They finned their way through the concha and into the external auditory meatus. Queasiness spread through the priest. Should they really be doing this? Did they truly have the right? Stalactites of calcified wax hung from the roof of the ear canal. Life clung to its walls: clusters of sargasso, a bumper crop of sea cucumbers. Thomas’s left flipper brushed an echinoderm, a five-pointed Asterias rubens floating through the cavern like some forsaken Star of Bethlehem.
It had taken the priest all morning to convince Crock O’Connor and the rest of the engine-flat crew that opening God’s tympanic membranes would not be sacrilegious — heaven wanted this tow, Thomas had insisted, displaying Gabriel’s feather — and now the fruits of their efforts loomed before him. Fashioned with pickaxes, ice choppers, and waterproof chain saws, the ragged slit ran vertically for fifty feet, like the entrance to a circus tent straight from the grandest dreams of P. T. Barnum.
As the dozen men bore their burden through the violated drum, Thomas’s awe became complete. God’s own ear, the very organ through which He’d heard Himself say, “Let there be light,” the exact apparatus through which the Big Bang’s aftershock had reached His brain. Again Rafferty signaled, and the divers thrashed their flippers vigorously, stirring up tornadoes of bubbles and maelstroms of sloughed cells. Inch by inch, the anchor ascended, rising past the undulating cilia that lined the membrane’s inner surface, finally coming to rest against the huge and delicate bones of the middle ear. Malleus, incus, stapes, Thomas recited to himself as the searchlights struck the massive triad. Hammer, anvil, stirrup.
Another sign from Rafferty. Team A moved with a single mind, guiding the anchor’s right fluke over the long, firm process of the anvil, binding the Valparaíso to God.
Now: the moment of truth. Rafferty pushed off, gliding free of the kedge and gesturing for the others to do likewise. Thomas — everyone — dropped away. The anchor swung back and forth on the anvil, its great steel ring oscillating like the pendulum of some stupendous Newtonian clock, but the ligaments held, and the bone did not break. The twelve men applauded themselves, slapping their neoprene gloves together in a soundless, slow-motion ovation.
Rafferty saluted the priest. Thomas reciprocated. Flush with success, he hugged the chain and, like Theseus reeling in his thread, began following this sure and certain path back to the ship.
Christ was smirking. Cassie was certain of it. Now that she looked carefully, she saw that the face on Father Thomas’s crucifix wore an expression of utter self-satisfaction. And why not? Jesus had been right all along, hadn’t He? The world had indeed been fashioned by an anthropomorphic Father.
Father, not Mother: that was the rub. Somehow, against all odds, the patriarchs who’d penned the Bible had intuited the truth of things. Theirs was the gender the universe folly endorsed. Womankind was a mere shadow of the prototype.
Around and around Cassie paced the cabin, wearing a ragged path in the green shag carpet.
Naturally she wanted to explain the body away. Naturally she’d be delighted if any of the crew’s paranoid fantasies — CIA plot, Trilateralist conspiracy, whatever — could be proven correct.
But she couldn’t deny her instincts: as soon as the priest had named the thing, she’d experienced eerie intimations of its authenticity. And even if it were a hoax, she reasoned, the world’s innumerable boobs and know-nothings, should they learn of its existence, would accept and exploit it anyway, just as they’d accepted and exploited the Shroud of Turin, the hallucinations of Saint Bernadette, and a thousand such idiocies in the face of thorough refutation. So, whether reality or fabrication, truth or illusion, Anthony Van Horne’s cargo threatened to usher in the New Dark Ages as surely as the Manhattan Project had ushered in the Epoch of the Bomb.
Cassie wrung her hands, callus grinding against callus, by-products of the hours she’d spent chipping rust off the athwart-ships catwalk.
Okay, it was dead, a step in the right direction. But that fact alone, she believed, while of undoubted relevance to people like Father Thomas and Able Seaman Zook, did not remove the danger. A corpse was far too easy a thing to rationalize. Christianity had been doing it for two thousand years. The Lord’s intangible essence, the phallocrats and misogynists would say, His infinite mind and eternal spirit, were as viable as ever.
Inevitably, she thought of her favorite moment from her irascible retelling of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac: the scene in which Runkleberg’s wife, Melva, smears her hands with her own menstrual flow. “I shall guard my son’s blood with my own,” Melva vows. “Somehow, some way — no matter what it takes — I shall keep this monstrous thing from happening.”
Slowly, methodically, Cassie removed the crucifix from the bulkhead and, taking hold of the brad, worked it free.
Gritting her teeth, she pushed the tiny spike into her thumb.
“Ow…”
As she withdrew the nail, a large red pearl appeared. She entered the bathroom, stood before the mirror, and began to paint, left cheek, left jaw, chin, right jaw, right cheek, pausing periodically to squeeze out more blood. By the time clotting occurred, a thick, smeary line ran around Cassie’s face, as if she were wearing a mask of herself.
Somehow, some way — no matter what it took — she would send the God of Western Patriarchy to the bottom of the sea.
Now, only now, standing on the starboard wing with the wind howling, the sea roaring, and the great corpse bobbing behind him — only now did it occur to Anthony that the tow might not work. Their cargo was big, bigger than he’d ever imagined. Assuming the anchors held, the chains remained whole, the boilers stayed in one piece, and the windlasses didn’t rip loose and fly into the ocean — assuming all these things, the sheer drag might still prove too much for the Val to handle.
Lifting the walkie-talkie to his lips, he tweaked the channel selector and tuned in the engine flat.
“Van Horne here. We got steam on deck?”
“Enough to make a pig sweat,” said Crock O’Connor.
“We’re gonna try for eighty rpm’s, Crock. Can we do it without busting a gut?”
“Only one way to find out, sir.”
Anthony turned toward the wheelhouse, waving to the quartermaster and giving Marbles Rafferty a thumbs-up. So far the first mate had acquitted himself brilliantly at the console, keeping the carcass directly astern and two thousand yards away, perfectly pacing the Val with her cargo’s three-knot drift. (Too bad Operation Jehovah was a secret, for this was exactly the sort of venture that might earn Rafferty the coveted paper declaring him “Master of United States Steam or Motor Vessels of Any Gross Tons upon Oceans.”) The kid at the helm knew his stuff, too: Neil Weisinger, the same AB who’d performed so splendidly during Hurricane Beatrice. But even with Sinbad the Sailor manning the throttles and Horatio J. Hornblower holding the wheel, winching in this particular load would still be, Anthony knew, the trickiest maneuver of his career.
Pivoting to stern, the captain surveyed the windlasses: two gargantuan cylinders twenty feet in diameter, like bass drums built to pace the music of the spheres. A mile beyond rose God’s balding cranium, His white mane glinting in the morning sun, each hair as thick as a transatlantic cable.
The mourners had all left. Perhaps they’d completed their duties — “swimming shivah” as Weisinger liked to put it — but more probably it was the ship that had driven them away. At some level, Anthony believed, they knew the whole story: the Matagorda Bay tragedy and what it had done to their brothers and sisters. They couldn’t stand to be in the same ocean with the Carpco Valparaíso.