The Footprints of God

CHAPTER 38

The sun shone white and clear outside the plane as we raced westward over the continental United States. Our El Al 747 had been left behind in New York. The corpo¬rate Gulfstream the Israelis had transferred us to was tiny by comparison, but far more luxurious. Rachel had been sleeping on a bed in the back since we'd left JFK. I wasn't so lucky. General Kinski had kept me up front, answering endless questions from the Israeli scientists. I badly needed rest, but since the Mossad chief could order the pilot to return to New York at any time, I had little choice but to cooperate.

Somewhere over Arkansas, Kinski finally realized I'd endured all I could. I visited the toilet, then walked to the rear of the plane to join Rachel. She was no longer sleeping, but staring out a window at the endless carpet of cumulus clouds below us.

"Are you all right?" I asked.

She looked up at me, her eyes circled in shadow. "I thought they'd never let you go."

I sat beside her. My throat was sore from talking, and my neck ached as though I'd been watching a film from the first row of a theater.

She slipped her hand into mine and leaned on my shoulder. "We haven't really talked since you came out of the coma."

"I know."

"Are we going to?"

"If you like. But you're not going to like what you hear."

"Did you dream?"

"Yes and no. It wasn't like my old dreams. Not like movies. It was like being deaf for a lifetime and then hearing Bach. An indescribable feeling of revelation. And now… I know things."

"That sounds like an acid trip. What kinds of things do you know?"

I thought about it. "The kinds of things that five-year-olds want to know. Who are we? Where did we come from? Does God exist?"

Rachel sat up, and I could tell she was slipping into her professional persona. "Tell me about it."

"I will. But you have to drop all your preconceptions. This is Saul-on-the-road-to-Damascus stuff."

She chuckled softly, her eyes knowing. "You think I expected something else?"

Part of me wanted to remain silent. The things I'd shared with Rachel in the past had stretched her willing¬ness to believe, yet compared to the revelations of my coma, they were conventional. The safest way to begin was with something familiar.

"Do you remember my very first dream? The recurring one?"

"The paralyzed man sitting in the dark room?"

"Yes. He can't see or hear or remember anything. Do you remember what he asks himself?"

"'Who am I? Where did I come from?'"

"Right. You said the man in that dream was me. Remember?"

She brushed a dark strand of hair out of her eyes. "You still don't think he was?"

"No."

"Who was he, then?"

"God."

The muscles tensed beneath the oval plane of her face. "I should have guessed."

"Don't panic. I'm using that word as a kind of short¬hand, because we don't have a word to communicate what I experienced. God is nothing like we imagine him to be. He's not male or female. He's not even a spirit. I say 'he' only as a conversational convenience."

"That's good to know." A wry laugh. "You're telling me God is a paralyzed man with no memory sitting in a pitch-black room?"

"In the beginning, yes."

"Is he powerless?"

"Not completely. But he thinks he is."

"I don't understand."

"To understand the beginning, you have to under¬stand the end. When we get to the end, you'll see it all."

She looked far from convinced.

"Remember the dream? The man in the room becomes obsessed with his questions, so obsessed that he becomes the questions. "Who am I? Where did I come from? Was I always here?' Then he sees a black ball floating in space ahead of him. Darker than the other darkness."

Rachel nodded. "Do you know what the ball is now?"

"Yes. A singularity. A point of infinite density and temperature and pressure."

"A black hole? Like what existed before the Big Bang?"

"Exactly. Do you know what existed before that?"

She shrugged. "No one does."

"I do."

"What?"

"The desire of God to know."

Curiosity filled her eyes. "To know what?"

"His identity."

Rachel took my hand in hers and began messaging my palm with her thumb. "The black ball exploded in your dream, right? Like a hydrogen bomb, you said."

"Yes. It devoured the darkness at a fantastic rate. Yet the man in the dream always remained outside the explosion."

"How do you interpret that image? God watching the birth of the universe?"

"Yes, but I don't interpret it. I've seen it. I've seen what God saw."

Her thumb stopped moving. She could not hide the sadness in her eyes.

"I know what you're thinking," I said.

"David, you can't read my mind."

"I can read your eyes. Look, to understand what I'm telling you, you're going to have to stop being a psychia¬trist for twenty minutes."

She sighed deeply. "I'm trying. I really am. Describe what you saw for me."

"I described it for you weeks ago. I just didn't under¬stand it then. That explosion was the Big Bang. The birth of matter and energy from a singularity. The birth of time and our universe."

"And the rest of your dreams?"

"You remember what I saw. After the bang, the expanding universe began displacing God. This didn't happen in three dimensions, but that's the only way we can think about it. Think of God as a limitless ocean. Genesis describes something like that. No waves, no ten¬sion, not even bubbles. Perfect harmony, total resolution, absolute inertia."

"Go on."

"Think of the birth of the universe as a bubble form¬ing at the center of that ocean. Forming and expanding like an explosion, displacing the water at the speed of light."

"All right."

"What happens inside that bubble is what I saw in my later dreams. The births of galaxies and stars, the formation of planets, all the rest. I saw the history of our universe unfold. You called it 'Hubble telescope stuff.'"

"I remember."

"Eventually my dreams focused on the Earth. Meteors crashed into the primitive atmosphere, amino acids formed. Evolution went from inorganic to organic. Microbes became multicellular, and the race was on, right up the chain to fishes, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, primates…"

"Man," Rachel finished.

"Yes. It took ten billion years just to get to biological evolution. Then hundreds of millions of years of muta¬tion to get to man. And all that added up to nothing in the eyes of God."

Rachel knit her brows. "Why? Didn't God intend all those creatures to exist? To evolve?"

"No. It's not like that. God was surprised by all of this."

"Surprised?"

"Well… I think the feeling was more like deja vu. He'd seen something like it before. Not exactly like it, but what he saw made him remember things."

She turned in her seat and stared at me. "And the cre¬ation of life meant nothing to him?"

"Not in the beginning. But then-out of that teeming mass of life-a spark as bright as the Big Bang flashed in his eye."

"What spark?"

"Consciousness. Human intelligence. Somewhere in Africa, a tool-making hominid with a relatively large brain perceived the fact of its own death. It perceived a future in which it would no longer exist. That hominid became not only self-conscious, but conscious of time. That moment was an epiphany for God."

"Why?"

"Because consciousness was the first thing in that ter¬rifying explosion of matter and energy that God recog¬nized as being like himself."

"That's what God is? Awareness?"

"I think so. Awareness without matter or energy. Pure information."

Rachel was silent for a while, and I couldn't read her eyes. "Where is all this going?" she asked finally.

"To a very provocative place. But let's stay with the dreams for now. Man evolved quickly. He tilled the ground, built cities, recorded his history. And God felt something like hope."

"Hope for what?"

"That he might finally learn the nature of his own being."

"Did God answer his questions by watching man¬kind?"

"No. Because after a certain point, evolution stopped. Not biological evolution, but psychological evolution. Almost as quickly as man created societies, he destroyed them. He sacked cities, salted fields, slaughtered his brothers, raped his sisters, abused his children. Man had unlimited potential, yet he was trapped in a cycle of self-destructive behavior, unable to evolve beyond an essen¬tially brutal existence."

"And God had nothing to do with this?"

"No. God can't control what happens inside the bubble. He doesn't exist in the world of matter and energy. Not as God, anyway. He could only watch and try to under¬stand. As the centuries passed, he became obsessed with man, as he'd once been obsessed with himself. Why couldn't man break the cycle of violence and futility? God focused all his being on the bubble, searching for a weak point, for a way into the matrix of matter and energy that was displacing him."

"And?"

"It happened. God found himself looking at the bub¬ble from the inside. Through the eyes of a human being. Feeling human skin, smelling the Earth, looking up into a mother's face. His mother's face."

Rachel had gone still. "You're talking about Jesus now, aren't you? You're saying God went into Jesus of Nazareth."

I nodded.

"You're saying exactly what Christians believe. Only… you make it sound like an accident."

"It was, in a way. God exerted his focus upon the world, and Jesus was the door that opened to him. Why that particular child? Who knows?"

"Did all of God enter Jesus?"

"No. Imagine a burning candle. You hold a second candle up to that flame, light it, then take it away. The new candle has been lit, but the original flame remains. That's how it worked. Part of God went into Jesus. The rest remained outside our universe. Outside the bubble."

"But Jesus had God's power?"

"No. Inside the bubble, God is subject to the laws of our universe."

"And the miracles? Walking on water? Raising the dead?"

"Jesus was a healer, not a magician. Those stories were useful to those who built a religion around him."

She was shaking her head like someone with vertigo. "I don't know what to say."

"Think about it. Very little is known about Jesus' early life. We have the legend of his birth. Some child¬hood stories that are probably apocryphal. Then sud¬denly he springs to prominence fully formed at the age of thirty. I've often wondered why people don't ask more questions about Jesus' youth. Was he a perfect child? Did he love a woman? Father children? Did he sin like all men? Why this huge gap in his life?"

"I suppose you have an answer?"

"I think I do. God entered the world to try to under¬stand why mankind could evolve no further. To do that, he lived as a man. And by the time he reached adult¬hood, he had his answer. The pain and futility of human life was made bearable by the ineffable joys that human beings could experience. Beauty, laughter, love… even the simple pleasures of eating fruit or looking at an infant. Through Jesus, God felt these wonderful things. Yet he also saw the doom of mankind as a species."

"Why?"

"Man had flourished in a violent world because he had the primitive instincts to match that world. Yet if he was to continue to evolve, man had to put those instincts behind him. Evolution would never remove them. Evolution wasn't designed to produce moral beings. It's a blind engine, a mechanism of competitive warfare geared only toward survival."

Rachel looked thoughtful. "I think I see where you're going."

"Tell me."

"'Through Jesus, God tried to persuade man to turn away from his primitive instincts, away from the animal side of himself."

"Exactly. What did Jesus say and do? Forget what his followers grafted onto his life. Just think of his words and deeds."

"'Love thy neighbor as thyself. If a man strikes you on the right cheek, offer him your left.' He denied his human instincts."

"'Give up all that you have and follow me,'" I quoted. "Jesus lived by example, and people were inspired to fol¬low that example."

"But he was killed for that."

"Inevitably."

Rachel bit her bottom lip and looked out the blue square of the plane's window. "And his crucifixion? What happened on the cross?"

"He died. The flame that was in him returned to its source. It left the world of matter and energy behind."

"There was no resurrection?"

"Not of the body."

Rachel sighed heavily, then turned to me as though afraid to hear what I would say next. "What did God do then?"

"He despaired. He'd done his best as a man, and though he influenced many, his message was embellished, twisted, exploited. For two thousand years, man's chief endeavor seemed to be finding more efficient ways to destroy his own kind. Until…"

"What?"

"A few months ago."

"You're talking about Project Trinity now?"

I nodded. "Within Trinity lay the seed of salvation, for man and God. If human consciousness could be lib¬erated from the body, then the primitive instincts that had crippled man for so long could finally be left behind."

"So, what did God do?"

"He focused on the world again. But in a much smaller way. On our little group of six. Godin, Fielding, Nara, Skow, Klein… me."

"David… are you saying what I think you are?"

"God wanted back inside the bubble."

"Why?"

"Because he saw that the man most likely to reach the next state of evolution-what we call the Trinity state- was as likely to destroy mankind as he was to save it."

"Peter Godin?"

"Yes."

She looked down at her lap. "Are you telling me God chose you to stop Peter Godin from entering the Trinity computer?"

"Yes."

She nodded as though silently confirming a diagnosis, then looked up at me. I'd nodded that way countless times myself. "David, you told me back in Tennessee that you felt you'd been chosen by God. Do you feel that God is inside you now?"

"Yes."

"Just as he was in Jesus?"

"Part of that original flame is in me now. That's why I had all those dreams of Jerusalem, and why they felt like memories. They were memories."

"Oh, David… oh, no." She tilted her head back and tried to blink away tears.

"You don't have to believe me. Soon you'll see with your own eyes."

"See what? What are you going to do?"

"Stop Godin."

She turned squarely to me, her eyes resolute. "I'm going to tell you what I think. I have to, because we're going to land soon, and you've asked General Kinski to drop us into a very dangerous situation. One you're not remotely ready to go into."

"Rachel-"

"May I please tell you what I think?"

"Yes, but you didn't let me finish. I told you that to understand the beginning, you had to understand the end."

She closed her eyes, and I saw that her patience had been exhausted. I sighed in defeat. "Go ahead."

She looked hard at me. "That man sitting paralyzed in that dark room isn't God. It's you. You've never recovered from what happened to Karen and Zooey."

I couldn't believe it. She'd gone full circle, back to her original diagnosis. "And everything I've told you today?"

"Reduced to its simplest terms, what have you told me? You're on a mission from God. A mission from God to save mankind. Do you agree?"

"I guess so, yes."

"Don't you see? By believing this fantastic story, your mind escapes the terrible pain of your family's loss."

"How?"

"Inside this complex delusion, the deaths of Karen and Zooey make sense. It was their deaths that made you write your book. It was your book that got you appointed to Project Trinity. If you believe God put you inside Trinity to stop Armageddon, then the deaths of your family have meaning, rather than being a senseless tragedy."

I squeezed the armrests to try to bleed off my frustra¬tion.

"David, you have a degree in theoretical physics from MIT. Your brain could construct this fantasy while you were balancing your checkbook."

"Karen and Zooey died five years ago," I said. "Wait. Forget that argument. Do you remember what my father said about religion?"

"What?"

"Mankind is the universe becoming conscious of itself."

"I remember."

"He was more right than he knew. And something in the way he raised me is what made me open to being penetrated by God."

"But you've never believed in God!"

"Not in the traditional way. But I believe this. I know this. And if you'll give me one more minute, you'll understand why I have to go to White Sands."

"One minute? That's more than I should listen to."

"After Niels Bohr was smuggled out of Nazi-controlled territory, he went to Los Alamos. He found some very disturbed physicists there. My father was one. These naive young academics had suddenly found them¬selves working with technology powerful enough to end not only the war, but the world. Bohr calmed them down by explaining a profound principle called comple¬mentarity. He said, 'Every great and deep difficulty bears in itself its own solution.' The bomb that could destroy the world also had the power to end large-scale warfare. And it has." I tapped the armrest with my knuckles. "The Trinity computer is the same. It can end our world or save it."

Rachel leaned back in her seat and rubbed her eyes. "Don't you think you're overstating the case?"

"No."

"I can't think about this anymore."

Rather than argue, I reached over and began massag¬ing her neck. Her tension was slow to ease, but after a while she settled deeper into the seat and began to breathe with a regular rhythm. I was feeling drowsy myself when General Kinski appeared in the aisle, his leathery face looking down at me with urgency.

"What is it?" I asked.

"A heavily populated river valley in Germany was just flooded. Half a town washed away. A dam opened of its own accord."

"What does that have to do with us?" Rachel asked sleepily.

"The dam was computer-controlled. Its human opera¬tors tried to override the automated system, but the computer's action had damaged the spillway doors. Dozens of people drowned."

"Trinity?" I said.

"We believe so."

"This is just the beginning."

Kinski nodded. "I fear you're right."

"But Germany," Rachel said. "What could Germany have to do with Trinity?"

"I expect we'll know before long," said the Mossad chief. "In any case, I believe we are now at war with a machine. Could you please return to the front of the plane, Dr. Tennant? We have some more questions for you."

I got up and followed the Israeli forward.