Msgr. B.: “I see your point. In that case, I’d say the command not to eat of the Tree of Knowledge. It was by breaking that injunction that Adam fell.”
T.M.: “But that’s still only a negative commandment… ‘Don’t do that.’ Wasn’t there something else? Something Adam was asked actively to do?
“Consider. Every heavenly intervention mentioned in the Bible, from Genesis onward, can be seen as a palliative measure, to help mend a fallen race of obdurate sinners. But what of the original mission for which we were made? Have we no clue what our purpose was to have been if we hadn’t sinned at all? Why we were created in the first place?” Msgr. B.: “Our purpose was to glorify the Lord.” T.M.: “As a good Catholic, I agree. But how was Adam to glorify? By singing praises? The heavenly hosts were already doing that, and even a parrot can make unctuous noises. No, the evidence is right there in Genesis. Adam was told to do something very specific, something before the fall, before Eve, before even being told not to eat the fruit!”
Msgr. B.: “Let me scan and refresh my… Ah. I think I see what you refer to. The paragraph in which the Lord has Adam name all the beasts. Is that it? But that’s a minor thing. Nobody considers it important.”
T.M.: “Not important? The very first request by the Creator of His creation? The only request that has nothing to do with the repair work of mortality or rescue from sin? Would such a thing have been mentioned so prominently if the Lord were merely idly curious?”
Msgr. B.: “Please, I see others queued for questions. Your point is?”
T.M.: “Only this — our original purpose clearly was to glorify God by going forth, comprehending, and naming the Creator’s works. Therefore, aren’t zoologists, crawling through the jungle, struggling to name endangered species before they go extinct, doing holy labor?
“Or take even those camera-bearing probes we have sent to other planets… What is the first thing we do when awe-inspiring vistas of some faraway moon are transmitted back by our little robot envoys? Why, we reverently name the craters, valleys, and other strange beasts discovered out there.
“So you see it’s impossible for the end of days to come, as your group predicts, till we succeed in our mission or utterly fail. Either we’ll complete the preservation and description of this Earth and go forth to name everything else in God’s universe, or we’ll prove ourselves unworthy by spoiling what we started with — this, our first garden. Either way, the verdict’s not in yet!” Msgr. B.: “I… really don’t know how to answer this. Not in real time. At minimum you’ve drawn an intriguing sophistry to delight your fellow Franciscans. And those neo-Gaian Jesuits, if they haven’t thought of it already.
“Perhaps you’ll allow me time to send out my own ferrets and contemplate? I’ll get back to you next week, same time, same access code.”
So that’s where we left it. Meanwhile, any of you on this SIG are welcome to comment. I’ll answer any useful remarks or suggestions. After all, if there’s anything I seem to have on my hands these days, it’s free time.
• CORE
It was a laser.
He still couldn’t get used to the idea. A gravity laser. Imagine that.
I wonder where the power comes from.
“Mr. Sullivan? May I freshen your drink, sir?”
The flight attendant’s smile was professional. Her features and coloration clearly Malay. “Yes, thank you,” he replied as she bent to pour, her delicate aroma causing him to inhale deeply. “That’s a lovely scent. Is it Lhasa Spring?”
“Why… yes sir. You are perceptive.”
She met his eyes, and for an instant her smile seemed just that much more than perfunctory. It was a well-measured look that fell short of provocative, but also seemed to promise a little more than mere professionalism during the long flight ahead.
Alex felt content as she moved on to serve the next passenger. It was nice flirting amiably with an exotic beauty, without the slightest temptation to ruin it by trying for too much. The last few months had left his libido in a state of suspension, which had the pleasant side effect of allowing him the freedom to appreciate a young woman’s smile, the fine, well-trained grace of her movements, with-out flashing hormones or unwarranted hopes getting in the way.
It had been different during his first year of graduate school, when he temporarily forsook physics to explore instead the realm of the senses. Applying logic to the late-blooming quandaries of maturity, he had parsed the elements of encounter, banter, negotiation, and consummation, separating and solving the variables one by one until the problem — if not generally solved — did appear to have tractable special solutions.
The mapping wasn’t exact, of course. According to Jen, biological systems never translated exactly onto mathematical models, anyway. Still, at the time he acquired certain practical skills, which garnered him a reputation among his classmates and friends.
Then, curiosity sated, his interests changed trajectory. Companionship and compatibility became desiderata more important than sex, and he even aspired for joy. But these proved more elusive. Seduction, it seemed, contained fewer variables and relied less on fate than did true love.
Disappointment never banished hope exactly, but he was persuaded to shelve aspiration for a while and return to science. Only at Iquitos did hope suffer truly mortal wounds. Compared to that loss, sex was a mere incidental casualty.
I know what Jen would tell me, he thought. We moderns think sex can be unlinked from reproduction. But the two are connected, deep down.
Alex knew most of the time he was in denial about the coming end of the world. He had to be, in order to do his work. In such a state he could even enjoy studying Beta, the elegant, deadly monster in the Earth’s core.
But denial can only rearrange pain, like a child re-sorting unloved vegetables on his plate, hoping a less noticeable pattern will deceive parental authority. Alex knew where he’d quarantined his bitter outrage. It still affected the part of him most intimately tied to life and the propagation of life.
Alex imagined how his grandmother might comment on all this.
“Self-awareness is fine, Alex. It helps make us interesting beasts, instead of just another band of crazy apes.
“But when you get right down to it, self-awareness is probably overrated. A complex, self-regulating system doesn’t need it in order to be successful, or even smart.”
Thinking about Jen made Alex smile. Perhaps, after the hard work of the months ahead was done, there’d be time to go home and visit her before the world ended.
Stan Goldman had been left in charge in New Zealand, continuing to track Beta while Alex went to California on a mission to beg, wheedle, and cajole ten years’ raw data from the biggest observatory in the world. This was a mission he had to take on himself, for it required calling in many old favors.
From a small building on the UC Berkeley campus, his old friend Heinz Reichle ran three thousand neutrino detectors dispersed all over the globe. The planet was almost transparent to those ghostly particles, which penetrated rock like X rays streaming through soft cheese, so Reichle could use the entire worldwide instrument round the clock to track nuclear reactions in the sun and stars. For his part though, Alex hoped the disks full of data in his luggage would show a thing or two about the Earth’s interior as well, perhaps helping the Tangoparu team track the awful Beta singularity to its source.