The sky was clearing gradually and the clouds dispersed; a hopelessly clear sky was soon going to illuminate the plain before nightfall. We were right next to the Tropic of Cancer—we were there grosso merdo, as Joker might have said when he was still in a state to produce witty remarks. “That has ass-hole-utely no importance, I am a-dick-ted to muesli for breakfast…,” that was the witty wordplay with which he normally tried to brighten up our days. What was going to become of him, this poor little man, now that Monkey Number One was no more? He flashed terrified looks at Cop and Knowall, respectively Monkey Number 2 and Monkey Number 3, who continued to walk up and down the room, and were beginning to size each other up. When the dominant male is unable to exert his power, the secretion of testosterone resumes, among most monkeys. Cop could count on the loyalty of the military faction of the organization—he was the one who had recruited most of the guards, and trained them, they obeyed only his orders; while he was alive, the prophet relied totally on him for these matters. On the other hand, the lab assistants and all of the technicians responsible for the genetic project looked only to Knowall, to him alone. Basically, we were dealing with a classic conflict between brute force and intelligence, between a basic manifestation of testosterone and a more intellectualized one. Either way, I sensed that it was not going to be over quickly, and I sat on an ottoman near Vincent. He seemed to become aware again of my presence, smiled vaguely, and plunged back into his reverie.
About fifteen minutes of silence followed; Knowall and Cop continued to walk up and down the room, the rug muffled their footsteps. Given the circumstances, I felt quite calm; I was conscious that neither Vincent nor I, in the immediate future, had any role to play. In this story we were secondary, honorary monkeys; night was falling, the wind infiltrated the room—the Italian had literally exploded the bay window.
Suddenly, Joker took a digital camera out of his jacket pocket—a Sony DSC-F101 with three million pixels, I recognized the model, I had had the same one before opting for a Minolta DiMAGE A2, which had eight million pixels, a bridge semireflex zoom, and which proved to be more sensitive in fading light. Cop and Knowall stopped, mouth agape, looking at the poor clown zigzagging around the room taking photo after photo. “Are you okay, Gérard?” asked Cop. In my view, no, he wasn’t okay, he was clicking mechanically, without even aiming the camera, and when he approached the window I had the distinct impression that he was going to jump. “That’s enough!” shouted Cop. Joker stopped, his hands were trembling so much that he dropped the camera. Still prostrate in her corner, Francesca sniffed briefly. Knowall also stopped walking, turned to Cop, and looked him straight in the eye.
“Now, we are going to have to make a decision…,” he said in a neutral tone. “We are going to alert the police, it’s the only decision we can make.”
“If we alert the police, it’s the end of the organization. We won’t be able to survive the scandal, and you know it.”
“Do you have another idea?”
There was another, clearly more tense silence: the confrontation had begun and I sensed this time it would go on to the bitter end; I even had a quite clear intuition that I was going to witness a second violent death. The death of a charismatic leader is always an extremely difficult moment to manage in a movement of a religious type; when care has not been taken to designate unambiguously a successor, a schism is almost always inevitable.
“He was thinking about death…,” interrupted Gérard in a tiny, trembling, almost childlike voice. “He spoke to me about it more and more often; he wouldn’t have wanted the organization to disappear, he was very worried that everything would dissolve after he had gone. We must do something, we must manage to understand one another…”
Cop frowned, vaguely turning his head toward him, as though reacting to an irksome noise; becoming conscious again of his total insignificance, Gérard sat back down on an ottoman next to us, lowered his eyes, and calmly placed his hands on his knees.
“May I remind you,” Knowall said calmly, looking Cop straight in the eyes, “that for us death is not definitive, this is even our principal dogma. We possess the genetic code of the prophet, we need only wait for the procedure to be perfected.”
“Do you really think we’re going to wait twenty years for your thing to work?” Cop retorted violently, without even trying to hide his hostility anymore.
Knowall shivered at the outrage, but replied calmly: “Christians have been waiting for two thousand years…”
“Maybe, but in the meantime they had to organize the Church, and I’m the best man to do it. When Christ had to designate a disciple to succeed him, he chose Peter: he wasn’t the most brilliant, the most intellectual, nor the most mystical, but he was the best organizer.”
“If I leave the project, you will have no one to put in my place; and, in this case, any hope of resurrection vanishes. I don’t think you’ll be able to last long in those conditions…”
There was silence again, and it became more and more heavy; I had the impression that they wouldn’t be able to come to an agreement, things had gone too far between them, and for too long; in the almost total darkness, I saw Cop clench his fists. It was at this moment that Vincent intervened. “I want to take the place of the prophet…,” he said in a light, almost joyful voice. The others jumped, Cop bounded to the light switch and then ran over to shake Vincent: “What are you talking about? What on earth are you talking about?” he shouted in his face. Vincent didn’t react, he waited for the other to let go of him before adding, in a voice that was just as playful: “After all, I am his son…”
The first moment of stupefaction over, it was Gérard who spoke, plaintively:
“It is possible…It is completely possible…I know that the prophet had a son, thirty-five years ago, just after the Church started, and that he visited him from time to time—but he never spoke about it, even to me. He had him with one of the first female followers, but she committed suicide a little while after the birth.”
“It’s true…,” Vincent said calmly, and there was only the echo of a very distant sadness in his voice. “My mother couldn’t bear his constant infidelities, nor the games of group sex he forced her into. She had burned her bridges with her parents—they were Alsatian Protestant bourgeois, from a very strict family, they had never forgiven her for becoming an Elohimite, in the end she no longer really had contact with anyone. I was brought up by my paternal grandparents, the parents of the prophet; during the first years, I practically didn’t see him, he wasn’t interested in young children. And then, after I turned fifteen, he visited me more and more frequently: he would debate with me, he wanted to know what I intended to do with my life, finally he invited me to join the sect. It took me about fifteen years to make up my mind. Recently our relationship has been—how shall I put it?—a little calmer.”
I then became conscious of a fact that should have struck me from the beginning, it was that the physical resemblance of Vincent to the prophet was incredibly strong; the expression in their eyes was very different, even totally opposite—it was no doubt this that had prevented me from noticing it before—but the main features of their physiognomy—the shape of the face, the color of the eyes, the position of the eyebrows—were strikingly identical; what’s more, they were almost the same height and the same build. Knowall for his part looked at Vincent very attentively, he seemed to come to the same conclusion, and it was finally he who broke the silence:
“Nobody is aware exactly of how far my research has advanced, we have kept it totally secret. We could easily announce that the prophet has decided to abandon his aging body in order to transfer his genetic code to a new organism.”
“Nobody is going to believe it!” Cop objected violently.
“Very few people, in fact; we can expect nothing from the mainstream media, they’re all against us. There will certainly be enormous coverage, and general skepticism; but nobody will be able to prove anything, we are the sole possessors of the prophe
t’s DNA, there is no copy, anywhere. And the most important thing is that the followers are going to believe it; we have been preparing them for years. When Christ rose again on the third day no one believed it, with the exception of the first Christians; this was even precisely the way they defined themselves: those who believed in the resurrection of Christ.”
“What are we going to do with the body?”
“There’s no problem if they recover the body, we need only make sure that the wound to the throat is undetectable. For example, we could use a volcanic fissure, and throw the body into the molten lava.”
“And Vincent? How do we explain the disappearance of Vincent?” Cop was visibly shaken, his objections were becoming more and more hesitant.
“Oh, I don’t know many people…,” Vincent interjected with levity. “What’s more, I was considered suicidal, my death would astonish no one. I think the volcanic fissure is a good idea, that’ll remind people of the death of Empedocles…” He recited from memory, in a strangely fluid voice: “‘And I will say to you again, prudent Pausanias, that there is no birth for mortal things; there is no baleful end in death; there is only mixing and dissociation of the components of the mixture.’”
Cop reflected in silence for a couple of minutes, then threw out: “We’ll also have to deal with the body of the Italian…” I knew then that Knowall had won the match. Immediately afterward Cop called three guards, and ordered them to patrol the grounds, telling them that if they found the body they should bring it back discreetly, wrapped in a blanket, on the backseat of the four-wheel drive. It took them only a quarter of an hour: the poor man had been in such a state of confusion that he had tried to climb the electric fence; he had, of course, been struck down on the spot. They laid the corpse down on the ground, at the foot of the prophet’s bed. At that moment Francesca emerged from her stupor, saw the body of her boyfriend, and began to make inarticulate, almost animal cries. Knowall approached and slapped her, calmly and firmly, several times; her screams turned into another bout of sobbing.
“We’ll have to deal with her as well…,” Cop remarked darkly.
“I think we have no choice…”
“What do you mean?” Vincent turned toward Knowall, suddenly sober.
“I think we would have difficulty counting on her to keep quiet. If we throw the two bodies out of the window they’ll be reduced to a pulp after falling for three hundred meters; I’ll be amazed if the police will want to do an autopsy.”
“That might work…,” said Cop after some thought; “I know the local police chief fairly well. If I tell him that I had come across them climbing the rock face days before, that I had tried to warn them of the dangers, but that they had laughed in my face…Besides, it’s very plausible, the guy liked extreme sports, I think he went rock climbing in the Dolomites every weekend.”
“Good…,” Knowall said. He nodded slightly to Cop, and the two men lifted the body of the Italian, one by the feet, and the other by the shoulders, they took a few steps, then threw it into the abyss; they had moved so quickly that neither Vincent nor I had had time to react. With terrifying energy Knowall returned to Francesca, lifted her by the shoulders, and dragged her along the carpet; she had fallen back into apathy, and showed no more reaction than you’d expect from a package. As Cop took her by the feet, Vincent screamed: “Hey!” Knowall put the Italian girl back down and turned to Vincent in annoyance.
“What is it now?”
“You can’t do that!”
“And why not?”
“It’s murder…”
Knowall did not reply; he looked at Vincent and crossed his arms. “Obviously, it’s regrettable…,” he said finally. “However, I believe that it’s necessary,” he added a few seconds later.
The long black hair of the young woman framed her pale face; her brown eyes settled on each of us in turn, I had the impression that she was no longer in any fit state to understand the situation.
“She is so young, so beautiful…,” murmured Vincent in a pleading tone.
“I imagine that, in the case of an ugly old woman, elimination would seem more excusable to you…”
“No, no,” Vincent protested angrily, “that’s not exactly what I meant.”
“Yes it is,” said Knowall pitilessly, “it’s exactly what you meant; but let’s move on. Tell yourself she’s just a mortal, a mortal like all of us up until now—a temporary arrangement of molecules. Let’s say that in this specific circumstance she is a pretty arrangement; but she has no more substance than a pattern formed by frost, that a simple rise in temperature would reduce to nothing; and, unfortunately for her, her death has become necessary so that mankind can progress. However, I promise you that she will not have to suffer.”
He took an HF transmitter out of his pocket and said a few words in a low voice. A minute later two guards appeared, one of them carrying a soft leather briefcase; he opened it, and took out a small glass bottle and a hypodermic syringe. At a sign from Cop, the two guards withdrew.
“Wait, wait, wait,” I interjected, “I don’t want to be an accomplice to murder either. What’s more, I don’t have any motive.”
“Yes you do,” Knowall dryly riposted, “you have a very good motive: I can call back the guards. You too are a compromising witness; you are someone famous, no doubt your death would pose more problems; but famous people die too, and anyway we have no other choice.” He was speaking calmly, looking me straight in the eye, I was quite sure he wasn’t joking. “She will not suffer…,” he repeated softly, and very quickly he leaned over the young woman, found a vein, and injected the solution. Like all the others I had believed that it was a sleeping drug, but in a few seconds she stiffened, her skin turned blue, then her breathing suddenly stopped. Behind me I heard Joker making bestial, plaintive groans. I turned around; he was trembling all over, and could only articulate: “Ha! Ha! Ha…” A stain was forming at the front of his trousers, I realized he had pissed his pants. Furious, Cop got out his own walkie-talkie and barked an order: a few seconds later, five guards appeared, armed with machine guns, and encircled us. On an order from Cop they led us into an adjoining room, furnished with a trestle table and metal filing cabinet, then locked the door behind us.
I couldn’t totally convince myself that all this was real, I sent incredulous looks at Vincent, who seemed to be in a similar state of mind, neither of us spoke, the silence was broken only by Gérard’s moaning. Ten minutes later Knowall came into the room, and I became conscious that everything was true, that I was looking at a murderer, that he had crossed the line. I considered him with an irrational, instinctive horror, but he seemed very calm, in his eyes he had obviously only carried out a technical act.
“I would have spared her if I could,” he said without addressing any of us in particular. “But, I repeat, we were dealing with a mortal; and I do not think that morality makes any real sense if the subject is mortal. We are going to attain immortality; and you will be among the first beings to be accorded it; it will, in some way, be the price of your silence. The police will be here tomorrow; you have all night to think about it.”
The days that followed left me with a strange memory, as if we had entered a different space, where ordinary laws were abolished, where everything—the best as well as the worst—could happen at any moment. I must, however, acknowledge in hindsight that there was a certain logic to all this, the logic of Miskiewicz, and that his plan was carried out to the letter, down to the slightest detail. First, the police chief had no doubts about the accidental nature of the death of the young couple. When faced with their disarticulated bodies, their bones in bits, practically reduced to the state of patches of blood spread over the rocks, it was actually very difficult to keep one’s cool, and to have any suspicion that their deaths could have had any cause other than the fall. Then, above all, this banal affair was rapidly eclipsed by the disappearance of the prophet. In the remaining hours of the night, Cop and Knowall had dragged his body to a
n opening that overlooked a small active volcanic crater; the molten lava covered him immediately, special equipment had to be brought from Madrid to recover him, and obviously any autopsy was unthinkable; that very night they had burned the bloodstained sheets, had the bay windows repaired by a workman who looked after maintenance in the grounds, in short they had been impressively active. When the inspector from the Guardia Civil understood that he was dealing with a suicide, and that the prophet intended to be reincarnated, three days later, in a rejuvenated body, he scratched his chin pensively—he was quite aware of the sect’s activities, in fact he believed he was dealing with a group of crazies who venerated flying saucers, his knowledge of them stopped there—and concluded that it would be best to refer the matter to his superiors. This was exactly what Knowall had expected.
From the following day onward, the affair was on the front pages of the newspapers—not only in Spain, but also in Europe, and soon in the rest of the world. “The Man Who Thought He Was Eternal,” “The Mad Gamble of the Man-God,” those were more or less the headlines. Three days later, seven hundred journalists were camped behind the protective fences; the BBC and CNN had sent helicopters to film the encampment. Miskiewicz selected five journalists from English-speaking science magazines and held a brief press conference. From the outset he excluded the possibility of a visit to the laboratory: official science had rejected him, he said, and forced him to work on the margins; he had taken note of this, and would only communicate his results once he felt the moment was right. From the legal point of view, it was hard to attack his position: it was a private laboratory, privately funded, he was perfectly within his rights to deny access to anyone; the grounds themselves were private, he pointed out, and the flyovers and filming by helicopters seemed to him to be a practice of completely dubious legality. Moreover he was working neither on living organisms, nor even on embryos, but on simple molecules of DNA, and this with the written agreement of the donor. Certainly, reproductive cloning was prohibited or restricted in many countries; but under the circumstance this was not a question of cloning, and no law forbade the artificial creation of life; it was a direction in research that the legislators simply had not dreamed of.
The Possibility of an Island Page 21
