Blameless in Abaddon Read Online Free Page B

prostate.” In other words, at the age of fifty-one, this devout Presbyterian and devoted public servant, this innocent lover of justice, had developed cancer.
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    Lucky you: I’m back. At this juncture in our hero’s plunging fortunes, it would be appropriate to chronicle the origin of the great shrine toward which his cancer will eventually propel him. Initially, of course, no one believed that the eighty-million-ton carcass embodied God Himself. Candle, for example, favored the theory that it was a hoax: a foam-rubber statue carved by a wealthy sculptor with a demented sense of humor, perhaps, or an inflatable dummy constructed by prankster existentialists. Other people were convinced it had fallen from a passing UFO. Still others dismissed the body as a movie prop that had drifted away from the set of an aquatic religious epic, much as the mechanical whale from the Hollywood adaptation of
Moby-Dick
had escaped during shooting.
    But then Pope Innocent XIV—staggering beneath the burden of his conscience, a weight that lay upon him like his Savior’s cross—came clean. On December 30, 1998, the pontiff stood before a dozen radio microphones, a score of TV cameras, and a phalanx of journalists from every corner of the globe and told an astonishing story. How six years earlier the Vatican had been visited by an archangel claiming that God’s inert body lay adrift in the Gulf of Guinea. How Gabriel and his fellow angels had hollowed out an iceberg pinned against the island of Kvitoya. How Captain Anthony Van Horne of the United States Merchant Marine, acting on orders from Rome, had piloted the supertanker
Carpco Valparaíso
to the body’s splashdown point off the coast of Gabon, strung two parallel chains from her afterdeck, secured them inside the divine ears, and—after a series of harrowing adventures—towed this strange cargo to the Arctic and deposited it inside the great crypt.
    While the fact that its Creator was quite possibly dead proved, on the whole, depressing for the human race, the situation nevertheless boasted a bright side. To the tabloid press the Corpus Dei was a godsend. General Dynamics was delivered from bankruptcy when the Vatican commissioned it to build the cooling chamber that, if He was indeed defunct, would presumably spare His body an unsightly dissolution. Lockheed Corporation was likewise saved when it submitted the low bid on the Series 7000 heart-lung machine that, if He in fact harbored a spark of life, might possibly stabilize Him. And, of course, there were those thousands of O-positive donors who, upon contributing their blood to this unprecedented project, experienced a variety of spiritual satisfaction no human beings had known before.
    Grief became a growth industry. Sympathy cards flowed back and forth among the world’s bereaved believers (even I sent one, to myself)—a phenomenon that not only quadrupled the worth of Hallmark, Incorporated, but forced the U.S. Postal Service to double its normal number of carriers. The major airlines fell over themselves offering discount rates to pilgrims wishing to pay their last respects. Arriving at the port of Naples, where the Corpus Dei was now moored (another tow by the tireless Van Horne), the mourners purchased bouquets from dockside vendors and tossed them into the waters, watching through tear-stained eyes as the currents bore the flowers across the bay and deposited them alongside His cooling chamber. For the first time in history, orchids had become a bonanza crop, eclipsing both tobacco and cotton, bowing only to opium.
    From New Year’s Day until well past Easter, Rome’s startling revelation commanded the front page of every major newspaper in the Western hemisphere. Dead or alive? Corpse or coma victim? Above all loomed the question of causality. Assuming that the object was in fact a corpse, by what means and for what purpose did God die, and why now? Had He been murdered