Towing Jehovah by James Morrow

Author:James Morrow [Morrow, James]
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: Science fiction, General, Fiction, Science Fiction - General, Adventure, Fantasy, Fantasy - General, American Science Fiction And Fantasy, Epic, Fiction - Fantasy
ISBN: 9780151909193
Publisher: New York : Harcourt Brace, c1994.
Published: 1994-05-14T23:00:00+00:00

Part

Three

Eden

ON THE SECOND OF September, at 0945 hours, the Carpco Valparaíso steamed free of the fog. The vibrant, piercing clarity of the world—the sparkle of the North Atlantic, the azure glow of the sky, the brilliant white feathers of the passing petrels— made Thomas Ockham weep with joy. This was how the blind beggar must have felt when, told by Christ to visit the Pool of Siloam and wash the muddy spittle from his eyes, he suddenly found he could see.

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.

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