"For God's sake, beat it. Publicity is something I can do without. Of course you were called up by some male nurse anxious to make a few guilders on the side."
"There's no point in asking me, Onno. I'd rather be sitting in the pub too."
"I'm not Onno to you."
"Okay, Dr. Quist, let's keep calm. I can understand that you're a bit overwrought. What's going on inside you at the moment?"
"The uncontrollable desire to smash your face for hour after hour! And if you don't clear off this minute I'm going to do just that."
When Onno made to get up, with the smock still in his hands, the journalist shrugged his shoulders.
"Okay, I'll do it without you," he said, turned on his heel, and disappeared.
Onno threw the smock furiously into the carryall. "Those sensation-seeking scum.."
"Don't get excited," said Max. "The fellow has already been sufficiently punished by being who he is."
Suddenly Sophia put her hand on both their arms. "Quiet a moment. ."
There was the scarcely audible sound of a child crying on the other side of the wall.
A little later a nurse put her head around the door and said with a smile: "The stork has been here! An angelic little boy! Mother and child are doing fine!"
The fact that it was a boy was hidden by a diaper — but establishing the sex meant little. They stood speechless in front of the incubator while doctors, assistants, and nursing staff looked over their shoulders. No one had ever seen such a baby. Newborn infants tended to look like boxers at the end of the final round: swollen, eyes puffed and closed, reeling from the violence they had been through — but what was lying there in the sealed glass space was really like a precious museum piece in a display case, more like a putto, such as could be seen in Italian Renaissance paintings: all that was missing were the wings.
It was not balding and wrinkled in the way some infants immediately prefigured their old age, but had strong black hair with a deep mahogany glow, which covered its whole scalp as though it had just come from the hairdresser's; its skin was firm and seemed bathed in the light of the full moon. Nor did it have the bloated monstrousness that could be found beautiful only when seen through the eyes of maternal and paternal instinct; its cheeks were full, and in the thighs and at the wrists there were slight folds of skin, which in an adult would indicate obesity. But there was no trace of endearing chubbiness; everything was perfect, like a work of art worthy of the name. At the same time this caused it to radiate a certain aloofness, as though it did not need anyone. The small nipples, the slim fingers and toes, looked as if they had been engraved with a fine etching needle; although it had been born a month early, not only the ears but the nose and mouth too had already developed into more or less their final shape.
However, most striking of all were the eyes. They were wide open, and the space between the dark lashes was completely filled with lapis lazuli, a color blue that none of them had seen before in a human being. It reminded Max of the color of the Mediterranean — but only at a particular moment, when after driving for days through Belgium and France he caught the first glimpse of it, between the scorching hills near Saint-Raphaeclass="underline" Thalassa! The incredible blue of that moment; he now saw it in two places in that pale, strange face. His fear of an immediately evident likeness had immediately disappeared — he could obviously relax for the first few years. He had looked immediately at the nose and the thumbs, but there was nothing of himself to be recognized in them, either. There was no discernible likeness to Onno, either, and from Ada it had only the black hair and the black, sharply etched eyebrows and eyelashes, which made the blue of its eyes even deeper.
"What a beautiful child," said Sophia. "That's going to cause him problems in the future." Suddenly she turned around and asked the faces behind her, "How is my daughter?"
"She's still in there. Everything is going according to plan, but it will be a little while yet."
Onno and Max were not thinking of Ada.
"What's his name?" asked Max.
Onno looked at him proudly. "You must know the story of the man who said to a colleague of yours that he understood how astronomers could determine every possible property of the stars with their instruments — but how had they discovered their names?"
"That is indeed our most brilliant achievement." Max nodded.
"Quinten," said Onno.
De Profundis
De Profundis
PART THREE. THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Second Intermezzo
— Congratulations! That must have been a satisfying moment for you. So there he was, our envoy — after years of hard work.
— Only for a moment, though. After that, it was like it always is: once you've achieved what you wanted to achieve, it's no longer what you wanted to achieve, but simply what you've achieved. You've come to take it for granted. What you win you lose, all things considered. What's more, when you see the havoc you've had to wreak to achieve it, it takes away the satisfaction. But anyway, I'm a professional, an old hand. Only the end matters.
— I take it you're thinking of the friendship between those two. But that tree that blew over. . was that coincidence, or were you behind that, too?
— I was behind that, too. There were two trees, by the way.
— What was the point of that? It was a very risky course of action, wasn't it? Suppose she hadn't survived, or had had a miscarriage. I know you don't care for this kind of question, but perhaps you'd like to answer anyway.
— If I couldn't make trees blow over exactly as I want, I wouldn't make any trees blow over. We know the position and force of every molecule in the air and, moreover, the elasticity of every point in the tree and its roots— it would gratify Laplace if he could see our aerodynamics division handling that kind of thing.
— Laplace? I expect he's one of those French intellectuals with a dirty scarf around his neck and a shawl over his shoulders.
— I don't know if they did that in his day. At any rate, a great man, a colleague of Max Delius's. But also an incorrigible optimist. A demon who knew all the world's preconditions at a given moment, he claimed — would not only be able to reconstruct the past precisely, but also work out the future with certainty.
— Definitely someone from the eighteenth century. Even we can't do that.
— We do very well at the level of trees being blown over.
— Tell me, why did that poor child have to have such a dreadful accident?
— Because otherwise the mission couldn't have been accomplished. In everything I did, I had only one thing in mind: the return of the dictate.
— All right, I can understand your not wanting to answer. Obviously it's a matter of your professional honor, and I respect that. I expect it will be clear to me in retrospect.
— To you, yes. In the past things were easier for us.
— What do you mean?
— When we simply used to address people directly as the need arose.
— But we stopped doing that after the creatures got the idea that it was not our voice they were hearing but their own inner voice. Of course, we couldn't stand for that kind of pickpocketing. It's undeniable that technology is increasingly taking the place of theology on earth, but psychology shouldn't get any big ideas on that score.