“Roger Penrose,” said Paul. With a French accent the name sounded quite beautiful, like that of a medieval poet.
“So the mind is electromagnetism—a force subtler than the Renaissance or even the nineteenth century realized, for quantum electrodynamics embraces all but subatomic interactions, and quantum field theory extends to the nuclear forces and gravity, which were unified at the birth of the universe but then broke apart, a subatomic Fall. And QED is indeed the force that animates the planets, and governs the actions of matter upon matter, just as the pneumatists believed.” It also governs the mechanisms of attraction and arousal, and in a manner that does not disregard the existence of women. Like the great designers of the nineteenth century, who dispatched messages and illuminated cities with pressurized gases until they learned how to do so with electricity, the pneumatists explained the mysteries of perception and consciousness by the most fleet and evanescent substance they knew. Were they foolish for not supposing that the force that drove lightning and the crackle of fur also ran through the body’s finest fibers?
Paul was amused. “But it’s not true,” he said. “That’s the point, finally, isn’t it? All of it was wrong.”
Amy felt a twinge of impatience. “Not really—or not in their own context. The Victorian scientists who agonized over the fitful evidence that life on earth was millions of years old—they looked at the sun, which they measured in size and apparent mass, and knew that no chemical reaction could cause it to blaze for that long. We laugh at them now for treating Biblical chronologies so respectfully, but they knew the universe of chemical reactions, which had done a fair job of explaining everything: were they fools for not positing some unknown force, which operated like nothing they could imagine and would shift every result by several decimal points?”
Paul adopted a wary expression Amy had no trouble reading: she was being unreasonable, but might possess better ammunition to defend her position than he had to hand. “Your laptop performs logical operations and commits data to memory through an electrical flux,” he pointed out. “Does that mean it has a soul?”
“The Stoics wondered about that,” she replied briskly. “If the pneuma animates all of nature, why are its various creatures so different? They decided that the pneuma does not penetrate all living things in the same fashion. There were three kinds of pneuma: the inanimate, the vegetative, and the psychic, and only the last informs the higher human faculties. My machine—” she patted it, smiling—“is purely electronic in nature: not even vegetative.”
Paul frowned as the espresso machine sputtered and spat a dozen feet away. “Vajrayana Buddhism used electrical imagery to describe consciousness and transcendence, but it turned out to hold the same beliefs about channels to the brain and vitalized semen as the other Buddhist schools.”
“Vajrayana?”
“Means ‘thunderbolt vehicle.’ ” Paul could never resist a little smirk when he found something she didn’t know. “As opposed to Hinayana— ‘lesser vehicle’—Buddhism, and Mahayana, the ‘greater vehicle’ variety. The vehicle was to get you off the cycle of rebirths to nirvana, and the thunderbolt was the fast way. Vajrayana Buddhism is basically the same as Tantric Buddhism, you know about that?”
Amy remembered something about tantric practices. “Something about sex?” she said dubiously.
Paul nodded. “If the adept did it right, his semen was converted into some magical essence, which would race up to the brain and blossom into the lotus of a thousand petals, allowing him to become one with the World Soul.”
Amy hadn’t intended to raise the subject, but here it was anyway. Perhaps it is intrinsic to the issue. “What about adepts who have no semen?” she asked.
“Who? Oh—I don’t know.” He hadn’t thought to wonder, and now blushed. “It’s probably a pretty sexist concept.”
“The whole pneumatic belief system works better if considered as an allegory,” Amy told him. “This means keeping the men’s dicks out of it.” Paul winced, then assumed a wounded expression, as though only a low blow could strike home. Amy sighed inwardly, a puff only she could feel. She was forming a grain of remorse when Paul lifted his chin, and as his bps quirked to shape breath she suddenly guessed what he would say:
“But if the elements in the system all represent synaptic responses, then the sexual act can still create changes in consciousness. At least—” and here he gave a little smile—“if it’s done well.”
“Oh, Paul.” It was just what she had hoped not to hear: a reference to his belief (never expressed but long apparent, resting complacently between them like a secret) that her ability to be multi-orgasmic—a happy faculty she had possessed since high school, and could confidently attribute to practice—was largely due to his own skills. Don’t bring this up; it was tolerable when covert, peeping foolishly forth like a testicle from baggy briefs; but to allude unmistakably to it—demand her complicity in the belief, whipped cream atop his sundae—would be insupportable: you don’t know where this could go.
“Let’s go.” She wadded her cup—it bent as though ready to fold, then ruptured with a soft crunch—and stood. Paul was chattering on; having proffered an emissary whose credentials were not being accepted, he was backpedaling to firmer ground, some innocuous comment about endorphins.
Of course sexual response produces changes in the hegemonikon: the sensory data is unremarkable, but people find the experience transforming; clearly it affects their experience of reality. Did Paul imagine that this metamorphosis—this reordering of the senses, for which people kill, obsess for years, or ruin their lives—could be finessed by his erotic virtuosity, the transfigurations of eros fine-tuned by technique?
It was a matter of technique, Tommaso had told himself and His Holiness: like the alchemist who combined proper ingredients under specific conditions to obtain a desired salt, he followed a procedure grounded in method, not superstition. Both men were robed in white linen, and no distracting gem nor metal artifact adorned their garments. The pontiff had asked whether it was permissible still to wear the Holy Cross, and Tommaso had assured him that no godly enterprise would debar one: yet bear one made of wood, on a string of twine. Urban presumably wore it next to his skin, for his raiments were as anonymous as a ghost’s.
Torches smoldered on the walls, while candles, specially prepared, flickered on the covered tables before them. The chamber, which had been chosen for its high ceiling, receded into darkness above the level of their heads, where the cypress smoke and vapors from the aromatics steadily rose, a conduit between them and the heavens. Three men, garbed in white though coarser cloth, sat silently with their backs to the wall; neither Tommaso nor the pontiff paid them any heed.
Urban had prayed before they had entered, sinking to his knees before the threshold and supplicating (no doubt) for his own deliverance, as indeed any man might justly do. Tommaso, who had confessed and prayed the day before, felt purified as a cleansed vessel; but recognizing that to admit no need for prayer would invite the sin of pride, he bent his head and offered a silent thanks for his good fortune to date and a plea for success to come. Then he broke the seal on the door (beeswax, a solarian substance), and the two sorcerers entered.