Bible Stories for Adults by James K Morrow

Author:James K Morrow [Morrow, James K]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Science Fiction, General, Fiction
ISBN: 9780156002448
Google: P2n8AgAAQBAJ
Amazon: 0156002442
Barnesnoble: 0156002442
Goodreads: 218574
Publisher: Mariner Books
Published: 1996-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

Falling, I see my birth. I see the Information Age, circa A.D. 2025. My progenitor is David Eisenberg, a gangly, morose prodigy with a black beard and a yarmulke. Philadelphia’s Covenant Corporation pays David two hundred thousand dollars a year, but he is not in it for the money. David would give half his formidable brain to enter history as the man whose computer program revealed Moses’ Law.

As consciousness seeps into my circuits, David bids me commit the numbered shards to my Random Access Memory. Purpose hums along my aluminum bones; worth suffuses my silicon soul. I photograph each fragment with my high-tech retinas, dicing the images into grids of pixels. Next comes the matching process: this nub into that gorge, this peak into that valley, this projection into that receptacle. By human standards, tedious and exhausting. By Series-700 standards, paradise.

And then one day, after five years of laboring behind barred doors, I behold fiery pre-Canaanite characters blazing across my brain like comets. “Anoche adonai elohecha asher hotsatecha ma-eretz metsrayem . . . I am YHWH your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of slavery. You will have no gods except me. You will not make yourself a carved image or any likeness of anything…”

I have done it! Deciphered the divine cryptogram, cracked the Rubik’s Cube of the Most High!

The physical joining of the shards takes only a month. I use epoxy resin. And suddenly they stand before me, glowing like heaven’s gates, two smooth-edged slabs sliced from Sinai by God’s own finger. I quiver with awe. For over thirty centuries, Homo sapiens has groped through the murk and mire of an improvised ethics, and now, suddenly, a beacon has appeared.

I summon the guards, and they haul the tablets away, sealing them in chemically neutral foam rubber, depositing them in a climate-controlled vault beneath the Covenant Corporation.

“The task is finished,” I tell Cardinal Wurtz the instant I get her on the phone. A spasm of regret cuts through me. I have made myself obsolete. “The Law of Moses has finally returned.”

My monitor blooms with the cardinal’s tense ebony face, her carrot-colored hair. “Are they just as we imagined, YHWH?” she gushes. “Pure red granite, pre-Canaanite characters?”

“Etched front and back,” I reply wistfully.

Wurtz envisions the disclosure as a major media event, with plenty of suspense and maximal pomp. “What we’re after,” she explains, “is an amalgam of New Year’s Eve and the Academy Awards.” She outlines her vision: a mammoth parade down Broad Street—floats, brass bands, phalanxes of nuns—followed by a spectacular unveiling ceremony at the Covenant Corporation, after which the twin tablets will go on display at Independence Hall, between the Liberty Bell and the United States Constitution.

“Good idea,” I tell her.

Perhaps she hears the melancholy in my voice, for now she says, “YHWH, your purpose is far from complete. You and you alone shall read the Law to my species.”

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