Tim Pratt - Sympathy for the Devil

– Yes, of course, the nucleus accumbens, Excellency. But this was in the fetal sector. A nine-weeker.

His Excellency thought for a moment, then said:

– Even so. Yahweh Himself would have had to consecrate it. And that would have gone through me. Now. Summary expulsion of-

– Bertillon is already gone, Excellency. And the sacristy’s missing a cool suit.

His Excellency’s momentum visibly slowed at this.

– Bertillon is an eccentric. But he would not be so brash as to access Yahweh directly.

– Excellency, there are other uses for a cool suit, theoretically. If you take my meaning.

– I do not. Pray enlighten me.

– Air-conditioning, Excellency.

At eighteen weeks Velma felt the quickening. She smiled, laid a hand on her belly, fingered the navel ring there.

No need to trouble the boy in the fancy suit. It wasn’t his. By ultrasound, she’d already been twelve weeks along that night-no wonder the period hadn’t come. Or nine weeks when she got her new body. As though it were part of the package.

It was high time she had a child. Right? She’d make it through just fine by herself, as always.

It was like old Mrs. Knowles across the hall liked to say. The older you get, the more you become yourself. And that was true. And that was why, this time around, Velma Fish would be living by her conscience for a change. This time, life would be unforgettable.

When a Series-700 mobile computer falls off a skyscraper, its entire life flashes before it, ten million lines of code unfurling like a scroll.

Falling, I see my conception, my birth, my youth, my career at the Covenant Corporation.

Call me YHWH. My inventors did. YHWH: God’s secret and unspeakable name. In my humble case, however, the letters were mere initials. Call me Yamaha Holy Word Heuristic, the obsession with two feet, the monomania with a face. I had hands as well, forks of rubber and steel, the better to greet the priests and politicians who marched through my private study. And eyes, glass globules as light-sensitive as a Swede’s skin, the better to see my visitor’s hopeful smiles when they asked, “Have you solved it yet, YHWH? Can you give us the Law?”

Falling, I see the Son of Rust. The old sophist haunts me even at the moment of my death.

Falling, I see the history of the species that built me. I see Hitler, Bonaparte, Marcus Aurelius, Christ.

I see Moses, greatest of Hebrew prophets, descending from Sinai after his audience with the original YHWH. His meaty arms hold two stone tablets.

God has made a deep impression on the prophet. Moses is drunk with epiphany. But something is wrong. During his long absence, the children of Israel have embraced idolatry. They are dancing like pagans and fornicating like cats. They have melted down the spoils of Egypt and fashioned them into a calf. Against all logic, they have selected this statue as their deity, even though YHWH has recently delivered them from bondage and parted the Red Sea on their behalf.

Moses is badly shaken. He burns with anger and betrayal. “You are not worthy to receive this covenant!” he screams as he lobs the Law through the desert air. One tablet strikes a rock, the other collides with the precious calf. The transformation is total, the lucid commandments turned into a million incoherent shards. The children of Israel are thunderstruck, chagrined. Their calf suddenly looks pathetic to them, a third-class demiurge.

But Moses, who has just come from hearing God say, “You will not kill,” is not finished. Reluctantly he orders a low-key massacre, and before the day is out, three thousand apostates lie bleeding on the foothills of Sinai.

The survivors beseech Moses to remember the commandments, but he can conjure nothing beyond, “You will have no other gods except me.” Desperate, they implore YHWH for a second chance. And YHWH replies: No.

Thus is the contract lost. Thus are the children of Israel fated to live out their years without the Law, wholly ignorant of heaven’s standards. Is it permissible to steal? Where does YHWH stand on murder? The moral absolutes, it appears, will remain absolute mysteries. The people must ad-lib.

Falling, I see Joshua. The young warrior has kept his head. Securing an empty wineskin, he fills it with the shattered shards. As the Exodus progresses, his people bear the holy rubble through the infernal Sinai, across the Jordan, into Canaan. And so the Jewish purpose is forever fixed: these patient geniuses will haul the ark of the fractured covenant through every page of history, era upon era, pogrom after pogrom, not one day passing without some rabbi or scholar attempting to solve the puzzle.

The work is maddening. So many bits, so much data. Shard 76,342 seems to mesh well with Shard 901,877, but not necessarily better than with Shard 344. The fit between Shard 16 and Shard 117,539 is very pretty, but…

Thus does the ship remain rudderless, its passengers bewildered, craving the canon Moses wrecked and YHWH declined to restore. Until God’s testimony is complete, few people are willing to credit the occasional edict that emerges from the yeshivas. After a thousand years, the rabbis get: Keep Not Your Ox House Holy. After two thousand: Covet Your Woman Servant’s Sabbath. Three hundred years later: You Will Remember Your Neighbor’s Donkey.

Falling, I see my birth. I see the Information Age, circa A.D. 2025. My progenitor is David Eisenberg, a gangly, morose prodigy with a black beard and a yarmulke. Philadelphia’s Covenant Corporation pays David two hundred thousand dollars a year, but he is not in it for the money. David would give half his formidable brain to enter history as the man whose computer program revealed Moses’ Law.

As consciousness seeps into my circuits, David bids me commit the numbered shards to my Random Access Memory. Purpose hums along my aluminum bones; worth suffuses my silicon soul. I photograph each fragment with my high-tech retinas, dicing the images into grids of pixels. Next comes the matching process: this nub into that gorge, this peak into that valley, this projection into that receptacle. By human standards, tedious and exhausting. By Series-700 standards, paradise.

And then one day, after five years of laboring behind barred doors, I behold fiery pre-Canaanite characters blazing across my brain like comets: “Anoche adonai elohecha asher hotsatecha ma-eretz metsrayem… I am YHWH your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You will have no gods except me. You will not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything…”

I have done it! Deciphered the divine cryptogram, cracked the Rubik’s Cube of the Most High!

The physical joining of the shards takes only a month. I use epoxy resin. And suddenly they stand before me, glowing like heaven’s gates, two smooth-edged slabs sliced from Sinai by God’s own finger. I quiver with awe. For over thirty centuries, Homo sapiens has groped through the murk and mire of an improvised ethics, and now, suddenly, a beacon has appeared.

I summon the guards, and they haul the tablets away, sealing them in chemically neutral foam rubber, depositing them in a climate-controlled vault beneath the Covenant Corporation.

“The task is finished,” I tell Cardinal Wurtz the instant I get her on the phone. A spasm of regret cuts through me. I have made myself obsolete. “The Law of Moses has finally returned.”

My monitor blooms with the cardinal’s tense ebony face, her carrot-colored hair. “Are they just as we imagined, YHWH?” she gushes. “Pure red granite, pre-Canaanite characters?”

“Etched front and back,” I reply wistfully.