The Philosopher’s Apprentice

by James Morrow

  “We’re okay with wiping out ovarian cancer, and on the whole your antiprostitution campaign sounds like a good thing,” General Snow said. “What worries us is the other data you’d like to carry out of here.”

  “What other data?” Dagmar demanded.

  “Don’t be coy,” General Snow said. “We know that Project Xelcepin is a front for the scheme that really matters to you, the development of…what’s it called?”

  “Nildeum,” Major Snow said.

  “Nildeum,” echoed General Snow. “The breakfast cereal additive that makes children stop believing in God.”

  “This meeting has outrun its usefulness,” Yolly observed.

  “It’s time we took leave of these clowns,” Colonel Fox concurred, squeezing Londa’s arm.

  My vatling made no response. She simply ripped away her hangnail and regarded the far wall with the sort of glassy stare Henry Cushing’s young audiences had doubtless accorded Professor Oolong’s Oompah-pah Zoo.

  “And we also know what you’re really designing at the Vision Syndicate,” Captain Snow said.

  “The automotive fuel whose secret ingredients are corn oil and menstrual blood,” Major Snow said.

  “We’ve worked out the implications,” General Snow said.

  “We’re no dummies,” Captain Snow said.

  “Once women realize they can sell their menstrual blood for thousands of dollars, they’ll try to produce as much of the stuff as possible,” Major Snow said.

  “We’re talking about de facto infertility,” Captain Snow said. “Diaphragms, IUDs, condoms—whatever it takes.”

  “We’re out of here,” Yolly said.

  “You people won’t rest until every oil company in America has gone bankrupt,” General Snow said, “and pregnancy has become a thing of the past.”

  A HEAVY SNOW was falling when we left the mackie headquarters and started back toward the city, though I doubted that the flakes would be sufficiently large, wet, or plentiful to insulate Themisopolis from the coming inferno. Midway through our return journey, Londa stopped walking, as if she’d acquired the plaster flesh and steel bones of Alonso the Conquistador, but she managed to communicate her immediate wishes through clipped phrases and spasmodic gestures. We carried her, literally carried her, to my room in Arcadia House. At first she simply sat on the mattress, grinding her molars and wringing her hands, but finally she spoke, telling her manager to have the city’s administrators and division heads assemble in an hour at the Institute for Advanced Biological Investigations.

  Not long after Dagmar’s departure, the immaculoids’ chanting and drumming started up again. Londa cast her livid gaze first on Colonel Fox, then on Yolly, and finally on me.

  “The strategy session that matters isn’t the one I just arranged,” she said. “It’s the one that’s going to happen right now.”

  By scouring the paramedics’ station, Yolly managed to scare up everything we needed for a tea party—Earl Grey, chai, lemon, sugar, biscotti—not a merry Donya sort of tea party, but the grimmest such gathering imaginable. As the tea bags steeped, Colonel Fox took out her PDA and began working the keyboard with her ballpoint pen, the point striking the membrane with the precise pistoning action of a sewing-machine needle as she summoned crucial statistics to the miniature screen.

  “Monday afternoon, as soon as I saw those swarms of mackies, I started running the numbers,” she said. “Our present civilian population is three thousand seventeen. I immediately subtracted the orphans and pregnant teens, also the zombie troupers—there’s no time to reprogram them for defilade—which gave me a hypothetical fighting force of two thousand and fifty-eight, including professional staff and maintenance workers. Next I conducted an informal survey and learned that about a third of those potential defenders, six hundred and eighty-five, are prepared to take up arms and hold the fort. Naturally we can count on total commitment from my Valkyries.”

  “That’s maybe nine hundred against six thousand,” Yolly concluded, aghast.

  Colonel Fox lifted a biscotto and set it between her teeth like a cigar stub. “Not great odds, I grant you. But we can still win. The minute the fetuses draw blood, they’ll lose public support. Even Governor Winthrop won’t dare say it’s just another antiabortion demonstration. He’ll have to send the National Guard to our rescue.”

  “Unless the immaculoids have already massacred us,” Yolly observed.

  “And here’s another factor in our favor.” Colonel Fox flipped an insouciant hand in the general direction of the mackie encampment. “Those are pretty unhealthy creatures out there. I doubt that they can shoot straight.”

  “You heard General Snow,” Yolly protested. “Their despair makes them abnormally dangerous.”

  “With all due respect, Yolly,” Colonel Fox said, “never employ the enemy’s propaganda in assessing the enemy’s strength.”

  Londa arced her thumb and middle finger into the shape of calipers, using the instrument to massage her temples. She lifted her head and fixed on the Valkyrie commander. “You make a compelling case for manning the walls.” She climbed off the mattress and presented me with a meandering grin. “Nevertheless, I’ve decided to follow the advice of my morality teacher. Go ahead, Mason. Tell me what to do.”

  “You’re dumping the decision in my lap?” I said.

  “I’m confident you can rise to the occasion.”

  “This isn’t fair.”

  “Sorry, Socrates,” Londa said. “I’m responsible for Themisopolis, and you’re responsible for me. You knew it might one day come to this. Take a posh job tutoring a gumbo girl for a hundred dollars an hour, and eventually there’ll be hell to pay.”

  My body, it seemed, had become fused with some sinister machine, its gyroscopes spinning in my aorta, its meshed gears nibbling at my stomach. I swallowed some tea and studied the paint-by-numbers tableau over my dresser: Jesus holding up a potential and soon-to-be-proverbial projectile, the famous unthrown first stone, inviting the vigilantes to contemplate its fearsome solidity, even as they took stock of their soggy souls.

  “I’ve always liked that story.” I gestured toward the painting. “It cuts through a lot of nonsense.”

  “Mason used to have us act it out,” Londa told Colonel Fox. “He played the mob leader. My friend Brittany was the adulteress, and I was—”

  “Let me guess,” Colonel Fox said scornfully. “You were the rock.”

  “It’s not generally known that Jesus had encountered a similar situation the week before—same adulteress, different mob,” I said, improvising wildly. “Only he didn’t intervene. He just stood and watched as a passing Pharisee told the vigilantes, ‘Let all the sinners gathered here start stoning the woman, while the flawless among you undertake to defend her.’ So the mob broke into two groups, pelters and protectors, and soon the stones were flying every which way. When the dust settled, all the pelters lay dead, but no protector had received so much as a lump on the head. And the Pharisee said, ‘What a glorious outcome—the defeat of the vengeful.’ And Jesus asked him, ‘What if the protectors had been slaughtered instead?’ And the Pharisee replied, ‘That, too, would have been glorious—the martyrdom of the righteous.’ And Jesus said, ‘We can do better than that.’”

  “Listen to your conscience,” Yolly implored her sister. “We have to make a strategic retreat.”

  “If we don’t fight, we’ll lose the data,” Colonel Fox said with equal urgency.

  “Remember how you programmed Joan of Arc?” I asked Londa. “‘There are no just wars. There are no greater goods.’”

  “No just wars,” Yolly echoed.

  “A miracle drug for ovarian cancer,” Colonel Fox said. “The end of sexual slavery.”

  Londa approached the dresser and stared into the mirror. Whether by serendipity or intention, her reflected eyes lay along the same horizon as the lush blue Protestant orbs of the Jewish rabbi.

  “It’s really no contest, is it?” she said.

 
“None at all,” I replied.

  “Mason, you earned every penny of that hundred dollars an hour,” Yolly said.

  “You’ve got a coward for a conscience,” Colonel Fox told her boss.

  “By this time tomorrow,” Londa said, “we’ll all be out of here, no massacre, no martyrs, not one life squandered, and I’ll be wishing I was dead.”

  I LAY AWAKE for many hours, perhaps the entire night—certainly no dream came: no alligator feedings with John Snow 0001, no sea urchin rescues with Donya. Dawn found me thrashing around amid my blankets like the reanimated Lazarus struggling against his winding-sheet. I summoned my remaining strength and staggered to the dresser, where I studied the play of the morning sunbeams on the Gospel canvas. In this light, the adulteress and her Nazarene advocate seemed positively beatific, painted not by numbers but by numinosity.

  I scrambled into my clothes and packed my overnight bag, whereupon the Sisters Sabacthani appeared, Yolly looking haggard and jumpy, Londa maintaining an uneasy détente among her warring selves. Each woman had brought along a small valise, and Londa also carried a birdcage. Its outraged occupant, Quetzie, repeatedly poked an indignant snout through the bars.

  “Tell me this isn’t happening,” Yolly said. “Tell me it’s all a mumquat dream.”

  “It’s happening,” I said.

  The instant the mackies issued us a cell phone, Londa explained, we would call Jordan and have her retrieve us from the state park. Apparently Londa’s decision to surrender Themisopolis, which she’d represented as “my former morality teacher’s decision to surrender Themisopolis,” had been well received by the medical and research personnel, who’d hastened to point out that they’d signed on to practice healing and pursue knowledge, not to cross swords with fetuses. Several Valkyries, custodians, and groundskeepers had volunteered to stay behind and wage guerrilla war against the arsonists, but Londa had told them, “I don’t want your blood on my conscience, and I don’t want it on my conscience’s conscience either.” Of all the creatures in our care, only the zombie troupers would not be joining the retreat. They were mere enfleshed machines, after all, insensate as sock puppets, and by Londa’s account they had opted to remain in the city and allow the mackie flames to end their meaningless programmed lives.

  I grabbed my overnight bag, and then the three of us left Arcadia House, marched across the quadrangle, and headed down Boudicca Street past the leafless, brainless ranks of trees, each elm and sycamore oblivious to its imminent incineration.

  The mood at the main entrance was dour, somber, almost funereal. Knapsacks on their backs, suitcases at their sides, the city’s entire population had collected in silent clusters of twenty and thirty. I spotted several terrariums and pet carriers—gecko, ferret, parakeet, Chihuahua, tortoiseshell cat: Londa wasn’t the only person who’d be saving an animal from the conflagration. Everyone spoke in whispers. To judge from their empty holsters and disgruntled deportments, the Valkyries had complied with the directive to leave their guns behind. I was pleased to note a team of paramedics administering to our orphans and pregnant teens, making sure they all had their mittens, scarves, and medicines.

  For twenty minutes we huddled in the raw morning air, stomping our feet and rubbing our hands, and then the gates opened to admit a company of three hundred heavily armed immaculoids, Lieutenant Colonel Jane Snow 3221 in command. With rude shoves, loutish punches, and the occasional coercive boot, the fetuses herded us through the portal and into a kind of open-air rat maze improvised from sawhorses and quivering streamers of yellow barricade tape. An additional immaculoid regiment appeared, breaking us into groups of ten and forcing us to negotiate the labyrinth, until eventually we stood before a line of nylon pavilions, eight labeled WOMEN, four MEN. Lieutenant Colonel Snow explained that we were about to be “processed”—checked for smuggled goods—and anyone who resisted would be “treated as callously as our parents treated us.”

  More waiting, a full hour this time, an interval during which I beheld the immaculoids climb into the forty gasoline trucks and drive them, engines gasping with diesel flatulence, through the gates toward the city’s combustible heart. Goaded by the butt of an assault rifle, I followed my nine fellow evacuees into pavilion number 12, where Sergeant John Snow 0875 required us to strip down to our goose pimples. Our teeth chattered furiously. We sounded like a castanet band. A squad of enlisted immaculoids X-rayed our innards with portable radiology gear, searching for ingested computer chips and swallowed microfilm capsules. A second squad commandeered our wristwatches, credit cards, and loose change, any of which might have been storage media in disguise. Squad number three examined our clothing, probing pockets, turning gloves inside out, inspecting every seam and cuff. A fourth cadre took out utility knives and peeled away the linings of our valises and suitcases like fur trappers skinning beavers. My overnight bag came back to me in tatters, but at least I’d passed the test, as had the rest of my group—not a single piece of contraband among us.

  At long last the sergeant issued the blessed command. “Get dressed, and no stalling!”

  As the next band of ten entered the pavilion, the mackies’ gun muzzles nudged us through the rear flaps. An instant later the Sisters Sabacthani emerged from pavilion 3. Londa still held Quetzie’s cage. Stupefied by the cold and grateful for the restoration of our clothes, we became putty in the hands of Lieutenant Colonel Snow and her regiment, and nobody raised the feeblest protest during our subsequent ordeal, which had us first standing around Hypatia Circle for two hours while the remaining Themisopolians were processed, then tromping four miles across frozen fields covered with thorny vines as treacherous as barbed wire, until at last we spied a line of snow-dusted evergreens marking the eastern edge of Quehannock State Park.

  The fetuses and their rifle butts continued to treat us harshly, pressing us toward our destination at a rapid clip. Upon reaching the parking lot, the Themisopolis commuters rebonded with their cars and vans, then took off, even as Lieutenant Colonel Snow and her subordinates moved among the rest of us, passing out the promised technology. When Londa received a cell phone, she sidled discreetly away from the mackies and, after ringing up Jordan, spoke to her in a whisper. At the end of the conversation, she offered Yolly a freighted nod whose significance eluded me. I took the phone and called Natalie, but she didn’t answer, so I left a message assuring her I was out of harm’s way and would probably spend the night in Jordan Frazier’s Georgetown apartment.

  Within a half-hour the evacuation vehicles started arriving—sedans, station wagons, hatchbacks, SUVs, pickup trucks, limousines, hired taxis. Particularly conspicuous were the shuttles bearing the logos of various Maryland hotels and motor inns, Londa’s medical staff having arranged for our orphans and outcasts to enjoy commercial lodgings until more permanent accommodations could be secured. I took comfort in the thought of our paramedics tucking in these wretches for the night, assuring them that a second City of Justice would one day rise from the ashes.

  Jordan was among the last chauffeurs to appear, vaulting athletically from the cab of her Plymouth Carmilla minivan. I wanted to tell her she looked fabulous—her buoyant brown eyes and lavish smile had ceded little to the years—and how much I admired her lobbying efforts on behalf of Sabacthanite ideals. But I was so frazzled I could only give her a doleful hug and thank her for being the one bright spot in an otherwise wretched morning.

  Under the immaculoids’ watchful gaze, we climbed into the minivan, Yolly settling beside Jordan while Londa, Quetzie, and I assumed the backseat.

  “On track with Plan Omega?” Londa asked Jordan as we cruised out of the park. “Matériel in hand?”

  “Lady Justice is looking out for us,” Jordan replied cheerfully.

  Plan Omega? Matériel? The terminology of the moment made me nervous.

  “I’m confused,” I said.

  “Have patience,” Londa said.

  Yolly inserted Linda Ronstadt: Greatest Hits into the dashboard music center
. As the Carmilla resounded with “You’re No Good” followed by “Silver Threads and Golden Needles,” Jordan piloted us to I-95, hit the accelerator, and zoomed into the fast lane, everybody except me singing along with the recording. By the time we reached the Havre de Grace turnoff, Ronstadt and her backup trio were belting out “That’ll Be the Day.”

  Jordan followed the exit ramp to a Burrito Junction, where she parked and killed the engine.

  “Can’t we do better than this?” I pleaded. God knows I was hungry, but I wasn’t in the mood for fatty ground beef enshrouded in a soggy tortilla.

  “We aren’t here to eat,” Londa explained. “We’re here to use the restrooms. Let’s say we get into our disguises in ten minutes max—okay, gang?”

  “Disguises?” I said.

  Londa squeezed my knee. “On her way to pick us up, Jordan bought everything we’ll need to turn ourselves into immaculoids. Orange jumpsuits, silver wigs, grease pencils.”

  “I could find only three suits,” Jordan said, “but as your getaway driver I don’t really need one.”

  “Getaway driver?” I said.

  “Last night we burned three hundred gigabytes onto sixty CD-Rs and hid them inside our statue of Themis,” Londa explained. “Not the first place the mackies will think to look, but not the last either, so the sooner we go fetch the data—you and me and Yolly—the sooner, the better.”

  “All three of us?” I said.

  “The plan turns on us having as many Sabacthanites inside the city as possible,” Jordan said.