Blameless in Abaddon (45 page)

“But surely the pre-coma God could have suspended a natural law when He saw it was causing pain,” said Lovett.

Cranach responded to this challenge pretty much as Job had done back in the divine brain: yes, the Defendant could have broken His own rules, but the more He did so, the more disorderly the universe would have become, until its utter randomness drove its inhabitants mad. “Which is not to say He
never
intervened. For all we know, there were hundreds of times when He looked down, noticed that a famine or a flood was in the offing, and willed it out of existence.”

“There might have been a thousand such times,” said Lovett.

“Or a million,” said Cranach.

“Or none at all,” muttered Martin.

“The catastrophes you've mentioned so far all exemplify natural evil,” said Lovett, glancing at Cranach as if the witness had just dealt him a straight flush. “What about moral evil? Shouldn't the Defendant have stepped in whenever a child was about to be molested or a massacre about to occur?”

“No.”

“No?”

Here it comes, thought Martin, the second great Jobian beast, the Leviathan of
liberum arbitrium.

Lovett and Cranach spent the rest of the day on a meticulous presentation of the free will defense. From his conversation with Adrian and Evangeline, Martin already knew the basics: if free will is to be a fully functional virtue, then it must belong to everyone, including those who would exploit it to swindle, plunder, rape, and kill. Cranach's elaboration proved both erudite and nuanced, peppered with references to Augustine's
De libero arbitrio
, Gregory the Great's
Moralia
, Saint Anselm's
De casu diaboli
, and Thomas Aquinas's
Summa theologiae.
When at last the lecture was done, Martin understood as never before the argument's iron logic. Given the alternatives of creating either robots wired to eschew iniquity or autonomous beings blessed with real choices, God had rightly opted for the latter.

“It seems to me the free will defense handles not only moral evil but also existential evil,” said Lovett.

“Absolutely. The gift of
liberum arbitrium
permits us to produce many impressive if prideful inventions: railroad trains, ocean-going ships, opera houses. All these inventions involve a potential for disaster—trains collide, ships sink, opera houses catch fire—but we're prepared to assume such risks in the name of progress and creativity.”

“Better to build an airplane, even though it may succumb to gravity, than to remain forever on the ground, confined by our Creator's loving desire to protect us?”

“I couldn't have put it more cogently.”

“Thank you for your enlightening testimony, Brother Sebastian. I have nothing further.”

 

When Martin awoke the following morning, the crab awoke with him, fastening its claws around his femurs and biting voraciously into his shoulders. Cancer patients have two kinds of days, he remembered Blumenberg telling him—bad days and terrible days. This was going to be a terrible day. He consumed four Roxanols and began to dress, all the while staring at the fifty 2cc vials of Odradex on his bureau. Did this forbidding ocher fluid really have the power to cure him? Could it truly end this agony forever?

Take a vial
, said his pain.
Just one vial won't cloud your mind.

“Not till I've had my shot at Cranach,” said Martin out loud.

Go ahead.

“No.”

Take a vial, Martin. Curse God, and live.

“I can't. No. My Jobians are counting on me.”

At 9:35
A.M.
, as Martin started across the Peace Palace plaza, his goal of spending the whole day cross-examining Cranach began to seem nothing but a preposterous fantasy. Fiery spasms tore through his pelvis and spine like lightning bolts hurled by the pre-coma Jehovah. Each upward step was an ordeal. Sensing his distress, Olaf and Gunnar slid their hands under his armpits, lifted him two inches off the ground, and carried him bodily into the courtroom.

Before Torvald could call the tribunal to order, Martin convened a colloquy comprising Lovett, Randall, the judges, and himself: the sort of hiatus the Court TV reporters loved, he mused—an opportunity for them to wallow in Louis Brady's bunnies, Mona Drake's calendar art, and related insipidities. Lovett agreed that Randall could cross-examine Cranach, provided Martin took over the instant he felt equal to the task.

Eyes aflame with nihilistic zeal, Randall strolled up to the prosecution table and appropriated a portion of Esther's breakfast: a doughnut dusted with confectioner's sugar.

“Let me guess,” she said. “The cosmic doughnut?”

“By the time I finish with Cranach”—he faced the lectern and started away—“he'll be wearing it through his nose.”

Randall began by feeling out the ontological defense. “The universe, okay?” he said, holding up Esther's doughnut for Cranach and the rest of the world to see. “Now, my question to you, sir”—he placed the doughnut to his eye, like a monocle—“is this: why does there have to be a hole at all? Why couldn't God have created a cosmic waffle instead?”

Cranach loosened the belt of his wool robe. “Even an omnipotent being must obey the demands of logic. The pre-coma God could not have purged Creation of matter, energy, and physical laws without simultaneously annihilating it. Leibniz, please remember, argued that ours is the best of all
possible
worlds. You're asking—illogically—for God to have made the best of all
impossible
worlds. A flawless universe wouldn't be a universe at all. It would be God Himself.”

“You haven't answered my question.” Randall screwed his index finger through the doughnut hole. “Why aren't we living in a cosmic waffle?”

The witness responded by evoking Leibniz again, whereupon Randall tried his waffle metaphor once more, and then the two of them went around and around this same metaphysical mulberry bush a dozen more times, and before they knew it an hour had elapsed.

ARID APES
, Martin wrote,
IS A DRAPE, A DESPAIR, PARADISE
.

PARADISE
?

PARADISE
!

A sudden excitement overcame him, a spasm of delight radiating through flesh more accustomed to pain. Paradise . . . Elysium . . . Heaven . . . yes! “I've
got
it,” he whispered.

“Got what?” asked Esther.

“The answer to the ontological defense. The free will theory too, now that I think about it.”

Having failed to make a dent in ontology, Randall began hammering away at
liberum arbitrium.
“If freedom is a gift from God, and if that gift inevitably causes cruelty and injustice, then why isn't He responsible for those evils?”

“Thomas Aquinas addressed that problem seven hundred years ago,” said Cranach. “In a brilliant melding of the free will argument with the ontological defense, Thomas reasoned that the average individual sooner or later loses touch with the divine harmony of the cosmos. This lapse is not itself an evil. It is not even a phenomenon. It is simply a
privation:
an ontological gap that occasionally inclines a person to behave wickedly. But if human sinfulness proceeds from a non-event—from a hole without a cause—then the question of agency becomes meaningless, and God cannot be held accountable.”

“I see,” said Randall morosely.

When the lunch hour arrived, Martin realized he was much too tired to leave the table, so he asked Esther to bring him a snack from the nearest Nordzee. She returned with a
haringsalade
accompanied by French fries suspended in mayonnaise. Martin ate eagerly, and a few minutes later his energy level rose. Whether this improvement traced to the food, the opium, or the fact that he'd finally deciphered
arid apes
, he really couldn't say. He knew only that he was ready to tackle Cranach.

“I imagine you believe in Heaven,” said Martin, staring fixedly at the witness while steadying himself on the lectern. “Quite so.”

“An amazing neck of the woods, I hear. An ideal world.”

“True enough.”

“Then I'm confused. Doesn't your ontological solution argue that an ideal world cannot exist?”

Cranach remained imperially unperturbed. “Heaven isn't like other places.”

“But it can still be distinguished from God. Correct?”

“More or less.”

“Which forces me to conclude either that Paradise is flawed or that the ontological solution is bogus. Is Paradise flawed, Brother Sebastian? Is there a rusty hinge on the pearly gates? Does Gabriel's harp have a broken string?”

“If Heaven contains flaws—”

“Or perhaps there's a child somewhere: one lonely, wretched, abused child—Ivan Karamazov's tortured five-year-old, locked away in a freezing outhouse, screaming for help.”

“If Heaven contains flaws, they aren't what we normally regard as flaws.”

“Then why can't
Earth
contain flaws we don't normally regard as flaws? Why can't it have slithy toves and borogoves instead of meningitis and Buchenwald?”

“You're assuming an analogy between two different ontological planes.”

The crab clawed its way into both of Martin's pubic bones. He grimaced, groaned, and said, “Maybe so, but—”

“There's no ‘maybe' about it. The Kingdom of God is completely discontinuous with the material cosmos.”

Martin mopped his eyes with Patricia's scarf, fighting both his pain and the fear his pain instilled. Oh, hell, he thought, there's an answer to my answer. “Nevertheless, we have to—”

“Ergo, no contradiction exists between the ontological solution and the promise of Christian redemption.”

“In your opinion.”

“In my opinion—
and
in the opinion of the Holy Catholic Church.”

“Let's move on,” said Martin, forcing the words between his clenched teeth. “The so-called free will defense states that most
liberum arbitrium
creatures must eventually wander into error. And yet your Holy Catholic Church exists primarily to celebrate an exception to this rule. Jesus Christ had free will. True?”

“Among his other assets.”

“Then it follows—does it not?—that the defense fails. Or did Jesus sometimes wander into error?”

“Jesus was—”

“Perfect. Exactly. Did the dishes, kept quiet in libraries, never burned a witch at the stake.”

“Of
course
he was perfect,” said Cranach. “He was divine.”

“Yes, but he was also a
man.
A man, sir. Deny that, and you're committing the Docetist heresy.” I've nailed him, thought Martin. Checkmate. “You're not a Docetist, are you?”

“Nobody's a Docetist anymore. What are you saying, Mr. Candle? Are you saying God should have populated the cosmos with nothing but emanations of Himself?”

“A planet of Jesuses might be pretty boring, but I'd prefer it to one featuring, say, Vlad the Impaler and Pol Pot.”

“You must understand that Christ cannot be grasped apart from the Godhead. He was not a ‘
liberum arbitrium
creature,' as you put it. He was not a ‘creature' at all.”

The crab bit clean through Martin's coccyx. He moaned, gritted his teeth, and hugged the lectern as if it were a handrail on the Heaven to Hell roller coaster. “Then what was he?”

“You know perfectly well what Jesus was. He was God incarnate, Mr. Candle—God incarnate.”

Martin gasped, partly from the crab's predations, partly from Cranach's recalcitrance: a long, low, whistling noise he feared the judges would interpret not as a cry of pain but as an admission of defeat.

“No further questions.”

 

As Martin eased back into his chair—slowly, carefully, so as not to antagonize the crab—Lovett told Torvald he felt no need to redirect the witness. I blew it, thought Martin. I failed to defeat ontology and freedom, and now they're on the loose. In his mind he saw the beasts attacking his courageous Jobians: Behemoth stomping Christopher Ransom into the dust and crushing Wanda Jo Jenkins's head between his jaws, Leviathan chewing off Stanley Pallomar's remaining arm and incinerating Harry Elder with a single fiery sneeze.

“The defense—at long last—calls Martin Candle.”

With the aid of his crocodile cane, he rose. Aiming himself toward the stand, he realized a fever now possessed him, twisting reality into odd, elongated shapes, as if God had constructed the world from Silly Putty instead of wood and clay. His progress down the aisle was halting, each step attained at the price of a spasm. In its entire career as his private torturer, the crab had never behaved with such Torquemadan zeal. Shivering, he sank into the witness chair, rested his cane on his knees, and blatantly lobbed four Roxanols into his mouth.

The usher came forward. Martin grasped the World Court's Dutch Reformed Bible, each shift of ligament and bone triggering an explosion of pain. He swore to tell the truth.

“You appear to be unwell,” said Lovett, his voice reverberating off the paneled walls.

Martin nodded. “I'll get through this.”

“Perhaps we should postpone the interview.”

“I said I'll get through it.”

Lovett marched up to the usher, secured the World Court's Bible, and returned to the lectern. “May I assume you're familiar with the Book of Job?”

Martin ground his molars together, seeking to dislodge any stray grains of Roxanol and deliver them to his brain. “I've read it fifteen times.”

“Then I'm sure you remember that dramatic moment in chapter thirty-one when Job requests an audience with his Creator. ‘Let the Almighty state his case against me . . . I would plead the whole record of my life and present that in court as my defense.' Shortly afterward, God appears, and the first thing He says is, ‘Where were you when I laid the foundations of the Earth?'”