The Enclave (39 page)

“The theory of evolution is not a belief system!” Maia Ahmed-White declared derisively. “It’s proven fact.”

“Is it?” Cam turned his gaze toward her. “How many of us, not being paleontologists, have actually seen the evidence that allegedly proves it? The way I understand it, the bulk of the theory rests on a slew of hypothetical ancestors the fossil record does not begin to support. But even that I don’t know for sure, since, again, I’m no paleontologist. I must take the respective experts at their words. Which is another way of saying ‘by faith.’ ”

His conclusion was met first with shocked silence, then sputtering outrage.

“That’s ridiculous!” cried Ahmed-White. “Humankind’s breadth of knowledge is simply too great for any one person to have intimate experience with all the evidence. If we don’t take the various experts at their words, no one would ever get anything done.”

“Which is my point,” Cam agreed. On the table to his left, the black box quivered as if it were made of gelatin rather than hard plastic—but only if he wasn’t looking right at it. Far from exuding calm, it stood his hairs on end and filled him with restlessness.

“Science builds on the work of other scientists,” said someone. “There’s nothing wrong with that!”

Cam pulled his mind back to the discussion. Searching in vain for the speaker, his glance caught on Nelson Poe, who sat hunched in a chair not far from Lacey, seeming inexplicably tense as he studied his hands folded in his lap. It wasn’t Poe who’d spoken, though; Cam would have recognized his voice.

“I’m not saying it’s wrong,” he said, giving up on a direct answer.“ I’m just saying it involves faith. I can put my faith in the word of various scientists and in the assumption that they and their predecessors have properly assembled, evaluated, and reported all the relevant evidence regarding the origins of our world, or I can believe what God has told us about such things in His Word.”

“First you have to believe the Bible
is
His Word,” said Dr. Orozco.

“No!” interjected Ahmed-White. “First you have to believe that God exists at all, and frankly, I don’t know how you can be involved in science and believe that.”

“I don’t know how you can be involved in science and not,” Cam countered. “So maybe the real question here is not why don’t I believe in evolution, but why
do
I believe in God? And why do many of you present today choose not to?”

Beside him the box edged forward and closer to him, quivering ever more frantically, as if demanding his attention. He shifted position to put it out of his field of sight, and turned his gaze toward those seated right of center.

“Well,” said Gen, “it has always seemed obvious to me there is no God. Just look at the chaos and suffering in the world.”

“God is just a human construct,” said Ahmed-White, “left over from an age when people did not understand the underpinnings of our world. God worship gave them answers to the questions of where they came from and why they are here.”

“And now that we’ve found the answers for ourselves,” said Gen, “we don’t need it anymore.” She shook her head in puzzlement. “You’re a man of learning, Cameron. I should think this would be obvious to you.”

“You like the answers your conclusions give you, then?” Cam asked.

“That we came from slime, a random accident, and there is no purpose for our lives?”

“We make our own purpose.”

“Ah.” He let the silence draw itself out.

Then, seemingly out of the blue, Aaron Stiles blurted, “It’s part of religion’s purpose to blind people. That’s why it always goes after the kids. If you’re raised in a particular belief, when you grow up you can’t break free.” He glanced down at Jade, who’d turned to look up at him as he spoke, and gave her a triumphant smile. For winning the bet on whether he’ d have the courage to bait his boss, perhaps?

“My parents are unbelievers,” Cam said. “I was not raised in any church. I believed in Christ on a dark desert plain in Afghanistan when I was twenty-one.”

“Before you went to college,” Gen noted.

“Nothing I’ve learned in university has changed what I believed that night in the desert.” His restlessness was deepening into outright anxiety, and his pulse pounded in his ears as a high-pitched whine now wrapped itself around his head, making it harder and harder to hear anything else.

Gen drew the conversation back to reasons why she didn’t believe in God, and there followed a lively interchange among the crowd, which he only partially heard, where various members of the meeting voiced their objections to blind faith, magical thinking, superstition, and the other usual protests.

“Where is God when we have all this misery and suffering?”

“If the Bible says we’re to pray for whatever we want and we’ll get it, why haven’t all the cancer patients been healed?”

“If He is love, how can He allow wars and famines and serial killers . . . ?”

Increasingly distracted by the quivering box and the mounting whine, Cam was caught off guard when the diatribe finally ran down and their attention returned to him. Having affirmed their mutual beliefs in materialism, facts, and their own flawless logic, they defied him to say anything about God that could possibly fit into those three criteria.

The waterfall in the atrium had grown into a roar, as if trying to drown out the box’s whine. It didn’t help that a voice at the back of his mind derided him for his anxiety. Here was his chance to proclaim truth. He knew what he believed. He knew he wasn’t what they thought, that his reasons were not without logic or basis. Yet he shook like a whipped dog and said nothing.
Gutless
is what Gen called him.

She prodded him. “So, Doctor, what do you have to say to all of that?”

He looked at the people around him, tried desperately to haul his mind back to the issues, and prayed for words. And amazingly, they came: “There’s too much complex order and design in the natural realm to think otherwise.”

“Order and design?” Gen cried. “What about all the chaos and suffering?”

“Suffering and chaos are mostly products of the free will of sinful men.”

“Tsunamis? Earthquakes? Mudslides? Those are the result of sinful men?”

“Those are evidence that the world is fallen along with the people that live in it.”

“I thought you just said there was order and design in it all.”

He stared at her, wondering if she really couldn’t understand what he’d meant or just didn’t want to.

“And how can the
world
be fallen? Natural processes don’t have . . .”

The whine surged, drowning out her words. He concentrated harder, trying to hear past it, but she stopped talking before he could figure out what she’ d said.

“Are you all right, Doctor?” Gen was regarding him curiously.

“I’m fine. The point is, you cannot prove the existence of an immaterial being if you demand that proof be made in material terms.” He wasn’t sure that was the point at all, since he’d forgotten what he’ d been trying to get across and had no idea what she’ d just said in rebuttal. But his statement
was
the crux of the matter.

“Hah!” Gen cried in exultation. “You admit, then, that He doesn’t exist.”

“I admit that One who is spirit by definition cannot be measured by empirical means. But rationalism
can
logically deduce His existence from what we see that He has made—the detail, the complexity, the inherent purpose in biological life and systems alone show that.”

“That is an inference, not a proof.”

“And what is evolution but the conclusion to a string of inferences?” he asked, somewhat testily.

She ignored him, turning her attention to their audience even as she pretended to speak to him. “You refuse to admit defeat, even though you’ve just conceded the fact there is no proof for God’s existence.” At her fingertips the box was literally jumping about now, seeming to fly at him every time he looked at it. Yet none of the others appeared to notice, all of them staring hard at Cam.

“There is no more proof for God’s existence than there is for fairies,” Gen declared. “Or unicorns. Or flying spaghetti monsters . . .”

Maybe the box wasn’t flying at him. Maybe it was actually drawing him into itself. . . . Cameron dragged his attention back to her words. “Except that no fairies, unicorns, or flying spaghetti monsters have sent us a communication proclaiming their existence—”

“Communication? You’re hearing voices now?”

“I’m referring to the Bible.”

She reddened, realizing she’d missed his obvious point and immediately countered with, “The Bible?! That thing is so full of inaccuracies, so full of nonsensical happenings, myths, and magical stories! It’s obviously man’s creation of his god. . . .”

The box leapt off the table at Cam and pulled him into it.

Suddenly he was riding in a small electric cart along the narrow, roughhewn stone corridor that led to the tomb hidden deep beneath the highest peaks of the Hindu Kush.

“Have you ever heard of Nimrod?” asked their guide, the Afghani archaeologist Dr. Sayid Khalili.

Rudy said they hadn’t, but he was lying.

“Great-grandson of Noah, grandson of Ham,” said Khalili. “King of Akkadia and the builder of the Tower of Babel. You know. In your Christian Bible.”

The cart’s head lamps showed that the tunnel opened into a larger chamber up ahead, their glare reflected off a pair of closed stone doors.

“We think this may be his tomb.”

“Why would the tomb of the builder of the Tower of Babel in Iraq be all the way up here in the Hindu Kush?” Rudy asked.

“We aren’t sure,” said Khalili as they entered and crossed the vast room. “But the friezes are consistent with what we know of him.” He slowed the cart as they approached the huge double doors, which were maybe forty feet high, and came to a stop in front of the smaller humansized opening that had been cut into one of them. A metal door painted to match the stone covered the opening, and now Khalili got out and unlocked the padlocked chain that held it shut. The door squealed open, and he led them into the long, high-ceilinged hall beyond.

Electric lights on tall metal stands lined both walls, their illumination barely glinting off a ceiling some fifty feet above them. At the gallery’s end hung a second pair of closed gargantuan doors, these adorned with bas-relief friezes of fish and ocean waves. The walls themselves were also lined with friezes, these of thirty-foot-tall warriors carrying swords, shields, lances, and other implements that looked more like bazookas or automatic assault rifles in stylized form than ancient combat gear. Cam eyed them curiously as he followed the others, footfalls echoing around them.

Their faces were handsome, stern, heavy-browed. Their eyes caught the light as if gems had been placed in the stone. They glowered down at the buglike intruders, and he could almost feel their disdain. Could almost hear their muttering in the air currents that sighed about them.

In one of the great doors at the hall’s end, another small opening had been cut out and sealed with a painted metal door. Again they waited while Khalili unlocked the chain and pulled the door open. This time they had to stoop down to step through the revealed opening. As Cam came in after Rudy and straightened up, Dr. Khalili turned the light switch, and the immediate area brightened as several standing lamps blazed. The spacious chamber before them was empty but for a single chest-high pedestal about twenty-five feet long, atop which rested a giant, stony, podlike object. Black crystalline cubes littered the floor around it.

“Ah,”
said one of the constantly muttering voices,
“you’ve returned.
Now come and let us out.”

Behind them, Khalili flipped more switches, and four parallel lines of standing lamps revealed themselves, lighting in dominolike cascade to illumine the arena-sized chamber beyond the entry alcove. It was so large Cam wasn’t sure he was seeing all the way to the end, and it was filled with sarcophagi, each as large as the first. And each of them, it seemed, had a voice, all demanding that the intruders come and release them.

He took a giant, gulping breath and returned abruptly to the common area outside the atrium, still seated in the chair, staring at the startled faces of his co-workers. His heart raced; sweat dribbled down his sides and trickled from his brow. Confusion amplified the terror that already gripped him, and he flinched hard at the sudden squawk of a parrot from the atrium.

Beside him, Genevieve leaned over the end table. “Dr. Reinhardt? Are you ill?”

Pain in his fingers drew his attention to his hands, gripping the chair’s arms like vises. He looked down at his hands but saw the box instead, resting right beside his left hand, practically touching it. Aversion and horror exploded within him as he realized what it was and knocked it violently off the table, so hard it sailed out into the midst of his startled audience. He stared up into scores of pale, wide-eyed faces, trying to figure out who these people were and why they were here.

He drew a long, calming breath and felt his muscles unlock. As the panic bled away, he realized he’ d had another flashback, right in front of everyone.

“Doctor?” Gen repeated.

He drew another breath and said, “No. I’m not ill.”

“Another one of your episodes?” She leaned back, an almost-smile on her face. “I thought you were over those.”

He turned away from her, embarrassment rushing in to replace the fear.

The others were glancing around now and shifting uncomfortably in their seats.

“Just exactly what
did
happen in Afghanistan, anyway?” Gen pressed.

“I counted a lot of beans,” he said dryly. His eyes fell then on the black box, which was being passed forward by those in the audience on its way back to Gen, and sudden horror filled him. Was it mere coincidence that Swain would have chosen as symbol of his institute an object that exactly matched the cubes associated with the sarcophagi? that exactly matched the cubes associated with the sarcophagi?

“Is that what drove you to your faith?” Gen’s words intruded on his thoughts. “Whatever happened there?”

He stood. “I think our time is up, Gen. Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a lot of work to do this evening.”