Discovery of Heaven

by Harry Mulisch

  "Look, a falling star! We can make a wish."

  He turned his head, but he did not entirely trust the grainy, slowly fading dust trail: it must be a block of one or two kilos, and meteorites were rarely that big.

  "And if it doesn't come true," he said, "it was a fragment of a satellite; the sky's full of them at this latitude. What did you wish?"

  "You must never say that." She looked at him in confusion.

  A child is what she had instantly thought, without hesitation, as though the wish had plunged into her mind like that thing into the atmosphere— I want a child. She felt as disconcerted as a good husband and father who, on seeing a meteor, suddenly desires a beautiful nymph of seventeen. As far as she was aware, she did not want a child at all, nor did Onno. So was she suppressing her deepest wish every time she swallowed that little white pill?

  Suddenly there was a syncopation in the rhythm of the waves: a faster, higher one arrived, which lifted them up and tumbled them over. Coughing, spewing saltwater, they surfaced again and grabbed each other again. Max gave her a kiss on the cheek and immediately afterward sought her mouth. Had he seen what she was thinking? She let herself be kissed and felt his hand disappearing down the back of her bikini bottom.

  "What are you doing?"

  "We need to finish something ..." he panted.

  Bring yourself off. His excitement of course also derived from the state he had gotten himself into with Marilyn; he had been given the cold shoulder and now Ada was the erotic substitute—but at the same time he harked back to that morning over three months ago, and that rendered her helpless. He had not forgotten, either; he too knew that it was wrong. At the moment that a wave lifted them up, he pulled down her bikini bottom and already had it around his arm. Almost weightlessly, she wrapped her legs around his hips and said, "Max ... this is impossible ... if Onno . .."

  But he could no longer hear. I made sure that a completely different force flowed through him, which cared nothing about him. She felt him penetrate her—and over his shoulder she saw that a blood-red, monstrous crescent moon had risen; in its first quarter, it lay back almost horizontally on the horizon . . .

  THE MISSION

  At that moment I said:

  —Spark! Yes, you! Drift toward me in slowly turning parallellepipeda through this whiter than white Light, which shines and resonates from all sides, by which we are surrounded and permeated, are ourselves a part of, light in Light, harmony in Harmony. Who would want to leave this pneumatic field, where each element coincides with the whole, where the whole is in every part, and where first here and then there figures take shape and disappear, triangles, circles, ellipses, hyperbolas, spheres, cones, cubes, octahedrons, dodecahedrons, where tumbling spheroids glow and merge in the endless harmony of the Endless Light, in which you are a single point, no, a harmoniously resonating string of Light. Can you leave? Look, there, near that convex polygon sector, there's one, whoosh, gone, something quivers for a moment, a faint echo, a tiny silence, then Light closes over itself and it is as though nothing has happened. But something has happened. Look around you—you can see it happening everywhere, continuously. Where are they going? Look hard—you can see Sparks coming back into the Light too: there, and there, and there. So is there nothing else but this eternal domain? Look into yourself into that unbroken light that you are, without a flaw—is there perhaps a flaw in it after all? Isn't that flaw a certain vague longing, which is always with you and which you are hence not aware of, just as you are not aware of the glowing harmony that you are by being a part of it? A kind of homesickness, although you have never been anywhere else but here? Isn't it as though even perfection is not perfect? The Light is not completely luminous and Harmony is not completely harmonious? Yes, you must know now: this world is not the only one. There is another world. I cannot prove it, you have to believe it, you have to take the step and only then will you really experience it. There is an earth. The earth exists—as the innermost dungeon of the Kingdom of the Archontes. There is no point in telling you much about it, or even a little, because you would not understand. You would not even understand what you do not understand, because you do not yet know what "not" is. So, for example, it is not always light on earth—but that is already beyond your understanding. I might as well say nothing, but I am going to say it all the same: perhaps from envy, because I will never be able to live there. In a way that is as explicable as it is mysterious, it is sometimes light, sometimes dark: but even the earthly light of the sun is Darkness compared with our Light. It is as if it were the shadow of ours, and the shadow of that shadow is the poison of earthly darkness. I realize that I am not making it attractive for you to depart for that impure, confused world, but I do not wish to hold out false hopes to anyone, even though they do not understand me—and precisely because you do not understand me, I will now reveal the deepest secret. Just as the germ of Darkness is hidden within our Light, so Darkness tends toward our Light and loves it. By going there, you will bring Light, and the only way of bringing Light is by going there. This cosmic mismatch ultimately contains the meaning of our world. That is, only by setting out for that region of black light, lies, deceit, violence, murder, sickness, and death do you make yourself meaningful. By far the greater number of the infinite number of Sparks—if I can put it like that—will never have that opportunity, because they are reserved for contingencies that will never arise. For them eternity will never give way to transience and the finite. But you are one of the small, select band who are given the chance. Much has already been invested in making your departure possible— more than you will ever know, for your peace of mind. And that investment has been made because you are being given a mission, which only you will be able to remember. But you will not remember it as a memory; you will think that it's your own idea, a fantastic brainwave. Because just as here you know nothing of the earth, on earth you will know nothing of this world. You will forget all about it. When we are mentioned, you will shrug the shoulders you will then have. Because while you are sinking through the three hundred and sixty-five eons, worlds, and generations on your way to the earth at a point in time, you will grow heavier and heavier; more and more litter from the cosmic spheres will attach itself to you, shrouds, clothes, excrescences, snails, dead weight, covering your awareness of the original Light, until you at last fall into the dark dungeon of spirit and flesh and are finally born as a human being. That is, as a being that remembers nothing, not even what it is, namely Light—like someone sleeping. That applies to you too.

  But at the same time you are different from the others. All the others are sleepers, who have yet to awake, through faith and knowledge. Only then is there a way back for them. But the heavy accretions have mostly reconciled them with life on earth; they have forgotten that they are aliens there and that they are what they think they are: that is the greatest threat to their return. Things will be easier for you. For technical reasons, we have decided on the VIP procedure. And now your moment has come; everything is ready for your reception. Farewell! Go! Now! Retrieve the testimony for us! Adieu!

  PART TWO

  THE END OF THE BEGINNING

  First Intermezzo

  —Dear me, that was a close thing.

  —You're telling me. The trouble with human beings is that we can lead them to the water, but we can't make them drink. For example, it's no trouble for us to make someone stand up and pace about his room, or to make him slip so that he breaks his neck; but to get someone to do something that runs counter to his feelings is less simple. People aren't puppets— they have a will of their own; before you know it, they've slipped through your fingers. Take the meeting of Max and Onno.

  —Did you fix that?

  —Who else?

  —It might have been coincidence.

  —Of course, but it wasn't.

  —Quite a feat. If Delius had driven past thirty seconds later, Onno might have gotten a lift from someone else.

  —Then everything would hav
e fallen through. Thank you for the compliment, but that kind of thing is routine for my department; for us that is almost as easy as some mechanical operation or other—for example making a tree blow over, or a meteorite strike, say—although in those areas too we often face uncertainties. Of course it was part of an extensive plan of action, because we had first to ensure that Max went to Rotterdam on the day of Onno's father's birthday, and so on and so forth, but as far as that was concerned there was no resistance to be expected.

  —But why would have everything have fallen through in that case? What was the point of the meeting? After all, it's only made matters more complicated. You could have left Onno completely out of it and simply have had Max meet Ada and have a child.

  —In the first place, he would probably not have given her a child in that case; and in the second place, it will become clear that Onno's presence was essential for us to achieve our ultimate objective. When you're involved in a project like that, you work not only on the moment that is immediately present, but are constantly keeping in mind everything that has already happened, what must happen in the future, everything that can go wrong, and how that has to be coped with and what will in that case have to be prepared, if you are to avoid it slipping through your fingers. You can compare it with a war: in retrospect in the history books it's a nice, rounded story, the result of which is known; but while it was going on, you as a field marshal may have had your plan of campaign, but it was still largely a chaotic succession of events, stupidities, and unforeseen surprises, which demanded new decisions every moment. And in the third place. . . . Oh, I've forgotten. Excuse me, you have touched on an essential point that we should perhaps be clear about from the outset. You asked me to tell the story at length and in detail and I've started. But to be honest, I don't feel like telling the story and at the same time saying why it is like it is and where I've intervened and where I haven't and why.

  —Have I touched on a sensitive spot?

  —To start with I have no sensitive spots, because in our pneumatic domain we exist entirely of intelligence, and moreover .. .

  —And moreover?

  —Let's leave it. I don't mind justifying myself now and then, or explaining something more fully, but I don't intend to keep biting my own tail.

  —You do have a tail, then?

  —The story may have one.

  —I don't know if you know but the Ouroboros, a serpent biting its own tail, is a symbol of eternity on that same earth.

  —That's as may be, but if I can't tell the story in the way that is implicit in the events themselves, then you will simply have to make do with the announcement that the matter is settled. You can ask me a hundred questions, or a thousand or a hundred thousand; you can ask me . . . for example, why Cuba had to be dragged in, and so on and so forth—that will all become clear. Take it from me that nothing has happened that wasn't absolutely necessary, at least as far as my interventions were concerned. It's no coincidence that I haven't once said "I" yet.

  —Except for those three times, that is. And let me tell you this. The fact that you are also in the top rank of the Celestial Hierarchy doesn't give you the right to strike such a damn impertinent tone with an official who is just a little superior to you. Anyway, that's how things are here these days. It's starting to depress me, but that may also be partly due to your story. You know, none of us has a view of the whole Pleroma, but if you operate at the edge of the Eight, as we do, with a view of the demonic world of Darkness, things are harder for you than for those higher entities who are scarcely aware of it; and you even more than I are standing with your back to the Light and facing Darkness. If my memory serves me well, once or twice in the past you even appeared in that Archontic area, which cannot even claim to have been created by the Chief, as most of those windbags there believe, because that anthropic explosion of light, which was to lead to them, was the work of our center. Compared with me you are already almost one of them, although for them you are infinitely far removed—at least if they even have an inkling of your existence. Most of them know beings like us only in the shape of infantile fantasies like Superman or Batman. Would you like to know why that is? It's because by now they have almost all our powers themselves, in the shape of their technology. And that's our own stupid fault. For centuries we have been complacently been asleep here, and in the meantime Satan-El has been doing his work.

  —Satan-El? What's that you're saying? In what form?

  —All those characters are scum anyway: Belial-Satan, Beelzebub-Satan, Asmodee-Satan, Azazel-Satan, Samael-Satan, Mephistopheles-Satan, and so on and so on, they're all the same. But of course it was Lucifer-Satan again.

  —What was the swine doing then?

  —We only found out recently. Five hundred years ago, without our realizing it, he entered into a pact with mankind, a sort of diabolical counterpart of the Chiefs testimony.

  —You must be joking! I only know the story that Mephistopheles is supposed to have entered into a pact with a certain Dr. Faust, that Faust is supposed to have sold his soul to him, but that seemed to me to belong more to literature.

  —That is true, but there now turns out to be a very dangerous aspect to it. Can I refresh your memory a moment? The historical Johannes Faust was a traveling German magician from Württemberg, with an infamous reputation, like many others in the first half of the human sixteenth century. In 1587, when he had been dead for about forty or fifty years, his legend began with the appearance of a chronicle. Historia von D. Johann Fausten dem weitbeschreiten Zauberer und Schwarzkünstler, in which that story of the pact with the devil occurs. That Faust legend, we believe, goes back to a similar traveling character, fifteen hundred years earlier, who is mentioned in the Acts of the Apostles, Simon Magus. He fell out with Peter, because he wanted to buy the Holy Ghost. That character, a Samaritan, had gotten it into his head that he himself was the Chief.

  —Go on. Was Satan-El behind that, too?

  —We assume so now. He was going with a Phoenician whore, whom he maintained was an incarnation of Helen of Troy.

  —How can you claim such a thing?

  —On earth you can claim all sorts of things, and there are always people who will believe you. But be careful, don't underestimate him. He said that the Feminine Principle was the first Idea in Thought—that is, in the Chiefs thought; that is, his own. That Principle next created us, whereupon we in our turn created the world. But according to him we do not want to be regarded as creatures, only as creators, and so we dragged our creator from Light to the Darkness of our creation and forced it into the physical shape of a centuries-old series of women, including Helen, and finally into a whore in the brothel in Tyre from where the Father, having descended to earth and become flesh, finally rescued the imprisoned Mother.

  —What a story! Of course that bit about the abduction and all those women is a scandalous lie—but how did that magician find out the truth about creation? Did Lucifer tell him about all that?

  —Can you think of another explanation?

  —And what did he have up his sleeve in doing that?

  —It was a red herring to disguise his real intention. Without anyone realizing it Simon Magus returned toward the end of the sixteenth century in the legend of Faust, the restless seeker after knowledge, who entered into a pact with the devil. The first literary adaptation was Christopher Marlowe's, The Tragicall History of Doctor Faustus, which was performed in London in about 1590. That was the beginning of a continuous succession of adaptations of the theme, down to the present earthly day, the high point of which was, naturally, Goethe's version, in which Helen again appears. In one of the most recent versions, Doktor Faustus by Thomas Mann, a syphilitic whore again crops up as the companion of the hero, and that was, significantly enough, inspired by a fatal whore in the life of Nietzsche, whom we were talking about just now. She was the cause of his fatal madness.

  —I know all about that. At the time I even dispatched that creature to get him. People sho
uldn't pronounce the Chief dead. But where was Lucifer's red herring? What was he trying to distract attention from?

  —The intention was to impress upon mankind that a pact with the devil was a literary matter: the noncommittal story of an imaginary individual thirsting after knowledge, who sells his soul. That was how it was possible for a dreadful, far from literary but very real event to go unnoticed until today—namely, that in that same last decade of the sixteenth century, also in London, Lucifer entered into a pact with mankind, a collective contract in which the whole of mankind sold its soul to him.

  —Good God! How should I imagine that? Did someone sign that contract on behalf of mankind?

  —Yes.

  —Who was that?

  —Francis Bacon.

  —Francis Bacon?

  —Francis Bacon. He has always been regarded as a man who prophetically foresaw the modern scientific and technological world. In a number of epoch-making works he sketched the outlines of a world in which science and technology would no longer be in the hands of a few individual amateurs, as was the case in his own days around 1600, but would have changed into an internationally organized, collective endeavor, subsidized by governments, with conferences and systematic publications. Only in that way could a full mastery of nature be obtained; and the scientific method would have to be that of induction, in which one progressed from the particular to the general, from empirical phenomena to natural laws, although you and I of course know that the only true method is the reverse one, that of deduction. At the end of his life he wrote Nova Atlantis, "The New Atlantis," which remained as a fragment and was published after his death. In it he sketches a central institute of a Utopian island called Bensalem, which he dubs "Solomon's House," but it is not something like the blessed temple of Solomon in Jerusalem, which is so dear to our hearts, not even something like a Christian church, but more like a modern research center, in which new biological species are manufactured.