The god machine, p.1
The God Machine, page 1
Paise for Gospel Truths
“A splendid, tautly woven thriller… An intelligent mystery of tremendous spiritual and literary depth.”
—Booklist
“By turns contemplative, descriptive and emotive, this mixture of mystery and intrigue reveals intense preparation and fine writing.”
—Library Journal
Praise for The Hunting Club
“A gripping story, well-told… Not only a tale of murder and betrayal, but an intelligent exploration of issues of male identity.”
—Bestselling author Scott Turow
“Slickly entertaining, right down to the last, inevitable twist.”
—Kirkus Reviews
“Sandom writes with stunning elegance and nearly poetic beauty… A sure hit with any suspense reader.”
—Booklist
Also by J.G. Sandom
Gospel Truths
The Hunting Club
I would like to thank Kate Miciak for her ongoing support; David Hale Smith for his stewardship; Sir Edward Dashwood, Bt., for his insights into the Hell-Fire Caves; Christy Thompson for granting me access to the Carpenters' Hall and Jim Cicalise for his spirited tour; Brigid Jennings and Terry Jung of the National Park Service for their perceptions of Thomas Edison and Shemaine McKelvin for her lecture about the Glenmont estate; Jonathan Korzen of the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine for his tour; my readers Dr. Matthew Snow, Marcia Zand and Sylvana Joseph for their keen ears and sage advice; Vanessa and Carl, Alexander and Benjamin, for their loving embrace of my folly; and my daughter, Olivia—my own personal God machine—who renews my faith every day.
J. G. Sandom
Summer 2008
Hopewell
For Judas, the misunderstood
Prologue
A.D. 33
El Minya, Egypt
EVEN BEFORE ABRAHAM AND THE BOY REACHED THE CAVE near El Minya, the old man knew he was dying. A Roman blade had pricked his stomach and the bleeding was getting worse. They had traveled by camel for three nights due south, following the Nile, sleeping by day, hidden by papyrus and palm fronds, like scorpions. But while they had eluded their enemies, death lurked in the shadows of the caves of Kararra. And it was tired of waiting.
The Romans had known exactly how to attack them, and when. It was a sad truth of the times. At first Abraham and the boy had felt safe in Upper Egypt, far from the troubles in Judea. But even here, when a more orthodox Christian group felt pressure from a Gnostic wing, they sold their rivals to the Romans. Seius Strabo, Prefect of Egypt, was more than happy to crown his career by taking credit for the kill, to crow about the Christian death count in his weekly reports back to Rome.
Abraham sighed. Though barely fifty, he felt the full weight of the history of human avarice and folly press down on his chest. It was difficult to breathe. He pulled at his Judean headdress and loosened his burnous, and his long gray hair fell down across his narrow shoulders. It was cold. It was always so cold here in this country. It had been a long wet season, full of rain and locusts. Full of strange beasts. And one night, the moon had turned completely crimson. It was a time of omens. The old man smiled. A good time to be moving on.
A Cainite Christian of profound faith and devotion, the old man had no fear of the next world. He had reconciled himself long ago to his body's eventual extinction. But he had one final mission—and only one chance now to complete it.
The old man rolled over, into a cauldron of pain. He clenched his jaw and felt the sweat break out on his brow. It was twilight. A tongue of night air flicked in from the desert, quickening the cavern's darkness. With another sigh, Abraham heaved himself up on one elbow, closer to the fire. “David?” he cried hoarsely. “David, are you there? Come into the light.” Where was his grandson? Abraham stared at the shadows that danced in the cavern, but his eyes were scaled over by cataracts. He couldn't see anything.
In an instant, the willowy David knelt down by his side. The old man reached out. To touch his face. To be certain, be sure.
Or, perhaps, just to feel. His talonlike fingers curled round the cheek and the soft dimpled chin of his grandson.
“I have a secret, a terrible secret,” he whispered. “I've carried it for a long time. Too long, really. Forgive me, for I am tired now, David. I can carry it no longer. But you, David, you can record it for me, set it down in Mishnaic and Greek, as I have taught you to do. The logoi. The words. Before they crumble into the folds of the desert, into the sands, with the rest of the man that surrounds me.” He fingered his stomach, tried to laugh. Then he grew suddenly serious. He grabbed at his grandson, twisting the flesh of his forearm and the muscles beneath. “The words of a man that I knew as a boy. A man named Judas Iscariot.
“Record his words,” he insisted. “And then hide them away from the world. Hide them from the Sanhedrin and the Romans, from everyone, David, save from those who believe in the Word. Now bring me the codex. There is something I have to set down, in my own hand, as it was passed unto me.”
The boy did as he was told. The old man selected a pen, dipped it into a calabash of black ink and began to trace a pattern of fine lines, rectangles and circles, in a dance of exquisite proportion.
When he was finished, he felt the unspeakable burden of memory leach through his joints and his ligaments, drip from his fingertips. He rolled onto his back. “He was a man of great faith, Judas, always kind to me, always,” Abraham told his grandson. “Lest we forget. And his Master's closest companion, despite what you hear. Jesus came to Judas, and He said to him, ‘Step away from the others, and I shall tell you the mysteries of the kingdom. It is possible for you to reach it, but you will grieve a great deal.’”
The old man shuddered, remembering the vision—or had it only been a dream? He had seen Judas at the head of that gully, as the other disciples descended, all around him, with those stones in their hands. Those stones. They had gathered around him like wolves. Foul murder! The skin simply tore from his face.
“‘You will be cursed by the other generations,’ Jesus said, ‘and you shall come to rule over them… you will exceed all of them. For you will sacrifice the man that clothes me so that I may fulfill the prophecies.’
“Judas said, 'Please don't ask me to betray you, my Lord.'
“And Jesus said, ‘Lift up your eyes and look at the cloud, and the light within it, and the stars that surround it. The star that leads the way is your star, Judas.’”
1492
Milan
THE VISION CAME UPON DA VINCI IN THE EARLY HOURS OF the morning. It was still dark outside the window. Only an occasional oxcart winding by, only a few lost revelers disturbed the quiet rhythms of the city before dawn. Da Vinci sat up in his cot, looked over at his desk and sighed. He had no choice. When a vision came upon him as it had, there was little point in trying to venture back to sleep.
He struck a flame, lit a lamp; he stood and stretched, and scratched his long gray beard. He poured himself a cup of wine, left over from the previous evening's meal, still heaped upon a pewter plate nearby: half of a pheasant breast, a trifle gamey; some kind of sausage, pork; a broken discus of wheat bread. He took another sip of wine and pretended not to notice the decaying flesh.
Almost without thinking, he reached out for his nearest notebook, open to his rendering of “Vitruvian Man,” the circle in the square. It was lying on top of his studies of Cecilia Gallerani, the duke's mistress; by his charcoal sketch of “Il Cavallo”—the equestrian statue designed to honor the duke's father; right next to those drawings of his gear train mechanical calculator…
Il Cavallo! Any minute now, Duke Ludovico Sforza would come barreling through that door and demand to see the masterwork he'd commissioned weeks earlier.Da Vinci winced and took another sip of wine. Weeks, or was it months? As if it were easy to keep cranking out statues and portraits, one right after the other. As if he were some sausage-maker, official butcher to the Duchy.
Da Vinci spread the notebook out before him on his desk. There. On the blank page facing “Vitruvian Man.” He had no time to waste. He did not want to lose the pattern. And he could always tear the drawing from the notebook later, and find some hiding place.
He reached out for a nearby leather satchel and removed another illustration. It was a copy of a copy, badly smudged and wrinkled, but it was all he had to work with. And it had taken him a considerable amount of time to find it, almost sixteen years, not to mention a small fortune to procure it from that bookseller in the Levant. Contrary to the popular myth, which he himself had invented, Leonardo was not the illegitimate son of a local peasant girl from Vinci named Caterina, who had left her destitute husband and child to run off with another man from a neighboring village. In truth, his mother had been a slave girl from Constantinople. He still had his contacts in the Arab world.
Da Vinci admired the pattern of fine lines, the rectangles and squares, the circles that danced in exquisite proportion.
He lifted the blank page in his notebook, across from “Vitruvian Man.” The parchment was thin enough for him to see the other drawing beneath. Then, he began to add his own imbroglio of fine lines, circles and rectangles, extending the pattern, adding on.
It was almost noon when Duke Ludovico Sforza started banging on his door. The sound was so disturbing that it tore da Vinci from the spell which had been riding him all morning. He felt it shedding like a second skin, a spent cocoon, the remnants of another self still dangling from his shoulder blades and fingertips and hair. He shook himself, he looked about th
e room, but he could not for the life of him remember how he'd gotten there.
“Leonardo! I know you're in there. I can hear you. Open this door instantly!”
Da Vinci hurried over to the door and swung it open.
Duke Ludovico Sforza glowered in the corridor. His liquid coal-black eyes looked bottomless. His dark hair hung about his face. It was no wonder he was called Il Moro—The Moor. “As long as I remain your patron, this is my house,” the duke sputtered, striding forward, eyeing every object with suspicion. He wore a coat of the deepest iridescent purple, like the wings of a butterfly, and Leonardo made a note to remember the color. “These are all my doors,” continued the duke, “to lock or unlock, as I please. As I will.”
“Of course.” Da Vinci leaned forward in a kind of bow. “As you will.”
“Where is my father's masterwork?”
“I wish you'd stop referring to it in that manner, my Duke.”
Ludovico Sforza, Regent and Duke of Milan, son of the great Condottiere Francesco, waved his left hand and said, “If you'd have the world believe in you, Leonardo, you must first believe in yourself.” He hovered for a moment by da Vinci's desk.
No, not a butterfly, thought da Vinci. More like a moth.
Sforza tugged at the studies of his mistress, Cecilia Gallerani, pulled them out and scanned them quickly in succession. “Is this it? Is this all you've been working on? I saw all of these pieces weeks ago. What about my father's masterwork? ‘Il Cavallo,’ Leonardo. The bronze horse, twenty-four feet high, which—as you wrote in your letter—shall endue with immortal glory and eternal honor the auspicious memory of the prince, my father,and of the illustrious house of Sforza.” The duke's eyes settled on da Vinci's notebook, the sketch of “Vitruvian Man,” and that strange drawing on the other side. “What's this? Another study? Another commission, perhaps? Some thing from Florence?”
Da Vinci snatched the notebook from Duke Sforza's grasp. “For another time, my Duke. Another lifetime, really.” He smiled and tucked it away. “Unworthy of your attention. But you are in luck.”
“Don't patronize me, Leonardo. I'm tired of waiting. Enough of your studies, your exercises, your sinewy deadlines and tiresome delays, your procrastinations and excuses—”
“For today is the day I begin…” said da Vinci. And he felt the knowledge descend upon him like an imponderable weight. “… your father's masterwork.”
1738
Philadelphia
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN WAS AWAKENED BY THUNDER. HE HAD been walking with Franky through an apple orchard, the one behind Bishop White's house. And they had been kicking the apples together down the swale, which ended at Dock Creek. And Franklin had kicked one particularly hard, and had turned toward his son with a great smile on his face, as if to say “You see? See how far?” But Franky was no longer there. And then that thunderclap unrolled through the city like a wave on the strand, and Franklin was alone in his nightshirt, lying in bed, sweat-soaked and stinking of fear.
Someone was knocking, not on his door, but somewhere below. Franklin could hear it. At the front door, no doubt, facing Market Street. Then the banging stopped,and someone was standing outside of his bedroom, in the corridor, right there on the landing, moaning and moving about by his door.
“Mr. Franklin, sir?” Peter offered up querulously.
Franklin rolled out of bed. He put on his spectacles. His clothes had been laid out with punctilious care, following a tested system linking joint movements to articles of clothing, and he started to dress with great speed and efficiency. Franklin was thirty-two. He still retained much of the muscular physique he had engineered for himself through his passion for swimming as a youth, abetted by his dynamic nervous energy, but his vegetarianism had failed the test of time, and he was growing soft about the middle.
Ever since his appointment as Postmaster General the previous year, Franklin rarely ate at the house that he rented on Market Street. He loved his Deborah—in his own way, to be sure—but her stews, made with a paucity of ingredients, no doubt meant to impress upon him her frugality, were singularly unexpressive, devoid of flavor. In a word: dull.
Franklin simply couldn't help it, despite his espoused penchant for moderation, and much to his chagrin. He enjoyed fine food and drink. While his bastard son William should have been a constant reminder of the price of his unfettered passions, Franklin still tried to disregard the knowledge that his stupendous appetites would—one day, at some great age, no doubt—come back to haunt him.
The result was he had grown used to taking his meals about town on most evenings, at the homes of friends, associates, or acquaintances, being feted by vendors, a visiting dignitary in some alien province, doing business as Postmaster General.
He was already losing his hair—a source of great dismay to Franklin, so much so that he flaunted his baldness, and ofttimes refused to wear wigs wherever it might prove most explosive not to do so. But to be losing his figure as well!
It was all going to hell, he thought, all falling apart. Since Franky.
“Mr. Franklin?” said Peter.
“Yes, I'm coming,” snarled Franklin. “Who's calling at this unholy hour?”
“The old Jew,” Peter said.
In the middle of the night, and in inclement weather? It was too late for cards and too early to argue philosophy. Unless… Franklin opened the door. “Is he alone?”
“No, Mister Franklin,” said Peter. The middle-aged house slave glanced nervously down the corridor, as if hunting about for the answer. “He has a gentleman with him,” he added, still averting his eyes. “A foreigner.”
Franklin grabbed Peter by the shoulders. He spun him about, as though he meant to attack him. Then he laughed, stepped around him and bounded away down the stairs.
Simon Nathan, the chief rabbi of Philadelphia, stood on the stoop facing Market Street. At his side, Franklin noticed a stranger, a dark man in a dark cloak with a hood. They huddled together in the rain like a pair of hunting dogs.
“Come in. Come in,” Franklin said.
“Forgive us for intruding upon you at this hour, Benjamin,” said the rabbi, as he passed through the door, “but since you …” He shook the rain from his hat. “Since we …” He watched as it fell in a stream to the floor.
“You found it?” said Franklin.
The rabbi smiled. He was an old man with dark brown eyes ringed by years of hard service. “Yes, we found it.”
“Where?”
“In Cairo.”
As if performing a magic trick, the stranger reached under his cloak and removed a leather-bound codex, a loose binder of cinnamon paper.
“This is my friend, Haym Solomon,” the rabbi said. “He arrived on the night boat from Spain. Before that, on foot and by camel from Cairo, across the Sahara.”
Franklin glanced about the foyer. “Peter,” he called. “Warm up some brandy for our guests. Peter? You're soaked to the skin. Peter! Where did he go now? He was right on my heels.”
“No, no brandy for us, thank you, Benjamin,” said the rabbi. “We can't stay. But I wanted to deliver this to you personally as soon as it reached me.” The rabbi took the codex from Solomon and gave it to Franklin. “In truth, I didn't want to keep it at the temple.”
Franklin stared down at the book in his hands. It was impossible to believe. After all this time. He cupped the leather spine, feeling the age of the codex seep into his fingertips. “You're sure it's the one, the Gospel we wanted?”
The rabbi fingered his payots. “The one you were seeking,” he said, with a sigh. “But not what you wanted, I fear, Benjamin. Listen to me. I tell you this as your friend. There is a reason it has been hidden from the world for seventeen hundred years. It will bring you no good. It will visit upon you the wrath of your enemies. They will rise up and strike you.”
The rabbi put on his hat. “Let it go, Bennie. Franky's dead.” Without another word, he took his companion by the arm and, together, the pair made their way through the door, down the street, until they vanished into the falling rain.
