James Morrow - Towing Jehovah

Thomas treated himself to a hearty swallow of Old Milwaukee. “Hard to say. Close to seven million tons, I’d guess.” The enjoyment of cold beer was probably the closest he ever came to sinning — beer, and the pride he took in seeing himself footnoted in The Journal of Experimental Physics — beer, footnotes, and the viscous oblations that followed his occasional purchase of a Playboy. “Captain, how do you see this voyage of ours?”

“Huh?”

“What’s our purpose?”

Van Horne flopped into his ruptured couch. “We’re giving Him a decent burial.”

“Your angel say anything about resuscitation?”

“Nope.”

Thomas closed his eyes, as if he were about to offer his undergraduates some particularly difficult and disconcerting idea, like strange attractors or the many-worlds hypothesis. “The Catholic Church is not an institution that readily abandons hope. Her position is this: while the divine heart has evidently stopped beating, the divine nervous system may still boast a few healthy cells. In short, the Holy Father proposes we apply the science of cryonics to this crisis. Do you know what I’m talking about?”

“We should get God on ice before His brain dies?”

“Precisely. Personally, I believe the Pope’s being far too optimistic.”

An uncanny but entirely reasonable gleam overcame Van Horne, the inevitable luminescence of a man who’s been given the opportunity to save the universe. “But if he’s not being too optimistic,” said the captain, a mild tremor in his voice, “how much time … ?”

“The Vatican computer wants us to cross the Arctic Circle no later than the eighteenth of August.”

Van Horne chugged down the rest of his beer. “Damn, I wish we had the Val now. I’d leave with the morning tide, crew or no.

“Your ship arrived in New York Harbor last night.”

The captain slammed the empty bottle onto the AT T spool. “She’s here? Why didn’t you tell me?”

“Don’t know why. Sorry.” Thomas collected the photos and slipped them back into his Bible. He knew perfectly well why. It was a matter of power and control, a matter of convincing this strange, oil-haunted man that Holy Mother Church, not Anthony Van Horne, was running the show. “Pier Eighty-eight…”

In a flurry of movement the captain pulled on a pair of mirrorshades and a John Deere fits-all visor cap. “Excuse me, Padre. I gotta go visit my ship.”

“It’s awfully late.”

“You don’t have to come.”

“Yes, I do.”

“Oh? Why?”

“Because the SS Carpco Valparaíso is currently under Vatican jurisdiction” — Thomas offered the scowling captain a long, meandering smile — “and no one, not even you, can board her without my permission.”

In his life and travels Anthony Van Horne had seen the Taj Mahal, the Parthenon, and his ex-fiancйe Janet Yost without her clothes on, but he’d never beheld a sight so beautiful as the rehabilitated Carpco Valparaíso riding high and empty in the moonlit waters off Pier 88. He gasped. Until that exact and magical moment, he’d not fully believed this mission was real. But there she was, all right, the canny old Val herself, tied to the wharf by a half-dozen Dacron lines, dominating New York Harbor with all the stark disproportionality of a rowboat sitting in a bathtub.

In certain rare moments, Anthony thought he understood the general antipathy toward Ultra Large Crude Carriers. Such a ship had no sheer, no gentle ascending slope to her contours. She had no rake, none of the subtle angling of mast and funnel by which traditional cargo vessels paid homage to the Age of Sail. With her crushing tonnage and broad beam, a ULCC didn’t ride the waves; she ground them down. Gross ships, monstrous ships — but that was precisely the point, he felt: their fearsome majesty, their ponderous glamour, the way they plied the planet like yachts designed to provide vacation crudes for rhinoceroses. To command a ULCC — to walk its decks and feel it vibrating beneath you, amplifying your flesh and blood — was a grand and defiant gesture, like pissing on a king, or having your own international terrorist organization, or keeping a thermonuclear warhead in your garage.

They went out to her in a launch named the Juan Fernandez, piloted by a member of the Vatican Secret Service, a bearish sergeant with frazzled white hair and a Colt .45 snugged against his armpit. Lights blazed on every floor of the aft superstructure, its seven levels culminating in a congestion of antennas, smokestacks, masts, and flags. Anthony wasn’t sure which of the present banners troubled him more — the keys-and-tiara symbol of the Vatican or the famous stegosaurus logo of Caribbean Petroleum. He resolved to have Marbles Rafferty strike the Carpco colors first thing.

As the launch glided past the Valparaíso’s stern, Anthony grabbed the Jacob’s ladder and began his ascent to the weather deck, Father Ockham right behind. He had to say one thing for this control-freak priest: the man had nerve. Ockham climbed up the ship’s side with perfect aplomb, one hand on his attachй case, the other on the rungs, as if he’d been scaling rope ladders all his life.

The retrofitted towing rig rose sharply against the Jersey City skyline: two mighty windlasses bolted to the afterdeck like a pair of gigantic player-piano rolls, wound not with ordinary mooring lines but with heavy-duty chains, their links as large as inner tubes. At the end of each chain lay a massive kedge anchor, twenty tons of iron, an anchor to hook a whale, tether a continent, moor the moon.

“You’re looking at some fancy footwork.” Ockham opened his attach й case and drew out a gridded pink checklist clamped to a Masonite clipboard. “Anchors brought down by rail from Canada, motors flown over from Germany, capstans imported from Belgium. The Japanese gave us a great deal on the chains — underbid USX by ten percent.”

“You put this stuff out on bid ?”

“The Church is not a profit-making institution, Anthony, but she knows the value of a dollar.”

Boarding the elevator, they rose three stories to the steward’s deck. The main galley was aswarm. Eager, robust, competent-looking women in blue jeans and khaki work shirts bustled through the great stainless-steel kitchen, filling the freezers and refrigerators with provisions: tubs of ice cream, wheels of cheese, planks of ham, sides of beef, sacks of Cheerios, barrels of milk, pools of salad oil sealed in 55-gallon drums like so much Texas crude. A propane-fueled Toyota forklift truck chugged past, its orange body peppered with rust, its prongs supporting a paddock piled high with crates of fresh eggs.

“Who the hell are these people?” asked Anthony.

“Vatican longshoremen,” Ockham explained.

“They look like women to me.”

“They’re Carmelites.”

“Who?”

“Carmelite nuns.”

In the center of the kitchen stood portly Sam Follingsbee, dressed in a white apron and supervising the chaos like a cop directing traffic. Catching sight of his visitors, the steward waddled over and tipped his big, floppy cream puff of a hat.

“Thanks for the recommendation, sir.” Follingsbee clasped his captain’s hand. “I needed this ship, I really did.” Swinging his formidable belly toward the priest, he asked, “Father Ockham, right?” Ockham nodded. “Father, I’m puzzled — how come a crummy Carpco voyage rates the services of all these lovely sisters, not to mention yourself?”

“This isn’t a Carpco voyage,” said Ockham.

“So what’s the deal?”

“Once we’re at sea, things will become clearer.” The priest drummed his bony fingers on the checklist. “Now I’ll ask a question. On Friday I put in a requisition for one thousand communion wafers. They look a bit like poker chips…”