by Peter Watts
“Bring me to God,” I croak. My throat burns like a desert.
They hold a prayer wand to my head. I feel nothing.
I feel nothing.
The wand is in working order. The batteries are fully charged. It’s probably nothing, they say. A temporary after-effect of the exorcism. Give it time. Probably best to leave the restraints for the moment, but there’s nothing to worry about.
Of course they are right. I have dwelt in the Spirit, I know the mind of the Almighty—after all, were not all of we chosen made in His image? God would never abandon even the least of his flock. I do not have to believe this, it is something I know. Father, you will not forsake me.
It will come back. It will come back.
• • •
THEY URGE ME TO BE PATIENT. After three days they admit that they’ve seen this before. Not often, mind you; it was a rare procedure, and this is an even rarer consequence. But it’s possible that the demon may have injured the part of the mind that lets us truly know God. The physicians recite medical terms which mean nothing to me. I ask them about the others that preceded me down this path: how long before they were restored to God’s sight? But it seems there are no hard and fast rules, no overall patterns.
Trajan burns on the wall beside my bed. Trajan burns daily there and is never consumed, a little like the Burning Bush itself. My keepers have been replaying his cremation daily, a thin gruel of recorded images thrown against the wall; I suspect they are meant to be inspirational. It is always just past sundown in these replays. Trajan’s fiery passing returns a kind of daylight to the piazza, an orange glow reflecting in ten thousand upturned faces.
He is with God now, forever in His presence. Some say that was true even before he passed, that Trajan lived his whole life in the Spirit. I don’t know whether that’s true; maybe people just couldn’t explain his zeal and devotion any other way.
A whole lifetime in the presence of God. I’d give a lifetime now for even a minute.
• • •
WE ARE IN UNEXPLORED TERRITORY, they say. That is where they are, perhaps.
I am in Hell.
Finally they admit it: none of the others have recovered. They have been lying to me all along. I have been cast into darkness, I am cut off from God. And they called this butchery a success.
“It will be a test of your faith,” they tell me. My faith. I gape like a fish at the word. It is a word for heathens, for people with made-up gods. The cross would have been infinitely preferable. I would kill these smug meat-cutters with my bare hands, if my bare hands were free.
“Kill me,” I beg. They refuse. The Bishop himself has commanded that I be kept alive and in good health. “Then summon the bishop,” I tell them. “Let me talk to him. Please.”
They smile sadly and shake their heads. One does not summon the Bishop.
More lies, perhaps. Maybe the bishop has forgotten that I even exist, maybe these people just enjoy watching the innocent suffer. Who else, after all, would dedicate their lives to potions and bloodletting?
The cut in my head keeps me awake at night, itches maddeningly as scar tissue builds and puckers along its curved edges. I still can’t remember where I’ve seen its like before.
I curse the bishop. He told me there would be risks, but he only mentioned death. Death is not a risk to me here. It is an aspiration.
I refuse food for four days. They force-feed me liquids through a tube in my nose.
It’s a strange paradox. There is no hope here; I will never again know God, I am denied even surcease. And yet these butchers, by the very act of refusing me a merciful death, have somehow awakened a tiny spark that wants to live. It is their sin I am suffering for, after all. This darkness is of their making. I did not turn away from God; they hacked God out of me like a gobbet of gangrenous flesh. It can’t be that they want me to live, for there is no living apart from God. It can only be that they want me to suffer.
And with this realization comes a sudden desire to deny them that satisfaction.
They will not let me die. Perhaps, soon, they will wish they had. God damn them.
• • •
GOD damn them. Of course.
I’ve been a fool. I’ve forgotten what really matters. I’ve been so obsessed by these petty torments that I’ve lost sight of one simple truth: God does not turn on his children. God does not abandon His own.
But test them—yes. God tests us all the time. Did He not strip Job of all his worldly goods and leave him picking his boils in the dust? Did He not tell Abraham to kill his own son? Did He not restore them to His sight, once they had proven worthy of it?
I believe that God rewards the righteous. I believe that the Christ said Blessed are those who believe even though they have not seen. And now, at last, I believe that perhaps faith is not the obscenity I once thought, for it can give strength when one is cut off from the truth.
I am not abandoned. I am tested.
I send for the bishop. Somehow, this time I know he’ll come.
• • •
HE DOES.
“They say I’ve lost the Spirit,” I tell him. “They’re wrong.” He sees something in my face. Something changes in his.
“Moses was denied the Promised Land,” I continue.
“Constantine saw the flaming cross but twice in his lifetime. God spoke to Saul of Tarsus only once. Did they lose faith?”
“They moved the world,” the bishop says.
I bare my teeth. My conviction fills the room. “So will I.”
He smiles gently. “I believe you.”
I stare at him, astonished by my own blindness. “You knew this would happen.”
He shakes his head. “I could only hope. But yes, there is a— strange truth we are only learning now. I’m still not sure I believe it myself. Sometimes it isn’t the experience of redemption that makes the greatest champions, but the longing for it.”
On the panel beside me, Trajan burns and is not consumed. I wonder briefly if my fall from grace was entirely accidental. But in the end it does not matter. I remember, at last, where I once saw a scar like mine.
Before today, the acts I committed in God’s name were pale, bloodless things. No longer. I will return to the Kingdom of Heaven. I will raise my sword-arm high and I will not lay it down until the last of the unbelievers has been slaughtered. I will build mountains of flesh in His name. Rivers will flow from the throats that I cut. I will not stop until I have earned my way back into His sight.
The bishop leans forward and loosens my straps. “I don’t think we need these any more.”
They couldn’t hold me anyway. I could tear them like paper. I am the fist of God.
Afterword
Contrary to what you may have heard, God isn’t everywhere. The only place He reliably hangs out is in the temporal lobes—at least, that’s where Vilayanur Ramashandran found Him when he went looking in the brains of hyper-religious epileptics at UC-San Diego. You’ll never find the Almighty slumming in the parietal cortex, judging by radioisotopes Andrew Newberg tracked through the heads of a meditating Buddhist monk at the University of Pennsylvania. Most spectacularly—and controversially—Michael Persinger of Laurentian University claims to be able to induce religious experiences using a helmet which bathes the brain in precisely-controlled electromagnetic fields.
We begin to understand the mechanism: Rapture is as purely neurological as any other human experience. With that understanding, inevitably, comes the potential for control. Religious belief—that profound, irrational disorder afflicting so many of our species—may actually have a cure.
Of course, a cure is the last thing many would want. Religion has been a kick-ass form of social control for millennia, even absent any understanding of its neurology. It seems likely that these new insights will be used not to free us from the rapture, but to tweak it to maximum effect—to make us even more docile, even more obedient, even less skeptical of our masters than we are now.
Today we’re just taking our first steps down that road—but what if we’d taken them back in the third century, instead of the dawn of the twenty-first? That was the time of Constantine, the Roman Emperor who legitimized Christianity after a religious vision promised him victory in battle. It’s not much of a stretch to posit a subsequent expedition to the Holy Land, in search of ancient miracles.
I see a vein of magnetic ore in the Sinai hills. I see it speak to Constantine’s pilgrims as it spoke to Moses, sixteen centuries earlier. I watch it seed a renaissance in neurotheology— inevitably, in all manner of electromagnetic physics—and then I jump forward a thousand years and tell you a story…
It’s an unbelievable gimmick of course, a natural miracle filling in for Persinger’s God Helmet. But given that conceit, the social consequences seem more than plausible; they almost have a ring of inevitability to them. Perhaps, in all these stories about parallel universes, we’ve focused too much on chaos and too little on inertia. Perhaps it doesn’t matter where the butterfly flaps its wings.
Perhaps human nature pulls all timelines back to same endpoint. ■
Hillcrest v. Velikovsky
An act of God?
THE FACTS OF THE CASE were straightforward. Lacey Hillcrest of Pensacola, 50 years old and a devout Pentecostal, had been diagnosed with inoperable lymphatic cancer and given six months to live. Five years later she was still alive, albeit frail. She attributed her survival to a decorative silver-plated cross received from her sister, Gracey Balfour. Witnesses attested that Mrs Hillcrest’s condition improved dramatically upon acquisition of the totem, a product of the Graceland Mint alleged to contain an embedded fragment of the original Crucifix of Golgotha.
On the morning of 27 June, Mrs Hillcrest and her sister patronized the Museum of Quackery and Pseudoscience, owned and managed by one Linus C. Velikovsky. The museum contained a variety of displays concerning discredited beliefs, theories and outright hoaxes perpetrated throughout American history. Mrs Balfour entered into a heated discussion with another museum patron at the Intelligent Design exhibit, temporarily losing track of her sister; they eventually reconnected at a display concerning psychosomatic phenomena, specifically placebo effects and faith healing. Mrs Hillcrest had evidently spent some time perusing the display and was subsequently described as ‘subdued and uncommunicative’. Within a month she was dead.
The charge against Mr Velikovsky was negligent homicide.
The Prosecution called Dr Andrew deTritus, a clinical psychologist with an impressive record of expert testimony on any (and sometimes conflicting) sides of a given issue. Dr deTritus testified to the uncontested reality of the placebo effect, pointing out that ‘attitude’ and ‘outlook’ — like any other epiphenomenon of the brain — were ultimately neurochemical in nature. Belief literally rewired the brain, and the existence of placebo effects showed that such changes could have a real impact on human health.
Velikovsky took the stand in his own defence, which was straightforward: all claims presented by his displays were factually accurate and supported by scientific evidence. The prosecution objected to this point on the grounds of relevance but was, after some discussion, overruled.
Far from disputing Velikovsky’s claims during cross-examination, however, the Prosecution used them to bolster its own case. The defendant had deliberately set up shop in “one of our great country’s most devout regions, with no thought to the welfare of the Lacey Hillcrests of the world”. By his own admission, Mr Velikovsky had chosen Florida “because of all the creation museums”, and had clearly been intent on rubbing people’s noses in the alleged falsity of their beliefs. Furthermore, Mr Velikovsky was obviously well-versed in placebo effects, having built an erudite display on the subject. What did he think would happen, the Prosecution thundered, when he forced his so-called truth down the throat of omeone whose motto — knitted into her favourite throw-cushion — was If ye have faith the size of a mustard seed, ye shall move mountains? In telling ‘the truth’ Velikovsky had knowingly and recklessly endangered the very life of another human being.
Velikovsky pointed out that he hadn’t even known Lacey Hillcrest existed, adding that needlepointing something onto a pillowcase did not necessarily make it true. The Prosecution responded that the man who plants landmines in a playground doesn’t know the names of his victims either, and asked if the defendant’s needlepoint remark meant that he was now calling Jesus a liar. The Defence objected repeatedly throughout.
The Defence had, in fact, fought an uphill battle ever since her client’s swearing-in, during which Velikovsky had asked whether swearing to tell the truth on “a book of falsehoods” might undermine the court’s alleged devotion to empiricism. The jury had seemed unimpressed by that question, and did not seem to have subsequently become more sympathetic.
Perhaps, if worst came to worst, their verdict might be set aside on technical grounds. But the closest thing to a precedent the Defence could unearth was Dexter v. HerpBGone, involving a mail-order scheme in which a mixture of sugar and baking soda had been marketed as a cure for herpes at $200/treatment. Although this ‘cure’ had (unsurprisingly) proven ineffective, HerpBGone’s council had cited Waber et al. 2008 (ref. 1) — which clearly showed that a placebo’s efficacy increased with price — arguing that the treatment could have worked if Dexter had only paid more for it. As he had refused to do so (the same product was sold under a different name at $4,000), responsibility devolved to the plaintiff. The case had been dismissed.
It would have been a risky gambit. The parallels were far from exact. Instead, the Defence recalled Grace Balfour to the stand and asked whether she believed the Bible to be the revealed Word of God. Mrs Balfour readily conceded as much. It was her faith, she maintained, that allowed her to stay strong when that horrible man at the Creation display had mocked her with his talk of monkeymen and radioisotopes. She had seen fossils for what they truly were, the tests of faith described in Deuteronomy 13.
Asked then why her sister evidently did not share her strength of belief, Mrs Balfour allowed— somewhat reluctantly— that “that horrid little Russian” had shattered her sister’s faith with his “lies and deceit”.
But did not the Bible itself arm the faithful against such wickedness? Did not Matthew warn that “false prophets shall rise, and deceive many”? Could Second Peter have been any more explicit than “There shall be false teachers among you, who shall bring in damnable heresies”?
Well, yes, Mrs Balfour allowed. Certainly, Velikovsky was a False Prophet. Sadly, as the Defence reminded her, false prophecy was not a criminal offence.
Ultimately there was no need to resort to technical exemptions. The jury, having been presented with the facts of the case, was unanimous: Lacey Hillcrest had not shown the courage for their conviction. Whose fault was it, after all, that her faith had been so much smaller than a mustard seed? ■
Home
IT HAS FORGOTTEN WHAT IT WAS.
Not that that matters, down here. What good is a name when there’s nothing around to use it? This one doesn’t remember where it came from. It doesn’t remember the murky twilight of the North Pacific Drift, or the noise and gasoline aftertaste that drove it back below the thermocline. It doesn’t remember the gelatinous veneer of language and culture that once sat atop its spinal cord. It doesn’t even remember the long slow dissolution of that overlord into dozens of autonomous, squabbling subroutines. Now, even those have fallen silent.
Not much comes down from the cortex any more. Low-level impulses flicker in from the parietal and occipital lobes. The motor strip hums in the background. Occasionally, Broca’s area mutters to itself. The rest is mostly dead and dark, worn smooth by a sluggish black ocean cold as antifreeze. All that’s left is pure reptile.
It pushes on, blind and unthinking, oblivious to the weight of four hundred liquid atmospheres. It eats whatever it can find. Desalinators and recyclers keep it hydrated. Sometimes, old mammalian skin grows sticky with secreted r
esidues; newer skin, laid on top, opens pores to the ocean and washes everything clean with aliquots of distilled sea water.
The reptile never wonders about the signal in its head that keeps it pointing the right way. It doesn’t know where it’s headed, or why. It only knows, with pure brute instinct, how to get there.
It’s dying, of course, but slowly. It wouldn’t care much about that even if it knew.
• • •
NOW SOMETHING IS TAPPING ON ITS INSIDES. Infinitesimal, precisely spaced shock waves are marching in from somewhere ahead and drumming against the machinery in its chest.
The reptile doesn’t recognize the sound. It’s not the intermittent grumble of conshelf and sea bed pushing against each other. It’s not the low-frequency ATOC pulses that echo dimly past en route to the Bering. It’s a pinging noise — metallic, Broca’s area murmurs, although it doesn’t know what that means.
Abruptly, the sound intensifies.
The reptile is blinded by sudden starbursts. It blinks, a vestigial act from a time it doesn’t remember. The caps on its eyes darken automatically. The pupils beneath, hamstrung by the speed of reflex, squeeze to pinpoints a few seconds later.
A copper beacon glares out from the darkness ahead — too coarse, too steady, far brighter than the bioluminescent embers that sometimes light the way. Those, at least, are dim enough to see by; the reptile’s augmented eyes can boost even the faint twinkle of deepwater fish and turn it into something resembling twilight. But this new light turns the rest of the world stark black. Light is never this bright, not since—
From the cortex, a shiver of recognition.
It floats motionless, hesitating. It’s almost aware of faint urgent voices from somewhere nearby. But it’s been following the same course for as long it can remember, and that course points only one way.
It sinks to the bottom, stirring a muddy cloud as it touches down. It crawls forward along the ocean floor.