At 1055 Lianne Bliss’s fax machine kicked in, spewing out what Thomas took to be the latest in a series of hysterical transmissions from Rome, this one distinguished primarily by its being the first to get through. Why had Ockham cut off communication? the Vatican wanted to know. Where was the ship? How was the Corpus Dei? Good questions, legitimate questions, but Thomas was reluctant to reply. While the sudden upwelling of a lost pagan civilization was hardly something he could have anticipated or prevented, he sensed that Rome would nevertheless find some way to blame him — for Van Horne Island, the intolerable delay, their cargo’s dissolution, everything.
At first neither Thomas nor anyone else on board realized how radically the corpse had soured. Their innocence remained intact as late as September 4, when the tanker crossed the 42nd parallel, the latitude of Naples. Then the wind shifted. It was a stench that went beyond mere olfaction. After burrowing into everyone’s nostrils and sinuses, the fumes next sought out the remaining senses, wringing tears from the sailors’ eyes, burning their tongues, scouring their skin. Some deckies even claimed to hear the terrible odor, wailing across the sea like the voices of the sirens enticing Ulysses’s crew to its doom. Whenever a party of stewards crossed over in the Juan Fernandez to harvest edible fillets from amid the burgeoning rot, they had to take Dragen rigs along, breathing bottled air.
Ironically, the softening of the flesh meant that Van Horne was finally able to get his chicksans into a carotid artery: a pathetic gesture at this point, but Thomas understood the captain’s need to make it. On September 5, at 1415, Charlie Horrocks and his pump-room gang began the great transfusion. Although they’d never sucked cargo on the run before, in less than six hours Horrocks’s men had managed to shoot eighty-five thousand gallons of salt water out of the ballast tanks and into the sea while simultaneously channeling as much blood into the Valparaíso’s cargo bays.
And it worked. From the very first, the ship began running at a steady nine knots, a third faster than at any time since the start of the tow.
The officers kept their watches faithfully. The deckies chipped and painted conscientiously. The stewards collected fillets dutifully. But only when the sailors started responding to their obligations with their customary grumpiness, only when the Val’s companionways began ringing with profane complaints and hair-raising curses, did Thomas grow confident that normalcy had returned to the ship.
“It’s over,” he told Sister Miriam. “It’s finally over. Thank God for Immanuel Kant.”
“Thank God for God,” she replied tartly, biting into a Quarter Pounder with Cheese.
As Labor Day dawned, cold and overcast, the priest saw that he could no longer deny, either to himself or to Rome, how woefully behind schedule Operation Jehovah had fallen. Indeed, their cargo was now so malodorous that he wondered, half seriously, if this sign of their misadventure could have spread eastward across the ocean, all the way to the gates of the Vatican. His fax was frank and detailed. They were two thousand miles from the Arctic Circle. The ship had gone aground on an uncharted Gibraltar Sea island (37 north, 16 west), trapping them on a mountain of rust for twenty-six days. During this interval, not only had the ethical relativism seeded by the Idea of the Corpse blossomed into total chaos, but putrefaction and neurological disorganization had doubtless befallen the body itself. Yes, the Kantian categorical imperative was now keeping everyone in line, and, yes, the captain’s transfusion scheme had boosted their speed significantly, but neither of these happy facts could begin to compensate for the hiatus on the island. Only when it came to the famine did Thomas censor himself, declining to specify the source of their salvation. Pope Innocent XIV, he felt, was not yet ready for Sam Follingsbee’s recipe for Dieu Bourguignon.
The synod took only one day to absorb, debate, and act upon the bad news. On September 8, at 1315, Di Luca’s reply poured forth.
Dear Professor Ockham:
What can we say? Van Horne has failed, you have failed, Operation Jehovah has failed. The Holy Father is devastated beyond words. According to the OMNIVAC-2000, not only is the divine mind now lost, the concomitant flesh has been corrupted too. By the time the freezing process begins, the degeneration will be so profound as to dishonor Him Whose remains we were elected to salvage. At this point, clearly, a different strategy is indicated.
We have decided to suffuse the Corpus Dei with a liquid preservative, a procedure the OMNIVAC believes will go smoothly, Van Horne having already siphoned off 18 percent of the blood.
Toward this end, Rome has chartered a second ULCC, the SS Carpco Maracaibo, filling her hold with formaldehyde in the port of Palermo and dispatching her west across the Mediterranean. The Maracaibo’s officers and crew have been advised they’re on a mission to commandeer a prop from a planned motion picture of unconscionably pornographic content, thereby forestalling production. We don’t need your friend Immanuel Kant to tell us such a ploy is morally ambiguous, but we feel the body’s true identity is already known to far too many individuals.
Upon receiving this message, you shall direct Van Horne to come about and revisit the island on which he bestowed his surname, there to rendezvous with the Maracaibo. I shall be on board, ready to supervise the formaldehyde injections and subsequent conveyance of the body to its final resting place.
Sincerely,
Tullio Di Luca,
Msgr. Secretary of Extraordinary
Ecclesiastical Affairs
Beyond the rude and uninformed finger pointing of the first paragraph, this letter actually pleased Thomas. Wonder of wonders: it looked as if he’d be getting a second chance to argue Neil Weisinger out of his suicidal penance, a matter that had been weighing on him ever since they’d left Van Horne Island. No less appealing was the thought of dumping the whole sordid, smelly business of Operation Jehovah into Di Luca’s lap. At the moment Thomas wanted nothing more than to go home, settle into his musty Fordham office (how he missed the place, its miniature Foucault pendulum, framed fractal photographs, bust of Aquinas), and start teaching a new semester of Chaos 101.
“He’s gotta be kidding,” said Van Horne after reading Di Luca’s communique.
“I think not,” said Thomas.
“Do you realize what this man’s asking?” Lifting Raphael’s feather from his desk, Van Horne weaved it back and forth through the God-choked air. “He’s asking me to give up my command.”
“Yes. I’m sorry.”
“Looks like you’re getting the boot too.”
“No regrets, in my case. I never wanted this job.”
Van Horne settled behind his desk and, opening a drawer, removed a corkscrew, two Styrofoam cups, and a bottle of burgundy. “Too bad you told Di Luca we blew the ballast. He’ll factor that into his calculations when he starts chasing us.” The captain twisted the corkscrew home with the same authority he’d brought to the problem of hoving chicksans into their cargo’s neck. “Luckily, we’ve got a good head start.” Yanking out the cork, Van Horne sloshed a generous amount of Chateau de Dieu into each cup. “Here, Thomas — it drives away the stink.”
“Am I to understand you intend to disobey Di Luca’s orders?”
“Our angels never said anything about an embalming.”
“Nor did they say anything about strange attractors, inverse Eucharists, or ballasting the Val with blood. This voyage has been full of surprises, Captain, and now we’re obliged to turn the ship around.”