Raphael Carter - The Fortunate Fall

I suspected a number of things, and I didn’t like any of them. Carefully keeping my eyes from the door, I began to gauge my chances of escape. The elevator was the only way up that I knew of, so if Voskresenye cut off the power, I’d be trapped. He’d have plenty of time to cut it, too, while I was running down the broken slidewalk. I might have to try to knock him out first—and I had no idea how strong his exoskeleton might be. Or did he control the elevator directly? If he were unconscious, would it fail to operate? Unless I found out, I could do nothing.

Or so I decided, because in my heart I didn’t believe I needed to do anything. I did not think Voskresenye, whale or no, could really have defeated Keishi. I believed in her. I thought that she would soon be there to rescue me, and that all I had to do was encourage the old man’s ramblings. I need only play for time.

“You disappoint me, Andreyeva,” Voskresenye said, when I had been silent a while. “Have you lost all your reporter’s instincts? Aren’t you going to catch me in my own contradictions?”

“Why don’t you tell me what you think they are?”

“I should think it would be obvious. I have done what I have done in order to end the sacrifice of the few to a principle; and in support of this principle, I have sacrificed the few. Again, like those who made the Unanimous Army. Why was the Army created? To defeat the Guardians. And why defeat them? Because they built their empire on conquest and exploitation. Then how shall we defeat them? Why, by building a machine that could conquer and exploit, not just the odd ethnic minority here and there, but every human it encountered. It is a kind of homeopathy, you see, but not in homeopathic doses.”

“What exactly is the—”

“Or if that explanation is too cunning to be understood,” he went on, seeming barely aware of my presence, “I commend to you my illustrious predecessor, Judas Iscariot. Don’t people still know that story, even now? Judas betrays Christ, his friend and Lord, and we are supposed to believe it is all for a few silver coins, which, as it happens, he covets so much as to immediately throw them away. Now I ask you as a camera, is that a plausible motivation? If a man like Judas said to you, ‘I did it for the money,’ would you believe him?”

“I suppose—”

“No! Of course you wouldn’t. There is only one reason why Judas committed his crime. He did it because it fulfilled the prophecy. It made Christ a martyr. He did it because if he had not, Jesus of Nazareth would have wound up as a starving beggar in the streets of Rome, leprous and louse-ridden, making himself portwine out of the ditch-water. He violated the shining law that Jesus had set forth, because only in that way could he make sure that law was not forgotten.

“And so you see that in order for good to exist, you must apply a little evil here and there. The Christians knew that, when there were Christians. At one time they knew even more: the fortunate fall, they called it. ‘O felix culpa’—happy fault! For when Adam and Eve gave their lives for that one bite of worm-eaten fruitflesh, they won heaven for their children. They say Eden means ‘garden’; my translation would be ‘wildlife park.’ If not for that snake happening by, we’d still be stuck there, with angels going around us in a monorail exclaiming over the wonderfully natural habitats. If I were a snake, I tell you, I would give the same advice.

“But they forgot—the Christians; the fortunate fall was forgotten. And well it should be. Those are the best times, when good can forget it needs evil to prop it up.”

During this speech I had thoroughly surveyed the door. If I could get him sunk that deep in his own words a second time, I might be able to get up and be nearly out of the room before he noticed. And then it would be a question of how fast his carapace allowed him to run. Not fast, I thought; it looked too heavy. With the elevator I would take my chances—there must be some provision for emergencies.

So I must make him talk. And I already knew he could be goaded.

“Do you consider yourself a Christian?”

“After a fashion,” he said reflectively.

“But that was the Guardians’ religion.”

Voskresenye fixed me with a look of pity. “Yes, well, they didn’t invent it, you know. My own researches lead me to believe that by the time Calin came to power, Christ may already have been dead. No, really. Possibly for as much as a few weeks. And even if I did at one time blame the faith for the actions of the faithful, surely all these years of atheist tyranny would have disabused me of the notion. No, Andreyeva, you cannot judge beliefs by keeping score.”

“And so you believe you are Judas Iscariot—what? Reincarnated?”

He pressed his fingertips to the corners of his eyes. “My dear, it’s a metaphor, not a delusion. I spoke of Judas because I supposed that if you knew about any religion, it was Christianity. If you were Muslim, I would remind you that Satan was damned not for loving God too little, but for loving Him too much—so much that he refused to bow to Man, that lesser creature. If you were Jain I would have told you of Kamatha, Mahavira’s evil counterpart, who pursues the hero through incarnation after incarnation, killing him not once but many times—and yet it is by suffering this evil that Mahavira finally escapes the doom of flesh. It is a simple principle, and one that has been discovered a thousand times through history: the darkness serves the light. And from time to time, people have realized the consequence: that sometimes, in order to bring about good, you must yourself become evil.”

“But how can it be evil? You think you’re saving the world. What are a couple of hackers compared to that?”

“Not the world, child. I’m only saving human hearts; what does that have to do with the world? The planet doesn’t give a damn about our pain or pleasure. It will go on whether we are happy or not, and whether we are here or not. Indeed, it would be better off without us. No, I’m not saving the world; just those two-legged bugs that infest it.”

“You make it sound like no one ever wrote a poem or composed a symphony—”

“Oh yes, symphonies, Exhibit A in everyone’s defense of us. Have you ever written one, Andreyeva? Has anyone you know? Has anyone at all, the last hundred years? For that matter, when was the last time you listened to one?”

“As a matter of fact—”

“We are a machine made by God to write poetry to glorify his creatures. But we’re a bad machine, built on an off day. While we were grinding out a few pathetic verses, we killed the creatures we were writing about; for every person writing poems, there were a hundred, a thousand, out blowing away God’s creation left, right, and center. Well, Maya Tatyanichna? You know what we have wrought. What is your judgment? Which is better? A tiger, or a poem about a tiger?”

“I think they both have their merits—”

“Sophist,” he snapped. “To equate a piece of paper with a thing of flesh and blood! No, there is no comparison. And even if there were, it wouldn’t matter. No one writes poems anymore, no one reads them. We just send people crawling all over the landscape with cameras in their heads, to record the world as it is. But God already knows what the world is, and He also knows it would have been better if he’d stuck with trilobites.”

“Then you do believe in God.”

“Yes. Despite all evidence, I do; may He help me, I do. I am not persuaded of His sanity at His advanced age, because if He were sane we would not be here. But He exists.”

“And you believe in Heaven? You believe that when you die you’ll go there?”

“Do you suppose that Judas walks about in Heaven? Do you suppose Satan is any the less damned because he loved God? No, no, it is his love that damns him; loving God while being estranged from him is what Hell is. Even Kamatha gets his, although, since this is India, where eternity is so vast that not even human hate can fill it up, he will eventually escape from Hell into another incarnation.” His eyes grew distant. “I find that messy, truthfully. For a stain so great, the punishment should surely be eternal. No, the crime is not the less just because it is for a good end. On the contrary, Judas’ crime is all the worse, because he has no hope of pleading that he knew not what he did. He knew just what he was doing, and he knew its price—as I do.”